Where do you escape for non-clickbait thoughtful/informational content?

Taking a step back, it's worth understanding why there's so much clickbait. Turns out that if the business model of a publication is selling ads, they're interested in reach. Generating reach is easier by having large quantities of shorter, and easier to produce stuff. This is true for videos, articles.

So if you're looking for more thoughtful things - which take time to produce - your options are:

1. Pay for publications that produce these. Ad-supported publications are unlikely to be able to budget for in-depth content. Just look at how eg BuzzFeed shut down their investigative reporting (which was unusually good). It just made no business sense to produce those articles when a meme piece or two would generate more ad revenue, while being 100x cheaper to produce.

In the tech world, publications that fall into the “paid and in-depth” category can be likes of The Information, IEEE, MIT Technology Review, and many newsletters, tech publications etc. Look for ones where ads is not their main business model.

2. Another source are people who do this for free... because they have a main job, and it's not a business for them to share their thoughts on things. These will typically be blogs, YouTube channels and other places. Based on your interests, you should be able to find plenty. Also, see this Hacker News thread about interesting blogs [1]. The only real downside is you won’t get these on a schedule, as it’s not a job for these folks.

3. Books and podcasts. Books are straightforward enough: they're meant to be deep, and reviews help do some justice on them. Podcasts are usually based on ad-based models, but most ads are less intrusive, and the format lends itself for thoughtful commentary. It's more time-consuming to listen to them over reading, of course.

I collect RSS feeds of both my paid publications, and thoughtful blogs using a reader (I use Feedly) and find this works pretty well.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27302195

Books are the best in my opinion as they require lots of structuring of thought before writing, and might go through a sometimes brutal editing process. But pick sensibly, business books, self-help books and the current weeks best-sellers should probably be avoided.

Some higher quality publications exist on the internet, such as nautilus, IEEE spectrum, No Tech magazine, The Baffler, Quanta magazine, Aeon, Le Monde Diplomatique, Current Affairs, The Public Domain Review, Spiegel International, writings by The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Foreign Policy, New Scientist, Science magazine, The Economist, etc.

While not perfect, these might keep you busy for a while and give you a broader perspective.

If your goal is genuinely to find thoughtful and informational content, daily internet browsing won't be the place to get it. The RSS hand-picked blog approach is mostly going to provide you comfort food that mimics the real thing. Sticking with blogs means you stick exclusively with the sort of ideas that end up in blogs, for better or for worse. That's not even mentioning the English-language cultural filter.

The long form articles or "serious" publications also suffer from a similar problem, in that the fact that you pay for them or that the journalist spent some thoughtful time on these pieces is no guarantee that you will be getting something truly valuable. Or you might be getting the sense that you are doing something important, while actually just gobbling up disconnected tidbits which don't really amount to anything concrete. This is what makes HN such a sophisticated trap.

Ultimately, reading (non-junk) books and reading widely is more or less the only solution. Unfortunately, finding which books you'd want to read is something you'll have to figure out on your own because it is intimately connected to the precise parameters of your own life.

London Review of Books.

The name may mislead you. Ostensibly, the articles are book reviews, but barely. The books reviewed are more starting points into long-form articles on their subject matter.

The articles are uniformly fantastic, though obviously not uniformly interesting to everyone. I find that every issue carries about three to five articles I find really interesting.

1. Books. My readings are thematic. I read 2-3 books simultaneously per topic

2. To supplement above I read the referenced papers. And long form articles.

3. I have created a nice Twitter bubble which serves me as a catchment area. It also enables me to engage in thoughtful conversations.

4. HN.

I stay away from mainstream news in all forms. I’m typically behind the current affairs by about 6 months.

Wikipedia. They have both pages on current events [0] and events from the past year [1]. The year page also has sub-pages for specific topics or counties. So if you're only interested in events from the USA, you can look at only that page. [2]. Wikipedia also has the benefit of being written in the style of an Encyclopedia, so editorializing is kept to a minimum (at least, that's the goal).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022#January

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_in_the_United_States

Books, but one problem is that they are often written to the format. ie A book might be 300 pages, but much of it is padding or secondary, supporting argument; it could easily be shrunk to 50 pages without losing much, but publishing doesn't work that way.

