It’s been a weird couple days; I keep running into this talking point that “journalists won’t use Mastodon unless we incentivize engagement farming”.
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I think if we’re honest with ourselves, the “service” most reporters provide on social media is entirely self-serving. A one-way firehose of signal boosting and self promotion.
“Look at me! I wrote this story. Click on it!”
And then you ask them a question, or have a correction, and nobody reads it, because Wired doesn’t care about building a community, just reaching a consumer. It’s fire and forget.We already have a tool for that, it’s RSS. What value does reposting a link here provide?
@Haste Precisely why I eschew accounts with many followers but few followed. If I want news, I will read it elsewhere. Exchange of ideas not lectures is what I am after.
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It’s been a weird couple days; I keep running into this talking point that “journalists won’t use Mastodon unless we incentivize engagement farming”.
Meanwhile I’m having a *great* experience here, because I use it to— I dunno— actually talk to people and form relationships?
I reject the premise that mastodon isn’t useful for reporters. I think it’s more accurate that modern news orgs use social media in purely extractive ways.
You might get more reporters that way, but you won’t like them.
@Haste Dunno, I kinda feel like it is a chicken/egg issue here. The nice thing about Twitter was that everyone was there. Once it fell people moved, but no a lot moved here.
So journalists (well everyone) need to post in more places and likely want to optimize for eyes seeing their stuff. Maybe it's just me, but I just don't see as much engagement here as I do on other platforms?
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@odd I’m not sure. I wasn’t on Twitter in the early days. By the time I got there it already sucked. lol
I did get to experience invite-only Bluesky, but I can’t really comment on it from a reporting standpoint because I only used it to shitpost. Which was very community oriented, but totally devoid of professional value.
Mastodon really is the only place I’ve had any interest in my work and I just assume that’s cause I’m pals with folks that live in Seattle here.
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@Haste @odd when twitter was smaller, two way conversation was indeed more common, there was
more a vibe of experimentation and play- and the rules were a bit different than how it is now:no pictures, no replies, no retweets, no search, and history only could go back about 100 posts.
as soon as retweets, replies and search got added, the vibe got less fun because retweets let dumb throwaway remarks go “viral”, blind replies turned virality into pile ons, and search enabled kiwifarms style analysis of targets
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@Haste I wasn't on Twitter before its downfall, but from what I've heard I got the impression that microblogging was a two-way street with journalists, scientists and 'common' folk.
It probably was more like you are suggesting though. But it does make me wonder if early Twitter really was less self-serving in a way.
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It’s been a weird couple days; I keep running into this talking point that “journalists won’t use Mastodon unless we incentivize engagement farming”.
Meanwhile I’m having a *great* experience here, because I use it to— I dunno— actually talk to people and form relationships?
I reject the premise that mastodon isn’t useful for reporters. I think it’s more accurate that modern news orgs use social media in purely extractive ways.
You might get more reporters that way, but you won’t like them.
@Haste A quais jornalistas esse argumento se refere? Aqueles que são apegados a declarações e promessas? Aqueles que reproduzem a retórica do patronato? Aqueles que são totalmente dependentes de agências de notícias? Aqueles que são paus-mandados dos poderosos? Aqueles camaradas chapa-branca que reproduzem sempre os mesmos textos, fotos e vídeos? Aqueles que se acham mais importantes que os leitores?
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It’s been a weird couple days; I keep running into this talking point that “journalists won’t use Mastodon unless we incentivize engagement farming”.
Meanwhile I’m having a *great* experience here, because I use it to— I dunno— actually talk to people and form relationships?
I reject the premise that mastodon isn’t useful for reporters. I think it’s more accurate that modern news orgs use social media in purely extractive ways.
You might get more reporters that way, but you won’t like them.
Then why are WSJ, propublica, the verge, forbes, etc (crap complicit press) on #mastodon trending page without logging in?
Here for the propaganda spreading phenomenon alone or trigger bait?
Gotta believe what they tell us, nothing else, you're not to think on your own. Got it!
Hence why no uproar about the overthrow, biggest news of the century, millennium, which should be front page since billionaires made their bribes using illegal citizens united loophole. -
It’s been a weird couple days; I keep running into this talking point that “journalists won’t use Mastodon unless we incentivize engagement farming”.
Meanwhile I’m having a *great* experience here, because I use it to— I dunno— actually talk to people and form relationships?
I reject the premise that mastodon isn’t useful for reporters. I think it’s more accurate that modern news orgs use social media in purely extractive ways.
You might get more reporters that way, but you won’t like them.
@Haste I don’t want journalists farming for engagement, I want them doing research and writing fact-based articles for publication. Anything that tempts journalists away from actual journalism is bad for society.
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It’s been a weird couple days; I keep running into this talking point that “journalists won’t use Mastodon unless we incentivize engagement farming”.
Meanwhile I’m having a *great* experience here, because I use it to— I dunno— actually talk to people and form relationships?
I reject the premise that mastodon isn’t useful for reporters. I think it’s more accurate that modern news orgs use social media in purely extractive ways.
You might get more reporters that way, but you won’t like them.
We have some journalists here. Good, serious ones. We don't need the state propaganda corp.
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@Haste Fuck all of that engagement bullshit. Those parasites should stay hell away from here. I don’t miss them. I don’t want them. Anything even remotely like that shit that was on commercial social media I block with extreme prejudice.
@oberstenzian @Haste and if you look at the average news site, it's filled with trackers (hint - there's no such thing as an "essential cookie") and clickbait ads.
Block JavaScript and most paywalls stop blocking you. The ones that use JavaScript to insert story contenf, you can find alternatives elsewhere.
