Note of clarification since the branding is easy to conflate: "Buzzfeed News" is a part of Buzzfeed, better known for viral/listicle content, but has been its own entity, i.e. the "serious"/indepth news and investigations.
The name "Buzzfeed" itself, even if you didn't know what it was, doesn't bring to mind serious investigative journalism.
It makes you think of content being shoved out as quickly as possible, about whatever topic is popular, in hopes of getting clicks. Which is exactly what their sans-"News" site is.
Profit at the expense of all else is toxic, in my book. The economic framework of capitalism doesn't absolve individuals of guilt, really. At the end of the day, a human being makes a decision.
Competition works, and is important, because you would rather make $1 for yourself even if it reduces someone else's profit by $10. Which is how the market gets $9 more efficient.
Sometimes the status quo sucks. This is often caused by a lack of competition or some kind of information problem. In media it's a little of both, but the main one is that people don't understand how they're being manipulated because the people they rely on to help them understand things are the ones manipulating them.
Social media algorithms aren't designed to make you happy or informed. They're designed to make you spend all day on social media.
It's not that hard to design algorithms to do the opposite. That's not the problem. The problem is people aren't informed of the choice, or don't have a choice because the network effect locks them in and the network doesn't let them choose the algorithm.
So we need to solve two problems. First, divorce the network from the algorithm, so people can choose. Second, people need to be informed, so they choose the one that works for them instead of against them.
The person who figures out how to do this gets the $1 at the expense of costing Facebook $10. But they're currently getting nothing, and 10% of what the incumbents get is still a lot. So who wants to make money?
Every news source that maintains a paywall should get with Apple, Google and maybe Microsoft and Facebook/Meta and set up a syndication arrangement using all of these companies (at a minimum) as access points. Then, offer an "all access pass" where someone can pay, say, $1000 or $2000 a year, access any news article from a participating provider, and never encounter another paywall, anywhere.
Additionally, for $5000/year, access is ad-free.
The universal subscription fee would be divided among the syndicate itself for distribution to its members as well as its access provider. The majority (but not all) of the revenue would be allocated to the members on the basis of how many times their articles were actually read.
You're welcome! Any other apparently-unsolvable problems need solving, you guys know where to find me.
That's a negotiating point, not a dealbreaker. The important thing is to offer both options.
What would keep this plan from working is if there were a lot of major holdouts that insist on keeping their own paywalls and subscription model. Can't account for that level of stupidity, but the market will eventually eliminate it.
Apple News in its current state is a step in the right direction, they just need to bring it to its logical conclusion.
I'm not sure most people would pay 4 figures, or even 3, for access to quality journalism - even if it didn't have ads. I remember when the Wall Street Journal came out on the Internet in 1997 - it was completely paywalled (no free articles at all), and the early pricing was scorned by critics and the public, even if it wasn't astronomical ($50/year for non-print subscribers, $29/year for print subscribers).
What we know doesn't work are thousands of individual paywalls and associated subscriptions. Can you imagine journalism continuing on this path for another 20 years?
I feel quite strongly that syndication is the only possible solution, if we're going to compensate journalists fairly. One subscription, no user-hostile gatekeepers or paywalls, no artificial barriers to either publication or exploration.
Apart from that, it's no longer 1997, and people are used to paying for stuff online. Frequently they pay a LOT for stuff online. There is nothing radical about this.
How do you determine who gets paid? If it's by impressions, you have all the clickbait problems as with advertising.
What happens when the central gatekeeper decides they've had enough of anyone criticizing their interests and starts booting people out who do? Or journalists self-censor for fear of that?
What do we do about privacy? Having a big database of everything everyone reads is bad. Tying it to payment info and therefore identity is unacceptable. We do not make lists for future fascists or communists. In theory it's possible to address this with cryptography and zero knowledge proofs, but we all know it won't be in a centralized system, because they want to track and control everything you read.
Meanwhile the real problem with subscription fees is people read different sources in different amounts. If you read one religiously, you pay the $5/month. But it should be possible to get the articles a la carte for a low price, e.g. $0.10 each, for the publications you don't read all the time.
So the thing we really need here is an anonymous payments system with low transaction fees. The blockchain people keep trying to do this, and let them if they can, but how about this.
A payment processor that uses the cryptography and the zero knowledge proofs. They know who you are, you pay them, you get a secret which allows you to spend the money. Now you can use the secret to pay for articles or anything else, and the payment processor debits your account and credits the seller's, but they can't tell who you paid, only that you paid someone and someone paid them. This would be highly useful in general, but especially here.
This might require some constraints like not supporting chargebacks, or maybe the cryptographers can figure it out. But if you can make an anonymous $0.10 transaction with no transaction fee, that's a solution.
This seems like you live in a crazy bubble. $1,000 a year is an astronomical amount to most people. Netflix costs $120. Hulu is something like $60 (with ads). There is no way most people can afford that to read articles. Given that digital goods have almost no cost of distribution, better to try for $100/year for more than 10x the people.
This assumes that people feel "worked against" by the current systems.
Facebook achieved market dominance in an open market, it's hard to convincingly argue that they won by doing things against the desires of the market. So the market would work for a problem like "Facebook is too expensive and doesn't need to be." But Facebook is already free, so you can't easily beat it on that point (it's unlikely that your thing would be so profitable you could meaningfully pay users to take them away from FB).
But we don't have to simply blindly accept that the result of market competition == the outcome that we'd all choose if we thought about the big picture and not just the in-the-moment choices.
