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Medium, Twitter Founder on Media: We Put Junk Food In Front Of Them and They Eat It (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader points us to an interview of Evan Williams, one of the co-founders of Twitter, and founder of publishing platform Medium: Ev Williams is not a fan of the increasingly homogenised media he currently sees, with its emphasis on feeding the great, gaping maw of platforms like Twitter and Facebook too often producing what he describes as tantamount to junk food. "It's understandable why media on the web is like it is today," Williams tells the Guardian. "That's not to say there's not a lot of great stuff out there, but a lot of people are dissatisfied with it. A lot of journalists who want to do great stuff are dissatisfied. Advertisers and brands are dissatisfied. We're still stuck in some very naive thinking, with the idea that people consuming media means that's what they want -- it's like, well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want."
The people that don't want it eat something else. And there's plenty of them. Just because something is spoon fed, it doesn't preclude you from rolling your own.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
it's like, well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want
Brave of him to describe his own site like that.
We post crap stories. People read them and comment on them, so they must want crap stories. We give them SJW stories, people read them, and comment. Therefore they must want SJW stories. Slashdot isn't any different than the junk food of Facebook and Twitter.
Don't take this post personally, whiplash. I'm just giving you shit, because you can take it and respond with entertaining and snarky replies.
Most people are incredibly stupid. They DO want junk food, both figuratively and literally.
I don't respond to AC's.
You have given us all dissatisfaction.
Creating yet another outlet for the drivel that passes for journalism today is not the answer. He's just putting that "junk food" in paper wrappers instead of styrofoam boxes. Take some of that $57 million in VC funding and create a news agency that does it old school with outdated ideas like "just the facts" and devoid of spin. Fund it so that investigative journalists spend the months it takes to really pull it all together on the complex stories that face us today - and let them do it without a bunch of bureaucratic bullshit getting in their way. There are great reporters out there (Sharyl Atkisson comes to mind) that don't need ever more half baked outlets for their journalism, they need a organization that will fund their efforts.
>> Ev Williams is not a fan of the increasingly homogenised media he currently sees
And yet people whine about Fox News or MSNBC, which gets their audiences because they provides an alternative viewpoint to what people see as a homogenised (CSB/NBC/CNN/ABC/etc.) media. As for Ev, his complaint sounds particularly phony since his company and other tech companies are in the process of INCREASING the homogenisation of media, with their avowed initiatives to limit fringe communications (that could potentially offend someone).
Saying that 'Twitter and Facebook must be what all people want' is like saying that so many of these political polls (or Primary election results) are really representative of what all citizens want: It's only really reppresentative of what the people who are showing up (at Twitter or Facebook, or at the polls) want. There are plenty of people who are disaffected of Twitter and Facebook (and so-called 'social media' in general) and therefore they just don't participate; how do you count them, then? Also, as TFA alludes to, if Twitter and Facebook are all there really is, how many people who are participating in those are doing so only because there really isn't anything else? Of course there are those of us for which there is no 'social media' that will satisfy us because we think the whole concept is whack to start with; how are they counting us?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
people who think they know what others really want & need, better than those same others, have an unjustifiably high opinion of themselves and equally unjustifiable low opinion of most of others.
logically, only way such people can even think like that is by reducing others to simplified fixed and limited objects, instead of complex dynamic unlimited individuals they, and all human beings, are.
its always a good rule to distrust people who think what others really want. if they ever get to choose for others, they do it badly, inevitably, as history and all socialistic experiments have demonstrated.
What a lot of people don't realize is that social media and the various ad clickbait sites are becoming a primary form of entertainment, much like TV was a generation ago. Everyone looks at this stuff, not just "computer people" anymore. Try this experiment -- go wait for a train for 5-10 minutes, or go to the DMV or any task that requires sitting still for a few minutes. Every single person who has one and knows how to use it is going to take out their phone and start playing. Advertisers and junk food websites like BuzzFeed or Medium are going to want to capitalize on that. TV is almost 100% reality garbage now because most people who still watch "regular" TV aren't all that swift, so the advertisers give them their junk food.
