- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Twitter, now X, was once a useful site for breaking news. The Baltimore bridge collapse shows those days are long gone.
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It’s actually crazy how low the percentage of people under like… forty is now that actually gets their news direct from a news site. Seriously, i don’t know a single person from like 20-35 who actually just goes on the NPR or C-SPAN app or whatever.
It kind of sucks. So much news is just reading the headline and seeing a photo now. And I just feel like there’s something bad about being able to see a comment section on Twitter or Reddit or even Lemmy now on every news event. Makes for a lot more group think rather than just reading the news and going “huh”
So much news is just reading the headline and seeing a photo now.
Mexico’s new president: 3-year-old Alfredo Pequeño Lobo becomes nation’s youngest elected and first canine leader. But can he be rough on the cartels?
The term may be 4 years but it will feel like 28 for him.
It’s actually a 6 year term for Mexico
Oh my I’m so invested in this story now.
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Ruff. “Can he be ruff on crime”. It was right there!
I think we saw how that goes in a Rick and Morty episode - Lawnmower Dog.
That’s what places like Lemmy are for though.
Great for seeing a headline and then finding an article yourself. Less great for finding articles. Half of you people here have a penchant for linking super weird news sources.
Lemmy is massively biased though. While that doesn’t mean the articles aren’t factual, you’re still only ever hearing one side of the story. What I find time after time is that majority of people who have strong opinions about current events are completely uncapable of fairly steelmanning the opposing side’s argument.
Agreed.
Lemmy, you are biased. You probably don’t intend to be, but it’s true for now.
Going to sound weird, but I came here because of who I knew the vocal people were. I didn’t understand many of their view points and reasons for being mad/hateful/etc. I am much more enlightened now and learn different perspectives everyday.
It is a giant echo chamber though if you are already very rooted in the spectrum here, and voicing decent usually leads to dog pile.
This is related to attitudes about news, politics, etc.
I’m not sure why you think that news orgs aren’t also biased. Everything and everyone is biased, even those that genuinely try to not let it show through and be fully impartial.
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So what are you implying? That it doesn’t matter where you get your news because all sources are biased anyway?
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There’s still a massive difference between news sources like NY times and Breitbart. It matters where you get your news from and even if it’s coming from a biased source you should atleast be aware of the bias. Some sites atleast try to counter their bias while others embrace it. These things matter. It’s not binary.
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Even Lemmy does that, though. You’re still influenced by the headline, the community/moderation and the users.
Assuming that everyone clicks through to the article, and doesn’t comment before reading the headline, anyhow.
And at the news organization, you are influenced by the editors and framing by authors.
Sure, but you find out about things hours days or even weeks after they happen.
I think the bigger issue is how bad news sites have gotten. I’m sure part of the reason for that is people getting news online from alternative sources, but mainstream sources are significantly worse than they once were which just pushes things further in that direction.
That said, I don’t know which caused more group-think. Was it having a few mainstream sources and that’s it or having many worse quality but more diverse sources? People relate to the new version more probably, which encourages them to follow along and not think for themselves, but I don’t know if that’s better or worse than not really having any dissenting opinion available at all.
Yeah, bad news sites is the reason I didn’t follow any news for years, I got burnt out verifying just about every article. Most bended the story one way or another, headlines usually not quite what the article read…
Having everyone see the same news didn’t mean there was no dissent and no discussion.
The facts shouldn’t really be all that controversial. A quote from a political leader is a fact. Everyone sees this quote. People have different opinions about what the politician said, feel different ways about it, talk about whether they actually trust that politician.
Now with more “diverse sources” those source often decide to report or not report on something depending on whether it fits a narrative they are promoting. The alternative sources decide what people’s opinions should be then determine which facts should be reported that align with those opinions.
The existence of these alternative sources allows people to choose sources that align to their feelings and never be challenged by inconvenient facts. A mainstream source that reports the facts regardless of whose politics it helps or hurts is seen to be biased relative to one’s chosen source that always conforms to how they feel.
There is more groupthink now because people are never challenged with inconvenient facts. Sure there’s multiple groups (that hate each other) but people within these groups have less real discussion and conform to the group more because they never get information that challenges how they think.
Most facts aren’t really controversial. Ship loses power and hits a bridge. Bridge collapses. Poltiician says X in response. These are things that happened. Why would there be a variety on how this story is reported? It’s only if there’s a need to push an agenda that there would be diverse sources for this story. And most news stories are actually like this.
You can find out the event from the news, but then get the facts from industry experts. It’s much better these days.
That’s how I get my news. I visit the Finnish equivalence of BBC once or twice a day and that’s my news diet. If they don’t report on it, I don’t need to know. Something like what a VOX journalist thinks about Twitter I couldn’t care less so I don’t even bother reading it. I’m proudly unaware of most of the things that non-serious news organizations report on.
