4 ms·

I doubt the sinister / political motives - these headlines and articles are nothing more than to drive traffic / revenue. Pick a popular company / product / se

by _s 8y ago

I doubt the sinister / political motives - these headlines and articles are nothing more than to drive traffic / revenue. Pick a popular company / product / service, find something that they could be doing, throw up an article suggesting that's what they could be doing but have the title inferring that it is what they are actually doing. Rinse / repeat.

EGreg 8y ago
However! This is what happens under capitalism when private news organizations are disrupted by the Internet. The solution is a collaborative news site, we don’t need intrepid reporters going into war zones when everyone can record video on their phone. We don’t need biased clickbait news providing fodder for soial network algorithms to herd us into echo chambers. We need a place where people of all viewpoints meet and duke it out like Wikipedia but for news. PS: wikinews in particular sucks though
- whitexn--g28h 8y ago
  There's a difference between the photos people take on a phone and the journalism that people like Tyler Hicks do. It's just not the same. Please show me a crowd sourced article that has this impact. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/20/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-invisible-war-yemen.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/20/world/middlee...
rjf72 8y ago
I'm not going to get into the subjectivity of what is or is not "sinister", but there's a more fundamental issue with the pattern you've described. Increasingly often today headlines are defacto articles. They get shared on various social media outlets and then people start discussing the title, filling in the body themselves. When the title is 'fake', it leads to mass disinformation. This gets even worse when the title and lead paragraph say one thing and it's only later in the article that the more nuanced reality is revealed. In that case you not only mislead the 'titlers' but also the skimmers. I imagine readers on HN actually read articles at a vastly higher rate than e.g. Reddit or Facebook, yet on reading the comments it often becomes quickly apparent that many users, even here, do not bother reading articles before commenting on them. In an ideal world I wouldn't mind seeing misleading headlines put in the same bucket as false or misleading advertising. Of course in practice that'd be a terrible idea since this rule would simply be used for the powers that be to litigate against anything they don't like being published.

by _s 8y ago

EGreg 8y ago

However! This is what happens under capitalism when private news organizations are disrupted by the Internet. The solution is a collaborative news site, we don’t need intrepid reporters going into war zones when everyone can record video on their phone. We don’t need biased clickbait news providing fodder for soial network algorithms to herd us into echo chambers. We need a place where people of all viewpoints meet and duke it out like Wikipedia but for news. PS: wikinews in particular sucks though

whitexn--g28h 8y ago
There's a difference between the photos people take on a phone and the journalism that people like Tyler Hicks do. It's just not the same. Please show me a crowd sourced article that has this impact. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/20/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-invisible-war-yemen.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/20/world/middlee...

rjf72 8y ago

I'm not going to get into the subjectivity of what is or is not "sinister", but there's a more fundamental issue with the pattern you've described. Increasingly often today headlines are defacto articles. They get shared on various social media outlets and then people start discussing the title, filling in the body themselves. When the title is 'fake', it leads to mass disinformation. This gets even worse when the title and lead paragraph say one thing and it's only later in the article that the more nuanced reality is revealed. In that case you not only mislead the 'titlers' but also the skimmers. I imagine readers on HN actually read articles at a vastly higher rate than e.g. Reddit or Facebook, yet on reading the comments it often becomes quickly apparent that many users, even here, do not bother reading articles before commenting on them. In an ideal world I wouldn't mind seeing misleading headlines put in the same bucket as false or misleading advertising. Of course in practice that'd be a terrible idea since this rule would simply be used for the powers that be to litigate against anything they don't like being published.