- it's just a front yard (It would make a good CAPTCHA question - select all photos of gardens. Anyone choosing a photo of this yard before the debris landed there would fail.)
- there's more than one soccer field in Broomfield
If you value the work you should definitely donate some money (PayPal link in the sidebar on every page on avherald.com). I'm pretty sure it's still just one person (Simon Hradecky) doing outstanding editorial work.
What, you don’t like the anchor people on TV asking each other how they feel about every piece of news and making horrible puns at every opportunity? Or having expected announcements be reported as BREAKING NEWS?
I distinctly recall signing up for "breaking news alerts" a few days after 9/11. I figured if something major happened, it would be nice to receive a notification about it. I quickly learned that my definition of breaking news was dramatically different from that of the news..
BREAKING NEWS: More people died of COVID today. I see see often headlines in my Google news feed saying something along those lines.
I've stopped clicking on YouTube videos that give me no idea what they are going to be in the thumbnail/title. For example on Linus Tech Tips second channel ShortCiruit a good chunk of their videos do this. Latest one from 3 years ago in my sub box "I almost hurt myself open this...." and the thumbnail is him maybe holding a big TV with a game on the screen. I can't tell if it's a big monitor, a tv, or if the video will be about what's on the screen in the thumbnail. I wish that videos/news/blogs that use titles like this could also just tack something on the end in brackets saying a couple words about what it's actually talking about.
Too often I'm having to fall prey to the clickbait just to see if maybe the video will interest me or not. More often than not it doesn't and I just wasted time.
I also stopped watching 90% of all LMG (his company) videos (on all their channels) because of the clickbait forcing me to click onto things that I am not interested in, only to quickly leave the video. I am not going to watch what I don't want to watch whether it has a clickbait thumbnail and title or not, so they just annoy me more with this. I have not voiced my opinion for two reasons: 1) it's a really common opinion, Linus is aware of it and this style is obviously good for business since they kept it, 2) fear of intense backlash from the fan community.
I'm on the same boat. I stopped watching their videos after I started to feel more and more videos were made just for the sake of making more videos. Every time I bite and watch through, I realize I haven't gained any fun, information, nor education and just wasted 10 minutes and 1 second of my time. I don't think it's just LTT. I feel that more and more channels are going this way.
Yeah it seems like almost all of their videos are using clickbaity titles now especially on the secondary channels like ShortCiruit. My viewership of their videos has really dropped. I'm sure they have seen results from gaming the recommended videos but I'd be interested to see if it has affected how many average viewers they get from the subscribed people.
Man first you had to get AdBlock, and recently it feels necessary to use SponsorBlock, and now it feels like there needs to be a new one called ClickBaitBlock which maybe swaps the video titles for a user voted new title similar to SponsorBlock. I'd actually install it if it existed.
I do think it would be cool though to expand SponsorBlock into more crowd-sourced things, since there is already a community of people willing to help.
Unfortunately this one seems to just change the casing of the title and then grabs a frame from the video to use for the thumbnail. I find that the thumbnail at least sometimes contains something useful whereas this may be counterproductive.
With YouTube you can hover over the video thumbnail and see a short preview of the video play so that aspect is already kinda covered by YouTube itself.
It's definitely getting closer to what I was talking about but unfortunately falls short.
There's a fan community? I was always under the impression that his videos served as glorified ads for consumer tech. The technical insight delivered was skin deep. Didn't he brag about a 20 drive NAS one week only to cry about the raid0 config dying and taking down a lot of their footage the next week?
I don't think it was Raid 0 if you're talking about the time a long time ago they nearly lost data. If I recall correctly, the data was in Raid 6, but there was no external backup.
I'm not sure if you're referring to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSrnXgAmK8k ("All of our data is gone"), but in any case, I've heard references to ZFS in later videos so yeah, the situation's probably not quite that insane now.
That video is technically hilarious though, it TL;DRs as "download Ubuntu-based USB image provided random RAID recovery company, boot USB and provide said company headless SSH to broken system"... at one point in the video I remember Linus talks to another recovery company about the process and the guy pretty much went "...O.o..." which IMO sums my own opinion up, lol
I watch LMG content because I find it more entertaining than anything else on YouTube, and I'm not even a PC gamer. I rarely look at the poster or video title at all before watching, I just queue the new items immediately.
I'm in the same boat .. actually, I'm more set in my ways, if the title doesn't tell me what it's about, I don't bother looking at the thumbnail. Here are some titles from recent videos:
I REALLY Love Building Computers!!
Never seen one of these before...
Sorry. Your gaming laptop sucks now.
