People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/9/18174631/old-people-fake-news-facebook-share-nyu-princeton <comment><USER2> Anecdotal evidence: I remember how my 65 years old dad changed from a large- minded, world-traveling retired professor to an avid consumer of fake news in the span of fewer than two years.

Yes, it was a shock, but most of all I am mortified that this could happen to me as well when I get to his age.

<comment><USER3> Stay unplugged from social media and _especially_ mainstream media and you'll be just fine.

<comment><USER2> You mean "Don't trust mainstream media, watch this shocking video instead"?

<comment><USER4> "Don't trust mainstream media" doesn't mean you have to turn to even more untrustworthy sources, nor does it mean you can't ever go to mainstream outlets for information. It just means you have to examine what you're told critically and compare it across sources.

I had an epiphany in mid-November 2018. I realized that, despite watching and reading the news on a pretty much daily basis, none of my voting decisions were changing as a result. I examined voting decisions I'd made going back to 2016 and realized none of them were materially changed by watching the news with such regularity and granularity. This isn't to say that I'm set in my ways and never change my viewpoint. Rather, I think it's more a reflection on the fact that political candidates don't tend to change much over short periods of time, so after a certain point watching or reading the news will simply reaffirm what you already know about them rather than introduce fundamentally new information. A politician who had viewpoint X or trait Y yesterday probably still has viewpoint X today or trait Y today; that may not be true in 5 years, but I don't need to be plugged in every single day.

I realized I only really need to "check in" periodically and see if the voting landscape has truly changed. When "checking in," I've found I have far less allegiance to a particular source and am more open to checking several and comparing. When you don't follow a particular source almost religiously and only peek in once a week or once every two weeks, the "circus" nature of the media starts becoming alarmingly apparent. The disparity between the calm of real life and the 24/7 chaos and tragedy of the news becomes impossible to ignore. My voting patterns have not changed as a result of my disengagement, but my anxiety/outrage/uneasiness have all went down significantly. I now view my previous habit of watching the media every day as a downright unhealthy addiction.

<comment><USER5> Yup Matt Taibbi has a good book calling the news media - Hate Inc. They spend all their time stoking fears and amping peoples anxiety and threat perception, all to maximize engagement - [https://taibbi.substack.com/p/introduction-the- fairway](https://taibbi.substack.com/p/introduction-the-fairway)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Like other commenters, this study jives with my experience with older relatives. I mean 'forwards from grandma' has been a thing forever, right?

'Bill Gates will give a nickel every time this is read' (remember email chains?), 'naked women get shared, but this heroic child won't get a single like', 'Like and Share if you stand with politician X', etc etc.

Combine this with the targeted scamming of elderly from various Nigerian princes and jailed grandchildren, and there does seem to be a much greater degree of credulity with our current elderly generation. I think a more interesting study would be to figure out whether it's generational, a function of changing brain physiology as we age, or what.

<comment><USER7> > I mean 'forwards from grandma' has been a thing forever, right?

Let me tell you that grandma' with email is a relatively new phenomena.

<comment><USER8> I started trading emails with my grandmother some time around 1990.

That's not literally forever, but, considering that it's longer than one or two HNers have been alive, it's at least figuratively forever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Study says that damage to the prefrontal cortex in older adults can increase susceptibility to fraud and scams, which may be related to why older people share more fake news.

[source] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4971060/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4971060/)

<comment><USER9> You can search for J. Rogan with Robert Sapolsky podcast where doc said that either prefrontal or orbitofrontal cortex finishes developing at ~25 years old, so brain can learn about environment and extrapolate accumulated experience later throughout life. I think age bias is not appropriate, because youngsters could consume propaganda with memes, feeds and games as well, just through the different medium. What matters here is anxiety level and/or IQ.

<comment><AUTHOR> Admittedly, there is definitely a precedent for youngsters who fall for fake news. I am reminded that a number of under-65s thought they could charge their iPhone in a household microwave, even though you would think that common sense would dictate otherwise.

[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2768976/Emergency-s...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2768976/Emergency- services-forced-step-iPhone-users-fall-internet-prank-explains-use-microwave- charge-phone.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It makes sense - they grew up in a time where news was (relatively) reliable/truthful, so perhaps don't have the same "this may not be true" skepticism that younger generations have.

<comment><USER11> > It makes sense - they grew up in a time where news was (relatively) > reliable/truthful,

No, they grew up in a time when media distortion was less likely to be revealed because the major media was narrower and it's ideological biases more consistent, and voices outside the major media had major barriers to reaching any substantial audience.

<comment><USER12> Media distortion and truthfulness are not the same thing.

People and media will always have a viewpoint that distorts their objectivity. That is just fact of live and not necessarily bad thing as long as it's honest belief. Media used to be more reliable and truthful in the past with the normal distortions that people had. Mainstream media is still like this. Their problem is the lack of money and time that lowers their ability to do original reporting and check facts. They are the victims of dishonest influencing, not the originators. Fox News is the only major mainstream media source that has completely turned news into dishonest influencing operation.

Today the distortions are the same but there is significant increase in intentional influencing with data and arguments that those who propagate them don't believe. Using the same talking point to argue for and against issues is good example of this.

Shady figures like Christopher Blair just sit in their homes and push out (non-mainstream viewpoints) disinformation they know is false.

<comment><USER13> >>Fox News is the only major mainstream media source that has completely turned news into dishonest influencing operation.>>

To me, it's ideas like this that perpetuate the problem. It clings to the idea that journalists and journalism - at least that which is sold via mainstream media channels - are capable of some kind of pristine objectivity. They aren't. It is much healthier in my opinion to understand that news is not special within its medium. It's entertainment like everything on every other channel. It's somewhat less fictional obviously, but the entertainment motive is what lies behind it.

I would suggest instead that Fox News was the first major mainstream media source that dropped the pretensions and openly did what "news" has been doing since Walter Kronkite but with an equal and opposite bias. And to that extent, it has had a beneficial effect on society: we now know to watch carefully what a given journalist decides to report on and what they don't and we work harder to extract facts, if there are any, from the pre-determined narratives they are wrapped in. Whether purposely or not, they made news look like a joke. And we are smarter now because of it.

<comment><USER14> Fox news doesn't correct their lies when exposed, they double down. Unlike any other journalistic entity that isn't state run.

<comment><USER13> Which is to say that their peers don't correct their lies when not exposed. Which is to say that the number of corrections is proportional to the number of exposures. So Fox is just a pig among pigs in lipstick. I'll buy that, but it doesn't really change my point.

<comment><USER14> Reputable publications correct their factual errors all the time. Reputable publications also fire people who discredit journalism with their behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here's the study since the article didn't link directly to it: [http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586)

<comment><USER16> Wow, that's bad.

The definition of "fake news" is a list of 21 conservative web sites chosen by BuzzFeed. For some reason, BuzzFeed wasn't in that list.

Unsurprisingly, by that definition, fake news is primarily spread by conservatives! Chart C shows that as the strongest result by far. Chart B, going by age, is a weaker result. Well yes, it seems that conservatives live longer (living less dangerously?) or that people turn conservative as they age. It is well-known that older people lean conservative.

This study is, itself, impressively fake, just like BuzzFeed.

<comment><USER17> Are you aware that buzzfeed actually has a pretty good news section too?

It doesnt pay well enough, so they also have the clickbait stuff

<comment><USER16> BuzzFeed is the site that spread the "piss dossier" nonsense. You can't get much more fake than that without invoking aliens and Elvis.

<comment><USER18> Are you referring to the dossier that a court found was in the public interest to publish because it had so much merit? The same dossier that two presidents were briefed on and was a subject of an active government investigation? That dossier is now, provably, not fake. It seems like you might be unintentionally spreading fake news yourself.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts- entertainment/2018/12/20...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts- entertainment/2018/12/20/public-has-right-know-buzzfeed-prevails-russian-tech- moguls-steele-dossier-case/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.58305596bd56)

<comment><USER16> The existence of the dossier itself is provably not fake. The content however is, along with the original story of how it came to be funded, created, and disseminated.

