They focus on misinformation, but I would argue that a deluge of "noise" is also pollution: the vast amounts of irrelevant, distracting content, and the popular platforms that do little to help us reduce that noise.
But the Internet is mostly pull not push. If you are under a deluge of noise, you have the power to control that. I think FOMO has led people to make poor decisions, driving people to Facebook and Twitter, and subsequently they find themselves overwhelmed with noise. It can be somewhat addictive too since it's cheap excitement and satisfaction; but that also erodes your willpower to do actual work. I recommend disconnecting.
> If you are under a deluge of noise, you have the power to control that.
Let's flip that around to illustrate the systemic issue here. Earlier today, there was a front page HN submission that touched on alcoholism. It seems to me that the statement, "Alcohol is mostly pull not push. If you are consuming too much alcohol, you have the ability to control that." is not a reasonable one when applied to an alcoholic.
To be clear, the above statement regarding alcohol is reasonable for me - but then I'm not an alcoholic. Similarly, while many people are capable of regulating their "information consumption" as you suggest, it is clear that there are also many who struggle to do so.
I don't pretend to actually have a workable solution; I just wanted to try to illustrate the systemic aspect of the issue.
Without trying to make a particular point for or against your point, I'd argue that alcohol is most definitely not 'pull', even in a time where overt advertising for alcohol appears to be regulated.
Alcohol is extremely difficult to avoid, for various reasons. Primarily social, but to a lesser degree in entertainment. In the same way that once upon a time the cool actors smoked (and sometimes they still do), drinking is still omnipresent in film/tv.
I'd say this supports your perspective, but mostly I just wanted to point that out. Alcohol is definitely nowhere near close to being a 'pull' sort of indulgence.
I think this is an issue of what is meant by the term 'pull'.
I used it to refer to physical consumption of alcohol, and by analogy spending time browsing the internet or similar. I'd quibble that the way you're using it would be more appropriately termed 'exposure', and then you could roughly equate social situations where alcohol use is prevalent to websites that expose you to a deluge of information.
This might seem like needless hair splitting, but I think it's core to the point I was trying to make. Exposure to alcohol at a social event isn't a problem for me - a non-alcoholic - because alcohol is pull (ie no one is actively coercing me to consume it). But that's irrelevant to an alcoholic, for whom exposure itself poses a problem.
Similarly, no one is forcing me to browse social media or navigate through to the next clickbait headline. But for some people, mere exposure is sufficient to cause this - they fail to successfully self-regulate their information intake.
So then to complete the chain of analogies, the article is about the power of employing such a deluge of information in a motivated manner. Depending on how nefariously this is done, we might compare it to anything from regular advertising (open and obvious), to product placement in movies (subliminal), to historical cigarette advertising prior to regulation (open, but usage is harmful to health).
This essay, "Advertising is Cancer on Society", makes many good points about advertising subverting and infesting traditional means of communication. Pull, not push doesn't help you anymore if articles you find are advertising in disguise.
http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
There are very determined and well-paid people working to confuse you, make you waste your time checking and ultimately give up.
It is (well, technically - not reasonably with push notifications being abused for ad delivery), but there's a lot of push content embedded in the pull content. For instance, when I visit HN, I pull information intentionally. If I follow a HN thread to an interesting article, I again pull information. But the ads that are in that article are definitely push.
'b0rsuk already linked my longer exploration of the topic. In a lot of places in that essay, you could replace "advertising" with "propaganda" with no loss in the argument. The way I see it, the two are different only in their goals (direct economic vs. political gain) - beyond that, they're the same thing.
I'd argue that even 'pulling information intentionally' is quite possibly more influenced by 'push' approaches than you might be aware of. While I think this is less of an issue on HN than on, say, Reddit, there's plenty of evidence that shows that it's quite possible to 'push' particular things to the front page, and if that's the well you're drawing from, it means you're affected by that.
EDIT: I've had this suspicion not so much with articles, but with comments. In particular political discussions I couldn't help but feel that there was deluge of comments arguing in favor of a particular position that struck me as manufactured.
It is pull, but for example, that clickbait alcohol headline on this site, which didn’t even adjust for population and seems to have cherry picked data ... it took me tons of time to realize the conversation was being shaped by the selective presentation of the truth.
Meanwhile the headline stuck in my mind almost instantaneously and created an impression of the state of the current world.
So I have to take hours away from my device entirely ... but I also have to be very careful what ideas I even glance at, because they take root in my brain.
I don't think it's really the popular platforms' fault though. Simply what has happened is that the internet has dramatically lowered the cost of distributing and of consuming information. Therefore, information gets distributed and consumed that would not have been worth the cost in the past.
Your point about the distribution costs is true, but platforms have a huge role in shaping those costs. If they encouraged curation/filtering, the distribution costs of unwelcome content would increase. But platforms want to flood people with content for two reasons:
1. Induce people to linger longer, thereby increasing “engagement”.
2. Insert promoted content (ads) into the deluge such that they become hard to filter out.
So sharing/dissemination platforms deserve as much of the blame as any other factor.
True, but you're expecting the platforms to behave honorably and not in the way that maximizes their profits. My point is the platforms' business model is a consequence of the economics of online information distribution.
Or to put it differently: anyone is free to create a competing platform that only hosts "high quality" content, but it seems no one has found out how to make that work on a large scale so far.
That's a good reason to regulate some of these practices out of existence. As you say, what happens today is a natural low point in the landscape of online information distribution; the only way to raise it is to reconfigure the landscape.
I would disagree with that idea that the vast amount of irrelevant and distracting content is somehow the problem.
Believe it or not it's an incredibly challenging problem. Google is burned at the stake everyday for their biased response on searches when they're parsing disgusting amounts of data and attempting to minimize noise. It's a damned if you do and damned if you don't honestly, because even if you can effectively minimize returns for a given query (regardless of topic), there is then information loss to some degree and therefore arguably a bias.
