How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by sqeaky on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @02:19PM (#14850419)

How long until a critical mass of people forms to allow some more useful form of news to gain economic momentum?

Will it ever happen? If not will the economic repercussions leave us with a decent world or some kind of dystopia?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by dageshi on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @02:45PM (#14850682)

I don't think they will, they'll turn off the news completely and follow "news" about other stuff instead. Sports, video games, hobbies, they'll ignore current events and politics or anything else they might find anxiety inducing.

That's what I do anyway, I'm much happier for it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by sqeaky on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @03:53PM (#14851295)

I suppose it is possible that a critical mass of people will give up. That seems unlikely to me, too many care for better or worse. The people that care will either remain poorly informed for gradually get more informed and by our electing of Trump it seems quite likely misinformed with reign for some time. (I am not trying to politicize this, but trump got huge help from crazy news sources like breitbart)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by SimbaOnSteroids on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @07:09PM (#14852626)

Could we build a plugin that alters headlines to reflect reality?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by breakingcups on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @06:00AM (#14854875)

That would be fantastic. I'd love a plugin like that.

There is a problem in curation / moderation though. Who do you trust with correcting headlines? The public, with voting? Easily manipulated still.

Another problem this doesn't correct is the selection of what events to report on. To use an example from the article, terrorism would still dominate your news feed.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by SimbaOnSteroids on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @08:15AM (#14855496)

For the terrorism example you could have a nifty bot that keeps track of worldwide terror stats and local terror stats and report something like: odds of dying in terror attack rise from .00005% to .00006% (obv made up number) after {city} attacks. Would have to figure out how to do this while still respecting those who were affected though.

Or for clickbait science headlines immediately report the statistical significance of the cited paper/credibility of journal based on the number of citations that journal recieves from other scientists.

Some types of articles would be tougher than others for sure but that doesn't mean we couldn't grab at the low hanging fruit.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by artur_makly on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @07:17PM (#14852665)

thats why i made this : http://TrumpTweets.io - is powered by caring humans

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by stcredzero on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @02:34PM (#14850567)

How long until a critical mass of people forms to allow some more useful form of news to gain economic momentum?

Such things started forming on YouTube (with some problematic elements) but were defunded with an eye towards attracting more old media ad money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfHXXV45EjE

Phillip DeFranco isn't perfect, but he's graduated from YouTube punk to what passes as a "moderate" there. (I think he's a good way to keep track of the middle of opinion in new media there.) He's also decided to start his own online news network.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by anigbrowl on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @02:21PM (#14850449)

Not long. We're at the stage where virtual assistants are being deployed through the population. As soon as people find reliable ways to ensure their loyalty, a strategic turn will make them unstoppable.

[ Parent | on HN ]