Tag: media

Risk and data

A while back a group of <a large number of scientists> wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister demanding greater data sharing with them. I must say that the letter is written in academic language and the effort to understand it was too much, but in the interest of fairness I’ll put a screenshot that was posted on twitter here.

I don’t know about this clinical and academic data. However, the holding back of one kind of data, in my opinion, has massively (and negatively) impacted people’s mental health and risk calculations.

This is data on mortality and risk. The kind of questions that I expect government data to have answered was:

  1. If I get covid-19 (now in the second wave), what is the likelihood that I will die?
  2. If my oxygen level drops to 90 (>= 94 is “normal”), what is the likelihood that I will die?
  3. If I go to hospital, what is the likelihood I will die?
  4. If I go to ICU what is the likelihood I will die?
  5. What is the likelihood of a teenager who contracts the virus (and is otherwise in good health) dying of the virus?

And so on. Simple risk-based questions whose answers can help people calibrate their lives and take calculated enough risks to get on with it without putting themselves and their loved ones at risk.

Instead, what we find from official sources are nothing but aggregates. Total numbers of people infected, dead, recovered and so on. And it is impossible to infer answers to the “risk questions” based no that.

And who fill in the gaps? Media of course.

I must have discussed “spectacularness bias” on this blog several times before. Basically the idea is that for something to be news, it needs to carry information. And an event carries information if it occurs despite having a low prior probability (or not occurring despite a high prior probability). As I put it in my lectures, “‘dog bites man’ is not news. ‘man bits dog’ is news”.

So when we rely on media reports to fill in our gaps in our risk systems, we end up taking all the wrong kinds of lessons. We learn that one seventeen year old boy died of covid despite being otherwise healthy. In the absence of other information, we assume that teenagers are under grave risk from the disease.

Similarly, cases of children looking for ICU beds get forwarded far more than cases of old people looking for ICU beds. In the absence of risk information, we assume that the situation must be grave among children.

Old people dying from covid goes unreported (unless the person was famous in some way or the other), since the information content in that is low. Young people dying gets amplified.

Based on all the reports that we see in the papers and other media (including social media), we get an entirely warped sense of what the risk profile of the disease is. And panic. When we panic, our health gets worse.

Oh, and I haven’t even spoken about bad risk reporting in the media. I saw a report in the Times of India this morning (unable to find a link to it) that said that “young are facing higher mortality in this wave”. Basically the story said that people under 60 account for a far higher proportion of deaths in the second wave than in the first.

Now there are two problems with that story.

  1. A large proportion of over 60s in India are vaccinated, so mortality is likely to be lower in this cohort.
  2. What we need is the likelihood of a person under 60 dying upon contracting covid. NOT the proportion of deaths accounted for by under 60s. This is the classic “averaging along the wrong axis” that they unleash upon you in the first test of any statistics course.

Anyway, so what kind of data would have helped?

  1. Age profile of people testing positive, preferably state wise (any finer will be noise)
  2. Age profile of people dying of covid-19, again state wise

I’m sure the government collects this data. Just that they’re not used to releasing this kind fo data, so we’re not getting it. And so we have to rely on the media and its spectacularness bias to get our information. And so we panic.

PS: By no means am I stating that covid-19 is not a risk. All I am stating is that the information we have been given doesn’t help us make good risk decisions

News and the Cornish coastline

Following news at more frequent intervals means there is more negative news, and thus a greater chance of getting triggered. 

How much news exists in the world? Is there enough news to fit a daily newspaper? Is there enough news to fit a daily that is focussed on a city? Is there enough news for All India Radio to cover in its three (?) news broadcasts a day? And what about 24/7 news channels? Do they have enough news?

The answer to this question is simple – within reasonable limits, irrespective of how frequently you want to report the news, there will be in some way or the other sufficient news to report.

In some ways, this is like that famous question in Chaos Theory about the length of the Cornish coast. The answer is – it depends upon the ruler.

The length of the famously jagged Cornish coast depends upon the length of the ruler you use to measure it. The smaller the length of the ruler that you use, the more the indentations in the coastline matter, and thus the longer the coast. There is a limit there, of course, if I remember, the “fractal dimension” of the Cornish coast is 1.33 or something.

It is similar with news. The amount of news that is there to report is a function of how frequently you want to report it. A good analogy here is with the stock markets.

