8 ms·

Ruling at the below link, because apparently every US news reporter is allergic to actually providing source docs in court cases . . . https://storage.courtlis

Ruling at the below link, because apparently every US news reporter is allergic to actually providing source docs in court cases . . . https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.326809/gov.uscourts.wawd.326809.289.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.32...

Workaccount2 2y ago
It's in violation of the sacred law of the attention economy: Never link outside your garden.
- braiamp 2y ago
  For some weird reason, outlinks are to be avoided, because it's seen as "leaving your site". In a store front, I can see that making sense. In a site to provide information... not so much.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    News sites aren't just providing information: they're trading reporting for ad impressions.
    - tmtvl 2y ago
      Serious question: are paywalled news articles better at outlinking and do they have no ads?
      - nemomarx 2y ago
        in my experience of i pay a sub it removes ads from the site at least, although not sponsored content
      - 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
        NYT will often outlink or if they're talking about a report, will provide a PDF of the report. Example: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/us/politics/trump-jan-6-case-jack-smith-evidence.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/us/politics/trump-jan-6-c...
      - mrandish 2y ago
        No, not in my experience. They usually have less external ads but a lot of other cruft is still there. Enshittification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) is getting so bad, I'd be willing to pay for sites that actually work. So far, paywall offers are just to remove external ads and that's only part of what I want. The rest of what I want is for the fucking site to actually work. For example, both Google and Amazon search have been seriously degraded and de-featured in recent years and it's been done very intentionally and systematically to optimize for their ad or sales revenue. I suspect this degradation has crept deeper into their stacks than just at the top layer where it could be easily turned off with a flag and sold as a paywall upgrade.
      - nnf 2y ago
        The Atlantic seems to have no problem linking to multiple outside sources in seemingly every article I read.
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        The Financial Times is also good about this.
        8bitsrule 2y ago
        Lately I think I've been seeing more science news sites linking to source articles, with DOIs usually abstracts-only are viewable) and Arxiv (often with PDFs) for example..
        hammock 2y ago
        Every FT article is paywalled
        hnben 2y ago
        iirc they are soft-walled, or at least they were the last time i checked, about a year ago. I forgot how exactly you could bypass the wall, i think something with cookies and private browsing, and ip-addresses.
        disgruntledphd2 2y ago
        Or you could just pay for it. It's expensive but totally worth it (IME, obviously).
        hammock 2y ago
        The Atlantic is bankrolled by Steve Jobs wife and historically is more of a “think tank” outlet than a journalistic enterprise
    - safety1st 2y ago
      It's a stretch to call many many of the stories these sites produce "reporting," I'm thinking in particular about the "Someone posted to Twitter and other people posted angrily to Twitter in response" genre
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - kredd 2y ago
    If You leave the website, your eyes won't catch a headline that's on the side that you might also click, spending more time on your website. Which translates to more money.
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    As a culture we don't value primary sources.
  - godelski 2y ago
    > For some weird reason, outlinks are to be avoided Because people don't understand metrics other than "optimize this". So they take social media metrics and apply them where they don't belong. To me fair, news is probably pretty hard to measure. Since the real value is in quality. People want information, quickly available, but accurate and easily readable. I mean isn't a big function of the news to explain complex topics more simply? I don't think there are any half way decent metrics for quality in really any domain.
  - lazide 2y ago
    They aren’t there to provide information, they are there to trap/collect eyeballs.
- godelski 2y ago
  Good old metric hacking. People seem to frequently forget that your measurement is always a proxy. A proxy for what? That's for you to decide. But you can't ever measure anything directly. It's sadly common even in data science but the biggest offenders I see are business people. You can't use metrics without understanding what they're for otherwise you'll just enshitify your product. Be that number of clicks, time on page/site, number of academic citations, whatever. They're meaningless at face value. A good example is time on site. That's great for social media like YouTube where it generally correlates strongly to "using the website for what the website does" but even then it can be "scrolled for 20 minutes looking for something to watch, gave up. But on a news site, no one fucking cares about that. Your job is to provide information, so time on {page, site} might actually be a negative because it doesn't necessarily mean people are reading that whole time but they might be struggling to find the information they are looking for. A confusing UX also optimizes time on site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
