"Just because Silicon Valley has desperately wanted to believe for twenty years that communities can self-police does not make it true. Point to one example where this has worked. Twitter is a cesspool — one which you are rapidly joining. Google gave up long ago on simple “wisdom of the crowds” algorithms around its search rankings and heavily skews the algorithm against spammers, cheats and other anomalies (and God knows what else, but that’s a different story). At Tumblr, we employed real, live humans to edit. At scale. It worked. Did fake news still appear? Yes. Did it leverage our “curating” and cause us as a platform to help falsities spread? No...
The only reason scale is a problem for you is because you want to remove the humans and give personalized news at scale, which is exactly the problem when it comes to news about society as a whole. Have you ever stopped to ask if stories that effect society as a whole should be personalized at all? What possible good comes of this?
And if there is a good of personalized societal news at scale, and algorithms are the only way to achieve this (by no means a given), your algorithms have failed. They’ve failed because by all appearances they seem ridiculously rudimentary...
In short, you’ve set foot into being a player in the news media, with zero interest in actually helping the news media, or in the social responsibilities that come with it. Now sure. You share ad revenue. But only popular stories garner ad revenue. You’ve aggravated the fundamental problem with internet news: only the most sensationalist stories generate the revenue. Whether the income came from subscriptions or ad revenue, in the old days, revenue to a paper was revenue to a paper. Sure, their research departments knew that some stories were being read more than others — I admit, there are days that I’ll pick up a paper and only read the celebrity stories. But I subscribe to that paper, and I picked up that copy, because I believed in that paper. You could have helped fix this on the internet, but you didn’t. You made it worse. Because none of this explained in any way your desire to set foot in the arena of news."
^ how white techy dudes are expressing their anger rn
It's a bit of a ramble-rant, but it's the kind of unfiltered anger that asks biting and useful questions.
FB: a very solid reality check on the idea of personalized social spaces that are so valued in Silicon Valley " In the real world, sure, I like hearing the news stories that my friends read, but I don’t care what their friends read. And I would never rely only on one or two over-eager friends to feed me all of my news. Offline, historically, social was only ever a small part of our news consumption patterns and you’ve given us no reason why that should change."
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