Comment by youeseh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by youeseh | Hacker News Reader

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Traditional TV and Print News Media gets the most eyeballs when they are controversial. Fox, CNN, MSNBC all do everything they can to coddle their specific segment. They phrase and comment on the news in a way that'll either excite their segment when they think it'll benefit and soften the blow whenever they think it'll hurt.

And no, none of them appeal to a general audience. The ads that each network displays will tell you exactly who their specific audience is.

Twitter's audience is narrow: Most of the people I know (across countries, religions, genders, professions) do not have a Twitter account. So, they make decisions that suit their userbase, which is significantly narrower than Facebook's.

Facebook user base is closer to the general public. Unfortunately, their platform also enables an echo chamber. So, they have a tough job to do and in this regard. They have to be careful about whom to censor. Whatever they choose will be closer the law. I think they're trying their best.

>Twitter's audience is narrow: Most of the people I know (across countries, religions, genders, professions) do not have a Twitter account.

most of the people in media are on twitter 247, talking heads take from twitter discourse and export that to other media

Twitter has a really high membership ratio in journalism and politics - pretty much every professional journalist and politician is very active.

Whether this is a good thing for society is a different question.

(I'd argue that it's not and that Twitter should be closed down. But I know that's an unpopular opinion)

Twitter should be closed down

It probably can't be closed down in a way that's not even worse than current situation. Even if there's no coercion and management just has the revelation and decides to close shop, some (probably Chinese-owned) clone will probably reach the same position soon, what's the win?

I reckon it's not as unpopular as you might think.

Twitter is very popular among influential people

Does your closing down suggestion only apply to Twitter or also other social media platforms? What would the effect be?

I don't know why Twitter is the one they all chose. It's unique in restricting the size of posts, maybe that's it?

I don't know what the effect would be. I don't think we can roll the clock back to 1995. But equally given the current situation in the USA I don't think the status quo is sustainable.

If you forced me to give an answer, then I think there should be a 1-hour delay on all tweets. It's the immediacy of the thing that gives it the power. If we just slowed it down then I think it would work better, because human nature.

I think the other social media platforms don't have as much of a mega phone effect that twitter does? Twitter posts by default can be seen by the world which differs from other social media sites?

I think most other social media sites are public by default. Reddit, most forums, Youtube, TikTok, HN, etc.

Twitter is really a broadcast medium, more geared towards posting in real time and reposting, and less towards a discussion. It also limits the size of a tweet, making them perfectly quotable, and discouraging nuance and detail, so a juicy bon mot is basically the only winning genre on Twitter.

No wonder any public person, any politician, any celebrity may find out that Twitter is a must, if they want to keep and grow their fame / celebrity / notoriety.

Twitter is the digital equivalent of gossip: truncated content that gets virally shared. Unlike gossip it's truncated from the onset, as opposed to at every reshare. Any kind of facts are then corrupted by comments.

While I actually agree that they are "trying their best" (though I feel like "their best" isn't that great ;P), I feel like they have also--on purpose--built something that requires super human levels of "trying" to get right... content recommendation is something that, even at that scale, should have ramifications attached to it, even if it means people don't build them (as the world would probably be better off without them anyway, and it ain't like causing harm at a larger scale is somehow less harmful than doing it on a smaller scale). Until such point, I am at least glad they have discovered a new source of truth: https://www.theonion.com/mark-zuckerberg-announces-all-of-fa...

This is a culmination of many things, and overall it shows we’ve really fucked ourselves as a country over the years.

Capitalism dictates how our communication and news operates, and this is a side effect of changing circumstances where TV and print media are dying, people aren’t paying for news, and companies are relying on ad revenue for their business models - which means having to attract and hold on to consumers.

I’m not trying to paint capitalism as the devil. Just saying it’s not like this was a total surprise given we could see the road we went down.

It’s pretty fucking unfortunate the most prevalent sources of current events and information equate to the ‘McDonalds of news and Walmarts of TV’.

I know people get spooked about propaganda at the thought of government funded news... though clearly having a bunch of rich assholes ‘run news’ hasn’t been so good either. Idk, I guess this is an eye-opener of the importance of publicly funded places like PBS?

I do not use Twitter, and yet I have been seeing screenshots of his half-formed sentences strewn across every news channel for the past 5 years.

At least that will come to an end.

I tend to think that the business model of a cable news room is pretty fundamentally broken.

Insofar as you value investigative journalism or pieces with some depth, you will be disappointed by organizations that host ESPN style shout fests, but they're produced for exactly the same reasons.

