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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

I had a subscription to newspapers.com for research in Inventing the Future. It was pretty valuable. You could also see how the LA Times was raking in the advertising bucks back in the day. 30 pages of story crammed into 200 pages of paper.

Not very searchable, though. I think if future historians can search NextDoor and all the little neighborhood newspapers, they'll be better off. That's a big IF, considering the paywalls.

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I'll take 200 pages of ads that can't intensively surveil me over a few banner ads that can.

I've noticed news sites have some of the most horrendous dark patterns and third party cookies I come across on the internet. Nothing frustrates me more than the video pop up on sites like CBS news. It makes me have a lot less sympathy for news organizations.

An LLM built from actual conversations of people about local things Nextdoor/FB is a better history recorder than Newspapers with an agenda

Uh oh not an AgEnDa! Because no one on Facebook/Nextdoor has an agenda, they're definitely not regurgitating the newspapers agenda at all either.

Facebook and Nextdoor at least has voice of the people, however wrong it is. It truly has both sides opinions. It captures the zeitgeist. I'll take that over any elite-class, university-brainwashed, liberal arts people writing about stuff through their biased lenses

I have some bad news for you. “Elite-class, university-brainwashed, liberal arts people” write about stuff through their biased lenses everywhere, including Nextdoor.

The point isn't that those people aren't contributing, it's that you get multiple perspectives, even if all of them are skew. You can get extremely accurate positions with many highly unreliable datapoints. because even if they're individually highly inaccurate, where they overlap (and/or where their centroid is) is more accurate than any individual measurement.

Then we really don't local news then. We capture university-brainwashed liberal perspectives in our NextDoor dataset.

You clearly aren't getting my point.

I'm arguing for 100 biased-perspectives over 1 biased-perspective

Except that 100 people are Nextdoor are not doing the "oversight of courts, local councils and school boards" except in exception circumstances.

They probably aren't even reporting the final numbers in the local council election.

Assuming NextDoor's dataset is around in 100 years (probably not) there will be some topics well represented. But you are going to have huge gaps in others.

I think you're missing the point, both of you. It's not people's opinions I'd be interested in 50 years from now; it's just what they were talking about. Everyone might have an opinion about some event, but it's the event itself I'd want to know.

You’re right, of course.

How many historical nextdoors are you aware of? For me, none. But is that because they don’t exist or just that no record survived? Social media is secret society.

None. That's what I noted: all these neighborhood-specific social sites would be gold for a future historian. Or novelist.

If you think the stuff Microsoft Tay spewed was bad, just wait until we have LLMs built with actual conversations on Nextdoor.

You will find no greater hive of scum and villainy than Nextdoor.

No, there are much worse. They are just stupid, at least on mine.

Newspapers will make and publish stories and reports a lot of times without an agenda because their profession is publishing news, and there are stories where they just don't have any personal interest and therefore no agenda to tout. If you were tasked with writing a story about something you really have no interest in, then you'd write it without an agenda.

Contrast that with the common public, who will of course not waste their time writing about or discussing matters that they do not have any interest in.

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