How does market competition divorce the network from the algorithm? Keep in mind that Facebook actively tunes their algorithm to give people more and more (short term) emotional reward for engagement.
A third party would have to convince people that they actually want stuff different than what they've currently been responding to, and that they should leave FB to get it (versus just behaving differently on FB to get a different version of the product).
There's already a lot of alternatives for news - I personally decided FB wasn't right for me (nor was any "social media" network) and got a newspaper subscription instead - but they're hardly seeing mass adoption from people migrating away from Facebook.
The natural extension of "we don't have to simply blindly accept that the result of market competition == the outcome that we'd all choose if we thought about the big picture and not just the in-the-moment choices" is that we would definitely not assume "the result of market competition == anything ethical."
Changing outcomes/behaviors to ensure people act ethically would have to come from an outside-the-market force, like government.
> Facebook achieved market dominance in an open market, it's hard to convincingly argue that they won by doing things against the desires of the market.
This is the information asymmetry. People sign up without understanding how the algorithm works, or sign up not knowing that the corporation can change the algorithm at any time to make it more abusive. Then the network effect locks them in even if some eventually figure it out.
So beating them in the market takes two things. First, yours has to be better.
Designing something which is better at the expense of being less (but not un-) profitable is straightforward. Let users choose the algorithm, they'll typically want one that optimizes for quality over volume etc., so you'll make less money but not none.
Second, people have to know yours is better. This is the information problem. This is also partially a coordination problem. You need everyone to find out quickly enough that enough can switch together and overcome the network effect before the early people forget about it or try it and give up because no one else is there.
That's not a trivial problem but it's hardly a violation of the laws of physics either. And if you can do it one time, the network effect is now in your favor.
> How does market competition divorce the network from the algorithm?
Because that's how you get people to switch from Facebook. That's the competitive advantage that Facebook doesn't have. Not locking you into a specific algorithm, which informed users would prefer once they learn the consequences of not having that.
In theory Facebook could see this coming and do this voluntarily. Then it would lose 90% rather than 100% of its profits because it couldn't optimize for getting people to spend all day on Facebook once users could choose an algorithm that doesn't do that.
Or their refusal to do this creates an opportunity for someone else to.
They don't need to not like it. It's relative. They just have to like the new thing better.
Which shouldn't be hard when they're objectively maximizing engagement at your expense. The hard part is figuring out how to overcome the network effect.
> Which shouldn't be hard when they're objectively maximizing engagement at your expense.
This needs more proof - specifically, would people agree it's at their short term expense even if they agree it's against their long term expense? Lots of successful short-term fun, long-term negative products out there in the world, and we rarely expect - or see - the free market alone to make those products go away.
Most products like that don't actually work. Payday loans are available to everyone, but people typically don't use them to buy luxury goods. The people who take them out use them to avoid things that are long-term worse, like eviction or losing your job because you couldn't pay to get to work.
The products in that category you see succeeding are survivorship bias, like cigarettes. Which only works because it builds a physical dependency.
But maybe the algorithm is like nicotine and it's hard to break the habit. We can still win, because we can offer the same algorithm, because we can offer more than one. So you switch because you aspire to quit. You want the option. And you don't have to quit today, you can switch and keep the addictive one.
But then you have a choice. You can turn it off when you're feeling strong. Wean yourself. Time lock the bad one in your client.
Which eventually makes it easier to quit smoking altogether.
maybe investor like NBCUniversal want to recoup their money. Buzzfeed stock have been drilling ever since IPO.
"In April, however, the deal was approved when BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti made NBC a guarantee of concessions that still came with a loss of some $100 million, people familiar with the matter said in the WSJ report. In order to ink the deal, Peretti agreed to terms that would put the burden on his company to raise its shares after the merger. According to the report, he had offered a portion of his stake to NBCUniversal if the shares did not reach their target."
That's valid, but the Buzzfeed executives carry much of the blame, not shareholders. There are a number of successful private companies, e.g. Wolfram Research, Huawei, Trader Joe's, Deloitte.
It's quite evident that Buzzfeed went public not to finance their news business, but to seemingly cash out. After all, it's now nothing more than a $700M list builder.
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I know I am correct, it was rhetorical question, not exactly sure why downvotes, if people are that clueless they don't know such general knowledge, same as Fanta is originally Nazi drink.
The more toxic the news side becomes the more I've tried avoiding the Fox shows. Bobs Burgers is about the only thing on there I still regularly watch.
>Fox News and watching the Simpsons on Fox is a more direct analogy. Any problem with the branding there?
How? Nobody gets confused between a cartoon and a news program. They are completely differently offerings, branded completely differently.
Buzzfeed, on the other hand, built up a reputation over years for pumping out lowest-common-denominator trash journalism, then later set up a serious news website under the same brand.
It would be more like if Fox News bought out the BBC and called it "Fox News UK".
Buzzfeed News isn't selling Buzzfeed to news readers. It's selling news to Buzzfeed readers, which is a deeply commendable activity and the branding is perfect for that.
> If you don't have the majority youre not the owner but an employee.
By that definition Bezos is (well, was) an Amazon employee. And Musk is Tesla employee.
Zuckerberg owns a minority of shares but a majority of votes, so I don't know where he falls in your calculus. But I disagree with your statement as a whole, so I don't care too much about the line.
That kinda pushes you into the absurdity of the situation, actually. What is ownership, if not control? To own something is to control it, and to control something is to own it. Possession, control, and power are much more fundamental concepts than an illusiory idea of ownership sold to you by the finance industry.
