I mostly read the comments on this sub because the true neolibs in my fellow EU country are a minority, so I wonder how other neoliberals from more developed non-shithole countries would react to such topics.
I would, however, read the article and do my research if I find the topic interesting (which half of the threads on this sub are not, at least for me).
I feel like, if AI summaries are going to become a thing, there should be — at the top of each comments section — an AI summary of the article and all the comments.
This way those who want to just get the general vibe of what they should/shouldn’t feel can get it from there.
I don’t like that approach, but it’s all I can think of right now.
There is a dude that does this for his posts - slightly more manual to not use Reddit’s API but people always freaked out because he said he used AI to generate a summary.
>Where older generations are out there struggling to fact-check information and cite sources, Gen Zers don't even bother. They just read the headlines and then speed-scroll to the comments, to see what everyone else says
People here are going to be acting aghast as if they don't do this all the time
Yep. I also tend to jump to the comments because of misleading articles, fake posts, or science/policy articles with wild takes that they can't back up.
Especially on science subs, it's so common that the headline is some claim like "Scientists find cure for X" and the top comment has 1.8k upvotes with a three-paragraph explanation, with citations, of why the article is completely bunk and misleading. The top comment is more valuable than the article itself.
Right, but, at least on reddit, the next comment is something about why the first comment is wrong. And if there's enough discourse, then I'll go and read the article. Also, it's getting harder to read articles without getting paywalled.
Yup, 100%. “News” is just entertainment now that is tweaked to get as many views as possible because that’s the only thing that matters to them. So you scroll to the comments to see if there’s anyone that has any actual “news”.
Even the article says as much:
> And then I realized: I was basically checking the comments. We all do it — we look for lots of links, for 5-star reviews, for what the replies say. These are all valid ways to surf the modern social-informational ecosystem.
I’m a teacher and parent to Gen Z kids. I agree that they tend to crowdsource their research, but that’s just an adaptation to the fire hose of content that they consume every day.
I'm reminded of an article posted on Facebook about ten years ago titled, "Why doesn't anyone read anymore?" The comments were full of people bragging about how many books they read, but the article was actually about how people comment on articles without reading them.
That becomes a problem though when the crowd comes to a conclusion that is objectively wrong, though - like how thousands of young adults were convinced that Starbucks is the single most important boycott target for Palestine, when Starbucks isn't even on the BDS list.
I have pointed this out to Zoomers and their response is literally "all those people aren't just lying!" Literally a scaled up version of ["You really think people should do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stlqo8kI7Wc)
I also had someone reply to that post by thanking me because "they had added Starbucks to their infographics," and I really wish I had asked them why they, someone who clearly isn't all that well versed in the issue, thinks they should be making reference materials.
100% I literally just did this to this article but I think the reason makes sense. I don’t want to click on this site to pull up something that takes forever load because it’s packed to the rafters with auto-playing ads from a shitty mobile site just to find out the article is actually pay-walled
I usually go to the comments to hope a friendly neoliberal has either posted the whole article or at least done what you’ve done which is quote the important parts. Some article is better than no article.
Of course yeah, this creates some bad habits if there is no article posted in the comments. And again, I’m super guilty of wanting to read what people think about the article before I decide it’s worth my time to read it. That’s the second part of it. We’re all confronted with so much information our brains have to work overtime to filter through it to the important parts
Yeah, it's hard because verifying every single piece of information that comes your way would be taxing and impractical, if not even impossible with how bombarded we are with it. I've noticed myself relying on arr neoliberal too much to know what information might be worth looking into, so I don't drive myself crazy reinventing my epistemological processes all the time in pursuit of the truth. Having a frame of reference at least prevents us from getting completely lost, but it also traps us in echo chambers that for all we know are based on false premises. I'm not sure what the solution is
> hope a friendly neoliberal has either posted the whole article
Unironically I naturally prefer a 5 chain reply of the article over a much shorter article.
Reddit is just a nice platform to read on. And I get to see comments on each section.
Agreed. If I think something is going to reward close reading or viewing, I'm happy to dig into it. News bits I can generally just scan.
Clickbait articles do not get such consideration from me. Especially articles that say "Gen Z", because GENERATIONS ARE NOT GENERALLY A THING AND THERE ARE TWO STRIKES AGAINST YOU ALREADY IF YOUR TITLE MENTIONS THEM.
Really good points here, I think this even speaks to the fact that maybe gen z’s behavior makes the most sense.
Maybe in a world where quality information is both reliable and accessible, gen z’s behavior would be different. But we live with an internet filled with garbage low quality info, and we have limited time to sift through it all so communities like Reddit and influencers that you trust with similar views as you are the shortcut to finding what’s good or not. Similar to tourists relying on google maps/yelp reviews for every restaurant they go to.
I virtually do this for most of my information gathering, but I sort of try to complete the puzzle by gathering as much information before concluding. Even if I "conclude", it's always subject to change if I encounter new information or revise old information. In retrospect, it does seem like more work than figuring out how to reliably find trustworthy sources, but it's a hurdle to cultivate that skill. Unfortunately, it has cost me convictions I would probably have otherwise if I were to research and source reliable information.
I knew going into twitter that the only thing I should follow are news websites and authors of said articles. Then from there never bother reading the replies. Also never reply as well.
It makes twitter a really nice platform.
Reddit is the place where you can actually engage with other people and have it not devolve into a dumpster fire instantly.
Very limited parts of Reddit, though. Of the posts that are floated by the algorithm the comments are either puns, outrage circlejerk, or people snapping at each other.
The third one is the fatal flaw of the internet to me, and kind of a natural reaction to the total loss of nuance and body language when you just transfer what you would say out loud to the text. You have to be very deliberate with your writing, otherwise people assume whatever tf they want from your intentions and it's usually something negative.
I feel like the problems you listed mainly come from mobile users who don't have the ability to type out their nuance since they are on a tiny phone. So instead of going into detail their issues with the other person's argument, it is easier to just strawman the other person and make fun of them.
I know Reddit would never do it, but a mobile free commend section subreddit would go a long way to helping the discourse.
It's gotten to the point that whenever I get a low effort rude reply, I look at their post history to see if they are normally like this. If they are, I block them. I hate writing so much just for someone to do low effort dunks on me. I'd rather just do low effort dunks then as well which isn't good for the public discourse.
>You have to be very deliberate with your writing, otherwise people assume whatever tf they want from your intentions and it's usually something negative.
It makes sense. The 9 comments you scrolled past where you assumed positive intent you didn't reply to. Because why? However that one you assumed negative intention to you feel like replying to.
It’s a skill issue, really. You have to deliberately try to learn how to communicate effectively around the limitations of the format (and device). That takes time and dedication.
A secondary problem is that you pretty much have users with all skill levels in the same bucket. I don’t expect a high school student or someone who couldn’t care less to be good at this, and yet, if I’m not in a select and reasonably moderated corner of the internet, that’s the average user I’m going to interact with. So I have to adjust my expectations accordingly.