I like the fact that you can still ignore the Internet's junk food for the most part, but the aggregator portals like Yahoo or MSN are full of it. Seriously, people complain about Slashdot but it's actually not bad compared to some of the alternatives.
Ev Williams is not a fan of the increasingly homogenised media he currently sees
Its his fault. companies like twitter, facebook, and reddit decided long ago their cash crop -- users -- had to be reigned in. certain topics and discissions could never be permitted on boards or by users. they did this ostensibly at the behest of maximizing brand value and appeal to brands and marketing.
A lot of journalists who want to do great stuff are dissatisfied.
because nearly every major news outlet is the brainchild of a media corporation, they are beholden to certain standards and practices designed to maximize brand value and attract marketers. this drives advertising revenue and shareholder value. its why medicine shows like Dr. Oz are successful, while investigative journalism into pharmaceutical corruption arent.
Advertisers and brands are dissatisfied.
by what? how would you know? Advertisers and brands are sated so long as their product or brand is consumed. they are only dissatisfied if a pitch or blitz didnt go as planned, or if an expensive viral campaign had no effect. Brands dont care about content, or topics, so to say they are dissatisfied with media is to say they are dissatisfied with the returns on investment they have made in platforms like Twitter...which has never really had a return at all.
with the idea that people consuming media means that's what they want
because we're driven to want it, you blithering imbecile. You dont think Proctor and Gamble spend two billion dollars a year on marketing campaigns like Terry Crews screaming "odor block" or Nike just conveniently happens to make shoes that 90% of the NBA enjoy do you? Public discourse, the free and open expression you seem to allude to, is all but dead in favour of whatever pseudo-hispanic consumable Taco Bell has excreted this month or how redbull helped an athelete conquer the very fabric of reality. The solution to the existential epiphany youre expounding upon from whatever golden shitter youre perched upon with iphone in hand is paradoxically to destroy or limit the very thing that sustains you. As you float about on your mega-yacht, take for a moment to consider this: the answer to your prayers for something other than internet bullshit already exists. Its called adblock, noscript, and and Tor. but, you want a golden goose. something thats unique, original, and can be monetized through advertising.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I think the Panama papers are a perfect example. In my opinion, this probably ranks in the top political scandals of my lifetime. But most people I know seem to care very little and don't know much about it.
I would be more impressed by what he's saying if I didn't know he founded Medium, the biggest McIntellectual pile of crap since TED talks.
You can find some really great Twitter and Facebook accounts to get high curated news and analysis. And you can subscribe to incredible podcasts like Democracy Now! and Belabored and keep up with all the news you want. And then you can go argue with people with different views than you and learn what they think and what they've been reading.
If you want to, you can supplement that with junk when you want to rest your brain. Or you can just watch tv.
But giving people access to the "good" information is a big win even if they also are able to consume entertainment as well. In the end, the Internet users that didn't want to use the Internet to become better informed just didn't want to become better informed by any medium. People who only care about celebrity news were just going to watch tv instead.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Granted I'm a bit pickier than most, I find navigating some websites these days to be incredibly painful and awkward. It's hard to believe this is 2016 and the web is still so bad . And this holds true for "titans" of the industry, as well as ma and pa businesses.
You might want to stop repeating this same post every week or two.
Why would the internet be immune from the same things that dog television, print and every other media?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Economist's love to talk about "expressed preference". Watch what people actually do, rather than listen to what they say they would do. Behavioural psychologists like to talk about time horizon, noting that how we balance near-term desires vs long-term goals is crazy-making.
It's 100% clear that expressed preference is mediated by environmental factors: all too soon, you are what you wallow in. The advertising industry exploits this with the precision of an ink-jet printer nozzle by ensuring that everywhere we go online, the environment is littered with lizard-brain crack cocaine. We know that if our "rational" brain gains is granted control, most people make choices more consistent with their stated long-term goals. In a moment of clarity, people go into their Facebook privacy settings and choose sane defaults. And then, whoops, those sane settings disappear over and over again.
Man vs Borg. Borg wins.
