Comment by unholiness | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unholiness | Hacker News Reader

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I personally haven't found the same effect in long-form media, such as:

- Non-fiction books

- University-centered online courses

- Documentaries

- Some of Netflix's original programs

- Wikipedia's monthly news summaries

- The "Great Courses" on Audible

These media aren't thoroughly monetized on a pay-per-attention-stolen model. They're more optimized around having good reviews from friends and online.

It makes me wonder if there might be the possibility of a Netflix for news, where a 3rd party curates and allows ratings of lengthier pieces on long-term issues, interviews with important figures, and 20-minute investigative reports (like I remember seeing on 60 minutes). Naturally, this wouldn't work for up-to-the minute news where everyone's attention is driven based on who's got the latest break, but it seems like it would work for these other things. It would still give the "lunch conversation" motivation, where people could talk about whatever was released in the last few days. Certainly it sounds like a less attention-assaulting place than the current state of news.

Such a site would suffer from 2 major disadvantages.

In the absence of advertisement driven revenues, it would have to charge money, raising the barrier of entry compared to the current alternatives. In addition it cannot provide regular dopamine hits (because that’s the whole point) so it even feels less appealing than the alternatives.

More expensive and less appealing is a hard combo to succeed with.

maybe it's an opportunity to go back to the old recipe of paying with money for things you want to acquire. I'd gladly pay for a news service like that.

My company is working on this idea of Netflix for news, although we are not yet ready to test the payment part. If we succeed it may mean less news media but higher average quality.

ps: excellent article and grateful for people like James and Tristan sounding the alarm on the ill effects of the attention economy.

However, I disagree with his association of new media with populism and apparently suggesting a causal relationship. Populism has existed, and proliferated, well before mass media. It's more commonly associated with extreme wealth inequality.

> lengthier pieces on long-term issues

I wish there was something opposite, daily and weekly summaries where every "article" is just a title and one paragraph. Almost all lengthy articles have poor information per character ratio.

The Skimm [0] covers a decent amount of US political and domestic issues. You can get automatic emails daily, if you'd like.

https://www.theskimm.com/archive/2017-11-20

It makes me wonder if there might be the possibility of a Netflix for news, where an 3rd party curates and allows ratings of lengthier pieces on long-term issues, interviews with important figures, and 20-minute investigative reports (like I remember seeing on 60 minutes)

Isn't this essentially the model that HuffPo and other news aggregators (rewriters) use? Hasn't really panned out in that context, but maybe there needs to be a more quality-focussed site that isn't subject so much to avarice.

The question of who creates the content is mostly orthogonal to what I mean.

I'm talking about is a platform where my decision to click/watch content is based on reviews and recommendations, not loud design and attention-grabbing headlines.

In that world, the subscription model could make sense and content aggregation could make sense, but neither is required, nor does either addressing the issue on its own.

Recommendations is basically Facebook.

I think there is almost always very little value in up-to-the-minute news - I find that it just doesn’t affect my life on a minute-to-minute basis.

Blender is an example of (supposedly) higher quality, longer pieces of (paid) news/reports. I haven’t tried it myself because they don’t allow pluses “+” in emails.

> Wikipedia's monthly news summaries

I'd be glad if you could provide me with the link to subscribe these summaries if they're email newsletters. I could not find them in the wiki itself.

They used to be more standard articles, now it's this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events/November...

There's not a way to subscribe to it, though it's not obvious how a subscription would work. The summary of any given day is not finished at the end of the day. Rather, the set of articles for that day, their summaries, and the articles themselves will all continue to grow as more information is gathered. So, it is a good way to "catch up" after some time away from current events. But to my knowledge there's no coordinated effort to "finish" a day or a month by any deadline.

Vice news on HBO is actually pretty close to what you describe.

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