It's not even plausible. The man is a germophobe. He had to overcome a handshake aversion (Where has your hand been today? Eeeew...) to even run for office.

It was trivial for the people in power to brief presidents or start a government investigation, with or without merit, and this leads the court to determine public interest. It's getting to be circular logic here, with merit coming from merit.

<comment><USER18> You're making straw man arguments without any proof or substance. Is there anything, articles, quotes, even tweets, anything that shows that the Steel Dossier is fake news? I'll admit that I thought it was unnecessary and possibly fake at the outset, but the data changed my mind. A court ruling, the news that two USA sitting Presidents were briefed on it, and the fact that the people who continue to deny it tell provable lies on a daily basis is a pretty strong set of data to counter the points you are making.

This leads me to the conclusion that you are either 1) uninterested in the facts 2) making your arguments in bad faith or 3) all of the above

In any case, arguing with you will not bring further truth out. Enjoy your day

<comment><USER16> The burden of proof falls on those who want to believe the claims.

The fact that the dossier is notable (in the public interest to publish) does not mean that the dossier is correct. The court only ruled that the dossier was notable. The fact that presidents were briefed means that the dossier is notable, not that it is correct. The bit about people telling lies... well that is an _ad hominem_ that also doesn't help to satisfy the burden of proof, plus if that were a valid argument then it could be applied to the source of the dossier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The elderly are generally more susceptible to internet fraud. Last summer the New Yorker had this story about how an 85 year old was scammed out of her life savings:

My Mother and Her Scammer [https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal- history/my-mother...](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my- mother-and-her-scammer)

<comment><USER20> Nigerian prince scams and the like are much older than the internet though.[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance- fee_scam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This article is a perfect example of the incredibly sloppy and biased thinking that happens in media and which is part of the very problem it talks about.

Fake news first and formost is a clickbait scam to get advertising dollars, NOT a political propaganda approach and this tendency to keep using it as if it's an actual political issue is really absurd and itself an example of what is probably more an example of sloppy news.

Furthermore the insinuation that the older generation somehow is more naive than the young generation in political views only adds to the superficial and naval gazing claims.

<comment><USER22> You're not accounting for internal and external to the US attempts to manipulate our democracy via social media. The IRA created fake accounts to encourage tribalism and partisan thinking. It's not new for Americans or companies as well, there's been manipulating the web with bots and disinformation ourselves for years. To say it's purely clickbait is to ignore a large amount of evidence that it's also politically motivated.

<comment><USER21> I didn't say it's purely clickbait I said it mostly clickbait which it is and the reason why it's being used as much as it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My hypothesis is that they grew with a notion that "if it is on a newspaper, magazine or a book, it must be true", which was indeed the case when compared to digital content in today's world.

It took me a long discussion to convince my Indian uncle that image of certificate (signed by director general of UNESCO) that he forwarded on WhatsApp, declaring Indian national anthem as the best national anthem in the world, can be created in 10 minutes by anyone these days.

<comment><USER14> I think it is a little more nuanced. No one takes the tabloids at the grocery store seriously, for instance, and they've been in print forever. But, you'd trust a tabloid story your cousin sent you on facebook to check out. Suddenly you trust that tabloid source since you trust your cousin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Overheard during the 2012 campaign in florida, between some octagenerians: I'm voting for that Mitt Romney because he's a nice Protestant boy, not like the others. (Not that it matters, but Obama was the only Protestant in that race, Biden and Ryan are catholic, Romney is like the most famous Mormon).

<comment><USER25> They may be aware of all that and still disagree.

Romney: technically, Mormons are protestant

Biden: he isn't a believable Catholic unless he opposes abortion

Obama: he actually slipped up and said "my Muslim faith" in an interview

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> A almost guarantee that 100% of the people who believe clickbait fake news articles from bogus and untrustworthy sources also have never heard of the scientific method.

I believe that many older people find critical thinking to be taboo, and prefer to take things at face value because they confuse passivity with wisdom. Why question something when someone will come along any minute to make you feel comfortable anyway?

They tend to be wrong when they think independently because they were never any good at critical thinking to begin with, so they just parrot what they were told makes sense. What's going to keep their lives "the same."

This article does a better job than I ever could explaining my reasoning... [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014616721243921...](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167212439213)

<comment><USER27> My mother taught me to be autodidact. She would never answer my questions and instead told me to go get an encyclopedia (It was the 70's) and find out myself. When I spouted ignorance she would correct me.

Now she's widowed. As my father declined with Alzheimer's he tuned into FOX news all day long. Oddly, he became less racist despite this because my wife is black. The more he fell in love with her as his daughter, the better person he became.

My mom still watches FOX news all day long. I know this because my son is living with her right now to help her out and he tells me outrageous stuff she does with her ideas and money. She's a devout Republican now. She hated the Obamas but could never tell me why. She loves Trump, but again she can't tell me why other than she "Likes the way he talks."

Any evidence of truth given to her elicits an "OK" and then she walks away. I have no idea how she went from "always look up the answer for yourself" to believing anything that fits her current worldview as shaped by the television she watches.

<comment><USER28> "The Brainwashing Of My Dad" is a very personal documentary about this effect on the director's father.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh3TeTxgNVo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh3TeTxgNVo)

<comment><USER29> I found the documentarian to be more interesting than her subject which was an old white man listening to talk radio that appeals to old white men and agreeing with it. Her old man is just very agreeable having gone from the left to the right to the center seemingly just parroting the news source he's listening to at the time.

The documentarian on the other hand appears to have never listened to Rush Limbaugh before setting out to do this documentary since she knows so little that's non-controversial about the man. Such as his quirk of saying ditto. She seems ro have just decided who he was by osmosis by reading left wing news articles about him. Rather than try to genuinely understand the appeal of right wing radio she just dismisses it as naziesque brainwashing. The way she belittles her father while not appreciating the narrow range of political thought she has exposed herself to is just so incredibly smug and oblivious.

This documentary in a nutshell is what is wrong with political discourse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Then again, people older than 65 share the most stuff period, if my relatives are any indication.

<comment><USER31> Age was apparently a better predictor than total number of links shared, according to the article.

<comment><USER32> Maybe older people share disproportionately more _news_ content? I tried to look at the study to find out what kind of links they even included in the evaluation, but the link in TFA only goes to the publication's home page.

Edit: it's here [http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586)

Edit': as I thought, their dataset includes all kinds of links, but they do the same analysis for sharing hard news and don't find significant age effects. It's table S14 in the supplementary material [http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2019/01/07/5.1....](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2019/01/07/5.1.eaau4586.DC1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> A day after an article about fake-news research being retracted and here are people commenting enthusiasticly and gullibly about another piece of fake-news research being promulgated. It's like no one has heard of the social sciences reproducibility crisis. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

<comment><USER34> No less from theverge. It's amazing that people take theverge seriously after their "how to build a pc" fiasco.

The one thing about the "fake news" hysteria is that one side consuming the fake news is accusing the other side consuming the fake news.

As far as I can tell, it's all fake news and propaganda.

<comment><USER35> Donald Trump's presidency is weird because the "mainstream media" (a term used by many, regardless of their political spectrum) began to be treated as "real news" simply because Donald Trump was calling it "fake news".

People have been talking about the issues with the "mainstream media" (in particular, whether their profit motives line up with their ethical duty) for a few decades, and it all it takes is one clown to suddenly restore faith in the media?

I have seen people talk about Bush like he was an okay president. It feels like many have forgotten about the responsibility of the media in promulgating the Iraq war narrative. People don't really seem to get the media actually continues to profit from its interaction with Donald Trump (those sweet, juicy views!), and continues to pass on useless information to the public, rather than actionable information which might stir the public into something other than apathy.

