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.

Slava Ukraini!

I can't find anything which doesn't reek of propaganda: Western or Russian.

Moreover propaganda-phobia is bad by itself. It can be a tool of a propaganda.

To teach and inform someone means to broaden their perspective. Without a goal like objectivity, a news story has no value. Why even listen to propaganda, it would not be to your benefit?

I still do like opinion pieces where authors describe their experience because sometimes an objective recapitulation does indeed not tell the whole story. But many modern news articles could use a dosage of detachment. It would improve the craft drastically.

I do not believe that anyone can be objective, because the process of selecting data to publication is a subjective process.

> many modern news articles could use a dosage of detachment. It would improve the craft drastically.

Maybe it would. But I'm reading news not to improve craft, but to keep myself informed. So I read what there is, not what it would be nice to have.

Moreover I believe that if you deem your sources are flawed, it make you better at critical thinking. Or rather it could make you better, if you didn't just turn to "post-truth", but tried to measure flaws and to undo them.

So maybe to impove craft of reporting and make it perfect, is not a good thing. It would mean that you no longer can author your own opinion, you can not practice the art, and you are extremely vulnerable to a manipulation. Though maybe if craft was perfected then it wouldn't be an issue?

Your statement would ultimately be an oxymoron too.

It demonstrates that the very notion of objectivity is flawed. Objectivity is a hyper-simplified model of external validity[1]. It cannot be measured as a boolean variable or by a real number. Neither black-and-white nor shades of gray could help with measuring objectivity. It is much more tricky. It is as tricky as the reality itself.

If someone wants to deal with the data from reality, they need to track all the way from reality to the data they got. Where did it come from and how it was processed. It is the only way, and it has no place for objectivity. I mean all your thoughts will have no references to objectivity, they would deal with ways how data might become biased or falsified on the way from a reality to you.

> There are observations that are more objective than others and those that are plain objective.

Can you give an example of a plain objective statement? I can think of no such statements. 2+2=4? It is a math statement, it is not about reality, it is just a part of definition of an addition.

Or maybe "apple hit Newton on the head"? Is it an objective statement? Did apple bounced and hit him on the shoulder also? Was someone sitting on the tree dropped apple on Newton's head? Was Newton leaning on a trunk of the tree? Did he tried to dodge? How many details were omitted? Who decided that these details are not important enough to report? Was he objective while deciding? How can anyone measure his objectivity?

The only way to explain why this is an objective reporting needs resorting to a beauty of a narrative of a sudden insight induced by a seemingly irrelevant and mundane event. And this narrative "decides" what is important and what is not. Was the choice of this narrative "objective"?

What if we choose a narrative of a God's blessing? Like Descartes did when he invented a coordinate system. If we did then the choice of details to report would be different. And it would be an "objective" reporting also.

Pure data (like numbers in a table) have no narrative, so maybe it is objective? But when we do not know the narrative behind the data, we cannot make inference from the data. So pure objective data is useless.

Everything is subjective. Though there are cases when it doesn't matter. Cases when we do not need to keep an eye on a narrative, on a process of data gathering and processing... But even despite the majority of cases are of this kind, a critical thinker needs to keep an eye on a narrative and on a process of data gathering, because it is his second nature: you never know when this skills will become needed, so the only safe way is to use them constantly. Make them automatic, so you need not to think about it.

[1] https://www.scribbr.com/methodology/external-validity/

Most western media (Murdock/Berlusconi type oligarch media aside) is fairly factual. It doesn't have 'spin' or 'agenda' in the sense that the journalists conspire to mislead (they don't have time for this).

You'll have next to no clue what's happening in middle nor South America, Africa, China, India, the rest of Asia, or the Arab peninsula.

In short: a lot of news nowadays has the agenda of selling itself and takes time to select stories and spin headlines for this. It has become genuinely harder to stay reasonably informed about what's going on in the world.

but on the other hand, there /is/ a «freer circulation of information».

It now has to be managed - the scenario is more complex.

So pardon me for being confused.

