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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   5747 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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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.

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