As regular readers of this blog might well know, stock price movement, upto some approximation, follow a random walk. This means that the “distance” covered by the stock ticker during the day is far higher than the “displacement”.

So a stock might gain 10% in the first minute of trading, and then lose 5% in the next hour, and then lose all its gains by lunchtime, and then go up and down and round and round and then end up pretty much where it started off at the beginning of the day.

If you are now reporting the news of this stock market with a “one day ruler” (say for your business daily), the market did nothing that day. However, if you have been watching its movement on CNBC (or any other real time news channel), there was a lot to report.

All news is this way. When you follow it at frequent intervals (through 24/7 TV, or through Twitter, for example), there appears to be a lot more news than there actually is when you follow it using a daily newspaper. And given that any piece of negative news is likely to cause anxiety, following news at more frequent intervals exposes you to far more negative news (think the stock market example again), and thus causes far more anxiety.

Not following the news at all (as I did for a while when I was in undergrad) sometimes means that you’ve missed out on all that has happened in the world, and might find it hard to cope with life. And so there is a tradeoff. This involves using a (time) ruler of an appropriate length.

Use too short a ruler and you cause yourself unnecessary anxiety and find yourself getting triggered all the time. Use too long a ruler and you find that you miss out on stuff that might have been necessary for you to know.

The frequency I’ve settled down upon is daily. I get three newspapers delivered to my door each morning, and that is how I’m informed about the world.

It’s interesting that back when the New York Times was a dead-tree periodical, it had a tagline that went “all the news that’s fit to print”. Now that it’s gone online, got a paywall and had to get into real time news, it’s become an outrage machine.

 

How to avoid Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia

I’ve written about Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia here a couple of times. The first time was when I discovered it in The Economist. Another time was when I likened it to the Vodnoy Paradox, where people recommend deregulation in all sectors except their own.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia for a while now because I recently bought a (cheap – ?25 a week) subscription to the New York times). And they take the level of Sominism in their India coverage (no surprise since Somini Sengupta used to be their correspondent) another launch.

In fact, when I was mulling buying a subscription, I was explicitly warned about their India coverage.

And as I’ve read them for the last month and a half, this remains true. Their coverage of India is really shitty. It’s no different for many other global “liberal” newspapers such as the Guardian, or the Washington Post, or the Atlantic. The most baffling thing is that all these worthies is that they frequently employ writers of fiction as their vehicles of choice to interpret India for their readers (recently even the FT fell for this, asking the excellent-writer-but-insanely-political Arundhati Roy to write for them about India).

In any case, I’ve been wondering why this is the case. Why is it that these newspapers do such a shoddy job of covering India (or possibly any other emerging market) (I’m not saying they do a great job of covering their home markets either, since these newspapers have all become rather political, but at least there is some good coverage)?

My hypothesis about this is that they do a shitty job of covering India because they don’t care about the Indian reader, who contributes a microscopic minority of their revenues. That they can offer their zero-marginal-cost product for half of what Indian newspapers charge Indians for print subscriptions suggests that Indian readers don’t contribute significantly to their revenues.

Instead, what they have is large numbers of paying subscribers in their home markets who are (rightly) their primary audience. And because the people who are paying them and the people they are writing about are disjoint, there is no need to be authentic in their coverage. They can simply offer their readership the sort of slant and opinions they want without ever being held accountable.

It is similar in the case of Murray Gell-Mann. The science reporting can afford to be bad because scientists who really care about the research form only a tiny part of the subscriber base of the newspaper, and they possibly couldn’t care about holding the papers to account.

Now you can argue that each and every person is a “minority of one”, and so newspaper coverage ought to be uniformly shitty about all subjects. Except that some groups of readers are more similar to each other than they are to others, and such groups are likely to be “better taken care of” by the newspapers than all the other readership.

I don’t really know how this can be solved. For each newspaper, there will always be groups of core readership who might hold them to account, but there will be nobody holding them to account on vast sections of their coverage.

The only thing I can think of is the Times of India model – apart from being mass-market advertising funded, they have the habit of “putting ordinary people in the newspaper” through their tabloid supplements such as Bangalore Times (this was stated to me by someone who used  to work with the group). When you put ordinary people in the paper, these ordinary people will be more invested, and you better not write shit about them.

The Two Overton Windows

If you want to appear intelligent when discussing something about public policy, you could do worse than uttering the phrase “Overton Window”. The Overton Window, “invented” by one Joseph Overton, suggests that there is a “range of policies acceptable to political mainstream”.