Hitler's empire was far greater than just Germany at the beginning of 1945 and he was still sending V-2s to London and Antwerp at the end of March that year.

I am envious of your faith in western media in much the same way I am envious of highly religious people that are certain what happens upon death: seems comfortable and reassuring, but it is likely not true.

I have a hard time believing that anyone can be this naive. We're you paying attention the last two years?

When journalists lied, suppressed and told everyone that Hunter Biden's laptop from hell was 'Russian disinformation" and refused to even investigate whether the claims that it had been verified by people with actual knowledge of Biden's dealings were true, how is that not journalists conspiring to mislead?

Thus all reporting on it was tabloid style sensationalism.

Hunter Biden's businesses dealings are not "U.S. centric" and Hunter Biden is not a celebrity (except maybe in addiction recover centers). They involve allegations that the son of a sitting VP (at the time), who had absolutely no experience in the energy sector, used his father's influence to obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in business dealings with Chinese and Ukrainian energy firms. That involves allegations of international corruption. Including having a prosecutor removed who was investigating one of the businesses tied to Hunter Biden (you know, the famous Joe Biden story about how he told Ukraine to fire the prosecutor or they would not receive a billion dollars in U.S. aid).

> "Thus all reporting on it was tabloid style sensationalism."

Except the reporting was not tabloid style sensationalism. It was actual investigative reporting that the media tried to CONVINCE people was "tabloid style sensationalism".

If you'd like to see how the media worked to convince you that the whole story was just "sensationalism", take a look at how the NY Times repeatedly dismissed everything that was being said before the election (when they called the laptop "unsubstantiated"), but then earlier this year (when it could no longer hurt Biden's chances) finally admitted that at least some of the allegations are likely to be true: https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/the-times-finally-admits-hunte...

But my suspicion is, you really wouldn't care in the slightest if Joe and Hunter Biden are actually corrupt.

On YouTube I follow Denys Davydov, a Ukrainian pilot that reports about the war. A few days ago he showed a video of a Ukrainian helicopter flying close over traffic, and he was critiquing how irresponsibly and dangerous that was. He claims to know that road and that is was far from the battlefield. So even him as a Ukrainian is able to try and be as objective as possible.

News can be objective. The claim that western media is full of propaganda is just kremlin propaganda.

This made me chuckle.

In Russia's case, it's pretty clear. They have laws to prohibit free press, jail time for claiming things opposite to the Kremlin.

In some other cases, it's more subtle. In Hungary, Orban's influence on the media is very high, and not healthy for a democracy.

But if you claim that the most objective news sources in the west still show straight-up propaganda, I would love to see some evidence of that. Any evidence, like a journalist that is fired over going against a government. Or laws, or some other influence from the government straight to media companies.

https://europeanjournalists.org/blog/2021/08/26/ukraine-pres...

But a few days ago a Turkish minister said over 60% was sold to Europe, so which is it?

5 seconds to enter "Ukraine wheat exports by country" into Google, yielding a USDA page saying: "In 2021, Ukrainian wheat exports were valued at $5.1 billion, with Egypt, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, and Bangladesh as the primary destinations."

Telegraph 1 - Turkish politician 0.

Here's the BBC quoting the UN:

> However, UN figures show that the bulk of Ukrainian food exported in the last three months has been going to Spain, Turkey, Italy, China and Netherlands.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-61759692

See why I'm confused?

Mainly through access. If you don't report favorably, your government sources might withdraw. Sources that provide you with exclusive information that you can provide first. There are of course unimaginable other venues to enforce compliance to a certain framing. There is also documentation how this was achieved in the past.

I saw how the press quickly turned people in favor of the Iraq war. It was clear propaganda. You can see the same stuff happening today with different enemies. Yes, Russia is a despotic state, but you are a victim of disinformation as soon as that prevents you to demand accountability at home. Because that would be your job as a citizen of a democratic state and what you can influence.

