The Onion
7 HN mentions · mentioned in 6 months, 2009–2024
3:10 · 2.7M views · Jul 10, 2009
A 2009 satirical news segment from The Onion's 'In The Know' in which pundits adjust their on-air opinions in real time according to a live viewer poll. It lampoons pandering media and politics.
Used as a punchline whenever commenters see consensus-driven decisions, politicians chasing public opinion, or metric-driven content.
7 comments from Hacker News
The value of netflix is probably not only on its technical prowess and app experience, but it seems they are pretty involved in content direction through metrics. ¹ ² Sources: [1] [LINK] [2] this video
Hmmm. But there is a reason that design by committee is a curse word. To his credit, I found it interesting that Ousterhout at least gave a hat tip to the dictator school of thought. I think though that there are many more examples which he omits. Linus -- "Benevolent Dictator for Life" Guido Van Rossum -- ditto Just about every other open source worthy -- ditto Larry & Sergey -- ditto If you don't have that ruthless product genius with "taste" you just aren't going to achieve greatness, IMHO. Open to counterexamples, but every time I've observed consensus based decision making it has devolved into politics and pre-meetings and vote-swapping. And this is among both tech academics and tech startups, who one would hope would be more rational. Actually, this Onion clip captures what happens during an open consensus based process where everyone can see each other's votes: this video Real-time pandering . Instead what you may want to do is buttonhole people or small groups with deep knowledge of the decision area, ask for their input, debate if you must, and then go out with a united front.
Yeah that sounds right to me. Even though use of the internet has expanded a lot since I was a kid, I remember making more genuine friends in the earlier days. My theory is that it has to do with the ubiquity of feedback mechanisms. Likes, followers, upvotes, etc. It's a never-ending popularity contest. We're now living this Onion satire from 14 years ago: this video The ubiquity of the "news feed" concept could also play a role -- long-running discussions are now fairly impossible. People who disagree just take potshots at each other, instead of getting to the root of the disagreement. It's a shame there's so much homogeneity across different social sites. Wish people would experiment more.
I would argue the defining factor of social media which separates it from blogs/forums/etc. is the ubiquitous feedback metrics, in the form of likes/downvotes/retweets/etc. Imagine attending party where whenever you finished a sentence, everyone who was listening immediately responded with a silent thumbs up / thumbs down in response. Pretty dystopian. The Onion did a sketch illustrating the problem a few years ago: this video By this definition, HN is halfway to being social media. There are metrics, but they aren't displayed publicly.
From what I gather, they invested in Onion News Network for IFC, and when that got canceled relatively quickly, they didn't risk online-only distribution. Maybe 2011 was too early to pivot to video? [LINK] My favorite bit, still stuck in my head whenever I see politicians from both parties rush to the scene of a protest or whatever, is "New Live Poll Lets Pundits Pander To Viewers In Real Time": this video