It's cheap to make garbage filler content. When you see that all of the channels are deeply flawed, it's because they're incentivized to be flawed in exactly the way that they are.

Curiously, John Oliver (say what you will about his biases) has found a way to fund real investigative journalism. This marks an interesting counterpoint to the 24 hour news room which extends what comedy central (daily show etc) had begun

John Oliver is also focused on a sub-segment and is also at least misleading at times.

There are no sources of information that are credible with more than 45-55% of US Gen pop. We really need a source that can at least be relied upon as accurate source by 70-80% to avoid total collapse of democratic order in US.

Find a business model that works for independent journalism, then.

Advertising pays more with more controversy. Patronage (having a rich person pay the journalists) comes with strings. Consumers appear willing to pay for journalism only when it supports their political beliefs.

Yeah, the solution isn't to find a single fount of truth we can all sup from. We are where we are because that mid-century model was fragile. Not to mention it allowed Americans to overlook any wrongs that didn't blip on the radar of the NorthEast intellectual hegemony.

The real solution is a healthy ecosystem of independent news.

We're trying! https://blog.nillium.com/why-were-building-forth/

Interesting! What business model are you going for?

Think of it sort of Twitter-meets-Substack.

It's still advertising/freemium, but with some big differences. We syndicate out the internal updates that reporters are already writing within their own newsroom, so while they work on their current formats, we just piggyback off of existing work. Then we revenue share from those ads/subscriptions back to support the reporters and news orgs doing the reporting.

There is money being spent on ads now, its just going to the wrong people. We're trying to fix that -- and align the incentives back so that everyone -- readers, reporters, us -- succeeds when we have good journalism, not clickbait.

That's interesting. I used to run a newspaper a couple of years ago and have spent a lot of time thinking about business models for it since.

The main problem with advertising is it monetises engagement, which means that it massively favours controversial or emotional content. How are you going to avoid this? If you have a good journalist writing great journalism, and a hack writing clickbait, how are you going to avoid the hack getting more ad revenue?

Because we aren't monetizing the views, per se.

Since we're posting _updates_ rather than full articles, it's more like Twitter. We can display ads in between the updates -- something print newspapers used to (and still) do all the time. Then we just take the revenue share from any specific market, divide it up by the number of updates contributed, and go from there. It's not perfect, and we may still want to tweak, but the hope is that we can then incentivize lots of hard news reporting, and not "5 celebrities without makeup."

OK, yeah I get it. That's interesting, I look forward to seeing how it pans out :) good luck with it :)

I signed up for Forth - you guys need to learn that zip codes only work in the USA, us foreigners have different things ;)

Nillium looks really interesting, too. I get the need. Slack is utterly useless for this, yet seems to be the default for some reason.

Thank you!

We're launching in the US initially -- but I get the issue. Still, any newsrooms outside of the US who might be interested should still get in touch. https://www.nillium.com/schedule-demo/

> upon as accurate source by 70-80% to avoid total collapse of democratic order in US.

The current news stations are reporting from the same, truthful, reality. It's the spin, slant, and selective omission when they're presented that is different. Having some true source, that dryly presents this reality, will be devoid of these biases, but they'll still picked up and presented in an almost certainly more entertaining, vastly more popular, biased way as they are now.

I think the problem is, and always has been, that people fundamentally prefer similar viewpoint rather than raw presentation of facts. I also assume this is why there are exactly 0, for profit, widely watched, media outlets that present information in this relatively boring way.

> There are no sources of information that are credible with more than 45-55% of US Gen pop

I completely agree

I also agree that John Oliver has a liberal bias! What I don't think, however, is that his bias is required by his business model.

(Curiously, as we discuss the daily show hosts, my very conservative parents both really like Trevor Noah. However, I don't think comedy central is to be our information salvation)

John Oliver? are you kidding me? he purposely takes things out of context, cartoonizes and dehumanizes the opposition, uses comedy as a shield to make substantial counter points, etc etc. His goal is less about engagement (like a news media) and more abut driving a deeper wedge between people.

John Oliver is a curse upon humanity, he makes this world worse.

“A curse upon humanity”? Aren’t you getting a bit carried away? You may not like the contents of the show but fact is he presents a lot of really complex issues in an easily digestible, shareable format, for people who only follow the 24/7 (shallow) news cycle and get their understanding from sound bites. Not to mention the hyperbole of “all of humanity” - his audience is not even all of America :)

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