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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

It's really weird to see this headline where underneath is a stock ticker showing "AAPL -0.41%" and "META +21.0%" and then another article on the side under Trending titled "Meta shares surge 20% on soaring profit, better-than-expected guidance and first-ever dividend".

Nothing is a lie here, but clearly the headlines convey certain ideals to people and those might not really match reality. And it seems like they're just playing the field, writing positively and negatively framed articles to appeal to whichever audience wants what. Why can I not just get one self contained coherent article that's something like "Meta shares surge despite major losses ahead of Apple's Vision Pro launch"? (or the reverse order). These are clearly aimed to be shared on social media and generate particular sentiment to those that only read headlines. Boy is the news a confusing mess.

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People tend to project their feeling of being overwhelmed by information onto the media/MSM/journalism.

It's actually probably true that:

- Apple's stock is slightly down today.

- Facebook's stock is way up today.

- Facebook netted -4.65B on VR.

- Apple's Vision Pro launched today.

Maybe it's from growing up on the internet, but my confusion starts when people expect The Media to be a monolith and project one consistent emotional vibe, and when they don't, to add _more_ confusion and start claiming that the news is being selected to drive a particular sentiment...even though their initial observation was there is no one singular comfortable bite-sized truth that wraps up VRs long-term story, today.

I don't think that's a completely fair point. People don't read a news article to learn a single fact. They read a news article to put those facts in perspective and context.

The complaints of this thread is that there are very conflicting facts and they don't feel the article (and other articles) is giving a fair representation of the overall picture, and rather feels like it's pandering to people who want to hear it framed in a particular way.

There's ~0 explication of why they feel this way after reading the text, other than musing about manipulation, and the text cited isn't editorialized. [^1]

I think it's charitable, but unwarranted, to claim they're implying they'd like more editorialization and a quick winner/losers narrative. They seem to indicate negative feelings towards that.

It does seem as simple as they see 2 headlines and 2 stock symbols in some kind of tension that implies editorialization and an unsustainable situation for everyone.

[^1] It's not FACEBOOK VR SHOCKER: LOSERS TAKE $5 BIL LOSS WHILE APPLE RELEASES VISION PRO TO UNIVERSAL ACCLAIM! (fb up 20% apple down 8%)

It's 4 separate things, without value judgements implied or attached. (literally 2 stock ticker symbols, and these 2 headlines detached from eachother: FB lost $5B in Mixed Reality division in last fiscal year, Apple Vision Pro released today).

You are confusing related to correlated or complementary facts. Meta and Apple shares are independent of each other and both are practically independent of Reality labs and Vision Pro.

The news headline is comparing two complementary business and so is valid.

> "Meta shares surge despite major losses ahead of Apple's Vision Pro launch"

This would have been a click bait as it is trying to relate independent events.

> Nothing is a lie here, but clearly the headlines convey certain ideals ... These are clearly aimed to be shared on social media and generate particular sentiment to those that only read headlines.

My statement is really about sentiment

> Why can I not just get one self contained coherent article

You just said it!

First of all, engagement optimization is as old as the printing press.

...But the difference now is thay is that news targets algorithms, not eyeballs and reputation.

My worry is about LLM driven news. You find a lot of free news sites are just summarized lazy versions of paid news like NYT or something else. But GPT can already do just as good summaries than those people (it really isn't hard) but certainly it is a lot cheaper than paying a person literally any rate by the hour. But how does the source material that is being leeched off of then survive when it costs less than a penny for what cost the source likely thousands. AI is pretty far away from performing its own investigative reporting where it knows who to reach out to, talk to, and perform all such actions coherently and consistently.

But it also makes it easy to spam shit like this where you just write 5 articles with different sentiment and send it out. It can even be an online system, optimizing headlines for higher "engagement". But engagement is a proxy and I think we need to start actively acknowledging that the metric has been long hacked and at this point abused.

> But engagement is a proxy and I think we need to start actively acknowledging that the metric has been long hacked and at this point abused.

It will not be, as long as it is the internet gatekeepers' livlihood.

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