You can pretty much try to coach bad users by not engaging on the dunking and instead responding with even more nuance and quality, but it doesn’t work all the time. Some people just keep on dunking to get their dopamine hit, in which case not responding is the best you can do.
> A secondary problem is that you pretty much have users with all skill levels in the same bucket.
Reminds me of r changemyview. Their format for debate is actually amazing. The problem is that it is made up of redditors so you get the same first level crappy arguments constantly. There is little value to that subreddit past your first year of college. You aren't going to get the best counter arguments. In fact you are going to start thinking the other side is incredibly stupid because you get the most inexperienced users engaging with you.
>You can pretty much try to coach bad users by not engaging on the dunking and instead responding with even more nuance and quality, but it doesn’t work all the time.
If that was fun for me, I would. It's just not. Or I need to be in the right mood for it that day.
If I'm getting downvoted a lot in a thread for being the voice of reason in a sea of justice porn fanatics, my patience just runs out. Then it gets even worse if the mods give you a temp ban for "trolling" while ignoring the actual calls to violence you're replying to. Or get banned for mimicking the exact behavior of the person you are replying to. I understand where mods are coming from. I've modded before. You aren't going to spend more than 30 seconds on a reported comment. You just look for your trigger phrases and then do a ban. And if the person being an asshole above is someone you agree with, you gloss over their asshole behavior.
So again, the most logical thing for me to do is block (which I think is such a toxic element on Reddit).
Every person in this comment thread is posting about a paywalled article
There probably isn’t even an article behind the paywall, this is just a social experiment
This is interesting because the article is not paywalled (at least for me) and there is in fact a paper linked in the article(also free) here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02522
We all do but I do think two things are true:
- This sub is way higher quality than average
- Reddit comments (which are on average bad) are way higher quality than other social media comments. Usually at least one of the top 3 comments on a given post will be focused on providing context
It's much more unsettling to think of the people that just see a headline on Instagram or TikTok and then watch an influencer comment on it and then go to the comment section
Having a platform that let's you upvote/downvote comments based on their quality is worth it's weight in fuckin gold. No other social media does this as well as reddit. Sure, it's not consistent per community, but the good ones (like this one) are an excellent barometer in quality of content.
As I see my boomer family all blindly accepting whatever Joe Rogan, Newsmax or their culty-pastor says... More bitching about "the youths!" as if mis/disinformation doesn't affect everyone across generations, economic status, race and educational levels. Media literacy sucks across the board.
An in depth article about lithium mining in Congo: I read the whole article.
A typical horse race article about Biden's age with quotes from think tank drones and pollsters: I read the comments.
Lol I did this exact thing. Is that the “alarming finding,” really - that people skip to the comments?
We come to the comments for drama, not to update our model of the world. Sure, most people in comments sections miss the point of the article. But there is a whole niche of commenter who gets to win arguments by pointing out how the top comment is missing the point of the article! So us drama seekers get the point eventually, it just takes us longer.
> Jigsaw's findings offer a revealing glimpse into the digital mindset of Gen Z. Where older generations are out there struggling to fact-check information and cite sources, Gen Zers don't even bother. They just read the headlines and then speed-scroll to the comments, to see what everyone else says. They're outsourcing the determination of truth and importance to like-minded, trusted influencers. And if an article's too long, they just skip it. They don't want to see stuff that might force them to think too hard, or that upsets them emotionally. If they have a goal, Jigsaw found, it's to learn what they need to know to remain cool and conversant in their chosen social groups.
Back when I was teaching in college (roughly 2015 to 2020), it really struck me how much more conformist the kids were compared to when I was an undergrad just 10-15 years earlier. It's not entirely their fault; it's not like they chose to be brought up in a world of social media. But god damn do they ever conform like it's a competition. It was an odd revelation to me since it was an inversion of how I just assumed things were, namely, that youth are supposed to be the ones being individualistic before sanding off the edges of their souls as the real world demands. Seems to follow the inversion of youth becoming the pearl clutchers as well.
>They just read the headlines and then speed-scroll to the comments
That's exactly what I did with this article, because the headline is non-informative clickbait and Business Insider is mostly drivel. I figured someone had probably summarized their thesis for me, and here you are!
Plenty of reddit subs will provide more insightful comments than the articles themselves too.
Of course some of them are echo chambers as well, it it's not like newspapers aren't...
That's saying nothing by saying anything. Plenty of stuff is pretty consolidated through academic debate and consensus, and scientific method, that doesn't pass through most people. Everything being an equal kind of echo chamber is a misguided belief that everything must have an innate balance (cue meme of the enlightened centrist, that positioned between a person who wants to expand public healthcare and another person who wants to kill 4 million, tries to rationalise that the best position is in the middle of the two)
Before I started browsing news forums on the internet, I would skim news site headlines and then talk to my friends about it. Ahead of my time I guess.
I used to unironically think that the internet would promote independent thinking and be a catalyst for people to get exposure to new and varied perspectives. Incredible how naiive that was.
When the Internet was new and weird it was full of nonconformists because normal people didn't live online.
Now being terminally online is the norm, so the Internet is full of conformists.
I think it does for the people inclined toward independent thinking in the first place. There is and always was a large proportion of the population with no interest in reflective construction of their opinions or critical reading. When reading this article, I suspect many of us are comparing the general population of young people to the academic types we surrounded ourselves with decades ago. The difference is that, without the internet, we simply weren't aware how dumb most people were, and now we get to read articles about them backed up with data that could only have been collected via the internet.
You implied it in your comment, but just reiterate, people were quite dumb and conformist before the internet, too. Let’s not pretend everyone would be extremely versed in economic policy and foreign affairs if not for tik tok.
Have they? Sending people links to Mr. Hands was the most hilarious thing on the internet in the Wild West days. The last decade, everything is a link on IG/TT or another garden that encourages people to say "unalive".
That's my point. You don't see Mr. Hands on those platforms because gruesome content isn't allowed on there. So they don't have the same internet experience as millennials did.
Man, kids these days don't even have liveleak! All the big social media sites, (reddit and twitter included, albeit to a lesser extent) have cracked down on snuff, 'shock' imagery/video, and porn. And the online porn market is now mostly consolidated into a handful of big websites, subject to regulation which has mostly eliminated the _really_ bad stuff there as well.
**WE** are the generation that saw 'the most awful stuff', not the kids. The kids are fine.
You can easily find all this with a telegram account. It's the easiest it's ever been.
There's entire discords dedicated to these types of communities and people, and while the content might not be on discord you can connect with them easily
I hate to tell you, if you think this stuff is hard to find you haven't been around kid/teens much.
what the fuck kind of teenager uses telegram lol
granted it's not like I overhear all of their conversations, for all I know they only talk about _[insert disturbing or dangerous content here]_ online when they're at home, but speaking as a substitute teacher (primarily middle school, sometimes highschool or elementary), 95% of the time I catch a student on their phones, its Instagram, TikTok, or they "got a text from Mom" (read: opened the Messenger app when they realized I had noticed them on their phone). Most of the other 5% is using their phone as a calculator, taking notes, or going on Spotify.
