5 ms·

I think there's already too much filtering. People need to make up their own minds regarding what is true and what isn't, what's worth their time and what's bu

by trgv 9y ago

I think there's already too much filtering. People need to make up their own minds regarding what is true and what isn't, what's worth their time and what's bullshit, which links to click on and which to avoid. If people can't handle this then we need to spend more money on education, or just accept that some people disagree with us. I don't think aggressively filtering "untrustworthy" content will lead to a net benefit.

altcognito 9y ago
I don't know about spending more on education, but Americans were astoundingly unprepared to even make basic differentiation between the parties, let alone sort through "bullshit".
petepete 9y ago
> People need to make up their own minds regarding what is true and what isn't We kind of tried that with religion and people still persist in believing all kinds of stuff
- paulddraper 9y ago
  So?
mc32 9y ago
As I posted elsewhere on this thread, journalism isn't exactly about the straight facts. It's always more about story and slant related to facts, sometimes more loosely than others. For example, it will take a lot of time for investigators to get close to the truth of what happened but no one is going to wait for official reports before publishing their takes on the incident --and I'm not nor would expect that. But we also can't very well expect only objective truth to be present in news stories/articles. Should Google FB do a better job a filtering obviously bogus information? Sure. Should they only source from a "pool" of sources in the era of citizen journalism? I don't think I want to cede that to news orgs who want to perpetuate their aura as the only legitimate purveyors of news.
- brewdad 9y ago
  Neither is perfect. Today exemplifies that better than most. Citizen journalists gave us amazing raw footage of LV and sent us chasing the wrong man for much of the morning. Professional journalists did better with LV coverage but reported Tom Petty dead and then retracted their stories hours before he finally passed. I guess I would ask Google and Facebook, etc. to keep 4chan and reddit off the top of news results in favor of more reputable news orgs. At the same time, I recognize that sites like those can absolutely provide unique info that mainstream media cannot. However, we have to recognize that the info is raw and unfiltered. It cannot become canon without further confirmation.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I wish there was a journalist outlet that would not care about story. Just facts. Preferably in bullet points (narratives are misleading). I'd be a paying subscriber to that.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Which facts? The very selection of relevance itself tells a story. However, you can sort of get this if you limit yourself to "agency" news, ie AP or Reuters. If you have a big chunk of money and news is important in your work, you'll have a Bloomberg terminal.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      All of them? Maybe I'm naïve, but I don't buy the inherent importance of doing selection. If I could trust that the news source includes all relevant facts they encounter, it'll be enough; I can reach my own conclusions. > However, you can sort of get this if you limit yourself to "agency" news, ie AP or Reuters. I've heard something about "wire services" before, but I'm not sure if there are any accessible to individuals at prices a regular person like me could afford. Do you know of any?
      - ascagnel_ 9y ago
        Wire services typically sell their feeds to newspapers; nowadays, though, the bigger services make their feeds available on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AP https://twitter.com/AP https://twitter.com/Reuters https://twitter.com/Reuters https://twitter.com/AFP https://twitter.com/AFP (Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse are three of the bigger ones)
phrh8 9y ago
