What's more valuable than building a top notch system for delivering news (and everything that tends to go with that) to a billion people?

A very large number of engineers were dedicated to building out the radio and television technology platforms over decades. Was it all just to deliver ads? Trivial then right? Well that's what paid for a lot of it. It delivered community, it delivered news, it delivered entertainment, it connected people to the rest of their nation.

> What's more valuable than building a top notch system for delivering news (and everything that tends to go with that) to a billion people?

Making it remotely accurate? Wiping out infectious diseases? Providing a billion people access to a healthy, nutritious diet? Saving the planet from ecological devastation?

I can think of a lot of very hard problems that have far more value than delivering advertisements packed into clickbait and fake news.

Software developers are not wiping out infectious disease.

There's room for software to help alot in these efforts.

Then maybe we should stop being software developers!

Delivering news is a solved problem.

It would appear there is no consensus about that.

I'd agree with them, by the way. I don't think we really have that many solved problems. I'd consider that to be hubris and see many things that can be improved on, across the spectrum of ideas and implementations.

In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of much of anything that is a solved problem. Most everything can be improved.

It's solved from a technical point of view.

You might want to find ways to optimize it form non-technical aspects, such as, how to get more users, how to write better titles, etc. But there's nothing that is technically challenging about it.

Both of your examples, more users and better titles, can absolutely be technical improvements. Both of them could be, for example, improved by using machine learning to attract more users by appealing on an individual level and doing things like optimizing titles for the individual and pushing those individualized results out.

I'm sure there are even more technological advancements that can be made - and I suspect there always will be.

I'm not saying that it is currently ineffective, just that it isn't solved - meaning that there are still solutions to improve efficiency and efficacy. I actually see 'solved problem' as a kind of defeatism.

I think using AI to make clickbaity titles is still sigh-worthy.

In theory, it doesn't have to be evil. In theory, it could be good to attract users to information that benefits them and increases discoverability for that purpose. In theory...

The same thing can be said about spam. It could be good to be able to send useful information to users right to their inbox while avoiding being detected as "spam".

In reality it's mostly just dark pattern marketing.

Well, maybe we could use the news to make more people aware of it and help mitigate human behavior? ;-)

But, yeah, it can be used for nefarious purposes. In fact, it probably will be. Hidden under that will be good uses.

I suspect there's going to be constant innovation. There are people who thought that personal transportation was a solved problem back when we rode animals. These days, we are looking at an EV revolution and SDV somewhere in the not-too-distant future. Along the way, it hasn't been a solved problem, even though it looked like it was.

I guess that's what I've been clumsily trying to say.

And the Jinri Toutiao app is just an aggregator delivering other sites' news.