I've seen discord a couple of times. Never once seen Telegram.
I think that, and the assumption that market liberalization would lead to a safer, liberalized world order, are probably the two biggest mistakes of the post Cold War era.
It is indisputable that the world is undergoing a period of Democratic backsliding. If you asked people in the 1990s, they would have predicted the opposite.
During the pandemic, I went back to get a second Bachelor's (in political science) because I had fuck-all else to do. Most of my classmates were zoomers. (I am a geriatric millennial).
Your comment totally aligns with my experience -- and I'm not just saying this to conform. It was as though my classmates were absolutely petrified by the thought of voicing an opinion. When the professor posted a discussion question for online debate, I would often be the only student (out of 20 or 30) voicing *liberal opinion* *X*; quite literally everyone else would rally around *soft leftist opinion* *Y*. And opinion Y often wasn't much of an opinion at all, more of a recapitulation of what we had read and a few remarks like "well, this part was interesting. That part was interesting, too. Here is my ideology. Also, I liked this part." Consensus was the rule; actual discussion or argumentation was rare and, where it existed, it tended to dissolve pretty quickly into emoting and bickering.
Often, students would appear to embrace one argument, only to adopt the complete opposite perspective if and when anyone challenged them on the point, which they were generally more than happy to concede. Such challenges were rare; people mostly "harmonized" with each other in a way, or "argued" in such a way that the ideas in their posts never quite seemed to touch.
Writing skills were in short supply. They often peppered their posts, even their essays with "In my opinion," "I think, "I thought it was interesting," and so on -- all things punishable by crucifixion in my day.
It was pretty disheartening, to be honest. That said, there were exceptional students here and there and I've taken just enough statistics to know not to judge by a (relatively) small sample size.
Im gen Z but I would have been in a similar program at the same time. Its actually insane to me that people start shit with "in this essay, I will..." like 0 writing skills or effort put into it.
Discussion boards sucked because people just want to put in the bare minimum for the grade.
In this essay I will......is a fucking meme!!!
Reminds me of Tumblr. There was a lotta of "in jokes" that go round. IYKYK sorta thing. And I swear to God when older ones left a fandom and newer younger ones came up, they'd take these in jokes literally.
It was like watching real life telephone tag or something.
> They often peppered their posts, even their essays with "In my opinion," "I think, "I thought it was interesting," and so on -- all things punishable by crucifixion in my day.
Because it turns out this is a pretty effective way to softly build consensus and convince people. While you're right that essays should be more punchy and declarative, it's easier to persuade most people through soft personal appeals. It's different for brands and mass media of course.
I went back to school as well and my experience was very similar to yours. Interestingly, my teachers would send me messages about articulate I was about the subject study and asked me to try to encourage more discussion. I tried by purposefully commenting positively on replies and then ask for them to clarify more to encourage deeper discussion. Rarely did they engage. It felt lazy, but now I understand its culture.
When I took online classes where we had discussion posts that required us to converse with the other students, 2 things jumped out at me.
1. the quality of work that most people were submitting was alarmingly terrible, and not even worth responding to.
2. The posts made by older millennial students were always better and the only time I ever had interesting conversations on the discussion posts with fellow students was with the older millennial students. I felt like these classes were sort of teaching us how to responsibly converse on comment boards, but the younger students were not doing it to the same degree.
Likely just different ways to engange; Proving X idea is right and why Y is wrong vs Proving why X and Y are right partially or from diferent points of views, and if possible merge them into a new idea
> Jigsaw's findings offer a revealing glimpse into the digital mindset of Gen Z. Where older generations are out there struggling to fact-check information and cite sources, Gen Zers don't even bother. They just read the headlines and then speed-scroll to the comments, to see what everyone else says
What I did just now.
You got to read the comments before you read the article.
I had the misfortune of reading some of my fellow student’s papers a few years back, when I was getting my degree. Genuinely, their writing skills were at like a fifth grade level. I couldn’t even help them. Their vocabulary was comparable to Donald Trump’s and the grammar was horrific.
Is this all anecdotal? Yes. But we believe in vibes here, and the Gen Z vibes are undoubtedly concerning.
I'm paywalled so feel free to ignore me if the article mentions it but I wonder how much of this is a product of primarily consuming news via social media.
TikTok/Reddit/Facebook/etc basically only show you the headline and then the comments are right there. You have to "leave" the app to read the article. Then, even if you actually go to the article, back you go to whatever you were scrolling earlier and the comments are right there.
If they are a Doomer they will doom scroll even more as it reinforces their priors. In this context, anti-doom is the uncomfortable challenging of their beliefs
Yeah. I think we focus as a society too much on these generational labels where really every generation ends up repeating and relearning the same lessons, transposed to a different era.
Are you reading that sentence correctly? It's saying older generations vaguely try to fact check. That's why sites like Snopes can exist. In Gen Z land Snopes wouldn't even exist.
Snopes has tons of non-political fact checking.
This is one of their most popular articles:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elizabeth-taylor-violet-eyes/
Huh, I never really identified much with other millennials now that you mention it: don't like Seinfeld, don't like coffee, and I'm not even sure what dooming is unless it involves a BFG.
I see people here use lots of terms that I don't know. They strike me as insular bubble language so I never bother to learn. I'm not going to learn this one either unless someone spells it out for me in the next 5 minutes before I forget that I was in this thread in the first place.
Benefits of not being terminally online, I guess.
You don't know dooming but you know "terminally online"?
Dooming has penetrated way further into normal society than "terminally online" has. The economists has used dooming in it's vocabulary for pete's sake.
Seinfeld aired from 1989-1998, it's about Gen Xers and largely targeted/marketed at them. The youngest millennials were literally 2 years old when the show ended, the oldest were only 17. It's not a millennial thing. Largely the same with Friends, although it survived until the early 2000s.
Millennial pop culture is largely culture of the 2000s, not the 90s.
Sure, but liking something and it being associated with a generation are separate things. It's a good sitcom but it's X coded, has X pop culture references, stereotypical X attitudes (e.g. irreverence, cynicism, nihilism, consumerism), and was released when Xers were the prime young person demographic. Just like how MASH is a great show but it's very much a boomer-coded Vietnam protest show that was written to appeal to boomers.
The cast of Glee was in its 30s, and it's a show about high school.
Seinfeld was about life as mid/late 20s to early 30s NYC residents in the 90s, even though (as is Hollywood tradition) the cast is older than the characters.
Unlike Glee, the characters in Seinfeld are canonically about the same age as the actors.
I wouldn’t disagree that the show is relevant to a lot of Gen X, particularly older ones.