And so you frequently have political commentators talking about the Overton Window “shifting” whenever a new political idea (or person) comes to the fore. This was bandied about much when Modi became Prime Minister of India, or when Trump became President of the US, or when Jeremy Corbyn became the Labour Party leader.

While “shifting Overton window” is something you come across rather often in policy discourse, my argument is that with the rise of subscription media, the Overton window is not shifting as much as it is “splitting”. In other words, we now have not one but two Overton Windows.

Without loss of generality, let us call them the “Jamie Overton Window” and the “Craig Overton Window”. Since both the twins are right arm fast bowlers, it doesn’t matter which brother is associated with which Overton Window.

So how did we get here, and what does it mean for us?

We started with the classic Overton Window. Let’s assume that all politics can be reduced to one axis (if we do a Principal Component Analysis of political views, the principal axis is certain to account for a large share of the variance, so this is not a bad assumption). So the Overton Window can be referred to by a line which the shifts.

As long as the world was “ruled by mainstream media”, this Overton Window kept moving back and forth, expanding and contracting, but it remained united. And then with the start of subscription ad-free media (maybe a decade or decade and half ago), the Overton Window started expanding.

The “left media” (that’s a convenient term isn’t it?) started admitting stuff that was left to the then Overton Window. The “right media” started admitting stuff that was to the right of the then Overton Window. And so over time, the Overton Window started expanding. And things can’t get into the media Overton Window unless they’re part of the mainstream political Overton Window.

The thing is that as the media became subscription-heavy and hence biased, political ideas that were once on the fringe now got a voice. And so the Overton Window got larger and larger.

Until a point when it got so unwieldy that it split, giving rise to Jamie and Craig. The image on the right is an approximate illustration of what happened.

And once the Overton Window split, there was no looking back. They started moving away from each other well-at-a-faster-rate. The Jamies could not come to terms with the policies of the Craigs, and vice versa. Political analysts and commentators started getting associated with the Jamie and Craig camps.

For a while, a few commentators continued to write for both sides, but the extreme fringes, which were getting more and more extreme, started overreacting. “How can we have someone who has written 10 articles for Craigs write for us”, the Jamies asked. “Most of our commentators are Craigs, so we might as well become a Craig newspaper”, the other side reasoned.

And that’s where mainstream media is going. The Overton Window has split down the middle. Crossing this gap is considered a crime worse than crossing the floor in Parliament.

Sadly, it is not just media that is getting Jamie and Craig. Mainstream politics reflects this as well, and so across countries we get political opponents who just cannot talk to each other, since everything one says is outside the Overton Window of the other.

Maybe the only way this can end is by going across axes, or inventing a new axis even. With the current spectrum politics, there is no hope of the two Overton Windows coming to meet.

 

Footage

So after a fifteen year gap, I was in the Times of India yesterday, writing about the joys of working from home (I’d shared the clipping yesterday, sharing it again). The interesting thing is that this piece got me the kind of attention that I very rarely got with my six  years with the HT Media family (Mint and Hindustan Times).

The main reason, I guess, that this got far more footage, was that it came in a newspaper with a really high circulation. ToI is by far the number one English newspaper in India. While HT may be number two, we don’t even know how much of a number two it is, since it seemingly didn’t participate in the last Indian Readership Survey.

Moreover, ToI is read widely by people in my network. While the same might be true of Mint (at least until its distribution in Bangalore went kaput), it was surely not the case with HT. I didn’t know anyone who read the paper, and since my articles mostly never appeared online, they seemed to go into a black hole.

Another reason why my article got noticed so widely was the positioning in the paper – it was part of ToI’s massively extended “page one” (it came on the back of the front page, which was full of advertisements). So anyone who picked up the paper would have seen this in the first “real page of news” (though this page was filled with analysis of working from home).

On top of all this, I think my mugshot accompanying the article made a lot of difference. While the title of the article itself might have been missed by a few, my photo popping out of there (it helps I have the same photo on my Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and WhatsApp – thanks Anuroop) ensured that anyone who paid remote attention to my face would end up reading the article, and that helped me get further reach among my existing network.

ToI is going to pay me a nominal amount for this article, far less than what Mint or HT used to pay me per piece (then again, this one is completely non-technical), but I don’t seem to mind it at all. That it’s given me much more reach among my network means that I’m satisfied with ToI’s nominal payment.