...something is so weird, and I am struggling to put my finger on it...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It makes sense that people who discovered the Internet through Facebook and Twitter at a later age would be more susceptible to memes.

I have been wondering if this will get better or worse. Once all Internet users have been using it since a very early age, will they be more skeptical and responsible? Or will they be more easily influenced?

I have been wondering what an elementary school course in memetics and evolutionary psychology should look like. Kids need memetic inoculation, not just to protect from fake news, but all kinds of automated marketing.

<comment><USER37> You don't need knowledge of evo-psych or "memetics" (whatever that means) to distinguish most sketchy sites from reputable ones. It may be tricky to distinguish more carefully-assembled fake news sites, but most of these bogus websites/Facebook groups are easy to pick out via stylistic cues alone.

<comment><USER38> I think it's unwise to rely on the incompetence of fake news websites.

Compare two UK newspapers, The Guardian and The Daily Mail. They are both well-known and have popular domains which have been around for ages. Considering only their contradictions on the topic of Brexit, one of them _must_ be about as dangerously out of touch with reality as it is possible to be. Which one?

I know which one I believe, but I am not a lawyer, a trade negotiator, or a politician.

<comment><USER37> If you can't tell the difference between The Daily Mail and The Guardian based on stylistic cues, I don't know what to tell you.

It is true that stylistic cues won't tell you everything. The rest, unfortunately, is a lot harder to teach. Avoiding the obviously-shoddy sites is sufficient as a start; the rest is really going to be dependent on particular knowledge in areas like science, history, etc.

EDIT: Kinda surprised at the downvotes I'm getting here. Have you _looked_ at the Daily Mail frontpage?

<comment><USER38> > If you can't tell the difference between The Daily Mail and The Guardian > based on stylistic cues, I don't know what to tell you.

Then you missed my point. Of course I can tell the _difference_ , but which one is _true_ — the one founded in 1821 or the one founded in 1896?

<comment><USER37> Don't look at the founding date, that's completely irrelevant. Look at the Daily Mail homepage. Does it look like a news site, or does it look like a tabloid?

<comment><USER39> >Does it look like a news site, or does it look like a tabloid?

I think you've just demonstrated why many people believe fake news. A lot of them are set up to look like regular news sites.

Fake news sites have been around for a lot longer than people think. I remember quite a few years ago reading an article about an event where some minority Christians were being mistreated in some non-Christian country. It looked like any other news article. The incident in question was reported in multiple news sites.

Then one person (or a team?) exposed it all. The event never happened. It was not obvious, and he/they had to do a lot of sleuthing to find out who owned the sites - a Christian advocacy group. All the other sites reporting on the incident were likewise (perhaps all under the same company - can't remember).

Years before 2016.

The only thing that may have clued me into it being fake news was that I hadn't heard of the news site. But then again, most people have not heard of most news sites.

Don't look at style or appearances. Really. Don't.

Oh, and as bad as The Daily Mail is, it is full of accurate (albeit misleading) material - compared to a typical tabloid in the US. I can easily dismiss nonsense I see on tabloids in the grocery store. With The Daily Mail, I have to _work_ to find out if it is true or not.

<comment><USER37> > I think you've just demonstrated why many people believe fake news. A lot of > them are set up to look like regular news sites.

You're reading my argument backwards. I'm not saying you should trust any website that looks reputable. I'm saying you should _distrust_ any site that looks _disreputable_. That's the first step, and it's a huge improvement over trusting everything (which is what most people who buy these fake news sites do).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I find it interesting that many people, especially boomers, can go to the grocery store and recognize checkout tabloids as obvious hoaxes, yet they stumble into something much more ridiculous online and determine it to be true.

They seem particularly susceptible to confirmation bias in propaganda memes and literal fake news.

<comment><USER41> I think part of it is learning "everyone knows" that Tabloids are all "batboy was impregnated by bigfoot". It doesn't require any critical thinking.

Yet they fall for it because it wasn't socially embedded as "obviously fake" to them. Not to mention that sadly most people are very vulnerable to flattery of their beliefs (see the infamous Sokal Hoax).

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I wonder how much of this is having free time and a lack of mobility.

</comment><comment><USER43> Their conclusions don't excite me, and theorising about the reasons doesn't help. I'd like to see a few comparison studies showing the bell curves by:

\- age

\- IQ

\- reading speed

\- concentration

\- bias

\- activism

\- non-social-media surfing time

For example, the people I would expect to see rank highly for fake news sharing:

\- a person with low reading speed and either a significant bias towards the conclusion or low concentration

\- a low-iq non-activist (less likely to have read up on the subject)

\- a person who only surfs social media

Of course, between these categories the data will have its own correlations (age + low eyesight, iq + surfing patterns, etc) and so I'd want to see the data both with and without correcting for those correlations too.

I don't know how surprising this data would be - once all the correlations are corrected for, I imagine the graph would look pretty flat.

</comment><comment><USER44> It's not _digital_ literacy, it's literacy.

Older people grew up believing in religion, in fact they could be beaten mercilessly if they expressed doubt.

They also grew up during one of the most intense ideological struggles in political history.

And on top of that they were the first generation exposed to mass media, in an era where there were still relatively few alternative information sources.

Basically they were ill prepared to think critically, and still are.

Sorry. I love my dad but he came out a Putin fan a while back. He also thought he'd won the lottery which he'd never entered.

<comment><USER45> So, does being a Putin fan imply one has 'gone off the deep end'?

<comment><USER44> It does if you're also in exile from your birthplace due to it having become an authoritarian state.

<comment><USER45> Maybe some people just prefer the authoritarian model.

It is not an objective truth that non-authoritarianism > authoritarianism. That's just, like, an opinion, man.

Further: when has Russia not been an authoritarian state?

<comment><USER44> Point is if you like authoritarian, why would you leave paradise?

> It is not an objective truth that non-authoritarianism > authoritarianism. > That's just, like, an opinion, man.

Shakespeare > Marlowe is just an opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Not at all a surprise.

The first time my dad used the Internet to look at used car ads on Craigslist, I found him trying to fight off a cascading series of popups (this was in the mid-2000s) that launched when he clicked the "You are our 1 millionth customer" ads.

Older people who are new to the Internet may simply think it's regulated like TV and Radio commercials are. Couple that with how easy it is to target these demographics using an FB/Twitter advertiser account, and how they make up big chunks of the voting bloc, and you have a recipe for disaster.

<comment><USER47> This reminds me of when my father-in-law got a fullscreen pop-up claiming to have seized his computer unless he paid $20. While I was looking at it to figure out how to close the window, he said, "I've already paid them twice now!!!"

<comment><USER48> It's a failure to understand how any of it actually works. There was a comment higher up how many older people have memorized steps to complete tasks, but have no understanding of underlying concepts. Despite 2 decades of effort on my part, my father has paper notebooks full of step by step instructions how to do things with his computer, but not a shred of understanding of any of the underlying concepts. Also, he was shocked to learn that the internet runs on money and advertising. He can do about 5 common tasks on it, and he has strict instructions never to enter any personal or financial information into any computer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> There's probably more money scaring old people about dying and buying pills.

When you compare to Fox health and sciences section, their political news looks reasonable. The scaring old people industry must be regulated.

</comment><comment><USER50> "Article with headline "makes sense" to my worldview and fits with my stereotyped understanding of elderly people so everyone piles on to comment"

Congratulations. We just did the same thing this article purports most people over 65 do most of the time.

This study was comprised of people sharing their Facebook profile data with a research company. I wonder what their disclaimers said when they clicked "Yes"?

