Any niche will eventually get filled, even the niche of "actual serious news stories for people who want to read actual serious news". In fact, the relative wealth of this demographic makes it a very attractive niche to fill.

Don't forget in all this fun handwringing that we're still a lot better off than we were just fifteen years ago. Back then it was a serious challenge to hear any news that didn't appear in a newspaper printed in your town, or didn't show up in one of the handful of TV/radio outlets you could pick up. Now you're two seconds away from reading any newspaper in the world.

... or maybe four seconds if you don't speak whatever language it's in and need to click Chrome's "yes, autotranslate this" button.

This directly applies to hacker news readers - if you read about a successful or even a failed startup founder, do you read that submission because it was useful and educational, or because it had a compelling story in it?

There is a large group of people who don't do startups but only think about doing startups. Since they lack the requisite experience they will upvote what looks compelling and inspirational to them, rather than what's useful or representative (the latter looks dull and muddy). And since this majority will upvote the sexy narrative, the rest of us will end up reading it. It's what I call "a narrative tar pit" and it's why I never look at the front page, only at the RSS feed. Frighteningly, at some point a random sample of submissions is bound to produce more useful reading material than the front page.

It would be even better if I could only see stories upvoted/commented by a couple of people here whose taste I trust, but whose names I will not call out to avoid another stampede. I hope that pg considers this modest proposal.

This seems to be a crucial problem in all facets of the news media - people incentivize the news they want to hear, not the news they should hear. Back when advertising was bundled across a whole paper or a whole news program, you could balance "Lindsey's Legal Troubles" with something informative that served the public good.

But now that viewers "pay" by the story with advertising, we hit a Tragedy of the Commons - everyone incentivizes the fluff, and hopes someone else will incentivize the important research. We've removed the "all the news that's fit to print" standard and traded it in for "whatever you want to read about".

An alternative way of phrasing this would be "Journalists try to write things that have a chance of being interesting to readers."

Put this way, it seems less like a new development, and a lot less surprising. Nobody ever voluntarily wrote a story with the idea, "This will be totally uninteresting!" True, a lot of stories are totally uninteresting, but that is usually a mistake, not a moral stance. Editors and publishers have always wanted stories that would attract readers. (And, of course, this is also what readers want.)

If you print more stories that people don't read, you really are just wasting your time.