alt Hacker NewsI remember reading a theory on this that basically it is a symptom of the decline of the news media industry. The positive attitude in the industry lined up with good times for them until around 2000 when their revenue peaked: https://compote.slate.com/images/42207fae-3603-4fe5-b4fe-a65...
For them it really is doom and gloom, and they spread it to the rest of society like a contagion by their writing much like the the banking crisis in 2008 poisoned the entire economy.
I'm not sure if it's true, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
Replies
watwut • yesterday at 7:53 PM
Except that journals pump one super positive article after another. It is everywhere else people get annoyed ... including at journalists that pretends tech is better then it is.
"If it bleeds, it leads" is older than society. A news org can put out a perfect spread of articles that cover a whole spectrum of positive to negative, and social media and normal human beings will only attract to and focus on the negative. Social media has been enhancing that effect, because they figured out that rage bait is more effective than even the most positive message you can come up with, because we are animals.
If you want to maximize "Engagement", which these companies explicitly do, then you WILL maximize rage and doom and gloom. They drive engagement more than anything else.