Thinking about it, if we think of newspapers as three-sided markets connecting writers, readers and advertisers, it is possible that others who write for ToI do so for below market prices as well, for it has an incredibly large reach among “people like us”. And that sets the size-related network effects (“flywheel” as silicon valley types like to call it) in action among the writer side as well -you don’t write for money along, and if it can be sort of guaranteed that a larger number of people will read what you write, you will be willing to take lower payment.

In any case, this ToI thingy was a one-off (the last time I’d written for them was way back in 2005, when I was a student – it’s incredible I’ve given this post the same title as that one. I guess I haven’t grown up). But I may not mind doing more of such stuff for them. The more obscure the paper, though, the higher I’ll be inclined to charge! Oh, and henceforth, I’ll insist my mugshot goes with everything I write, even if that lowers my monetary fees.

 

Tautological Claims

Sometimes the media can’t easily reason on what led to something that they consider to be negative. In such cases they resort to tautologies. One version of this was seen in the late 2000s, during the Global Financial Crisis. The crisis “was caused by greed”, claimed many a story. “It is because of the greed of a handful of bankers that we have to suffer”, they said.

Fast forward ten to twelve years later, and the global financial crisis is behind us (though many economies aren’t yet doing as well as they were before that crisis). The big problem that a lot of people are facing is addiction – to their smartphones, to apps, to social media, and so on. Once again, media at large seems to have been unable to reason effectively on why this addiction is happening. And so once again, they are resulting in “tautologies”.

“Apps are engineered so that you engage more with them”, they say. If you ask the product manager in charge of the app, you will find out that his metric is to increase user engagement, and make sure people spend more time on the app. “Apps use psychological tools to make you spend more time on them”, the outlets write, as if that is a bad thing.

However, if you are an overstretched product manager hard-pressed to increase engagement, there is no surprise that you would use every possible method – logical and psychological, to do so. And if that means relying on psychological research that talks about how to increase addiction, so be it!

It is tautological that social media companies “want to increase engagement” or “want to increase the amount of time people spend on the platforms”, and that they will try to achieve these goals. So when media agencies talk about these goals as something to be scared about, it’s like they’re bullshitting – there’s absolutely no information that is being added in such headlines.

It is similar to how a decade and a bit ago the same media decided to blame a fundamental human tendency – greed – for the financial crisis.

What Makes The Athletic Great

In recent times I’ve bought subscriptions to two online media outlets – The Ken and The Athletic. I’d subscribed to the Ken a year ago, and was happy enough with the hit rate of their pieces (I’d find one in two pieces insightful) that I extended my subscription for three years earlier this year.

And since I did that extension, the product has been disappointing. They lost half their team to The Morning Context, a breakaway (and similar) outlet. They decided to expand in South East Asia, and since I have little interest in articles about that reason (at least not enough to pay for the writing), that automatically means less content that interest me. In some senses their quality is slipping. All this together means that I find less than one in five articles in The Ken compelling, and with the frequency of their publication (one article every weekday) I’m pretty disappointed.

Maybe it has to do with Marie Kondo’s popularity, or interest in behavioural economics research about the paradox of choice, but organisations are starting to make minimalism and limitations in inventory a virtue. The Ken started with the aim of “exactly one long form article every day”.

Having less choice, and being minimalistic, is good when this limited choice fits the appetite of the customer. However, if the choice isn’t particularly relevant, then minimalism becomes a bug rather than a feature – the customer doesn’t find what she is looking for and goes on to another outlet.

In that sense, I quite like the model of The Athletic, which I bought a year-long subscription to a year back. The Athletic’s model is just the opposite – massively high volumes with a highly curated personal feed. And maybe they’ve got their curation right, in terms of getting customers to click on the right kind of tags at the time of sign up, but so far I’ve found at least two useful articles on their site every single day since I turned up. And that’s insane value for money!

And that is despite me being interested in exactly one out of the nine sports that The Athletic covers (it’s mostly US-centric, and I don’t follow American sport at all. However I guess I’ll find it useful when I have to follow any controversy in American sport). And I’m interested in a subset of that – I follow one league (English Premier League) and games played by a handful of clubs in that league.

If I compare The Athletic to Netflix (both subscription-driven media outlets with large volumes of content), where the former scores is in its discoverability.

