Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?
I've been offline since last Wednesday, driving and camping throughout northern outback australia (escaping the vid!). I have a second rate carrier and tonight I hear my phone ping for the first time since I left. I've had reception before, but usually only while driving, usually passing through a larger town. This time I'm sitting next to the fire, near a town called Nhulunbuy in East Arnhem, aboriginal land, one of the more remote regions on the planet. I'm on a small red cliff overlooking the ocean, I've spotted a largish croc on the sand below only an hour before, and I can see the entire milky way above me (it's a new moon). As i'm writing this I just looked up and saw a satellite. The sky's been pretty similar the last week, but still it's spectacular. Anyway my phone pings and I pick it up and I end up reading the news and checking HN (for the first time in two weeks .. same old stories). What gives?
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[ 738 ms ] story [ 5528 ms ] threadNew stuff, head lines, news flashes, breaking news, current events, notifications etc. all trigger some dopamine release and make me feel satisfied.
I read (or more likely heard on a podcast) about an experiment with mice and a food dispensing button. In one case, the button reliably dispensed food every time it was pressed. In the other case, sometimes the button wouldn’t work. The mice with the reliable button didn’t do anything odd. Whenever they were hungry, they would hit the button for some food. The mice with the unreliable button however would repeatedly hit the button, and they ended up being overweight.
My feeling is that if EVERYTHING on something like HN was super interesting, we’d only be here when we were up for some interesting reads. But the fact is, not everything is. But the possibility that something EXTRA interesting might pop up keeps us coming back in an addictive type of way.
It is relevant here as the mice in the experiment loose control over their "mind" and start behaving in a self defeating manner.
Some people have good luck modifying their network configs to enforce this when their willpower or habits are weak.
Fortunately there isn't a physical component to the addiction so it is safe to go cold turkey. Usually after a few days or weeks it gets easier but if you slip up it is very easy to fall back into old habits.
Since this community is all about using IT tools to achieve goals:
- There are some browser extensions that can do this, e.g. lock you out of Facebook, Reddit or $newswebsite after X minutes of usage.
- HN itself has the "noprocrast" setting in the user profile which I hear works similarly.
Ditto, really, for how I engage with the industry. I'm looking at long-term principles like the fundamentals of distributed systems and not getting hung up on chasing certifications for Bob's New Cloud Platform. The details change slightly over time, but the principles remain the same.
I resolved, my news addiction, by redirecting the time I would have scanned ~12 different news sites multiple times a day, into reading more substantial content. Be that more long form (investigative) journalism, books written on a topic, studies, etc. Content, that let you actually understand the why of things, not just the what that is happening.
How to filter on which things to focus on, or tame the fear of missing out came naturally with the realization, that if something is important enough for me to care about (be that politcal or a new javascript framework), it will reach me eventually one way or another.
Also for big sudden events, like for example a terrorist attack, no matter how reputable and connected the news paper, in the beginning nobody has any solid information, which doesn't stop anyone from reporting and wildly speculating. It might be tough to just ignore that, especially since people will think you don't care, but beyond some basic facts, you won't be able to get any useful information for at least a couple of weeks.
I'd say it is closer to a fast food meal. Yes they can be very tasty and satiating for a moment but the nutritional value is extremely low. If consumed too much it is pretty bad for you
Working in a office complex where about a dozen different news papers and sites were made, just made me realize that the "news" section is pretty much purely about relatively cheap traffic generation, nothing else. They license a bunch of wire agencies like Reuters, AP, etc. pick out and often blow up the stories that the target audience will likely click on. The site that is regularly the fastest in publishing something, will gain visitors.
So its not that there is per se something nefarious happening within any particular story, but the news feed is there to make you consume more and boost the numbers advertisement pricing is based on, not to inform you.
Related Article from The Guardian "News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier" https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...
The author, Rolf Dobelli may be worth checking out, though I don't 100% agree with the article.
A good approach may be to do some independent analysis with the widest variety of sources, then use that going forward.
Eg anti Russian and China bias is coming more and more to the fore these days (not saying their leaders are good, far from it) but once its characteristics are recognised it's easier to ignore and not be influenced by it.
Poker machines are built the same, as are the recently banned loot boxes in video games.
I like to model this in terms of multi-armed bandits. Given a set of levers giving out unknown rewards, what is the optimal policy to maximize your rewards over time? A bad way would be to try all the levers until one gives you a reward, and then just keep pulling that one lever in hopes of more. This doesn't work because the other levers might have given you even better rewards.
