“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • I think you’re in the same boat I am where I fucking haaaaaaate the culture on link aggregators (and probably other social media) where people will bitch and moan to no end that their preferred format (publicly reacting to disconnected headlines whose articles they haven’t read) isn’t giving them literally all the information they need to form a cogent opinion.

    • “I had time to write a 300-word short essay about this headline, but I’m going to whine if I get called for something in the first paragraph that invalides everything I said.”
    • “I can’t believe this headline mentioned a pretty common thing I’m not personally familiar with but the publication’s target audience obviously is.”
    • "Headline didn’t answer every single question I could possibly wonder? Uh, clickbait much?
    • “The headline writer didn’t account for this batshit non sequitur I drew from it, so they’re basically lying.”

    They genuinely think that the article body should be effectively superfluous to the headline – not just to have a basic gist of but to discuss and debate current events, which is insane. It reminds me of people who think they can learn math and physics by passively watching somebody else do it – which is true only to an utterly incosequential extent.

    Speaking as someone who’s read thousands of articles for research, I feel confident saying that reading the article is an insane force multiplier to understanding. Any time you spent reacting to the headline would’ve been 3x as effective put into reading even just part of an article. This doesn’t just apply to current events, and even I haven’t thoroughly learned this lesson; so many times I’ve been editing Wikipedia and arrived at a point where reading one goddamn article for three minutes would’ve saved me half an hour of fucking around (“two hours of debugging can save you five minutes of reading the documentation”).

    This is my way of pleading with you (you, the non-CombatWombat reader): it’s enriching once you can steel yourself and work through the initial dopamine drought, and it quickly becomes enjoyable. It’s not your fault it’s so hard psychologically; this was done to you by formats that value engagement with the platform over engagement with the material.

    But if you don’t, please at least accept that headlines cannot always contain everything you want.









  • Buddy, I don’t like the culture of ragebait that the Internet has fomented either, but this isn’t that. This is an LGBTQ magazine reporting on an influential figure’s intentions to disenfranchise every trans person in the US.

    The news in its ideal form exists to tell you about important things that are happening, not to balance itself to make you feel better about the world (and things generally are pretty terrible right now).

    The examples of “Young Doctor Wants to Improve Healthcare” or “Environmentalist Wants to Protect Our Forests” are totally nebulous in what they want to achieve, ambiguous in how they plan to achieve it compared to an org that’s been systemically dismantling the US from the inside for over a year, and a type of story that gets reported on all the time when it’s actually consequential.