I think you're overthinking it. The concepts of ownership and control are pretty well separated. It happens all the time. In leasing, for example, or silent partnership agreements.
There's nothing illusory about it, the definitions about what you can do with Facebook voting and non-voting shares would be quite rigorously defined.
You’ve pointed out two examples of “big personality” CEOs that are colloquially understood to “own” their company, but your argument seems to be that they must own them by virtue of it sounding preposterous to a layperson that they don’t?
Tesla would probably exist without Musk as CEO. Amazon would certainly exist without Bezos as CEO.
I kept using the word "employee", not "owner". And I think most people would agree that the largest shareholder who is CEO is not an employee in the standard use of the word.
Since the OP responded in a different post that Zuckerberg, by virtual of control of the majority of Meta stock isn't an employee, he's clearly referring to power, not to equity. And I think it's true that Bezos (if he chose to reassert himself) or Musk can do whatever they want with their respective companies. I mean, even if he doesn't control more than 20% of the stock, who do you think is going to stand up to Musk? The institutional investors? A coalition of people who bought into Tesla because they worship him? The minority that is none of the above?
This was easy to see coming. Prestige doesn't matter if you're a public company, all that matters is this quarter's results. Buzzfeed could play that game when their investors were happy that Jonah was incinerating their money, but now that they're public and their SPAC dropped like a rock, anything unprofitable has got to go.
Eh, going public, by itself, doesn't necessarily result in this kind of outcome. There's plenty of public companies that are operating with little in profits or even at a net loss.
Presumably the way this SPAC was structured resulted in a change of control, and if you make that decision, you get what you get.
"Prestige" BuzzFeed was always a tainted name there inability to realize how shitty their reputation was and release real news under a different name directly lead to this.
I have no idea why you are getting down-voted. It's 100% true that the absolutely terrible brand that is BuzzFeed spilled over BuzzFeed News and hurt its public perception.
Yep. Literally every thread about buzzfeed news has multiple posts explaining the different pods of the business, with the caveat that BFNews is serious.
> I have no idea why you are getting down-voted. It's 100% true that the absolutely terrible brand that is BuzzFeed spilled over BuzzFeed News and hurt its public perception.
Don't you have that backwards? I was always under the impression that BuzzFeed News existed to help prop up the BuzzFeed brand's reputation.
BuzzFeed News was created later, years after BuzzFeed established its reputation as the internet equivalent of a shoddy tabloid. That crippled the News org's credibility from the very start; I know I still have a "drivel alert" instinct from their domain name, despite the knowledge that they have, in fact, produced impressive investigations at times.
I'm not really sure that this matters. The problem is that the news organization didn't make money, and judging by the financials they aren't close to making money. It would be a different thing if we could point to other media companies that were making money with their better brand but they basically don't exist. They're either also unprofitable or they're massively bigger than Buzzfeed news - for example NYT has >20x the staff and has a huge reputation that took decades to establish. Buzzfeed going public was the right move, trying to go for scale and make the best of consolidation. The problem is that that plan failed because no one was willing to put up the cash to do it.
More toxic investors who think the world needs more ads, less investigative journalism. Good to hear that Peretti is pushing back, but somehow I doubt that he'll last if he keeps it up.
Maybe some investors are ok with an organization in a company losing $10M yearly but it doesn't really strike me as toxic for them not to be ok with this.
A CEO of a public company is responsible for selling investors on what he/she is doing. If News is fundamental to the company or to his vision then he is responsible for explaining that or selling that vision. If investors don't believe in it I don't blame them per se I'd just say the company either shouldn't be public or they should have a CEO that can reasonably explain to investors why they should care that News exists.
Sure. Just like TI, HP, and many others killed off their R&D departments because they didn't make direct profits, only ate money and produced ideas that other departments would monetize. Penny wise, pound foolish. Fuck the future, I want my money now.
Unless you're indicting the entire Western economic system (which is fair but also not something I'm going to argue about), blaming investors is nonsense. Corporate officers are responsible for having and selling a vision. If these companies got rid of the R&D departments, management owns that, not investors.
Investors are the ones making the decision for higher profits in the short term over long term viability of the company. It is absolutely in the investors, usually profit hungry corporate investors like superannuation or the local equivalent.
Foresight isn’t profitable. Sustainability isn’t profitable. They want next years bonus cheques not a healthy retirement fund.
Pardon my French, but this is bullshit. Activist investors pressuring buzzfeed are directly responsible for their actions. At best, they looked at the orgs under the umbrella and decided that the best move is to axe BFN. Experience tells me that either they're focused on short term profits, or silencing journalists they dislike.
And, yes, this is partly an indictment of the entire western economic system. Rapacious focus on short term profits will be our downfall. This is merely one example of many.
Oh please, Buzzfeed does not have a good reputation, yes some articles were pretty good, but it's far from something people would be willing to defend as a good news source.
Investors don't have to shoulder costs for a service that no one cares about. You want a "what flavour of jelly bean are you" quiz you go to Buzzfeed. You want serious news you read one of the countless other site that covers world news. Yes it's cynical, but if I had money in Buzzfeed I would have pressured the CEO too.
That's not what I meant, the articles from Buzzfeed News were good, I don't deny it.
That being said, their reputation as "Buzzfeed" is bad, if you repeat a piece of information to someone and say that you "read it on Buzzfeed", there will be an inherent bias that the source is bad, because most people associate them with terrible pop-culture articles on Facebook and don't even know that they won a pullitzer prize.