These platforms have hyper-optimized their products to show as much stuff as possible that people will engage with (share, click), so that they also engage with ads and stay active. The problem is there is often some time when there is no news. No news isn't interesting, so it doesn't get shared as much as "news". Take the moments immediately following a disaster. Two types of news articles will show up: "There was a shooting. We don't know anything yet, but we will keep you posted". Boring. "We know who the killer is. Bobby Bobertson done it". Woah! Now imagine you are a heavy social media user. You don't want to stay silent on such a big news story, so you want to share something showing you are engaged. Which story do you share? (edit: removed duplicate "the problem is")
- grandalf 9y ago
  This comment is absolutely right. The algorithms are not optimized to inform people, they are optimized to maximize the number of ads people click on while consuming whatever content the algorithms promoted to the top. This is at best a conflict of interest when it comes to content that ought to be viewed as news. But there is significant pressure these days to blend news with entertainment (which simply means engagement, which entails ad sales).
- brewdad 9y ago
  I was never so happy to stay off social media as I was last night. I was awake, but not online, for about 2 hours after the LV shooting. My phone had a headline about 2 people dead when I went to bed. My wife woke up at 5am and shared the news with me when I woke up. By the time I engaged with the news sites, it was 8am this morning and most of the initial bullshit had been filtered away. Saved myself from a lot of unnecessary anxiety.
unabst 9y ago
You've summed up the age of facebook brilliantly. > People need to make up their own minds regarding what is true and what isn't, what's worth their time and what's bullshit, which links to click on and which to avoid. This is exactly what everyone is doing, and exactly the problem. > we need to spend more money on education And this is what many agree we need. > or just accept that some people disagree with us. And this is exactly what many have settled for since Trump took office. > aggressively filtering "untrustworthy" content will lead to a net benefit. It will lead to the Nightly News. But I the people have spoken already. They prefer Facebook. They prefer making up their own minds regarding what is true and what isn't.
jimmytidey 9y ago
It's not cognitively possible for a user to simultaneously view every piece of content. Someone has to make a decision about what goes at the top. Of course, users aren't passive, they could get their news elsewhere or change the filtering. But we know that defaults matter a lot. For many people, the order in which platforms present news is going to be profoundly influential. The inescapability of choosing defaults settings, and the empirical fact that default settings do influence people a lot, taken together, imply an ethical responsibility on the part of platforms. Making people smarter would be great - but you've got to be realistic about how effective that would be, and how long it would take. What other usability problem would you solve by changing the people rather than the technology?
- revmoo 9y ago
  > Someone has to make a decision about what goes at the top. What happened to just ranking based on backlinks?
pjc50 9y ago
I think at this stage it's like insisting that people filter their own water when there are organisations out there actively dumping toxic waste into it. It's not just the Internet though, it's organisations like Infowars who are out there claiming that the Vegas shooting was some kind of "false flag", after his previous disinformation on the Sandy Hook incident.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway4945 9y ago
  I believe your metaphor is falling short. Taken to the opposite extreme, censorship would be giving the people clean water? Or are we about to make claims about "absolute truth" in breaking news?
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Absolute truth is hard to come by. Absolute falsehood is all over the place. Let's not straw man by pretending that the existing system is entirely 100% censorship free, either. (I don't have a clear proposal and it's a complex problem, but in the worst case - Rwanda - some of the people involved in hate radio were eventually charged with crimes against humanity)
