6 ms·

>"Facebook’s takeover of online media looks rather like a slow-motion coup. Before social media, web publishers could draw an audience one of two ways: through

by norikki 10y ago

>"Facebook’s takeover of online media looks rather like a slow-motion coup. Before social media, web publishers could draw an audience one of two ways: through a dedicated readership visiting its home page or through search engines. By 2009, this had started to change. Facebook had more than 300 million users, primarily accessing the service through desktop browsers, and publishers soon learned that a widely shared link could produce substantial traffic." It seems to me that the New York Times is just complaining that they can't control the political narrative anymore because the proles can now decide for themselves what news they will read. Thoughts?

platz 10y ago
> decide for themselves That's in interesting interpretation of what goes on to determine what Facebook shows to users.
- tracker1 10y ago
  Worse, it adapts to interactions.. so if you lean one way, you tend to mostly see one way... same the other way. There is some weird influence from FB news, or so it would seem. But mostly it's confirmation alignment... It's weird what some friends see, vs what I see in our respective feeds. I have an eclectic combination of very conservative, liberal, statist, centrist and libertarian friends. So I see it all over the map. Other friends don't.
duncan_bayne 10y ago
> Facebook’s takeover of online media looks rather like a slow-motion coup. ... complains the former king.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  When was the last time the NYT was the king of anything? Rush Limbaugh and his type have been dominating for a couple of decades now.
  - dexterdog 10y ago
    Do people still listen to Limbaugh? He's on in the middle of the day in any market I've ever been in so he was never even competing for either of the drive times for me. I moved completely to podcasts a few years ago anyway.
    - M_Grey 10y ago
      He has about twenty million weekly listeners.
      - 65743892 10y ago
        He actually has about 13 million weekly listeners. The weekly audience of The New York Times is likely 3-4x larger. Details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13911658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13911658.
    - jcranmer 10y ago
      In the blue collar world, it's not unreasonable that people have the radio on while they work.
  - dosgonlogs 10y ago
    Google seems to somehow avoid criticism for doing the same crap other companies do. They have had horrible problems with Sexual Harassment, just as bad and toxic as Uber, but the narrative is not there, just stop and think about that for a second.
- motherx2 10y ago
  you're implying the NYT has ever been the king of online media
  - duncan_bayne 10y ago
    Only unintentionally. I meant that they were king of print, and have been completely usurped by a new mechanism for controlling content consumption by users. I don't buy for a moment that Facebook users are choosing a lot of the content they see.
    - drumdance 10y ago
      > king of print The Wall Street Journal has had a larger national subscription base for years. And of course there were many dominant local city papers in the days before digital. I used to read the Chicago Tribune cover to cover every day. Before that I read the Atlanta Journal.
M_Grey 10y ago
Realistically speaking, when would you say the NYT last controlled the political narrative? I would argue that it's not a recent loss of control, so implying that this is a case of sour grapes strikes me as unlikely to come close to the truth. Besides, Facebook is an appalling, festering wound. It's not just politics, but of course a lot of money and talk floats around politics and a lot of noise as a result. Facebook is a case of a minority using the service to keep in touch with some people, and a vast majority engaged in a bizarre and self-destructive series of narcissistic behaviors. The evidence keeps mounting that using Facebook and unhappiness are strongly correlated, and I keep seeing people who aren't remotely surprised by that.
- jdoliner 10y ago
  It can be hard to attribute control, if 100 news organizations all push a narrative and that narrative sticks maybe all 100 of them had some control, maybe one had control and the other 99 were just mindlessly parroting what they said. The last time the NYT's narrative matched up with the generally accepted version of the truth? Probably as recently as the 2012 election, possibly even more recently. Was that control? Certainly looks like it to me but you may disagree and as I said, control is tough to prove. I don't think the parent comment is unlikely to come close to the truth though. It seems to come from pretty reasonable observations.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    That's just not even close to being true, for at least half of the country. You're not controlling anything if an order of magnitude more people listen to Rush Limbaugh than read your paper. For a huge section of society, the NYT has been seen as basically untrustworthy or a "liberal shill" since Reagan to be realistic, and Clinton to be charitable.
    - jdoliner 10y ago
      There's no way an order of magnitude more people listen to Rush Limbaugh than read NYT. There might be more listeners than subscribers. But that's hardly an apples to apples comparison, one is free, the other costs money. Many many more people read NYT articles for free without subscribing.
