That's a fair argument, and I can't dispute it. Thinking about this made me reflect a different way to put it. It shouldn't be one vs. the other, but rather, 4chan (and similar forums) are a meta reading of the news and train you to see blind spots or what's not being reported, listen to arguments from both sides of the aisle, and sprinkles a healthy dose of skepticism. After all, most of the discussion revolves around an extract from a maintream newspaper article or mainstream personality, so you're exposed to the "mainstream viewpoint" no matter what.
So the bottomline of what I'm trying to say would be: if you exclusively consume mainstream news, you're probably more vulnerable to adhere to a narrow viewpoint, and maybe not even know there are people who disagree.
Similar to how HN operates when discussing a blog post, especially clickbaity posts -- when reading the comments you may see that there's more to the story or that the author is wrong about something. Sometimes that has helped me get a more nuanced perspective on a specific topic.
> 4chan is usually demonstrably and objectively worse than any mainstream news at sharing important, relevant, and true information.
Are you talking about trivial news reporting ("this thing happened today")? If so, yes.
If you're talking about important questions in society, no. I mean, if you want full-on propaganda you can read the New York Times or The Atlantic, or Washington Post, etc. Aside from tangible reporting, your probability of finding truth about important questions in society is extremely low, while they tout it to be really high -- extremely disingenuous. And yes, in all of these places the Opinion section has adquired so much relevance that they are no longer newspapers in the traditional sense.
On the other hand, if you want actual truth, you'll have to read through tons of bullshit, slurs, memes, jokes, fake news, fake tweets, CIA narratives, Mossad/JIDF narratives, but it will be there... buried somewhere deep in a 4chan thread. The great thing about this is that there's no pretense, it's: come at your own risk, use common sense, take everything with a grain of salt, "everything said here is satire".
> Note specifically that in unmoderated channels, governments already do participate with propaganda
That's definitely true, there's even specific slurs for those pushing propaganda. But that's the beauty of it, there could be conflicting narratives being pushed at once, and there's no way to tell whether someone believes it or is just shilling. At the end of the day, it's just an anonymous comment and you can only determine it's value based on the content of the post. You can't even safely tell if it's a human or a bot nowadays.
I have no doubt in my mind that the free flow of information is always better. Now, you can argue about the practicity of this, and you'd be right. The thing is, this is a symptom of the state of affairs. Think about it, there are 8 billion people walking on Earth, a great proportion of which have a computer with an internet connection and a high quality camera in their pockets. That means that this year will be the most commented on, most recorded in human history by far. On top of that, there are governments around the world spending billions of US dollars in propaganda. It's no wonder 'truth' is obfuscated and almost impossible to come by.
Yes, I've thought about that. In my opinion, the difference is that "you(s)" often reward controversial/contrarian takes. 4chan is already contrarian so what I mean here is going the opposite way. That is, you can go and post something that's completely against the culture of the forum and you'll get plenty of reactions. Even if it's just insults or slurs.
In a funny way, this incentivises swiming against the current, so there's never a consensus.
Karma on the other hand only creates a chilling effect, beacuse you're either banned or shadowbanned or somehow silenced. Take HN for example, if you post something controversial here not only it doesn't get more visibility, but it's grey-ed out and thrown to the bottom.
I understand what you're saying, and it would definitely make for an interesting experiment. If every news piece meets that criteria, it would be a very specific subset of news, but valuable nonetheless.
> (a) they're reasonably likely to materially affect some significant portion of readers sometime in the next 6 months, and (b) there's something they can do about it or in response to it.
That's the entire point. Who are you to decide that? How can you quantify 'likelyhood to be materially affected'? How can you empirically determine if 'someone can do something about X'?
Your opinion is worth the same as the next guy's. Anarchy and no moderation whatsoever, in this context, is always better no matter how you try to rationalize it. The only problem is that it makes is harder to tell the signal from the noise (noise being fake stuff, tangential topics, hearsay, bullshit, etc.). But the opposite is much much worse.
I suggest the opposite. I'd like a proof that there is no government involvement.
Believe it or not, I think the closest to this is ideal is 4chan /pol/. It's not backed by any major corporation (unlike HN which is backed by Y Combinator), it's not partly owned by Tencent/China (unlike Reddit), and so on. There's no algorithm, there's no karma, there's no blue badge, it barely scrapes by using shady NSFW ads. That's the closest to the libertarian anarchy ideal we had in 90s.
There's of course alphabet agencies mining data and pushing narratives, but that's fine.
Define news. Is it the local gossip section or large social shifts or trends? Is the release of GPT-4 news? Was covid news? Any sufficiently important event will eventually knock on your door, so it's not like you can stick your head on the sand completely.
Ultimately, news is indistinguishable from information, and information is valuable if you're able to tell the signal from the noise, extract the meaning, and find the balance between getting the most value and not wasting time. You can use that information to make decisions over your own life: should I invest in X? Should I work in Y? Should I move to Z?
For example, amid the tech layoffs and the rise of AI tools to write code, I think one should reconsider starting a career path in software engineering
That is, unless you're completely self sufficient and living off the grid, in which case you don't need any of it.