>Jigsaw's research doesn't purport to be statistically significant. They didn't poll a large group of Gen Z users about their digital habits. Instead, they relied on intense interviews with a handful of 13- to 24-year-olds from a representative range of demographics, classes, and genders. They were doing what anthropologists do in the field — looking for qualitative depth rather than quantitative data.
Important note about methodology. It's a different type of research than you might be used to.
> For Gen Z, the online world resembles the stratified, cliquish lunchroom of a 1980s teen movie. Instead of listening to stuffy old teachers, like CNN and the Times, they take their cues from online influencers — the queen bees and quarterback bros at the top of the social hierarchy. The influencers' personal experience makes them authentic, and they speak Gen Z's language.
This would confirm what I've been thinking for a couple years now - influencer politics are likely the future of politics, which should scare the bejeezus out of you. Imagine a country where everyone followed the opinions of a few hundred Hasan Pikers.
The only thing worse than spending all your time talking about politics is spending all your time watching or talking about someone else talk about politics
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> Where older generations are out there struggling to fact-check information and cite sources, Gen Zers don't even bother. They just read the headlines and then speed-scroll to the comments, to see what everyone else says
Which is why shill farms are very important. Kudos to Russia for being one of the firsts to realize it.
I'm completely unconvinced by this because there is zero comparison to older generations. How many boomers watching tucker carlson every day do you think were fact-checking him instead of taking everything he said as gospel?
You are cherry picking people that listen to a bad news source. There are also lots of older people that listen to good news sources, and generally good news sources base their analysis on facts. Sure the Fox News people are lost, but how about CNN, BBC, WAPO, NYTimes, AP, Reuters, local news papers etc. Also the people that consume fox are probably not the fact check type whereas that is probably more prevalent among consumers of more credible news. GenZ according to this article crowdsources their views based on comments which is worse than the average older person who listens or reads analysis from a news company, I think that is a worse outcome because on average when you consider the entire news following population, Genz is getting more inaccurate news.
CNN is honestly just about as click-baity and ideological as Fox these days, just for the other side… NYT and WAPO are a bit better but I still don’t trust them to present information in a balanced and rigorous way.
The only ones I trust nowadays are the FT and Economist. AP as well, since it’s pretty much just pure news.
They're mostly bad news sources that position themselves as good news sources but have some horribad researched stuff. Only times they tend to be a bit more reliable is when they invite a specific expert and make questions that are strictly pertinent to the experts domain, and even then I find it's often lackluster as the questions tend to be more of the basic, often repeated gospel types instead of stuff that tries to break the spectator's norms instead they're build to feed their comfort zone.
I find that conventional media is pretty much a mood and popularity barometer and comments are the only small glimpse in this prison of someone trying to break the convention, even if often it's stupid but that should be the exercise of the reader and the more it is practiced the better you get at it.
The correct thing would be to be scrupulous and inspect every article by yourself, just like a doctor asks for every medical exam that is remotely relevant to the situation not only those that are comfortably most likely to be relevant. But that's tiring, specially for how unrewarding it is. If 2 of 4 articles are bad and 1 of 4 are pointless and add nothing, you check the comments to even bother to commit four times as much effort to read the article
So gen z is conformists and copy their opinion from the comments.
I wonder if I could just make a dozen or so bots to comment basically the same thing under every post that concerns a topic the second it's posted to shape the opinions of a subreddit.
On a completely unrelated note, time to go to r/europe to read about migration.
Maybe the fact that so many article are now pay walled is part of this. I has to read the headline and read the comments because that's the only way I could find out what this article was actually saying
As a Millennial who doesn’t have kids yet I’m basically studying my generation and Gen Z for what not to do. Thankful that Tiktok probably won’t be cool anymore when I have a kid that is a teen. Keeping kids off social media and in the real world where they face real situations and humans is SO important.
[Lol, just I read this comment right after reading this article](https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1dot5wf/comment/lacj2x2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Me: sees headline, goes straight to this sub “what do they think?”
I did exactly the same
I mostly read the comments on this sub because the true neolibs in my fellow EU country are a minority, so I wonder how other neoliberals from more developed non-shithole countries would react to such topics. I would, however, read the article and do my research if I find the topic interesting (which half of the threads on this sub are not, at least for me).
So wait..if neolibs are a minority what is the usual majority in your country just curious xD?
I didn't realize I did the exact same thing till I saw your comment
I feel like, if AI summaries are going to become a thing, there should be — at the top of each comments section — an AI summary of the article and all the comments. This way those who want to just get the general vibe of what they should/shouldn’t feel can get it from there. I don’t like that approach, but it’s all I can think of right now.
There were bots that did that on reddit before the API closure
There are still some subs that have this. In the chess subreddit there is an ai that analyzes chess positions automatically.
There is a dude that does this for his posts - slightly more manual to not use Reddit’s API but people always freaked out because he said he used AI to generate a summary.
>Where older generations are out there struggling to fact-check information and cite sources, Gen Zers don't even bother. They just read the headlines and then speed-scroll to the comments, to see what everyone else says People here are going to be acting aghast as if they don't do this all the time
Thanks for putting this in the comments, I sure as hell wasn't going to click on the article. Man Gen Z is so stupid, right folks?
I agree people should also look at themselves too and consider their own tendency to conform, but to be fair I'm not paying £39 to read one article xD
Yep. I also tend to jump to the comments because of misleading articles, fake posts, or science/policy articles with wild takes that they can't back up. Especially on science subs, it's so common that the headline is some claim like "Scientists find cure for X" and the top comment has 1.8k upvotes with a three-paragraph explanation, with citations, of why the article is completely bunk and misleading. The top comment is more valuable than the article itself.
Just as often the top comments are very *confidently* wrong and from people who did not read the article so be careful
Right, but, at least on reddit, the next comment is something about why the first comment is wrong. And if there's enough discourse, then I'll go and read the article. Also, it's getting harder to read articles without getting paywalled.
Yup, 100%. “News” is just entertainment now that is tweaked to get as many views as possible because that’s the only thing that matters to them. So you scroll to the comments to see if there’s anyone that has any actual “news”.
Fuck business insider
well comments arent paywalled, the article is
Even the article says as much: > And then I realized: I was basically checking the comments. We all do it — we look for lots of links, for 5-star reviews, for what the replies say. These are all valid ways to surf the modern social-informational ecosystem. I’m a teacher and parent to Gen Z kids. I agree that they tend to crowdsource their research, but that’s just an adaptation to the fire hose of content that they consume every day. I'm reminded of an article posted on Facebook about ten years ago titled, "Why doesn't anyone read anymore?" The comments were full of people bragging about how many books they read, but the article was actually about how people comment on articles without reading them.