Same for me with news from Germany. Technically tagesschau.de is a news magazine run by our largest public broadcaster and not the broadcaster itself, but it’s the same thing really.
And then I casually browse news.google.com in German to skim over headlines that might not have made the mainstream news. My blocklist there features more than 200 “news” sites, so that I really get a curated feed of some 20-30 trustworthy ones.
I wish there was a whitelist instead of a blocklist for news.google.com
Vox is a reputable and very thorough news source, though, usually worth the read.
This two-pager, for example, highlights false Twitter journalists popping in Baltimore to politically spin the recent bridge collapse.
That’s not my point. What I’m saying is that I knowingly limit my news diet to what is the most important/interesting and this is neither so I’m not bothering my mind with it. I don’t need to know and not knowing has zero effect on my life.
I get my news from a paper and it is a decent blend of good and bad news. Quality journalism. I gift articles often just to kinda fight back against the whole title-and-picture-only news.
I gift articles often
FYI if you do so on !nyt_gift_articles@sopuli.xyz you’ll reach several hundred people.
A few months back, i subscribed to the news aggregator Ground News. Although there are more expensive options, i pay about $6/year and I love it. You get news stories from lots of different sites and gives you a good idea of biases. I highly recommend it!
I use 1440, which sums up daily news in a fact-based way and leaves out all opinion. It’s magical. It takes 10 minutes to read and I’m not bombarded by why “libtards are destroying america” or why “this ties back to trump destroying democracy” somehow.
Highly recommend it for daily news.
I’d read more articles if they weren’t paywalled.
APNews.com, relatively low bias, no paywall.
Try explaining that to a rightist, though. It’s not right-wing propaganda, therefore it is left-wing propaganda. 😔
Reuters is also good and less USA Centric (at least for their notifications) which is a good thing for me because I am not from the USA, but AP is excellent too). I don’t think you can even disable USA news in your “interests” with AP.
Both Reuters and AP are news agencies that sell news (and stuff like photos) to other news companies. So it’s very likely that everyone here has read at least some content from them.
Both are also often regarded as among the most reliable and least biased news sources available. AFP is also in that group.
Yes agreed, Reuters is my other go-to. Both great options in a sea of disinformation.
For me it’s RSS, Lemmy, and suprisingly YouTube as I can get the major news sources( eg BBC, CNN, FT, DT, MSNBC) chunked up into specific topics so I don’t have to sit through a bunch of garbage to get to the topics I care about. And I get it from more sources.
I started building an aggregator “start page” that has become my new news homepage - https://s.marko.tech - just to solve this problem
Cool. Is there a guide to using it? A way to customize feeds, etc?
yea definitel! - working on a site for that with docs etc, prolly a week or two - currently rebuilding the user settings / models - just a preview till then ^^
Honestly I think a big part of people looking at headlines and pictures is closely related to people’s attention span. Why read many words when less is better. Those same people can’t hold conversations for more than a minute or two on the subject then it spirals into speculations which is where the misinformation starts to take place. Society is bombarded with so much information hour by hour people don’t want to miss anything so they skim through an immense amount of partial information. It’s wild and I’m guilty of it myself so I’m in no place to speak ill of anyone.
Watching CSPAN is weird now. It used to be more boring but some the more recent ones have felt I was watching a behind the scenes show where each person was saying things so perfectly crafted for sound bites they seem incongruent with what someone else would say.
The dark forest of the Internet is driving this migration of human Internet traffic. It is not a fault but rather a result.
I highly prefer getting my news from independent journalists/investigators. You think everyone reading the same news sites is going to be better for groupthink?!
None of your independent journalists / investigators are independent.
Right, news corporations owned by oligarchs are for more independent. of course, how silly of me
You’re going to have to tell me what oligarchs own NPR, C-span, and the associated press
I see, let’s just all get our news from 3 sources. That’ll definitely help with the groupthink
I think you might be an idiot my man.
Wow you get backed into a corner and resort to middle school name calling. Like, maybe you need to get out of your comfort zone. Maybe you need to put on your big boy pants and accept that your original premise is incoherent
I used to use news sites (BBC, Guardian mainly), but the coverage is seriously limited and quite biased.
Why go to propaganda source
I mean it was never actually a good place for news, aside from the top five trending stories, if you wanted infinite bad takes on them.
You could follow journalists you like or outlets though
I used to get all my news from Reddit and I, unfortunately, fell into the habit of reading just the headline and then comments. After quitting I started looking for an healthy replacement to my news fix. I looked at many different RSS apps but many of them had monthly fees or the interface just sucked. Eventually I found an amazing one (iOS only) called feeeed that has been incredible. It’s free, no in-app purchases or ads, lovely interface, a simple reader mode, dark mode, and more. I really recommend it for anyone trying to quit Twitter/Reddit for news.
