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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking the same thing, is BuzzFeed reporting on this because they don't like competition?

I hate the new "hate clicks drive ad revenue" model to the internet and cable TV. It is so damaging to society, more so than any "fake news" thing posted on a random blog with a few wackos believing. We're talking 1000x the exposure and people believing it's "mainstream." Producers on cable TV purposefully tell people to play to an extreme, publications purposefully get pieces that get hate clicks and hate engagement because it boosts their numbers. It's all so horrible.

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Everything that's old is new again.

Soon everyone will be so completely saturated with this type of news/entertainment, that I bet they'll crave things that are actually real.

I think on HN we tend to be ahead of the curve. Almost everyone on here has completely given up or is giving up on a lot of social media and news feeds.

Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers pushed public opinion for the Spanish American War based on a lie. So the cycle is alive and well.

An alternate opinion:

https://mediamythalert.com/2011/01/13/the-anniversary-of-a-m...

>Almost everyone on here has completely given up or is giving up on a lot of social media and news feeds.

In fairness, HN itself is actually a social media news feed, and is also filled with it's share of clickbait outrage porn.

The reality is that no user sourced digital medium is going to be free of these kinds of issues. If you could figure out a way to actually create a system that is free of these issues, you could probably make a billion dollars.

There is an easy solution but you are not going to like it... require real names. And verify them. And keep track of their reputations.

Edit: Proposed this as a solution for disinformation agents. Guess I picked the wrong sub-thread to place that. Sorry for the confusion.

this is exactly right. folks could likely get by anyway, but it would be dramatically reduced.

until there are consequences for lying online, and as long as there's money to be made by lying, enough people will be assholes and do it.

Politicians lie in real life and suffer few consequences.

Yeah, now if you state an opinion that's too controversial or against the grain you get blacklisted by anyone with enough time to feed your name into a database.

Real names: no, no, no, no, no

Even better as real names are stolen and traded, you can find out via identity theft that you're a real jerk online.

Have you seen the lowest common denominator facebook feed? Plenty of people will post plenty of garbage of their own volition even if you ignore just sharing other sources of clickbait and that's under their own name and face most of the time.

Reputation tracking is most useful for detecting bad faith actors (ie the person "just asking questions" but regular participates in extremist forums), but doesn't seem to be enough to promote any sort of self moderation.

> require real names. And verify them.

Facebook does this and even requires some users to upload a photo ID to prove their identity[1], and that site is a cesspool.

A side effect is that people like me, who have no desire to create a public index of everything they've ever said or done on the internet, will not use those products in any capacity.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/183000765122339

In reality, Facebook has been quite unsuccessful at verifying accounts. [1]

[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebooks-fake-accounts-doubled...

Hah, I deleted my account months ago and made a new account with a made-up name that literally has the word "Fake" in it, just to keep tabs on one or two groups whose events I'm interested in. Didn't even know that there was a risk they'd try to verify it.

Counteranecdote: I made a fake account for work purposes (needed to look at certain things on Facebook that you can only see while logged in, and didn’t want to use my personal account) and it got deleted pretty quickly.

My wife tried to create a new FB account a month ago after many years of not having one. Entirely genuine, real name, photo and cell phone number. Rejected as deemed to be fake.

YouTube implemented real names and that was an absolute shitshow. Not only did it fail to meaningfully reduce toxic content, by removing the protection of anonymity it enabled cyberbullying based on demographics: "Oh, now I know who you are I can more effectively harass you based on your sexuality/gender/ethnicity/etc." They rolled it back for many reasons, but that was a big one.

Even for disinformation that wouldn't work very well. Reputations are made to be gamed even without it being a concrete thing, proxies exist, and it in itself is something exploitable for misinformation.

There is no easy epistemological shortcut to the truth (barring say mathematics and other verifiables), let alone the grey area of deliberately misleading truths.

Or at least a nobel peace prize

I think its more like a fire that is burning a system we might have called ‘civic discourse.’ Our societal communication is sustaining damage, it looks like Fury Road on the other side.

The theory of moral sentiments, the ideas of The Republic, are an architecture built over centuries of human civilization. The forces of anarchy and disorder are hard at work pulling it down.

and behind that disorder and anarchy are corporations and totalitarian regimes looking to weaken democracies for their own self-serving ends.

I think you're dead wrong, and have only to look at the history of yellow journalism (int he US) or the daily cesspool of tabloid newspapers (int he UK) to see that there has always been a large audience for trash.

My problem isn’t that tabloid have and always had a large audience, it is that formerly serious newspapers like the FT are becoming propaganda outlets. Even news agencies which historically had very strong standards seems to think they should put their thumb on the scale, like Reuters embargoing a story on O’Rourke to give him a chance to beat Ted Cruz. There isn’t any neutral, trustworthy news anymore. All news is now about pushing narrative.

The Two Minutes Hate. Truly Orwellian.

Upvoted for reminding me about this. I'm probably due a re-read of 1984 as I'd completely forgotten about the Two Minutes Hate. Orwell really was a visionary.

