It does not seem like things will change until the masses (especially those with money and influence) reject such low standards and demand something better. Any ideas? I'm thinking something along the lines of intellectuals and entertainers forming a coalition along some hard-to-define shared interests.
Those interests are so hard to define because success in the modern era depends on such sensationalism.
I think something is required to drive home the point to people who don't know better what a waste of time all this stuff is.
Even sites like hacker news (where you would think things can be different) seem to send a signal that if you don't check us out everyday you are missing stuff.
Nobody really needs to be checking hackernews everyday. Seriously. But for some reason we have this need too. And there is no reason to feed that need. Especially when it wastes everyones time. Even when there is something interesting on here, I feel my time being wasted wading through ever increasing unnecessary commentary. I'd like to see a system that deletes 80% of commentary just like StackOverflow works. If you don't know what you are talking about there should be a separate space for that. Probably IRC or a chat room.
I also don't like these karma and upvote/downvote systems that every news related site seems obligated to implement. The kind of people who fixate on these numbers also turn into the biggest contributors on these sites. And that's artificial and doesn't reflect society at all.
Sites like Hacker News actually do force you to check every day as there is no way to see the content from previous days. Technically the content exists, but it becomes noise as the actual value of the site is the ranking that lets me see what people were interested in, not the raw list of all stories, and the ranking is live and "rots" over time.
Those interests are so hard to define because success in the modern era depends on such sensationalism.