Maybe sport is easier compared to movies/tv shows in order to understand someone’s interests. Maybe it is that The Athletic, right up front, asked me to identify which sports, leagues, authors and teams I’m interested in (Netflix never made an attempt to do that). Maybe it is that The Athletic, with loads of fresh content every single day, is able to serve my preferences far easier than Netflix.

In any case, reading the Athletic makes me think that if I were to run a media outlet some day, I would want to follow that kind of a model – produce lots of content, so that lots of people will be interested in buying subscriptions, and then hope to use superior algorithms to make sure that people can see what they want and not have to cut through too much noise in order to do so!

Video Geographic Monopolies

There is one quirk about video which we don’t face with print – some content is simply impossible to access legally in some parts of the world.

I’m specifically talking about BBC’s Match Of The Day, their end of day highlights package covering the English Premier League. It was one show that I watched unfailingly during my time in London, both for the match highlights, and for the quality of the discussion featuring Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer, Ian Wright et al.

Now I find that the show is simply not available in India – some youtube channels illegally offer the show (before they are taken down, I guess), but without the bits that show pictures of the game (which they are not allowed to show). And that makes for rather painful watching, knowing that you’re watching something substandard.

This is not the case with something like text – as long as I’m willing to pay, I’m able to access content produced anywhere in the world. I can sit here in Bangalore and buy a subscription to the New York Times, and access all its content. Audio is also similar – I can sit here and subscribe to any international podcast, and be able to access the content.

Video doesn’t work that way. The problem is with the way rights are sold – the Star network, for example, has a monopoly on showing pictures from the Premier League in India (having paid a substantial amount for it). And part of their arrangement means that nobody else is allowed to broadcast this material in India. A consequence of this is that we are stuck with whatever (mostly crappy) analysis Star decides to provide around its games. Stuff that is unwatchable.

There is a lot of great sport content online, but the video part is constrained by the inability to show pictures. Check out analysis by Tifo Football, for example – it’s absolutely top class. However, for most games, they have to rely on stock images and block diagrams since they can’t show the pictures which someone has a monopoly on. And that makes the analysis less rich (the Athletic, which I have a subscription to, “solves” this in an interesting way – by using screenshots of the TV footage of the game as part of their text analysis).

I wonder if there is a way out of this. Some leagues such as the NBA have shown some enlightened thinking on this – while they are anal about copyright of their live feed, they don’t care about copyrights on recorded footage. This means that anyone can use footage from historical NBA games as part of their analysis. Better analysis means more people interested in the sport, which means more people watching the live feed, which makes more money for the league (read this excellent interview of NBA Commissioner Adam Silver).

I’m also beginning to think if there is a regulatory antitrust response to this issue. Video distribution (especially of live content) is a natural monopoly, so it doesn’t make sense to have competing broadcasters. However, I wonder if there is any regulation possible for historical feeds that makes them more tradable (with the rights holders getting appropriately compensated without much transaction costs)!

One can only hope..

Mass marketing and objective journalism

This is a fascinating essay by Antonio García Martinez on the history and future of journalism (possibly paywalled). The money paragraph is this:

The bigger switch happened as a national market for consumer goods opened after the Civil War, when purveyors like department stores wanted to reach large urban audiences. Newspapers responded by increasing the number of ads relative to content, and switched to models that went light on the political partisanship in the interest of expanding circulation. This move was driven not exclusively by lofty ideals but also by mercenary greed. And it worked. Newspapers used to make lots of money. Mountains of money.

Basically, the move to objective journalism came in the late 1800s when advertisers such as Macy’s wanted to take out full page ads, and wanted to do so in newspapers that served the largest sections of the market. And when a newspaper had to reach a large section of the market, it inevitably had to tone down the partisanship, and become more objective.

Over the last decade, we have been witnessing (across the world) the decline of objective media. All media is “#paidmedia” based on which side of the political spectrum you stand on. There aren’t that many truly objective papers around, and social media is bombarded left and right by extremely politicised reporting that goes as “news”.

It is perhaps no coincidence that this period has coincided with a time when print circulation has been dropping steadily (in the developed world at least), and where online advertising can be highly targeted.

In theory, mass marketing is inefficient. When you pay to put up a hoarding somewhere, you’re possibly paying a small amount for each person who sees the hoarding, but not all of them might find it interesting. Consequently, this reflects in a depressed per-person price of the hoarding implying the owner of that real estate can’t make as much as she could if the hoarding were to be more “targeted”.