I've found The Guardian's reporting and FT's analysis to be quite good. They report based on verifiable facts and also claims by both sides, with explicit mentions if there's corroborating sources or not. The Guardian also have a daily "what's new" so that's useful to keep up.

Do you have any specific examples? I can't say that it mirrors my experience but i might have missed something.

However, most Indian journalists call them "right wing."

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/wion-world-one-news/

The Institute for the Study of War aggregates open source intel into daily control of terrain maps. https://twitter.com/thestudyofwar

Thanks.

The complete lack of geopolitical and historical context in the media around this event has really shaken my trust. In the future I'll probably just be heading directly to the history books rather than trying to parse out the missing context from the media

One reason the US and UK come across stoppy (eg "Boris to stop the peace negotiations") is Ukraine used to have nukes and in 1994 the US, UK and Russia signed an agreement for them to give them up in return for the parties to guarantee their borders. If you let Russia just send in tanks, kill a few people and then say lets have a new agreement then what's even the point? If they don't stick to the first one they probably won't stick to the second. And then why even bother with nuclear non proliferation? If the agreements aren't worth the paper they are written on you may as well try to get nukes instead.

It has little to do with the quality of the news, more with the psychosocial mechanisms of any polarized conflict that involves life and death. One may lament it, but only from the outside and at some distance.

As a side note one might wonder if this is not a main purpose of war: to create a polarized environment where dissent becomes impossible.

Putin isn't crazy - he's coldly calculating, and clearly demonstrated his ruthlessness in Chechnya (which the world chose to ignore).

“Residents of Crimea, up to 60% percent of whom are Russian, were given a choice of either joining Russia or opting for more autonomy from Ukraine under the 1992 constitution.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/03/16/crimea-...

Isn't it suspicious that Ukraine's large, aggressive, well-armed neighbor was somehow involved in the referendum, and then sent in the "green men" to enforce the inevitable results?

And what about the native ethnic Tatars? Russia pretends they don't exist.

However, it's worth mentioning that Eastern Ukraine has also been heavily targeted with Russian propaganda for decades now and it's quite likely that had an impact. I haven't read into it, but I'd be surprised if they didn't also encourage Russians to move to Ukraine to make it more ethnically Russian. This is pretty much in the playbook of every colonizer (e.g. Israel with Palestine, Morocco with SADR, or China with Xinjiang).

I know i'm biased, but first, this is a belief i held in my formative years (that the Russian army was full of violent pigs), and it seems to align the the propaganda i'm seeing now. So perhaps there is some exageration right now, perhaps there was some exagerations 15 years ago, but to me it aligns perfectly.

I also know two ex-special force guys, one who worked in Africa against Wagner, and while Wagner seems to be less rape-happy than the average Russian military guy, massacring and trying to put it on their opponent is their MO. I think i can say it now because Wagner was recently caught and will be more carefull next time, but the French army decided to keep satellite + air surveillance over all their old bases and now put bodycams and surveillance on all sites that can be used to frame them.

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.

At least in my area there is a surprising large number of things the city council can do to improve (or not improve) the everyday lives of me and my loved one.

I love that those decisions are usually very accessible in that they don't concern themselves with big sweeping legal frameworks and fundamental political ideologies.

Even without being a council member it feels nice to ride on a bike lane that you helped to bring to live.

You don't "win" everytime of course but you tend to learn a lot about how other political factions think on a local level.

> 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?

Do you vote or participate in politics in any way or do events in the news directly affect your life? One reason it's rational to read the news: If you don't read the news, then you're at risk of lacking important contextual knowledge about society and social norms. It's pragmatic to keep track of these conversations to avoid embarrassment and to not behave in ways that might offend others. I find it useful to be aware of contentious issues on which I might have a side or a stake.

> If you don't read the news, then you're at risk of lacking important contextual knowledge about society and social norms.

Unfortunately there's very little news that doesn't have an agenda. So I'm not getting the news. I'm getting someone's opinions with various facts spun in a way so as to try to get me to vote one way or another. Is that a better way to be informed on how to vote?

I guess it's up to the individual to choose what they prefer.

