It's absurdly common with news articles. They never link the stats/paper/organisation. I often wonder about the amount of collective time spent by individuals simply trying to find the data summarised in an article.
For all the lamenting about the media's decline there's plenty of amateur blogs out there that manage to link their sources when writing an article.
My pet peeve is when news organizations write about a court case (whether civil, like a lawsuit, or criminal) and forget to include (1) the court name and docket number so you can look up the status and filings yourself; (2) a copy of the latest filings to date (this can be harder to do depending on your platform).
It's even more infuriating when certain words have a link you would expect to be the source, but it turns out the link only leads to a sub-category of news about the word.
This is my biggest pet peeve with news in general. Why does a high school paper have more rigor in terms of citations than the average post from a major news organization? It honestly drives me crazy.
How in the world can a majority of major news organizations not overcome the hurdle of... adding links to what they're covering..?
It makes digesting political news all but impossible.
>This is my biggest pet peeve with news in general. Why does a high school paper have more rigor in terms of citations than the average post from a major news organization?
Because news is not meant to inform, it's meant to indoctrinate and keep you passively under the thumb of the rich.
>It makes digesting political news all but impossible.
The question is do you know the upper classes know your brain doesn't see the world as it is, you can be told the facts and not reason to the right conclusion?
I was wondering the same and once when I asked someone who knows about the topic the answer was basically: Don't want to give free backlinks for SEO, don't want people to just scroll to the link and leave the site.
It might just be a policy to not add links except if it's to articles on the same site, which is obviously stupid from the user's point of view.
It’s not very relevant to a story about eels, but the problem media has with primary sources, is that you can’t spin primary sources. They would rather have you read their editorial account of the primary source, rather than provide it to you, where there’s a greater risk of you making up for own mind about what to think of it.
It’s infuriating how true this seems to be. Especially in politics, so many big-name news sites across the entire political spectrum seem to consistently run stories that collapse instantly when checked.
How on earth do they still exist with a business model that seems to consist solely of making absurd interpretations of YouTube videos and tweets?
Fwiw, I recently started writing for a well-known website.
When I asked if it's okay to link to sources, they told me I was allowed to if absolutely necessary. I should try not to because it takes readers away from our site, and they might not come back.
I suspect that many sites have the same line of reasoning.
> I should try not to because it takes readers away from our site, and they might not come back.
> I suspect that many sites have the same line of reasoning.
Not your fault, obviously, but FFS: this is the most vapid line of reasoning. If I want to find out more I'm going to leave your site anyway, so surely it's better if I'm not irritated by your lack of citations when I do inevitably go?
Does Wikipedia worry about people leaving and not coming back? No. Do you know why I go back to Wikipedia all the effing time, often using it as a starting point for research? Well, one of the big reasons is that many articles have a decent list of authoritative citations and external links at the bottom that I can use to find out more when I need or want to.
Talk about myopic: even the BBC do this, and it's incredibly frustrating. Absolutely smacks of some clueless senior manager[1] setting up the wrong metrics for measuring site performance.
[1] Manager bashing is a bit of a tired trope here on HN and I'm not trying to make a generalisation but, as with every job, some of them are certainly idiots/clowns.
Thus news should not be a business. The business model of news is diametrically opposed to informing the public. We’re better off sticking to nonprofit journalism.
You've completely missed my point: if you want my attention you're more likely to get it for the longer term if you provide me with what I'm looking for, including citations, because I'll keep coming back. If on the other hand you're obstructive by not providing this, you probably won't. From a monetisation perspective it therefore makes sense to provide those citations.
Exactly! If a site gives me useful info and leads me to more, the site is much more likely to be the FIRST place I look for similar stuff next time. Otherwise they go on a mental blacklist and I never click on the links to that site in the first place.
You're probably an outlier. Most people are lazy (in particular, unlikely to embark on research projects), and accustomed to newspapers not citing sources (no hyperlinks in the dead-tree version, after all). They probably have data showing the rate at which people leave the site via external links.