In that context, their reputation is permanently damaged for most people. If Buzzfeed really want to create "serious" news branch they'd have to call it something else at the very least.
BuzzFeed News can't rely on one prize to boost their reputation when they have a severe retention problem.
Two of the three reporters on that winning team no longer work there.
Despite that they are burdened by the Buzzfeed name. Just look at this thread arguing back and forth about this. They should really spin it off and shed all the Buzzfeed branding.
Talk is cheap if you aren't the one footing the bill. The investors are likely in the top .001% in spending money on investigative journalism, but if they don't spend even more money on it, they get to receive criticism for killing journalism from people who made more lucrative investments.
Funny I was using chrome on android the other day and the number of sites with huge ads that obscure content reminds me of popups in the early 2000's. Some mainstream sites are practically unusable. I suppose they've driven their engagement metrics by making a tiny 'close' button that's designed to make you inadvertently click the stupid ad.
I say we draft the ad people to defend Ukraine before we let them back into society on parole.
> More toxic investors who think the world needs more ads, less investigative journalism.
You're talking on Hacker News where people routinely bypass paid content by posting workaround links. The same people who get angry when people stealing their SAAS subscriptions. This is the pot calling the kettle black.
I'm not sure that subscription fees are the panacaea to the proliferation of PR instead of journalism that you seem to think. When you had to pay for newspapers, they still had ads in them.
Those ideals died long ago when they took 500M+ of venture capital. Years later, those investors are taking their losses and public market actors can and will force them to make the hard decisions, like cutting the CEO's vanity project. Call it ruthless if you want, but any option post-VC, whether it's PE or public markets, is going to involve a lot less "lighting money on fire" projects. Outside that environment, a company is simply worth the sum of it's discounted future cashflow, with direct monetary incentive to maximize it.
I agree that Buzzfeed should not have gone public. For those of us who are more cynical, we see Buzzfeed News as the reputable veneer on the listicle business. The actual news organization was started 5 years after the listicle business.
Buzzfeed's purpose was to make money. Buzzfeed News was a semi-successful attempt to take money from advertisers who preferred high minded NYT/WSJ type audiences by gaining the reputation of "no, no, you see Buzzfeed News is the serious part, it actually does good stuff!".
It didn't work because the financial cards are stacked against print media, there is basically NYT and then tech billionaire charity cases like The Post and The Atlantic.
I don't know. If you just straight-out divide 10 million by 100, it comes out to 100,000 per employee. If you spread that out with some management, and take into account that the burdened rate of an employee is typically 1.4 times their salary, that sounds pretty accurate if the company has very little revenue.
100 employees is a lot of people. Even if you paid them nothing more than median wage (~$52k), with healthcare and other HR costs that easily adds up to the lions share of $10 mil. And this is just talking about people. Not servers, office space, equipment, contracts & rental fees, licensing, etc.
Hardly. Clearly they are left leaning but they back up their opinion with facts. For example calling out Republicans using half-truths against Jackson to try and make her look bad. That's some good reporting.
I didn't see much "D good". There was a bit of "Specific R bad", but they only quoted that left-wing rags like the National Review to back up that what they said was bad. I won't repeat them, because they were less half-truths and more "meritless to the point of demagoguery" - (National Review).
I was calling the National Review, founded by William Buckley, the famous conservative pundit, a left wing rag as a tongue in cheek way of saying even super conservative publications call it meritless.
I considered it as obvious sarcasm as calling Fox News a left-wing front of the Democratic Party.
Just because a source looks biased doesnt mean its not factual. Saying "republicans are saying awful things to/about XYZ person", if they were doing it, wouldnt be biased, it would be the truth.
And I wouldnt consider them "far left" anyway, just left of some other mainstream news sources.
> Still far-left in my eyes, but you're not wrong in the general sense, simply because most MSM is far-left nowadays.
What do you consider far left? Mainstream media pushes for larger police budgets, high defense spending, defends billionaires, defends foreign policies that cause death, destruction, and misery all over the world, they are almost never actually critical of politicians and/or what they say in a way that matters. They defend massive corporations that are working against Americans, push fossil fuels (and for adjacent industries, like cars), push against single payer healthcare, and many other policies that are even just slightly left of center.
No part of our mainstream media is even close to far left, basically no major source in the world is.
At best, you might get a left wing opinion article in the NYT or something, but thats still going to be sandwiched between police propaganda and the current week's article on cancel culture.
Regardless of thoughts on Thiel, the second link feels like a hit piece —- the entire article hinges on one paragraph “BuzzFeed News can reveal that in at least one instance during the summer of 2016, Thiel hosted a dinner with [white nationalist]… And then Thiel emailed the next day to say how much he’d enjoyed his company.“ How many other people were at the dinner? How many other people received this email? What were the contents of the email, i.e. was it a generic thank you? Left to suspect these details would make the story less interesting
Using quotes when the quote doesn't exist should be enough to get this comment deleted.
I know nothing about Thiel, but the actual quote is "hosted a dinner with" which like the one you responded to here said, could easily mean there were 50 guests at a party and one of them was this guy.
Your made up quote is something entirely different.
Does it matter? You couldn’t pay me enough to dine with a known white nationalist and I certainly wouldn’t be sending any thank you notes as a follow-up. I can’t imagine I’m unique in this regard.
The article doesn't establish Thiel knew the guy was a white nationalist. Guilt by association is weak by itself, but if the two just attended the same party unbeknownst to Thiel and then Thiel spammed a list-serve of attendees with "THANKS EVERYONE I ENJOYED ALL YOUR COMPANY"--that's not association. The article is so threadbare its impossible to know whether that happened or whether Thiel purposely hosted a dinner specifically for the white supremacist. Or something in between.
What are the odds the person at your table widely known for founding "Youth for Western Civilization" turns out to be a white supremacist? Talk about bad luck, Pete. It could happen to anyone, really. And it's not like Thiel has access to troves and troves of personal data on just about every person with an internet connection and a program specifically designed to identify "extremists" by analyzing patterns in their social network and interests. Oh wait...
This analysis is based on many unfounded assumptions like he knew that the guy founded Youth for Western Civilization or even what that was. I traveled in right wing circles on colleges campuses in 2006-2008 and I never hear of them until today.
If Thiel was getting into bed with this guy, then yea, you can probably impute some knowledge b/c Thiel would do some diligence. But we are talking about a dinner and an email.
I met a new person this weekend under similar circumstances. You shouldn't take that as a a sign I agree with that person's politics.
Shrug. I would — and have — had dinner with all kinds of people whose beliefs and behavior diverge sharply from what I think is advisable or ethical. Having dinner with someone is not an endorsement of their worldview, full stop.
Maybe this will sound corny, and I guess it probably won't land with non-Christians, but I'll offer my heuristic anyway: What would Jesus do? I don't think shunning is the answer.
Personally, I would be open to such an experience. I am not so insecure in my beliefs that I would worry on that front. I might learn something about them and the nature of the world, and maybe they would too.
Investors are the worst possible people to tell you how to create something great. I've never seen a notable public market investor who made the world a better place.
I want to say Carl Icon's push to separate PayPal from eBay was beneficial. Not that PayPal stock has done so well lately, but it's a real company providing a real service now, and overall the calculus is positive
This doesn't really dispute your point though. Rules tend to have an exception or two.
Paypal separating from eBay was good financial engineerings, but at the end of the day you've got two crappy companies with 1 sinking faster than the other, neither has done well since, and separately they're both too small to compete in their markets.
> I've never seen a notable public market investor who made the world a better place.
which isn't their goal.
Investors' goal is to earn the highest return possible on their capital they invest, and take the lowest risk possible they can get away with.
Making the world a better place is something a charity does. Making money is what a company does. If the company incidentally makes the world a better place, that's great, but why does anyone expect this to happen?
> News doesn't make money unless you're a solo operation out of a basement or behind a paywall with 100+ years of experience under you.
A solo news operation sounds a lot like a OS written by one person. At some point, it takes more labor to build something than one person is capable of.
"As it turned out, for many former employees, it was all too good to be true. This past Monday, as BuzzFeed went public, many of them learned something alarming: they weren’t able to trade the stock that they had waited years to exercise."
When you have skin in the game it aligns interests.
“As the markets opened on December 6th, former BuzzFeed employees contacted their brokerages to initiate trades, but later found out that the type of stock they held, known as Class B, couldn’t be publicly traded yet. That evening, Continental, a stock-transfer company that BuzzFeed had engaged to facilitate the spac merger, sent an e-mail informing former employees that, in order to trade their Class B shares, they would have to convert them into Class A shares. In order to complete the process—which would take three to five business days—former employees were informed, they would need to print the e-mail, sign, scan, and return it.”.
“An e-mail circulating among former employees this past week raised the question of whether they could have a legal case. “This is rotten and definitely slimey, but I have not figured out if it’s illegal,” a person wrote. When asked whether anything illegal had occurred, Matt Mittenthal, a spokesman for BuzzFeed, said ‘of course not.’”.
And this only applies to past employees that exercised their options - paying some money and taxes for their equity.
Shut it down and move all the employees to contractors, get rid of all benefits, put up a paywall, and only pay the employees when they actually deliver quality material that you can run ads on.
> OH NO! where will i get TOP 100 CELEBRITY DOGS THAT LOOK LIKE POISONOUS FROGS lists in the future?
Oh don't worry, you'll still get that. In fact, that's all you'll get. Investors know how to sort the wheat from the chaff to provide us with the race to the bottom our society really needs.
the value that is being subsidized by the viral clickbait mess of the regular buzzfeed site, seeing as nobody wants to pays actual money for the "societal value" that you mention
> “Though BuzzFeed is a profitable company, we don’t have the resources to support another two years of losses,” [Peretti said]
This part confuses me. The newsroom is a loss, but buzzfeed as a whole is profitable, got it. But if buzzfeed as a whole is profitable even with the news division in the red, what does it mean to say you "don't have the resources to support another two years of losses"?
Except it’s not. Their duty to the stockholders is to be responsible, not to maximize profits. If they feel their news division is important to the company and the community, that’s a perfectly valid reason to maintain it.
Actually duty to the shareholder is do as shareholders ask . Those things could be responsible or profit maximizing or not.
Legally it is hard to define either as they vague and subjective, obeying the board directions is much easier to define and codify in law.
If management does not do as shareholders ask , shareholders can get management replaced by nominating and voting for directors who want the same thing in the next general meeting or call for a emergency one.
Management reports to the board and the board reports to the shareholders.
It is hard to counter the direct wishes of all shareholders combined. However rarely all shareholders want the same thing. Management themselves own substantial shares and obviously will feel different for example.
"Maximizing shareholder value" has been cause of more evil in the past 100 years than just about any other philosophy on earth, and that includes fascism.
Maybe I'm being too literal, but if they say they are profitable despite the current losses, then why say they don't have the resources? Clearly they do, in fact since they are profitable they have more than enough resources, by definition. I suppose what they mean to say is "we choose not to devote resources to an unprofitable division".
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadGithub repo of their open-sourced work: https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/everything
Previous HN submissions from the domain: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buzzfeednews.com
2021 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting: https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/megha-rajagopalan-alison-ki...
It makes you think of content being shoved out as quickly as possible, about whatever topic is popular, in hopes of getting clicks. Which is exactly what their sans-"News" site is.
Competition works, and is important, because you would rather make $1 for yourself even if it reduces someone else's profit by $10. Which is how the market gets $9 more efficient.
Sometimes the status quo sucks. This is often caused by a lack of competition or some kind of information problem. In media it's a little of both, but the main one is that people don't understand how they're being manipulated because the people they rely on to help them understand things are the ones manipulating them.
Social media algorithms aren't designed to make you happy or informed. They're designed to make you spend all day on social media.
It's not that hard to design algorithms to do the opposite. That's not the problem. The problem is people aren't informed of the choice, or don't have a choice because the network effect locks them in and the network doesn't let them choose the algorithm.
So we need to solve two problems. First, divorce the network from the algorithm, so people can choose. Second, people need to be informed, so they choose the one that works for them instead of against them.
The person who figures out how to do this gets the $1 at the expense of costing Facebook $10. But they're currently getting nothing, and 10% of what the incumbents get is still a lot. So who wants to make money?
Additionally, for $5000/year, access is ad-free.
The universal subscription fee would be divided among the syndicate itself for distribution to its members as well as its access provider. The majority (but not all) of the revenue would be allocated to the members on the basis of how many times their articles were actually read.
You're welcome! Any other apparently-unsolvable problems need solving, you guys know where to find me.
What would keep this plan from working is if there were a lot of major holdouts that insist on keeping their own paywalls and subscription model. Can't account for that level of stupidity, but the market will eventually eliminate it.
Apple News in its current state is a step in the right direction, they just need to bring it to its logical conclusion.
I feel quite strongly that syndication is the only possible solution, if we're going to compensate journalists fairly. One subscription, no user-hostile gatekeepers or paywalls, no artificial barriers to either publication or exploration.
Apart from that, it's no longer 1997, and people are used to paying for stuff online. Frequently they pay a LOT for stuff online. There is nothing radical about this.
How do you determine who gets paid? If it's by impressions, you have all the clickbait problems as with advertising.
What happens when the central gatekeeper decides they've had enough of anyone criticizing their interests and starts booting people out who do? Or journalists self-censor for fear of that?
What do we do about privacy? Having a big database of everything everyone reads is bad. Tying it to payment info and therefore identity is unacceptable. We do not make lists for future fascists or communists. In theory it's possible to address this with cryptography and zero knowledge proofs, but we all know it won't be in a centralized system, because they want to track and control everything you read.
Meanwhile the real problem with subscription fees is people read different sources in different amounts. If you read one religiously, you pay the $5/month. But it should be possible to get the articles a la carte for a low price, e.g. $0.10 each, for the publications you don't read all the time.
So the thing we really need here is an anonymous payments system with low transaction fees. The blockchain people keep trying to do this, and let them if they can, but how about this.
A payment processor that uses the cryptography and the zero knowledge proofs. They know who you are, you pay them, you get a secret which allows you to spend the money. Now you can use the secret to pay for articles or anything else, and the payment processor debits your account and credits the seller's, but they can't tell who you paid, only that you paid someone and someone paid them. This would be highly useful in general, but especially here.
This might require some constraints like not supporting chargebacks, or maybe the cryptographers can figure it out. But if you can make an anonymous $0.10 transaction with no transaction fee, that's a solution.
Facebook achieved market dominance in an open market, it's hard to convincingly argue that they won by doing things against the desires of the market. So the market would work for a problem like "Facebook is too expensive and doesn't need to be." But Facebook is already free, so you can't easily beat it on that point (it's unlikely that your thing would be so profitable you could meaningfully pay users to take them away from FB).
But we don't have to simply blindly accept that the result of market competition == the outcome that we'd all choose if we thought about the big picture and not just the in-the-moment choices.
How does market competition divorce the network from the algorithm? Keep in mind that Facebook actively tunes their algorithm to give people more and more (short term) emotional reward for engagement.
A third party would have to convince people that they actually want stuff different than what they've currently been responding to, and that they should leave FB to get it (versus just behaving differently on FB to get a different version of the product).
There's already a lot of alternatives for news - I personally decided FB wasn't right for me (nor was any "social media" network) and got a newspaper subscription instead - but they're hardly seeing mass adoption from people migrating away from Facebook.
Changing outcomes/behaviors to ensure people act ethically would have to come from an outside-the-market force, like government.
This is the information asymmetry. People sign up without understanding how the algorithm works, or sign up not knowing that the corporation can change the algorithm at any time to make it more abusive. Then the network effect locks them in even if some eventually figure it out.
So beating them in the market takes two things. First, yours has to be better.
Designing something which is better at the expense of being less (but not un-) profitable is straightforward. Let users choose the algorithm, they'll typically want one that optimizes for quality over volume etc., so you'll make less money but not none.
Second, people have to know yours is better. This is the information problem. This is also partially a coordination problem. You need everyone to find out quickly enough that enough can switch together and overcome the network effect before the early people forget about it or try it and give up because no one else is there.
That's not a trivial problem but it's hardly a violation of the laws of physics either. And if you can do it one time, the network effect is now in your favor.
> How does market competition divorce the network from the algorithm?
Because that's how you get people to switch from Facebook. That's the competitive advantage that Facebook doesn't have. Not locking you into a specific algorithm, which informed users would prefer once they learn the consequences of not having that.
In theory Facebook could see this coming and do this voluntarily. Then it would lose 90% rather than 100% of its profits because it couldn't optimize for getting people to spend all day on Facebook once users could choose an algorithm that doesn't do that.
Or their refusal to do this creates an opportunity for someone else to.
People who don't want it have moved on.
Facebook is like Congress. People like their part but hate the other parts.
Which shouldn't be hard when they're objectively maximizing engagement at your expense. The hard part is figuring out how to overcome the network effect.
This needs more proof - specifically, would people agree it's at their short term expense even if they agree it's against their long term expense? Lots of successful short-term fun, long-term negative products out there in the world, and we rarely expect - or see - the free market alone to make those products go away.
The products in that category you see succeeding are survivorship bias, like cigarettes. Which only works because it builds a physical dependency.
But maybe the algorithm is like nicotine and it's hard to break the habit. We can still win, because we can offer the same algorithm, because we can offer more than one. So you switch because you aspire to quit. You want the option. And you don't have to quit today, you can switch and keep the addictive one.
But then you have a choice. You can turn it off when you're feeling strong. Wean yourself. Time lock the bad one in your client.
Which eventually makes it easier to quit smoking altogether.
"In April, however, the deal was approved when BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti made NBC a guarantee of concessions that still came with a loss of some $100 million, people familiar with the matter said in the WSJ report. In order to ink the deal, Peretti agreed to terms that would put the burden on his company to raise its shares after the merger. According to the report, he had offered a portion of his stake to NBCUniversal if the shares did not reach their target."
https://www.thewrap.com/nbcuniversal-expects-to-lose-100-mil...
It's quite evident that Buzzfeed went public not to finance their news business, but to seemingly cash out. After all, it's now nothing more than a $700M list builder.
More people are interested in buzz than turned off by it.
Note the lack of "make sure you know what you're talking about before you tell me"
What you're describing is gossip.
https://media.bayer.com/baynews/baynews.nsf/id/Bayer-launch-...
https://www.bayer.com/en/agriculture/agriculture-biologicals
In 1925 Bayer merged with five other German companies to form IG Farben
IG Farben the made Zyklon B, and as a result it got split up after the war, into it's original companies, one of them bayer.
So, yes, you are mostly correct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_21st_Century_Fo...
How? Nobody gets confused between a cartoon and a news program. They are completely differently offerings, branded completely differently.
Buzzfeed, on the other hand, built up a reputation over years for pumping out lowest-common-denominator trash journalism, then later set up a serious news website under the same brand.
It would be more like if Fox News bought out the BBC and called it "Fox News UK".
By that definition Bezos is (well, was) an Amazon employee. And Musk is Tesla employee.
Zuckerberg owns a minority of shares but a majority of votes, so I don't know where he falls in your calculus. But I disagree with your statement as a whole, so I don't care too much about the line.
There's nothing illusory about it, the definitions about what you can do with Facebook voting and non-voting shares would be quite rigorously defined.
Tesla would probably exist without Musk as CEO. Amazon would certainly exist without Bezos as CEO.
Since the OP responded in a different post that Zuckerberg, by virtual of control of the majority of Meta stock isn't an employee, he's clearly referring to power, not to equity. And I think it's true that Bezos (if he chose to reassert himself) or Musk can do whatever they want with their respective companies. I mean, even if he doesn't control more than 20% of the stock, who do you think is going to stand up to Musk? The institutional investors? A coalition of people who bought into Tesla because they worship him? The minority that is none of the above?
Presumably the way this SPAC was structured resulted in a change of control, and if you make that decision, you get what you get.
An absolutely awful branding decision.
Don't you have that backwards? I was always under the impression that BuzzFeed News existed to help prop up the BuzzFeed brand's reputation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30768059
It's not the organization, just the division.
News is responsible for the very good image that Buzzfeed has. Why do they give it up when they can finance it?
Foresight isn’t profitable. Sustainability isn’t profitable. They want next years bonus cheques not a healthy retirement fund.
Pardon my French, but this is bullshit. Activist investors pressuring buzzfeed are directly responsible for their actions. At best, they looked at the orgs under the umbrella and decided that the best move is to axe BFN. Experience tells me that either they're focused on short term profits, or silencing journalists they dislike.
And, yes, this is partly an indictment of the entire western economic system. Rapacious focus on short term profits will be our downfall. This is merely one example of many.
But I'm saying that no matter what, management is responsible for actions they take.
That's a strange point to make in a discussion about how investors are pushing management into making the short term decision.
Investors don't have to shoulder costs for a service that no one cares about. You want a "what flavour of jelly bean are you" quiz you go to Buzzfeed. You want serious news you read one of the countless other site that covers world news. Yes it's cynical, but if I had money in Buzzfeed I would have pressured the CEO too.
That being said, their reputation as "Buzzfeed" is bad, if you repeat a piece of information to someone and say that you "read it on Buzzfeed", there will be an inherent bias that the source is bad, because most people associate them with terrible pop-culture articles on Facebook and don't even know that they won a pullitzer prize.
In that context, their reputation is permanently damaged for most people. If Buzzfeed really want to create "serious" news branch they'd have to call it something else at the very least.
I rank BuzzFeed on the same level as the Huffington Post. You want real news? Go to the Associated Press directly, or Reuters.