"To be, or not to be ...: Whether 'tis nobler ... to sleep No more ... [or] in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune"

I.e.: if you want to participate, then some degree of effort is involved.

And I already gave up the game of trying not to offend people. I say what I think, and if it happens that I offend someone, I'll consider it when it happens and apologize or ignore it, depending on if it makes sense to me.

It’s been at least a decade since news has been a reflection of social norms (I’m in Canada). It feels more and more disconnected and like they’re either pushing agendas or simply filling airtime so they can serve the right amount of ads.

Most of it is a spectacle and my actions and point of view are entirely irrelevant to it. Frankly, I don’t believe a lot of the news is even rooted in reality. To have a point of view on it, or to have feelings about it, would be to lend legitimacy to something I sincerely believe is part of a bizarre, performative, ephemeral blob of social invention. I don’t mean to sound absurd or like a conspiracy theorist at all; I really can’t see how much of what’s in the media is remotely objective or connected to any kind of shared reality that is practical and sane.

As far as being embarrassed, I find I can get by with simply listening to people and letting them get their ideas across. They like to express themselves and I’m content to listen. I typically won’t be embarrassed because no one really cares what I think or what I think I know, too. No one asks unless I say something in the first place.

I think we’re encouraged to believe it’s some other way, but if you keep to yourself you’ll find very quickly that indeed, almost no one cares. Even here on hacker news, the vast majority of readers don’t care about what I wrote. It’s irrelevant to them, and that’s okay. It’s probably a good thing.

The only people in my tiny corner of all of this who have any remote concerns about me are right here, near me, in my life. The rest is mostly a spectacle. If it can effect me, the chances that I can effect it in any meaningful way are infinitely tiny.

I do vote, too, but again… I’m not convinced it means what people think it means, or that it leads to things I hope it will. On the other hand, by working on local concerns I can actually make a difference. The changes we can make like restoring a watershed to improve wildlife diversity, reduce erosion, improve runoff capacity, and so on can be a real model for improving these features of other municipalities. That can matter many times more than a vote for the leader of my country; it can lead to real data that people turn to improve the places they live in. It seems totally uninteresting and pointless compared to the notion of democracy and national governance, but from my point of view, it’s far more pragmatic and connected to reality.

I agree with you overall. I want to be aware of contentious issues on which I might have a side or a stake too. I think the difference between us is only that I think the scope of these issues is extremely small; there’s very little I come across in my day where it truly matters at all what I believe, and any stake I may have is almost exclusively relevant to me alone.

https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/texas-oklahoma-ranked-among...

It turns out that it is wholly based on a corporate PR puff piece by Wallethub, with a very pseudoscientific and manipulative use of statistics to reach its conclusions. The arbitrary weight assigned to the entire category of physical and property crimes was 15%. Bullying incident count was weighted as more important than drug overdoses. And when factoring in Covid, they weighted based on vaccination rates - not actual local hospitalizations/deaths.

https://wallethub.com/edu/safest-states-to-live-in/4566

There must always be a "most safe" and "least safe" state (by a given measure) - but if the spread between them is insignificant then that's not particularly important information. Even less so when the headline qualifies with "ranks among" so they're not even the actual least safe.

Also, the methodology gave murders per Capita double weight and vaccine percentages double weight. Both are numbers bound between 0 and 1, and both have a significant impact on population safety.

So no, I'd much rather talk about why someone would make those weightings and what the correct ratings should be using a statistical analysis mixed with some judgements of how safe I feel in the face of those statistics.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...

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.

> How do you find topics to read up on via Wikipedia?

The above link is the "News Portal" of Wikipedia. I'll assume that -like me at 1st- you didn't even imagine it could exist.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417715

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417336

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417454

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417439

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.

And yet, I feel like you do but in the opposite direction with English media. The only thing that is good in English for me now is old books.

- 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
  - Handelsblatt

But 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.

Except everything is an emergency. Did you hear the latest X said about Y thing? Did you hear what is happening in X-istan? What about the climate?

