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Burning wood for power worse for climate than gas equivalent
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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Climate
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The problem is that a huge chunk of the online audience only ever sees the headline. Click-through rates hover around 2% and of those who vote or comment, only about one in four has clicked the link.
It's not a crazy concern, but definitely should be expressed more clearly.
There is a reason I quoted the key paragraphs in the post.
When it's even in the subheader ("Research casts doubt on plans by UK government to offer subsidies for carbon capture attached to the power source"), I'm not going to blame news outlets. I'm going to blame people who treat the news like a series of disconnected headlines that they extrapolate their own fantasy version of and react to on social media (or, for the more cromulent and sophisticated, in their RSS feed). Even just reading this headline, I'd wonder why they're comparing the two and quickly check in (literally five seconds) before rushing to the comments accusing them of mispresentation; if that makes me different, that's not the news outlet's fault.
I'm really growing sick of the expectation that news be dumbed way the hell down for absolute morons who have 4th-grade-level media literacy and zero interest in reading news except to stoke their own emotions. It's just a race to the bottom of expectations getting progressively dumber; the chronically willfully stupid will never be satisfied. "If you don't want to read the news, don't read the news."
How people treat the news is a result of how the UI on reddit, lemmy, and social media is designed. It's not appropriate to blame people who don't have control over that
Social media UI facilitates that behavior, I agree. It trivializes the pipeline of reading a headline and then broadcasting one's stupid, uninformed, baselessly authoritative thoughts about it. Nevertheless, everyone has a choice; the UI is not making exercising basic responsibility any harder than it was before. When I fail to do that, that's my fault.
UI design sharply increases the probability of behaving in this way; it takes a real fundamental rethink of the UI in order to change that. For what it's worth, commercial platforms are increasingly pushing people away from providing a link, either by banning links like Instagram, or by having a feed ranking algorithm which discourages their inclusion (X, Facebook, others)
I don't blame individual choices for something that's largely a result of platform design.
i mean:
news outlets turning their pages into ad-riddled hellscapes that make the user feel as if they entered the dirtiest back alley they've ever seen could, possibly have something to do with the vast majority only reading the headlines...but sure, blaming the users works too!
honestly news sites are simply commonitng a slow suicide with the advertising based financial model...the whole internet is.
(yes, the UI on social media makes this problem worse, but it didn't create the problem)