> "When we bring up the age finding, a lot of people say, 'oh yeah, that's > obvious,'" co-author Andrew Guess, a political scientist at Princeton > University, told The Verge. "For me, what is pretty striking is that the > relationship holds even when you control for party affiliation or ideology. > The fact that it's independent of these other traits is pretty surprising to > me. It's not just being driven by older people being more conservative."

Was his going-in hypothesis that older people are more conservative? Or that hoaxes only target conservatives?

I am not saying the entire study is BS, merely that everyone saying "haha yeah it must be that 65+ don't have good BS detectors because they watched Ed Murrow on TV" may not have employed their own detector 100% when reading this article.

</comment><comment><USER51> It has really upset me to see my father, an accomplished businessman, constantly share with me videos/news and ask questions based on information that is obviously false. I never would have believed it if you had described it to me, but for some reason the social component adds an element that gives these stories a lot more legs than they'd otherwise have

</comment><comment><USER52> Only 38% opted in, which was only ~1100 people. Moreover, the group of "older" people spread at a rate of only 11%, which was lower than other cohorts (I won't mention which).

Finally, only 8.5 percent actually spread fake news, so this whole study is about about 95 people and how they spread news.

Other commenters mention that the domain list is also suspicious.

Clickbait science

<comment><USER53> People are increasingly aware of fake news now and I really hope this spreads further into scrutiny on science, especially news articles about science. You really need to dig deep into the methods of a study so you can understand all of the caveats that go with its conclusions, but obviously a "news" article on a finding is going to gloss over most of that and crystallize the entire paper into one click bait sentence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> For a lot of those 65+ they remember when an article that claimed: 'If you ________________* then share this with 10 of your friends ' would have cost them 10 quarters and taken several days of effort to comply.

They know the free postage won't last forever, so they'll use it while it lasts.

</comment><comment><USER55> While this is complete conjecture, I don't think the ability to ascertain truth from falsehood is uniquely age related; I believe it comes down to the age of media you were raised in. That's not to say it age doesn't play a factor at all, as cognitive function does decline as you get older. Unfortunately we don't have the data to control for generational changes, so 'older people' and 'the current older generation' are used synonymously. In my opinion, younger generations have become better accustomed to the bombardment of lies, in the form of new age marketing, that older generations didn't have growing up (at least, weren't as acutely aware of). That is compounded with the fact that people become more trusting of their chosen form of media over time [1]. If you've grown up with a small amount of media to choose from, and develop a loyalty to a certain one, it's a hard cycle to break out of.

Anecdotally, it seems to me that the older people I know only consume information from 1-3 sources, whereas younger people tend to flip-flop between many different ones. So if any of that small pool of media sources becomes untrustworthy it 'poisons the water', so to speak, much quicker.

To add to this, modern forms of media often have instant feedback mechanics (article comments, suggested counter-articles, up-vote/down-vote functions etc.) that can control fake news to a small extent. If someone shares fake news on HN for example, I can read the discussion and be made aware of any falsehood in the article. Traditional paper and television media does not have this control mechanism. Take note, I'd argue that this argument shouldn't apply to Facebook (which happens to be the most used website for over 50's). Their algorithm favours popularity over anything else so even if people react negatively to it (angry react), it only serves to spread fake news further.

[1] [https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/...](https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey- research/generations-trust/)

<comment><USER56> > _I don 't think the ability to ascertain truth from falsehood is uniquely > age related; I believe it comes down to the age of media you were raised > in..._

I don't know man?

I think it has a whole lot more to do with the common sense of the individual. If you're the type of person who will believe that the US never landed on the moon, or that Hillary, congresspeople and bankers are sexually molesting children who are held captive in the basement of a pizzeria, then there's not much that changing a media source is gonna do for you.

<comment><USER57> >congresspeople and bankers are sexually molesting children who are held captive in the basement of a pizzeria, then there's not much that changing a media source is gonna do for you.

Let's adjust that a little bit.

Movie producers are sexually molesting children and women, and the police are helping covering up and not investigating it, for decades.

<comment><USER56> ...in the basement of a pizzeria?

A story like that would make sense to you?

<comment><USER25> Having seen some of Podesta's emails, it seems likely that the pizzeria is a codeword for some other location.

Normal people don't rent specific numbers of pizza slices by the hour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Discerning whether a story is fake or not is a cognitive task. Many people over the age of 65 are in some stage of cognitive decline. It should not be surprising to anyone that they would score more poorly than young adults.

</comment><comment><USER59> One would think from this title that I share more fake news than younger people. I'm 72. I don't share news at all.

What is "more fake news"? Is it that some individuals share more fake news than others or more individuals share at least some fake news?

I'm sure a better title could be composed.

One would think from these comments that younger people don't share fake news. There is a reason the words 'naive" and "youth" are often associated with each other. Youth trying to evaluate/judge older people is, in a word, naive itself.

</comment><comment><USER60> Given the increased hostility between religion due to inflammatory social media posts -- I wonder if things are harsher now, or whether these sentiments were always there and facebook just made it easier for people to say things! Maybe, in a way, it's ok that people have shown what they truly believed in, and so our understanding of people's true belief's has been expedited.

</comment><comment><USER61> I've been thinking of building a 'fake news' app to embarrass people like this who share fake news.

The idea is to have a legitimate looking site.

The link would be something like 'thebostonreporter.com' where it looks like a real news URL and the content ALSO looks like a legitimate news site.

The site would create news stories that confirm the bias of people who tend to share fake news.

For example, "Hillary Clinton Convicted of Money Laundering in Boston Court" or something like that...

Then we push it on social media.

Once the links has gone out and has been distributed across social media we flip the content of the link and say, basically:

"You've been the victim of fake news!"

and explain what they did wrong and how to be more critical of links they share.

PART of this is going to have to be to shame them.

Another part is to make it clear that the next link they share MIGHT be another "fake news time bomb" that could revert and embarrass them again - hopefully making them reconsider sharing fake links in the future.

<comment><USER62> This is a very interesting idea. This approach is similar to one the SEC did with ICOs to combat all the scam and fraud happening.

I'm not sure how you determine when to do the flip. You would need a certain amount of people to see the fake news but these things cycle really quickly. If you wait one day, it may be too late as all that user's followers already saw the fake news and have moved on. I wonder if you could do a logarithmic decay for the fake new to shame page where there is an increasing percentage of people who get the "you've been had" page.

You'd also have to be very careful to not run afoul of libel. You'll need lots of "a well-informed source..." and lots of "may" and "might" and "is expected to" language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Fortunately they tend to be retired so there is less impact to their lives to go vote on a Tuesday in the middle of the work week. Wait. What? Ha!

</comment><comment><USER64> Also from the article:

"Users who identified as conservative were more likely than users who identified as liberal to share fake news: 18 percent of Republicans shared links to fake news sites, compared to less than 4 percent of Democrats."

<comment><USER65> Did they bother controlling for political affiliation? People 65 and older are much more likely to be Republicans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Who shares the most real news?

<comment><USER14> Reputable institutions, not cousin Cathy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Seems like this could be solved by issuing large fines for publishing fake articles. There obviously needs to be more regulation on news agencies or companies that put out all this disinformation.

</comment><comment><USER68> Elderly people are frequently the target of scams.

I'm curious what the age statistics for people who clicked on Nigerian Prince scams and viagra spam were like before social media.

