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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

It is remarkable to see (in this age of the internet) the huge gap between what the media believes about the present vs. what is more likely based on the far deeper amount of information made available on the internet.

Society is made up of many parallel subcultures, and only a very small group of them keep journals, write, or otherwise record history. That group appears to be mostly disconnected from the nuts and bolts of what is actually going on technologically, politically and economically.

It has always been understood that history was unreliable, but the collapse of media credibility as we gain access to primary sources stands as a stark warning of just how little we really know about the past.

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This reminds me of old shows about Big Foot, Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, etc...

Now that many people can easily take videos/photos on there phones, it turns out there's a lot of official and police misconduct, bigotry, and people acting like dilholes in general, and not many monsters. At least not yet.

> …it turns out there's a lot of official and police misconduct, bigotry, and people acting like dilholes in general, and not many monsters.

One can argue they are the monsters

Similarly, miracles and credible supernatural events have all but stopped. Odd.

Didn’t they just release a lot of military ufo videos. Most of them already debunked by several YouTubeers

The end result of analyzing the UFO videos just ends up publicizing more and more details of military technology that should be kept secret. By that I don't mean that aliens are real, I mean the far more mundane implications of military espionage such as your enemy having extensive knowledge about your sensor capabilities because that is what most of these UFO sightings are, they are sensor artifacts.

yet the earth is more flat it is remarkable..

There have been far more sightings and phone recordings of the LNM than there used to be. They just don't make the headlines any more.

I'm agnostic about the LNM and don't lean either way.

And of course this is now History Channel click-tainment, so it's not a serious topic.

Even so - it's not factually correct to suggest there are no recent photos or videos of surface phenomena that seem to match the profile.

> Now that many people can easily take videos/photos on there phones

Vampires are known to not show up properly in mirrors, so they may have properties that interfere with smartphone camera optics as well.

Though here's an iPhone ghost photo from 2015, blamed on "an oddity from an iPhone's imaging capture":

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150629-the-intriguing-h...

> It has always been understood that history was unreliable, but the collapse of media credibility as we gain access to primary sources stands as a stark warning of just how little we really know about the past.

Establishing provenance and reliability post 2020 is going to be...interesting...

Why 2020 specifically?

Generative AI

Specifically the combination of generative AI and the lack of current understanding of it by the history-making professions (archivists and historians). Historians and archivists rely a lot on primary sources and right now digital provenance is already a dumpster fire - I don't even want to think of what generative AI is going to do. A lot of the methods traditionally used for identifying an authentic primary source aren't going to work with generative AI.

It isn't particularly new, given that most of our media are either doctored, touched up, or manipulated in some ways.

Most of us don't have VFX knowledge or the ability to detect minute flaws in Deepfake works.

We do it through by filtering and selecting sources of information.

I disagree. Historically, having a lot of subcultures wasn't a thing in any society I've heard about. Even in the west today, what people call a subculture is just people doing stuff that is conformant with the dominant culture (mostly individualism and progressivism, what indivduality or direction of progress might change and people think that's a subculture).

History looks at all available sources not just popular ones. Merely surviving up to the present age is a huge feat for any historical evidence.

I am constantly seeing disputed history when I look into historical events or figures. I only agree with your last sentence because much of history was oral and like the game of telephone it has gotten distorted or just lost.

History is written by not the winner, but those who accuire power.

Or by those who make the headlines that get the most clicks.

Often stories are exaggerated or twisted, not for any particular side, but for attention and clicks.

Potato, potato.

History is written by those who know how to write.

For a long time they were a small minority. Even poor monks could leave manuscripts. Not necessarily the "winners".

Although certain writing has a greater chance of being considered important, and of surviving through time.

Is this why "defeatist" narratives feel so much more prevalent lately? Those at the bottom are sharing their pain and suffering more widely on social media?

Not that their experiences aren't valid, but that there is an overwhelming feeling that "America sucks and is failing" when this isn't a true assessment. Not for the middle class and above, and especially not relative to the rest of the world on average.

Social media lumps all voices in together and tends to amplify strong feelings. But if you zoomed out, you'd see a very different picture of what constitutes this collective voice.

...is your solution to have those sharing their pain and suffering made to stop?

I seriously don't understand your point, nor the level of mental gymnastics it takes to see a trend of independently dissatisfied people and say - oh, my neighborhood is doing fine, you're just being defeatist.

I'd wager that if you "zoom out" what you see is a dangerously reckless societal experiment for some, and a life of modern amenities for others. Both can be true at the same time.

Good news is seldom shared or amplified. It's also seldom relevant, but I'd argue the same is true of the negativity.

Online content is overwhelmingly negative. Bad things happen, but in reality the proportionality is much smaller than you encounter online. But negativity is what gets amplified, since that drives engagement. The smallest grievances become threads that take up disproportional space in the attention feed and crowd out the rest.

I guess I'm wondering if this isn't just the algorithm, but also an amplification of certain subpopulations over others. The ones that tend to be angry.

> ...is your solution to have those sharing their pain and suffering made to stop?

I want a mute button. Or a threshold that caps it past a certain point.

Or, if this is just some people contributing to most of the problem, maybe just a way to opt out of their noisiest signals.