  - immibis 2y ago
    Enshittification is a good thing for the business people.
    - godelski 2y ago
      No it isn't, but it looks like it is. The same is also true with (abusive) monopolies. They make less money stagnating. The difference in both is that it's easier to be poorer. But you give up a lot of value for easy money, and let's be real, when you're that rich it's no longer about the (utility of) money but the power and high score/bragging rights. (Markets can work with monopolies, even efficiently, but it's the problem of benevolent dictators. They're never benevolent and eventually abuse their power. Competition is good for everyone involved because a stagnating monopoly is just one overtaken by bureaucrats who don't know how to make money, i.e. it is already dying)
- phreack 2y ago
  This is actually my quickest rule of thumb for any internet article. If it's got links and some actually leave the site, I'll be immediately more invested and read through it. Otherwise I'll barely glance at it and go back to whatever got me to the article in the first place.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
cynicalpeace 2y ago
I find this to be the case with most primary sources, not just for court cases. A couple days ago, an American WWII bomb exploded at a Japanese airport and the article linked on HN didn't even show or link the video. Legacy media really sucks.
- daemoens 2y ago
  Why single out legacy media for this specifically? This isn't something newer media is better at.
  - cynicalpeace 2y ago
    Many popular podcasts would show the video, or pull up fact-checking in real time. If that's what you mean by "newer media" I would say it's 10x better. Reuters is legacy media, hence why I mentioned legacy media.
    - hughesjj 2y ago
      Linking the publishing source is needed too. So many videos get reposted and mislabeled. Like basically any rocket attack I assume happened in like 2006 and between completely different belligerents than whatever a post claims at this point
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      > Many popular podcasts would show the video A podcast doesn't include any video data. How could it show a video?
      - jpc0 2y ago
        There's this modern trend to call a bunch of people staring around a table a podcast. Whether they have cameras or not... It annoys me too but I'm young enough to tolerate the kids on my lawn...
      - cynicalpeace 2y ago
wnc3141 2y ago
I've noticed two things about most news. One they never provide sources. Not just their sources but sources behind figures or statements of truth. Two it's hard to find articles that highlight different points than the leading article on the topic.
- defrost 2y ago
  Good news reporting is an expensive and dying craft. These days most articles have one of two sources: * rewritten from a single prime news reporting source that did the hard yards, * copied near verbatim from an official Press Release and|or Advertorial Press Material. The second is the real bane of modern "news" sourcing - eg: straight up disguised advertising- a mega shopping chain pays a network to insert "news" pieces about fighting back against inflation savings that "local" stores are offering up to "stick it to the big guys" and other such template garbage. Perhaps worse; the undeclared "vested interest" news that comes from (say) a mining or energy companies Press Release. More and more it's hard to find any truly independant journalism (because of cost cutting), and near impossible to find multiple sources and viewpoints. One answer is for more citizens to become "press aware" and start to distribute their own press kit releases on local issues to spread the side of events that they want aired. That still faces the counter pressure of actual advertisers that spend with networks that would rather see their take get the airtime.
  - oblio 2y ago
    I appreciate your optimism but I think you got the order wrong. I'm fairly sure that the #1 source of news articles, social media posts, etc, probably by far is "native advertising" aka hidden advertising (this is actually illegal in some countries) aka PR articles posted as if from the news source. https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
    - defrost 2y ago
      > but you I think you got the order wrong. Other than the fact that text is sequential I imposed no ranking, these are the two major sources. > "native advertising" aka hidden advertising aka submarine news, aka Advertorial Press Material (as I called it above) Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. This is what I was talking about, perhaps we have differing nomenclature due to differing countries of origin or somesuch but it's the same thing; "news" sourced from preprepared press releases issued by vested interests - either advertisers and|or PR think tanks, etc. Either way it's "free" professionally prepared copy that costs nothing in paid reporter time and sometimes comes with a carrot (paid advertisement inches), sometimes with a stick (we're thinking of withdrawing | changing contracts, but we have this copy we'd like to see run).
thayne 2y ago
Or scientific papers, or even original release notes for software updates
EasyMark 2y ago
Most of us don’t care about court filing direct links, just that they were filed, to be fair. It’s easy enough to look up on google. I think only the 1% of law nerds who want to read it themselves care if there is a link or not and they already know how to look that stuff up.

