It’s been a weird couple days; I keep running into this talking point that “journalists won’t use Mastodon unless we incentivize engagement farming”.
Meanwhile I’m having a *great* experience here, because I use it to— I dunno— actually talk to people and form relationships?
I reject the premise that mastodon isn’t useful for reporters. I think it’s more accurate that modern news orgs use social media in purely extractive ways.
You might get more reporters that way, but you won’t like them.
I think if we’re honest with ourselves, the “service” most reporters provide on social media is entirely self-serving. A one-way firehose of signal boosting and self promotion.
“Look at me! I wrote this story. Click on it!”
And then you ask them a question, or have a correction, and nobody reads it, because Wired doesn’t care about building a community, just reaching a consumer. It’s fire and forget.
We already have a tool for that, it’s RSS. What value does reposting a link here provide?
@Haste Back on 
, I felt like they did provide a service. They cited their own articles, but adversarially to the publications they worked for - poking through the clickbait and bullshit headlines, telling the stories of what they cared about, how they researched the story, etc. that they weren't allowed to do in the actual publication.
Now, all they do is act as mouthpieces for the companies they work for. 🤮
EVHaste
Cassandrich