Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy
&gt; News: We’re facing two major issues with news. The first is fake news. The business model for online media rewards the people who get the greatest number of page views, clicks and likes. That results in a system that prizes virality over truth.<p>This is insanely difficult as interpersonal trust is expensive and getting first-hand information&#x2F;data is extremely non-trivial.  I agree that &quot;mainstream media&quot; (quotes because that phrase makes my mouth taste like ash) has happily devolved into BuzzFeed-style clickbait, but another parrot of AP isn&#x27;t progress.<p>Paul Graham suggests that the best way to come into a good startup idea is to become the sort of person that has them, which I think applies to informing the public at large -- I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s realistic to expect to build a revenue model off of people that will only give you their eyeballs for 20 minutes a day in the hopes of finding something to have an opinion on.  I think this is a much larger, nearly intractable, problem of making societies into the types that are interested in nuance and dry detail.