Y’all, the article is talking about a media extinction event, referring to the increasing difficulty of obtaining enough funding to remain solvent as a news source and “race to the bottom” as far as advertisement revenue, page views, and subscriptions.
It is not talking about an actual human extinction event, although of course that is a huge blaring concern at the moment.
Why is it being down voted?
I honestly have not the slightest idea. I read it on the train, and I thought holy shit, that’s a really good deep dive into a significant problem that seems like it’s only going to get worse. I liked reading it and I felt like it was worthwhile and so I wanted to share it.
And… I honestly can’t even make any sense of the reception. I can’t tell if people are just reacting to the title alone, or (ironically) don’t like that there’s a paywall, or think it’s not news, or actually read the article but disagreed, or what it is.
Honestly, if I had to guess, I think the lemmy.world section of Lemmy has mostly completed its arc of evolution into full blown “Hold my referential in-joke, I’m going in!” Reddit 2.0, and there’s just not that much going on there to even read into. But like I say I genuinely just have no idea. If someone tries to explain it to you, let me know.
To me the title is deceptive as there is no extinction level event and so I read the above comment (by @stoneparchment ) as sarcasm :
Why is it being down voted? /sarcasm
No, I genuinely don’t understand.
Sure, it’s hyperbolic to envoke extinction when you’re talking more accurately about the collapse of an industry… but like, it’s not like the author is passing off the metaphor as literal.
I guess the answer is that people don’t like the title? But the article is interesting and thorough. I enjoyed reading it and hearing the perspective of the journalist.
I guess the answer is that people don’t like the title?
Yes, this is what I was trying to say and despite this, I believe you that it’s a good article.
The title is very clickbait-y.
No
What am I missing?
Look at covid as an example there was different narratives coming from all over the place . People can’t agree on anything. We have people who beileve in Scientology and flat earth ffs.
There is also the fact that media organizations are owned by someone or some group so they have their own take on things.
Then we have deepfakes and LLMs getting better by the day.
The media all the while has devolved into clickbait titles and tiktoks.
To top it off we are in an extinction event , the planet is fucked and the media sure isn’t going to save us.
titanicquartet.jpg
For traditional media at least (television/radio/newspapers) I think this quote from Leslie Moonves sums up the death of journalism pretty succinctly:
Frankly, fascism is at the gates and these fuckwits are more concerned with how much money they can make in short term than being worried about whether the fascists plan on stringing them up by their necks for being the “wrong” kind of journalism, once Trump is a dictator.
the planet is fucked and the media sure isn’t going to save us.
Politically, socially, economically, and ecologically flat out fucked.
EDIT:
Look at covid as an example there was different narratives coming from all over the place . People can’t agree on anything. We have people who beileve in Scientology and flat earth ffs.
People often talk about 1984 or Brave New World, but honestly, your statement right here speaks deeply that we should be way more worried about a Fahrenheit 451 future, and a legion of Captain Beattys. Some choice Captain Beatty quotes follow:
Where’s your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You’ve been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!
The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we’re the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.
Yes. It’s a massive problem. Imagine if there was an article that covered one of the main reasons for that problem in depth; its past, present and future.
Almost like the industry was better before it became 24-hour infotainment. The media doesn’t need as many people as it has. It needs to cut back its hours and stop serving us all a constant stream of crap.
No.
Ads are…scarce, wtf!?
In the context of the article, they’re talking about the fact that news outlets aren’t getting enough ad revenue to sustain themselves, and people don’t really buy classifieds in papers anymore.
I feel like ads got worse over time to the point that one can barely fathom visiting a news media site without an adblocker.
This could be a good thing in that it could potentially help democratize journalism, taking it out of the hands of billionaires. Conversely, it could make harmful conspiracy theories more widespread.
Most likely, it would be a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.
Also, why the hell is this downvoted? Am I missing something?
I did not down-vote this OP or any comment here, but since you asked, here are some thoughts that might help.
one can barely fathom visiting a news media site without an adblocker
Or even with one. Giant half-page banners pop up at you - from the top, from the bottom, from either side, from the middle (LOOK OUT, IT’S BEHIND YOU!!!:-P).
And don’t even get me started on the unskippable videos, even when you go to GREAT lengths to make your browser not auto-play things by default. Okay so in fairness, I may have later turned it off b/c I wanted youtube videos to auto-advance:-P. If I really wanted to read a bunch of news articles, I would set up a browser dedicated solely to doing so. CONSENT SHOULD MATTER, but “news” sources are hands-down the worst offenders for me whenever I visit them on the internet. Fuck, even piracy websites don’t have the sheer blatant offensiveness of news media sites.:-(
And it still does all that even for gift articles! i.e. even if you pay money, you still have to swat away the ads for “would you like to subscribe to our newsletter?”, “what about this partner’s newsletter though?”, “oh and what about this other partner’s newsletter?”. They’re just fuckin terrible:-(.
Separately, I think Lemmy.World trends towards a younger audience, and let’s be honest here: this article while it may be entirely well-meaning, isn’t “news”, being about 10 years if not multiple decades behind the times. Combined, what that means is that for one, many people today know of literally no other world than the one that we are now in - during their entire adult and even teen lives this is simply the way that it’s “always been”. And two, “news” isn’t dying - a large fraction of it died at least a decade ago - and what is “dying” now is the bloated remains of their corpses.
It’s hard to feel sympathy then, yes, when the sites that ignore everyone else’s consent, now also says that they want moar moonay from the whole affair. I mean, their owners are already billionaires and trillionaires - e.g. the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who bought them all out - but now, somehow it’s OUR faults that they are dying, b/c what… we don’t watch enough ads?! That has more than the tiniest sense of an abusive person vibes - “look what you made me do!”
I could go on and on… and so okay, I will, at least for one more: I learn more from watching just ONE video, from the likes of John Olivier, or Kurzgesagt, or Crash Course, or some source like that, than I can get from a 12-hour documentary on a traditional television channel such as baby boomers watch (those seem geared more for entertainment, and spread their non-information out very slowly along with music in the background, seemingly more to facilitate people sitting down to watch them than to actually inform anyone of anything). True, there are always exceptions - here’s one (damn, I was going to give you a link to an 8-hour documentary from 11 years in the past, that has been free most of that time, except now it is marked “subscription only” on Plex, unless you watch it on YouTube - hence arguably making my point all the more strongly?) - but in general the trend has been that real sources of information have already moved away from those billionaire-bought enterprises that are now trying to blame us, the audience, for not watching them enough, rather than LISTENING to what people WANT. TLDR for this part: news media did not go away, it just changed its format - case in point: Jon Stewart.
Even with an ad blocker, news sites are so full of garbage that you need to scroll past or close.
I have that about:config setting in Firefox that makes videos only play if you manually click them. Many news sites refuse to display the video at all with this setting.
Another thing they do that makes them unusable for me and anyone else with impaired vision is they aggressively disable the “force pinch to zoom” accessibility setting that browsers have. ABC News does this, for example. I actually did file an ADA report about this, but it was rejected, even though it’s a clear violation of the federal ADA guidelines. Worthless corporations protected by worthless government agencies that only exist to protect the rich.
To make a long story short, I have no qualms about not giving these sites my money. Let them burn.
no
