Ask HN: What is your information diet?

No TV consumption, no social media like Reddit, Twitter or Facebook. I don't buy newspapers and seldom magazines. My smartphone is only for traveling and snapshots, I leave it at home most of the time (it has no SIM card). For phone calls I use an internet-less dumbphone instead, which is annoying to use, to use it as little as possible. In addition, I try to outsource as much communication as possible to email, to slow it down. I have the luxury to get away with reading work mail only at work. My private emails are filtered and freed from annoying subscriptions and newsletters. I have only a handful of websites I visit on a regular basis, which is still time consuming enough. If I need specific information, I web-search for it. Apart from this, I actively try to scrutinize information to avoid bias, but that's almost hopeless.

Books have been great, the more difficult the more nutritious. But the more nutritious they are, the harder they are to digest, so I don't recommend trying to read too many at a time.

Books themselves are also a great resource to find other great resources. Generally things that attract your attraction are the ones which give the best ROI. Books are a great place to find this, as you can trace a source and really consume it. Books like Tools of Titans are better off as a directory for discovery rather than read end to end.

Classics are worth reading when you find yourself pacing over an idea a few times. Discussing a lot of capitalism? Pick up The Wealth of Nations sometimes. Need help getting into the flow? Read the original book on Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

I do want something that highlights good new tools and trends. Product Hunt feels a little too sponsored. HN is great, with good critical feedback, but it's biased towards the older crowd.

Facebook has been the source for 80% of my discoveries, but it's got a terrible signal-noise ratio. Only about 5% of FB is actually useful. But it gives a lot of anecdotal information about the rest of the world around me. I'd love to quit FB if possible though. A big part of my frustration with it is that dangerous misinformation is so abundant and spreads more easily than actual information. I don't see myself using FB actively in the next 5 years.

Reddit is fun, but I picked up nothing useful from my time there.

Browsing foreign job ads is a good way to see what's going on in the rest of world, and where the trends are flowing. There's a tendency for people to cargo cult tech that's just popular in their area, but this is a good way of seeing patterns.

i try to get in an hour a day of reading material that requires alot of thinking, for me it's technical articles or "hard" books. I'll read for an hour but i probably spend another hour or two thinking about it. I try to do this everyday. Other than that, i put my phone in silent mode and turn the screen's face down during work hours. I visit hacker news everyday, and try to limit my reddit viewing. I find that reddit in low doses actually provides a decent cross section of what's happening in the world.