Phoronix comes to mind.
So, their main goal wasn’t to hide the comments, but push people to forums where there is a better format for conversation.
At least that’s how it used to work.
I mostly stopped paying attention to the comment section after that, and Ars in general.
Is HN really the last remaining forum for science and technology conversations? If so... very depressing.
Honestly, HN isn’t very good anymore either. The internet is basically all trolling, bots and advertising. Often all at once.
Oh and scams, there’s also scams.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was by no means perfect but I think it was better than now where people getting the illusion of information with little accountability for selection or accuracy.
As to the Iraq war, I will note that the media had extensive debates at the time. Ask anyone who was there and outside of a handful of hard-right outlets, the reporting noted that all of the justifications were unverifiable and coming from the same two governments, and plenty of people questioned that. Again, it wasn’t perfect but I think the answer to “the NYT should’ve fired Judith Miller sooner” is that the NYT should have more rather than less competition.
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.
