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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Vernor Vinge's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End was quite prescient on this point, describing a world where the Internet largely becomes useless due to infinite disinformation crowding out the real.

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I think eventually (hopefully?) most folks realize that the only solution is smaller, highly-moderated communities (like this one), and even then it's important to be aware of the implicit underlying biases of those communities. Some really great smaller subreddits also come to mind.

Yes, the book had people form "belief circles" of that nature.

I'm not sure, but that doesn't sound all that great. It's kind of the problem now, people in belief circles with little basis in reality.

The problem is we kind of have that with Facebook groups, but when they’re filled with people with low online media literacy they become semi-private conspiracy breeding grounds

Seriously, why am I being downvoted? It’s well established that FB groups are being used as niche channels for spreading misinformation. The only difference between one of these and HN is the quality of moderation.

I get downvoted for saying unpopular but true things here, and so are you. Which undercuts the quality of moderation argument you are making.

The downside is that small communities become echo chambers and cause people to further polarize themselves. It is vitally important to engaged with a diversity of opinion if you don't want to become radicalized, especially with viewpoints that you don't agree with.

Yeah, or things like Mastodon instances, moving from twitter to Mastodon has been the best media consumption decision I've made in the past couple of years.

I didn't notice how bad twitter actually was until I was away from it for a while. The constant noise of advertisements/manipulation feels to me like the hum of an AC, your brain filters it out after a while and you convince yourself it doesn't bother you, but only after it's turned off, do you realize how bad it actually was.

Key word here is "smaller". Anything works on a small-enough scale. In general, subreddits are very balkanized, with a strong echo chamber effect (downvotes for dissenting opinions) and terrible moderation. For any reason at all, dissenters can be put on a list to have their posts quietly hidden from anyone else.

I thought that’s Putin’s playbook. Since you can’t control the situation anyway, just push out a lot of disinformation so nobody believes anything anymore. You could argue that the current US president plays the same game by shouting “fake news” all the time.

But isn't the whole "Russian disinformation" thing in turn a way of discrediting information? Orwell was writing about this 80 years ago, it's never seemed more relevant.

That is how disinformation can be protected from exposure. If you fill the channels with enough disinformation, then even true information exposing disinformation is treated as disinformation. It’s very corrosive of society.

But it's also how perfectly valid discussions can be completely shut down - certainly very corrosive.

>whole "Russian disinformation"

That depends on how you define "whole." There must be examples of people either unknowingly and wrongly invoking "Russian disinformation" or intentionally invoking it for whatever purposes but there is definitely actual "Russian disinformation" occurring. Disinformation from all sorts of sources. It's imperative to be discerning now, and to be discerning about how to be discerning.

Very valid point.

The suggestion is that Vladislav Surkov [1] is behind this playbook.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladislav_Surkov

Interesting guy. It just shows that we shouldn’t correlate high intelligence and talent with virtue.

It's funny considering "fake news" was invented by liberals in the US to shut down conservative media.

More surprising to me is that seems to have virtually wiped out legitimate journalism at the same time.

Our unwillingness to pay for journalism is what wiped it out.

People, in aggregate, appear to want to read "news stories" with little discrimination about the quality or accuracy of those stories. When consumers want a product without care for quality, the market optimizes for that. So you get free news that's worth what you paid for it.

Perhaps. I should clarify that by "wiped out", I mean that many formerly reputable and workmanlike publications abandoned the basic principles of journalism (e.g., the five W's, separation of church and state, etc.).

Right. The reason they abandoned them was economics. They were no longer making enough money to pay for fact checkers, copy-editors, and investigative journalists. They were forced to focus on clickbait articles because those were the only ones that generated enough traffic to pay for the ads to keep the business afloat.

Can't really argue with that. Guess I should pry open my meager wallet and support a few of the last good ones.

No it isn't. Lots of people are willing to pay for journalism, but it's a major pain to do it. That's the problem syndication was supposed to solve, but large media companies (apparently) made the decision to kill off RSS.

It's not any harder to pay for journalism than it is any other product online. I have subscriptions to a couple of newspapers I respect and getting those set up was no harder than buying a hoodie from a web store.

Journalism as passionate advocacy for things actually believed in is far older than journalism as a product. Paying more for a journalism "product" doesn't magically make it not propaganda. I'd say the opposite happens - that journalism as product incentivizes outlets to pander to the audience to increase circulation, without regard to the truthfulness of the content. High-"quality" commercial journalism is clickbait, because what's rewarded is circulation. not degree of accuracy.

The problem is that journalism product crowds out (and delegitimatizes, intentionally, as competition) honest advocacy.

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