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Comment by topocite | Hacker News Reader

The article just reminds me that I hate modern journalism and try to not read any news articles.

Hyperbolic attention grabbing headline followed by appeal to authority, appeal to authority, appeal to authority, counter opinion appeal to authority that the previous appeal to authority might all be wrong.

So wide reaching and all over the place, the reader and can pick from the menu on what point they want to use as confirmation of what they already believe to be true. Then the article can be cited in a type of scientistic, mostly wrong, gossip.

IMO a complete waste of time.

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You shouldn't conflate a pop science magazine with all of modern journalism. Try a high quality outlet like The Economist. "I try not to read any news articles" screams anti-intellectualism.

The GP has a point about the state of journalism generally and the pervasive nature in which Yellow journalism is returning.

One need not be anti-intellectual to find the state of reporting to be difficult to deal with and not wanting to read it. In addition to the GP’s complaint; journalists of any ilk also tend to conflate editorializing with reporting. You see this all the way from pop science to NYTimes to Fox News and yes even the Economist.

A question is whether the more fact based reporting of the early-mid 20th Century is the exception to the tendency of Yellow journalism that existed before and seems to exist now.

I see the same thing with YouTube videos. I catch myself watching and afterwards being like "that was a load of wasted time"

I think it depends. While AI has flooded YouTube and further degraded its quality, some channels are still useful (or can be). Daily Dose of Internet is still semi-ok, as one example, though I also noticed I have fatigued quite a lot lately - too much time wasted on youtube in general.

Yes, a common issue now with Youtube content, enormous variability in quality of content. Gemini does a good-enoug job of debunking Youtube transcript, and I use that when I have a doubt, but clearly will all the slp I get sent by well-meaning YouTube-watching acquaintances, I don't want to butn too many tokens on that treadmill... I wonder how man Terms & Conditions of use some distributed debunk-data repository for videos would cross? Users vetted by hckrnews-karma checks posting "this video is bunk because"... Would be a real boon.

Ah come on, Drumeo is excellent entertainment with cocktail party knowledge bits here and there. ;)

I love those Drumeo challenges. I don’t even play drums. But watching creative people who are excellent at their craft solve an unknown problem in a new way - when we are all familiar with the original solution - is fascinating.

> IMO a complete waste of time.

That's the new New Scientist entire. The mag is now pap for non-scientists.

Conflating New Scientist with all modern journalism is a category error. New Scientist has been a zombie mag for going on two decades at this point. As with many magazines, the internet killed it.

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