<comment><USER69> What's wrong about the viagra spam? Did it actually scam people out of anything? I thought these were the actual e-shops selling actual (generic and probably of dubious quality) stuff, just did it in an overly pushy way because of oversaturated market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> This is not news! There's a certain brand of conservative baby boomers in the US who are obsessed with upsetting news, and they are extremely vulnerable to fake news. Long before this whole "fake news" thing on social media came to the popular consciousness, I was already getting e-mails about the Clintons being part of an assassination plot or a certain breed of poisonous spiders living in the toilet waiting to bite your butt and kill you. I called these "old person emails" because only baby boomers would send them. It's the reason we have snopes.com. Unfortunately I sent one of the snopes articles back in a response to one of these "old person emails", and the response I got was, "snopes is a liberal site!". In the US, the people from this generation grew up fearing death by nuclear attack by communists at any moment. Even though the world has changed pretty extremely since they were young, I think the psychological effect of it never wore off for some people. Unfortunately, I find Donald Trump to be the worst possible example of this type of personality: he's always angry, he refuses to believe news that doesn't fit his angry world view, and he says everything out loud that every angry baby boomer has always dreamt they could say out loud (thus many people see him as bold, not rude).

</comment><comment><USER71> When I was young, I was told to not believe everything on TV. Now I tell my parents not to believe everything on the internet

</comment><comment><USER72> This research will make it easier for purveyors of fake news to target those who are more likely to fall for it.

</comment><comment><USER73> And people younger than 30 created them.

<comment><USER14> Yup, at 55 Savushkina Street in St. Petersberg!

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> How is fake news defined? So many things people disagree with are called fake news these days.

</comment><comment><USER75> My Dad (mid 70s in age) shares the fake news articles because he thinks they are funny. He still cannot believe that people take so much of this crap seriously. Of course, when you have an elected representative that thinks an island will tip over if you put too many people on it, its not hard to understand where critical thinking has failed.

<comment><USER76> I've been realizing more and more as I grow up that many of the old people I thought were retarded are actually playing dumb and punking me hard into getting trolled by their shenanigans, making me the retarded one

<comment><USER75> He's not playing dumb or trying to punk anyone. He thinks these people are idiots and wants to share the stupid so we all can get a laugh. He's not spreading it for you to believe it. Its like the old Weekly World News that got bought and left in the diner. Its so absurd that its funny to read. I still think I have the article where the North Dakota governor sent a hit team to kill the devil. Most of the fake news these days is just as stupid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> The researchers found that Republicans shared more fake news than Democrats, but they suggest that is only because recent fake news has been largely directed to support Trump (i.e. that age-susceptibility to fake news is otherwise ideologically neutral). If it turned out that conservatives as such are more susceptible to fake news, though, that might help explain why the elderly are more susceptible insofar as old people tend to be conservative.

</comment><comment><USER78> It depends on how you define fake news. I see most of what I'd consider fake news being shared by people under the age of 40. I'd classify most of The Verge articles as "fake news" for instance. They're politically charged clickbait/outragebait often with undisclosed relationships between the authors and subjects.

</comment><comment><USER79> If you conveniently define conservative viewpoints as fake news, then yes.

</comment><comment><USER80> For they are underexcited.

</comment><comment><USER81> Having spent Christmas back home, I've come to the conclusion that people over 65 should not have the right to vote.

You've had almost forty years of voting, you don't really have any future left, and your minds aren't what they used to be. Please stay out of it.

<comment><USER82> I'm not sure this is fair to all people over 65. It sounds like maybe your relatives are much like mine, and I agree, my relatives shouldn't be voting either.

If we're going to put up a discriminatory barrier to voting, I think it'd be more effective if it was education-based. People with no education make poor voting choices, as we've seen in recent elections.

<comment><USER83> It's quite frightening to see how popular this education barrier to voting idea is. Another one I've heard is that everyone should make a test before being allowed to vote.

<comment><USER84> I'm inclined to support educational qualifications for elections supervisors and poll workers, not voters, and while we're there, forcing open source/open inspection ballot counting systems. Isn't it long past time to deal with the ineptitude problem and corrupt canvassing at the source?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> I think people older than age 65 are more interested in "news" period.

Older people also vote so they are worth targeting, particularly by right-wing organizations that would like to mobilize them.

<comment><USER86> And since they are the ones with the least experience with the internet and the smaller capacity to adapt/learn/sort a lot of info, the whole thing make sense.

<comment><USER85> Some oldsters have been using the internet since before there was a world wide web so they may have more experience than youngsters. Some of them have been sharing memes on AOL since before some HN readers were born.

So far as cognitive capacity, I don't know. I've seen young people refuse to learn from other people's mistakes, take deadly risks, etc.

When it comes to the epistemology of these people the right way to think about it is the emotional gain they get out of the whole thing. That has nothing to do with the internet. Listen to the Rush Limbaugh show this afternoon and you'll realize that anyone who gets a kick out of that will be vulnerable to a particular strain of "false news".

Rush Limbaugh and his ilk have been degrading the American political environment since Bill Clinton got elected, but it was only in 2016 that it became a monster that the Republican establishment could not control in the US. (And the center-right elsewhere)

<comment><USER86> Go to a school and an old folks house. Ask them to create an instagram account, take a picture, crop it, and post it online.

Would you really try to defend the point of view that the kids wouldn't do much better ?

<comment><USER85> That's instagram, which does lean young.

My aunt Lucy in a nursing home has a phone and thinks that Facebook is the bee's knees -- she can keep up with what her family is up to.

I get many "This email was sent with an iPhone" messages from oldsters. Nothing gets talked about in breathless tones in the New York Times (e.g. Apple products) unless it appeals to the 50+ set. Note how "fall detection" is a selling point of the new iWatch.

If you'd been around long enough you'd notice that selling things to oldsters based on recapturing their youth or vicariously enjoying the youth of youngsters has been a big business for a long time. It had a lot to do with how baby boomers were celebrated in the 1960s (e.g. hippies did not read the New York Times, but oldsters did) Eventually boomers became the target audience and the breathless talk was about millennials.

Gen X got skipped mercifully because there were too few of us to move the needle.

<comment><USER86> Instagram is just an example. Make them them film a video and share it. Order a Uber or a delivroo. Drive with waze. Book their train/plan ticket. Search for an amazon product.

Sure, some 65+ people manage. Some.

Most people under 40 manage, and more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> #shocked

</comment><comment><USER88> >what is fake news? the news I don't like or I don't want to hear

this is how pathetic our generation is

</comment><comment><USER31> And they are more likely to vote than young people. We really have to work to make elderly people more digitally literate and young people more involved in politics, I reckon it will require the removal of multiple barriers (like, oh I don't know, not having the election on a weekday that makes no difference for retired people but all the difference in the world to minimum wage employees living pay check to pay check? And make it harder for ISPs to screw over rural people?).

<comment><USER89> Aren't employers legally required to give you time off to vote? In roughly half of the states it's paid time off as well.

<comment><USER11> > Aren't employers legally required to give you time off to vote?

Only 30 states require this (no federal requirement exists), and not all of them required _paid_ time off to vote.

[https://www.businessinsider.com/can-i-leave-work-early-to- vo...](https://www.businessinsider.com/can-i-leave-work-early-to-vote-2016-11)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> Does anyone have a link to the source used to classify some news as fake and other news as real in this paper? Whomever control that definition can shift any conclusion, similarly to how hate speech definitions is used to silence speech on platforms such as Patreon [3].

I think we should treat any conclusion made by YouGov with caution because on at least on one occasion YouGov associated themselves with people believing in and adovocating for social justice [1], so maybe they are part of the ongoing effort [2] to re-gain progressive information gateway control in a world where much information dissemination is shifted from traditional media to social networks and streaming.

[1] [https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/core/wp- content/up...](https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/core/wp- content/uploads/2018/01/YouGov_CSJ_Polling-Results_2018.pdf)

[2] [https://www.changetheterms.org/](https://www.changetheterms.org/)

[3] [https://www.businessinsider.com/patreon-crowdfunding- platfor...](https://www.businessinsider.com/patreon-crowdfunding-platform- defends-itself-amid-boycott-2018-12)

<comment><USER91> In the above news article, there is a direct link to the magazine with the study. The direct link to the study is here: [http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586)

The study appeared to correlate two sources to determine the nature of fake news:

A) The primary source was a list of fake news sites compiled by Buzzfeed Media: [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral- fa...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fake- election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook)

B) The study was cross-checked with a list of sites from a peer reviewed paper (H. Allcott, M. Gentzkow, Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. J. Econ. Perspect. 31, 211–236 (2017)) and according to the paper was similar.