I just read this headline first and your comment second. Yikes. Guilty.
I thought you said news. This just looks like spam?
Yeah sorry, my subscriptions aren’t the best example of the content you can subscribe to. I mostly follow tech news and deals. My intent with the screenshot was to showcase the general layout of the app. You can subscribe to any RSS feed you want though, like traditional news sources about non-tech things.
Here’s an example of what that could look like (I made a folder with 3 traditional news sources and pinned it to the bottom nav bar):
I just gave it a whirl out of curiosity. It’s kind of garbage in, garbage out. Subscribe to good RSS news feeds, and you get good stuff. Subscribe to Gizmodo blog spam, and you get blog spam.
Any android alternatives?
I just installed feeder from F droid yesterday. Still setting up the feeds but it seems pretty nice
I use Feeder too, it’s entirely satisfactory.
I remember when Reddit was consistently two to three days ahead of the news cycle. Same for Fark
Thanks Aaron Swartz! Reddit might not be working out but RSS has the staying power.
I used to use Twitter as a way of directly following a few sources of news. Follow NPR, BBS, Reuters, Etc. I don’t know anyone who expected to learn of news from “the algorithm”. That’s still true today. Expect to get fed news from whatever is trending and you’ll be bamboozled, fed useless stories a day propaganda.
Some of these sources can instead be snagged from RSS feeds and Mastodon and besides official apps, those are much better ways to follow news and always have been.
I did find some reliable sources on aggregators like flipboard, but setting aside the best way to follow the news responsibly is still directly following them via browser links and collections. The other risk is following too many things, to the point of obsessing over them. So I decided to give myself a number of good articles instead, and go by quality. I am out of the loop when it comes to social media trends, but it’s not a bad thing.
I first saw it on YouTube when a local TV station posted the raw video.
I wasn’t looking at any other media at the time.
Tbf, I saw the early videos coming from X (and I’m not on X)
i heard about it first in an ibxtoycat video (on his second channel)
I heard about it from television news. I normally only watch TV broadcasts between the time when I turn the TV on and launching an app / turning a HDMI device on. Which is not very long. Does Elon have any idea how unlikely it is for me to pick major news this way?
I saw it on TikTok…
My family sent me TikTok’s. I rarely use it, but have it installed for this purpose.
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Are you thinking of a timeshare? I know some people who love having an HOA take care of all their shit for them
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I was reading an article the other day about a couple who bought an ocean view home to retire.
It was perfect, but the neighbours driveway ran along the beach between their home and the beach - and they thought it would be nice to have a garden there instead… so they spoke to their new neighbour about maybe buying the land for the driveway, and selling him an equal sized strip of land on the other side of their property. Basically, no change to their neighbour’s home at all - but the neighbour’s driveway would go between two houses instead of along the beach.
All perfectly reasonable, but somehow it fell to shit when the neighbour… turned out to be a nutcase and bought two huge rusty shipping containers, an old bulldozer, cars that had been crashed, etc and dumped all of them along his driveway right next to their house. And when they complained, he added huge a canvas tarp sections between all that mess and the ocean. So now they can’t even see the ocean at all from their home - all they can see is a huge white wall and a bunch of rusty old crap along their fence line.
If they were in a HOA… they would be able to force him to remove all of that junk. But they’re not, so there’s nothing they can do. They tried taking it to court, but the judge said “yeah, he’s obviously an asshole… but it’s his land. He is allowed to have shipping containers and ruined cars on his land”.
If you’re in a HOA, you might occasionally be forced to do something you’d rather not do. But you will never have to deal with totally unreasonable neighbours like that example. Living in a HOA definitely isn’t something I’d want - but I can see why some people like them.
But anyway… I fail to see how that is any way like X. If anything X is exactly the opposite of a HOA… it’s like buying a house in a suburb that’s full of trolls and assholes. A “HOA” social network is a place where everyone is boring and if you’re not boring, you get kicked out.
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Twitter, now X, was once a useful site for breaking news.
the fuck ? No it never was, the finest info you ever could find there was thinly veiled holocaust denial ? If journalists really think fucking twitter was ever an important source of news that explain the downfall of journalism
What are you talking about? It was the go-to app for journalists for a decade. They could live report from events in a simple, chronological thread, or collect eye witness reports by quote tweeting personal accounts. I followed the Charlottesville and January 6th riots in real time by reading journalists threads. There was a lot of trival or even harmful bullshit on Twitter, but the way journalists used it was a huge positive.