Not hacker news. It’s mostly click bait / programmer junk food for the last couple of years (I only started reading then but took a while a realise)

Here's some I like.

New Books Network.

https://newbooksnetwork.com/

My History can Beatup Your Politics

https://myhistorycanbeatupyourpolitics.wordpress.com/

The Conversation

https://theconversation.com/us

Pro Publica

https://propublica.org/

The Marshall

https://www.themarshallproject.org/

Delayed Gratification

https://www.slow-journalism.com/

I'd like to suggest Rest of World - though I do work there but not on editorial side. It is an international nonprofit journalism organization that "covers what happens when technology, culture and the human experience collide, in places that are typically overlooked and underestimated".

They publish 10-12 stories a week, that are researched, edited, and fact-checked by a team that is distributed across the world. It's fun to sit in editorial meetings from time to time.

https://restofworld.org/

You could read it through full-content RSS if you like, but some stories have media (like this one explaining Chinese censorship memes) that wouldn't make it through properly:

"How Chinese citizens use puns to get past internet censors"

https://restofworld.org/2022/china-social-media-censorship/

or this one:

"A guide to pronouncing names of global tech companies"

https://restofworld.org/2022/global-tech-company-pronunciati...

For full-content RSS, just add "full" to the RSS url:

- RSS: https://restofworld.org/feed/latest/full (Full content)

- RSS: https://restofworld.org/feed/latest/ (Summary)

- JSON: https://restofworld.org/feed/latest/json (Summary)

More: https://restofworld.org/platforms/

There are no ads, and we're pretty proud of our web page performance score:

https://webperf.xyz/

Nothing fancy: blogs, newsletters, Mastodon.

The trick is to use non-algorithmic platforms or aggregators with chronological feeds that deliver ALL the entries from ALL the sources I follow or subscribe to. As indoorskier noted, clicking links and exploring further sources (especially blogs and books) is another key tool.

Check out https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random

I find that substack has a lot of good authors on the topics that are relevant/interesting to me (e.g. economics). You can search here [1] to discover authors. If you find an author on substack interesting, you can then see a list of their recommendations down on their homepage (e.g. [2]). If you follow this process enough times and subscribe to a few authors, you'll get a list of curated content in your inbox each week.

[1] https://substack.com/discover

[2] https://www.apricitas.io/

Ft.com is worth paying for. Especially the big read, weekend FT articles and some opinion pieces.

Other people’s recommendations.

Specifically at least two other recommendations on books, publications, newsletters, podcasts, documentaries, etc. One recommendation has me interested, but two has me diving in.

For example I used to love the Harvard business review when certain contributors were still alive, now I only read certain articles if they are recommended given the decline in quality content.

Books are easier. If I see the same book referenced in two other books I’ve read, it is almost always great.

I am mostly settled for some sources on gopher because no ads, limited number of users, no tracking all and users are very much there because they despise the way the web turned out. For deeper research i mostly start at wikipedia for a brief intro in what i am searching for, the next step after this is usually my local library.

For some topics i also found out that there are really interesting deeper discussions in the FidoNet

Pocket (getpocket.com) has a pretty wide selection of long form writing. The recommended articles are curated by humans. Their app is especially nice if you get on a plane and need something to read offline.

The Conversation is a news site that was created by a collection of initially Australian university who were sick of having their academics ignore and misquoted in the news.

Insightful articles the go a little behind the news, written by academics on current topics and refined by professional journalists who work for the conversation.

They been running maybe a decade, and cover multiple counties now.

US edition: https://theconversation.com/us

Global editon: https://theconversation.com/global

Books, sometimes HN. The only way to escape a clickbait is to not read the sources where some clickbait might be happen.

I subscribed to an actual physical newspaper and some magazines and deleted my Twitter account. Reading physical media feels like a radical act of self-care in the modern world.

If you're not limited to the written word, then some podcasts are very good.

As a software developer, I've really enjoyed "Corecursive".

As a religious agnostic, I get a lot out of Tim Keller's "Gospel in Life" podcast. It lets me examine a particular Christian theology without the awkwardness of attending church services as a non-Christian.

