I haven’t had FB for over 6 years and I don’t use Twitter. I primarily find the internet to be a distraction these days and considering just phasing out news all together for weeks at a time. Has anyone done something similar?
In the past people have been harsh to call me ill informed for not being up to date on all things media, but to what end does this actually benefit the individual? My argument is that it’s mostly a detriment given the state of the world.
For those that have experimented with “going dark” in a sense, how was it, what did you do and what’s a good balance?
Seems too much. I have to dose and follow rules I set for myself. Some days I go off. Some are more filled with information.
People in Belgium watched news and decided to host my wife with infant during attack on Kyiv. Some journalists investigated that one judge had russian passport and citizenship. It created tensions and people pushed to president to solve the issue. Drop in an ocean and no guarantees of results, but it’s better than nothing.
I don’t praise media, but in my specific circumstances I need it.
I could do better. I followed the Ukraine-Russia war for a while, and although I wasn’t glued to it, I put too much focus on it.
There is literally nothing that happens if I know what’s going on there. Nothing at all. It distracts me from my family, friends, work, and myself. I have no interesting insights or original thoughts about it, and if I did, absolutely no one would care. So why read it?
I think it’s worth getting a sense of where things are every quarter or so? Over time I feel myself moving further towards that kind of pattern, and I spend far more time interested in my little corner of the world. I read relatively more local reporting and look at what’s happening with my municipality, the mayoral and council proceedings, try to find out what’s changing with local problems, etc. But even that isn’t a requirement.
I’m getting involved with a 50 year plan to help restore a watershed. Things like this seem infinitely more important and worthwhile than the news.
Most news look to me as entertainment, not information. Articles detail what B.Spears has done or what hominous unacceptable sentence has been said by CongressMan X or Y.
Spoiler : I don't want entertainment, I don't want to be outraged (most people do and won't really admit it). I want the state of the world, at least a comprehensive and kinda global one.
Did you know there is a war in tigray (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigray_War) ? Well wikipedia has been reporting it for a year. Most news outlet focus only on Ukraine (yes it's important) and on the latest hookup of celebrity Z.
> to what end does this actually benefit the individual?
Agreed, entertainment does not improve my global thinking. News does.
> For those that have experimented with “going dark” in a sense, how was it, what did you do and what’s a good balance?
Completely dark, no FB, no Insta, no twitter/reddit/name_it . It's almost boringly peaceful. Craving is only the first half a year. Now I feel like I can describe some "shape" of the world - but of course in parties I can't relate to the (useless) "Did you see this guy sneezing coca cola on tiktok - yeah right, gross, it was all over the news for a week".
PS: happy with it.
So, except of HN I have only Youtube time sucker and I really miss the times when my Internet connection used to be too slow to watch videos. But I appreciate YT for be a source of information from both camps, I use to consume roughly equally amount of war information from both camps for not get polarized. Consuming really low amount of information and not having a smartphone allows me to read a lot of books and even keep progressing in Mathematics not because of job but because of joy.
- I go through my RSS feeds every day but don't read anything. I just bookmark whatever looks interesting based on the headline.
- At the end of the week, I go through the bookmarked articles. 80% are no longer interesting/relevant at that point, or they were low-quality spam. I read the other 20%.
This has worked reasonably well for me. I spent about 15min each day, and then 1-2 hours at the end of the week.
Another thing I do is rely on "top weekly news" at the end of week. As part of the routine above I look at the most upvoted posts on reddit/HN/etc. Doing this daily is too much noise, but relying on the weekly filter works better and is not too much work.
TLDR; I batched all my news reading into a 2 hour window at the end of the week. Trying to follow news in real time is a waste of time. There is too much noise.
That's "News" to me. I read HN on and off during the day, when I'm waiting for a test to complete or there's some other reason for a break, and there's also some technical stuff I follow.
So no, I have not stopped reading news. Can't do that, I'd rather know what happens before I get it in the face. But I mostly get my news at breakfast, then I (mostly) concentrate on other stuff the rest of the day, and I may check news again after dinner.
I never touch FB or Twitter. I did have an account on FB once, just because someone said "You should make an account so that others don't make one in your name" so, well, I did.. and FB blocked me after a while, presumably because I never posted anything. Anyway, FB? That's not what comes to mind if someone says "News".
Most big newspapers have English language versions of their websites [0]. Sure, yeah, they are biased too. But their biases are somehow easier to spot to me. And they tend to have biases that I don't really care about. Like, AUS newspapers are really biased towards AFL or NRL coverage, but I don't really care about either.
Also, newspapers that are pure propaganda are good to read too. Like ones out of China or Iran. They are very clearly designed to try to steer you in a direction. So, it's kinda fun to read them and see what they are fearing this week or whatever. It's like a inoculation, I think.
Then you go back and read you own country's news and can somehow see the biases better, or at least tell yourself that you can.
If you can read another language, it's also a great way to keep up with that language. I can read Spanish, so also choosing to read the news in Spanish is a great tactic too. Seeing the difference in coverage and especially in advertisements is eye opening.
Like, watch Telemundo, they really think something different between the Anglo demos and the Spanish demos, the ads are really something.
[0] Except for the French ones, for some reason. Their English language sites tend to be pretty terrible.
