3 ms·

>Consider that for anyone wanting to start such a thing for local news, the barriers to entry are really, really low. You're effectively talking about blogs, "

>Consider that for anyone wanting to start such a thing for local news, the barriers to entry are really, really low. You're effectively talking about blogs, "twitter journalism" and freelance journalism of the type you might see from Forbes. It is, by and large, crap and incomparable to the kind of journalism that dedicated professionals used to provide before cable TV ratings and algorithms destroyed the incentives.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> It is, by and large, crap and incomparable to the kind of journalism that dedicated professionals used to provide before cable TV ratings and algorithms destroyed the incentives. Print media consolidation and cost-cutting did that before cable news rose to prominence (people were complaining about it at least as far back as the 1980s), much less online media and its algorithms (which, anyway, optimize for exactly the same thing ad-supported media has always optimized for.)
WalterBright 5y ago
By and large, most open source attempts at programming languages are crap. But a handful are very professional. Other very successful similar initiatives are wikipedia and stackexchange.
- dralley 5y ago
  There's still several big differences. It's not so difficult to filter out good programming languages from poor ones - the barrier to entry is still fairly high on both sides of the equation (production and adoption) and thus quantity of new languages is low. Even creating a bad programming language requires a certain degree of skill. Further, programmers have a much higher qualification to judge programming languages than the average person has to judge the quality of their news, which could span every possible topic. [0] And lastly bad amateurish programming languages can be ignored. They have little consequence on the whole of society. None of this is true for poor quality or fabricated news. It's easy to produce [1] and trivial to consume and share and thus it is everywhere, it encompasses every subject matter and thus nobody is well-qualified to judge a significant fraction of it, and the desire to believe in fabrications that align with one's own beliefs is wildly stronger than the desire to strongly commit to learning a new programming language. [0] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > It's not so difficult to filter out good programming languages from poor ones I beg to differ. There are some pretty awful but popular programming languages! No, I won't name them because I don't want to ignite a flame war here. It's actually not easy to do a good programming language design. It looks obvious only after the fact. > And lastly bad amateurish programming languages can be ignored. They have little consequence on the whole of society. They impose a lot of cost on society, both direct and indirect.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> It is, by and large, crap and incomparable to the kind of journalism that dedicated professionals used to provide before cable TV ratings and algorithms destroyed the incentives. Print media consolidation and cost-cutting did that before cable news rose to prominence (people were complaining about it at least as far back as the 1980s), much less online media and its algorithms (which, anyway, optimize for exactly the same thing ad-supported media has always optimized for.)

WalterBright 5y ago

By and large, most open source attempts at programming languages are crap. But a handful are very professional. Other very successful similar initiatives are wikipedia and stackexchange.

dralley 5y ago
There's still several big differences. It's not so difficult to filter out good programming languages from poor ones - the barrier to entry is still fairly high on both sides of the equation (production and adoption) and thus quantity of new languages is low. Even creating a bad programming language requires a certain degree of skill. Further, programmers have a much higher qualification to judge programming languages than the average person has to judge the quality of their news, which could span every possible topic. [0] And lastly bad amateurish programming languages can be ignored. They have little consequence on the whole of society. None of this is true for poor quality or fabricated news. It's easy to produce [1] and trivial to consume and share and thus it is everywhere, it encompasses every subject matter and thus nobody is well-qualified to judge a significant fraction of it, and the desire to believe in fabrications that align with one's own beliefs is wildly stronger than the desire to strongly commit to learning a new programming language. [0] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > It's not so difficult to filter out good programming languages from poor ones I beg to differ. There are some pretty awful but popular programming languages! No, I won't name them because I don't want to ignite a flame war here. It's actually not easy to do a good programming language design. It looks obvious only after the fact. > And lastly bad amateurish programming languages can be ignored. They have little consequence on the whole of society. They impose a lot of cost on society, both direct and indirect.