say what you will about TBPN, but it was never objective journalism

Bezos said WaPo would retain independence and it did. For a while. Then he meddled to the point of ruin.

Obviously this will never happen, but what do you think about a system where there's a "media" fund from the government that gets distributed to several independent media outlets?

The decision on who and how much to fund gets decided by a randomised group in the population, like jury duty, maybe every 2 years?

I don't know if this could potentially make the media companies worse at reporting facts as they would try and raise money by appealing to people, but with enough competition it should sort its self out as long as there's no outside funding?

> "we'll never tell you what to say,"

TBPN had almost all the big AI names in there, and they were extremely friendly. This would have been a problem anyway. They are not the "tough questions" kind of place.

Theyre not. They have never been focused... actually they were when they first created the market. But since.. nah.

I visited it to find out what the hell a tbpn is and abjectly failed

It's also slow as hell. It takes like 200ms for the social media buttons to change color upon hover.

oh wow you were not kidding

I've seen it mentioned before but never checked it out. It def has ESPN vibes but I think it's more like a new Techcrunch.

> Why though?

It got your "attention", which is what they (OpenAI) are after.

> So rather than trying to recreate that ourselves, it made a lot of sense to bring them in, support what they’re doing, and help them scale—while keeping what makes them special.

OpenAI was losing attention to Anthropic because of Claude Code, so they raised money and are trying to buy it back.

Essentially yes. It only has traction on X, but in the AI world that is all that is necessary. (its engagement metrics are poor for its size on all other platforms)

but Jensen said we already achieved it!

There was a 2020 US presidential candidate, Andrew Yang, who proposed something like this.[1]

1. https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/04/andrew-yang-the-most-meme-...

> Obviously this will never happen, but what do you think about a system where there's a "media" fund from the government that gets distributed to several independent media outlets?

This is how German system works actually. So, it DID HAPPEN. The German government has only some control over the budget but the actual media companies control the content themselves. Every resident has to pay a monthly contribution. This is a contribution to an independent account / budget for media only. It is not a tax that goes into a common pot that politics can decide to take out.

There are national outlets like ZDF, Tagesschau, Deutschlandradio and regional ones like Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Bayerischer Rundfunk. Each design and present their own programmes.

See more details on: https://www.rundfunkbeitrag.de/welcome/english

I would like to see a system like New York's campaign finance vouchers, where individual citizens get to decide where the public funds are directed. That way you have to have an audience and you have to appeal to people's sense of what's truly valuable, rather than just trying to farm views.

I think there will be an AI correction and OpenAI will be the center of it. I have no clue what their plan is, they seem to throw everything at the wall an nothing sticks. Gonna take MicroSlop down with them. Anthropic and Google will come out the other end in great shape though.

> The decision on who and how much to fund gets decided by a randomised group in the population, like jury duty, maybe every 2 years?

Why not fill all government positions via random selection? The ancient Athenians thought that if your government officials were chosen by a process other than sortition, you don't have a democracy.

I am sure that what you mentioned was said, but it is surprisingly difficult to have a conversation in a room full of these

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_eWdX4qBUyQ3D

>I bet OpenAI genuinely believes they're using their money to help free media exist

>TBPN genuinely believes this is the right choice for economic freedom

Company literally sold to someone else, we now conclude they believe to achieve economic freedom.

>Company genuinely believing anything.

Yep, it is 2026 and words mean nothing in, we better ooga booga or something

Sort of. There's a lot of activity now in other places:

- Reddit has a ton of exciting content about local models

- Bluesky has some interesting developers toying with memory and social media bots since it's an open platform (unlike X)

However, most leaders in the AI space all post on X and sam altman + the sv investor class are all hopelessly addicted to it.

Picking winners at this stage is hard, but maybe you are right on Alphabet and Anthropic. The former has use for data centres including those filled with ML hardware in a way MSFT and AWS may not if LLMs crash, simply by virtue of YouTube and other services which have relied on ML long before the hype started. Their buildout also started earlier and that may help them not overbuild to keep up with the hype, but who knows.

On Anthropic, hard to tell from the outside whether they are just more quite on their buildouts or whether they truly mainly rent their hardware, which could give them some flexibility if the market craters.

On MSFT, I'd rather they fix their products, at least to keep their mass of employees from being affected negatively.

Fairly good encapsulation of chomskey's manufactured consent. TBPN was chosen precisely because they'll never have to tell them what to say.

I mean, in theory I like this. But look what happened to NPR and PBS; it was ultimately at the behest of the president. They lost their revenue for not saying the "right" things.

I just recently switched away from Bluesky to reluctantly checking back in to X, for the first time since the acquisition. It feels like all the AI information is on X, it's basically necessary.

Bluesky is better than Mastodon for AI, and I'd rather be on a platform where it's more open and I can at least use whatever client I want. I love what Hailey & Cameron are doing on Bluesky and I miss chatting to Penny & Void. But Bluesky felt like being in a rural country town, and X was like a major city. Turns out it isn't just hearing relevant information that's important, but the speed with which you hear it. Half the time Bluesky was just screenshots of X anyway.

I gave up on Bluesky at the point where Anthropic / Claude got its designation from DoW, and no-one on Bluesky even cared. I'm still bitter about that.

Focus always wins out in the end.

That's true, and in the UK we've just removed jury duty trials for some crimes at the snap of a finger.

I know it is hard to see the bias when you are in the bubble along with them.

This was reversed upon judicial review. Checks and balances.

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/31/nx-s1-5768399/npr-pbs-trump-f...

what do you even do on X, you basically just subscribe to a bunch of blowhards to get insider sloppy seconds, then occasionally yell into the void and hope someone (anyone) finally responds?

Great, show me something they consistently misrepresent.

I agree that everyone has, by definition, some bias, but NPR/PBS tend to avoid editorialization significantly more than their counterparts.

the damage is already done.

PBS brings on Brooks Capehart to discuss politics. Having two partisan players from opposite sides of spectrum is a good way to get some balance. The fact that they agree so often on the fundamentals tells me the US is cooked.

Damage is done constantly in human existence, all around us. This is no different. Failure is when you stop trying. If you’re tired, rest, don’t quit.