Within about 48 hours of doing it I felt much more relaxed and at ease. My screen time is at all time low and I’m more present and interested in more productive things.
Most of the news today is nonsense - negative, biased, agenda driven, vacuous speculation or designed to provoke a click and a response. I’ll happily trade off being slightly less informed to ignore all of that garbage.
I also agree with the current top poster that I cannot influence the situations on the news, and am unlikely to do anything different after reading it. The mental cost and time invested in it has zero personal benefit.
I'm using selfoss as feed reader. News sources I can recommend:
- Financial Times (you can select the categories that interest you and build a feed from them)
- Economist
- Techcrunch
- The Register
German:
- Faz
- HandelsblattBut I don't consider Facebook and Twitter sources of news, either. I'm old-fashioned and still use a feed reader. CNN, BBC, NPR, and the Associated Press are my primary news sources. I would say 80%-90% of the news is current events having no impact on me personally. For those items seeming interesting I delve in and read the article.
Since I live in a democracy and I vote I think it's best that I know and understand what's going on, who's behind it, how our political leadership has affected it, and who I can vote for to help better manage it. This information also helps with my investments I'm depending on for my retirement. I don't see how my being uninformed will help me make good decisions.
I’m not on most social media platforms as well. I subscribe to the print & digital New York Times. Reading the paper is old school, but I find it relaxing and I absorb a wider array of information vs what recommendation algos would feed me. I subscribe to ESPN/Cricinfo etc for specific sports that I follow.
I haven't been reading news since mid-August. I was in Georgia a that time, and I noticed just how much reading news (especially Russia-related news) made me sick. At the place I stayed at, there was another girl who was also feeling sick from reading news, so we decided to do a full detox -- no news, no politics in discussions.
So we unsubscribed from all political channels (our biggest news source was Telegram), and left all chats and groups where politics and news were being discussed.
I'm not looking back. I don't worry that I'll miss some major piece of news. I'll hear it here on HN anyway, or, if it's Russia-specific, I'll inevitably get it forwarded to me by friends who still read news. For example, here's how I learned that Mikhail Gorbachev has died: I read it here on HN, and a friend who was sitting next to me, read about it in a Telegram channel about high fashion.
So, I have no plans to get back to that dopamine hell. My life is too short for that.
The nice thing is that you don't get the usual heavily US-centric political bias, and instead just see stuff happening around the world. The obituaries are on the side as well, which is convenient because, being Wikipedia, you can easily read about them.
Coincidentally, I just turned on my domain blocker again this evening (I use Freedom.to, it syncs all your devices on the ban-list to avoid unconsciously opening up news sites out of habit).
I can't resist quoting Lord Vetinari from Discworld:
----
“I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people,” said the man. “You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”
He waved his thin hand toward the city and walked over to the window.
“A great rolling sea of evil,” he said, almost proprietorially. “Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end. Amazing!” He slapped Vimes good-naturedly on the back.
“Down there,” he said, “are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no."
- Rolf Dobelli - Towards a healthy news diet [https://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/2010-dobelli.pdf]
- Adam Mastroianni - Reading the news is the new smoking [https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/reading-the-news-...]
My wife asked me about this just today; she's trying to wean herself off of Twitter, but it's useful to her for keeping on top of "news" (you can get it to do that if you set your feed just so). I didn't really have a good answer for how she might do that without Twitter other than something like Reddit; the mix of human interest + culture + news is hard to reproduce.
I've got an itch in the back of my brain telling me the next winning "social" media app will be one that can capture that "news feed" aspect of Reddit, Twitter and Facebook, but without enabling the direct interaction that ruins those platforms, but I'm kind of "terminally online" at this point so my PoV is likely skewed.
(Because I'm terminally online) Kind of like somehow disabling /all chat in LoL -- a way to consume the news/content without the toxic infighting and abuse the Internet apparently triggers in people.
The most disturbing fact for me is the thing when news push narratives. One example was the short squeeze on Gamestop. Hedge funds had overleveraged their shorts and people took note. The media was on the side of the hedgefunds glossing over the fact that the funds got caught redhanded with shorting more stock that was available in the liquidity pool. I commented this on one article and a reminder that back in 2008 that this particular news outlet had stories about regulation of stock shorting for these very reasons and that they glossed over the fact that hedgefunds where doing something bad. My comment was removed, but I noticed more than one antisemitic Rotschild banking conspiracy comment just left there to reinforce a narrative that there are people out there talking about "evil jews". News can't be trusted.
So I would argue that there is no news anymore. Not in the sense of news being factual and unbiased.
If I read news on a topic that interests me, I only do so to find the links to the source material and explore that without reading the bias surrounding it. Takes more time but is infinitely more rewarding.
A number of comments here suggest getting involved locally. Good advice; it's much harder to introduce spin and bias at such a level of granularity.
It's been good for my health so far since it helps me get more of the things I want to do outside of work done (thus reducing late night existential panic attacks over what I'm making of my life).
I do still use Twitter etc but I've filtered out most things so all I see is stuff directly related to my hobbies.
If something especially interesting happens I tend to just hear about it in jokes from friends and family and maybe I'll look it up then. But I don't generally go after most news actively.