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It’s been a weird couple days; I keep running into this talking point that “journalists won’t use Mastodon unless we incentivize engagement farming”.
Meanwhile I’m having a *great* experience here, because I use it to— I dunno— actually talk to people and form relationships?
I reject the premise that mastodon isn’t useful for reporters. I think it’s more accurate that modern news orgs use social media in purely extractive ways.
You might get more reporters that way, but you won’t like them.
@Haste what this place needs is more journalists, said nobody ever.
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@bri7 @odd I bet the internet itself is also kind of different than back then. I don’t have a base for comparison with twitter but I encountered this recently going back to play WoW.
It’s like.. the sewage we’ve all been wading in has made people more cautious and cynical. So it’s kind of just harder to talk to strangers than it used to be online?
At least, it’s hard to imagine using the internet in some of the ways that used to feel normal.
@Haste @bri7 @odd exactly. Britain's Communications Ministry (Ofcom) recently noticed that folk were using social media less. and moving to private messenger services.
A lot (especially younger women) have had way too many bad experiences to go around "talking to strangers", and I don't think they are going to be flocking to Fedi either - the damage has already been done.
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It’s been a weird couple days; I keep running into this talking point that “journalists won’t use Mastodon unless we incentivize engagement farming”.
Meanwhile I’m having a *great* experience here, because I use it to— I dunno— actually talk to people and form relationships?
I reject the premise that mastodon isn’t useful for reporters. I think it’s more accurate that modern news orgs use social media in purely extractive ways.
You might get more reporters that way, but you won’t like them.
Exactly this.
Getting engagement on Mastodon is quite easy. But if you're uninterested in a dialogue and sees engagement as a zero-sum game you must win, then you're in for a rude awakening.
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E em0nm4stodon@infosec.exchange shared this topic
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@rhold oh I hadn’t even thought to include artists in that observation. I’d be delighted to have a feed full of artists promoting their stuff. 🤩
@Haste @rhold those semi commercial FOSS brands (along with some of their devs) have been present on Fedi for years (you can add Nextcloud to the mix as well).
I'm occasionally mildly annoyed by the way some of these brand accounts never seem to reply to anyone and they often go quiet if folk point out bugs/issues in their replies, but they seem to have got better in that respect and at least its software/services that folk on here tend to actually use..
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I think if we’re honest with ourselves, the “service” most reporters provide on social media is entirely self-serving. A one-way firehose of signal boosting and self promotion.
“Look at me! I wrote this story. Click on it!”
And then you ask them a question, or have a correction, and nobody reads it, because Wired doesn’t care about building a community, just reaching a consumer. It’s fire and forget.We already have a tool for that, it’s RSS. What value does reposting a link here provide?
@Haste I've run into a small handful of reporters and journalists who've done that, along with a few other content creators who... don't really engage with folks but are here to just drop self-promo and that's that.
I don't really mind certain kinds of self-promo (e.g., "I wrote a thing!" or "I made a thing!"), especially when it's nested within genuine interaction or other interesting posts (even if it's shitposting with another person). I love seeing people drop their art (whatever it is) or writing, and it's given me a lot of cool and new perspectives I haven't otherwise found.
But I think if more journalists and reporters actually engaged with people, it might alleviate (not solve) the issue of how a bunch of 'em forgot who they claim they write for and inform. It might even get a few to stop doing disinformation or strong one-sided perspectives of news stories (e.g., when all of their info for a story comes primarily from cops or corporate mouthpieces without further looking into it).
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@bri7 @odd I bet the internet itself is also kind of different than back then. I don’t have a base for comparison with twitter but I encountered this recently going back to play WoW.
It’s like.. the sewage we’ve all been wading in has made people more cautious and cynical. So it’s kind of just harder to talk to strangers than it used to be online?
At least, it’s hard to imagine using the internet in some of the ways that used to feel normal.
@Haste Could be. I'm pretty nostalgic for the time when search was Webcrawler and Altavista. Don't know if the early internet was as trustworthy as I'd give it credit for now, but at least there were less financial incentives to lie to users.
Now I don't really have the energy to retake the net. I read about the small web and it sounds a lot of fun, but somehow I can't really get the hang of it.
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@Haste How are you defining journalists? For me a journalist is someone like @briankrebs Not many around anymore, I gave up on NPR over a decade ago because quality and depth were gone, despite them still retaining some real journalists, they weren't allowed to work as such. I suspect Brian has much deeper understanding and insights into the issue than myself with his background and expertise.
@CliffsEsport @Haste Yeah, back when I first started in journalism in the 90s, the major publications all had real experts who were assigned to or carved out specific beats like aviation, cars, healthcare, education, the environment, the courts, etc. These were largely well educated people who knew these awfully complex subjects intimately and could explain them simply but fairly to anyone. To the extent they want any reporters to write about these specific subjects anymore, newsrooms tend to favor young (cheap, replaceable) general assignment folks who lack that institutional knowledge.
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R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
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It’s been a weird couple days; I keep running into this talking point that “journalists won’t use Mastodon unless we incentivize engagement farming”.
Meanwhile I’m having a *great* experience here, because I use it to— I dunno— actually talk to people and form relationships?
I reject the premise that mastodon isn’t useful for reporters. I think it’s more accurate that modern news orgs use social media in purely extractive ways.
You might get more reporters that way, but you won’t like them.
@Haste Thank goodness there is someone here talking about one-way communication from journos and big follower “personalities”. Extractive is exactly the right term and I hate that approach. There should be engagement and community building - especially important now IMO. Just followed you.