coliveira 10y ago
Not exactly, they're complaining that ANOTHER company is controlling access and therefore the financial gains associated to the news industry. It was never a battle simply about ideas, but about the profits behind the news-producing machine.
matt4077 10y ago
No – the article wouldn't make any sense if it were some other newspaper taking the NYT's market share, even thought the loss of power for the NYT were the same. This isn't some selfish ploy to protect power by the NYT. Maybe their view of the importance of journalism is tainted by being the subject as well, but there are any number of non-journalists agreeing with the idea. The political culture has significantly changed over last twenty years, and the changes in the media landscape are one of very few causal mechanisms that have been proposed (neo-capitalism destroying the middle class being among the others). Looking at these changes, it's really hard to argue that the media of the past (or, actually, present) failed the people – at least in comparison to whatever instagram feed is supposed to replace it.I'm hoping there'll be a few powerful institutions left when the slaughter is over, but they all disappear, today's democratic societies will devolve into some bizarre pre-democratic dystopias.
epigramx 10y ago
> the proles can now decide for themselves the facebook algorithms are a black box
mherdeg 10y ago
> It seems to me that the New York Times is just complaining that they can't control the political narrative anymore because the proles can now decide for themselves what news they will read. Thoughts? Well, there have always been different sources of media contending for the narrative. My grandpa used to read both the Washington Times, which he saw as basically true news; he also read the Washington Post (affectionately: "the com-Post") because he wanted to keep an eye on the other team's plans. What is novel here is that there are now random teenagers in Macedonia just totally making stuff up, and this is competing for reader attention with the same amount of weight as all the other stuff which we traditionally called "news" (https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/). As recently as 2009 it seemed totally crazy that, like, teenagers on the Internet could just make stuff up and it would affect world affairs -- see https://xkcd.com/635/ https://xkcd.com/635/ , Randall Munroe's September 2009 mockery of the Orson Scott Card "Ender's Game" future where blogger kids make stuff up to change national discourse. Munroe was wrong, Card was right (?!), and it totally happened. The 2016 US elections went to /b/, /pol/, and /int/ -- congrats, folks! Interesting times. The "old media" people who bewail this stuff may be complaining that they're losing influence, yes, but some of them actually believed the story that they were doing a public service, and those people are upset about something else, too. A friend who spent some time in the old media told me that what worries them about this shift is that people are "no longer following a single newsgathering organization they can hold accountable" and instead use "contextless random shares via their Facebook feed (which produce a sort of race to the bottom)". He added that "the passive nature of the Facebook News Feed is one of many forces causing people to take less responsibility for their information intake and lose information literacy skills. I guess that's probably bad." Those are reasonable things to be worried about whether you favor the Washington Times or the Washington Post or Breitbart or the Huffington Post or Coast to Coast AM.
- Asooka 10y ago
  And how the hell do you "hold accountable" a traditional old media? They are big powerful conglomerates that are only really accountable to the politicians that pay their salaries, the few cents you give them by buying the paper is a drop in the ocean. At least with FaceBook you're on a level playing field with everyone else that's posting shit, and there are a LOT of people posting, so you have more freedom to pick your sources based on their objective truth or any other metric you care about. And if you don't want to hear the truth, you won't be reading the Washington Whatsit, you'll be reading the Daily Mail in the first place.
cyphar 10y ago
> because the proles can now decide for themselves what news they will read. Except that Facebook is very much like minitrue, a large machine with people as its cogs that outputs information that may or may not be correlated with facts. Not to mention that it's also targeted at each prole, so the proles always get an echo chamber that will quell the rebellion. The 1984 analogies go both ways.
denzil_correa 10y ago
> It seems to me that the New York Times is just complaining that they can't control the political narrative anymore because the proles can now decide for themselves what news they will read. Thoughts? Lets assume that NYT is indeed complaining. How does this make it ok for Facebook to control? This is a classic ad hominem fallacy.
sandworm101 10y ago
The proles only think they are deciding. Things were tolerable when media outlets controlled access. Thier bias was open for all who cared to challenge. Now control is in the hands of facebook's robot. Bias is now hidden behind math, code and interface. There is nobody to challenge or attack. Instead of calling out NYT we must now fight smoke.