I occasionally fire up google news to make sure nothing horrible is going on locally. This has helped me recover somewhat from post-pandemic negativity.
Just like what is said about gmail (Even if you don't use gmail, google has all your email because everyone else does), most people are consuming news and they are bringing their triggered-selves to the other parts of the existence. I'm finding it very hard to spot spaces that are purely creative, informative and joyous hubs.
I don't really take news that seriously considering quality of MSM, so I don't see it as detriment, it's fun and waste of time. Sure if you have better things to do and enjoy them more then you hardly need to follow any news and spend more than 5-10 minutes per day to stay informed.
I went dark during travel when you have obviously much better things to do and it's not really important toi stay in picture other than know current border situation in your location, but since I am settled now I take news as fun and I don't mind. If I felt bad about what I read I would stop reading it, I am not masochist. I don't really use Twitter and don't have FB for many years.
Also slowly whittled my social media presence down to LinkedIn, and that’ll be gone once I’ve firmed up my retirement plans in a few years
For news, I don't seek them out much, HN is my daily source of new interesting stuff.. (I find it similar in some way to fazed org back when.. though more technically focused).
I have subscribe to a few RSS feeds, worldnews and a few others on reddit that I peruse once in a while, but not even weekly.. Along with hackaday feeds.
I do visit gossip sites daily, to glance over the headlines, but I rarely click on them, it's more of a meta-thing, getting some idea of what society is interested in, rather than trying to find out what's actually happening (which I don't think you can from those sources anyway)
I also don't go on Reddit much anymore. Besides a waste of time, I always found that site to have a deeply corrosive community.
I'm active here because the quality of discussion at HN has stayed rock solid.
I always figure that if something is important enough, I'll hear about it organically.
https://www.economist.com/the-world-in-brief
which contains seven pieces of news in a paragraph, then a "fact of the day", then five slightly longer analyses in two paragraphs. Closed by a quiz and a daily quotation.
I recommend, if you have little time, to just read that page - or find a similar equivalent - up to the level you need.
In trying to better understand whats currently happening in Europe I've been watching this CNN documentary about the cold war that was filmed in the 90s and includes interviews with many of the people originally involved.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3H6z037pboGWTxs3xGP7...
In some ways I find myself having to do the job I guess journalists used to do. Learning about the subject, acknowledging my own naivete, and then trying to piece together some kind of a narrative of whats going on.
I find podcasts can be good for news but theres a lot of junk in that category too.
It's really hard now. I feel like the things I do to consume news in a way that informs are mostly weird hacks at this point. In the documentary case you can even argue about how much that even has to do with news in the first place. Definitely speaks to the current quality of news content.
Even setting aside all of the emotion, outrage, and panic that most news is laced with these days, it's simply not very helpful to stay informed of the vast majority of things going on in the world.
I think many people feel a perverse sense of duty to suffer the fear and grief of things they have absolutely no agency to affect, just as some sort of weird penance to the world. But overloading yourself with painful emotions doesn't help anybody- in fact, it makes it harder for you to be a positive-contributing member of your community and society. A person who's anxious and depressed all the time at best has less to give to those around them, and at worst becomes an active source of toxicity. The places where you have the most impact on the world (positive and negative!) are in your human interactions with those around you, not in abstract far-flung issues. Optimize for that.
Emotional energy is a precious resource that should be spent on things that matter, not thrown away in self-flagellation.
It's been a huge life improvement. I've been able to let people back into my life that I had mentally cast aside because they had a political opinion I didn't agree with. I talk to my neighbor now whose been wanting to talk to me for years (kinda trumpy, but genuinely good human being who lends me lawncare equipment). I no longer try to fit every person I see into some kind of stereotyped character. People will surprise you when you actually talk to them.
My emotions feel less manipulated by arbitrary news cycle headlines that I can't control. I feel more down to earth. The internet feels smaller and in some ways I feel less connected to people I once did, but I'm realizing now just how superficial those connections always were -- it's far better to be a part of your local community.
Don't get me wrong - I still vote, but my free time is spent on my hobbies and family now. This feels like a healthier way to live.
I find ignorance really is bliss, however there are drawbacks. I usually hear about big stuff from friends talking about them, so I have yet to miss an election for example, but I have on multiple occasions found myself on election day not knowing who is even running. I have on those occasions asked a trusted friend who to vote for as there simply wasn't enough time to read up on all the politicians running.
I guess I come across as a bit clueless at times, but it's usually when the topic of conversation is centered around either celebrities of some sort, or recent politics.
I find I'm not actually very interested in those topics anyway so I'm ok with being clueless there.
Whenever I do come out of complete darkness I usually stick to tech focused sites, like HN and arstechnica, as I find they usually have less stressful content than "regular" news sources.
As others have pointed out the news is no longer just reporting or analysis, but also has an agenda. Not reading the news is not a solution. My solution: read news from multiple sources, and extract the actual news by removing the coloring of the source and their agenda. This is not foolproof but works better than not questioning the possible hidden agendas.
I do read up some sporting news and watch some sports, and I will read up on a particular event of a major scale (say, the war in Ukraine), but I do not follow much of anything really.
> My argument is it’s mostly a detriment giving the state of the world.
