http://i.imgur.com/wqSKhrT.jpg
I have been reflecting over one issue that is triggered by many news posts recently and a while ago. Those news posts mostly were just rearranging or summarizing the content created by other professional news sources. The only value I can see for those posts to be rewarded is because they passed the information real time to the community if you did not pay attention to those news. To reward news sharing is no problem to me at all. After all, this is a free platform and people have rights to upvote whatever they like - this is sort of basic principle here.
Having said that, the only cases that I have doubts are those news involved with tragic disasters. It may be earthquakes, buildings collapse, plane crash, fire accidents and etc. And mostly they are involved with a large number of deaths or causalities. We, as emotional beings, tend to spread the news to alleviate the bad feelings from seeing this.
I couldn’t help but wonder … (borrowing from Carrie Bradshaw)
Should people benefit from passing on the information about other people’s death or suffering? Is there room for debate regarding the ethical aspect of such outcomes?
I don’t mean to point my finger at those whoever have done this before really and I also did not check whoever (maybe my friend) is having this kind of post at the moment. After all, they might just want to share these news so as to relieve their sorrows in the first place without considering being rewarded at all. But IMO we as a community should discuss such issue and it might help guiding future behaviors..
IMO again, I think a possible good solution to it is to donate at least all liquid rewards to a charity fund that will be used afterwards (hopefully we will have a tool or something to facilitate charity). Maybe there is no need to connect directly the disaster and the news post per se since it might not be easy, but by doing so we can make sure that this info sharing has a public benefit side attached to it and those who acknowledge the benefit of knowing this news can reward info passing and doing charity at the same time.
We shouldn’t compete to report a tragedy. We should compete to help those in need.
What do you think?
Note. I will donate all the author’s income (not just the liquid half, yes, that means I have to self-finance it) from this post to charity. You will have to trust me on doing this. But I reserve the right to do it within 6 months (in case it is too small to meaningfully do any good and I need to combine it with other promises I made before. I had it recorded here before.)
This page is synchronized from the post: ‘Should Spreading News about Disasters be Rewarded ? An issue to think about …’