by norikki 10y ago

platz 10y ago

> decide for themselves That's in interesting interpretation of what goes on to determine what Facebook shows to users.

tracker1 10y ago
Worse, it adapts to interactions.. so if you lean one way, you tend to mostly see one way... same the other way. There is some weird influence from FB news, or so it would seem. But mostly it's confirmation alignment... It's weird what some friends see, vs what I see in our respective feeds. I have an eclectic combination of very conservative, liberal, statist, centrist and libertarian friends. So I see it all over the map. Other friends don't.

duncan_bayne 10y ago

> Facebook’s takeover of online media looks rather like a slow-motion coup. ... complains the former king.

M_Grey 10y ago
When was the last time the NYT was the king of anything? Rush Limbaugh and his type have been dominating for a couple of decades now.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  Do people still listen to Limbaugh? He's on in the middle of the day in any market I've ever been in so he was never even competing for either of the drive times for me. I moved completely to podcasts a few years ago anyway.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    He has about twenty million weekly listeners.
    - 65743892 10y ago
      He actually has about 13 million weekly listeners. The weekly audience of The New York Times is likely 3-4x larger. Details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13911658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13911658.
  - jcranmer 10y ago
    In the blue collar world, it's not unreasonable that people have the radio on while they work.
- dosgonlogs 10y ago
  Google seems to somehow avoid criticism for doing the same crap other companies do. They have had horrible problems with Sexual Harassment, just as bad and toxic as Uber, but the narrative is not there, just stop and think about that for a second.
motherx2 10y ago
you're implying the NYT has ever been the king of online media
- duncan_bayne 10y ago
  Only unintentionally. I meant that they were king of print, and have been completely usurped by a new mechanism for controlling content consumption by users. I don't buy for a moment that Facebook users are choosing a lot of the content they see.
  - drumdance 10y ago
    > king of print The Wall Street Journal has had a larger national subscription base for years. And of course there were many dominant local city papers in the days before digital. I used to read the Chicago Tribune cover to cover every day. Before that I read the Atlanta Journal.

M_Grey 10y ago

Realistically speaking, when would you say the NYT last controlled the political narrative? I would argue that it's not a recent loss of control, so implying that this is a case of sour grapes strikes me as unlikely to come close to the truth. Besides, Facebook is an appalling, festering wound. It's not just politics, but of course a lot of money and talk floats around politics and a lot of noise as a result. Facebook is a case of a minority using the service to keep in touch with some people, and a vast majority engaged in a bizarre and self-destructive series of narcissistic behaviors. The evidence keeps mounting that using Facebook and unhappiness are strongly correlated, and I keep seeing people who aren't remotely surprised by that.

jdoliner 10y ago
It can be hard to attribute control, if 100 news organizations all push a narrative and that narrative sticks maybe all 100 of them had some control, maybe one had control and the other 99 were just mindlessly parroting what they said. The last time the NYT's narrative matched up with the generally accepted version of the truth? Probably as recently as the 2012 election, possibly even more recently. Was that control? Certainly looks like it to me but you may disagree and as I said, control is tough to prove. I don't think the parent comment is unlikely to come close to the truth though. It seems to come from pretty reasonable observations.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  That's just not even close to being true, for at least half of the country. You're not controlling anything if an order of magnitude more people listen to Rush Limbaugh than read your paper. For a huge section of society, the NYT has been seen as basically untrustworthy or a "liberal shill" since Reagan to be realistic, and Clinton to be charitable.
  - jdoliner 10y ago
    There's no way an order of magnitude more people listen to Rush Limbaugh than read NYT. There might be more listeners than subscribers. But that's hardly an apples to apples comparison, one is free, the other costs money. Many many more people read NYT articles for free without subscribing.