I would argue differently: the world is pretty much what it always was, we are just hyper-informed, and especially with negative stories.
Part of that is natural psychology ("husband amd wife were enjoying a beautiful walk and game with their kids" is not much of a "story", whereas "husband and wife have stabbed each other" is). But for the most part, it's what sells and keeps people engaged: nothing gets the money as well as inducing conflict, tribal behaviour and keeps them coming back for more.
Eg. all the US gunfight violence news in Europe only makes us Europeans think how we are better than the people in US, whereas I know from experience that people in US are just as lovely and welcoming as everywhere else I've been. It's a clear example of pitting one group against another even though they are largely similar, and while this hasn't been put to use to divide us yet, a sufficiently motivated politician has a "tool" ready to fire the masses up.
I am still proud when someone is surprised how I am not in the daily loop, but when they share whatever news with me, and I show them how that's nothing any of us can do something about, they end up being more confused.
I do find I miss the local news (this road is getting closed, a flooding rain is coming, these streets are getting electricity cuts for maintenance...), but I try to find direct sources for those and "pull" from them instead.
There are some exceptions of course, like the long form articles in the Atlantic for example.
News like NYT, TWP, WSJ is just partisanship, it isn't something people should take seriously. Even the factual reporting on those sites is selective, they will deliberately leave out certain details in order to reach a political end. At the same time, I still read them to figure out what they're trying to obscure or distract people with, that in itself is interesting and entertaining
Things like AP/reuters or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events are much more reliable for knowing about actual events
I do read a lot about the Ukraine war - I can't resist - but I do so in the full knowledge that the first casualty of war is truth.
That said, I remember back in the early days of the war, when the media was flush with stories of Ukrainian resistance and Russian blunders, there were a lot of "enlightened" voices dismissing it all as wishful thinking and asserting that Russia would, in fact, steamroll Ukraine soon enough. Such comments have aged poorly. People can point to the fact that Russia still occupy large parts of Ukraine but it can scarcely be denied that the war has gone much worse for Russia, and much "better" (militarily and relatively speaking of course) for Ukraine, than most would have predicted in February.
I'm sure there are similar sites in other countries.
The reason is that the news is a necessarily biased selection of facts. And a biased set of facts, even if accurate, can cause people to believe things about the world that are not true.
The facts tend to be anecdotal evidence about things that invoke fear and outrage. Many people consequently have an extremely disproportionate, warped sense of what sorts of problems and dangers face themselves and society. This is of course a big problem.
It is nobody’s job to provide you with a comprehensive, balanced set of important facts about the world that would make you an informed citizen. So if you passively consume news and do not actively seek information, you will be ill-informed.
I don’t have a really great answer to the problems of modern media coverage, but burying our heads in the sand isn’t a good answer.
As a gay person, for example, things are rapidly trending towards the “first they came for trans people” territory. Is it even remotely wise for me to ignore the news given the ever-escalating attempts to eradicate fellow queer people from public life? Like, for no reason other than self-interest: I must pay attention.
I envy everyone on here who can truly disconnect. I really, honestly do. My only request is that you find a way to pay some kind of attention to what’s going on in the world, because looking away only emboldens people looking to do harm.
Tech/science news, local/city news, reddit threads on specific topics/hobbies
National news is full of sensational drama and I don't have much influence on the outcomes anyway.
When the pandemic came around, as an avid reader of news my family managed to accumulate large amounts of N95 masks, toilet paper, bottled water, and ordered work from home equipment early. Beat the rush and many had to wait for those things.
News of the tech layoffs, well, I make sure to refresh my network periodically is what I will say.
News of the problems with air travel made me look more closely at various priority programs at airports so I would not be caught up in them.
All manner of little government programs have been useful to me at one point in my life or another and I have mostly learned about those through the news.
I will often donate to causes I learn about in the news.
I wish I had the time to consume more.
To me the idea of cutting out news for one's mental health would be like ignoring medical problems to avoid having to think about them. Refusing to know about something doesn't change the world.
The mainstream media's coverage is often worse than those feeds, and definitely and deliberately lacking in the truth, with a clear intent to skew public opinion to one of those sides, depending on the publication. The ones that pretend to be neutral are somewhat worse than those that wear their biases on their sleeves, because of an additional layer of deception.
> "These are, somehow, curated news extracting relevant trends and some edge cases for borderline nerds, that don’t want to miss out, nor spend a shit-ton of time filtering trivia."
I don't agree fully, but it has stuck with me.
Additionally, I read a lot of news because it helps me articulate the need for more labor power and collective action. Understanding how Musk is overworking folks helps because it's a clear example of where unions would help, for instance.
Local news keeps me up to date on what my city is doing.
Every news outlet has a bias, no exceptions, and I mostly read things that loosely align with my own opinions, which helps with the frustrations of seeing so much garbage out there. (It's just not worth my time or anger to watch something like fox news or CNN.)
No I have not stopped reading or listening to most news. I have never read the social media "news" so technically I also can't say I've stopped reading that. Unless HN counts. Since you reference "the state of the world" I don't think it does. Very little in the way of world affairs makes it to HN (which is just how I like it).
