Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulgb | Hacker News Reader

The model I use for making sense of Twitter is that most of the blue check dialogue is just bringing the people-fighting-on-cable-news dynamic to the internet. Personalities on both sides of every debate have a symbiotic relationship where they have inane arguments because that's what gets boosted and gives them more visibility.

Which is fine, if you treat it as entertainment, but people think they're following the news and instead they're watching a wrestling match.

View on HN

The painful realization about social media and most forms of media is that, at the end of the day, even the people you like, the people you agree with, have very little in common with you and far more in common with those they vocally disagree with, generally.

I'm generally politically very left and I listen to a show which I won't name here but is also relatively left. At some point, I realized the income the hosts make puts them squarely in the same economic bracket as many of the people that they are often calling greedy or unprincipled. From that realization stemmed the next, that these people, even if they started with perfect intention and perfect action, necessarily must be subverted towards entertainers over informers by the design of the platforms they use to spread their message.

This post feels 100% like it's about Chapo.

Yes. Surely it's about Chapo. I'd certainly not call them as 'greedy' or 'unprincipled' as the people they criticise. However I'll not waste this opportunity to call them bland, effete and ignorant.

Please stop downvoting comments just because you disapprove. This is probably the worst practice on HN of late.

This post is entirely independent of the subject being discussed. I have no opinion on these particular podcasters.

I don't even have the rep to downvote comments.

Late reply. It was your comment that had been downvoted into the negative when I came across it. So I was engaging in a kind of off-topic defense of your comment. ;-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com