3 ms·
The "media sentiment change happened because Facebook ad revenue surpassed newspaper advertising revenue" makes a cute soundbite and there's some correlation gr
by majormajor 3y ago
The "media sentiment change happened because Facebook ad revenue surpassed newspaper advertising revenue" makes a cute soundbite and there's some correlation graphs, but the details presented here are pretty weak.
E.g. the NYT started being negative towards facebook because of "filter bubbles" undercutting them in a conspiratorial way instead of a "that sounds bad" way - HN is mostly negative on filter bubbles too. Same with Juicero.
And the "economic attack" on Hollywood, for instance, is hardly so - the initial investor-money-burning decade of streaming talked about here was WONDERFUL for most of Hollywood. You get to make way more shows, and they aren't supposed to all be lowest-common-denominator reality stuff? That was a bonanza for actors, writers, directors.
I'd also want to see media sentiment of TV, streaming; ad revenue comparisons of that, and all the other options in the world between a binary "newspaper" and "tech" in that one graph.
Not to mention some research on consumer sentiment not just media sentiment. Does the author really believe the average Joe wasn't getting more negative about FB over that time span? Where was "Tech" on that "people think the president should do something about" list five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago? 40% is lower than oil and airlines; what's the rate of change? (One might say "yes, the public got more negative because the media pushed the narrative" which would be a pretty interesting argument, but it's notably not what this article is saying - the author is saying that the public "Techlash" basically "never happened" outside the media. (But that's not really new, right - Tech criticizing the "media" [or slices of it] is also a decades-long well-established practice. This ain't a one-way street.)
Yet spend a week on HN and you'll see that even in the industry, there's a LOT of organic negative sentiment against certain tech companies. I would agree with a claim that the media is oversimplifying that to "frustrating with tech," I don't agree that it's not a real trend with real causes independent of media reporting. We all use these products, we can all see the gradual shittification of them - FB, TikTok, Snap, Google Search...
- hikawaii 3y agoThe bit about ad revenue was actually specifically called out here as probably not the story. The interesting part to me is the overall positive sentiment towards tech in general, because you are right - at least for specific companies, sentiment as reported by a local poll of people I play games with, Elon and FB are the literal devil.
- sergiomattei 3y agoI felt the same way about the article. Large amounts of conspiratorial conjecture presented, little to show for it.
- elefanten 3y agoIdk that economic “attack” is good phrasing but the bundling of video content combined with tools/platforms/monetization for user generated video content absolutely had a devastating effect on legacy video media. Maybe, in your words, the initial money-burning provided a lift, but now Hollywood writers are striking for more pay and Netflix is one of they key bogeymen.
- majormajor 3y agoAgreed - initially it was a windfall in the 2010s, now we're seeing a backlash because the cable residuals aren't there anymore and the streaming networks realized that lighting money on fire to out-compete each other was a zero-sum game.
- novok 3y agoIf you dig in more into the techlash, you also see a lot of... biased behavior on the NYT. Other newspapers also have this demonstrated behavior too, but the NYT is the most well researched. It's not just FB article sentiment analysis, it's everything they've written. If you look at all sentiment & word usage of all articles you'll notice sudden shifts . The NYT also has a narrative department that explicitly crafts all articles towards a target narrative for example and rejects articles or phrases that doesn't go towards the current target narrative. And because people that work in these industries do not want to be informally blacklisted explaining this, in an industry where it's hard to get work, there isn't much in terms of good investigative journalism into the behavior of media itself, so it has to come from outsiders often. If you can get an NYT journalist drunk and talk about the right things, your eyes will start getting realllllllyyyy wide. The NYT explicitly decided to generate the techlash as their current narrative, it wasn't an emergent behavior because of events in the world.
- comex 3y ago> The NYT also has a narrative department that explicitly crafts all articles towards a target narrative for example and rejects articles or phrases that doesn't go towards the current target narrative. Citation needed.
- supriyo-biswas 3y agohttps://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192 https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex (NYT controversy)
- CrazyStat 3y agoNeither of those links provide evidence for the existence of a narrative department.