Maybe upgrading is pointless…..
Linus was right.
It's such click-bait, and so annoying.
It's sad about LTT too. I can't find it now, but I saw a video of his talking about this. He doesn't actually like these titles, but claims to have proof they improve viewership counts, so in his quest to optimized for higher and higher counts, he annoys some long time viewers. Can't blame him if it works, but I do wonder if it'll be self-defeating in the end.
I am interested in how he A/B tests these things. I've never seen non-clickbait LMG videos, so if they're constantly testing they must not be up for long. Or they test on their forums or something like that.
(I know it sounds like I'm confirming the theory that videos don't get recommended if they're not clickbaity, but I only rarely get LTT recommendations in general. I do specifically go to the channel and look for things to watch every so often, however, and it's there that I don't see any non-clickbait test versions.)
Oh yeah I can't really blame them. I don't feel upset personally at them for it, I feel upset at YouTube for making these clickbaity titles do better than more normal titles. It's unfortunate because this is likely actually just machine learning realizing that a lot of us humans use our pea brains to decide if we want to watch a video and thus often times those clickbait videos get more clicks. But I really wished they put some manual tweaks in place to make the user experience a bit more enjoyable and stop promoting those clickbait videos in recommendations so that creators didn't feel the need to do it.
I mentioned it in my other comment, but it feels like we need a ClickBaitBlock similar to SponsorBlock which uses user generated timestamps to skip sponsor blocks in videos. Could be a user generated/voted on new title that gets used. I'd actually use something like that too. It allows creators to play their YouTube game, but also us avoid the game if we choose to. Hell the extension could even support allowing the video creator to submit their own alternative titles. It would be a neat way to beat YouTube at it's own game.
They don't do the clickbait titles or thumbnails on floatplane(their in house version of youtube), and will often edit the titles if it's too clickbait-ey
Without the sarcasm it would just be restating exactly what the parent comment said.
I agree with the OP: if we disapprove of posts that only say “same” or “me too” we should probably also discourage posts that dress exactly that in sarcasm.
> if we disapprove of posts that only say “same” or “me too” we should probably also discourage posts that dress exactly that in sarcasm.
I fully agree on this point, but the comment in question (sarcastically) criticized certain behaviours ("asking each other how they feel about every piece of news" and "making horrible puns at every opportunity"), so I don't think it fully falls under that threshold.
As a European who tuned in to US News for the US election I thought that was crazy.
I'd watch a few of the right media orgs to see what they were saying and then stay on CNN/MSNBC etc for most of it. It's mad how so much of it every hour was essentially people just regurgitating stuff to fill the time. I mean OK what's happening is important but if you can't fill the airtime why not shift to other news (as in everything else happening in the world - HK democracy leaders were arrested during that time and I don't remember any proper mention through days upon days).
Also the fake breaking news thing was stupid. The amount of times I'd turn up Wolf Blitzer or something because I would hear breaking news announcements in the background and thinking like you'd get at the BBC, Channel 4, RTE, France 24 Al Jazeera English, etc that something important was happening. Only to find breaking news was basically just random scheduled things or just regurgitation of what happens. Here Sky News is bad for playing things up but nowhere near as bad as any of them.
News on the right in the US is awful but the Left isn't much better unfortunately. What do people watch that's in the Centre and actual news rather than hyperbole? PBS?
PBS news hour is a total of 6 hours per week (weekend shows are 30 minutes each). In those 6 hours, they cover more than any one of the 24 hour news networks. You're killing your mind watching 24 hour news networks, any of them.
I think the answer is don't watch TV news if you can help it. If 100% of their revenue comes from ads, then their incentives are clear: keep you watching no matter what.
The way I see it, written news at least has a wider range of options, and the subscription model means they have slightly less incentive to be so manipulative.
Yep agree absolutely. I probably read 5-10 different global media a day normally online. I rarely watch TV news but it was sort of an experiment I guess. Wow some of the stuff on places like Newsmax made Fox look like The Guardian.
Newsmax and OAN are notorious for extremely slanted coverage.
The Guardian has a slant, but nearly every news outlet will have some slant, either by coverage or through omission. But it's certainly a lot worse at Newsmax and OAN.
I love The Guardian, it's the closest to my views but it most it definitely has a slant. I don't mind that. It's news is newsy and it's commentary is openly left wingish.
Yup, its nickname ("Grauniad") may be about its historically awful proofreading but it's just as politically off-centre as say the Daily Telegraph ("Torygraph") which gets an explicit accusation of political bias right in the nickname.
Every publication is going to have at least editorial bias in what opinions get written, and what stories are covered, at all or in greater profile.
