cars posted:

Another place where Posting fails me is trying to mock CNN Underscored, CNN's entire front-page section of servile infomercials groveling at the feet of consumer industry, as dwindling viewership and near-universal ad-block destroy even its half-hearted posture at independence from its sponsors. Fawning and toadying beyond not just parody but even plain old sarcasm

Is this just their version of NYT's Wirecutter?

dimashq posted:

18 pieces of outdoor furniture under $500 that actually look expensive.

One thing i DO remember about NYT is how clearly these sources have begun to tell on themselves as no longer shaping public consciousness. Like.. people post stories from newspaper and news channel web sites nowadays and comment, "Wow, these articles must be intentionally incendiary, because they seem to be written only for a tiny proportion of the population with a huge amount of money, they just sound insane to everyone else, that must mean they're secretly WRITTEN for everyone else to get clicks." And it's like... maybe SOME of those stories ARE written as bait...? But most of them CAN'T be.

The vast majority of those articles are simply written for the only people who are likely even to SEE the average story like that, much less read through the text and find the "click bait" details. These "big time" news sources can't even hope for the average story on home-buying, etc., to escape into the wild anymore. The "content" is aimed squarely at the new readership, smaller and better-off but mostly unwilling to pay extra for what they know is simply a showy, feel-good bonus of disposable wealth.

The "big" news sites' advertising reflects that demotion in the world of capital, the demolition of the "news" market by the Internet, and the sort of "surplus dependence" that "news" now has on both private advertisers... same in a lot of ways as their increased dependence on imperialist propagandists, a transition from ostensible partnership in deception, for the supposed common good of keeping the public "properly" informed, to something more like thinly-veiled subjugation. (This is also one reason why the current "leftist" fantasy about finance news containing the Hidden Masonic Truths of Earth is so clownish; nowadays, finance news exists mostly as a means for better-connected wealth to fool the types who have to read a news story to know how "their" stocks are doing.)

So, like: CNN Underscored has the same business model as Kinja's fake "deal of the day" stories, where CNN no doubt gets paid some flat sub-prime-advertisement fee to "feature" the product, but they only make money on the story appearing on the front page when some chump clicks through and actually buys a $499 deck chair that cost the seller $20 and the economy-of-scale manufacturer $2 in labor and wages. This is part of what I mean by how pathetic it is. Today, advertisers know (thanks to contemporary metrics pioneered by Google) that a huge amount of the target audience never sees their ads, so they can leverage that into more or less forcing CNN to work for ad money on commission.

cars posted:

dimashq posted:

18 pieces of outdoor furniture under $500 that actually look expensive.

One thing i DO remember about NYT is how clearly these sources have begun to tell on themselves as no longer shaping public consciousness. Like.. people post stories from newspaper and news channel web sites nowadays and comment, "Wow, these articles must be intentionally incendiary, because they seem to be written only for a tiny proportion of the population with a huge amount of money, they just sound insane to everyone else, that must mean they're secretly WRITTEN for everyone else to get clicks." And it's like... maybe SOME of those stories ARE written as bait...? But most of them CAN'T be.

The vast majority of those articles are simply written for the only people who are likely even to SEE the average story like that, much less read through the text and find the "click bait" details. These "big time" news sources can't even hope for the average story on home-buying, etc.,

cars posted:

and hoping (with a reasonable chance of fulfilling that hope) that their own readers won't actually read the articles they're lying about.

i think that's actually the central pillar of news propaganda now: misconstrue the article's contents (that no one will read) in the headline (that people will read.) the news knows we just scroll past and through everything, the strategies for curating that are known and efficacious. it hits us all psychologically in our impressions of the news even for things we don't engage with, and it gives insurance against being caught lying because you can just dissimulate about the content being technically correct.

cars posted:

whatever "Insider dot com" is supposed to be, it just reposts its own lone story on some random topic 50 times in a row, and the only reason anyone pays attention is because Twitter auto-promotes it to "Trending" whether anyone's "engaging" or not. That gives its top tweet, out of 50 tweets about that same story, something like 1K or 2K likes automatically because clicking on the "Trending" button, instead of taking you to a "trend" list of a bunch of tweets on the topic like it usually does, instead takes you to a page that's nothing but "Insider dot com" tweets linking back to the same story.

Then suddenly every now and then "Insider dot com" farts out some insane anti-China propaganda story, some fake anti-Beijing "movement" from the creep fash gang in Hong Kong or whatever. And suddenly that's on Trending, a link straight to 50 tweets about it from that one site, even though it has the least "engagement" of any of the site's stories. Alphabet squad shit.
Eventually "Insider dot com" will be revealed as a fed cut-out, Reader's Digest-style

pogfan1996 posted:

american parents buy 40% of the worlds toys, it’s nuts

to be fair this is because parents in the prosperous "Asian Tigers" instead purchase large plastic numerals and mathematical symbols, classified as foodstuffs under WTO agreement, to pile on top of their children in the wintertime "Ritual of Chüd"