buybuydandavis comments on When considering incentives, consider the incentives of all parties - Less Wrong

-5 Post author: casebash 29 May 2016 01:47PM

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Comment author: Lumifer 06 June 2016 12:59:33AM 2 points [-]

But I'm not commenting on quality of the writing as much as the structure of what is written.

That structure is a major element of the "quality of writing".

Plus, of course, the incentives changed somewhat. If you are going out of business, clicks/eyeballs become more important than the reputation of a respectable publication.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 06 June 2016 10:08:52AM 2 points [-]

Ok, I think I'm catching on.

It's not really that people were trained differently. (May or may not be). Instead, market conditions have changed, and therefore what the market produces has changed.

Evidence and argument takes time. Stories and stream of consciousness can be churned out. Whether that trade off is better to survive in current conditions is dependent on the particulars of the conditions.

I can see an argument that with the barriers to entry in publishing removed, the proliferation of outlets means fewer eyeballs for each. In that environment, revenue goes down.

Also, the number of people who want a reasoned and evidenced article is limited. Their tastes were probably overly accommodated in the past, because of the meritocratic competition for the few chairs at the table left smart, talented people at the table making decisions. With the click democracy and proliferation of outlets, the mass who have relatively little interest in reason and evidence will have more outlets more suited to their tastes.

Comment author: Lumifer 06 June 2016 02:41:07PM 2 points [-]

See another current story on the fall of Salon which goes into some details about how quality first slipped and then went into free fall. Notable quote:

“The low point arrived when my editor G-chatted me with the observation that our traffic figures were lagging that day and ordered me to ‘publish something within the hour,’” Andrew Leonard, who left Salon in 2014, recalled in a post. “Which, translated into my new reality, meant ‘Go troll Twitter for something to get mad about — Uber, or Mark Zuckerberg, or Tea Party Republicans — and then produce a rant about it.’ … I performed my duty, but not without thinking, ‘Is this what 25 years as a dedicated reporter have led to?’ That’s when it dawned on me: I was no longer inventing the future. I was a victim of it. So I quit my job to keep my sanity.”

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