 |
| Why I Quit Being So Accommodating (1922) (mikecanex.wordpress.com) | ||
| recommended by 2 users | 2012 | 650 points by mikecane | life advice | original thread | | ||
| 2 users recommended this thread. What they said: |
| RyanZAG Dec 26, 2012 | on: Follow This Rule — If You Want To Be Popular (1922) | context |
|
thefastlane Dec 27, 2015 | on: Why I Stopped Helping People and You Should Too | context
a life must be balanced around certain principles; we feel it and we see the undesirable results when it is unbalanced; recalibrating -- adjusting boundaries in our lives -- is often necessary, as Pham illustrates. these boundaries must be derived from a respect for one's self, one's work (regardless of whether you are paid for that work or not -- e.g., a poet often is not), and one's family. however, we must never throw magnanimity out the window wholesale; it would be a travesty to abandon such an essential virtue. "Why I Quit Being So Accommodating" is a great essay that showed up on HN some time back; worth a read for a fuller treatment of this topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4969041 |
As with the other article from 1922 [1], this article is just so much better written and conveys a far more widely useful point than the articles you see in the media today. Feels a bit like journalism in general has gone backwards enormously.
I think this because journalism is now ranked by 'page views', when in 1922, journalism was ranked by professional editors. For journalism, page views = ad views = revenue, so optimizing for anything else is folly. A short article with eye catching headlines and sensationalism is always going to outdo a great article like the OP. Any way to reverse this trend? Even pay-for journalism today is still plagued by 'page views', as no follow up article is going to be written if the views are low. Back in 1922, nobody really knew the page views and they could only be badly estimated with a reader's survey.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4969041
EDIT: I've actually changed my mind - journalism of this standard is definitely alive and well, you just have to look to lesser known bloggers now instead of big media. This is probably the true death-knell of big media if I ever saw it - loss of quality content. I present the following blog post from this year as evidence:
http://www.lindsredding.com/2012/03/11/a-overdue-lesson-in-p...
The way writing styles have changed in general in 100 years is also interesting!