YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Sure, but it's become a major issue with social media too because of the ease and ability to amplify things that aren't even something major or regional media would cover and profitable media still has some incentive to not be completely inaccurate because of liability. Now you can have the dumbest people with no concern for liability, because they own nothing and don't really have any source of income, making factually inaccurate AI assisted posts, videos, images, etc that inflame the general public who do no verification or fact checking.

Just an example, but in my city there have been some local cost overruns on projects, which of course is a problem. But the amount is not huge, ~ 3 million which has accumulated over like 5 years. The money was clearly spent on projects as they have been completed, but there are people making videos doxxing every contractor that did anything with the city, calling for FBI investigations and posting the personal information and videos contractors,city employees, elected officials families and coming up with wildly numbers 30 million+ etc to say they have been stealing the funds. It's impactful to the point that some of the contractors have decline further municipal wok which literally is going to add millions of costs as the local companies were considerably cheaper, plus it will delay projects.

Plus the fun thing is many of the people making videos etc don't even live here and half of the commenters threatening violence etc are from other places in the country and don't even realize the discussion isn't about their town.

It's also not democracy, and never has been (with rare exceptions).

I think that removes agency and responsibility from the public.

The truth is that people like outrage and outrageous content.

Boring, even handed content does not get engagement.

We have to call out human nature to be able to reckon with it.

a hallmark of fascism and dictatorships is the capture of media, and the censorship of it.

i find it hard to accept that the solution to your problem here is that democracy must fall because of propaganda, when the very same propaganda is what leads to dictatorship.

Without a way to create objective dialogue, what is any system of government other than the picture it paints. Facts, and nothing else, is the only way to maintain a democracy.

Once you permit subjectivity, conjecture, and propaganda, like, say... when right wing billionaires buy create fox news, buy cnn, john oliver, colbert, every local news network (sinclar), washington post, tik tok, twitter, etc etc etc etc etc........ democracy is no longer possible.

I agree the world was better with chronological feeds.

But humans prefer to spent more time on enraging/outrageous content.

So in a competitive social media environment - the platform with the most engaging content will win.

When TikTok launched short form Video - instagram’s choice was to copy or lose.

20 years ago, presidents weren't talking about cleansing countries of immigrants, or allowing foreign adversaries to bomb cities that skew the opposite of their political identity.

the concept of a democracy, and the root of power being the will of the people is far more sound than a dictatorship.

What youre seeing today is the result of a 70 year long campaign that started when nixon resigned and roger ailes said nixon was actually innocent and founded fox news on the principle that the media was the real reason he was impeached.

and then suddenly we're surprised to see right wing authoritarian technocrats buying up every piece of media they can, as fast as they can, after they systematically destroyed every regulation put in place to prevent that.

No. Our democracy was not lost. It was conquered by right wing authoritarians who seek to purge any and all political opposition.