I don't care about any of it. At the end of the day being more informed about the comings and goings of every atomized point of the world only causes me more existential stress. If I'm being honest I really only care about what happens in my locality, and by extension my state. If it's big enough, maybe I'll care what happens at the country level. But very, very few things rise to meet this and cause me to have a need to burden myself. What Trump, or Biden, or Zelensky, or whoever is in the media circuits today says has literally zero bearing on my life in my community. Sometimes it's best to turn off the brain melting box in the corner of the room.

Democracy doesn’t work in uninformed passive society.

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.

PastEvents is my entry point to the news nowadays. It updates daily and I can look at source material and relevant articles linked directly from the event, as well as search the past for related events to understand chronology.

I really like the date range selector. I can see this being very useful for getting a clear picture about what the world thought about certain topics before they blew up in certain directions in more recent times.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417715

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417336

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417454

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417439

(Yes, Wikipedia's Current events portal is great)

I posted the exact same comment in all 4 positions talking about Wikipedia - if anyone feels offended or spammed just ler me know and I'll delete this superflous cross-reference

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417715

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417336

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417454

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417439

Indeed, I always check to see if my name is in it.

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."

A practice that’s been good for my psychological health is to imagine how a good person would come to hold the ideas I disagree with. I’ve never failed, unless the subject is someone really beyond the pale like a mass murderer.

You can come up with multiple explanations, that range from “they are ignorant” to “they know something I don’t” and everything in between.

To try to engage with the example you gave, I’d imagine this about the people who support the lockdown:

1. They believe covid is extremely dangerous, and they want to protect people from dying. They don’t like that the lockdown is an inhibition of personal freedom, but they believe it’s justified due to the extreme circumstances (kind of like how it’s OK for the government to force people to evacuate their homes if the area is about to be flooded). Probably if covid had a 5% death rate, you’d support lockdown too. A poll found that over 35% of US adults believe covid has a death rate of 5% or more! [1]

2. They may think that the economy can just go back to the way it was before when lockdown ends, the government makes the money, and it can just pay people enough to buy what they need for now.

3. They may understand the economic cost of the lockdown, and they know it will make life more difficult in the future, but they believe the sacrifice is worth it (kind of like how the government went into debt in WWII).

I’m not saying these people are right about the facts - I’m just saying their motivations are not evil. You and them both want the world to be a good place, you are just working from different premises that lead to you different ways of achieving that.

Now, if you want to be some kind of political activist, you can go through life trying to convince people they are wrong about things. That could be noble.

But if you are just trying to enjoy life, it’s good to be able to walk around and look at the people you meet and have positive feelings about them. It will make you happier, and it sounds like that is something you want.

[1] https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/co...

> 3. They may understand the economic cost of the lockdown, and they know it will make life more difficult in the future, but they believe the sacrifice is worth it (kind of like how the government went into debt in WWII).

> I’m not saying these people are right about the facts - I’m just saying their motivations are not evil.

Well, you’ve summarized the possible explanations clearly. It’s fairly probable they don’t mind sacrificing people for their fight against Covid. Concluding they are not evil is quite a bold stretch.

Moreover, it’s not them, but it’s the media. But they choose to believe it, however astonishing it may sound, and they either don’t see the BS or they choose to ignore it.

But that’s the story of living in a society, at one point you have to admit that you are defeated and some crazy people have control, and that they are literally watching what escapes of happiness you have and closing them one by one, because you’re white, male, have a company, may want to date, may want to travel, all of this is under threat, they’ll demonize all those attributes while valuing people who believe in astrology or in carpe diem.

They’re not acting random. They’re after me, as an archetype. There is no path to happiness.

- 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.

[0] https://www.memeorandum.com/

I haven't really found a source that is truly neutral. Reuters does an okay job and that's about it. Journalism is more-or-less dead in the era of eyeballs.

Furthermore, most folks don't really want a neutral news outlet - do I want to see equal time given to white supremacists and Black civil rights leaders? No, I'm just not interested in any "neutral" discussion of human rights. I don't want to read or listen to nationalists, incels, or whoever offering up opinions on the "great replacement theory" or whatever.

