We need some kind of authority to vet what is represented as news but when anyone can blog or tweet a shoddy and hasty observation as something of importance and it can be picked up and redistributed by organizations that purport to have integrity it's a slap in the face to what journalism has been for a couple hundred years.

Your impression of past journalism might be a bit rose-colored. Prior to the last century, there wasn't any independent news to speak of. Even in the second half of the 1900's when news outlets could afford genuine investigative journalism, the topics they chose to cover were heavily influenced by politics and cultural bias. We are smack in the middle of a disruption of how journalism is paid for and distributed. It's messy, but there are actually many quality outfits to be found, and if anything the pluralism is an improvement.

Speaking as someone that used computers before the web, the internet has been transformative. I don't even know who you are, or where you are, but we can converse about a topic like this.

I liked your post, but I hated the formatting. I took the liberty of formatting it for you:

I spend basically all my free time on the internet so I definitely enjoy the internet but it's like the most disappointing development in communication in the history of man.

In the nineties when futurists were predicting what it would become it was like the greatest achievement we've ever created and it would bring us together in ways that would demolish borders and increase global understanding. In practice people use it to reinforce their beliefs and clump together into little factions with other people who will tell them they're right.

The problem of the internet growing up isn't about technology companies, it's about the people who make up the internet. The average user isn't paying attention to the issues raised in this story, they use the internet to read stories that reinforce their opinions and download free porn (not criticizing, love me some BT porn) and look at gifs of cats. The whole endeavor is monstrously disappointing.

Any time I've ever read something that actually changed my opinion on something or made me examine my beliefs it was total serendipity that I stumbled across such a story or comment. The democratization it's created in regards to journalism is probably the worst thing to happen to critical thought ever.

We need some kind of authority to vet what is represented as news but when anyone can blog or tweet a shoddy and hasty observation as something of importance and it can be picked up and redistributed by organizations that purport to have integrity it's a slap in the face to what journalism has been for a couple hundred years.

You get out what you put in. I normally don't speak in aphorisms, so rest assured that I actually mean this one. All of the things you said are true of the lowest common denominator, and occasionally even the highest (even hubski, gasp), but they don't have to be.

I learned a long time ago not to be disappointed in the "average" person. I reserve disappointment for when the standouts act like they're average. Sometimes yes on the internet, but often no. Any tool that allows me to read the personal blogs of physics professors at MIT, machine intelligence researchers on the west coast, authors everywhere... these are brilliant people I would never have met. Bottom line for me.