NYT can be ok, but their monetization tactics are kind of weird
This is what people mean when they say capitalism won't solve all our problems.
I say we draft the ad people to defend Ukraine before we let them back into society on parole.
You're talking on Hacker News where people routinely bypass paid content by posting workaround links. The same people who get angry when people stealing their SAAS subscriptions. This is the pot calling the kettle black.
It's simply unfortunate branding.
It didn't work because the financial cards are stacked against print media, there is basically NYT and then tech billionaire charity cases like The Post and The Atlantic.
Expensify which featured on HN a few times have been drilling as well since IPO.
100 employees is a lot of people. Even if you paid them nothing more than median wage (~$52k), with healthcare and other HR costs that easily adds up to the lions share of $10 mil. And this is just talking about people. Not servers, office space, equipment, contracts & rental fees, licensing, etc.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/peter-t...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/peter-thiel-d...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/paulmcleod/ketanji-brow...
We need more of this kind of journalism to keep the facts out there and point out lots of pols twist things to fool the public.
It's a clear slant of D good, R bad, here's how we explain away what R's are saying because we think X.
There's a million left-wing outlets to do this, Buzzfeed News will not be missed.
I considered it as obvious sarcasm as calling Fox News a left-wing front of the Democratic Party.
And I wouldnt consider them "far left" anyway, just left of some other mainstream news sources.
Definitely, unfortunately the facts are usually scarce and twisted in those hit pieces.
> And I wouldnt consider them "far left" anyway, just left of some other mainstream news sources.
https://wikiless.org/wiki/Overton_window
Still far-left in my eyes, but you're not wrong in the general sense, simply because most MSM is far-left nowadays.
What do you consider far left? Mainstream media pushes for larger police budgets, high defense spending, defends billionaires, defends foreign policies that cause death, destruction, and misery all over the world, they are almost never actually critical of politicians and/or what they say in a way that matters. They defend massive corporations that are working against Americans, push fossil fuels (and for adjacent industries, like cars), push against single payer healthcare, and many other policies that are even just slightly left of center.
No part of our mainstream media is even close to far left, basically no major source in the world is.
At best, you might get a left wing opinion article in the NYT or something, but thats still going to be sandwiched between police propaganda and the current week's article on cancel culture.
I know nothing about Thiel, but the actual quote is "hosted a dinner with" which like the one you responded to here said, could easily mean there were 50 guests at a party and one of them was this guy.
Your made up quote is something entirely different.
If Thiel was getting into bed with this guy, then yea, you can probably impute some knowledge b/c Thiel would do some diligence. But we are talking about a dinner and an email.
I met a new person this weekend under similar circumstances. You shouldn't take that as a a sign I agree with that person's politics.
Maybe this will sound corny, and I guess it probably won't land with non-Christians, but I'll offer my heuristic anyway: What would Jesus do? I don't think shunning is the answer.
Personally, I would be open to such an experience. I am not so insecure in my beliefs that I would worry on that front. I might learn something about them and the nature of the world, and maybe they would too.
This doesn't really dispute your point though. Rules tend to have an exception or two.
which isn't their goal.
Investors' goal is to earn the highest return possible on their capital they invest, and take the lowest risk possible they can get away with.
Making the world a better place is something a charity does. Making money is what a company does. If the company incidentally makes the world a better place, that's great, but why does anyone expect this to happen?
A solo news operation sounds a lot like a OS written by one person. At some point, it takes more labor to build something than one person is capable of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZvXi8W9o_U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnYVH_Rrp00
"As it turned out, for many former employees, it was all too good to be true. This past Monday, as BuzzFeed went public, many of them learned something alarming: they weren’t able to trade the stock that they had waited years to exercise."
When you have skin in the game it aligns interests.
“As the markets opened on December 6th, former BuzzFeed employees contacted their brokerages to initiate trades, but later found out that the type of stock they held, known as Class B, couldn’t be publicly traded yet. That evening, Continental, a stock-transfer company that BuzzFeed had engaged to facilitate the spac merger, sent an e-mail informing former employees that, in order to trade their Class B shares, they would have to convert them into Class A shares. In order to complete the process—which would take three to five business days—former employees were informed, they would need to print the e-mail, sign, scan, and return it.”.
“An e-mail circulating among former employees this past week raised the question of whether they could have a legal case. “This is rotten and definitely slimey, but I have not figured out if it’s illegal,” a person wrote. When asked whether anything illegal had occurred, Matt Mittenthal, a spokesman for BuzzFeed, said ‘of course not.’”.
And this only applies to past employees that exercised their options - paying some money and taxes for their equity.
Oh don't worry, you'll still get that. In fact, that's all you'll get. Investors know how to sort the wheat from the chaff to provide us with the race to the bottom our society really needs.
This part confuses me. The newsroom is a loss, but buzzfeed as a whole is profitable, got it. But if buzzfeed as a whole is profitable even with the news division in the red, what does it mean to say you "don't have the resources to support another two years of losses"?
Legally it is hard to define either as they vague and subjective, obeying the board directions is much easier to define and codify in law.
If management does not do as shareholders ask , shareholders can get management replaced by nominating and voting for directors who want the same thing in the next general meeting or call for a emergency one.
Management reports to the board and the board reports to the shareholders.
It is hard to counter the direct wishes of all shareholders combined. However rarely all shareholders want the same thing. Management themselves own substantial shares and obviously will feel different for example.
> You don't have permission to access "http://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/22/buzzfeed-investors-have-pushe..." on this server.