You may be right, but people leaving the site isn't really the key metric here. The key metrics are ad and subscriber revenue: in this case particularly ad revenue.
If the reason they're leaving makes it's more likely they'll come back again in future this may lead to an increase in ad revenue due to more sessions even though average session duration falls.
Obviously I don't know, and unfortunately I've learned not to trust that higher-ups in certain organisations have done their homework on revenue-affecting decisions, but you'd at least hope that they had some data to back up the thinking.
I suggest to repurpose the hashtag (#pleaseRememberHumans) for an initiative about human needs regarding news sites – and also for issues with overly crafted UX in general (e.g., websites shying away behind a shield and hiding behind a subscribe dialog as soon as a human visitor shows up) –, once the original event is over.
Although I think this is wonderful, I wonder is there a non-public outreach reason for not just showing pre-recorded videos of people?
I’m also curious about how well these eels can perceive screens. Some animals seem to be able to process things on a screen while others seem to totally ignore it. Is there some biological difference here, maybe the frequencies of light emitted by a TV/monitor being designed for human eyes?
Some animals perceive movement much more quickly than we do, so standard 24 or 30 FPS video appears like a slideshow to them (apparently pigeons fit this category, I have no idea which animals it was tested for).
For binocularity, I'm not as sure, but it may be that with different eye setups, perspective has different rules to appear realistic.
There is also the simple fact that images on a screen don't appear realistic to us either, we just choose to take interest in them because we understand what they are meant to represent.
> Some animals seem to be able to process things on a screen while others seem to totally ignore it
In my experience, it's more about the particular individual of animal rather than broadly "all eels can see screens", at least that's what I experience with my dogs. One of them ignore screens and seemingly can't see / don't want to see what's on the screen, even if prompted to look at it. The other one watches TV with me, as soon as I'm watching something. And if there is something appearing on the screen resembling an animal, she tries to scare them away with barks. Humans on TV is fine, and she follows them, but birds, dogs or any other animal is an enemy according to her. Even animated animals are recognized as animals for her, unless they are too abstract.
Watching BoJack Horseman was an interesting experience, to see where she would react vs not. Seems most animals/humans in that show are fine, unless they are really behaving like animals, then it's not fine.
My younger cat also completely ignores televisions and the mirror, just doesn't look at it any longer than a regular wall. The older one reacts to the "cat in the mirror" and also watches TV. Even goes as far as to go look at the other side of the wall that the TV is on if she sees something on TV she wants to hunt/eat.
Is part of the fauna of Europe and US. You can find native Garden Eels in tropical but also temperate areas. Cool creatures. I had seen them in the wild and it was a strange experience. Like seeing a lawn growing backwards.
There are more cheap and simple solutions than video-chat (figures printed on cardboard and cut for example), so we can safely assume that eel eye reaction to screen flickering is not the real point here.
> is there a non-public outreach reason for not just showing pre-recorded videos of people?
The OP delights and your question made me think about how some among the unwashed masses of Internet users will send video to the eels that may harm and/or frighten them.
Aquariums in Japan are simply awesome. One of each five aquariums in the world are there. This means that there is a permanent competition for public's eyes and the risk to the people forgetting about a particular installation and favouring other.
The direct translation of this article for me is: Aquariums are expensive to maintain, especially if the public expects a high level of excellence. If your bussiness depend on massive loads of people and suddenly this is not possible anymore by the current situation, you have a problem. Some systems will struggle after two-three months of sudden lack of income. Either they are trying to monetize remote viewings or, if coronavirus keeps pushing, "Adopt an eel" campaign will most probably follow.
Both are reasonable solutions to a problem, of course, as long as people remain informed if their video-chat data are being monetized somehow.
43 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 96.9 ms ] threadhttps://www.sumida-aquarium.com/news/details/2236/
https://www.sumida-aquarium.com/news/details/2236/
A shame that The Guardian’s article did not include a backlink to it.
For all the lamenting about the media's decline there's plenty of amateur blogs out there that manage to link their sources when writing an article.