Being uninformed is certainly care free! I would love to criticize you for being part of the problem, but I'll be honest. Even though most of my reading is news, for all the news I consume I don't "do" a damn thing with it. Except maybe, maybe, use it to inform my useless vote.
1. Those who are so busy in local community/politics activities that they don't have time or interest in happenings far away in the world. They still consume some national news via printed newspapers.
2. Those who are so busy in tech work and consume only sources like hn and nothing else as far as regular news media. There's a subset of this who consume economic/financial news.
3. Those who are busy consuming all kinds of news media – cable tv, printed news, social media etc.
The number of people around me in #3 bucket is definitely dropping. I'm in #2 bucket and seem to be surrounded by more such people. I'm curious about people in #1 bucket.
Respect of the past instead of just reading headlines, now turned too much into pure propaganda, I try to spot trend aggregating different PR news here and there. It's time consuming but as a sysadmin I have many "free time" still bound to a desktop so... when I'm on holidays, on a trip etc I just casually looks headlines and coming back skim a bit what's accumulated, generally dropping the excess. Not really a good balance but effective enough for my taste.
Unfortunately in the modern world a GOOD source who made daily press review does not exists anymore so...
A long time ago, like in the 90s, non professionnal traders on the stock market were the first to have this kind of problem. Depending on their trading style some cope by only reading the news during the week end.
For general news, there is a lot of content that follows this weekly pattern. But for folks that really want to focus on some project, maybe need to spend some months in the jungle or focus for weeks... Maybe it would be interesting to have monthly summaries, something that can help you catch up months in mere hours.
I personally would feel very unconfortable to completely unplug for many weeks without some way to catch up.
Filtering the noise is not hard like email spam filtering because there's no adversary actively trying to circumvent your filters, and false positives don't really matter. Now all the garbage disappears and when I visit Twitter I see AI and space and gamedev related stuff instead of news and politics. It's quite nice!
I choose a few sites, and check them periodically. BBC News, Drudge, Mother Jones, and occasionally the routing services like AP, Reuters, and AFP. Usually every other day or so, or when I'm bored, have downtime, etc. Occasionally pick up a copy of the Economist when I'm tired of looking at screens.
But on my terms, when I feel like it. No feed or regular updates, no trying to figure out if it's a clickbate headline.
But what about HN? Well, fair enough, though a lot news gets posted to the "active" URL here at HN and that serves as a "hey check AP" flag, so my approach more-or-less holds.
Overall I'm an independent thinker and fans of others who are too.
I do read my Google News feed daily but it's entertainment, music and tech news and I don't care if that media programming is lying to me. It's not news trying to control my life through facts I can not verify.
Most news isn't relevant to my life, and if it is, I usually can't do anything about it. This month, there was an election in my city I didn't follow at all because the incumbent's victory was guaranteed from the start.
If it's important it'll make itself known to me.
The content I consume now is HN, Reddit, and direct sources of things I find interesting or want to learn more about. I stopped Twitter within the last two years because it was too much, “let me tell you why X, click thread below for 5 reasons”.
I’ve been told I’m ignorant or that it’s embarrassing that I don’t know about current events but honestly I don’t really care and it feels great. I’m able to focus on what I really care about and be in a positive headspace.
It's like reading classic literature - the stuff that stays around is more likely to be of relevance. Filtering out the news from daily newspapers means I miss out on opinion, poorly researched facts and stories that turn out to be garbage before the weekend. Sure I occasionally read about a major story as it happens, or if something is important to me.
Focused time is the key - I try not to idly scroll through news/information.
I don't think it's ill-uninformed to be choosy about your attention. Most "news" is written to move ad inventory, not inform you.
I think Gen Z is especially keen on "information diet" being as important as physical diet/health. Met a 22 year-old who was rocking a flip phone like the one I had as a teenager (20 years ago).
My cycle is usually:
1) See some news event spawning on twitter/reddit/news frontpages.
2) Research it (by that I mean: look for a primary source that the news article being shared was based on and read that)
3) Despair at how the aforementioned are trying to use these events as wedges to drive people further towards hatred for one another.
Don't disconnect yourself so much that it makes interaction with others difficult. Find one or two good sources of headlines. And don't go deeper than the headlines or the first paragraph. 2 minutes a day is enough news.
I suppose one could mitigate this somewhat by following a diversity of sources, but I've found my approach of just disconnecting has left me more sane.
My experience was that surprisingly I often understood more about current issues than people that were constantly reading the news.
Much of news is just noise. If you read all the news, all the time, you are acting as a noise filter. If you let other people work as your noise filter, and start listening what they say about the current events, the important things will bubble up, and you will know about them practically as soon as everybody else.
News agencies in contrast share generate and share news. By understanding theyr agenda or political view, you are able to categorize it. For example as inflated or understated.
On social media you are unable to find such a context and thus are unclear about the relevance of the information. You rarely ever know the political view or background of some foreign user account.
1. Check 2 subreddits I am following.
2. Check hacker news.
3. Google chrome new tab , see around 15 articles customized for my interests (yes please have my cookies and show me articles relevant to my recent searches!) Even here I rarely find more than 1-2 articles to read or bookmark.
I have not owned a TV the last 10 years.
Online — I actively avoid news sites, twitter, Google News.
FB? What’s that?
