Ask HN: So news is bad for us, but is the solution to follow people directly?

There seems to be an agreement among the HN community [1] that "news is bad for you" [2] and that we need to find a replacement for the primary news feed providers, cause their main purpose is to make make profit and not to keep us informed.

My idea of an alternative news feed is to keep following inspiring people you encounter, like a professor you have in university, or the no-name author of a movie. Following should be agnostic of a social network platform, just to keep track of all their public feeds. That way you would build up your personal network of people, that keeps growing and producing more value.

Whats your thoughts on that?

Maybe we can keep this on a conceptual level, and avoid technical problems of networks in general (like power laws and spaming), implementation details or reward mechanisms.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16763604 [2] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli