Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

This is an incredibly editorialized headline that blurs the distinction between SAG-AFTRA leadership and membership, and the article itself contradicts the title in the very first paragraph:

> In a statement posted to its official website, the union confirmed its board had "voted unanimously" to "send a strike authorisation vote to SAG-AFTRA members" in interactive media ahead of its "forthcoming bargaining dates with video game companies".

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/02/business/sag-aftra-strike-str... has more details that this is just one of multiple steps:

> While a strike authorization does not launch a strike, it can be a useful tool at the bargaining table because it gives the union the ability to declare a strike if negotiations break down. Eligible SAG-AFTRA members will be able to vote on authorizing a strike until September 25 at 5 p.m. PT, the evening before discussions resume.

If and when membership does authorize a strike, we would see language akin to this announcement: https://www.sagaftra.org/sag-aftra-members-approve-strike-au...

Calling it "incredibly editorialized" is generous.

The headline is just flat-out 100% completely false.

I'm surprised eurogamer would stoop so low for clicks, I thought they were a reputable publication...

For disclosures sake, I used to work in the games industry and don't anymore but I hold a huge bias against "games journalism" sites.

At times like this I think it's good to remember Knoll's law, that other pieces you've read on Eurogamer are similarly flawed and inaccurate.

Please, please go on. I would love to hear about why you feel that way (I do as well, but it's just from reading Kotaku)

Yeah, it's scandalous that a site called _Euro_gamer does not have the expertise to understand the difference between an american labor union voting on a strike and an american labor union _board_ suggesting a vote on a strike.

Is American practice in this regard radically different to Europe?

Well, there's no unified legal frameworks for them across all of _Europe_, for starters.

But in many places there's no need to get the members to authorize the strike, the union itself holds that power (I am at least 99% sure that's the case in Germany and France, at the very least.)

In Germany members have to vote for a strike and also for ending a strike. The term is "Urabstimmung".

Right, yes, I oversimplified.

You don’t need a vote for „Warnstreik” (warning strike), which frequently is enough to make a point, which makes the „real”/open-ended strikes much more rare than otherwise.

AFAICT all strikes I’ve ever seen happen here (the plethora of different train and airport unions) were technically warning strikes and not „real” ones; but they were enough to get the unions their wins.

I don't understand your point. It follows that if they don't have the expertise, than maybe they should not have published the article, no?

I think there's a world of difference between "someone misunderstood something and published an incorrect article" and "someone deliberately wrote misleading headline".

My reading of GP disappointed post was that they were accusing them of the latter; which is, in my opinion, underserved here.

> I think there's a world of difference between "someone misunderstood something and published an incorrect article" and "someone deliberately wrote misleading headline".

There's a difference, but I don't really see the "world" of difference. They both seem like fundamentally irresponsible journalism. Case (a) should never happen because there's an assumption of due diligence, and case (b) should never happen because there's an assumption of truth-seeking. Not doing due diligence is pretty close to ignoring (or at the very least not caring about) the truth.

I think in an ideal world you’re basically right.

In the world we’re living in, with the incentives of modern journalism being what they are (and the state of gaming media industry specifically), I’m willing to cut more slack to people writing about things outside their comfort zone.

The UN report on the Attention Economy says 0.5% of content produced is consumed.

No other industry works like this. And thats without any AI involvement.

In that context this entire fight between creators and content publishers/distributors is a gigantic farce.

We are already drowning in an ever growing ocean of content. These people want to be rewarded without doing any single thing to reduce the size of that ocean. They think the ocean will alway expand. Its just as absurd to watch as the sub prime crisis.

What does 0.5% of content even mean? Are you referring to content people are actually paid to produce?

He's right in that art consumption is an attention based economy. 0.5% would not surprise me. I think his conclusion is wrong though. He seems to question the need for a strike in the economic environment he described, but that environment is exactly why organized labor is important. Unions can make trying to pursue creative work professionally slightly more bearable.

If you're including every amateur unpaid artist, then sure maybe 0.5%.

BUT if you're talking about paid professional TV and film production (the context of SAG-AFTRA), probably something like 95% of content that is written, shot and edited into a final product makes it to audiences. After all, that stuff is expensive.

By the hour, most of that content is TV shows. Most of the unseen ~5% is produced pilot episodes that didn't get picked up for a full season. And a small amount will be films that halted production midway, or turned out to be so bad they weren't released.

I'd say that sounds accurate for open source projects. Calculate how many GitHub projects have a "used by" section.

That’s an odd methodology that would conclude React isn’t “used by” anyone.

Is this some thinly veiled comment against video gaming?

I don't understand this statistic - even a child's macaroni picture gets seen by their teachers and parents.

But does it get savored?

Assuming this[1] is the report you’re referring to:

> By the 2000s, so much information was being generated worldwide that only a small fraction (0.5% in 2015) of the digital data generated was being analyzed at all. [emphasis mine]

Not only is it ‘data analyzed’ and not ‘content consumed,’ but I can’t figure out what they mean by ‘analyzed’ either. Reading the rest of the paragraph makes me think that this is talking about things like clickstream data that businesses love to collect “so we can use big data to enhance user engagement” and then leave to pile up in their data warehouse once they discover that data analysis is hard; if so, this statistic is unrelated to the production:consumption ratio of “content” in the sense of things that people might want to look at on its own merits.

[1]: https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/attention_economy_...

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