We tend to think of advertising in the competitive, capitalist frame: Coors vs Budweiser in a taste bud alliance set to. Closer to the truth, it's probably Coors & Budweiser vs deck repairs and completing that extra certification after work. Every reminder that you could be drinking a cold beer instead takes another small bite. This is why potato chips are now displayed at eight difference places in every supermarket. Every impression counts, in the extended lizard-brain arm wrestle.
These days it's not Marshall McLuhan saying "the medium is the message", it's the behavioural neurologists.
Over and over and over again, the experimental subjects who self-report being "good" at multitasking (the kind that resembles having persistent social media feeds open on your desktop) actually measure as being the worst, at both the primary task and the distraction task.
Dunning-Kruger, thy name is Twitter.
It is the same problem with movies. Even if everyone wants something better, everyone thinks 'better' is something different. A producer might make something better, but the audience shrinks. So instead they pander to the lowest common denominator in order to have sufficient viewership. Eventually the producers reach the point where they say, why put in the effort to do something better when they will pay $X each to watch this garbage instead? Hence JJ Abrams' stupid Star Wars|Trek movies.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
What do you expect when I read shit like this:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-clinton-bill-de-blasio-criticized-for-race-based-joke/
When it's Hillary and De Blasio making racial jokes, it's called "race based" jokes.
Now, what do you think it would be called if Trump and someone else made the same joke?
Answer: Racist.
Yet, no protests, no real mass media coverage of it, etc.
Journalists: You lose credibility when you post shit like this when there's a clear bias. People are wising up to the fact that you aren't "journalists" anymore. Let's talk about the most recent case of actual journalism: The CBS report about the classified 28 pages relating to 9/11.
No bias, no bullshit, just reporting facts.
If you can't even do that, then don't be surprised when people are disgusted with you, and your ratings plummet. There's a reason why MSNBC's ratings are in the shitter.
Hideki!
Too many choices is just as bad as too few. It is not just news sources but even places like Amazon. Look for something like a bike light and you will get hundreds of hits and you will not know which one is any good.
With news sources it is worse. People tend to pick the source that will reinforce your world view aka and runaway feedback loop. That is what we are seeing today all too often. If you support Trump and someone posts something negative you dismiss it if they post something positive you eat it up. Same is true with Sanders and Clinton supporters. It is human nature to want to be right so we often flock to those that will tell us what we want to hear.
As far as news in the US I suggest VOAnews.com Yes Voice of America actually does a really good job of just presenting facts. I also think NPR is pretty good but biased to the left. I like that since I am slightly conservative so I will question their reports. CNN is also not terrible. MSNBC and FOX are both junk and score on average below 50% on accuracy.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
At least you had recruiters asking you for positions. Most places from '09-10 would ask if I had a valid TS/SCI clearance or a CISSP, and when told neither, would tell me how to fuck off in new and elegant ways. I eventually wound up being hired because I knew Solaris, and the company needed people who could actually do zones and LDOMs, as opposed to asking for more stuff in the rack.
You might want to stop repeating this same post every week or two.
Just contributing my two bits. If you don't like it, read someone else's comment.
At least you had recruiters asking you for positions.
Not at that time. I was applying for non-help desk jobs and being told that no help desk jobs were available.
Today I'm getting 20+ calls and emails per day from recruiters even though I'm not looking for a job.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Medium, Twitter Founder
He talks to dead people?
Or does he just like people to know he's average-sized?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"Junk food" is a perfect description for many of the social media services- twitter, facebook, instagram, pinterest, etc etc etc.
Twitter is more like the confetti of the internet (along with emojis) but facebook is full-blown junk food: lots of empty calories and zero nutrition. That's they way they want it. And by "they", I mean both the producers and consumers of social media.
Oh, they might claim they want something more substantial, more "filling" and "healthy", but they don't. It's like the drunk on a bender who says he'll quit drinking "tomorrow".
