Ah, the journalism of 2017. Poorly written perspective piece with zero sustenance.
TL;DR: Man decides to try 'alt-right' sites and services catered to conservative 'alt-tech' communities. Sites are poorly designed and implemented. Sites lack users. Opinions on social media. End.
I find it strange that a piece on how political lunatics (painted with an overly broad brush, to be sure) are building bastions of free speech has no mention of Tor, EFF, etc. The article is more biased in what it leaves out than by what it actually discusses.
What I know of the communities in the article leads me to believe that there isn't much overlap between them and the crowd that supports the EFF and Tor.
Gab is an interesting study in and of itself. I have an account there and really wanted it to succeed - I even advocated on their behalf across the diverse range of communities in which I participate when they launched a set of more advanced content filtering capabilities than Twitter. Sadly, they seemed to have been quickly branded as "alt-Right" when Milo was banned from Twitter, and I've since given up trying to attract more diversity of opinion to the platform. I don't think I've logged on there more than once in the past year or so.
I've been seeing this style of headline writing for a while now, with two sentences, almost a story within a story. Is this something that has happened recently, or is it just something I didn't notice before? It feels clickbaity.
I've come across it a lot with the Washington Post. This is the first I've noticed with the New York Times.
It's very clickbaity and it comes from a lot of the garbage "news" sites (Buzzfeed, et al). It's basically a loud siren stating that this article will affirm your beliefs about topic X.
It's sad to see it creep into reputable news orgs, but here we are.
I don’t think it’s at all new for feature writing of this type (it's been done, I think, for decades in print.)
Online, section distinctions that would segregated the kind of content to which this practice would apply are less noticeable than in print newspapers, though.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 1038 ms ] threadTL;DR: Man decides to try 'alt-right' sites and services catered to conservative 'alt-tech' communities. Sites are poorly designed and implemented. Sites lack users. Opinions on social media. End.
Gab is an interesting study in and of itself. I have an account there and really wanted it to succeed - I even advocated on their behalf across the diverse range of communities in which I participate when they launched a set of more advanced content filtering capabilities than Twitter. Sadly, they seemed to have been quickly branded as "alt-Right" when Milo was banned from Twitter, and I've since given up trying to attract more diversity of opinion to the platform. I don't think I've logged on there more than once in the past year or so.
I've come across it a lot with the Washington Post. This is the first I've noticed with the New York Times.
It's sad to see it creep into reputable news orgs, but here we are.
Online, section distinctions that would segregated the kind of content to which this practice would apply are less noticeable than in print newspapers, though.