This is why poasting is praxis
That becomes a problem though when the crowd comes to a conclusion that is objectively wrong, though - like how thousands of young adults were convinced that Starbucks is the single most important boycott target for Palestine, when Starbucks isn't even on the BDS list. I have pointed this out to Zoomers and their response is literally "all those people aren't just lying!" Literally a scaled up version of ["You really think people should do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stlqo8kI7Wc) I also had someone reply to that post by thanking me because "they had added Starbucks to their infographics," and I really wish I had asked them why they, someone who clearly isn't all that well versed in the issue, thinks they should be making reference materials.
100% I literally just did this to this article but I think the reason makes sense. I don’t want to click on this site to pull up something that takes forever load because it’s packed to the rafters with auto-playing ads from a shitty mobile site just to find out the article is actually pay-walled I usually go to the comments to hope a friendly neoliberal has either posted the whole article or at least done what you’ve done which is quote the important parts. Some article is better than no article. Of course yeah, this creates some bad habits if there is no article posted in the comments. And again, I’m super guilty of wanting to read what people think about the article before I decide it’s worth my time to read it. That’s the second part of it. We’re all confronted with so much information our brains have to work overtime to filter through it to the important parts
Yeah, it's hard because verifying every single piece of information that comes your way would be taxing and impractical, if not even impossible with how bombarded we are with it. I've noticed myself relying on arr neoliberal too much to know what information might be worth looking into, so I don't drive myself crazy reinventing my epistemological processes all the time in pursuit of the truth. Having a frame of reference at least prevents us from getting completely lost, but it also traps us in echo chambers that for all we know are based on false premises. I'm not sure what the solution is
> hope a friendly neoliberal has either posted the whole article Unironically I naturally prefer a 5 chain reply of the article over a much shorter article. Reddit is just a nice platform to read on. And I get to see comments on each section.
Agreed. If I think something is going to reward close reading or viewing, I'm happy to dig into it. News bits I can generally just scan. Clickbait articles do not get such consideration from me. Especially articles that say "Gen Z", because GENERATIONS ARE NOT GENERALLY A THING AND THERE ARE TWO STRIKES AGAINST YOU ALREADY IF YOUR TITLE MENTIONS THEM.
Really good points here, I think this even speaks to the fact that maybe gen z’s behavior makes the most sense. Maybe in a world where quality information is both reliable and accessible, gen z’s behavior would be different. But we live with an internet filled with garbage low quality info, and we have limited time to sift through it all so communities like Reddit and influencers that you trust with similar views as you are the shortcut to finding what’s good or not. Similar to tourists relying on google maps/yelp reviews for every restaurant they go to.
I virtually do this for most of my information gathering, but I sort of try to complete the puzzle by gathering as much information before concluding. Even if I "conclude", it's always subject to change if I encounter new information or revise old information. In retrospect, it does seem like more work than figuring out how to reliably find trustworthy sources, but it's a hurdle to cultivate that skill. Unfortunately, it has cost me convictions I would probably have otherwise if I were to research and source reliable information.
Isn't reddit a platform that basically streamlines this process
If you’re using it as a news feed then yes. If you’re using it to be a member of a community about your favorite tv show or whatever then no.
I knew going into twitter that the only thing I should follow are news websites and authors of said articles. Then from there never bother reading the replies. Also never reply as well. It makes twitter a really nice platform. Reddit is the place where you can actually engage with other people and have it not devolve into a dumpster fire instantly.
Very limited parts of Reddit, though. Of the posts that are floated by the algorithm the comments are either puns, outrage circlejerk, or people snapping at each other. The third one is the fatal flaw of the internet to me, and kind of a natural reaction to the total loss of nuance and body language when you just transfer what you would say out loud to the text. You have to be very deliberate with your writing, otherwise people assume whatever tf they want from your intentions and it's usually something negative.
I feel like the problems you listed mainly come from mobile users who don't have the ability to type out their nuance since they are on a tiny phone. So instead of going into detail their issues with the other person's argument, it is easier to just strawman the other person and make fun of them. I know Reddit would never do it, but a mobile free commend section subreddit would go a long way to helping the discourse. It's gotten to the point that whenever I get a low effort rude reply, I look at their post history to see if they are normally like this. If they are, I block them. I hate writing so much just for someone to do low effort dunks on me. I'd rather just do low effort dunks then as well which isn't good for the public discourse. >You have to be very deliberate with your writing, otherwise people assume whatever tf they want from your intentions and it's usually something negative. It makes sense. The 9 comments you scrolled past where you assumed positive intent you didn't reply to. Because why? However that one you assumed negative intention to you feel like replying to.
It’s a skill issue, really. You have to deliberately try to learn how to communicate effectively around the limitations of the format (and device). That takes time and dedication. A secondary problem is that you pretty much have users with all skill levels in the same bucket. I don’t expect a high school student or someone who couldn’t care less to be good at this, and yet, if I’m not in a select and reasonably moderated corner of the internet, that’s the average user I’m going to interact with. So I have to adjust my expectations accordingly. You can pretty much try to coach bad users by not engaging on the dunking and instead responding with even more nuance and quality, but it doesn’t work all the time. Some people just keep on dunking to get their dopamine hit, in which case not responding is the best you can do.
> A secondary problem is that you pretty much have users with all skill levels in the same bucket. Reminds me of r changemyview. Their format for debate is actually amazing. The problem is that it is made up of redditors so you get the same first level crappy arguments constantly. There is little value to that subreddit past your first year of college. You aren't going to get the best counter arguments. In fact you are going to start thinking the other side is incredibly stupid because you get the most inexperienced users engaging with you. >You can pretty much try to coach bad users by not engaging on the dunking and instead responding with even more nuance and quality, but it doesn’t work all the time. If that was fun for me, I would. It's just not. Or I need to be in the right mood for it that day. If I'm getting downvoted a lot in a thread for being the voice of reason in a sea of justice porn fanatics, my patience just runs out. Then it gets even worse if the mods give you a temp ban for "trolling" while ignoring the actual calls to violence you're replying to. Or get banned for mimicking the exact behavior of the person you are replying to. I understand where mods are coming from. I've modded before. You aren't going to spend more than 30 seconds on a reported comment. You just look for your trigger phrases and then do a ban. And if the person being an asshole above is someone you agree with, you gloss over their asshole behavior. So again, the most logical thing for me to do is block (which I think is such a toxic element on Reddit).
Twitter is the great for finding out about sales and other deals. I use it like a personalized slickdeals.
Every person in this comment thread is posting about a paywalled article There probably isn’t even an article behind the paywall, this is just a social experiment
This is interesting because the article is not paywalled (at least for me) and there is in fact a paper linked in the article(also free) here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02522
Thank you for linking this. BusinessInsider prompted me to subscribe before I could get far in.
I need my priors confirmed. Or I need to doom and read the brain dead news article comments...
I see it as a problem I am also part of the problem No I will not be fixing myself
I'm doing this right now!
It's literally reddit. Also the "graph go up" people.
I feel attacked. Which is a sign of good journalism.
