Caltrops - Motherfucking News





	[quote name="blackwater"][quote name="Fullofkittens"]What this leaves out is what journalists have been saying about Facebook: the reason publishers "pivoted to video" in 2016-2017 was that Facebook told them that videos got more engagement than articles by some astounding amount. <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html">That was dishonest of them:</a> in reality they wanted publishers to make content that didn't take people to another site, and anyone that uses Facebook could have told them this. [/quote] Ha, I had almost forgotten about that. Even as far back as 2015 I remember discussions about how all users wanted was video. People like me were dinosaurs for not wanting to bother watching a video that explained a paragraph of text over the course of 15 minutes! [quote name="Fullofkittens"]I think the Slate article is on the money(!) in that a fundamental problem with the web is that money == eyeballs and that leads to distorted incentives for news outlets. [/quote] I mean, that's kind of always been true. "If it bleeds, it leads." People like reading about outrageous stuff. William Randolph Hearst knew that. So did Mark Twain (who apparently often just made up stuff when he was a reporter -- how's that for "fake news"?) The difference with the modern web is that you have these huge and powerful distribution platforms like Facebook and Google that just use the news organizations as toilet paper. [quote name="Fullofkittens"] Personally, I think NPR is a bit ahead of the curve on this point: over the years they've figured out how to say "hey, we make the stuff you want, you've got to pay us or we will go out of business" in such a way that people actually do pay them [/quote] NPR is partly funded by the government, so I fund them whether I want to or not. At least they're consistent in practicing what they preach (mooching from the government). [quote name="Fullofkittens"] It's actually easier for me to imagine Amazon Prime or Netflix coming up with a journalistic arm than it is for me to imagine an existing news outlet forming a productive business relationship with Facebook, because Facebook's entire business model relies on people not paying for things and never leaving Facebook. [/quote] Yes, it would be very smart for the technology giants to start buying up or starting their own newspapers. In general I expect to see more of the "wealthy patron" model of news in the future. Did you know that FB is actually awesome according to CockZucker news (a wholly owned subsidiary of ...)[/quote]