LinkedIn — avoid like the plague.
Some techcrunch titles still catch my eye and I read through as they are relevant for my work (digital marketing & tech entrepreneur). It is not hard not to read the news, it is hard to avoid being bombarded by bombastic news titles all the time but after a while of practice, an initial reaction (haha, WOT?!, OMG) is all they get out of me.
Not using linkedin, it is trash.
Have Instagram but not using it. too much effort in posting a photo, see no point in showing off (usually a show off platform)
Twitter - gone crazy last week, most recommendations are irrelevant and interactions not genuine. I do use it to be informed though, better than watching cable filled with ads.
So yes, there is no good platform to connect with the world.
I read the economist for a while but I found the volume overwhelming and the content from issue to issue too samey (esp. with the very consistent slant - I'd have preferred more variance in opinion). I think ideally the content volume would have been about half.
Less consumption of news makes me less manipulated and more open for other opinions. Problem is that I find less and less people around me with same approach. Then leading unbiased conversation on various topics is quite difficult.
I guess rising of "tribalism" is product of overconsumption of news.
If you want to be better-informed, buy books. Actually being informed requires understanding the nuance of the situation, and only books have the space to convey it all.
I'm subscribed to daily newsletters on The Washington Post, Bloomberg and The BBC News. This is how I stay in the loop.
I also get instant notifications for breaking news (e.g. when the latest prime minister of the UK resigned).
Very rarely now I manually visit news websites.
I haven't used social media (Facebook, Twitter) for years. If I want to share something with someone, I use instant messaging.
My doctor, and old horse, refused to give me beta blockers or other pills. Instead he said "Stop reading newspapers (yes, that was thing then) and drinking coffee. Come back in a couple months."
I did and boy, did it change my life for the better!
The freedom protest in Ottawa this year is what broke me. The absolute propaganda which was published against the protest was beyond shocking to me. Truck drivers tend to be sikh in Canada; calling a bunch of brown people a bunch of nazis? wtf?
It was the end of covid restrictions; 90% of the USA had dropped restrictions. Majority of europe had dropped. Canada was meanwhile increasing. A protest was certain to occur.
If I were PM, I'd go get on their stage and talk to them with reasonable position. I wouldn't be obligated to jump instantly but if you were to say, ok, restrictions drop in a month. Sure wipes out the protest. Instead they never got an audience with even a low level staffer? The media and government treated the protest as if they were nazis, there are no nazis in Canada. Absolutely ridiculous. The government showed their hand and it's clear to me the bought and paid for media is simply an extension of the government. Willing to publish government propaganda? I have no interest in reading any of their "news".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events/November...
People will always call you out for doing things different, or not differently, from them. In reality most news is terrible and does not inform you. This includes all news about politics, which is anyway mostly staged.
I definitely agree that news is addicting and a waste of time but I do like to be in the loop.
Pick your news sources of choice (newspapers, websites, tv stations) and use those. Not what someone on 'Facebook' might tag as such.
Being able to quickly go through a list of headlines and view what interests you might be one way of being generally informed about what is happening without feeling overwhelmed.
It's factual enough not to induce rage/emotion, and superficial enough so as to not be a time sink.
Every other form of news/media I feel is a rehash of reuters/AP headlines but with all the emotion/clickbait involved.
On the other hand, I subscribed to my local regional newspaper (print), so I can stay informed about stuff in my immediate environment. It's boring, nothing ever happens, but somehow I can relate to it so much.
For other news, I try to keep things balanced as far as the culture war goes, and I try to keep in mind the ultimate sources of the stories I read (press release, leak from government employee, etc).
What I get in return is peace of mind. I’m able to stay neutral when friends, in person or online, tell me stuff. I don’t feel a need to counter with my own strong preconceived opinions. And I’ve seen that this has a tempering effect on other people too. People are less likely to be vitriolic if they don’t feel they have to make me see the error of my ways.
But what if I am letting “them” brainwash me? By not being fully “pre-informed”, am I opening myself up to misinformation that will eventually convert me into a hateful bigot? I don’t believe that is likely. First, the “them” here is friends and family. I know they come from a good place even if some of their opinions (for some of them, all of their current opinions) may be wrong at times. Being brainwashed by a horde of anonymous trolls on the internet is more likely and much worse. Second, I trust my inner compass enough to know that I’m unlikely to ever become that kind of a hateful person who actively wills harm upon a section of humanity. But I am, like most others, susceptible to being overwhelmed or confused. Opting out of the rapid bombardment of information online helps me avoid that.
News is so specific and subject to biased coverage. Really most news should be replaced with general statistical trends. One doesn't have to examine those as often and the generality abstracts away the emotionality and hopefully bias.
With Covid, it was figuring out how to navigate social situations. What are useful measures, which ones are useless? With the Ukraine it was, is my family in immediate danger? Is there something I can do to help from where I am at?
When I found an answer to these questions, I adjust my behavior and I turn the news off and only tune in occasionally to follow along and check if those answers are still valid or did something fundamentally change.
I normally read one of the big news papers here in Germany, die Zeit, to keep an eye on local and country wide politics. Usually I scan the headlines and then read one or two articles a week.
