'Good news day' decimates website's readership

So when you stop giving people things to worry about, and I think they use it as a crutch to organize their day, they are at a loss. Too often news is "Its going to rain" therefore I need to have my raincoat tomorrow, "Idiots are going to win the election", therefore I need to vote, "Kids are getting kidnapped", therefore I need to protect my kids. But when the news is, "All the trains are on time!" what help does that give you in planning your life? None. And in fact you have now "wasted" time on reading an article that hasn't helped you figure out anything you need to prepare for or worry about, so that are only so many more minutes left in the day to prepare.

It's a very strange cycle. You can play it the other way though, you can both report good news and give planning data, like "The trains are all on time and cars are less reliable than they were, consider changing your plan to use the train tomorrow." That is the sort of positive news I'd prefer we got, "Here is what is going on and here is some action you can take to help it continue and/or mitigate it."

[1] I suspect there are several alternate uses of this name though.

For example, I actually come to HN because in general there are 'happier' or at least less depressing stories on HN than negative. If all of the sudden this changed, I probably would visit it significantly less.

Plus, I would like to point out that Russian's (or any society for that matter), may have react different to happy stories.

"If it bleeds it leads" is a saying because it absolutely works. There seems to be a huge attention bias toward negative information.

Is it possible that the world we live in is so nice that almost all of the out-of-the-ordinary things that happen are bad things? People still cheer on news like the Philae landing, but highway overpasses being completed on time is the very incarnation of met expectations.

I don't know the original articles, but if the headlines in the BBC story are in any kind representative, then I have my doubts that the failure of the whole operation was really because people only want to read bad news.

For a basic definition of "news item", I would require that it tells me something I don't already know - or at least don't assume is the norm. Stuff like "you can use the public road system to commute to work today" or "municipal construction project is still on time as of today" does not fit that definition. (Okay, maybe the last one kinda does)

I think in general it is possible to make "sellable" headlines from good news as long as they are in some way actually relevant for the reader: Everyone would like to be informed about some new tax laws that allow them to save money. The HN frontpage itself also frequently contains new, positive developments from tech or science the top ranks.

I am curious if the result would be different in a country other than Russia. In particular any country that doesn't have a recent history of heavy handed censorship and oppression.

>"No disruption on the roads despite snow,"

>an underpass would be built in time for Victory Day.

These seem eerily like the kind of headlines you would get in an environment where newspapers are forbidden from commenting on negative events. I wonder whether Russia's recent history makes people more averse to this kind of reporting than might be the case elsewhere.

The headline writer ought to look up the definition of decimate.