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Comment by flyinglizard | Hacker News Reader

In the US of 50 years ago, democracy was protected by codes of conduct, honor, and most importantly, strong content moderation in the form of monopolistic legacy media. All of this went out the door with the rise of social networks and the demise of legacy media. I don't see how democracy has the tools to survive populists with direct connection to the voting public. Even if elections happen in 2028, there's a good chance the pendulum will swing the other way and instead of thinking about moving forward we'll be locked in left/right destructive cycles, with the resulting purging of institutions, dramatic shifts in policies and just chaos all around.

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this is EXACTLY it. the rise of social media and demise of legacy media weaponized politicians to create flamewars over issues which are great for winning elections but have no real meaning for our day-to-day lives. wokeness, transgender athletes, how many genders we have on the web forms to choose from, how many "immigrants" are we going to deport... are entirely meaningless for 99.98% of the population. instead of talking about how to move the country forward the public discourse is now filled with meaningless "social wars." I do not see a way out of this and I am about as optimistic of a person as you'll find... I mentioned to my colleague few weeks back when we had to change the gender dropdown from tens of options to just two to just stash the changes till 2028 when we'll get 983 options for that same dropdown :)

Personally I don't see a use or benefit of large gender dropdowns. Either keep any existing m/f or simply remove it if you don't need to adress them as her or him. Imo making lists increases chances for stigmatization.

"Large gender drop downs" is a canard, three is a large number for the purposes of their argument. It's not about gender dropdowns of any size other than exactly two as it's about strict enforcement of a rigid, patriarchal class hierarchy.

Accepting "the purpose of a thing is what it does" is important for these times. So is avoiding the epistemic traps of disingenuous actors.

Most internet forms that ask for gender have absolutely no reason to care about that information. Basically, biological sex should matter to healthcare professionals, and gender should matter to virtually nobody. So yes, "simply remove it" should be the answer to this most of the time.

I do not work on "internet forms" but medical research :)

Didn't Ben Franklin have his own printing press promoting his views?

America's political class got complacent and lazy, and forgot that they have to sell what they were pushing to the American people. They never even FOUGHT the battle of ideas. As they age out/get pushed out new Ben Franklin with their own printing press types will rise.

Other part of it, yes, Benny F was quite an edgelord, but it took patience and drive in those days. You couldn't just drop a shitpost in 30 seconds, no, you had to lay out the shitpost in little tiny metal letters, and make copies of the shitpost, painstakingly, one at a time, to distribute. And people didn't come by much reading material in those days, so the shitpost was cherished when acquired. Generally speaking the supply/demand curve of the written word was very much different than it was now. Now, the writing itself and the distribution is automated by machines

Why did you create yet another account?

>democracy was protected by codes of conduct, honor, and most importantly, strong content moderation in the form of monopolistic legacy media.

50 years ago? Perhaps some of what you describe applied, in very limited form and only if you view a small segment of the media/political landscape with extremely rose-tinted glasses, but go read more of U.S media history to see how completely off base you really are.

Media in the United states has spent most of its history being absolutely saturated with extremely yellow, scandal-mongering political hack journalism of the absolute most dishonest kind you can imagine (yes even in the age of social media). This was the case throughout the 19th century, the whole early part of the 20th century and it certainly applied 50 years ago, which would be roughly the late 60's to the 70s.

Overall, i'd say you have no idea at all of what you're talking about and pulled this funny notion out of nowhere for the sake of forcing an alarmist point.

50 years ago someone like Trump wouldn't have a way to obtain a platform from which he can amass a big enough public following. Anyone that wanted to play had to play nice with the establishment. 50 years ago, editorials mattered. Any messaging of a politician or candidate would be followed with context, analysis or discussion by journalists.

Even more amazing when you consider that 50 years ago Trump was embarrassingly in the Enquirer quite often in situations not nearly as respectable as Stormy Daniels, and that was only the gossip they could corroborate. Much more was withheld from publication. People were mainly talking about the way he couldn't be trusted with anything. Plus him & Epstein were eventually running buddies at one point.

For decades the vast majority of those who even knew Trump existed were aware from the beginning he was a fake and it was just so curious to watch him take the pratfalls that he set himself up for. He only became widely known because he was such a complete failure compared to ordinary businessmen, and he would not shut up about how successful he was, it just emphasized how much he didn't have a clue and he was all PR. It was so cringeworthy people could not help but notice. Some things never change.

But under those media conditions he was merely a comic figure for the longest time. Bragging about how rich he is when he's actually bankrupt in more ways than one.

It just wouldn't have been very easy to build critical mass among people who would be willing to take him the least bit seriously. Especially about anything concerning money.

Now it's too late.

The establishment gave us the bay of pigs and then when that fiasco got them snubbed it killed the executive (or at least had something to do with it, I don't believe they literally did it). More recent examples include our adventures in the sandbox in the 20yr following 9/11. Or if you want to go further back you can look at the Catholic church in the 1500s.

I get that the establishment also sometimes does good things like create the EPA but it seems like those good things only ever happen after there's a huge amount of public screeching and that the default behavior is for the establishment to wage war and enrich itself.

The establishment should not be in bed with the media IMO. While the current fragmented media landscape is causing turbulence in the short term it is a good thing in the long term IMO.

you really don't know what you're talking about. 50 years ago, Trump, or someone like him, being very wealthy outside of politics, could have just bought his own media source, or several smaller ones, and let em rip with yellow attack journalism while promoting his vision. Failing that, he could have made paid agreements with all kinds of supposedly "reputable" mainstream media sources to promote his politics. This is indeed exactly what a lot of dirty politics across the decades did and your vision of some golden age in which it didn't apply is completely false. This is particularly so considering how many mendacious lies and other garbage these same major media outlets sold to the public over decades on behalf of government. We should applaud their golden past? Get out of town.

Today at least, if anything, people have access to a vast plurality of views that despite many of them being absurdly mistaken at least through the mechanism of their existence let massive cracs rapidly open in any official or propagandist narrative. On the whole, this is what major media truly hates, while couching its complaints in fear mongering about misinformation.... Much of that fear mongering surged especially strong during the recent pandemic, while media at the exact same time promoted several major official narratives that were obviously politically motivated rather than being based on any thing resembling solid editorial standards.

>...could have just bought his own media source, or several smaller ones, and let em rip with yellow attack journalism while promoting his vision.

Maybe he tried?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside_South,_Manhattan#Tel...

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