gldalmaso 9y ago
If we simply leave it up to people, we already know the outcome. Some, maybe even a lot of people will take fabricated lies as facts and proceed to engage other people with these facts, sometimes violently. By doing that we are empowering the people who fabricate lies to move an agenda. It's ridiculously cheap to make fake news and the value gained is immense because people are having a hard time filtering it themselves. It is the social media equivalent of the Mirai Botnet. Do we want to live in a world where the best lier wins?
- Fricken 9y ago
  We've always lived in a world where the best liar wins. The best liar is in the Whitehouse, we still live in that world today. The preoccupation with objective truth is a relatively recent notion, and only of interest to what appears to be a minority of the population. The rest are happy to have their biases confirmed, it doesn't much matter whether it's true. The difference between now and 30 years ago, is that now if someone actually cares about getting to the bottom of something, the tools for doing so are much more accessible, making the ongoing prevalence of bullshit that much more frustrating. We're not getting any stupider, but the gap between the informed and the disinformed or uninformed has widened substantially. Even here on HN, when it comes to the handful of subjects I'm knowledgable in, it's pretty common to see some masterclass bullshitting holding top spot in a thread.
  - cirgue 9y ago
    > We've always lived in a world where the best liar wins. True, but we also seem to have collectively become a lot more skittish about excoriating bullshit because "everyone does it". That's definitely not the optimal solution.
intended 9y ago
In other words: We have free will, and the incidentals effects on that exercise of free will have no other effects on our life and larger society - ie the exercise of free will has no effect on the larger world itself, and so we need not look further.
alexc05 9y ago
You can't just decide what is true. Think back to the US election you can't just "decide" that the story of thousands of Ohio ballots pre-marked for Hillary Clinton was true. http://www.snopes.com/clinton-votes-found-in-warehouse/ http://www.snopes.com/clinton-votes-found-in-warehouse/ You can't just decide that the story of a protester with a rape Melania was true http://www.snopes.com/2016/11/14/melania-sign-at-anti-trump-protest/ http://www.snopes.com/2016/11/14/melania-sign-at-anti-trump-... You can't just decide for yourself that climate change isn't true. The consequences of people deciding for themselves would be globally disastrous.
- creaghpatr 9y ago
  ...so you outsource your Truth to Snopes, got it. I hope Snopes never lets you down. people will always draw conclusions based on their own observations, good thing Einstein didn't have snopes to say "Actually, the Theory of Relativity is a myth: Pants on Fire rating!
  - Boothroid 9y ago
    Snopes is apparently beyond reproach on HN.. as the downvotes prove, ha.
  - acdha 9y ago
    Snopes cites sources and has spent the last couple decades building a reputation for reliability. That doesn’t make them perfect any more than, say, the dictionary contains no errors but the odds overwhelmingly favor them being right over some random internet commenter.
Joeri 9y ago
We have no hope of ever understanding even a fraction of the things in the world well enough to make an informed decision about them. For example, I am not a climate researcher, so I simply don't understand climate science well enough to make an informed decision about the topic of climate change. I have opinions about it, but I recognize those are based on faith of who I think has the best handle on the truth about this topic. Every one of us takes most things in our lives on faith to one degree or another. And that's why it matters that google curates content. 99% of what they curate we cannot research in depth ourselves within our lifetime. We have to be able to trust that they've done the job of curation properly.
- revmoo 9y ago
  I remember when search engines were just search engines.
dugluak 9y ago
problem is when things are not as easy as black & white or good & bad. In reality things can be fuzzy.

