Why the Media is Dying (It Sucks, No Mentally Healthy People Will Tolerate This for Long)
THERE is a lot of stuff going on in the world, but few people bother or even try to cover it (quoting "tweets" is faster and cheaper, even when those "tweets" are false). The "money-chasing sellouts" (like clickfraud spamnil [1, 2, 3] go further than just spamming and some refuse to offer a simple disclosure of who funds the lies, e.g. Microsoft. So a lot of today's media is just lies and there's no easy way to detect who funds the lies (or that those are lies, irrespective of whom funds these).
One reader gave a couple of new examples:
"Microsoft is pushing these sales to take advantage of the sunk cost fallacy in its fight against open formats," the reader explained.
Then there's also spam.
A huge proportion of articles in RSS feeds of self-describing "news" site are like this. There are ways to identify this spam from a distance, but it's still annoying, time-consuming, and it means that linking to actual news articles helps fuel the spam, too. This is intentional; this is what they look to 'monetise'.
It's sort of getting hard to blame Web users for not reading news sites. Seeing what quality many sank to (lies and ads disguised as news, sometimes SEO slop), who can argue against that choice? █