4 ms·

There's also an excellent Exra Klein podcast where he talks to game-philospher C. Thi Nguyen about Twitter's Like button's effect on journalists. [1] He says t

by SamBam 4y ago

There's also an excellent Exra Klein podcast where he talks to game-philospher C. Thi Nguyen about Twitter's Like button's effect on journalists. [1] He says that as a journalist on twitter (which almost every journalist is) it's nearly impossible to get away from measuring your worth/impact by the number of likes you get. It's so buit into our minds, we can't not use Likes as a proxy for how engaging our story is. The issue is that it subtly, though completely, changes how you write a story. For example (taking as a premise that even plain factual reporting is essentially political at this point) if you are a New York Times journalist and you write an environmental story that appeals to the emotions of the people who already understand the dangers of climate change, you'll get thousands of likes. But the story won't be impactful because you're preaching to the choir. If, instead, you wrote a story framed in a way that might change a few people's minds, you won't get nearly the number of likes, because the very angles you'd approach the story at would be ones that would be less comfortable to your core audience, your choir. Preaching to the choir is one of the biggest causes of our echo chambers and widening divides, and it's directly caused by counting likes. 1. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-philosophy-of-games-that-is-really-a-philosophy-of-life/id1548604447?i=1000552204773 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-philosophy-of-games-...

bachmeier 4y ago
This is less of a problem to me than the other side effect of like-driven journalism. If you only preach to the choir, you can get away with misleading or inaccurate claims. Like-driven journalism encourages a style where you present only some of the facts or even just make stuff up. Folks like stuff because of what it says. They don't care if it's partial truths or lies. Like-driven journalism quite literally punishes honesty.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  This is also talked about in Nguyen's work, as the difference between "epistemic bubble" and "echo chamber". It's worth checking out https://academic.oup.com/book/39388/chapter/339074130 https://academic.oup.com/book/39388/chapter/339074130
- Mattasher 4y ago
  This gets to the heart of the problem and is even understated. If your audience is partisan, going against what they want to hear by providing nuance, context, or even straight news, can provoke extreme outrage. Perhaps people will recall when the NYT had to change a factually correct headline because it wasn't sufficiently critical of the previous president.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    And good luck fitting nuance and context into ~~140~~ 280 characters !
    - ChainOfFools 4y ago
      compression and curation are the parents of persuasion
      - BlueTemplar 4y ago
        That's a very good point - I feel very uncomfortable on Twitter even today, but I can see how a "words first" education would make it easier to cope with. It doesn't remove the issue though, since the space is so limited - IMHO Twitter is instead a much more fitting space for poets...
- tenpies 4y ago
  The best part is the reward of lying for "journalists". If you lie and get caught, ignore it. If the person who called you out has too much of a following to ignore, then just write a small sentence at the bottom clarifying how you're not lying, you just interpreted things different. They still won't go away? Find one of their followers who makes a comment that's just a bit out of line. Can't find one? Well a Twitter account is free to make. Boom, the story is now how your critic is inciting violence, sexist, racist, probably voted for Trump, and insurrectionist, a climate change denier, white supremacist, transphobe, etc. That's the story now and you're the victim at the center of it all. And the people employing these "journalists" don't just shield them from consequence, they reward them for it.
  - ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
    Don't forget that if there are many different people calling you out for telling lies, it's obviously targeted harassment.
- imbnwa 4y ago
  So basically, how often is one presented with aporias on Twitter?
xhevahir 4y ago
> If, instead, you wrote a story framed in a way that might change a few people's minds, you won't get nearly the number of likes... Or, more painfully, you'll see a lot of derisive quote-tweets, subtweets, hostile screencaps, the dreaded "ratio"... Twitter users are a catty bunch.
- mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  It all looks so pathetic once you put some distance to it. None of it matters. That’s why there’s so much drama.
pphysch 4y ago
Joseph Pulitzer, the prize's namesake, was simultaneously a media mogul and U.S. congressman. His name is often associated with the dawn of "yellow journalism" and USA imperial war propaganda. Point being, unethical incentives and corruption are at the foundation of the American journalism tradition. It did not start with Twitter or the internet.
- MarkPNeyer 4y ago
  Basically all of history was powerful people lying to everyone and mass media helping them do it. For some reason people think the world is different today.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    Absolutely: Hearst's "You furnish the pictures. I'll furnish the war" predates social media by quite a bit
sangnoir 4y ago
The NYT also engages in the opposite of like-based reporting: contrarian articles that target engagement via outrage. The "relatable racist next door" stories are a recurring motif for the NYT (alternatively, look at any prepandemic article that mentions "economic anxiety" from 2015/2016 onwards)
greggman3 4y ago
I've argued that Likes are evil and should be banned. I've tried in some places to remove them from my life. Via ublock-origin I have them blocked from HN beacuse I feel the rush of elation everytime I see I've posted somethign that gets even a few up votes and I can feel it addicting me to wanting to seek out more of that. I've done the same on stackoverflow when I used to post their a lot. I hid other people's scores as well as the answer scores. I'd go so far as to say I believe it's possible the like button is large percentage of the cause of all the various problems with social media. Likes on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc... I feel like remove the like button would go along way of removing the addiction and the attention seeking behavior of all the various social medias
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Fine, here's your upvo- oh, wait... More seriously, I can see how these are useful in situations where there is just too much content to sort through (hacker news, reddit, slashdot... google ?). Of course you can also have randomly displayed results, but then this goes against the goal of elevating the quality of the results, at which point you need to pick winners and losers somehow. (Obviously, the traditional way to do it : human editors, has its own issues...)
  - viridian 4y ago
    After using the internet and nested thread style sites for way, way too long, I've finally comes to the conclusion that we had it right the first time with mailing lists, e-bulletin boards, forums, and imageboards: chronological, oldest to newest is the best way to read these threads. Not only does it disincentivize the bad behavior we are talking about, but it also has the unique effect of giving you an intuitive meta perspective on a thread, and you get to see how older threads affected newer ones, as they happen. It feels way more organic, even if you aware that all the other commenters are trapped in the algorithm box.
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      Oh yeah, I prefer forums too, they work great... until too much people want to comment on the same topic. Then they quickly become unusable for in-depth conversation, in a similar way that chats become for any conversation (except emote spam). But now I realize that there is also option of a purely chronological tree view (WordPress comments, some mailing lists...) that can go very far in mitigating this - I wonder why it's not more common ? (I might still be better if it defaulted to random roots, at least on your first visit, to avoid the incentives for people posting as quick as possible...)
ever1337 4y ago
Professor Hans Georg-Moeller of the University of Macau I think has some really good observations and a systematization of what he calls the "profilicity mode of identity production", as contrasted to "authenticity" and "sincerity". He frequently comments on how social media causes people to view their actions not directly, but on a "second order", through the eyes of the "general peer" as personified by the quantified likes and comments posts get on social media. I haven't done a great job summarizing here but he has a youtube channel with some good videos on the topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QMHOsfjHq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QMHOsfjHq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cSkb1KppNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cSkb1KppNc I think his framework helps a lot in making sense of the way people act online and offline in our current age, and the implications for "identity production" are quite interesting.