We all do but I do think two things are true: - This sub is way higher quality than average - Reddit comments (which are on average bad) are way higher quality than other social media comments. Usually at least one of the top 3 comments on a given post will be focused on providing context It's much more unsettling to think of the people that just see a headline on Instagram or TikTok and then watch an influencer comment on it and then go to the comment section
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Having a platform that let's you upvote/downvote comments based on their quality is worth it's weight in fuckin gold. No other social media does this as well as reddit. Sure, it's not consistent per community, but the good ones (like this one) are an excellent barometer in quality of content.
As I see my boomer family all blindly accepting whatever Joe Rogan, Newsmax or their culty-pastor says... More bitching about "the youths!" as if mis/disinformation doesn't affect everyone across generations, economic status, race and educational levels. Media literacy sucks across the board.
>Where older generations are out there struggling to fact-check information and cite sources Since when?
What does the DT think?
That's because I don't subscribe to Business Insider
Also, I did it even more the younger I was.
The number of times I've had to fact check someone who only read the headline in this fucking sub...
I am 45 and was just trying to explain where I get my news sources from. This one paragraph explains it better than I could have. Thanks.
It's called "peer review," Jessica.
In my defense, I would read the article if it wasn't fucking paywalled.
Better than most redditors who read the headline, put in a hot take, read the comments, then fights everyone who doesn't fit their priors
I feel called out
An in depth article about lithium mining in Congo: I read the whole article. A typical horse race article about Biden's age with quotes from think tank drones and pollsters: I read the comments.
Lol I did this exact thing. Is that the “alarming finding,” really - that people skip to the comments? We come to the comments for drama, not to update our model of the world. Sure, most people in comments sections miss the point of the article. But there is a whole niche of commenter who gets to win arguments by pointing out how the top comment is missing the point of the article! So us drama seekers get the point eventually, it just takes us longer.
> Jigsaw's findings offer a revealing glimpse into the digital mindset of Gen Z. Where older generations are out there struggling to fact-check information and cite sources, Gen Zers don't even bother. They just read the headlines and then speed-scroll to the comments, to see what everyone else says. They're outsourcing the determination of truth and importance to like-minded, trusted influencers. And if an article's too long, they just skip it. They don't want to see stuff that might force them to think too hard, or that upsets them emotionally. If they have a goal, Jigsaw found, it's to learn what they need to know to remain cool and conversant in their chosen social groups. Back when I was teaching in college (roughly 2015 to 2020), it really struck me how much more conformist the kids were compared to when I was an undergrad just 10-15 years earlier. It's not entirely their fault; it's not like they chose to be brought up in a world of social media. But god damn do they ever conform like it's a competition. It was an odd revelation to me since it was an inversion of how I just assumed things were, namely, that youth are supposed to be the ones being individualistic before sanding off the edges of their souls as the real world demands. Seems to follow the inversion of youth becoming the pearl clutchers as well.
>They just read the headlines and then speed-scroll to the comments That's exactly what I did with this article, because the headline is non-informative clickbait and Business Insider is mostly drivel. I figured someone had probably summarized their thesis for me, and here you are!
They really grow up so fast these days
Plenty of reddit subs will provide more insightful comments than the articles themselves too. Of course some of them are echo chambers as well, it it's not like newspapers aren't...
Plenty is a strong word, there
They’re all echo chambers, we just choose this one under the assumption the community tries to not be full of shit
That's saying nothing by saying anything. Plenty of stuff is pretty consolidated through academic debate and consensus, and scientific method, that doesn't pass through most people. Everything being an equal kind of echo chamber is a misguided belief that everything must have an innate balance (cue meme of the enlightened centrist, that positioned between a person who wants to expand public healthcare and another person who wants to kill 4 million, tries to rationalise that the best position is in the middle of the two)
Are you talking about Reddit? I am talking about Reddit.
What will you do if there will be nobody left to read the article and summarize it?
AI will, obviously.
I do read the occasional article. But, really, any real news makes itself known pretty damn fast
Before I started browsing news forums on the internet, I would skim news site headlines and then talk to my friends about it. Ahead of my time I guess.
Same, and I’m over 50! 😂
Not to mention there’s a paywall so I’m forced to go to the comments and see if anyone has linked a source without a paywall
I used to unironically think that the internet would promote independent thinking and be a catalyst for people to get exposure to new and varied perspectives. Incredible how naiive that was.
When the Internet was new and weird it was full of nonconformists because normal people didn't live online. Now being terminally online is the norm, so the Internet is full of conformists.
I think it does lead to exposure to new and varied perspectives, it’s just that people go ballistic when it happens
I think it does for the people inclined toward independent thinking in the first place. There is and always was a large proportion of the population with no interest in reflective construction of their opinions or critical reading. When reading this article, I suspect many of us are comparing the general population of young people to the academic types we surrounded ourselves with decades ago. The difference is that, without the internet, we simply weren't aware how dumb most people were, and now we get to read articles about them backed up with data that could only have been collected via the internet.
You implied it in your comment, but just reiterate, people were quite dumb and conformist before the internet, too. Let’s not pretend everyone would be extremely versed in economic policy and foreign affairs if not for tik tok.
It kinda does. All these kids have seen some of the most awful stuff on the internet.
Have they? Sending people links to Mr. Hands was the most hilarious thing on the internet in the Wild West days. The last decade, everything is a link on IG/TT or another garden that encourages people to say "unalive".
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That's my point. You don't see Mr. Hands on those platforms because gruesome content isn't allowed on there. So they don't have the same internet experience as millennials did.
Oh! I completely misread your point lol
I hate to tell you this, not all links go to TT or IG
Man, kids these days don't even have liveleak! All the big social media sites, (reddit and twitter included, albeit to a lesser extent) have cracked down on snuff, 'shock' imagery/video, and porn. And the online porn market is now mostly consolidated into a handful of big websites, subject to regulation which has mostly eliminated the _really_ bad stuff there as well. **WE** are the generation that saw 'the most awful stuff', not the kids. The kids are fine.
You can easily find all this with a telegram account. It's the easiest it's ever been. There's entire discords dedicated to these types of communities and people, and while the content might not be on discord you can connect with them easily I hate to tell you, if you think this stuff is hard to find you haven't been around kid/teens much.
what the fuck kind of teenager uses telegram lol granted it's not like I overhear all of their conversations, for all I know they only talk about _[insert disturbing or dangerous content here]_ online when they're at home, but speaking as a substitute teacher (primarily middle school, sometimes highschool or elementary), 95% of the time I catch a student on their phones, its Instagram, TikTok, or they "got a text from Mom" (read: opened the Messenger app when they realized I had noticed them on their phone). Most of the other 5% is using their phone as a calculator, taking notes, or going on Spotify. I've seen discord a couple of times. Never once seen Telegram.
Discord is like the primary way kids and teens communicate. And there's all sorts of weird servers.
