What, you don’t like the anchor people on TV asking each other how they feel about every piece of news and making horrible puns at every opportunity? Or having expected announcements be reported as BREAKING NEWS?
I've stopped clicking on YouTube videos that give me no idea what they are going to be in the thumbnail/title. For example on Linus Tech Tips second channel ShortCiruit a good chunk of their videos do this. Latest one from 3 years ago in my sub box "I almost hurt myself open this...." and the thumbnail is him maybe holding a big TV with a game on the screen. I can't tell if it's a big monitor, a tv, or if the video will be about what's on the screen in the thumbnail. I wish that videos/news/blogs that use titles like this could also just tack something on the end in brackets saying a couple words about what it's actually talking about.
Too often I'm having to fall prey to the clickbait just to see if maybe the video will interest me or not. More often than not it doesn't and I just wasted time.
I also stopped watching 90% of all LMG (his company) videos (on all their channels) because of the clickbait forcing me to click onto things that I am not interested in, only to quickly leave the video. I am not going to watch what I don't want to watch whether it has a clickbait thumbnail and title or not, so they just annoy me more with this. I have not voiced my opinion for two reasons: 1) it's a really common opinion, Linus is aware of it and this style is obviously good for business since they kept it, 2) fear of intense backlash from the fan community.
So yeah, got that off my chest.
Man first you had to get AdBlock, and recently it feels necessary to use SponsorBlock, and now it feels like there needs to be a new one called ClickBaitBlock which maybe swaps the video titles for a user voted new title similar to SponsorBlock. I'd actually install it if it existed.
I do think it would be cool though to expand SponsorBlock into more crowd-sourced things, since there is already a community of people willing to help.
With YouTube you can hover over the video thumbnail and see a short preview of the video play so that aspect is already kinda covered by YouTube itself.
It's definitely getting closer to what I was talking about but unfortunately falls short.
Actually a pretty good telling of a story all too common for those tasked with handling precious data.
That video is technically hilarious though, it TL;DRs as "download Ubuntu-based USB image provided random RAID recovery company, boot USB and provide said company headless SSH to broken system"... at one point in the video I remember Linus talks to another recovery company about the process and the guy pretty much went "...O.o..." which IMO sums my own opinion up, lol
I REALLY Love Building Computers!!
Never seen one of these before...
Sorry. Your gaming laptop sucks now.
Maybe upgrading is pointless…..
Linus was right.
It's sad about LTT too. I can't find it now, but I saw a video of his talking about this. He doesn't actually like these titles, but claims to have proof they improve viewership counts, so in his quest to optimized for higher and higher counts, he annoys some long time viewers. Can't blame him if it works, but I do wonder if it'll be self-defeating in the end.
Veritasium also had video on this topic: https://youtu.be/fHsa9DqmId8?t=1041
I'll give him credit for being straight about it.
I mentioned it in my other comment, but it feels like we need a ClickBaitBlock similar to SponsorBlock which uses user generated timestamps to skip sponsor blocks in videos. Could be a user generated/voted on new title that gets used. I'd actually use something like that too. It allows creators to play their YouTube game, but also us avoid the game if we choose to. Hell the extension could even support allowing the video creator to submit their own alternative titles. It would be a neat way to beat YouTube at it's own game.
(I know it sounds like I'm confirming the theory that videos don't get recommended if they're not clickbaity, but I only rarely get LTT recommendations in general. I do specifically go to the channel and look for things to watch every so often, however, and it's there that I don't see any non-clickbait test versions.)
I agree with the OP: if we disapprove of posts that only say “same” or “me too” we should probably also discourage posts that dress exactly that in sarcasm.
I fully agree on this point, but the comment in question (sarcastically) criticized certain behaviours ("asking each other how they feel about every piece of news" and "making horrible puns at every opportunity"), so I don't think it fully falls under that threshold.
I'd watch a few of the right media orgs to see what they were saying and then stay on CNN/MSNBC etc for most of it. It's mad how so much of it every hour was essentially people just regurgitating stuff to fill the time. I mean OK what's happening is important but if you can't fill the airtime why not shift to other news (as in everything else happening in the world - HK democracy leaders were arrested during that time and I don't remember any proper mention through days upon days).