by SamBam 4y ago

bachmeier 4y ago

This is less of a problem to me than the other side effect of like-driven journalism. If you only preach to the choir, you can get away with misleading or inaccurate claims. Like-driven journalism encourages a style where you present only some of the facts or even just make stuff up. Folks like stuff because of what it says. They don't care if it's partial truths or lies. Like-driven journalism quite literally punishes honesty.

kixiQu 4y ago
This is also talked about in Nguyen's work, as the difference between "epistemic bubble" and "echo chamber". It's worth checking out https://academic.oup.com/book/39388/chapter/339074130 https://academic.oup.com/book/39388/chapter/339074130
Mattasher 4y ago
This gets to the heart of the problem and is even understated. If your audience is partisan, going against what they want to hear by providing nuance, context, or even straight news, can provoke extreme outrage. Perhaps people will recall when the NYT had to change a factually correct headline because it wasn't sufficiently critical of the previous president.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  And good luck fitting nuance and context into ~~140~~ 280 characters !
  - ChainOfFools 4y ago
    compression and curation are the parents of persuasion
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      That's a very good point - I feel very uncomfortable on Twitter even today, but I can see how a "words first" education would make it easier to cope with. It doesn't remove the issue though, since the space is so limited - IMHO Twitter is instead a much more fitting space for poets...
tenpies 4y ago
The best part is the reward of lying for "journalists". If you lie and get caught, ignore it. If the person who called you out has too much of a following to ignore, then just write a small sentence at the bottom clarifying how you're not lying, you just interpreted things different. They still won't go away? Find one of their followers who makes a comment that's just a bit out of line. Can't find one? Well a Twitter account is free to make. Boom, the story is now how your critic is inciting violence, sexist, racist, probably voted for Trump, and insurrectionist, a climate change denier, white supremacist, transphobe, etc. That's the story now and you're the victim at the center of it all. And the people employing these "journalists" don't just shield them from consequence, they reward them for it.
- ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
  Don't forget that if there are many different people calling you out for telling lies, it's obviously targeted harassment.
imbnwa 4y ago
So basically, how often is one presented with aporias on Twitter?