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
It's not that media companies are purposely putting junk food out because they have some sinister plan, they put it out because the advertising profits available to them incentivize page hits rather than duration. They would rather get you to quickly view as many pages as possible and share them with all your friends and family using the share links provided. To ensure the view counts though, they do pull some shenanigans to keep you open to the page for a minimum duration. Some of their tactics include pop-overs for unrelated crap, lengthened summaries for SEO that also pushes the actual content further down the page, and worst of all video content that automatically plays. CNN is the worst offender in this regard, using click-bait titles and every trick in the book to maximize page hits.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And they believe it is their right to do so. Nothing will change until that does.
Couldn't choose among several fitting replies, so have them all:
* Projecting much?
* Takes one to know one, eh?
* Classic trasnference
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
All that junk actually serves a purpose: it is there to drive traffic in order to earn a better rank on google. When the blog/news website/anything gets enought audience it suddenly become a valuable SEO tool for brands and online shops to put their links and market their products on.
Since google's algorithms are in constant evolution, webmasters and shop owners know that a simple and accurate keywords list embedded within their homepage just isnt enought anymore to get a good ranking: they now need real content, "buzz", audience and traffic to be relevant to big search engines. So the truth is, all that crap is currently being produced by so called "community managers" for that unique purpose. It also costs significant money to make it work, because then we would all be able to be on first page, wich is impossible.
Think of all that junk content as SEO tools: the shop selling nursery items will have an associated side blog with bullshit content about childcare, linked and advertised on every social network and so called "news" aggregators, just like the car parts shop will have a blog about vintage muscle cars, the fashion shop will have a junk blog about the latest trends and kim's latest outfit ect... We don't really care, it's not real content, but google's bot will find it relevant and rank it accordingly.
After all, maybe all the hype around AI will finally get us something usefull: AI-augmented google bots that will bust bogus content and rank them down ? Would that even be in google's best interest ?
I honestly think so, because Amazon is becoming google's main competitor as a search engine. It is now so difficult and expensive today to have a good ranking on google for selling products, using this junk content, fake blogs ect... that peoples now try to get a good ranking on amazon instead: we are witnessing The Rise of the Marketplace.
Think as amazon as the new search engine, but for things: anything you want, you can just look it up on amazon, get it at the lowest price possible with free shipping, delivered at your door tomorow night. Even google can't beat that.
Hipster rich dude Evan Williams, decries the "junk food" media culture he helped create with Twitter. You know, the one that made him rich.
"Yeah, I founded the largest butcher shop chain on the continent. Myself, I don't eat meat, I'm a strict 9th order vegan. Meat is murder you know. I won't eat anything that casts a shadow!"
Hypocrisy, arrogance, faux wisdom and elitism all rolled into one tasty sushi roll. 100% organic of course.
TV is almost 100% reality garbage now because most people who still watch "regular" TV aren't all that swift, so the advertisers give them their junk food.
Top Ten List For Prime-Time Network TV - March 28th
1 Big Bang Theory - Which shouldn't need any introduction here.
3 Empire - Prime time soap opera with a mix of drama and contemporary music - with a Golden Globe and other awards to its credit.
8 NCIS
9 Blue Bloods - NCIS and Blood Bloods both long running police procedurals, a genre that network TV does very well.
10 Sixty Minutes,
The #1 on cable that week was The Walking Dead and #5 The Talking Dead --- and for those of us who have grown weary of the Zombie Apocalypse, the broadcast networks have quite a bit to offer.
only ad hominem?
a good example of that in fact.
you do not argue against what i said, but questioning my personal motivation for saying it. you are free to engage in absurd speculations about my motivation (btw even though you use word 'several', "all" of your "*"s are the same), but that wont invalidate my argument.
A good start would be to clean out the Abuse/Truth & Safety departments and close them down. Fire them with prejudice to ensure that they cannot return.
Then make sure that anyone ever brought in for an Abuse Department role cannot use it for an ideological purpose. If they do, send them packing.
As an additional measure, purge blocklists and then remove API support for blocking. Then remove the blocking feature entirely.
If any complaints are received or threats are made for such actions, do nothing that results in appeasement (while doing everything to speed up implementation).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.