Edit: I just realized the question is how one finds such things. Unfortunately I don't remember how I came across either of these.

Slow-news / tech-related links: https://thomas.me https://restofworld.org https://themorningnews.org https://waxy.org

Create your own stuff and curate what you read/watch yourself.

You don't need to be a content creator to create good stuff, and unsurprisingly, you find a lot of great things when you have a specific topic you're trying to get information about/research.

Filler/white-noise/empty content is inevitable on any source. HackerNews has tons of advertisements that masquerade as thoughtful posts and the comments aren't always gold. (though the HackerNews moderators deserve huge credit for maintaining a pretty nice balance of freedom to say whatever and maintaining civility/reasonableness)

The best articles I've read have come from non-content creators, just some person somewhere that decided to write or do a video on a subject they happen to be really passionate about. The quality of videos isn't super high (talking about production value), but the content is solid. Not every release from the same person needs to be a million+ views piece, just understand that they have some good thoughts on some subjects and are worth checking in on.

When I'm doing some research for something I want to write about or share or learn, these pieces usually come about somehow after sifting through forums or the 2nd/later pages of search results.

Click-bait articles/videos are not new by any means, it's just easier to publish them now. It was always necessary to sift through it before, and learning to sort such information is a skill that you need to practice. But I can almost guarantee you that trying your own hand at creating something helps reduce that pressure of "it's all clickbait". Don't just copy and summarize, try to make something and just dive in on the process, even if no one ever sees it.

As many have mentioned: books! I do like to add the Economist. It's my way of keeping up to date with current affairs

The surprising thing is that it takes so long for a thoughtful link-aggregator to manifest. https://lemmy.ml is an approach but it's more a copy of reddit with all its problems.

It seems like the people who could create it have no need to discover more thoughtful content.

Something i occasionally enjoy: https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/the-long-read

Print media.

NYT Sunday Paper, Atlantic, Economist, New Yorker

"The amount of dramatic clickbaity hollow content is only getting worse and kinda saddening me."

I guess tabloidization of content is consequence of loosing interest and trust of public in virtual space. With AI generated content, strong lobby, pushing ideologies, spreading fear and so on, consumerism of virtual content falls down. Or maybe not... Maybe it just me. I don't know.

To answer question... Decentralised gathering of information from small, independent creators via RSS is possible way how to not feel terrible and stupid after reading.

I actually skip the search engine and directly go to the reference section of the wikipedia page of the said subject (after skimming for the page once or twice).

Wherever the content is not paid by an advertiser.

I have https://longreads.com/ as a pinned tab.

Do you find HN to be clickbait, do you need more content than is on HN (kudos if you've finished the front page before it updated), or is there not enough informational or thoughtful content here? I'm not quite sure what you're looking for, like if HN is good and you just want more of this, or different topics, or...

I believe you can never fully clickbait? There has never been a point in time (to my knowledge) where there was no clickbait.

Back than it was just called 'good writing'

I believe it is simply important that you know the context of the sender of the information and are able enough to validate information that seems sus.

I've built up folios of RSS feeds over more than ten years, and continue to curate them. Every day they throw up a fair percentage of content I'm not interested in, but that's easily ignored, and the good stuff is excellent.

Lawfare blog, and especially its podcasts: https://www.lawfareblog.com/topic/podcasts

Close second, "War on the Rocks" podcast: https://warontherocks.com/podcasts/

Lot of "National Security / Foreign politics" content has been a breath of fresh air, because while this is clearly biased toward an American viewpoint, there is an intellectual respect toward other peoples/states situation, objectives, and possibility of getting to those objective.

In practice, that means that when talking about Putin, they debates around why Putin is doing that, and why Putin would be doing it that way, what are the possible outcomes, and how the US/NATO/other parties can try to act or react in a way that's beneficial for them.

Another example: Lawfare where highly critical of the Trump administration, but they always approached their analysis by asking "What is his thought process" and "What is he gaining by doing that".

Once you get used to hear a bunch of smart people articulating their thought in that way, it's painful to listen back to a discourse centered around "our good values vs. their bad intentions", which is unfortunately the norm.