You pick an extreme example to make the same point anyone says about "free speech". I do find it funny that you left out the other side of the extreme. I am equally uninterested in listening to climate extremists who spray oil on businesses, rioters, antifa, anti-gunners, etc. Turns out, the extremes don't groove well with journalistic integrity because they don't believe in truth anyway. In fact, many of these extremes are created by the exact "journalism" we are complaining about here.

I do want neutrality in the truest sense. If news could be a list of facts derived by good journalism with sources, interviews, etc then I would be content. I don't want spin, I don't want an editorial disguised as a front page article. I want a person with a mundane droning monotone voice to tell me what happened, read off the interviews, and then close out the show. I want a set of facts that I can then derive my own conclusion from. This leaping off point would let me take this to my friends or family and have a meaningful discussion on what they think, or how it effects people, etc. Instead everything is an emergency. Everything is extreme. Every news outlet on whatever side you believe is telling you what to think, not what happened. You can't even listen to the big 3 news outlets in America, average their opinions, and end up anywhere closer to the truth. Coincidentally, this is the same problem with so-called "fact checkers", which is just a clever rebranding of yellow journalism, where the "fact check" is just a re-link to another disguised editorial or speculation on the meaning of something with enough filler to feel "truthy".

> There is no such thing as a neutral news source.

No there isn’t, but there are news sources that try to be critical of the points they normally support and don’t let people get away with bullshit for “the greater good”.

NPR (KQED in particular in the Bay Area) just went batshit after 2016. No more news, just wild conspiracy sessions about Trump nuking countries, etc. It was no longer about events, it was about how every presidential tweet made the hosts and guests feel.

Replace “leftist” in what I said with “elected under association with the Democratic Party in California”.

We often call the Democratic party the left, but they are not a leftist party. (In fact they are a pretty bog standard centrist party these days).

Just like the right isn't some monoculture, the left has pretty important sub groups. Leftist typically implies socialist, anarchist, maybe social democrats, communists, etc.

Neither the left nor the right are monocultures, and they do not hold consistent views. The world is more complicated than that. I'm a socialist who hates plenty of leftists and can hang with some right wingers because I don't write off anyone right of me as a "right wing nut job" or whatever.

You also seem really bothered by this. I'm not sure what's got you so upset. I just don't see the world as black and white as you do, we can say "agree to disagree" whenever if this conversation is making you angry.

https://thenewpaper.co/

I like the text.some_newsite approach.

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.

"78 people dead and several injured as a recently renovated 100-year-old suspension bridge in the Indian state of Gujarat collapses, officials say the bridge could not bear the weight of the people standing on it, committee formed to probe the incident"

There were more than 130+ people dead reported already yesterday and maybe if those people were not aholes actively swinging the bridge (videos available on twitter/reddit) then it could bear their weight.

> We provide an alternative startpage for news, free from left-wing bias

Now, I must recommend that the ideal be "to find information which has worth because of the deserved authority of the writer, owing to being blessed with well-earned capital of wits, good sense and intellectual cultivation and wisdom, analytical experience and synthetic talent" -

and not "to find information from people with glamourous lower leanings", also promoting a satanic tendency towards relativism and groupism.

I don't know how good these sites are for sweden news, but they are outright fake news for world news.

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.

> completely unplug for many weeks without some way to catch up.

Things move very slowly. You'll fill in the missing bits when you start reading the news again after a hiatus. Have you never gone on holidays? Just try it. Ignore the news for two weeks, then start reading it again. Sure, you'll miss some things, but there's nothing that needs your attention that fast. Should WWIII break out, you'll find out through other means, but the odds are very, very small that that'll happen while you take a news break.

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!

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

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417715

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417336

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417454

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417439

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.

I am afraid of propaganda from Fox news and MSNBC, not a relatively weak Russia and other "foreign actors".

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).

https://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4hL5Om4IJ4

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.