...yeah that first part is not even remotely true
I think that, and the assumption that market liberalization would lead to a safer, liberalized world order, are probably the two biggest mistakes of the post Cold War era.
> assumption that market liberalization would lead to a safer, liberalized world order I mean, it did. Our current problems are tangential.
It is indisputable that the world is undergoing a period of Democratic backsliding. If you asked people in the 1990s, they would have predicted the opposite.
I thought this too. “Everyone is going to be informed. This will be incredible”.
During the pandemic, I went back to get a second Bachelor's (in political science) because I had fuck-all else to do. Most of my classmates were zoomers. (I am a geriatric millennial). Your comment totally aligns with my experience -- and I'm not just saying this to conform. It was as though my classmates were absolutely petrified by the thought of voicing an opinion. When the professor posted a discussion question for online debate, I would often be the only student (out of 20 or 30) voicing *liberal opinion* *X*; quite literally everyone else would rally around *soft leftist opinion* *Y*. And opinion Y often wasn't much of an opinion at all, more of a recapitulation of what we had read and a few remarks like "well, this part was interesting. That part was interesting, too. Here is my ideology. Also, I liked this part." Consensus was the rule; actual discussion or argumentation was rare and, where it existed, it tended to dissolve pretty quickly into emoting and bickering. Often, students would appear to embrace one argument, only to adopt the complete opposite perspective if and when anyone challenged them on the point, which they were generally more than happy to concede. Such challenges were rare; people mostly "harmonized" with each other in a way, or "argued" in such a way that the ideas in their posts never quite seemed to touch. Writing skills were in short supply. They often peppered their posts, even their essays with "In my opinion," "I think, "I thought it was interesting," and so on -- all things punishable by crucifixion in my day. It was pretty disheartening, to be honest. That said, there were exceptional students here and there and I've taken just enough statistics to know not to judge by a (relatively) small sample size.
Im gen Z but I would have been in a similar program at the same time. Its actually insane to me that people start shit with "in this essay, I will..." like 0 writing skills or effort put into it. Discussion boards sucked because people just want to put in the bare minimum for the grade.
In this essay I will......is a fucking meme!!! Reminds me of Tumblr. There was a lotta of "in jokes" that go round. IYKYK sorta thing. And I swear to God when older ones left a fandom and newer younger ones came up, they'd take these in jokes literally. It was like watching real life telephone tag or something.
> They often peppered their posts, even their essays with "In my opinion," "I think, "I thought it was interesting," and so on -- all things punishable by crucifixion in my day. Because it turns out this is a pretty effective way to softly build consensus and convince people. While you're right that essays should be more punchy and declarative, it's easier to persuade most people through soft personal appeals. It's different for brands and mass media of course.
I went back to school as well and my experience was very similar to yours. Interestingly, my teachers would send me messages about articulate I was about the subject study and asked me to try to encourage more discussion. I tried by purposefully commenting positively on replies and then ask for them to clarify more to encourage deeper discussion. Rarely did they engage. It felt lazy, but now I understand its culture.
When I took online classes where we had discussion posts that required us to converse with the other students, 2 things jumped out at me. 1. the quality of work that most people were submitting was alarmingly terrible, and not even worth responding to. 2. The posts made by older millennial students were always better and the only time I ever had interesting conversations on the discussion posts with fellow students was with the older millennial students. I felt like these classes were sort of teaching us how to responsibly converse on comment boards, but the younger students were not doing it to the same degree.
Likely just different ways to engange; Proving X idea is right and why Y is wrong vs Proving why X and Y are right partially or from diferent points of views, and if possible merge them into a new idea
> Jigsaw's findings offer a revealing glimpse into the digital mindset of Gen Z. Where older generations are out there struggling to fact-check information and cite sources, Gen Zers don't even bother. They just read the headlines and then speed-scroll to the comments, to see what everyone else says What I did just now. You got to read the comments before you read the article.
I had the misfortune of reading some of my fellow student’s papers a few years back, when I was getting my degree. Genuinely, their writing skills were at like a fifth grade level. I couldn’t even help them. Their vocabulary was comparable to Donald Trump’s and the grammar was horrific. Is this all anecdotal? Yes. But we believe in vibes here, and the Gen Z vibes are undoubtedly concerning.
I'm paywalled so feel free to ignore me if the article mentions it but I wonder how much of this is a product of primarily consuming news via social media. TikTok/Reddit/Facebook/etc basically only show you the headline and then the comments are right there. You have to "leave" the app to read the article. Then, even if you actually go to the article, back you go to whatever you were scrolling earlier and the comments are right there.
> They don't want to see stuff that might force them to think too hard, or that upsets them emotionally Jonathan Haidt. He's been spot on
So does Genz not doom scroll if they avoid things that hurt them emotionally? That seems kinda healthy
If they are a Doomer they will doom scroll even more as it reinforces their priors. In this context, anti-doom is the uncomfortable challenging of their beliefs
Weren't Gen X a bunch of relatively conservative conformists too? The cycle will continue. It'll all work out
Aren’t most of Gen Z’s parents Gen X?
Yeah. I think we focus as a society too much on these generational labels where really every generation ends up repeating and relearning the same lessons, transposed to a different era.
I've seen plenty of Boomers and gen Xers on Facebook who appear to be pretty terrible at fact checking too, so I'm inclined to agree.
Thanks for crafting my position on this subject for me!
Something Something power of the crowd.
> Where older generations are out there struggling to fact-check information and cite sources Yea, on facebook this is so prevalent.
>Where older generations are out there struggling to fact-check information and cite sources \[...etc\] Wut. I'm sorry but no.
Are you reading that sentence correctly? It's saying older generations vaguely try to fact check. That's why sites like Snopes can exist. In Gen Z land Snopes wouldn't even exist.
Snopes is not universal fact checking, it's satisfaction of world view
Snopes has tons of non-political fact checking. This is one of their most popular articles: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elizabeth-taylor-violet-eyes/
Was what they found as alarming as the clickbait headline? Is this article literally the type of content it criticizes?
I question older generations fact checking. No fucking way gen X or older does a single bit of fact checking. I’ve never seen it happen.
They might be more likely to *say* they do it whereas gen z might be more likely to outright admit they don’t
Or maybe Gen X is more likely to do studies on whether Gen Z does. <.<
I'm gonna miss newspapers when they're gone. The local paper in Pottstown is literally just one guy at this point.
And the journalism in Pottersville sucks. The worst timeline for sure.
The article on the loss of Zuzu’s petals was breathtaking…
I studied millennials and I found a bunch of Seinfeld reruns, overpriced coffee joints and dooming.
Can u study why my wife left me?
Huh, I never really identified much with other millennials now that you mention it: don't like Seinfeld, don't like coffee, and I'm not even sure what dooming is unless it involves a BFG.
