none of this is to "appease google". it's malicious incompetence, malaise, and cynical stupidity.
They do this because Google wants them to, so that their ranking goes up.
/rant
Lol am I still reading HN or is this Reddit?
You can see the Core Web Vitals. What modern day news organizations are doing is nowhere close to that.
Look at the Washington Post site. One good article above the fold, a right column of clickbait, and more clickbait when you scroll. Then crap "lifestyle" articles. Pathetic.
You may be operating on a model of the New York Times from ten or more years ago. I know I often find myself resorting to this model, at least until I remind myself that it no longer reflects reality.
Here are some of the headlines on the New York Times front page right now:
The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex
Ocasio-Cortez Never Steered Money to a Key Arm of Her Party. Until Now.
New Zealanders Are Crazy for This Fruit. It’s Not the Kiwi.
Salt Is Hiding Everywhere. Can You Spot It?
What’s the Best Way to Get Rid of a Hangnail?
Where to Buy Plants Online
Audiences are already very familiar with the ideological narratives emanating from the NYT newsroom. It’s fine as flavour, but the NYT are so heavy handed with it that often the substance of the articles are distorted to fit the narrative.
One example: the NYT fired its opinion page editor for publishing an article by Tom Cotton calling to suppress the George Floyd riots with the National Guard. For context, calling in the Maryland National Guard to stop the Freddie Gray riots was one of the most popular things Larry Hogan ever did in that blue state. Cotton’s opinion was squarely in the mainstream, and by firing Bennett the NYT revealed itself to be quite far to the left.
Another example is anything touching on affirmative action. Americans oppose taking race into account in hiring to increase diversity by a 3:1 margin. It’s an extremely unpopular and out-of-the-mainstream position. But the NYT engages in such hiring practices. And when you read the NYT’s coverage of such issues, including the supreme court’s decision in SFFA, it’s clear where the paper’s bias lies.
The folks who got Bennett fired were indeed part of a very small minority of the left, which doesn’t even carry a majority within mainstream left-leaning organizations like the NYT. They’re just effective at weaponizing rhetoric to beat establishment liberals into submission.
If that's what you're arguing we should be hearing more of from the NYT, though, I'm all for it. Not, say, another half-baked article about "crime waves" so that the NYPD can get another billion in overtime or whatever. Or, on the hysterically liberal side, not another article about "Biden wiping out student loan debt [which he was obligated to do under already existing statute]."
The funny thing is that, insofar as you’re talking about what the US is doing “abroad,” I’m very plugged into that political sentiment, since my home country was on the receiving end of some stupid American foreign policy choices, and my dad works in international development. I know lots of Nigerians, Palestinians, etc., but nobody would call themselves “PoC.” It’s an utterly non-sensical and reductive label.
The NYT certainly platforms self-identified “PoC,” but as far as I can tell, their viewpoints are limited to ones that flatter white liberal NYT readers. Would the NYT ever platform all the Bangladeshis I know that begrudgingly credit Trump for pulling out of Afghanistan or opposing the war in Ukraine? Would they publish my parents, who think affirmative action is a threat to Asians and want the state department to stop flying pride flags in Muslim countries? And would you even recognize that as a genuine “PoC” view if you read it?
That's overly reductive and dismissive. An alternative POV is that language changes over time to introduce terminology that is now relevant due to some new context, shift in social dynamics, demographic changes, etc.
There are certainly people who identify as PoC in some of these contexts who who don't fit neatly into the two buckets you prescribed.
>My whole family is non-white immigrants, and I never even heard the term “PoC”
See above. Additionally, the history of race in the U.S. certainly does not impact every race identically. The phrase PoC does have a particular meaning and intent to describe a dynamic with certain groups that also have socioeconomic and other historical properties in common.
In any case, the term was likely never intended to be taken literally, hence to include your experience. But, that does not delegitimize it.
I would encourage you to consider that your family's experience as immigrants is distinctly different for many reasons that significantly impact your worldview. Not the least of these is a desire to identify with the majority in the nation to which you've voluntarily immigrated. This seems quite natural to me. But, for some, this impulse sometimes extends to a certain "fervor" to de-identify with other groups (e.g. PoCs) and their perspectives.
I've seen many of your comments along the lines of this one and it strikes me that there appears to be very little attempt to empathize with other experiences unlike yours. Further, your perspective frequently adopts the biased and somewhat punitive elements of some majority positions; for instance, concern that affirmative action discriminates against Asians in spite of the well-known data that shows everyone is far more disadvantaged by legacy and wealth.
So, it's also true that language can take on political connotations, especially in today's climate. And, that has certainly happened with this phrase. The same dynamics that animate your interpretation of affirmative action, etc. also make you disdainful of the PoC label.
