8 ms·

I was thinking the same thing, is BuzzFeed reporting on this because they don't like competition? I hate the new "hate clicks drive ad revenue" model to the in

I was thinking the same thing, is BuzzFeed reporting on this because they don't like competition? I hate the new "hate clicks drive ad revenue" model to the internet and cable TV. It is so damaging to society, more so than any "fake news" thing posted on a random blog with a few wackos believing. We're talking 1000x the exposure and people believing it's "mainstream." Producers on cable TV purposefully tell people to play to an extreme, publications purposefully get pieces that get hate clicks and hate engagement because it boosts their numbers. It's all so horrible.

hcurtiss 7y ago
The Two Minutes Hate. Truly Orwellian.
- Anthony-G 7y ago
  Upvoted for reminding me about this. I'm probably due a re-read of 1984 as I'd completely forgotten about the Two Minutes Hate. Orwell really was a visionary.
  - realmod 7y ago
    Two minutes hate is not something new, the difference is just how accesible creating and disseminating such sentiments have become.
    - HenryBemis 7y ago
      And once "the internet" (some nasties behind it) found the way to make these "two minute" increments compound (e.g. YT showing a more extreme version than the one just watched), combined with profiling etc, then boom, CA and FB win elections ;)
- aalleavitch 7y ago
  This just once against demonstrates what Orwell really meant and America never heard, everything he painted in his dystopia was just as possible under authoritarian capitalism as it is under authoritarian communism. The American education system loves making kids read Animal Farm and 1984 but for some reason they never seem to mention that Orwell was an anarcho-socialist.
at-fates-hands 7y ago
> We're talking 1000x the exposure and people believing it's "mainstream." Twitter is now famous for this. You'll see an account with two or three followers post some news story that pushes some agenda. Within minutes the tweet has over 8,000 retweet and likes. Less than an hour later its trending and snowballs from there. Suddenly, the mainstream media picks it up and reports it as fact - even though its blatantly obvious this story has been propagated and driven in a totally false manner. It's become the blueprint for pushing propaganda from social media into the mainstream media, making public opinion remarkably easy to manipulate.
- Karunamon 7y ago
  It has the ability to go even further than that. Once something has reached some ill-defined level of media coverarge, it's eligible for inclusion on Wikipedia, which then populates Google SERPs and all manner of other services. (And in Wiki's case, even if someone figures out the BS, they won't be allowed to do anything about it because the non-media coverage counts as "original research") Granted, this generally won't happen unless an actual shill for whatever cause is editing the site, but still. Misinformation has never been able to move faster.
onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
Everything that's old is new again. Soon everyone will be so completely saturated with this type of news/entertainment, that I bet they'll crave things that are actually real. I think on HN we tend to be ahead of the curve. Almost everyone on here has completely given up or is giving up on a lot of social media and news feeds.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers pushed public opinion for the Spanish American War based on a lie. So the cycle is alive and well.
  - emmelaich 7y ago
    An alternate opinion: https://mediamythalert.com/2011/01/13/the-anniversary-of-a-media-myth-ill-furnish-the-war/ https://mediamythalert.com/2011/01/13/the-anniversary-of-a-m...
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  >Almost everyone on here has completely given up or is giving up on a lot of social media and news feeds. In fairness, HN itself is actually a social media news feed, and is also filled with it's share of clickbait outrage porn. The reality is that no user sourced digital medium is going to be free of these kinds of issues. If you could figure out a way to actually create a system that is free of these issues, you could probably make a billion dollars.
  - im3w1l 7y ago
    There is an easy solution but you are not going to like it... require real names. And verify them. And keep track of their reputations. Edit: Proposed this as a solution for disinformation agents. Guess I picked the wrong sub-thread to place that. Sorry for the confusion.
    - killface 7y ago
      this is exactly right. folks could likely get by anyway, but it would be dramatically reduced. until there are consequences for lying online, and as long as there's money to be made by lying, enough people will be assholes and do it.
moosey 7y ago
The book "Anti-Social" by Andrew Marantz introduced me to the concept of "High Arousal Emotions", which is exactly what clickbait, advertising and 'social networks' take advantage of to get clicks. Personally, I don't think it runs up against the first amendment to limit the use of such a blatant emotional/mental hack.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  >I don't think it runs up against the first amendment to limit the use of such a blatant emotional/mental hack. The Snowden leaks resulted in some fairly high-arousal emotions, so I would be careful with where you go with that.
- partiallypro 7y ago
  I don't believe it should be limited, I am generally an absolutist on free speech. But I do think media outlets need an internal reform, or we need to start looking at alternative methods of revenue that don't rely on societal damage. I honestly don't even think some of these people mean what they say, it is very much an Ann Coulter methodology.
- aalleavitch 7y ago
  I keep saying this: we don't need to be attacking the symptom, we need to be attacking the disease. Regulating what people are posting online will never get rid of the real problem, there is simply too massive of an incentive to manipulate people for financial gain. Until that's fixed we're just going to keep putting out new fires when someone discovers the next big unethical business practice that happen to work.
  - r00fus 7y ago
    So what, pray tell, is the disease in your analogy? Human nature?
    - aalleavitch 7y ago
      Unchecked capitalism.
Zarath 7y ago
Honestly I'm surprised more people aren't burnt out on this. I can only be angry and get triggered by the same bullshit for so long before it just doesn't work.
- aiphex 7y ago
  But isn't that a sinister side of it too? Burn out and disengage those of us who are rational and reasonable. Only 150 more years till we can apply to Starfleet...
  - filoleg 7y ago
    Being disengaged from mainstream news reporting and clickbait articles isn’t the same as being disengaged from news, reading articles, and being informed though. It just means that instead of following the outrage threadmill and blindly trusting the first source you encounter, you get more emotionally disengaged and have to do more work to filter out your sources and read multiple different coverages of the same piece of info to get a more full and objective picture that isn’t clouded by the lens and emotional coloring through which the source could present it. It does take more of your willpower and effort to do all that, but that’s the price we have to pay to get a more objective view of something. Back in the old days, the access to information in the first place was what people had to work hard for. In the age of information abundance, you still have to work to get it, but now you have to do more filtering and less figuring out how to access it in the first place.
- Swizec 7y ago
  An old quote I heard once: “The news doesn’t tell you what to think, the news tells you what to think about” Doesn’t matter if the emotional jerking doesn’t work no more. Your mind is still hijacked.
- caseysoftware 7y ago
  Copied from where I've said this elsewhere: Almost 10 years ago, I conducted an experiment. I watched an hour of CNN every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago. It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person] will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as opinions, they were presented as facts and the obvious next steps or conclusions. I realized pretty quickly that avoiding CNN kept out the blatantly wrong information so even if I didn't replace it with anything, I was net ahead. A few years ago, I discovered this article and realized that some portion of it was probably on purpose: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...
rumblerock 7y ago
They aren't exactly two distinct things, in the sense that if you can drive hate clicks with fake news you just put yourself in business.

