I joined a panel with awesome fellow founders and builders of Mozilla to discuss the future of "citizen publishing" as a way to democratize the internet. Massive shoutout to "How to do nothing" by Jenny Odell which informs a lot of my thinking on what is wrong with the internet and how we can began to fix it. You can watch me from 30:28 and at 1:23:39. David Transcript of my part: Question: Also we have with us Linh of Hacker Noon whose team has worked tirelessly to decentralize citizen journalism. Linh - we hear a lot about misinformation.. and big media channels can be worrisome sometimes. How does citizen journalism promise to keep society differently? Answer: Here at Hacker Noon, I think a lot about the flow of information. If you think about how we traditionally receive information, it's typically via things like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, a group of very prestigious journalists that create the kind of information that people historically trust. Now with the rise of social media, you see an entirely different way "citizens" can receive information (whether or not it's journalism is questionable). But, social media is very accessible, easy to use, and information, trust-worthy or not, spread like wild fires. So here at Hacker Noon, we try to combine the good aspects of traditional journalism as well as the good of social media, making it accessible for everyone, anyone with a keyboard can publish on Hacker Noon as long as they have some kind of expertise on technology. But unlike social media where there's a big question mark about how verified information is  (for example, not until the 2016 election that Twitter started to realize the lack of fact-checking necessary for information circulating online), we go above and beyond. We don't think just put a tag on the fact is enough, there always needs to be another set of eyeballs to factcheck the information (what we call the at Hacker Noon). That human touch guarantees that an editor can always vet whether or not a submission is worth publishing. So to answer your initial question, to combat misinformation, we need accessibility as well as a good verification process. We try to do that at Hacker Noon instead of throwing a towel in traditional journalism or social media. Second Human Rule #fixtheinternet with Mozilla.

Flow

Mozilla

Twitter

Wall Street Journal

A COVID Chronicle: How HackerNoon Dealt With Changes at the Onset of the Pandemic

Some Good News: Election 2020 Edition

Check out my corner of the internet here 

Read My Stories

Now Hiring

Too Long; Didn't Read

Fix the Internet Showcase: Thursday October 29 Noon PST

Linh Dao Smooke & David Smooke repping Hacker Noon at the Mozilla Fix the Internet Showcase

Linh Dao Smooke & David Smooke repping Hacker Noon at the Mozilla Fix the Internet Showcase

About Author

Comments

TOPICS

THIS ARTICLE WAS FEATURED IN

Related Stories

Untitled Story

10 Podcasts That (Happily) Steal 15+ Hours From Me Every Week

The Noonification: How Big Tech Influences Privacy Laws (11/24/2022)

10 Most Evolving Big Data Technologies to Catch Up on in 2022

5 to 23 Patterns to Ace Any Coding Interview

5 Ways We Can Work to Close the Gender Gap in Tech

10 Podcasts That (Happily) Steal 15+ Hours From Me Every Week

The Noonification: How Big Tech Influences Privacy Laws (11/24/2022)

10 Most Evolving Big Data Technologies to Catch Up on in 2022

5 to 23 Patterns to Ace Any Coding Interview

5 Ways We Can Work to Close the Gender Gap in Tech

Light-Mode

Classic

Newspaper

Dark-Mode

Neon Noir

Minty

HN StartUps