Yes, the term was introduced due to the need in some circles to extend the white/black dichotomy of US politics to encompass Asians and Hispanics. But that label doesn’t serve the distinct interests of Asians and Hispanics.
> I would encourage you to consider that your family's experience as immigrants is distinctly different for many reasons that significantly impact your worldview.
Of course, but that’s exactly my point. The majority of people encompassed by the label “POC” are immigrants or descendants of relatively recent immigrants (excepting native Hawaiians and Tejanos and the like). But the term “POC” is based on the experiences of ADOS and indigenous Americans. It erases a salient distinction (the common experiences shared by immigrants), and elevates a superficial distinction (non-white skin).
> But, for some, this impulse sometimes extends to a certain "fervor" to de-identify with other groups (e.g. PoCs) and their perspectives.
Of course they do. Immigrants already have a pre-existing identity based on shared culture, language, and history. Why would they identify with other people with whom they have little in common, culturally or in terms of political interests? Why would they embrace “people of color” as an identity, which denotes no cultural or historical ties, but exists in mere juxtaposition to white people?
The term “POC” also obscures a fundamental conflict in economic interests between immigrants and ADOS/indigenous people. Immigrants are all basically at various stages of the same economic assimilation curve. Guatemalan Americans are poorer than Swedish Americans, but that’s because of timing of immigration; upward mobility is similar between the two. Immigrant POC thus have a strong interest in “not fixing what isn’t broken” (for them). By contrast, economic gaps between black/indigenous people and everyone else haven’t been closing over generations. They remain as big now as in 1960. Those groups this have strong economic incentives to demand fundamental changes.
That is not to say that individual Asians and Hispanics may not favor such changes for the same reason many individual white people do. But the starting point must be recognizing that different groups are distinct and have distinct interests.
First, affirmative action is morally wrong. We shouldn’t inflict the concept of race on the next generation. Second, you can get rid of both affirmative action and legacy admissions.
Third, the math on that idea just doesn’t work. Eliminating affirmative action tends to almost double the percentage of Asians from 20% closer to 40%. There’s no way eliminating legacy admissions would have a similar effect. It’s simply not possible under any system of race balancing to make Asians better off than they would be in a race-blind system. More generally, when you’re a minority group that’s 6% of the population but accounts for 20% of the seats at Harvard and 40% of Silicon Valley, “equity” is simply contrary to your self interest.
Sure you could. But the point is about where the conversation has been directed and where the emphasis is placed, including by you.
>affirmative action is morally wrong. We shouldn’t inflict the concept of race on the next generation.
But, we should forget the impact of the legacy of race for some members of those same generations?
The problem with these kinds of arguments is that their proponents frequently recast corrective actions as "the immoral racist thing", then dismiss them as immoral and racist.
So, it begs the question of course. But, it's not exactly intellectually honest to start the clock at the place that suits one's argument.
The unfortunate truth is that race was the basis for what needs to be corrected. That wasn't a choice made by those in need of the correction.
The other elephant in the room, conspicuously missed by these kinds of arguments, is that racial discrimination continues to this day; not by law, but by biases, social networks and other artifacts from the era of overt and codified discrimination. Affirmative action also acknowledges this plain fact. The counter from those intellectually honest enough to also acknowledge it frequently runs something along the lines of "yes, but we can't fix discrimination with more discrimination". The truth is that we actually can, but it does require that people stop inciting resentment by facilely re-framing these corrections as merely more "immoral" discrimination.
And, what do we propose those on the receiving end do while society works through its ongoing issues with discrimination?
>Eliminating affirmative action tends to almost double the percentage of Asians from 20% closer to 40%
Your numbers here suspiciously align with Harvard demographics, and indeed you go on to cite that same 20% explicitly for Harvard.
And, that is stunning. You are essentially replacing every admitted student who could have taken advantage of affirmative action with Asian students.
The obvious conclusions are that:
1. Virtually every Black, Latin, indigenous and otherwise "affirmative action eligible" student at Harvard would not have been admitted, save for affirmative action.
2. Every seat taken by those students would have instead been occupied by an Asian student.
Not only is this wildly presumptuous and flat wrong, it reveals a lot about your thinking, including some "biases" (to state it euphemistically). There is a certain "they wouldn't have earned it anyway" undertone here, which also animates anti-AA arguments in the main. Poetically, these are exactly the kinds of biases I mentioned earlier, which lead to ongoing discrimination that AA seeks to address.
It also conveys a very specific POV—more accurately, narrative—that dishonestly frames affirmative action as a war between Asians and Blacks or other non-privileged groups, while de-emphasizing the effects of legacy and wealth. You have, essentially, been misdirected and enlisted as a proxy.
It's a time honored tradition to scapegoat underprivileged groups while the privileged enjoy the spoils. And, in spite of your claim that "the math doesn't work"—which you appear to have supported only with faulty assumptions—the numbers actually bear out who's really winning:
"In 2022, Harvard’s overall acceptance rate was 3.2%. The average admit rate was approximately 42% for donor-related applicants and 34% for legacies." [0]
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaunharper/2023/07/05/legacy-a...