In addition to that I follow several journalistic podcasts that provide more detailed information and context on ongoing topics. They are typically a once a week overview. From the show notes, I jump to one or two long form articles if I want to know more about a certain topic.
From where I am at, there is nothing I can do to shape the course of the world at large, but I also don’t want to lose contact. But yes, I prefer to get a detailed breakdown afterwards than a live ticker.
There is also the regional events and decisions in my neighborhood and kids school to keep up with, which is where I feel it is my citizen’s responsibility to stay informed and ideally participate in the decision making process.
I am also trying to block out tech news that are not immediately relevant to my current work as that also easily distracts me.
The senders are all turned up to eleven and is up to the receiver to filter out the noise.
The book that had the biggest influence on how I consume media was Neil Postman‘s Amusing ourselves to death.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74034.Amusing_Ourselves_...
Even if I completely stopped using social media I wouldn’t stop reading and watching news. I read news on news sites and newspapers, and watch news programs on TV (yes regular broadcast television).
They explicitly separate "views" from factual reporting, so, in general, you can expect factual reports, and you can draw your own conclusions.
And liveuamap for the upcoming dirty bomb, and the wind direction (if going to Russia or Europe).
I've stopped bothering with free news.
archive.is doesn't quite cut it
Really though, any of it is only done for some mediocre recreation.
As a random example, these days I'm playing Slipways[1], but Diablo-style games or factory/builder games are also suitable.
Meanwhile I like to listen to fantastically insightful interviews with people like Julia Ioffe. You can watch a thousand 1-minute news clips and not gain as much understanding about Putin and the war in Ukraine as from a one-hour interview with her. Similarly, the Telegraph's "Ukraine the latest" is a roughly one-hour podcast I listen to every morning while taking the kid out for a walk. Perun's analysis of the logistics situation also tends to be spot on, and very insightful.
I used to listen to interesting characters on Joe Rogan, but Joe turned a bit... right wing nutjob. Lex Fridman is less crazy but also a less skilled interviewer. Still, he's got some stellar interviews like the one with Jim Killer[1]. Do you want to watch a soundbite from a politician in another country talking about something that will never affect you, or do you want to hear from the horse's mouth how your everyday life will change because of new technology?
I used to feel I didn't have time for this kind of thing, but overlapping it with gameplay makes it seem like zero time "spent" on it.
As an adult, I used to follow the news much more closely. But I realized that most of what is shown to Americans as news was really just opinions and "news" as entertainment.
It was the run up to the 2016 election that sealed the deal for me. I started noticing the narratives ever channel had. How much they were hoping for a Trump win because Trump was driving ratings and ad revenue, and regardless of what spectrum they fell, Trump would be good for them.
Nowadays, I watch very little. I'll briefly listen to NPR usually when driving on occasion on the web.
For me, its nice to have a general idea of what is going on. The big picture news develops over weeks and months, not hours or days. Following it so closely isn't good for your mental health and doesn't get you anywhere. Listening to peoples opinions just keeps you from being able to form your own. Ideally I just want to briefly be updated on the important facts of the world once or twice a week.
Since doing this. Even though I dread the state of the US I not being constantly reminded of it frees up my mind to worry about other things. Which is nice.
RSS feeds (including HN) are my only sources of news.
I mean, looking right now at the front page of one of the most popular news sites in my country I can see:
- clickbait title about possible corruption between two politicans
- some dude I don't know discussing some changes to social programs, except the government is not actually changing anything about that program
- some border shenanigans that doesn't affect me at all
- some celebrity I haven't heard about before is dead
- speculation regarding Russia-Ukraine war
- someone found a dead body in the forest
- another debate about a policy that is not even being changed
- someone crashed a car into a gas station building
- a balcony fell down
- speculation about Putin doing whatever
- report about the court case of a school shooter in the US (I don't live in the US)
- more speculation about Putin
- more Russia-Ukraine speculation
- a driver killed a cyclist on the road
- Hubble telescope photos
So many articles and yet the value of what I've seen is close to zero. Why would I want to keep up with this?
I start with mainstream news first thing in the morning to see the prevailing narrative / propaganda people are being fed.
From there I go to broadsheet left and non-loony right-wing sources to find alternative perspectives.
I enjoy critical thinking amd take everything pretty lightly, so I don't really get too upset about stuff. Life and relationships are far more important.
Throughout the pandemic my girlfriend would occasionally give me updates, for example about having to wear a mask or being barred from businesses for not being vaccinated.
I do have an RSS feed set up for 4chan that I check on occasionally as it's proven to be a great source for things that I'd like to actively know more about. It's an indictment of the MSM that you may hear from them about a "lone wolf with no known motive" with a doctored photo, meanwhile 4chan has his entire biography, photos, religious affiliations, criminal record, and analysed his entire social media history in a fraction of the time.
I haven't found actual journalism. Reuters does an okay job most of the time. It's serviceable. The closest I've ever gotten to real journalism was the news feed in a trading platform I paid a lot of money for several years ago. Very "just the facts" - exactly how I like it.
"Journalists" have realized two things about modern media that I think lead us to this:
1. People LOVE drama. The more you can doll up a story to be a life-or-death fight, no matter how mundane or irrelevant, the better.
