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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

So what caused things to improve between then and the advent of the Web?

Did they improve? Anecdotally, as a kid in the 80s, I can recall plenty of shams being published. They were limited by physical printing and word of mouth.

Going digital just made this information even easier to transmit faster and farther.

We all bought into the "razors/poison in the Halloween candy" bullshit.

"Poisoned candy myths - Wikipedia" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoned_candy_myths#:~:text....

Publicly owned broadcasters and news agencies came into existence, in some countries, and unburdened by the need to compete primarily on gathering attention they could focus on quality.

The CBC and BBC, for example.

Not to be cynical but, what makes you assume it ever improved? I kinda assume it has just been getting worse and worse.

I'm somewhat young still, so I don't have a large personal memory of the times before The Web.

From my short pre-Web memory, I feel there was a "brief" (several decades) period when a small number of regulated (and after regulation ended, acculturated) neutral TV news channels provided a baseline common narrative. That was already eroding in the '90s, as the massive expansion of available channels through both cable and better over-the-air encoding created a similar publishing boom. Both cable and talk radio in the '90s-'00s presaged the greater impact the web and social media would have.

I too have that feeling, but it still feels somewhat misguided... I can't quite place why.

Perhaps I'm just being too pessimistic, that things could in fact be better again.

I wonder...

Many common narratives are themselves hoxes or scams. Many regulations exist to simply protect the scammers. So I'm not quite sure I agree with your implication. I do however agree that culture was more uniform which could cause the illusion of being taken for a ride a bit more appealing.

As for today, I'm amazed at how few people I know even half as pissed off as I am, so maybe they're all still happily on the ferris wheel too?

The common-denominator media didn't put a stop to disinformation and scams, but it did provide some limits to how completely they could alter your worldview. Information contradicting the mainstream media (which was a realer institution then than it is now) had to be quite convincing to take hold.

I think it's worse! Social media creates a bubble effect where nonsense gets amplified more efficiently and reaches a wider audience. It's having quite a detrimental effect on society right now.

I think the proliferation of it made people aware and learn quickly to proceed with caution on many fronts.

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