How in the world can a majority of major news organizations not overcome the hurdle of... adding links to what they're covering..?
It makes digesting political news all but impossible.
Because news is not meant to inform, it's meant to indoctrinate and keep you passively under the thumb of the rich.
https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Econo...
>It makes digesting political news all but impossible.
The question is do you know the upper classes know your brain doesn't see the world as it is, you can be told the facts and not reason to the right conclusion?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
Pathetic, right?
It might just be a policy to not add links except if it's to articles on the same site, which is obviously stupid from the user's point of view.
How on earth do they still exist with a business model that seems to consist solely of making absurd interpretations of YouTube videos and tweets?
When I asked if it's okay to link to sources, they told me I was allowed to if absolutely necessary. I should try not to because it takes readers away from our site, and they might not come back.
I suspect that many sites have the same line of reasoning.
> I suspect that many sites have the same line of reasoning.
Not your fault, obviously, but FFS: this is the most vapid line of reasoning. If I want to find out more I'm going to leave your site anyway, so surely it's better if I'm not irritated by your lack of citations when I do inevitably go?
Does Wikipedia worry about people leaving and not coming back? No. Do you know why I go back to Wikipedia all the effing time, often using it as a starting point for research? Well, one of the big reasons is that many articles have a decent list of authoritative citations and external links at the bottom that I can use to find out more when I need or want to.
Talk about myopic: even the BBC do this, and it's incredibly frustrating. Absolutely smacks of some clueless senior manager[1] setting up the wrong metrics for measuring site performance.
[1] Manager bashing is a bit of a tired trope here on HN and I'm not trying to make a generalisation but, as with every job, some of them are certainly idiots/clowns.
If the reason they're leaving makes it's more likely they'll come back again in future this may lead to an increase in ad revenue due to more sessions even though average session duration falls.
Obviously I don't know, and unfortunately I've learned not to trust that higher-ups in certain organisations have done their homework on revenue-affecting decisions, but you'd at least hope that they had some data to back up the thinking.
I’m also curious about how well these eels can perceive screens. Some animals seem to be able to process things on a screen while others seem to totally ignore it. Is there some biological difference here, maybe the frequencies of light emitted by a TV/monitor being designed for human eyes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteroconger
For binocularity, I'm not as sure, but it may be that with different eye setups, perspective has different rules to appear realistic.
There is also the simple fact that images on a screen don't appear realistic to us either, we just choose to take interest in them because we understand what they are meant to represent.
In my experience, it's more about the particular individual of animal rather than broadly "all eels can see screens", at least that's what I experience with my dogs. One of them ignore screens and seemingly can't see / don't want to see what's on the screen, even if prompted to look at it. The other one watches TV with me, as soon as I'm watching something. And if there is something appearing on the screen resembling an animal, she tries to scare them away with barks. Humans on TV is fine, and she follows them, but birds, dogs or any other animal is an enemy according to her. Even animated animals are recognized as animals for her, unless they are too abstract.
Watching BoJack Horseman was an interesting experience, to see where she would react vs not. Seems most animals/humans in that show are fine, unless they are really behaving like animals, then it's not fine.
At least it worked on me, I spent 2h digging through wikipedia and Youtube about Garden Eels.
There are more cheap and simple solutions than video-chat (figures printed on cardboard and cut for example), so we can safely assume that eel eye reaction to screen flickering is not the real point here.
The OP delights and your question made me think about how some among the unwashed masses of Internet users will send video to the eels that may harm and/or frighten them.
The direct translation of this article for me is: Aquariums are expensive to maintain, especially if the public expects a high level of excellence. If your bussiness depend on massive loads of people and suddenly this is not possible anymore by the current situation, you have a problem. Some systems will struggle after two-three months of sudden lack of income. Either they are trying to monetize remote viewings or, if coronavirus keeps pushing, "Adopt an eel" campaign will most probably follow.
Both are reasonable solutions to a problem, of course, as long as people remain informed if their video-chat data are being monetized somehow.