Also the fake breaking news thing was stupid. The amount of times I'd turn up Wolf Blitzer or something because I would hear breaking news announcements in the background and thinking like you'd get at the BBC, Channel 4, RTE, France 24 Al Jazeera English, etc that something important was happening. Only to find breaking news was basically just random scheduled things or just regurgitation of what happens. Here Sky News is bad for playing things up but nowhere near as bad as any of them.
News on the right in the US is awful but the Left isn't much better unfortunately. What do people watch that's in the Centre and actual news rather than hyperbole? PBS?
I check nyt and cnn (both with a large grain of salt) periodically (~1x per week, for 5-10 minutes?) but unfortunately neither of those are quite as reliable as one would hope.
The way I see it, written news at least has a wider range of options, and the subscription model means they have slightly less incentive to be so manipulative.
The Guardian has a slant, but nearly every news outlet will have some slant, either by coverage or through omission. But it's certainly a lot worse at Newsmax and OAN.
EDIT: accidentally said "doesn't have"
“the Guardian is seen as Britain’s most left-wing newspaper”
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2017/0...
You have to be careful with this though.
Once upon a time people said this and what they meant was essentially selection bias. So they would report all the major stories, but when choosing the minor stories to fill the rest of their space, it would be stories favorable to one side or the other. And the stories they did cover were covered fairly.
The common practice now is purposely misleading people. Omitting key details of a story or selectively quoting people out of context to change the meaning of what they said.
Probably the canonical example of this is when people were protesting the taking down of statues of members of the confederacy. Some but not all of the protestors were neo-nazis. Others make the case that people are more than the worst thing they ever did, or that taking down the statues is an attempt to memory hole what happened.
Trump got in front of a camera and said "very fine people on both sides." In the same interview he makes explicit that he's not talking about the racists and condemns them:
https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trump...
That quote was widely taken out of context for years to imply that he was calling the racists "very fine people."
It's not the same thing as just choosing which minor stories to cover. It's dishonesty.
Every publication is going to have at least editorial bias in what opinions get written, and what stories are covered, at all or in greater profile.
Private Eye - a famous British satirical magazine - has an entire section ("Street of Shame" referring to Fleet Street) about the worst of this (e.g. newspapers taking long term advertiser money and then conspicuously failing to mention grave problems at the advertised business), but it too has its share of blind spots, most famously it took Wakefield's side on the MMR vaccine claims long after mainstream opinion had shifted to focus on the apparent abuse and profiteering by Wakefield, and even after he was struck off it continued to slow walk any suggestion that its coverage had been wrong or misleading. Its coverage for the present pandemic has been... less than stellar also, except in the sense that it criticises the government for doing a bad job, an open goal sometimes missed at a few of the most right-wing papers.
The weekly videos from Robert Wright & Mickey Kaus on Bloggingheads Tv is pretty good too. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeamuoYuBeRnRRbmq5CmjVg
If my mom calls me after she has been watching that shit, she sounds strung out on stimulants. Agitated, easily angered. She is normally a calm, fairly rational person.
It's fear mongering and it exists because it is effective. If one gets caught up in it, it can be hard to take a step back and realize what is going on. One might hear rationalizations like "I have to stay informed" or "it is related to my work". Very similar behaviour to other addictions.
I'm reminded of Tool lyrics:
"Stare like a junkie Into the TV Stare like a zombie While the mother Holds her child Watches him die Hands to the sky crying Why, oh why? 'cause I need to watch things die From a distance Vicariously I, live while the whole world dies You all need it too, don't lie
Why can't we just admit it?"
> Occasionally watching terrestrial/mainstream TV is equivalent to dipping your head back into the Cave, except, the shadows no longer make any sense, and yet everyone is entrapped by them. It's noisy, bright and hellish, you can't go back, you're in a different world now.
once you can curate information feeds and investigate topics in depth on demand, not to mention adblocking, watching tv at all feels like a psychic assault
Thus I would read US election news on European or Asian news sites, Brexit from Asia, etc. Just my 2c.
The only thing that amazes me at this point is that it is apparently still effective enough that they keep doing it.
It is highly stressful. A good tip is to write “Breaking”, “Alert” and “Urgent” as spam words in the Twitter administration, so all tweets containing it will be hidden (or leave them, to ensure the Twitter experience is as bad as possible until you hate opening it).
Newspapers are better than TV: the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are both much less sensational than any of the broadcasters.
It’d probably be pretty slow to update, but that’s be fine by me.