People can say all they want, but it doesn't mean they deserve a place in my limited attention and emotional energy feed.

Emotion is contagious.

I want my media use to drop to only the most salient bits. And I want it to be more positive.

Nobody is forcing you to use social media. If you don't want to see something you don't have to.

On the flip side you should consider that some people like the affirmation and validity they get out of hearing stories similar to their own. People have their own needs that are met by social media. If yours aren't, maybe consider that you aren't the target audience?

> Nobody is forcing you to use social media. If you don't want to see something you don't have to.

> People have their own needs that are met by social media. If yours aren't, maybe consider that you aren't the target audience?

The internet isn't for me?

That's interesting. I was here first and then the platforms came and ripped apart our old methods of high-signal communication. RSS, IRC, and forums are ghost towns or dead. Replaced with anger amplification and marketing money printers.

My response to this is that we can perhaps begin filtering out these voices and negative remarks with AI and NLP. That could make social media broadly useful again, even if the platform owners themselves would be opposed.

No, the internet is not for you. It's used by billions of people around the planet.

What I'm hearing is basically "the poors are making too much noise for my liking." Well, prepare to get eaten I guess.

Sigh.

Enshittification is happening everywhere. I also mourn the vanishing old internet. Social media is increasingly difficult to curate, and our search engines are compromised to the point they don’t work. We are at the mercy of algorithms that are measurably driving young people insane, and you are like ‘lol at least lots of people use it, get destroyed.’

That doesn’t seem like a very thoughtful or measured response.

Confounding enshittification with people daring to express negativty in 'echelon's internet' is lacking empathy. Platform creep is a problem. People looking for validity in their emotions is not.

Anyone who says the internet, a resource used by billions of people, and prescribes changes that suit their personal preferences, is probably narcissistic too.

There are a couple things happening here:

1) We benefit from social media lumping voices together because it's easier to argue against and internally reason with. They aren't individuals with individual experiences, they're the unwashed entitled masses crying on social media spreading their lies. See how easy that was? We do this a lot for everything we don't agree with.

2) Spend any time anywhere and it's easy to start seeing "narratives". Online bubbles are real: most people do not comment on any given platform. Therefore, commenters are already a bubble in themselves. So we do what humans do and start seeking patterns, and then extract these patterns into narratives. Note: this does not mean that there aren't groups of people who do share whatever "narrative" idea, but the reality is their views on it tend to be more nuanced than the narrative we've imagined in our minds. For example, 'America sucks and is failing' could be a common vague narrative people share, but you would get so many varied explanations that it stops existing as such a simple narrative until you reduce it again into a vague narrative.

3) Social media has its pros and cons, but one of its neutrals is it forces people from entirely different groups to interact with each other. This winds up becoming world shattering a lot of the times, because as humans we tend to create these internal stories that justifies our world views. We seek out things that justify these internal stories. We seek out people who reflect what we want, and this feeds into #2 and makes it harder to break out of. So, if you are optimistic you'll seek others who are also optimistic, and when social media does its recommendation/random thing, you'll encounter people who do not share this view and then it leads right back into #1 turning this into tribes. A beautiful self powering triangle if you will.

Most records don't survive. Over any considerable timespan, the ones that do have been copied and rewritten dozens or hundreds of times (with the exception of a few archeological gems). Every generation is curating the past based on what they think is important.

> It is remarkable to see (in this age of the internet) the huge gap between what the media believes about the present vs. what is more likely based on the far deeper amount of information made available on the internet.

So "the media" has no internet?

> Society is made up of many parallel subcultures, and only a very small group of them keep journals, write, or otherwise record history. That group appears to be mostly disconnected from the nuts and bolts of what is actually going on technologically, politically and economically.

Is the fact they write or record history stopping them from digging out those real deep youtube videos about the truth behind everything?

Did "the media credibility" collapse in that very moment when you found out that the pentagon was behind 9/11?

> Did "the media credibility" collapse in that very moment when you found out that the pentagon was behind 9/11?

That's a funny question to ask, because a huge amount of people on the US lost confidence on the media exactly because most of them conspired to lie to the public about Iraq's WMDs shortly after 9/11.

Even funnier: most US citizen were pro Iraq war first, then embarrassed, then looking for someone else to blame...

I don't remember the embarrassment stage. I think it went from pro-war to forgetting about it. President Obama said it himself: "we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards".

I’m curious, are you deliberately avoiding the very obvious implication that “most US citizen” only felt that way because of CNN/Fox messaging?

I feel like you’re remembering this timeline pretty poorly. Were you living in the US at the time?

If you choose to be mad at cnn/fox that is probably not irrational. Just dont go about blaming every media outlet for secretly cooperating with the goverment and question yourself first. I was not living in the US then and i remember attending an anti irak war protest. The media info i got at the time was that the us policy was foolish and likely to destabilize the entire region. I guess the media here was right then.

I for myself thought getting rid of saddam and creating a democratic irak was desirable if not easily achievable- i was not sure what would be best to do.

I don't think they conspired to lie, they just reported the information they were getting from the government. They didn't have any way to independently verify any of it.

The information they got from the government was literally ridiculous. Outside of the US it was more reported on comedy shows than on the news.

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