Hate the click bait headlines, totally degrading to a paper like Washington post that presumably wants to maintain respectability. But you won't believe what happens next!
My favorite HN moment was when we were all debating whether a crew could burn a shipwrecked boat for several years. Someone who happened to be burning a boat for fuel for years stepped in and confirmed it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10803552
Mine (in this vein at least) was when someone posted an article about optimizing FedEx's location and then someone who was involved with it stepped in and gave the real story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9281466
Probably not the best idea. While they do tend to summarise well, comments tend to be filled with opinion - generally a better idea to ensure you form your own, rather than rely on a potentially biased third party.
I also find that the discussions in certain comments/responses can tend to go largely off topic. When you're on mobile, instead of scrolling ALL the way down to the next parent comment, you (I, at least), tend to navigate away to other HN posts.
But the article is a biased opinion of a single third party? It's better to rely on HN comments where the discussion is open rather than blindly accepting what a journalist writes.
Don't forget their long status as a mockingbird operation. You got downvoted with no comment because there is very little intellectually honest retort to be had, but in their defense, the surveillance state and general degredation of journalism as a whole has affected much more than just WaPo.
The fourth estate is dying and the internet, which should be it's replacement, is under legislative attack because it is a threat to the oligarchy.
For folks who didn't understand the Operation Mockingbird reference, it seems to refer to the CIA in the 50s - 70s hiring the publisher & co-owner of the Washington Post, to run a propaganda operation feeding misinformation to reporters at all the major newspapers in the US:
Well, the internet is also under attack from various actors seeing to distort the narrative for their own means. Tons of planted comments and highly questionable "news" websites".
Traditional media had similar problems, but to a much lesser extend... and the biases/propaganda were much more obvious.
Indeed, the sockpuppetry really hit hard around 2010/2011, and I've yet to see a website handle it very well. Honestly HN is one of the last places I take the actual time to comment on because of it. There are some methods that slashdot uses that I think could also be helpful, but there is no easy fix.
Like you said though, one interesting side-effect is that for the astute reader you can discern what the talking points of the day/week/month are by paying attention to the narrative.
If I'm going to read a daily, it's probably the Washington Post, NY Times or the WSJ. I haven't noticed a particular drop in quality of any of those three. Why do you think the Post has gotten worse?
Also, it doesn't "kill kindness", it reduces the empathy of test subjects, but actually what they measured is estimations of the pain experienced by others. Which doesn't seem exactly like empathy, and definitely isn't kindness, because kindness is action.
The entire news industry is in dire straits so clickbait is only going to get worse. I remember it was just 10 years ago, the news industry was desperately trying to game the SEO to stay afloat, now they have entire social media teams dedicated to clickbaiting headlines and spamming stories on social media. WaPo got a huge cash infusion from Bezos ( AMZN founder ) and they hired a bunch of social media "experts" so they will be at the forefront of the new clickbait norm. Despite Bezos' assertions, he is going to expect "dividends" from his investment in WaPo.
Whereas other industries fully recovered from the financial crisis via cheap debt, the news industry only stopped the bleeding. Their wound hasn't healed and only that cheap debt goes away, the blooding letting in the industry is going to happen again. So you can't blame them for trying any desperate tactic to stave off layoffs/collapse/etc.
But if you think about it, the news industry has always been at the forefront of clickbait. In the late 1800s, during the heyday of yellow journalism, Hearts and Pulitzer intentionally lied and pushed clickbait via their news properties. If you were around during 2000, you know that the news industry feasted on the Y2K scaremongering clickbaits.
I think the clickbait was always there. It's just now, people are more aware of it.
Hate the click bait headlines, totally degrading to a paper like Washington post that presumably wants to maintain respectability. But you won't believe what happens next!