Two minutes hate is not something new, the difference is just how accesible creating and disseminating such sentiments have become.

And once "the internet" (some nasties behind it) found the way to make these "two minute" increments compound (e.g. YT showing a more extreme version than the one just watched), combined with profiling etc, then boom, CA and FB win elections ;)

This just once against demonstrates what Orwell really meant and America never heard, everything he painted in his dystopia was just as possible under authoritarian capitalism as it is under authoritarian communism. The American education system loves making kids read Animal Farm and 1984 but for some reason they never seem to mention that Orwell was an anarcho-socialist.

> We're talking 1000x the exposure and people believing it's "mainstream."

Twitter is now famous for this.

You'll see an account with two or three followers post some news story that pushes some agenda. Within minutes the tweet has over 8,000 retweet and likes. Less than an hour later its trending and snowballs from there. Suddenly, the mainstream media picks it up and reports it as fact - even though its blatantly obvious this story has been propagated and driven in a totally false manner.

It's become the blueprint for pushing propaganda from social media into the mainstream media, making public opinion remarkably easy to manipulate.

It has the ability to go even further than that. Once something has reached some ill-defined level of media coverarge, it's eligible for inclusion on Wikipedia, which then populates Google SERPs and all manner of other services. (And in Wiki's case, even if someone figures out the BS, they won't be allowed to do anything about it because the non-media coverage counts as "original research")

Granted, this generally won't happen unless an actual shill for whatever cause is editing the site, but still. Misinformation has never been able to move faster.

The book "Anti-Social" by Andrew Marantz introduced me to the concept of "High Arousal Emotions", which is exactly what clickbait, advertising and 'social networks' take advantage of to get clicks.

Personally, I don't think it runs up against the first amendment to limit the use of such a blatant emotional/mental hack.

>I don't think it runs up against the first amendment to limit the use of such a blatant emotional/mental hack.

The Snowden leaks resulted in some fairly high-arousal emotions, so I would be careful with where you go with that.

I don't believe it should be limited, I am generally an absolutist on free speech. But I do think media outlets need an internal reform, or we need to start looking at alternative methods of revenue that don't rely on societal damage. I honestly don't even think some of these people mean what they say, it is very much an Ann Coulter methodology.

I keep saying this: we don't need to be attacking the symptom, we need to be attacking the disease. Regulating what people are posting online will never get rid of the real problem, there is simply too massive of an incentive to manipulate people for financial gain. Until that's fixed we're just going to keep putting out new fires when someone discovers the next big unethical business practice that happen to work.

So what, pray tell, is the disease in your analogy? Human nature?

Of course the massive irony is that if it was accepted as true the rationale in itself is a "High Arousal Emotion" to manipulate into accepting limitations and seeing nothing wrong with them. It doesn't technically mean it is wrong (Fallacy fallacy style) but I find it reason to be suspicious.

Right or wrong with the First Ammendment it isn't exactly precedented in the best of ways as the closest doctrines were abandoned for good reason. Fighting words and vague definitions of "inciting a riot" which mean "the mob really doesn't like you" instead of "calling for them to murder/burn something down". There is false advertising but that framework would be far more limited by design. Even if considered a good idea it would call for its own constitutional amendment.

Honestly I'm surprised more people aren't burnt out on this. I can only be angry and get triggered by the same bullshit for so long before it just doesn't work.

But isn't that a sinister side of it too? Burn out and disengage those of us who are rational and reasonable.

Only 150 more years till we can apply to Starfleet...

Being disengaged from mainstream news reporting and clickbait articles isn’t the same as being disengaged from news, reading articles, and being informed though. It just means that instead of following the outrage threadmill and blindly trusting the first source you encounter, you get more emotionally disengaged and have to do more work to filter out your sources and read multiple different coverages of the same piece of info to get a more full and objective picture that isn’t clouded by the lens and emotional coloring through which the source could present it.

It does take more of your willpower and effort to do all that, but that’s the price we have to pay to get a more objective view of something. Back in the old days, the access to information in the first place was what people had to work hard for. In the age of information abundance, you still have to work to get it, but now you have to do more filtering and less figuring out how to access it in the first place.

An old quote I heard once: “The news doesn’t tell you what to think, the news tells you what to think about”

Doesn’t matter if the emotional jerking doesn’t work no more. Your mind is still hijacked.

Copied from where I've said this elsewhere:

Almost 10 years ago, I conducted an experiment. I watched an hour of CNN every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago.

It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person] will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as opinions, they were presented as facts and the obvious next steps or conclusions.

I realized pretty quickly that avoiding CNN kept out the blatantly wrong information so even if I didn't replace it with anything, I was net ahead.

A few years ago, I discovered this article and realized that some portion of it was probably on purpose:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...

> I watched an hour of CNN every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago.

This is an amazing thought experiment. I wonder if using this method, but extrapolating to multiple competing news sources could get remove bias both in recency as well as consistency.

I think the main conclusion of that thought experiment was that you're better off not watching the news in the first place. No point in trying to see if you could average out bias by watching multiple news sources; you've failed the moment you've started to watch any of them.

