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Comment by josefresco | Hacker News Reader

> places like wikipedia

Did you mean NY Times?

I too also hate when this sort of language is used. Typically it's "Twitter thinks" or "Facebook reacts" when the correct terminology should be "These 3 users on Twitter" or "This specific person on Facebook".

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I've lost count of how many times I've seen news people claim that a video has "gone viral" only to find out that it has something like 80,000 views.

80k views is nothing to sniff at, but that's hardly "viral".

Not really the same as what you're talking about, but I was reminded because it's another example of lazy use of language by journalists.

The very nature of "gone viral" is based on the concept that the content was created and then spread by a minority of users. Context matters. If your town population is 5K and a video of it's town administrator accepting a bribe gets 80K views that's viral, relative to the townspeople.

I think we're in agreement here; stop lazy journalism.

I joke about this a lot, but if anything is a sign of the state of journalism, its "Twitter is outraged" articles, which consist of a "journalist" finding 2-3 tweets that agree with their stance and have moderate to high engagement, writing up a few paragraphs, and embedding the tweets.

Unfortunately the words of a complete and utter hack can be delivered with the exact same servers, fonts, and layouts as actual journalists.

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