coliveira 10y ago

Not exactly, they're complaining that ANOTHER company is controlling access and therefore the financial gains associated to the news industry. It was never a battle simply about ideas, but about the profits behind the news-producing machine.

matt4077 10y ago

No – the article wouldn't make any sense if it were some other newspaper taking the NYT's market share, even thought the loss of power for the NYT were the same. This isn't some selfish ploy to protect power by the NYT. Maybe their view of the importance of journalism is tainted by being the subject as well, but there are any number of non-journalists agreeing with the idea. The political culture has significantly changed over last twenty years, and the changes in the media landscape are one of very few causal mechanisms that have been proposed (neo-capitalism destroying the middle class being among the others). Looking at these changes, it's really hard to argue that the media of the past (or, actually, present) failed the people – at least in comparison to whatever instagram feed is supposed to replace it.I'm hoping there'll be a few powerful institutions left when the slaughter is over, but they all disappear, today's democratic societies will devolve into some bizarre pre-democratic dystopias.

epigramx 10y ago

> the proles can now decide for themselves the facebook algorithms are a black box

mherdeg 10y ago

> It seems to me that the New York Times is just complaining that they can't control the political narrative anymore because the proles can now decide for themselves what news they will read. Thoughts? Well, there have always been different sources of media contending for the narrative. My grandpa used to read both the Washington Times, which he saw as basically true news; he also read the Washington Post (affectionately: "the com-Post") because he wanted to keep an eye on the other team's plans. What is novel here is that there are now random teenagers in Macedonia just totally making stuff up, and this is competing for reader attention with the same amount of weight as all the other stuff which we traditionally called "news" (https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/). As recently as 2009 it seemed totally crazy that, like, teenagers on the Internet could just make stuff up and it would affect world affairs -- see https://xkcd.com/635/ https://xkcd.com/635/ , Randall Munroe's September 2009 mockery of the Orson Scott Card "Ender's Game" future where blogger kids make stuff up to change national discourse. Munroe was wrong, Card was right (?!), and it totally happened. The 2016 US elections went to /b/, /pol/, and /int/ -- congrats, folks! Interesting times. The "old media" people who bewail this stuff may be complaining that they're losing influence, yes, but some of them actually believed the story that they were doing a public service, and those people are upset about something else, too. A friend who spent some time in the old media told me that what worries them about this shift is that people are "no longer following a single newsgathering organization they can hold accountable" and instead use "contextless random shares via their Facebook feed (which produce a sort of race to the bottom)". He added that "the passive nature of the Facebook News Feed is one of many forces causing people to take less responsibility for their information intake and lose information literacy skills. I guess that's probably bad." Those are reasonable things to be worried about whether you favor the Washington Times or the Washington Post or Breitbart or the Huffington Post or Coast to Coast AM.

Asooka 10y ago
And how the hell do you "hold accountable" a traditional old media? They are big powerful conglomerates that are only really accountable to the politicians that pay their salaries, the few cents you give them by buying the paper is a drop in the ocean. At least with FaceBook you're on a level playing field with everyone else that's posting shit, and there are a LOT of people posting, so you have more freedom to pick your sources based on their objective truth or any other metric you care about. And if you don't want to hear the truth, you won't be reading the Washington Whatsit, you'll be reading the Daily Mail in the first place.

cyphar 10y ago

> because the proles can now decide for themselves what news they will read. Except that Facebook is very much like minitrue, a large machine with people as its cogs that outputs information that may or may not be correlated with facts. Not to mention that it's also targeted at each prole, so the proles always get an echo chamber that will quell the rebellion. The 1984 analogies go both ways.

denzil_correa 10y ago

> It seems to me that the New York Times is just complaining that they can't control the political narrative anymore because the proles can now decide for themselves what news they will read. Thoughts? Lets assume that NYT is indeed complaining. How does this make it ok for Facebook to control? This is a classic ad hominem fallacy.

sandworm101 10y ago

The proles only think they are deciding. Things were tolerable when media outlets controlled access. Thier bias was open for all who cared to challenge. Now control is in the hands of facebook's robot. Bias is now hidden behind math, code and interface. There is nobody to challenge or attack. Instead of calling out NYT we must now fight smoke.