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Comment by ycdxvjp | Hacker News Reader

The UN report on the Attention Economy quotes a study that says 0.5% of content produced is consumed by anyone and dropping.

Platforms don't advertise it and have created a totally absurd industry where the limits of Consumption has no impact on the limits of Production. So there is no journalism going on.

Content explodes and finite Attention fragments into smaller and smaller bits so Content Producers view counts stay up with ever diluting short lived impact.

Consumption is not being measured right. If the you get a single viewer who then goes and reads 50 other things you are really getting 1/50th of that view. Self serving content producers and platforms don't talk about it at all.

It's like watching home builders debating what they are building before the subprime meltdown.

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You're not reading (the first sentence of) the report correctly.

> By the 2000s, so much information was being generated worldwide that only a small fraction (0.5% in 2015) of the digital data generated was being analyzed at all.

Information and its analysis is not equivalent to content and its consumption, nor can you extrapolate one from the other.

That you seem to use this as the sole basis for your conspiratorial findings that we're in a content bubble and "platforms don't advertise it" is unfortunate.

I think you are greatly over estimating how much impact analysis is having here. Not to mention skipping over the dilution and fragmentation of Attention (even of experts).

Journalism value lies more in surfacing data/info rather than analyzing it - an MRI tech might be able to observe and detect cancer before everyone else, but that doesn't mean they are qualified docs or cancer researchers. Or whatever they think needs to be highlighted really needs everyones attention. The platforms regularly waste everyone's time and energy.

Journos are in a similar position to the MRI tech and do call in experts to look at their data, but it all gets regularly drowned out by the info tsunami, plus experts usually need Time the more complex anything gets. The platforms profit from the expectation that what they promote, translates to action or solution instantly. And when it doesn't they don't indicate how much energy has been wasted.

The info flows have to change for more action and less unnecessary attention capture. The MRI techs are getting too much attention without an equivalent increase in lives saved.

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