When you can target your advertisements more precisely, everybody wins. You as the marketer know that your advertisement is only being shown to your intended audience. The owner of the real estate where you put your advertisement can thus charge you more for your advertisement. Even the customer will be less pained by the advertisement if it is highly relevant to her.

Another way of seeing it is – an advertisement shown to a customer who doesn’t want to see it is wasted. The monetary cost of this waste are borne by the owner of the real estate and the advertiser, and the non-monetary cost is borne by the customer (being forced to see something she didn’t want to see). And so one of the biggest technological problems of today is on how we can target advertisements better so that we can minimise such costs – and in the last decade and half, we’ve made significant progress on that front.

The problem with greater efficiency, however, is that it comes with the side-effect of biased media. When Nike knows that it can precisely target an advertisement at American leftwingers, it makes an ad with Colin Kaepernick and shows them to American leftwingers to sell them more shoes.

This doesn’t however, mean that Nike only sells to left-wingers. The same company can make another advertisement targeted precisely at right-wingers and use it to sell shoes to them!

So now that you can make left-wing and right-wing ads, and you have the ability to target them, you want to cut the waste and place the ads so that you can target as best as possible. In other words, you want to place your left-wing ads in places that only left-wingers want to see, and right-wing ads only in places that right-wingers will see. And so you prefer to advertise in CNN and Fox rather than in a hypothetical “broad market” media outlet.

And the reason you created the politically charged ads in the first place was because there were some outlets (Facebook, for example) where you could precisely target people based on their political orientation. And so you see the vicious cycle – that you can target in some places means you want other places where you can target and that creates demand for more polarised media.

It was the opposite cycle that took effect in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There was no way brands could target (also, when you make physical advertisements, with 1900s technology, each advertisement is costly and you don’t want to make one per segment) too effectively, and so they went mass market in their communication.

And this meant advertising in the outlets that could get them the maximum number of eyeballs. When you can’t discriminate between a “right” and a “wrong” eyeball, you pay based on the number of eyeballs. And the way for media organisations to grow then was to cater to everyone. Which meant less less bias and more objectivity and more “features”.

Sadly that cycle is now behind us.

Algorithmic curation

When I got my first smartphone (a Samsung Galaxy Note 2) in 2013, one of the first apps I installed on it was Flipboard. I’d seen the app while checking out some phones at either the Apple or Samsung retail outlets close to my home, and it seemed like a rather interesting idea.

For a long time, Flipboard was my go-to app to check the day’s news, as it conveniently categorised news into “tech”, “business” and “sport” and learnt about my preferences and fed me stuff I wanted. And then after some update, it suddenly stopped working – somehow it started serving too much stuff I didn’t want to read about, and when I tuned (by “following” and “unfollowing” topics) my feed, it progressively got worse.

I stopped using it some 2 years back, but out of curiosity started using it again recently. While it did throw up some nice articles, there is too much unwanted stuff in the app. More precisely, there’s a lot of “clickbaity” stuff (“10 things about Narendra Modi you would never want to know” and the like) in my feed, meaning I have to wade through a lot of such articles to find the occasional good ones.

(Aside: I dedicate about half a chapter to this phenomenon in my book. The technical term is “congestion”. I talk about it in the context of markets in relationships and real estate)

Flipboard is not the only one. I use this app called Pocket to bookmark long articles and read later. A couple of years back, Pocket started giving “recommendations” based on what I’d read and liked. Initially it was good, and mostly curated from what my “friends” on Pocket recommended. Now, increasingly I’m getting clickbaity stuff again.

I stopped using Facebook a long time before they recently redesigned their newsfeed (to give more weight to friends’ stuff than third party news), but I suspect that one of the reasons they made the change was the same – the feed was getting overwhelmed with clickbaity stuff, which people liked but didn’t really read.

Basically, there seems to be a widespread problem in a lot of automatically curated news feeds. To put it another way, the clickbaity websites seem to have done too well in terms of gaming whatever algorithms the likes of Facebook, Flipboard and Pocket use to build their automated recommendations.

And more worryingly, with all these curators starting to do badly around the same time (ok this is my empirical observation. Given few data points I might be wrong), it suggests that all automated curation algorithms use a very similar algorithm! And that can’t be a good thing.