There is some additional methodology in the study link.

<comment><USER90> Thanks! Buzfeed believes in far-left progressive views and is not known for objective reporting, so using this as a primary source for classifications of fake news would predetermine this outcome.

With this in mind I think we can't trust the studys conclusion.

<comment><USER92> Why don't you address the actual study instead of disregarding it on a partisan basis?

<comment><USER90> To show that the classification system used as a premise for the study has problems is addressing the methodology of the study, and exactly what I learned in my scientific training.

The fact that the classifications are likely to be politically biased due to them being made by buzzfeed does not make the statement of that fact necessarily political.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stop Writing Javascript Code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/legalreach/pipeline

<comment><USER2> Nice! This will definitely save a lot of time.</comment>


Build a facebook messenger Bot for your media publication in 2 minutes - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mindiq.in/build-a-bot-for-your-media-publication-in-2-minutes-d747bfe597be <comment><AUTHOR> These are the sample bots which get created using the platform

Example #1: Check out the bot that we created for the Disney YouTube channel here. Bot Link: [https://www.messenger.com/t/1773551439597171/](https://www.messenger.com/t/1773551439597171/)

Example #2: A bot created to aggregate news Political News from BBC, Sports News from ESPN and Tech News from TechCrunch. Bot Link: [https://www.messenger.com/t/180877825654853/](https://www.messenger.com/t/180877825654853/)

Example #3: We used the RSS feeds of Times of India to create a sample News bot. Bot Link: [https://www.messenger.com/t/1772749859662311](https://www.messenger.com/t/1772749859662311)</comment>


Web Trolls to Face Two-Year Jail Terms - <AUTHOR> http://news.sky.com/story/1355930/web-trolls-to-face-two-year-jail-terms

<comment><USER2> There is another example of journalism having no idea what the word "troll" means. The people this article are referring to aren't trolls. There are many words better suited to describe what those people are in the context, but I can see why they wouldn't put them in a headline.

</comment><comment><USER3> See also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8476415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8476415)</comment>


ANN: PISI development branch - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/examachine/pisi <comment><AUTHOR> PISI was the package manager of Pardus Linux written in Python. The original development branch by the original author, forked from 1.1-beta12. Stay tuned!</comment>


Things Every Programmer Should Know - <AUTHOR> http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Contributions_Appearing_in_the_Book <comment><USER2> -1. Try to eat less, and choose healthy food choices. -2. Get a little sunlight. -3. Spend time around living creatures.

I spent the last few days inside putting together a website, and I feel like crap. My normal aches, and pains are turning into something serious in my hypochondriacal mind.

<comment><USER3> Hey - go talk to someone about that! I've had similar issues when I was going through a stressful time and I figure it was by brain's weird way of keeping me away and distracted from the stressor. It takes a while sometimes to figure out exactly what it is though. What you said did help though, especially #3, and also getting regular and enough sleep. But tackling the issue at its heart helps more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a cache of it if it's still down: [http://web.archive.org/web/20130914013327/http://programmer....](http://web.archive.org/web/20130914013327/http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Contributions_Appearing_in_the_Book)

<comment><USER5> Using that cache is a good idea. The site linked to was used to gather the original content rather than broad consumption. (I wrote two of the chapters in this book, and this was where we revised them.)

Lots of good articles in there, though.

<comment><USER6> Nice work Ryan. I've been reading through these, and "Code is Design" is roughly similar to something I was trying to explain to my manager not too long ago, but I couldn't quite put it into words. I just sent him a link haha.

The parallels between software and physical construction are pretty amazing.

<comment><USER7> Jack Reeves essays on software design are also worth a read [http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design_m...](http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design_main.html)

<comment><USER5> Yes, these are excellent, and goes into much more depth than the brief article I wrote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Avoid embarrassing yourself, and our profession, by behaving like a hamster in a cage spinning the wheel.

[http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Hard_W...](http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Hard_Work_Does_not_Pay_Off)

</comment><comment><USER9> Not sure I like #17 ([http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Commen...](http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Comment_Only_What_the_Code_Cannot_Say) ). While I would prefer working this way, my colleagues probably won't. Reading code you haven't written yourself is tough and time consuming. If the code is accompanied by the 'natural language explanation' of the code, you get into the code quicker. The downside to this is making sure they stay up2date, which was probably why the author wrote the section.

<comment><USER10> That's why it's worth having short methods that do one thing and are meaningfully named. And from a personal point of view I'd prefer several lines containing short expressions that are then assigned to meaningfully named variables etc, rather than 1 really long hard to parse line of code.

<comment><USER11> This is how I originally felt a few years ago doing Ruby, and I have tried to make all my code human-readable since.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This book is intended for beginning developers. Tips like "put everything under version control" or "resist the temptation of the singleton pattern" or "floating point number are not real" are not exactly rocket surgery (pun intended). (I own a copy, and consider it to merely be a shelve filler)

</comment><comment><USER13> Here are the 97 contributions compiled in one gist : [https://gist.github.com/pauletienney/6639605](https://gist.github.com/pauletienney/6639605)

Pull request are welcome for text formatting, linking, etc ..

<comment><USER14> Also, [http://www.amazon.com/Things-Every-Programmer-Should- Know/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Things-Every-Programmer-Should- Know/dp/B00CVDXWV8) for the dead tree version which supports its production.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> HN Effect. Checking back when the crowds have died down.

<comment><USER16> Pretty sure that already has a name: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect)

<comment><USER6> yeah except now Slashdot hopes to get "Hacker news'd"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One of my favorite bathroom books. But a little too much OO-centric, and imho, a little out of date.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Why was the title of this submission changed? I clearly remember what i entered. Odd

</comment><comment><USER18> Also available on Safari if you have it.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd begin by basic electronics

<comment><USER20> And I'd begin with basic mathematics.

<comment><USER19> most students already know basic mathematics. most important thing to teach is the O() notation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why 97?

<comment><USER22> Apparently because 100 is too obvious, 99 is too cliched, and 98 is not a prime.</comment></comment>


The Great Spotify Mystery - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/18/spotify/

<comment><USER2> For those who don't know, Phorm, from Wikipedia:

Phorm, formerly known as 121Media, is a Delaware, United States-based digital technology company known for its advertising software. Founded in 2002, the company originally distributed programs that were considered spyware, from which they made millions of dollars in revenue. It has since stopped distributing those programs after complaints from groups in the United States and Canada, and announced it was talking with several United Kingdom Internet service providers (ISPs) to deliver targeted advertising based on the websites that users visit.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm>

The article implies that Spotify will essentially turn into something similar to survive.

<comment><USER3> (Not to get off topic but...) I do find it amusing that there is SUCH an outcry over phorm (again, not passign judgement either way, just observing) and yet when companies do something like this hardly anyone is bothered or notices...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sometimes I think that the only way there will be a music industry is for the current one to go ahead and totally collapse, and then for the doomsday scenario to actually occur: For some reasonably value of "good music", there really isn't any more, for some large number of people's definitions of "good music". Only then would there be some real pressure to figure out how to make some money model work in the face of "free". The industry makes noises about how necessary they are, but "we" as a whole clearly don't believe them, and the only way they can prove they are right is to stop.

Of course, the music industry is stuck, in that it's very easy to make and distribute music. It's a common hobby, and has been for decades, and just gets cheaper and cheaper.

Maybe the movie industry could pull this off; while movies will continue to get easier and easier, I doubt a "summer blockbuster" will ever get as easy as music is now, if for no other reason than the fact that a five minute song is adequate but a "full" movie is an hour and a half, and each minute is intrinsically harder.