2. Since everything is on the internet there's no need to be right. 50 years ago when a newspaper, or news show released its information that was it. There was usually no easy way to redact parts of a story and not take massive heat for it. Now, we can watch news articles change in real time. You might say this is good but it leads to lazy journalism. Misinforming people and then pretending they had the right idea by the time they've edited the real story in.
I just stay away from most things now. Anything important enough to truly effect me I'll hear through other channels. It's a good enough filter. I don't need to be a "good global citizen" and take the burden of the world on my shoulders. My life is tough enough as it is.
Occasionally I get some quite good information and leads to good information from Hacker News. And I have a few other sources.
Then there is what is commonly called the MSM -- mainstream media. It could be on paper, on TV, or on the Internet. Well, I want nothing to do with their paper, junked my TV sets, but do make a lot of use of the Internet.
From news articles, I want the writing at least to come up to common high school standards for writing term papers, especially careful references hopefully to credible, respected, objective primary sources for all claims.
But I want more: I want data, data presentations, and data analysis. For data presentations I want, say, graphs done like can find in articles on applied statistics, physics, applied math, and engineering -- again, with good references, and, maybe surprising, axes can actually read with annotation, large type, thick lines, thick tick marks, usually solid black on a white background. Then for data analysis, I realize that that is asking a bit much of the MSM.
That's what I want. I do hope, and have some hope, that the Internet is letting new sources with content for selected audiences provide more of what I want.
But for the MSM today, I absolutely, positively, flatly refuse to take anything from them at all seriously. Ah, maybe there is an exception: I should also be well informed on hoaxes, scams, fads, total nonsense, ugly perversions, despicable outrages, destructive, manipulative propaganda, etc., and I trust the MSM to give me a lot of that. But I don't get much of that from the MSM because I refuse to pay any serious attention to the MSM. To me, the MSM has no credibility, none, is fundamentally corrupting and dishonest.
My standard remark for the MSM is that on paper they can't compete with Charmin and on the Internet they are useless for wrapping dead fish heads. But the MSM is worse than that; the MSM is corrupting, harmful.
In particular, when posts here at Hacker News are to articles in the MSM, nearly always I will immediately, strongly, solidly, bitterly refuse to look. I'm not going there. It's bad stuff, and I just won't go there.
Yes, I'm angry with the MSM. This is not a small thing with me, and not temporary or a snap reaction. Instead I've been angry with the MSM and slowly developing better understanding of what they do and why for years. I have learned that a lot of what the MSM does goes way back and, actually, was neatly explained in the 1930s movie Meet John Doe and other movies.
What the MSM does is not a secret, and it is not just waste but deeply corrupting. I strongly believe in the First Amendment, but US citizens need to be critical readers, informed consumers, to understand how bad the MSM really is.
The only future I see for the MSM is that they just go out of business. They can be replaced by new sources on the Internet where they pay nothing for ink or paper. For the images, still or video, those are now getting much cheaper and easier to do. Writing some HTML is much easier than setting type or setting up a fancy studio set with hollow headed, blow-dried anchors.
Fixing the MSM is pointless, would be a waste of money: Their credibility is GONE, and it would be very expensive to bring it back and much better use of the money just to start new sources. MSM, all of you, bye, bye.
Anything pro-Russia is fairly suspect, but when you get the right cross channels it's fairly easy to identify real video vs Russian Ministry of Defense propo.
CNN reporting is generally ok, but for the most part they will show a few short clips of some actual footage before switching to the standard talking heads schema. That's the point in each video where I switch away.
Reuters and the AP are generally solid, if lacking in details and being many hours to a few days late.
Other than that I generally ignore most news about things because it's mostly fluff or skips over important things that are actually going on.
edit
Also I generally trust the BBC's international reporting. Their YouTube clips are generally in line with what I see from the more "on the ground" source channels, plus I always appreciate the more thorough interviews of public persons they do, mainly because they give their respondents time to actually reply thoughtfully rather than interrupting them continually like we see in US news agencies.
Also to add on to getting Ukrainian news: You have to be mindful of videos being released by the official Ukraine government sources. They are definitely promoting their country's successes and downplaying the losses. They are in no way as flagrant as Russian sources are, but you have to eat some salt with anything they release.
For example, I am continually seeing mixes of video clips from various drones about dropping grenades by drone onto RU troops, or different "angles" of artillery strikes on Russian assets. It's upsetting because in a few cases the official Ukraine sources are splicing together different clips from entirely different engagements. When you watch enough of them daily you start to see the overlaps. For example, the next time you see a video about Russian troops surrendering and it features a couple guys driving up their tank with a white flag on it, that happened months ago. But it keeps getting clipped into many new videos.
There are others that are similar. Like a new video a couple days ago from a soldier in heavy brush dealing with surrendering RU troops. Some a-hole in the back decided to throw a grenade and all it did was explode next to him. The trooper recording then approached carefully and shot the dumb fuck many, many times. The when the soldier got close, he shot a few more times into the body to make sure he was dead.
The problem is that video is really only viewable on Telegram and YouTube and major news outlets won't show it. And since they refuse to show the full context of the actual encounter I'm starting to see clips of that encounter being included in other videos which either don't entirely tell the story or are making stuff up completely.