hcurtiss 7y ago

The Two Minutes Hate. Truly Orwellian.

Anthony-G 7y ago
Upvoted for reminding me about this. I'm probably due a re-read of 1984 as I'd completely forgotten about the Two Minutes Hate. Orwell really was a visionary.
- realmod 7y ago
  Two minutes hate is not something new, the difference is just how accesible creating and disseminating such sentiments have become.
  - HenryBemis 7y ago
    And once "the internet" (some nasties behind it) found the way to make these "two minute" increments compound (e.g. YT showing a more extreme version than the one just watched), combined with profiling etc, then boom, CA and FB win elections ;)
aalleavitch 7y ago
This just once against demonstrates what Orwell really meant and America never heard, everything he painted in his dystopia was just as possible under authoritarian capitalism as it is under authoritarian communism. The American education system loves making kids read Animal Farm and 1984 but for some reason they never seem to mention that Orwell was an anarcho-socialist.

at-fates-hands 7y ago

> We're talking 1000x the exposure and people believing it's "mainstream." Twitter is now famous for this. You'll see an account with two or three followers post some news story that pushes some agenda. Within minutes the tweet has over 8,000 retweet and likes. Less than an hour later its trending and snowballs from there. Suddenly, the mainstream media picks it up and reports it as fact - even though its blatantly obvious this story has been propagated and driven in a totally false manner. It's become the blueprint for pushing propaganda from social media into the mainstream media, making public opinion remarkably easy to manipulate.

Karunamon 7y ago
It has the ability to go even further than that. Once something has reached some ill-defined level of media coverarge, it's eligible for inclusion on Wikipedia, which then populates Google SERPs and all manner of other services. (And in Wiki's case, even if someone figures out the BS, they won't be allowed to do anything about it because the non-media coverage counts as "original research") Granted, this generally won't happen unless an actual shill for whatever cause is editing the site, but still. Misinformation has never been able to move faster.

