BuzzFeed lays off 47 HuffPost workers less than a month after acquisition | Hacker News Reader

BuzzFeed lays off 47 HuffPost workers less than a month after acquisition

theguardian.com

20 pointsstickydink8 comments

In the long run, I wonder how clickbait can be a viable business model for an organization such as BuzzFeed. If you think about it, clickbait is designed to be disappointing.

The goal is to make the subject seem much more interesting than it really is - otherwise you wouldn't need clickbait for people to be interested in it. Faced with the fact that all your content is a letdown in some way, how does that not condition your userbase to be dissatisfied with your brand and it's content?

I know BuzzFeedNews is supposed to be legitimate, but I just can't see it as anything other than an arm of a business that produces chum.

Buzzfeed has some legit straight-news reporting though that have had some good scoops the past few years.

But yes most of it is clickbait

As I recall, BuzzFeed has been upfront that this is their model: Unabashed clickbait for reach, serious investigative reporting leveraging the dollars and attention coming from that reach.

Ah yes, the serious investigation surrounding which type of mushroom I am, or a list of ten reasons why Ryan Reynolds is just so darn cute.

In two consecutive years (2017, 2018), Buzzfeed was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting: https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/staff-buzzfeed-news and https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/chris-hamby-buzzfeed-news.

While we are not quite there yet, I wonder if GPT4 or 5 (hypothetically) will allow these businesses to fire most of their workers.

While investigations are hard, writing a piece with no substance for clickbait doesn't seem that hard, and then you just have someone proof-read and post it. Your cost would be very close to 0 and the articles would carry just as much substance as they would have if written by a human being.

>I wonder if GPT4 or 5 (hypothetically) will allow these businesses to fire most of their workers.

The real inflection point is slightly different: when we switch from human preference to AI preference. Let me explain:

The current "gold standard" is human-created content. At present you have humans, algorithms, and AI on both sides (newspapers, Google) trying to out-wit each other by, respectively, pretending to be humans writing content, and by detecting non-human writing.

At present the humans are a necessary ingredient, and combination of algorithms and AI is unable to match the value.

However at some point the algorithms and AI writing content quite possibly will exceed humans' - and so Google and the likes will start prioritizing the machine-created content over the human-created content. Once that tipping point is reached, you can expect a somewhat rapid flip in content authoring. The funniest part of it is that we might not even become aware of the flip for a while - due to the sheer complexity of the algorithms and AIs that Google employs to grade the content.

The Intercept posted recently that their subscriber numbers have plummeted since Trump left office (and they can no longer post clickbait political yellow journalism).

I suspect the same thing happened to HuffPost. They can't dunk on Trump with 50 articles a day so the money is gone.

Trump was the best thing to happen to the media, because of the billions in ad and subscriber revenue he gave to them. He paused the news industry decline, which will now continue.

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