2023-01-26 · timestamps by ADAtainment
UPD 01/26/2023
- A response to an opinion article titled Charles Hoskinson would be the worst thing to happen to CoinDesk, used to diagnose journalism's real problem.
- The core argument is that journalism's incentive structure is broken: outlets are paid to make you angry and click, not to establish truth.
- Veracity bonds borrow from prediction markets, where research shows real money is more accurate than play money, so a writer stakes money on a claim being true.
- Public trust in media is low across the political spectrum, and redefining real journalism as your own political values misses that the incentives are the issue.
- The reflexive move of elites is to say a critic is not qualified and attack them personally, which is a sign the challenge is landing.
- The goal is an outlet with depth, peer review, accountability, and citizen journalism, where readers can ask what skin a writer has in the game.
20 entries
An opinion article titled that Hoskinson would be the worst thing to happen to CoinDesk epitomizes the fundamental problem in journalism.
The article credits CoinDesk with breaking the FTX story, but Coffeezilla and others did that while CoinDesk stayed silent.
The article dismisses the ideas as a rich oligarch replacing Barry Silbert, missing that they are aimed at fixing journalism.
Like Novogratz talking to ten people, the author cites collective revulsion from journalists who say Hoskinson knows nothing about the field.
Prediction markets use money to forecast outcomes, a concept central to fixing the incentives.
A Rosenbloom and Notz paper found real money markets are significantly more accurate than play money for non sporting events.
The fundamental problem is the incentive structure, and very few people, across party lines, trust the mainstream media.
Journalism's current incentive is to make you angry, divide you, and make you click, not to pursue objectivity or truth.
A veracity bond puts an outlet's credibility on the line financially, so publishing something inaccurate costs real money.
The Hunter Biden laptop story shows the broken incentive: called Russian disinformation until it was not, with no consequences.
Staking a thousand dollars on a claim being true, with a process to adjudicate it, makes a reader believe it far more.
People accept fact checkers who share their politics but reject economic incentives for accuracy, an elitism that makes people hate journalists.
The dirty secret is that stories are written to make money, not to call truth to power, and believing otherwise is naive.
A vacuous top ten celebrity list draws a million readers while the right story reaches five, so guess which gets written.
The vision is an outlet that incentivizes the top crypto ecosystems to collaborate and resolve contradictory stories transparently.
Ownership is immaterial and could be a DAO or consortium, since the goal is depth, peer review, timeliness, accuracy, and accountability.
Readers should be able to fund follow ups on abandoned stories, turning the customer into a driver of what gets investigated.
The powers that be fear changing the incentives because it would raise expectations they cannot honor and unravel manufactured consent.
Elites say you are not qualified and attack you personally, which is how you know you are on the right road to changing things.
The real question a reader should ask is how you know something is true and what skin the writer has in the game if it is wrong.