What if there isn't actually any way to monetize these industries? Should anything be done about that? What should, and what _could_ , be done? I don't think going all draconian on copyright is worth it for society (the value of the movie industry is not infinite and it's distinctly less than free speech and freedom in general, no matter how they feel), but are there any other options? Because let's get real, we're not going to donate or micropay our way to "Star Trek" or "Terminator 4".

</comment><comment><USER5> For some reason it feels like that article completely misses the point.

If the record industry own 30% then they can get access to statistics then they are able to much better target what music to push.

That's just one place that spotify allows for return on investment.

But the biggest problem with the claims is simply this.

The article states that if no one can make money on music then no one will invest in music making.

That's purely and utter nonsense. Art is created DESPITE there being no money in it, further more the artist can instead make good money on live concerts because they have reached a much higher fan-base.

Don't blame spotify for the record industries lack of imagination. Actually blame the record industry for existing at all at this day. Who really needs them.

</comment><comment><USER6> You get interrupted every fifteen minutes or so by an advert - surely they make money from that?

The article completely misses this...

<comment><USER7> The ads are localized. Here in Norway I tend to get an ad or two (excluding the user feedback) during a 7 hour workday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How can a person in Canada "simulate" an IP address seeming to originate in the UK to get access to Spotify? It currently rejects visitors from Canada.

<comment><USER3> (Hey, guys. Downvoting a genuine question is a bit cruel!)

They can use a proxy or similar so "traffic" goes through a server in the UK first.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the save! I hate to see my karma erode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> spotify not being able to monetize is a joke, they are in the position to completely dominate the market, and launched from day one (I believe, if not at least very early) with media subscriptions.

media subscriptions can make a lot of money, spotify are the first with an application that could pretty much kill physical media sales, if you replace all that market, thats a hefty bunch of cash.

micropayments, people still want to own their music, have it backed up, play it on their mp3 player, I believe this is in the works, if it happens, then they have all of itunes money.

advertising / merchandising / ticket sales, if you become the home of music to most people, then you pocket pretty well here.

They still have a bit to go, I am hoping they come up with a better way of transitioning free customers to subscribers than bombarding them with ads, but from what ive seen that looks like the strategy, people dont need a lot of convincing to upgrade their accounts because the service is so good.

their mechanisms for finding music, the artists radios suck, however they have a fundamental change in the way people can find new music because... sharing playlists actually works, drownedinsound / pitchfork / my friends with good taste can all make playlists and share them with me, thats a million times better than some dodgy collaborative filtering.

Their social aspects are pretty non existant, but thats very easily added, they are new and they have done the hard ground work and passed with flying colours.

They dont have all the music in the world, but they have a lot and its only going to grow, any limitations on artists are purely down to it being new and needing some more traction for labels to understand they dont hae a choice.

The music industry has been faltering time after time to try and keep people paying for music, spotify from what Ive seen has the chance to completely own the new music buying market.

<comment><USER10> I don't think they should plan on too many premium subscriptions in the U.S., Napster does this now, and they even recently went to $5 a month, and you don't hear too much about them. I think anything "youth-oriented" (music, Facebook) will need to live or die on ads because the kids don't have credit cards and don't want to ask their parents to pay for this, especially if the parents know they can "get it for free".

<comment><USER9> I dont think media subscriptions are a dead end, people pay £50 a month to watch some tv, I would be very surprised if people wouldnt shell out £10 a month to listen to whatever music they wanted.

Its just a problem that hasnt been solved well yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So, maybe the free UK version of Spotify provides no reason to upgrade. But I can tell you that the Swedish version is getting on a lot of people's nerves. And many of those people are seriously thinking to upgrade.

\- First, there are plenty of commercial ads, the stuff that used to run on the radios years ago. Cheesy.

\- Second, they fill up ad inventory with non-profits ads. So for example the ad about safe sex that goes something like: "everyone loves music, especially in the bedroom".

\- Then they have ads from artists promoting their albums and telling you that if you upgrade, you get the single 1 week early.

\- Also, you have ads urging people to call in and leave a fans voice mail.

\- And finally Spotify plays the voice messages from people to tell you how much they like it and how much they love the premium version.

In summary, Spotify is clearly playing a carrots & stick game to get people to subscribe - the carrot being the social networking features they want to launch, the ability to create playlists, etc.

And I can clearly imagine how the company is bringing the stick strategy to the UK soon.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think one of the major problems is that it's hard to use. I struggle to find songs or artists on there - and it seems like there is no easy way to browse about and find suggestions etc. They could lear a lot from Last.fm's way of doing all that.

Plus the "radio" stations are useless - set it to metal and you get 90's punk......

So, I'd say their main problem is a poor product :)

<comment><USER12> It isn't that bad, I definitely wouldn't call it a "poor product".

The radio feature is next to useless, yes, and in terms of finding new stuff, it's not great; however the pros (high quality music, practically zero buffering, and everything for free) vastly outweigh the cons.

I'm hoping they do find a way to monetize the free plan, because I for one love the service, and happily pay for it (even though the paid subscription offers basically nothing more over the free plan, which seems like a bit of a mistake if you ask me)

<comment><USER3> ok not poor (your right that was unfair). I think "clunky" is better then. Your correct I cant fault the actual music playback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Arctic startup has a go at success of Spotify and what it could mean to the future of iTunes.

[http://www.arcticstartup.com/2009/05/12/the-future-of- spotif...](http://www.arcticstartup.com/2009/05/12/the-future-of-spotify-and- its-competition/)

IMO, Spotify's popularity means that they're already a prime acquisition target.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's an interesting comment about "passing information back to record labels" especially given: "It was stated that the labels own 30 per cent of Spotify through equity investments. It may be higher."

I'm not implying it's some big conspiracy, just that keeping user data private when you're (part) owned by the companies a lot of your users are scared of is _hard_.

<comment><USER5> The record industry have used .torrents to track. Don't seem where the conspiracy should be.

It makes good sense they use that information to know what artists to push and where.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am using VPN to stimulate UK address in Manchester (from Brazil) and have not heard one ad in the two weeks I have been using Spotify. At the moment I have been listening for more than three hours straight, and still not one ad. My wife is using a similar setup and she has not heard one ad. I actually want to hear one so I can believe they exist :)

</comment><comment><USER15> Call me cynical but isn't the music industry famous for business ventures that don't make any money. They just ensure they get their cut in advance, and cook the books if necessary to make sure there's nothing left for the artists to get a percentage of.

</comment><comment><USER16> "Acquiring it may not be pleasant: doing so may help support a neo-Nazi with a grudge."

What? Is there some news story this is referencing that I missed?

<comment><USER15> Took me a couple of reads to understand that too, I thought they were talking about the Music companies buying into Spotify.

It actually means that downloaders getting music illegally from The Pirate Bay, may be (via ad revenue) lining the pockets of a backer who has links to far-right groups in Sweden:

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/26/pirate_bay_neo_nazi/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was told Spotify pays _per play_ for music licensing. This is interesting because it means as Spotify grows at a crazy rate, so do their costs.</comment>


Contrasaurus - Defender of the American Dream (An HTML5 Legendary Adventure) - <AUTHOR> http://contrasaur.us

<comment><USER2> I can't even begin to describe the awesomeness of controlling a jetpack powered dinosaur wielding twin chainsaws while fighting communists all to the midi-encoded tunes of Lady Gaga. The plotline was truly amazing, I totally didn't see the ending coming.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh wow I only played the first three levels (did not finish the third)... How much more ridiculous can it get?

That said controlling a machine-gun/flamethrower/chainsaw wielding T-Rex that also has a jet-pack and missiles is truly awesome!

<comment><USER4> More. You can have laser eyes, dual battle axes, _and a parachute_!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's about time! Death to all communists!

