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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   5751 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for September 2023

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.

Quality Contributions in the Main Motte

@Fruck:

@ymeskhout:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

@cjet79:

@Londondare:

@self_made_human:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@raggedy_anthem:

Contributions for the week of August 28, 2023

@jimm:

@RandomRanger:

Contributions for the week of September 4, 2023

@ToaKraka:

@coffee_enjoyer:

@TracingWoodgrains:

@jeroboam:

@SSCReader:

All Moderators Are Bastards

@ymeskhout:

@Amadan:

@cjet79:

The Aliens Have Landed Gentry

@RobertLiguori:

@raggedy_anthem:

@hydroacetylene:

@ebrso:

Contributions for the week of September 11, 2023

@zeke5123:

@roystgnr:

@cjet79:

@screye:

Will the Real America Please Stand Up?

@satirizedoor:

@WhiningCoil:

@MathWizard:

Contributions for the week of September 18, 2023

@CanIHaveASong:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@Lizzardspawn:

@Soriek:

The Best Offence is a Good Defense

@Pulpachair:

@WhiningCoil:

@ymeskhout:

Who's Cheating Whom?

@MadMonzer:

@FCfromSSC:

@Meriadoc:

Contributions for the week of September 25, 2023

@JulianRota:

@kurwakatyn:

@functor:

@gattsuru:

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>mother approvingly emails Washington Post editorial to me
>read the relevant court filings and send back an explanation of the background and the judge's reasoning
>decide to crosspost it here for some extra upboats at near-zero marginal cost
>explicitly mark it as "not an effortpost, just a casual summary"
>tfw it still gets inducted as a "quality contribution"

There is in truth much to be said for a simple, honest effort at a clear-eyed explanation of a potentially complicated situation. It's not always clear to me why people nominate what they nominate--some users use it as a "super upvote," certainly--but one common way to get a lot of nominations is to be honest, clear, and thorough. We have a fairly sizeable silent readership--people who make accounts, submit reports, and click the quokka without ever writing a single post of their own. And while they apparently don't mind the heavier culture war stuff, they absolutely love it when posters present information as you did here: facts about something that is interesting but that is being spun so hard by legacy media outlets that good information is actually hard to find.

(For an example on my own part, I am totally mystified by the way that legacy media will report on major Supreme Court decisions without linking back to the actual court documents, freely and publicly available online, and often without even giving a case name or other identifying information. Like, what the fuck kind of reporter are you, if you can't even report the most basic facts about something? [Answer: a New York Times reporter, of course!])

Or to try to say this in fewer words: often the thing people find most compelling about the Culture War thread is posts that downplay, obviate, or otherwise evade the culture war angles.

I'd say that ToaKraka's post is a good example of actual high-quality journalism. All of the relevant facts presented clearly and concisely with minimal spin and links to relevant sources. It's more of a wonder that some person on the internet does it for free far better than the entire legacy media with their salaries, experience, and degrees.

The contexts are different. ToaKraka produced one piece of journalism, legacy media is trying to balance a lot more problems and issues.

The difference between these contexts is irrelevant. Providing a link to the primary source, after you already looked it up, is trivial, but legacy media routinely refuse to do so.

I've written enough long posts to notice the slight drag it adds, I think it's understandable why some people would not, especially if you're paid to crank out maximum articles instead of a few notable ones. Add to that the clear difference between writing news articles because you want to and writing articles because you have to pay your bills.

Whether that's how it should be is a separate question.

Whether that's how it should be is a separate question.

It's not. We're talking about whether or not Tora's post is actual high-quality journalism compared to legacy media. Clearly it is. You explained why legacy media has such poor journalism, but you haven't argued that it's not poor quality.

Re-read the comment I initially responded to, it says the following.

It's more of a wonder that some person on the internet does it for free far better than the entire legacy media with their salaries, experience, and degrees.

This is what I was talking about.

It's more of a wonder that some person on the internet does it for free far better than the entire legacy media with their salaries, experience, and degrees.

Their goals and ideas around high-quality journalism are very far from ours I'm afraid.

As one of the (mostly) silent majority who got a few ACQs back when we were on Reddit, you summed it up well.

I also share your frustration that media seems completely uninterested in citing any primary source, particularly court documents. It's not hard at all to find the .pdfs, so I can only assume they don't want readers to come to their own conclusions; just trust whatever we tell you!

I think the editors don't allow links in news stories because it harms the website's pagerank to have outbound links to other (often competing) webpages. This is one of the many subtle unforeseen harms caused by google's monopoly on search that I haven't seen people properly discuss.

What does Google have to do with it? How would having multiple viable search engines encourage adding links to sources that, for one thing, don't go through any of them?

End users have different priorities than advertisers. Right now, with one game in town, the advertisers’ priorities easily win. Introduce competition to retain users, and maybe that gets a little better. I wouldn’t be optimistic; the engines would also be competing for ad share, which is where all the money is, anyway.

Yeah, I think part of the issue is journalism has become really competitive now that everyone and their mother has a college degree so it’s a bit of a raised to the bottom.

journalism has become really competitive

This feels like quite an understatement. At least in the US: Newsroom employment dropped by nearly a quarter during the late 2000s, both because of downsizing and because thousands of newspapers have shut down completely. The job losses hit young and especially mid-career journalists hardest, and the median age for journalists today is nearly 50. This all followed a couple decades of already-declining job satisfaction and autonomy.

I could understand competitors in such a brutal market being reluctant to link to each other ... but reluctant to link to primary sources? Nobody's advertisers are going to lose eyeballs because their readers just went directly to PACER or whereever. The part of me that's annoyed at how lousy a job some of the media does wants to blame it on selection bias: perhaps most of the people competent enough to do citations as well as a typical Wiki editor are now making more money elsewhere than they could as a reporter? But more realistically I'd guess the problem is just a combination of tradition and overwork. You can't put a hyperlink in ink on paper, and it takes time to realize that in formats where you can add links, you should. And any sector with declining employment tends to become an exhausting place to work as everybody still remaining works their ass off to avoid becoming one of the ones who get pushed out, but typically that extra work cashes out as attempts to increase volume or marketability, at the expense of quality. "We never omit a hyperlink to a 50 page PDF full of legalese!" isn't marketable.

A humblebrag if I've seen one, but I feel like it's warranted haha

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