Comment by lukan
7 days ago
The context here is this story, an AI Agent publishs a hit piece on the Matplotlib maintainer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729
And the story from ars about it was apparently AI generated and made up quotes. Race to the bottom?
Ars has been going downhill for sometime now. I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising. I'm not saying Ars is fully there yet, but the pull is strong.
The comments section on Ars is particularly depressing. I've been posting there for two decades and watched it slowly devolve from a place where thoughtful discussions happened to now just being one of the worst echo chambers on the internet, like a bad subreddit. I've made suggestions over the years in their public feedback surveys to alter their forum software to discourage mob behavior, but they don't seem to be doing anything about it.
They don't actually publish the comments under the article, only a link. I've long suspected sites doing that are fully aware of how shit the comment section is, and try to hide it from casual viewers while keeping the nutjob gallery happy.
Phoronix comes to mind.
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Hard agree. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/meta-debuts-playstati... is an example I remember. The subject matter of the is not controversial (just another Game Pass like subscription), but the comment section is full of -- yes you've guessed it -- Meta BAD! There is absolutely no meaningful discussion of the service itself.
I mostly stopped paying attention to the comment section after that, and Ars in general.
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The switch to their newest forum software seems to discourage any kind of actual conversation. If I recall correctly, the last iteration was also unthreaded, but somehow it was easier for a back-and-forth to develop. Now it is basically just reactions-- like YouTube comments (which, ironically, is actually threaded).
Is HN really the last remaining forum for science and technology conversations? If so... very depressing.
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I can say that to a certain degree about Hacker News too.
Still often good comments here, but certain topics devolve into a bad subreddit quickly. The ethos of the rules hasn't scaled with the site.
They should get rid of the fairly extremely prominent badges of years-on-the-forum and number-of-comments. Maybe that'd help quell some of the echo down, because every comment section on Ars articles is 10+ year old accounts all arguing with each other.
I can only conclude it’s what they want at this point
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Try reading Slashdot these days and it's the same story. I stopped reading regularly when cmdrtaco left but still check in occasionally out of misplaced nostalgia or something.. The comment section is like a time capsule from the 00s, the same ideas and arguments have been echoing back and forth there for years, seemingly losing soul and nuance with each echo. Bizarre, and sad.
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Yea but doing that would decrease engagement and engagement is the only metric that matters! /s
Yeah it's like a rogues' gallery of terminally online midwits over there
The bigger story is the way tech companies sucked the oxygen out of journalism. This started with capturing a growing chunk of ad revenue but then became editorial control as everyone started picking headlines, writing styles, and publication schedules to please the tech companies which control whether they receive 80% of their traffic.
Everyone writes like Buzzfeed now because Twitter and Facebook made that the most profitable; Google/Twitter/Facebook need a constant stream of new links and incentivize publishing rapidly rather than in-depth; and Facebook severely damaged many outfits with the fraudulent pivot to video pretending they’d start paying more.
Many of the problems we see societally stem back to people not paying for media, leaving the information space dominated by the interest of advertisers and a few wealthy people who will pay to promote their viewpoints.
> sucked the oxygen out of journalism.
They helped monopolize the industry. Willingly destroying the utility of RSS for end users is a prime example.
> Google/Twitter/Facebook need a constant stream of new links
Yet people can't understand that "AI" is just a tool to rip off copyright. For almost _precisely_ this reason here.
> we see societally stem back to people not paying for media
The problem is there is not infinite bandwidth for media. If a free option exists people will gravitate towards it. The real problem is that media sales people and media editors are allowed to be in the same room. We used to understand the value of a "firewall" in this context.
It has nothing to do with the people. It has everything to do with those holding the profit motive. They'll willingly destroy useful things in order to tilt the field in their direction. Social problems rarely have a distributed social cause.
Like the good old days when the media was basically complicit in support of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction?
It seems to me that the news has always kind of been mass bullshit. What has changed is we democratized the production of mass bullshit.
Now everyone can make their own version of "Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain!"
Not to mention, podcasts go deeper on subjects than any investigative journalist ever really could given the format.
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> I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising
Maybe this is exactly the issue? Every news company is driven like a for-profit business that has to grow and has to make the owners more money, maybe this is just fundamentally incompatible with actual good journalism and news?
Feels like there are more and more things that have been run in the typical capitalistic fashion, yet the results always get worse the more they lean into it, not just news but seems widespread in life.
> Race to the bottom?
There is no bottom. It's turds all the way down!