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago

Everything that's old is new again. Soon everyone will be so completely saturated with this type of news/entertainment, that I bet they'll crave things that are actually real. I think on HN we tend to be ahead of the curve. Almost everyone on here has completely given up or is giving up on a lot of social media and news feeds.

bobthepanda 7y ago
Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers pushed public opinion for the Spanish American War based on a lie. So the cycle is alive and well.
- emmelaich 7y ago
  An alternate opinion: https://mediamythalert.com/2011/01/13/the-anniversary-of-a-media-myth-ill-furnish-the-war/ https://mediamythalert.com/2011/01/13/the-anniversary-of-a-m...
bilbo0s 7y ago
>Almost everyone on here has completely given up or is giving up on a lot of social media and news feeds. In fairness, HN itself is actually a social media news feed, and is also filled with it's share of clickbait outrage porn. The reality is that no user sourced digital medium is going to be free of these kinds of issues. If you could figure out a way to actually create a system that is free of these issues, you could probably make a billion dollars.
- im3w1l 7y ago
  There is an easy solution but you are not going to like it... require real names. And verify them. And keep track of their reputations. Edit: Proposed this as a solution for disinformation agents. Guess I picked the wrong sub-thread to place that. Sorry for the confusion.
  - killface 7y ago
    this is exactly right. folks could likely get by anyway, but it would be dramatically reduced. until there are consequences for lying online, and as long as there's money to be made by lying, enough people will be assholes and do it.

moosey 7y ago

The book "Anti-Social" by Andrew Marantz introduced me to the concept of "High Arousal Emotions", which is exactly what clickbait, advertising and 'social networks' take advantage of to get clicks. Personally, I don't think it runs up against the first amendment to limit the use of such a blatant emotional/mental hack.

whatshisface 7y ago
>I don't think it runs up against the first amendment to limit the use of such a blatant emotional/mental hack. The Snowden leaks resulted in some fairly high-arousal emotions, so I would be careful with where you go with that.
partiallypro 7y ago
I don't believe it should be limited, I am generally an absolutist on free speech. But I do think media outlets need an internal reform, or we need to start looking at alternative methods of revenue that don't rely on societal damage. I honestly don't even think some of these people mean what they say, it is very much an Ann Coulter methodology.
aalleavitch 7y ago
I keep saying this: we don't need to be attacking the symptom, we need to be attacking the disease. Regulating what people are posting online will never get rid of the real problem, there is simply too massive of an incentive to manipulate people for financial gain. Until that's fixed we're just going to keep putting out new fires when someone discovers the next big unethical business practice that happen to work.
- r00fus 7y ago
  So what, pray tell, is the disease in your analogy? Human nature?
  - aalleavitch 7y ago
    Unchecked capitalism.

Zarath 7y ago

Honestly I'm surprised more people aren't burnt out on this. I can only be angry and get triggered by the same bullshit for so long before it just doesn't work.

aiphex 7y ago
But isn't that a sinister side of it too? Burn out and disengage those of us who are rational and reasonable. Only 150 more years till we can apply to Starfleet...
- filoleg 7y ago
  Being disengaged from mainstream news reporting and clickbait articles isn’t the same as being disengaged from news, reading articles, and being informed though. It just means that instead of following the outrage threadmill and blindly trusting the first source you encounter, you get more emotionally disengaged and have to do more work to filter out your sources and read multiple different coverages of the same piece of info to get a more full and objective picture that isn’t clouded by the lens and emotional coloring through which the source could present it. It does take more of your willpower and effort to do all that, but that’s the price we have to pay to get a more objective view of something. Back in the old days, the access to information in the first place was what people had to work hard for. In the age of information abundance, you still have to work to get it, but now you have to do more filtering and less figuring out how to access it in the first place.
Swizec 7y ago
An old quote I heard once: “The news doesn’t tell you what to think, the news tells you what to think about” Doesn’t matter if the emotional jerking doesn’t work no more. Your mind is still hijacked.
caseysoftware 7y ago
Copied from where I've said this elsewhere: Almost 10 years ago, I conducted an experiment. I watched an hour of CNN every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago. It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person] will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as opinions, they were presented as facts and the obvious next steps or conclusions. I realized pretty quickly that avoiding CNN kept out the blatantly wrong information so even if I didn't replace it with anything, I was net ahead. A few years ago, I discovered this article and realized that some portion of it was probably on purpose: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...

rumblerock 7y ago

They aren't exactly two distinct things, in the sense that if you can drive hate clicks with fake news you just put yourself in business.