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Comment by chiefalchemist | Hacker News Reader

I'm torn. Is it cool - or not - to comment on this?

As long os it is...

‘We can actually do whatever we want and be just as successful..."

Regardless of age / generation, you can't simply speak successs. By definition, that's not how it works. It is a result. A result of decisions and actions. It's not an oversimplify social media post.

This statement makes an assumption, and a false one at that. This is probably uncool to say but there's more to success than proclaiming a particular emoji is out of style.

Sure. Rules are made to be broken. Of course. But let's not be so shallow as to overvalue skinny jeans, or any decision associated with them.

Or maybe The Onion has a guest post on NYT?

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I mean, the NY Times will never run an article where the thesis is “Millennials are working hard at similar jobs as boomers and slowly improving their financial stability”, even if they found it was representative of the data.

Because that won’t get clicks and sell ads.

So instead, you find some weird edge case, talk to a few people to get their take, filter out the common sense viewpoints then call it “a new trend”.

People furiously tweet it, spend a couple days talking about it and NYT gets a bunch of clicks and some ad revenue to do it all over again.

The sad irony is, that feeds the false narrative around this issue.

I hope the NYT is mistaken. I hope we don't have generations that base their understanding of reality on bogus paradigm of social media.

This article is everything that is broken in media and it honestly pains me to see NYT printing this stuff. However, I am also a capitalist and I suppose I can’t blame NYT for doing what it has to do to earn a profit. It’s the incentives we have.

There is clearly a market for it, but I guess my issue is that it’s passed off as “news” and the NYT benefits from a reputation as a “paper of record” so people think they’re reading a well researched article when it would be better characterized as opinion or fluff.

The only saving grace is the internet now allows one to quickly research past news articles.

It’s pretty hilarious to get a reminder about some trend that caused an uproar in 2007 that the NYT started that turned out to be completely false. Serves as a good reminder to be very skeptical about everything you read no matter the source.

So, capitalists get a free pass, do they?

Correct. The mechanics of the advertising industry and the incentives it imposes on other industries are some of the greatest evils our society has created in recent memory.

> Regardless of age / generation, you can't simply speak successs. By definition, that's not how it works. It is a result. A result of decisions and actions. It's not an oversimplify social media post.

After we started to mistake the Internet for reality, this became entirely possible.

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