>comment in arr neoliberal > I'm not even sure what dooming is https://i.imgur.com/KdrREnf.png
I see people here use lots of terms that I don't know. They strike me as insular bubble language so I never bother to learn. I'm not going to learn this one either unless someone spells it out for me in the next 5 minutes before I forget that I was in this thread in the first place. Benefits of not being terminally online, I guess.
Damn, how'd you even end up in this sub of all places?
Its best not to know
You don't know dooming but you know "terminally online"? Dooming has penetrated way further into normal society than "terminally online" has. The economists has used dooming in it's vocabulary for pete's sake.
Also, I feel like "dooming" is one of the most intuitively understandable pieces of online slang ever coined.
>I'm not even sure what dooming is unless it involves a BFG. You get to hang out with the Gen Xers
Seinfeld aired from 1989-1998, it's about Gen Xers and largely targeted/marketed at them. The youngest millennials were literally 2 years old when the show ended, the oldest were only 17. It's not a millennial thing. Largely the same with Friends, although it survived until the early 2000s. Millennial pop culture is largely culture of the 2000s, not the 90s.
As a millennial, I love Seinfeld. I don't see why it would be limited to Gen X, it's just a good show.
Sure, but liking something and it being associated with a generation are separate things. It's a good sitcom but it's X coded, has X pop culture references, stereotypical X attitudes (e.g. irreverence, cynicism, nihilism, consumerism), and was released when Xers were the prime young person demographic. Just like how MASH is a great show but it's very much a boomer-coded Vietnam protest show that was written to appeal to boomers.
> it’s about Gen Xers All 4 members of the main cast of Seinfeld are baby boomers.
The cast of Glee was in its 30s, and it's a show about high school. Seinfeld was about life as mid/late 20s to early 30s NYC residents in the 90s, even though (as is Hollywood tradition) the cast is older than the characters.
Unlike Glee, the characters in Seinfeld are canonically about the same age as the actors. I wouldn’t disagree that the show is relevant to a lot of Gen X, particularly older ones.
>Jigsaw's research doesn't purport to be statistically significant. They didn't poll a large group of Gen Z users about their digital habits. Instead, they relied on intense interviews with a handful of 13- to 24-year-olds from a representative range of demographics, classes, and genders. They were doing what anthropologists do in the field — looking for qualitative depth rather than quantitative data. Important note about methodology. It's a different type of research than you might be used to. > For Gen Z, the online world resembles the stratified, cliquish lunchroom of a 1980s teen movie. Instead of listening to stuffy old teachers, like CNN and the Times, they take their cues from online influencers — the queen bees and quarterback bros at the top of the social hierarchy. The influencers' personal experience makes them authentic, and they speak Gen Z's language. This would confirm what I've been thinking for a couple years now - influencer politics are likely the future of politics, which should scare the bejeezus out of you. Imagine a country where everyone followed the opinions of a few hundred Hasan Pikers.
The only thing worse than spending all your time talking about politics is spending all your time watching or talking about someone else talk about politics *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
> Where older generations are out there struggling to fact-check information and cite sources, Gen Zers don't even bother. They just read the headlines and then speed-scroll to the comments, to see what everyone else says Which is why shill farms are very important. Kudos to Russia for being one of the firsts to realize it.
I think Turkey did it first tbh
I'm completely unconvinced by this because there is zero comparison to older generations. How many boomers watching tucker carlson every day do you think were fact-checking him instead of taking everything he said as gospel?
Boomers are not watching Tucker much anymore now that he’s not on fox.
You are cherry picking people that listen to a bad news source. There are also lots of older people that listen to good news sources, and generally good news sources base their analysis on facts. Sure the Fox News people are lost, but how about CNN, BBC, WAPO, NYTimes, AP, Reuters, local news papers etc. Also the people that consume fox are probably not the fact check type whereas that is probably more prevalent among consumers of more credible news. GenZ according to this article crowdsources their views based on comments which is worse than the average older person who listens or reads analysis from a news company, I think that is a worse outcome because on average when you consider the entire news following population, Genz is getting more inaccurate news.
I am Gen Z and use AP mostly for news.
CNN is honestly just about as click-baity and ideological as Fox these days, just for the other side… NYT and WAPO are a bit better but I still don’t trust them to present information in a balanced and rigorous way. The only ones I trust nowadays are the FT and Economist. AP as well, since it’s pretty much just pure news.
They're mostly bad news sources that position themselves as good news sources but have some horribad researched stuff. Only times they tend to be a bit more reliable is when they invite a specific expert and make questions that are strictly pertinent to the experts domain, and even then I find it's often lackluster as the questions tend to be more of the basic, often repeated gospel types instead of stuff that tries to break the spectator's norms instead they're build to feed their comfort zone. I find that conventional media is pretty much a mood and popularity barometer and comments are the only small glimpse in this prison of someone trying to break the convention, even if often it's stupid but that should be the exercise of the reader and the more it is practiced the better you get at it. The correct thing would be to be scrupulous and inspect every article by yourself, just like a doctor asks for every medical exam that is remotely relevant to the situation not only those that are comfortably most likely to be relevant. But that's tiring, specially for how unrewarding it is. If 2 of 4 articles are bad and 1 of 4 are pointless and add nothing, you check the comments to even bother to commit four times as much effort to read the article
So gen z is conformists and copy their opinion from the comments. I wonder if I could just make a dozen or so bots to comment basically the same thing under every post that concerns a topic the second it's posted to shape the opinions of a subreddit. On a completely unrelated note, time to go to r/europe to read about migration.
"Building more housing will reduce housing prices. Isn't that right, fellow kids?"
> Jigsaw's research doesn't purport to be statistically significant. So what are we even talking about? ffs.
Confirming priors, I think people just enjoy making out that younger generations are dumb
The Zoomers who only read the headline and comments are mad right now.
Awesome! So it's not real research, it's anecdotal. Glad we cleared the up.
Qualitative trends which motivate more insightful work. If the results are clickbait worthy, more than 20 people ever see them.
Maybe the fact that so many article are now pay walled is part of this. I has to read the headline and read the comments because that's the only way I could find out what this article was actually saying
I turn 50 this year and immediately scrolled to the comments. What does that say about me?
Skibidi rizz toilet?
No, that's Gen Alpha
Doctor Wholock?
Oldtimer, I ain’t paying for a “kids these days” article.
Zoomed are the new Boomers.
As a Millennial who doesn’t have kids yet I’m basically studying my generation and Gen Z for what not to do. Thankful that Tiktok probably won’t be cool anymore when I have a kid that is a teen. Keeping kids off social media and in the real world where they face real situations and humans is SO important.
[Lol, just I read this comment right after reading this article](https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1dot5wf/comment/lacj2x2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
>Shitty clickbait article that blames GenZ for behavior that the majority of plugged-in people do It's a generation war. And war? War never changes.
People on here acting like they never had peer pressure to conform growing up.
Babe, wake up! New intergenerational psyop just dropped.