Comment by chankstein38
2 years ago
I think this is an amazing idea! The only flaw I see with it is that without the sensationalized headlines I read through going "Oh that doesn't matter, that doesn't matter either" etc haha I haven't found an article that sounds interesting in a few scrolls.
I mean, it's great because it's accurate. Half of the "news" we're fed is sensationalized so we'll click on it and it's really nothing but it gets us riled up about something that is effectively meaningless to us. This just brings reality to the forefront and makes me realize I don't care about the news lol
Thank you though, this is awesome!
I think the issue here is that we've been fed a high-sensationalism diet, so our brains are acclimated to in-your-face headlines. Perhaps if we detoxed our brains a bit (by using this app exclusively for a week or two), we would be able to recalibrate our expectations for what seems "interesting".
This is sort of like how you recalibrate your tongue to a low-salt diet if you stop eating salty food for a few weeks.
The problem with the news isn't that it's sensationalized, which of course it is, but that an ever increasing amount of it is completely made up.
Hm, maybe from some news outlets. I think the main issue for big news outlets isn't outright falsehoods, it's the coverage bias. You really can't get a full sense of what's going on if you don't make an effort to get news from divergent sources because each outlet covers the news that fits its preferred narrative.
7 replies →
Just read a non-sensationalised news outlet ? It’s pretty easy to find.
> This just brings reality to the forefront and makes me realize I don't care about the news
Maybe the pre-clickbait era version of you would have found more of these articles interesting? So maybe it's not that you don't care about the news, but your "base level" of what's interesting is different due to being used to clickbait.
100% agree, doing this wholesale would probably help my (and likely others) mental states as a whole! Imagine desensationalizing product sites and ads and the like, we might actually be able to bring down that threshold so it can stop ever increasing. The irony here is I feel like what I wrote here is sensationalized lol I do truly think it could be helpful I just think a lot of us are "broken" as far as that's concerned from the exhausting nature of everything these days always vying for our attention.
Sensationalism typically involves the use of exciting or shocking stories or language at the expense of accuracy, in order to provoke public interest or excitement. Your text, while expressing strong feelings about the topic, doesn't exaggerate or misrepresent the facts for dramatic effect. You're discussing your thoughts and feelings about the potential positive impact of desensationalizing advertisements, which is a subjective opinion rather than a sensationalized claim.
> The only flaw I see with it is that without the sensationalized headlines I read through going "Oh that doesn't matter, that doesn't matter either" etc
That's a feature, not a bug. The 'news' is 90% useless, if not descrutive, information. Ask yourself: what percentage of the news is optimal to maintain your worldly wisdom? I'd guess about 1%. So getting it down to 10% is half way there, on a logarithmic scale.
I'd bring it down to 0%. Thomas Jefferson explained why as well as any could [1]:
---
To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted so as to be most useful, I should answer ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. it is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood.
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. the real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time: whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.
General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will &c &c. but no details can be relied on. I will add that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. he who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
Thomas Jefferson, 1807
---
The most interesting thing is that this would have sounded quite hyperbolic but 10 years ago, and probably near to completely unreasonable 30 years ago. Yet now? It sounds completely reasonable. Like so many things in history show, the era we're entering into is not some wild uncharted domain, as it sometimes feels. Rather the era we all lived and grew up in was the weird one. Now we're simply returning to 'normalcy.'
[1] - https://www.founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-...
> The most interesting thing is that this would have sounded quite hyperbolic but 10 years ago, and probably near to completely unreasonable 30 years ago. Yet now it sounds, at the minimum, completely reasonable.
Ironically, it was more reasonable 10 years ago, and even more reasonable 30 years ago. The difference is that the alignment between the ideological and institutional biases throughout the media (in the US) was more uniform 10 years ago, and even moreso 30 years ago, so if you ran into lies (including lies of story selection and detail omission, as well as the more direct falsehoods), they’d be more likely to be the same lies from every source, leaving no reason to question them.
1 reply →
Yes, this has a lot of potential. If the news orgs won't de-sensationalize because of incentives, we can do it for them. It would be a great browser plugin, and you can define the URL's you want to de-sensationalize.
I love that idea!
> Half of the "news" we're fed is sensationalized
Half? It's higher than that.
The other issue is - and your quoted "news" hints at it - a significant amount of what we're fed isn't news at all. Yes, it's something that happened. That doesn't make it news.
So while this app might remove the hyperbole what about the things and details that are being ignored? How do we fill the gaps so we're getting a more complete context?
I’m not sure that’s a flaw
> The only flaw I see with it is that without the sensationalized headlines I read through going "Oh that doesn't matter, that doesn't matter either" etc haha I haven't found an article that sounds interesting in a few scrolls.
I tried doing the same thing as OP with chatgpt and came to the same realization so I stopped.
Maybe it could also use the LLM to rank the articles by essential importance or impact.
Maybe we need a recommendation on top of the boringfied version to find the truly interesting stuff for you.
This is why I am just as skeptical of criticism of the media.
Everyone wants to consume their work, but they need people to pay for it so that they can keep working, but people won’t consume their work unless it’s sensational.
> but people won’t consume their work unless it’s sensational.
I think this is only true because we allow unlimited sensationalism. It's just like any other junk intake (candy, social media, gamification, etc) - it's easy, it has an immediate reward, and it's not valuable. But out bodies and brains were conditioned by evolution to only care about the first 2, so junk news is just hacking our brains (or exploiting our vulnerabilities).
To be blunt, we've turned something that should serve us into a parasite. We need to have awareness of this and put create standards and/or regulations. When the playing field is level and (almost) nobody is writing clickbait, our brains will return to normal.