Johnson, With His Job Under Threat, Gets a Lifeline From Trump
Biden Wipes Out Another $7.4 Billion in Student Loan Debt
5 People Killed in Stabbing at Busy Mall in Sydney, Australia
Campaign Puts Trump and the Spy Agencies on Collision Course
Republican Women Are Divided on Abortion as Bans Spread
Ocasio-Cortez Never Steered Money to a Key Arm of Her Party. Until Now.
You also list one of these (the last), but the others seem fairly standard things that a newspaper would report, and not clickbait rubbish at all.
I take issue with the last one (and others like it) because of its intentional coyness in an attempt to get you to click through. I've been seeing this more and more from them lately, and the kindest thing I can say about it is that it does not befit a newspaper like theirs.
Top Stories:
Biden Shrinks Trump’s Edge in Latest Times/Siena Poll
At Least 6 Dead in a Mall Stabbing That Horrifies Australians
China Had a ‘Special Place’ in Modi’s Heart. Now It’s a Thorn in His Side.
The O.J. Simpson Trial Served as a Landmark for Domestic Violence Awareness
And then there's side bar and below the fold type stories. Generally still leaning very heavily on the news/politics side though.
What the heck does that even mean? A decade ago, NYT wasn’t behind an paywall. But even then, are you implying that my version of NYT is a decade old, or is my “operating model” of NYT my perception of the site? Either way, what you’re saying makes zero sense. I opened it right now and it isn’t what you’re describing. Most of the headlines you posted were never on the front page. Here’s what it shows right now:
Iran Fires Over 200 Drones and Missiles at Israel in Retaliatory Strike
Biden Shrinks Trump’s Edge in Latest Times/Siena Poll
A Closer Look at a Slight Shift in the Polls
China Had a ‘Special Place’ in Modi’s Heart. Now It’s a Thorn in His Side.
In Ukraine’s West, Draft Dodgers Run, and Swim, to Avoid the War
What is reasonable about OpenAI’s “we learn fairly from everyone’s IP, but paying customers may not train competing models with outputs we gave them?”
Imagine you paid a teacher and they said you weren’t allowed to teach someone else what they teach you, while they are actively teaching you things that other people taught them, and they’re so new at teaching, you wind up teaching them. Seems legit
I don’t earn money from AI/LLM, but I tend to think that there’s a point past which the derivative nature of a type of summarization is not obviously a derivative of that entire corpus of work. (At least not in a sense that’s meaningful/practical.)
The NYT makes a credible argument that the AIs are just cutting and pasting from their training set, sometimes lining up words or phrases from different sources. There's a bit of synthesis going on, but not as much as you might do after 10 years on the job.
NYT itself is full of fluff and derivative news, and suing for expired news that only have historical value now. It's just flexing their power to corner AI.
We can't copyright everything. Some things are free: letters, words, sometimes common phrases, also, ideas. An AI is entitled to learn everything at the level of ideas, even from copyrighted works. They just need to paraphrase or rewrite as Q&A the copyrighted material before training to avoid identical replication.
Copyright is already too big as it is, don't allow them to make ideas protected as well, it will have a chilling effect on us too, not just AI models.
If anything, their examples illustrate the kind of knowledge that can only be found in the NYT's original reporting. They focused on some events that only their newspaper covered well and the AI responded by plagiarizing the NYT's coverage, something that's part of its inherent design.
And I'm not talking about copyrighting everything. Nor is the NYT. Consider the opposite case where they have no way to force readers to pay them for their hard work. Is that the kind of world you want to live within?
I'm very happy to reward the artists and writers who make creations. I don't see anything wrong with giving them what anti-copyright people call a "monopoly." Why? Because I know that it pushes other people to create their own new knowledge for society and not skate through by simply plagiarizing.
I’m pretty sure I wait through/ignore/click past an ad every time I play Connections.
But maybe we’re grading on a curve here.
Also they have a mix of comically bad articles and really good ones. Whereas in the past there was some level of baseline journalistic integrity.
Now I frequently read articles where at least once a week I have to check if I’m accidentally reading an op-ed, because it’s so opinionated. And this is even when I happen to agree with the political slant they’ve clearly taken.
I don’t want any slant. I want factual, objective reporting, whether I like the outcome or not.
the only reason they have to appease google is because they had given up on worrying about navigation or discovery on their own platforms, and ceded that to google. which is dumb. google's not forcing them to do anything, they gave up control and responsibility to google.
To appease Google…
Conversely, NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam. The games have no ads and there’s nothing pushing you to read more. No feed. No algorithm. NYT got the hell away from SEO and focus on the customers, who decide with their wallets