Totally different subject, but if one is interested in religions, I highly recommend the Youtube channels "Religion for Breakfast" and "Let's talk religion", who goes deep into a variety of subjects, while disclosing what is still contentious in the academic term, and try to be as unopinionated as possible.

For technical news: arstechnica and theregister. For more niche topics, I've found the best way is to follow people in that field on twitter. If they are trustworthy non-grifters then look at the sites they share.

I just read the comments on HN (often without even reading the links).

Only thing that has worked for me is long walks and podcasts.

I've walked thousands of miles this year thanks to podcasts. This is only way i've found to escape screens and actually focus.

HN, and posts shared in twitter by a handful of people I trust.

Substack has been great for this. Lots of long-form blogs, some of which readers pay directly. Journalists like Matt Taibbi and Matt Yglesias are there.

Just follow individual people and check what they read?

I use Fritter, an login-less F-Droid app to follow a few people on twitter.

Starting there, I add and remove people according to my preferences.

I agree, esp with ML models being where they are. For people writing blogs/articles it’s a similar problem - how do you stand out against the noise?

Honestly I don’t have answers but here’s a few ways I’ve found cool people:

- via “slow-grow” communities like lobste.rs

- if someone writes a good comment or tweet or whatever, check out if they have a blog

- Sometimes I subscribe to a bunch of things that seem promising, and then follow a “three strikes and they’re out” policy to extend the reach

- start reading papers from conferences. It’s a heavier format than blogs, but it’s reviewed and novel, at least if you pick good conferences.

https://www.aldaily.com

I like to hear omegataupodcast.net during kitchen work. They have some episodes in (a sort of :-) english.

TheMotte [0] is pretty good. It's explicitly about long form argumentation about any topic really. It was originally a subreddit and stemmed from the Slatestar Codex community I believe, and then they made their own forum. The discussions are pretty interesting, ephemeral even, but if you hang out, you soon learn who the regulars are.

[0] https://themotte.org

Paper Books

HN, though there's some degree of clickbait. Otherwise books

Academic journals and textbooks almost never disappoint me.

I go to public radio (NPR) and podcasts, mostly.

Reading on dead flat ex-trees and writing

Kindle on airplane mode is my savior.

Newsletters

Lex Fridman podcast, Sam Harris podcast

tweetdeck, personalize many feed of yours.

economist.com

Podcasts...

BBC: am--Global News Outlook https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02nq0gn/episodes/downloads

BBC: pm--Newshour https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p002vsnk/episodes/player

BBC: Witness History https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004t1hd/episodes/downloads

BBC Reel [video] https://www.bbc.com/reel/

CBC News: As It Happens https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-2-as-it-happens

CBC News: World at Six https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-8-cbc-news-the-world-...

CBC: The Current http://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcasts/current-affairs-information...

CBC: Ideas http://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcasts/documentaries/the-best-of-i... ( Catch this while it's still reachable: "Erasing Africa's role in the rise of the West" at https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/erasing-africa-s-role-in-the-... )

CBC: Quirks & Quarks https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcasts/science-and-tech/quirks-qu...

CBC: Spark http://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcasts/arts-culture/spark/

CBC: Under The Influence (Check the back catalog. Get what you can while you can.) https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-70-under-the-influenc...

Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/

Economist: Checks n Balance https://play.acast.com/s/checksandbalance

Food: BBC Food Chain https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p028z2z0/episodes/downloads

Food: Gastropod https://gastropod.com/category/podcasts/

Freakonomics @ NPR https://www.npr.org/podcasts/452538045/freakonomics-radio

Fresh Air Podcast http://www.npr.org/podcasts/381444908/fresh-air

Marketplace https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace/

Nader https://ralphnaderradiohour.com/

On The Media http://www.onthemedia.org/

Radio Open Source http://www.radioopensource.org/

TTBOOK https://www.npr.org/podcasts/388466288/to-the-best-of-our-kn...

WORDS: A Way with Words https://www.waywordradio.org/category/episodes/

World: PRI https://www.pri.org/programs/3704/episodes

The big blue https://www.metafilter.com/

Books.

text.npr.org/1001

Twitter

lobste.rs is a refined, quality version of HN.