Private Eye - a famous British satirical magazine - has an entire section ("Street of Shame" referring to Fleet Street) about the worst of this (e.g. newspapers taking long term advertiser money and then conspicuously failing to mention grave problems at the advertised business), but it too has its share of blind spots, most famously it took Wakefield's side on the MMR vaccine claims long after mainstream opinion had shifted to focus on the apparent abuse and profiteering by Wakefield, and even after he was struck off it continued to slow walk any suggestion that its coverage had been wrong or misleading. Its coverage for the present pandemic has been... less than stellar also, except in the sense that it criticises the government for doing a bad job, an open goal sometimes missed at a few of the most right-wing papers.
> I love The Guardian, it's the closest to my views but it most it definitely has a slant. I don't mind that.
You have to be careful with this though.
Once upon a time people said this and what they meant was essentially selection bias. So they would report all the major stories, but when choosing the minor stories to fill the rest of their space, it would be stories favorable to one side or the other. And the stories they did cover were covered fairly.
The common practice now is purposely misleading people. Omitting key details of a story or selectively quoting people out of context to change the meaning of what they said.
Probably the canonical example of this is when people were protesting the taking down of statues of members of the confederacy. Some but not all of the protestors were neo-nazis. Others make the case that people are more than the worst thing they ever did, or that taking down the statues is an attempt to memory hole what happened.
Trump got in front of a camera and said "very fine people on both sides." In the same interview he makes explicit that he's not talking about the racists and condemns them:
Fear makes things memorable, makes it hard to turn away. It's an evolutionary thing.
If my mom calls me after she has been watching that shit, she sounds strung out on stimulants. Agitated, easily angered. She is normally a calm, fairly rational person.
It's fear mongering and it exists because it is effective. If one gets caught up in it, it can be hard to take a step back and realize what is going on. One might hear rationalizations like "I have to stay informed" or "it is related to my work". Very similar behaviour to other addictions.
I'm reminded of Tool lyrics:
"Stare like a junkie
Into the TV
Stare like a zombie
While the mother
Holds her child
Watches him die
Hands to the sky crying
Why, oh why?
'cause I need to watch things die
From a distance
Vicariously I, live while the whole world dies
You all need it too, don't lie
> Occasionally watching terrestrial/mainstream TV is equivalent to dipping your head back into the Cave, except, the shadows no longer make any sense, and yet everyone is entrapped by them. It's noisy, bright and hellish, you can't go back, you're in a different world now.
once you can curate information feeds and investigate topics in depth on demand, not to mention adblocking, watching tv at all feels like a psychic assault
They figured that little “Breaking News Alert!” out during 9/11, during which it was useful, but not at all after. I remember when Jason Priestly got into a car accident and they started throwing those alerts up. I realized then, “ok. Now they’ve jumped the shark”
The only thing that amazes me at this point is that it is apparently still effective enough that they keep doing it.
Reuters TV, 30 minutes every day, about 15-20 stories from around the globe but focusing on US. Read by a faceless person in an emotionless voice. That's what I do.
All US TV “news” is intolerable garbage, but since the US is the global cultural hegemon, plenty of foreign media outlets cover our news. Almost any well-respected European broadcaster is a better source for US political news than any in the country.
Newspapers are better than TV: the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are both much less sensational than any of the broadcasters.
My favorite is lately CNN posts an article outlining what the new administration is planning on doing the next few days. Then when they do every part of it, they post a BREAKING NEWS article about that item. Like, I, a very causal reader of the news, knew it was going to happen. Who is it a surprise to?
If you want news on a hot button topic it is usually better to watch it reported from far away. Less attachment leads to more information and less spin.
Thus I would read US election news on European or Asian news sites, Brexit from Asia, etc. Just my 2c.
Tweets now often start with the 3 gyrophares then “breaking news urgent!!!”
It is highly stressful. A good tip is to write “Breaking”, “Alert” and “Urgent” as spam words in the Twitter administration, so all tweets containing it will be hidden (or leave them, to ensure the Twitter experience is as bad as possible until you hate opening it).
i like that they keep such a positive tone of voice. I get the impression they delight in sharing "bad" news since it invariably can be blamed on whichever party their outlet opposes.
I tried to do that, but even MSNBC these days seems to have fallen to hyperpartisan agitprop.
I check nyt and cnn (both with a large grain of salt) periodically (~1x per week, for 5-10 minutes?) but unfortunately neither of those are quite as reliable as one would hope.
The video of the landing & the passengers cheering—- that huge sigh of relief. Brings a smile to my face.