I spent years working for a newsroom. Every election night we’d get a historic web traffic surge from users reloading to see wisps of results which would be mostly inconclusive until morning. We had no autoscaling for traffic then, so it was a Big Deal to keep all our systems online. Every election the office would be full past midnight, scrambling to obtain county and state results by hook or by crook.
Part of me misses that shared excitement. Mostly it’s a relief to be able to look away now.
@jjwolverine And as you say, the stakes are high enough that there’s not much value in gamifying it.
@jjwolverine Yeah, the horse race coverage is so manufactured, as though Red/Blue/Plaid is “pulling ahead”… No they’re not. There is a winner already, votes are cast, we’re just midway through figuring out who it is.
I’m not too big on blaming The Media — not an actual monolith, as a sector they’re largely trying their best in good faith, yet both partly complicit in and victims of audience demands. End result is several days’ worth of worthless news coverage.