Workaccount2 2y ago

It's in violation of the sacred law of the attention economy: Never link outside your garden.

braiamp 2y ago
For some weird reason, outlinks are to be avoided, because it's seen as "leaving your site". In a store front, I can see that making sense. In a site to provide information... not so much.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  News sites aren't just providing information: they're trading reporting for ad impressions.
  - tmtvl 2y ago
    Serious question: are paywalled news articles better at outlinking and do they have no ads?
    - nemomarx 2y ago
      in my experience of i pay a sub it removes ads from the site at least, although not sponsored content
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
      NYT will often outlink or if they're talking about a report, will provide a PDF of the report. Example: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/us/politics/trump-jan-6-case-jack-smith-evidence.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/us/politics/trump-jan-6-c...
    - mrandish 2y ago
      No, not in my experience. They usually have less external ads but a lot of other cruft is still there. Enshittification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) is getting so bad, I'd be willing to pay for sites that actually work. So far, paywall offers are just to remove external ads and that's only part of what I want. The rest of what I want is for the fucking site to actually work. For example, both Google and Amazon search have been seriously degraded and de-featured in recent years and it's been done very intentionally and systematically to optimize for their ad or sales revenue. I suspect this degradation has crept deeper into their stacks than just at the top layer where it could be easily turned off with a flag and sold as a paywall upgrade.
    - nnf 2y ago
      The Atlantic seems to have no problem linking to multiple outside sources in seemingly every article I read.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        The Financial Times is also good about this.
        8bitsrule 2y ago
        Lately I think I've been seeing more science news sites linking to source articles, with DOIs usually abstracts-only are viewable) and Arxiv (often with PDFs) for example..
        hammock 2y ago
        Every FT article is paywalled
        hnben 2y ago
        iirc they are soft-walled, or at least they were the last time i checked, about a year ago. I forgot how exactly you could bypass the wall, i think something with cookies and private browsing, and ip-addresses.
        disgruntledphd2 2y ago
        Or you could just pay for it. It's expensive but totally worth it (IME, obviously).
      - hammock 2y ago
        The Atlantic is bankrolled by Steve Jobs wife and historically is more of a “think tank” outlet than a journalistic enterprise
  - safety1st 2y ago
    It's a stretch to call many many of the stories these sites produce "reporting," I'm thinking in particular about the "Someone posted to Twitter and other people posted angrily to Twitter in response" genre
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- kredd 2y ago
  If You leave the website, your eyes won't catch a headline that's on the side that you might also click, spending more time on your website. Which translates to more money.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  As a culture we don't value primary sources.
- godelski 2y ago
  > For some weird reason, outlinks are to be avoided Because people don't understand metrics other than "optimize this". So they take social media metrics and apply them where they don't belong. To me fair, news is probably pretty hard to measure. Since the real value is in quality. People want information, quickly available, but accurate and easily readable. I mean isn't a big function of the news to explain complex topics more simply? I don't think there are any half way decent metrics for quality in really any domain.
- lazide 2y ago
  They aren’t there to provide information, they are there to trap/collect eyeballs.
godelski 2y ago
Good old metric hacking. People seem to frequently forget that your measurement is always a proxy. A proxy for what? That's for you to decide. But you can't ever measure anything directly. It's sadly common even in data science but the biggest offenders I see are business people. You can't use metrics without understanding what they're for otherwise you'll just enshitify your product. Be that number of clicks, time on page/site, number of academic citations, whatever. They're meaningless at face value. A good example is time on site. That's great for social media like YouTube where it generally correlates strongly to "using the website for what the website does" but even then it can be "scrolled for 20 minutes looking for something to watch, gave up. But on a news site, no one fucking cares about that. Your job is to provide information, so time on {page, site} might actually be a negative because it doesn't necessarily mean people are reading that whole time but they might be struggling to find the information they are looking for. A confusing UX also optimizes time on site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- immibis 2y ago
  Enshittification is a good thing for the business people.
  - godelski 2y ago
    No it isn't, but it looks like it is. The same is also true with (abusive) monopolies. They make less money stagnating. The difference in both is that it's easier to be poorer. But you give up a lot of value for easy money, and let's be real, when you're that rich it's no longer about the (utility of) money but the power and high score/bragging rights. (Markets can work with monopolies, even efficiently, but it's the problem of benevolent dictators. They're never benevolent and eventually abuse their power. Competition is good for everyone involved because a stagnating monopoly is just one overtaken by bureaucrats who don't know how to make money, i.e. it is already dying)
phreack 2y ago
This is actually my quickest rule of thumb for any internet article. If it's got links and some actually leave the site, I'll be immediately more invested and read through it. Otherwise I'll barely glance at it and go back to whatever got me to the article in the first place.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