</comment><comment><USER6> dat soundtrack :E

Such a good idea!

</comment><comment><USER4> Everything went according to plan.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you use iTerm2? Its best features? - <AUTHOR> What are the things people use it for that good ol' Terminal bash can't do? The features that make it worth using. Thanks!<p>I recently started using iTerm2 on a mac, it seemed so cool. But I quickly got sick of it being so slow to startup, sometimes 10 or 20 seconds, and even sometimes slows/freezes the machine with a few windows open. Seems very bloated. So I stopped using it before I got to know its best features. (I had the daily tips appear daily, but never learnt anything from that.) <comment><USER2> You might have something in your .bashrc or similar that is tripping it up. On my system, the main account runs just fine. But when I log in under one of my work-related accounts on the same machine, iTerm2 takes an extra click before it will load (the first time fails, second time succeeds). I've never found out why that is, but I haven't really been bothered by it since the workaround for me is simply remembering to click-pause-click.

Having said that, from the regular account I don't find it slow at all.

The feature I like most - tabs. My workflow consists of a lot of tmux, and tmux+tabs makes things awesome. I also like that iTerm2 puts all your terms back in the same directories you left off on if you restart the terminals or reboot.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Little known features of iTerm2" [https://banga.github.io/blog/2020/03/02/little-known- feature...](https://banga.github.io/blog/2020/03/02/little-known-features-of- iterm2.html) (HN discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22461605](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22461605))

I don't use most of the features, set the color scheme once after installation. The slow pasting mode, tab duplication, clicking on links, showing timestamps is enough. On my computer it becomes slow after 3GB memory usage (tailing lots of logs in the background or such).</comment>


AT&T to cut 12,000 jobs due to economic downturn - <AUTHOR> http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D94RTSPO0&show_article=1&catnum=0 <comment><USER2> Appears it's not _entirely_ due to the economic downturn:

 _However, like most telecom companies, AT &T has been seeing many customers defect from landline phones to wireless services_

This has been a growing issue for some time now. I know people who don't even have landlines anymore. While AT&T does have wireless services, they don't enjoy the localized monopolies they used to back in the day.</comment>


A Structural Reevaluation of the Collapse of World Trade Center 7 - <AUTHOR> http://ine.uaf.edu/wtc7 <comment><USER2> The part that stuck with me is:

> The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a > global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in > the building.

I'm not an expert in structural engineering but simultaneous failure of every column seems like there is definitely some explaining to do.

Also here is the direct link to the draft version of the report.

[http://ine.uaf.edu/media/222439/uaf_wtc7_draft_report_09-03-...](http://ine.uaf.edu/media/222439/uaf_wtc7_draft_report_09-03-2019.pdf)

<comment> java-man yes, the explanation is long overdue.

NIST did eventually admitted free fall acceleration:

[https://www.ae911truth.org/evidence/free-fall- acceleration](https://www.ae911truth.org/evidence/free-fall-acceleration)

<comment><AUTHOR> So how do they explain the free-fall? Doesn't free-fall mean that all structural support has vanished from below? Freefall means that the thing basically could not fall any faster -- unless something more than gravity was pushing it down from above? It did not fall any faster but it did not fall any slower either. And they admit that.

<comment> java-man They did not explain, they tried hard to conceal this fact.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see. I was googling it a bit and found this on wikipedia:

"The collapse made the old 7 World Trade Center the first tall building known to have collapsed primarily due to uncontrolled fires,[7] and at the time, the only steel skyscraper in the world to have collapsed due to fire.[8]"

[FROM: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_World_Trade_Center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_World_Trade_Center)]

The phrasing "the first, at the time the only ..." seems to suggest that there have been other steel-skyscrapers which collapsed because of fire AFTER that. But as far as I can tell this wikipedia article does not name them.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Safety Check: Connect with friends and loved ones during a disaster - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/about/safetycheck/

<comment><USER2> First time I've seen this in action because I had a friend in the area of the earthquake: [https://www.facebook.com/safetycheck/nepalearthquake/](https://www.facebook.com/safetycheck/nepalearthquake/)

I can totally see safetycheck to become a place I compulsively re-check whenever there's "breaking news" of this kind (just how we are wired...)

For those who are not on Facebook, there's also Persong Finder by Google.org: [https://google.org/personfinder/global/home.html](https://google.org/personfinder/global/home.html)</comment>


For Young Female Coders, Internship Interviews Can Be Toxic - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/for-young-female-coders-internship-interviews-can-be-toxic <comment><USER2> > More than half of the respondents said they either had a negative experience > while applying for engineering internships or knew another woman who had a > negative experience, such as being subjected to gender-biased interview > questions and inappropriate remarks, or observing a noticeable lack of > diversity when they interacted with company representatives during the > interview process.

Using statistics that lump "noticeable lack of diversity" into the same category as "inappropriate remarks" really undercuts the message. It makes the reporting appear dishonest and I had to read the rest of the article much more critically. It feels like someone wanted to start that paragraph with "more than half" to make the problem seem as big as possible, and then throw a run- on sentence in the readers face hoping they don't notice two issues of very different severity are conflated.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would consider the ability to reject a job offer from a reputable company at age 18 over the tone of someone's voice to be more of a marker of entitlement than anything else.

<comment> t-writescode Agreed. Either they need a better writer for this article to explain just how this tone was actually a problem; or, they need to focus on more useful details of toxicity than a story about the current "bassiness of someone's voice", or lack thereof, revealing they're annoyed.

<comment><USER4> > More than half of the respondents said they either had a negative experience > while applying for engineering internships or knew another woman who had a > negative experience, such as being subjected to gender-biased interview > questions and inappropriate remarks…

> They described instances where a male interviewer flirted with them during > the interview, sent an unsolicited photo of himself, asked if they had a > significant other, or made sexual remarks in their presence. The respondents > also reported feeling dismissed or demeaned because of their gender. One > respondent was asked why she would want to go into tech as a woman; in > another instance, a male interviewer laughed when the candidate said she saw > herself becoming a software engineer in five years.

These quotes were taken from the article. The problem seems to be greater than just tone of voice.

<comment><USER5> Not to diminish the issue at hand, but your quote (or rather, what you left out) makes it sound worse than it is. The full sentence is:

> More than half of the respondents said they either had a negative experience > while applying for engineering internships or knew another woman who had a > negative experience, such as being subjected to gender-biased interview > questions and inappropriate remarks, _or observing a noticeable lack of > diversity when they interacted with company representatives during the > interview process_.

<comment><USER4> I considered leaving it in, but I figured it would be a trigger point for people to brush the rest of the sentence off as unimportant just because they didn't like one part of it. I'm not sure if you proved my point or if I inadvertently fulfilled my own prediction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm sure the interviews can be toxic for young female coders, but unless you also pose the same questions to young male coders you can't say anything about discrimination.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you look at what people have to go through in 2019 for an entry level job at the coding fields, everyone hates it and it's not just 'toxic' for female coders.

Take a look at /r/cscareerquestions on reddit. People grind for 18 months at a time on leetcode and interview prep, like how rich suburban kids prep for the SAT, and then offer this advice up as the pro-tips others can use to get their foot in the door of a high prestige tech company.</comment>


What I discovered living 3 months in Japan - <AUTHOR> http://jules.dourlens.com/3-months-in-japan-what-i-discovered/ <comment><USER2> Japanese people look forward to seeing you again :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I guess you are japanese, what did you think about the post?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Did any of your neighbors drop by to appologize form making noise?

<comment><AUTHOR> They are so silent that I thought I did not have neighbors..

<comment><USER3> I couldn't remember the title in my op, and it just came to me. I read Confucius Lives Next Door many years ago. What I stll remember is the part where a neighbor appologized for his child making noise.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Lives_Next_Door](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Lives_Next_Door)</comment></comment></comment>