by trgv 9y ago

altcognito 9y ago

I don't know about spending more on education, but Americans were astoundingly unprepared to even make basic differentiation between the parties, let alone sort through "bullshit".

petepete 9y ago

> People need to make up their own minds regarding what is true and what isn't We kind of tried that with religion and people still persist in believing all kinds of stuff

paulddraper 9y ago
So?

mc32 9y ago

As I posted elsewhere on this thread, journalism isn't exactly about the straight facts. It's always more about story and slant related to facts, sometimes more loosely than others. For example, it will take a lot of time for investigators to get close to the truth of what happened but no one is going to wait for official reports before publishing their takes on the incident --and I'm not nor would expect that. But we also can't very well expect only objective truth to be present in news stories/articles. Should Google FB do a better job a filtering obviously bogus information? Sure. Should they only source from a "pool" of sources in the era of citizen journalism? I don't think I want to cede that to news orgs who want to perpetuate their aura as the only legitimate purveyors of news.

brewdad 9y ago
Neither is perfect. Today exemplifies that better than most. Citizen journalists gave us amazing raw footage of LV and sent us chasing the wrong man for much of the morning. Professional journalists did better with LV coverage but reported Tom Petty dead and then retracted their stories hours before he finally passed. I guess I would ask Google and Facebook, etc. to keep 4chan and reddit off the top of news results in favor of more reputable news orgs. At the same time, I recognize that sites like those can absolutely provide unique info that mainstream media cannot. However, we have to recognize that the info is raw and unfiltered. It cannot become canon without further confirmation.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
I wish there was a journalist outlet that would not care about story. Just facts. Preferably in bullet points (narratives are misleading). I'd be a paying subscriber to that.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Which facts? The very selection of relevance itself tells a story. However, you can sort of get this if you limit yourself to "agency" news, ie AP or Reuters. If you have a big chunk of money and news is important in your work, you'll have a Bloomberg terminal.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    All of them? Maybe I'm naïve, but I don't buy the inherent importance of doing selection. If I could trust that the news source includes all relevant facts they encounter, it'll be enough; I can reach my own conclusions. > However, you can sort of get this if you limit yourself to "agency" news, ie AP or Reuters. I've heard something about "wire services" before, but I'm not sure if there are any accessible to individuals at prices a regular person like me could afford. Do you know of any?
    - ascagnel_ 9y ago
      Wire services typically sell their feeds to newspapers; nowadays, though, the bigger services make their feeds available on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AP https://twitter.com/AP https://twitter.com/Reuters https://twitter.com/Reuters https://twitter.com/AFP https://twitter.com/AFP (Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse are three of the bigger ones)

phrh8 9y ago

These platforms have hyper-optimized their products to show as much stuff as possible that people will engage with (share, click), so that they also engage with ads and stay active. The problem is there is often some time when there is no news. No news isn't interesting, so it doesn't get shared as much as "news". Take the moments immediately following a disaster. Two types of news articles will show up: "There was a shooting. We don't know anything yet, but we will keep you posted". Boring. "We know who the killer is. Bobby Bobertson done it". Woah! Now imagine you are a heavy social media user. You don't want to stay silent on such a big news story, so you want to share something showing you are engaged. Which story do you share? (edit: removed duplicate "the problem is")

grandalf 9y ago
This comment is absolutely right. The algorithms are not optimized to inform people, they are optimized to maximize the number of ads people click on while consuming whatever content the algorithms promoted to the top. This is at best a conflict of interest when it comes to content that ought to be viewed as news. But there is significant pressure these days to blend news with entertainment (which simply means engagement, which entails ad sales).
brewdad 9y ago
I was never so happy to stay off social media as I was last night. I was awake, but not online, for about 2 hours after the LV shooting. My phone had a headline about 2 people dead when I went to bed. My wife woke up at 5am and shared the news with me when I woke up. By the time I engaged with the news sites, it was 8am this morning and most of the initial bullshit had been filtered away. Saved myself from a lot of unnecessary anxiety.

unabst 9y ago

You've summed up the age of facebook brilliantly. > People need to make up their own minds regarding what is true and what isn't, what's worth their time and what's bullshit, which links to click on and which to avoid. This is exactly what everyone is doing, and exactly the problem. > we need to spend more money on education And this is what many agree we need. > or just accept that some people disagree with us. And this is exactly what many have settled for since Trump took office. > aggressively filtering "untrustworthy" content will lead to a net benefit. It will lead to the Nightly News. But I the people have spoken already. They prefer Facebook. They prefer making up their own minds regarding what is true and what isn't.

jimmytidey 9y ago

It's not cognitively possible for a user to simultaneously view every piece of content. Someone has to make a decision about what goes at the top. Of course, users aren't passive, they could get their news elsewhere or change the filtering. But we know that defaults matter a lot. For many people, the order in which platforms present news is going to be profoundly influential. The inescapability of choosing defaults settings, and the empirical fact that default settings do influence people a lot, taken together, imply an ethical responsibility on the part of platforms. Making people smarter would be great - but you've got to be realistic about how effective that would be, and how long it would take. What other usability problem would you solve by changing the people rather than the technology?

revmoo 9y ago
> Someone has to make a decision about what goes at the top. What happened to just ranking based on backlinks?

