Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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I suspect that the market and capitalism has had a hand. In my youth, I remember opinion pieces being marked quite clearly in newspapers, and in general it seemed like there was a sort of a popular, chatty, slightly-pompous style they were usually written in. I.e., it was pretty clear what exactly they were, and by that very nature, it allowed the writer to have some real fun with the premise.
Over time, my guess is that the faster nature of modern civ / society combined with capitalism skewed things towards dropping much of the former signal language, and treating news as more of a pure product, with a certain deception and advertising built-in to drive engagement and revenue.
On a side note, my take on scientific papers is that they're generally very difficult for laypeople to understand (hand raised here), and need a certain trained class of news-people to represent them accurately, simply in terms of what the paper is about. But more than that, even more specialised people are needed to put the paper in to full context, considering the publication, peer-review level, and junk science possibility. Unfortunately for the public, I'm not sure those people exist in any significant quantity.