xhevahir 4y ago

> If, instead, you wrote a story framed in a way that might change a few people's minds, you won't get nearly the number of likes... Or, more painfully, you'll see a lot of derisive quote-tweets, subtweets, hostile screencaps, the dreaded "ratio"... Twitter users are a catty bunch.

mattgreenrocks 4y ago
It all looks so pathetic once you put some distance to it. None of it matters. That’s why there’s so much drama.

pphysch 4y ago

Joseph Pulitzer, the prize's namesake, was simultaneously a media mogul and U.S. congressman. His name is often associated with the dawn of "yellow journalism" and USA imperial war propaganda. Point being, unethical incentives and corruption are at the foundation of the American journalism tradition. It did not start with Twitter or the internet.

MarkPNeyer 4y ago
Basically all of history was powerful people lying to everyone and mass media helping them do it. For some reason people think the world is different today.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  Absolutely: Hearst's "You furnish the pictures. I'll furnish the war" predates social media by quite a bit

sangnoir 4y ago

The NYT also engages in the opposite of like-based reporting: contrarian articles that target engagement via outrage. The "relatable racist next door" stories are a recurring motif for the NYT (alternatively, look at any prepandemic article that mentions "economic anxiety" from 2015/2016 onwards)

greggman3 4y ago

I've argued that Likes are evil and should be banned. I've tried in some places to remove them from my life. Via ublock-origin I have them blocked from HN beacuse I feel the rush of elation everytime I see I've posted somethign that gets even a few up votes and I can feel it addicting me to wanting to seek out more of that. I've done the same on stackoverflow when I used to post their a lot. I hid other people's scores as well as the answer scores. I'd go so far as to say I believe it's possible the like button is large percentage of the cause of all the various problems with social media. Likes on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc... I feel like remove the like button would go along way of removing the addiction and the attention seeking behavior of all the various social medias

BlueTemplar 4y ago
Fine, here's your upvo- oh, wait... More seriously, I can see how these are useful in situations where there is just too much content to sort through (hacker news, reddit, slashdot... google ?). Of course you can also have randomly displayed results, but then this goes against the goal of elevating the quality of the results, at which point you need to pick winners and losers somehow. (Obviously, the traditional way to do it : human editors, has its own issues...)
- viridian 4y ago
  After using the internet and nested thread style sites for way, way too long, I've finally comes to the conclusion that we had it right the first time with mailing lists, e-bulletin boards, forums, and imageboards: chronological, oldest to newest is the best way to read these threads. Not only does it disincentivize the bad behavior we are talking about, but it also has the unique effect of giving you an intuitive meta perspective on a thread, and you get to see how older threads affected newer ones, as they happen. It feels way more organic, even if you aware that all the other commenters are trapped in the algorithm box.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Oh yeah, I prefer forums too, they work great... until too much people want to comment on the same topic. Then they quickly become unusable for in-depth conversation, in a similar way that chats become for any conversation (except emote spam). But now I realize that there is also option of a purely chronological tree view (WordPress comments, some mailing lists...) that can go very far in mitigating this - I wonder why it's not more common ? (I might still be better if it defaulted to random roots, at least on your first visit, to avoid the incentives for people posting as quick as possible...)

ever1337 4y ago

Professor Hans Georg-Moeller of the University of Macau I think has some really good observations and a systematization of what he calls the "profilicity mode of identity production", as contrasted to "authenticity" and "sincerity". He frequently comments on how social media causes people to view their actions not directly, but on a "second order", through the eyes of the "general peer" as personified by the quantified likes and comments posts get on social media. I haven't done a great job summarizing here but he has a youtube channel with some good videos on the topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QMHOsfjHq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QMHOsfjHq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cSkb1KppNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cSkb1KppNc I think his framework helps a lot in making sense of the way people act online and offline in our current age, and the implications for "identity production" are quite interesting.