2024: a post-industrial dystopia where the global economy runs on a cryptocurrency called 'Bitcoin', people wear computers on their faces and the Wall Street Journal has been reduced to reprinting tweets as news.
Good line! But in reality -- speaking as a former journalist and a founder of a new SF bay area startup that's in the same business -- news organizations have done this kind of thing forever.
One journalistic function is ingesting a tremendous amount of information, then filter it -- so people reading the WSJ's venture capital blog can bookmark it and read only articles that are relevant. A generation ago it might have been highlighting the best news stories in the trade press. Today it's subscribing to the Twitter feeds of dozens or hundreds of VCs (including Marc A.). Highlighting the best ones provides a valuable service.
Of course the HN-relevant question then becomes: can this be better done, or equally well done for less $$$, algorithmically. :)
the Wall Street Journal has been reduced to reprinting tweets as news
Why 2024? I've already seen this happening for the last few years, where the established press takes original content/reporting/etc. from online sources (blogs/etc.) with scant attribution.
I particularly "love" [1] articles where they take screenshots of a bunch of tweets, and present them with interspersed commentary, rather than actually writing a coherent narrative. Guess it makes it easier to recruit "journalists" when you don't need to worry about whether most of them finished high-school.
I often enjoy these kind of articles, especially when the interpolated comments give me information and ways to look at things I did not previously have.
They'll win, but they won't make any money from it and nobody else will. This will keep happening with industry after industry, until there is nobody to buy advertising from Google. Then society will fall.