I gave up on TV news before I was even out of high school because I was fed up with the "milling" of incessantly covering to death a few topics with endless speculation and often dropping them before they resolved. That and youth as villain moral panics which were trivially bullshit like rainbow parties (even the coolest of kids claiming to have gotten blown by seven girls with different color lipsticks would get cries of bullshit by those who actually believe that someon has a "girlfriend in Canada", and "pharm parties" which consisted of filling mixing bowls with random cabinets full of pills.

Even the dumbasses who stick paper clips in electrical outlets because they think it would be funny or looking to get high wouldn't do that because it not only is obviously dangerous but not likely to get high. Smoking random literal area weeds would be more fun and less stupid.

I agree. About a year ago I made the conscious decision to remove the vast majority of "news", particularly political news, from my life. On Reddit, I blocked all political-related subreddits, removed CNN et al from my bookmarks, unsubscribed from news-related podcasts, removed all news apps from my phone, and I only browse sites /subreddits that pertain to specific interests of mine (HN, subreddits about programming, technology, fitness, financial news about specific companies I am following, etc). I will open a "news site" very rarely when I catch wind of a significant event happening (impeachment, bombing Iran), but again this is very rare. When it comes time to vote, I'll spend some time doing active research on current topics so I can make informed decisions, and the active research helps significantly to avoid clickbait/ragebait that pops up when passively browsing the internet.

I can say without a doubt it has made a significant improvement to my general mood and demeanor. I no longer get sucked into a trap reading infuriating news about the government or inane comments on social media sites. Now when I do happen to come across a clickbait/ragebait headline, my brain seems to just ignore it and carry on with life. Sometimes my friends will bring up the latest "omg Trump, did you hear?" news while we hang out and it will devolve into a bitchfest where they get visibly angry as they talk about it, meanwhile I just sit back and say "I have no idea what you're talking about". Ignorance is bliss, and I say that completely unironically.

It is a little sad because I previously loved being "in the know" and always kept up with the news and wanted to be involved in politics. I miss that aspect a little bit, and I'm certainly wary of the greater effect if everyone in society just disengaged from public debate, but for the most part the improvements have far outweighed that negative.

If you find yourself spending more than even a couple minutes a day being angry/stressed at current events, I strongly recommend limiting, if not totally cutting out, that type of news. It really is great.

Another approach is trying to take a disciplined, abstract view of the situation.

For the news, pay less attention to the content of the news, but the style in which it is delivered, paying particular attention to word choice, chosen perspective, suspiciously excluded details, double standards, epistemic soundness (how would one actually know the "fact" that is being reported), etc.

For internet conversations, try to remain undecided on the particular issue being argued, but closely observe the nature of the conversation, using the same techniques as above.

I think if you can manage to do this skillfully, what would normally be an exercise in frustration and stress can transform into a pleasurable study of the nature of human beings, if you're into that sort of thing.

I'm with you, though it's hard to talk about what you observe from this point of view with people who are neck deep in a given narrative. It's isolating at the same time as enlightening.

Completely agree. On one hand, this seems like little more than plain old common sense, little more than observing the peculiarities of human psychological quirks in action. But then on the other hand, I can't escape this feeling that's there's something actually quite interesting going on here...more specifically, that relatively more intelligent people tend to be aware of these psychological phenomena, and are able to discuss them when the topic is the phenomena themselves, but when a topic is something else, this ability/knowledge "seems" [0] to ~vanish. And it seems it's not only that a strong psychological resistance to the phenomena arises, but that perhaps something occurs in the mind that makes prior knowledge ~literally inaccessible.

It seems fairly unlikely that this is a novel idea, but I've yet to come across any literature that discusses it directly. I imagine part of the problem is that studying such a thing would be incredibly difficult.

[0] I say "seems" because I am running purely on heuristics derived from aggregate patterns of aggregate behavior, comments, and voting - to be more certain, one would require the ability to somehow monitor individuals to see if this theory can actually be observed at the individual level.

Yes, I deleted reddit altogether and rarely read/watch the news. Yes maybe this is a "privileged" position. But it's not as if I can affect much other than local happenings in my community. The thing about most political issues is that they are all more nuanced than we pretend and unless we're experts, we're probably wrong and/or underinformed so it's mostly a waste of time anyway. I stick to a few personal axioms and leave the rest

Sounds like you're a few axioms short of nihilism.

One thing you can actually add: local news.

The local news people don't put every fire or robbery through some ideological/woke lens, generally, it's just facts.

Moreover, that it happens near to you gives it some extra empathetic relevance.

When it's 'people you kinda might now' you don't think of it as an abstraction.

I'm in Montreal and I watch PBS Vermont often. Burlington/Montpellier local news. It's so provincial it's almost funny.

It's really refreshing to see regular people, and to know that even if the events are 'local' - it's these kinds of events that are actually most relevant to most people's lives. The political stuff is weirdly not that important.

They aren't exactly two distinct things, in the sense that if you can drive hate clicks with fake news you just put yourself in business.

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