Twitter, now X, was once a useful site for breaking news. The Baltimore bridge collapse shows those days are long gone.
The slow death of Twitter is measured in disasters like the Baltimore bridge collapse
3 years ago by jeffw to c/technology
load all comments
Shake747 90 points 3 years ago
Sometimes there's good discussion though, and it's good to hear different takes.
Having comments also gives less power to the writer, like could you imagine if we all took Fox News or CNN headlines at face value and didn't discuss them?
remotedev 39 points 3 years ago
Yea, you can't just read the news and go huh. anymore, because the news is no longer "this is what happened." Now it's "OMG YOU WON'T BELIEVE THIS YOU'RE GONNA HATE THAT this happened AND EVERYONE IS PISSED"
bradorsomething 22 points 3 years ago
The term may be 4 years but it will feel like 28 for him.
Potatos_are_not_friends 12 points 3 years ago
Oh my I'm so invested in this story now.
LarryTheMatador 4 points 3 years ago path: 0 8901561 8905817 8915445, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0
Black_Gulaman 1 point 3 years ago
Huh...
Kissaki 1 point 3 years ago
I think we saw how that goes in a Rick and Morty episode - Lawnmower Dog.
space 26 points 3 years ago
I'm guilty of doing this (just reading the headlines) as well. I usually do it for these reasons:
I don't care enough to want to read more. For example, news about US politics. I don't live in the US. I feel that reading the headlines is enough to keep me informed about what's happening, but I really don't care any more than that.
The details aren't valuable to me. For example, the Apple anti-trust lawsuit... Is it important? Yes. I'm already well aware of the horrible anticonsumer practices of Apple. But do I need to know all the particular details about the lawsuit? Not really. In fact, the only thing that matters is the final verdict, which hasn't happened yet.
I care, but I already know enough details.
I don't feel like the article would bring a lot of value, especially if the title is click-baity. I've encountered too many articles that are void of content, just the title repeated in 10x more words.
I don't like visiting news sites because, in addition to all of them being obnoxious and ad riddled, I feel like I'm wasting a lot of time reading long articles that could be rewritten as 3 bullet points. On platforms like lemmy, users will highlight the important bits in the comments which saves a lot of time.
flop_leash_973 2 points 3 years ago
I have grown to like https://www.axios.com/ for reasons like your last bullet point. Frequently they give 3-4 bullet points that tells you the story without a shit tone of editorializing.
VeganCheesecake 11 points 3 years ago
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.
T156 10 points 3 years ago
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.
Thorny_Insight 8 points 3 years ago
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.
douglasg14b 5 points 3 years ago
Sure, but you find out about things hours days or even weeks after they happen.
Cethin 11 points 3 years ago
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.
Jourei 2 points 3 years ago
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...
SpaceCowboy 1 point 3 years ago
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.
Thorny_Insight 8 points 3 years ago
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.
viking 7 points 3 years ago
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.
cygon 4 points 3 years ago
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.
OceanSoap 8 points 3 years ago
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.
Rolando 6 points 3 years ago
I gift articles often
FYI if you do so on !nyt_gift_articles@sopuli.xyz you'll reach several hundred people.
Branch_Ranch 7 points 3 years ago
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!
Ultraviolet 7 points 3 years ago
I'd read more articles if they weren't paywalled.
fuckingkangaroos 12 points 3 years ago
APNews.com, relatively low bias, no paywall.
realitista 5 points 3 years ago
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.
desmosthenes 4 points 3 years ago
I started building an aggregator “start page” that has become my new news homepage - https://s.marko.tech - just to solve this problem
LifeOfChance 4 points 3 years ago
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.
fruitycoder 3 points 3 years ago
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.
DanglingFury 2 points 3 years ago
The dark forest of the Internet is driving this migration of human Internet traffic. It is not a fault but rather a result.
PipedLinkBot 1 point 3 years ago
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/JrcbH0ge2WE?si=abGT5LDb7Zk3uo4W
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
MonkCanatella 1 point 3 years ago
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?!
technology
@lemmy.world
88795
22180
14530
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
go to feed...
technology
@lemmy.world
88795
22180
14530
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
go to feed...
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”
save