pjc50 9y ago

I think at this stage it's like insisting that people filter their own water when there are organisations out there actively dumping toxic waste into it. It's not just the Internet though, it's organisations like Infowars who are out there claiming that the Vegas shooting was some kind of "false flag", after his previous disinformation on the Sandy Hook incident.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
throwaway4945 9y ago
I believe your metaphor is falling short. Taken to the opposite extreme, censorship would be giving the people clean water? Or are we about to make claims about "absolute truth" in breaking news?
- pjc50 9y ago
  Absolute truth is hard to come by. Absolute falsehood is all over the place. Let's not straw man by pretending that the existing system is entirely 100% censorship free, either. (I don't have a clear proposal and it's a complex problem, but in the worst case - Rwanda - some of the people involved in hate radio were eventually charged with crimes against humanity)

gldalmaso 9y ago

If we simply leave it up to people, we already know the outcome. Some, maybe even a lot of people will take fabricated lies as facts and proceed to engage other people with these facts, sometimes violently. By doing that we are empowering the people who fabricate lies to move an agenda. It's ridiculously cheap to make fake news and the value gained is immense because people are having a hard time filtering it themselves. It is the social media equivalent of the Mirai Botnet. Do we want to live in a world where the best lier wins?

Fricken 9y ago
We've always lived in a world where the best liar wins. The best liar is in the Whitehouse, we still live in that world today. The preoccupation with objective truth is a relatively recent notion, and only of interest to what appears to be a minority of the population. The rest are happy to have their biases confirmed, it doesn't much matter whether it's true. The difference between now and 30 years ago, is that now if someone actually cares about getting to the bottom of something, the tools for doing so are much more accessible, making the ongoing prevalence of bullshit that much more frustrating. We're not getting any stupider, but the gap between the informed and the disinformed or uninformed has widened substantially. Even here on HN, when it comes to the handful of subjects I'm knowledgable in, it's pretty common to see some masterclass bullshitting holding top spot in a thread.
- cirgue 9y ago
  > We've always lived in a world where the best liar wins. True, but we also seem to have collectively become a lot more skittish about excoriating bullshit because "everyone does it". That's definitely not the optimal solution.

intended 9y ago

In other words: We have free will, and the incidentals effects on that exercise of free will have no other effects on our life and larger society - ie the exercise of free will has no effect on the larger world itself, and so we need not look further.

alexc05 9y ago

You can't just decide what is true. Think back to the US election you can't just "decide" that the story of thousands of Ohio ballots pre-marked for Hillary Clinton was true. http://www.snopes.com/clinton-votes-found-in-warehouse/ http://www.snopes.com/clinton-votes-found-in-warehouse/ You can't just decide that the story of a protester with a rape Melania was true http://www.snopes.com/2016/11/14/melania-sign-at-anti-trump-protest/ http://www.snopes.com/2016/11/14/melania-sign-at-anti-trump-... You can't just decide for yourself that climate change isn't true. The consequences of people deciding for themselves would be globally disastrous.

creaghpatr 9y ago
...so you outsource your Truth to Snopes, got it. I hope Snopes never lets you down. people will always draw conclusions based on their own observations, good thing Einstein didn't have snopes to say "Actually, the Theory of Relativity is a myth: Pants on Fire rating!
- Boothroid 9y ago
  Snopes is apparently beyond reproach on HN.. as the downvotes prove, ha.
- acdha 9y ago
  Snopes cites sources and has spent the last couple decades building a reputation for reliability. That doesn’t make them perfect any more than, say, the dictionary contains no errors but the odds overwhelmingly favor them being right over some random internet commenter.

Joeri 9y ago

We have no hope of ever understanding even a fraction of the things in the world well enough to make an informed decision about them. For example, I am not a climate researcher, so I simply don't understand climate science well enough to make an informed decision about the topic of climate change. I have opinions about it, but I recognize those are based on faith of who I think has the best handle on the truth about this topic. Every one of us takes most things in our lives on faith to one degree or another. And that's why it matters that google curates content. 99% of what they curate we cannot research in depth ourselves within our lifetime. We have to be able to trust that they've done the job of curation properly.

revmoo 9y ago
I remember when search engines were just search engines.

dugluak 9y ago

problem is when things are not as easy as black & white or good & bad. In reality things can be fuzzy.