cynicalpeace 2y ago

I find this to be the case with most primary sources, not just for court cases. A couple days ago, an American WWII bomb exploded at a Japanese airport and the article linked on HN didn't even show or link the video. Legacy media really sucks.

daemoens 2y ago
Why single out legacy media for this specifically? This isn't something newer media is better at.
- cynicalpeace 2y ago
  Many popular podcasts would show the video, or pull up fact-checking in real time. If that's what you mean by "newer media" I would say it's 10x better. Reuters is legacy media, hence why I mentioned legacy media.
  - hughesjj 2y ago
    Linking the publishing source is needed too. So many videos get reposted and mislabeled. Like basically any rocket attack I assume happened in like 2006 and between completely different belligerents than whatever a post claims at this point
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    > Many popular podcasts would show the video A podcast doesn't include any video data. How could it show a video?
    - jpc0 2y ago
      There's this modern trend to call a bunch of people staring around a table a podcast. Whether they have cameras or not... It annoys me too but I'm young enough to tolerate the kids on my lawn...
    - cynicalpeace 2y ago

wnc3141 2y ago

I've noticed two things about most news. One they never provide sources. Not just their sources but sources behind figures or statements of truth. Two it's hard to find articles that highlight different points than the leading article on the topic.

defrost 2y ago
Good news reporting is an expensive and dying craft. These days most articles have one of two sources: * rewritten from a single prime news reporting source that did the hard yards, * copied near verbatim from an official Press Release and|or Advertorial Press Material. The second is the real bane of modern "news" sourcing - eg: straight up disguised advertising- a mega shopping chain pays a network to insert "news" pieces about fighting back against inflation savings that "local" stores are offering up to "stick it to the big guys" and other such template garbage. Perhaps worse; the undeclared "vested interest" news that comes from (say) a mining or energy companies Press Release. More and more it's hard to find any truly independant journalism (because of cost cutting), and near impossible to find multiple sources and viewpoints. One answer is for more citizens to become "press aware" and start to distribute their own press kit releases on local issues to spread the side of events that they want aired. That still faces the counter pressure of actual advertisers that spend with networks that would rather see their take get the airtime.
- oblio 2y ago
  I appreciate your optimism but I think you got the order wrong. I'm fairly sure that the #1 source of news articles, social media posts, etc, probably by far is "native advertising" aka hidden advertising (this is actually illegal in some countries) aka PR articles posted as if from the news source. https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
  - defrost 2y ago
    > but you I think you got the order wrong. Other than the fact that text is sequential I imposed no ranking, these are the two major sources. > "native advertising" aka hidden advertising aka submarine news, aka Advertorial Press Material (as I called it above) Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. This is what I was talking about, perhaps we have differing nomenclature due to differing countries of origin or somesuch but it's the same thing; "news" sourced from preprepared press releases issued by vested interests - either advertisers and|or PR think tanks, etc. Either way it's "free" professionally prepared copy that costs nothing in paid reporter time and sometimes comes with a carrot (paid advertisement inches), sometimes with a stick (we're thinking of withdrawing | changing contracts, but we have this copy we'd like to see run).

thayne 2y ago

Or scientific papers, or even original release notes for software updates

EasyMark 2y ago

Most of us don’t care about court filing direct links, just that they were filed, to be fair. It’s easy enough to look up on google. I think only the 1% of law nerds who want to read it themselves care if there is a link or not and they already know how to look that stuff up.