Instead, you should try to learn to predict how much reward each lever is going to give you. A fast way to do this is to focus on pulling levers that "surprise" you, i.e. where your predictions of reward deviate from the actual reward you got. This works as long as the reward from the environment is at least in principle predictable, as it mostly is in nature. But with truly random rewards, you tend to end up with addictive behaviour. In nature this isn't a big problem, because truly random rewards are generally one-off events. So we're basically exploiting a bug in our own reward mechanisms, and evolution hasn't had time to adapt.
Incidentally, all of this can be viewed as a mathematically and psychologically precise way of saying that the reason you get addicted to news is because you are curious.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=doomscrollin...
The unknown of what's behind that notification drives our brains crazy and makes us need to check.
More from Nir Eyal here: https://www.nirandfar.com/want-to-hook-your-users-drive-them...
Aggregators like people who are gossips, newspapers and now social media are all attention based. Even the structure of writing of news stories to give you the main story in the headline, then start with the conclusion and fill in the details has been making this type of information bite sized from the dawn of time.
And now of course our “news” is global, often the stories about people are not people actually in our lives (Royals? Celebrities, who cares?), and politics have cranked us vs them to 11. No wonder it’s addictive.
Add in complicated feelings that we want to avoid (how bout that pandemic?) and looking at new information also serves as a distraction from the things we can or cannot change in our lives.
Be well weary news consumer. Get off your phone and enjoy nature.
Congratulations for those of you who have enjoyed your presence there.
Great! Richard Daris https://www.RichardDaris.com
I'm actually making an alternative to Facebook that shows posts chronologically in the feed instead of using machine learning algorithms to make them addictive. I also plan to not include a share button on posts. I think these two changes would make it far less addictive and better for users.
[1] https://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/conditioned-social-m...
"I’m having trouble deciding whether I understand the world better now that I’m in my seventies than I did when I was younger, or whether I’m becoming more and more clueless every day. The truth is somewhere in between, I suspect, but that doesn’t make me rest any easier at night. Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet. My late father, in the final year of his life, claimed that he finally found that long-sought serenity by no longer reading the papers and watching television. Even then, and I was thirty years younger than he, I knew what he meant. What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day."
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/12/05/goodbye-serenity/
Edit: Charles Simic is a Serbian-American poet who lived through WWII and saw some really grisly things, some described briefly in the article, hence "after everything I had lived through and learned in my life..."
A genuine question: is it access to news or content of the news that messes with our sense of wellbeing? Does “the media” upset me, or knowledge, for example that climate models appear to be more conservative than reality, upset me?
In not reading the news, are we simply happy in the way ostriches are happy when they place their heads in the sand?
I've read this sentence multiple times and still not sure what it means. Would you please expound?
The poster is saying that global climate change is probably even worse than people think. Often, the reporting around climate change focuses on the best case, the average case, or what could be achieved with an immediate strong response. But the actual paths we are on seems to track some of the worse, more pessimistic cases.
Unless you're reading the entirety of academic research yourself and able to critically judge the validity of that research (by being a climate scientist yourself) it seems like you're always depending on someone else's biased interpretation.
To clarify: not disputing climate change. Only the ability for someone to make judgement calls on whether the reporting is accurate.
I.e., things are even worse than we thought.
Where can you find up-to-date temperature readings (as up-to-date as possible)? Are there public datasets available?
Those with political power in the US could conveniently turn a blind eye to the problem with plausible deniability with a he said she said excuse, but now they have to face the problem.
I think that’s an important development in the progress of my country.
You should be having an emotional response to the huge undercurrent of racism and classism pervading society.
The truth of the matter is that the story (and "updates") are all crafted specifically to be addictive, to be click bait. It isn't about sharing information or exposing the truth. All that matters is ad revenue. I do get it that we need to pay journalists. It has become clear we need a new system. I guess NPR kinda has a solution via patronage. If only we could now get more different viewpoints this way. God knows we have enough multi-billionares to fund it.
> that long-sought serenity
But i don't think changing your input is related to gaining that long-sought serenity - in a sense of being immune to those inputs if required.
I my opinion it boils down to being human and being to some degree a puppet of your brain chemistry, meaning we can search for said serenity but are propably doomed to never find it.
It is designed to be addictive. Either by accident or deliberate is up for debate. I have my opinion on it but it is just that. They use your own feelings to manipulate you into watching/clicking for more. Facts matter little, feelings do in this segment of our world. Mr. Bernays should be proud of the monster he set loose upon us. Even the vaunted NPR does this. I noticed it years ago after a drive across the country and realizing they try to make it look like they were investigating things and not just reading something of one of the 4 or 5 news wires.
I recently upped my monthly donation to my local NPR station, and I feel like if anything it's made me more critical of them. Probably most of it is that I lean politically Right, and they lean Left. But it feels like sometimes they just go out of their way to try to check all the boxes of "woke" culture, whatever the hell that is.
The example that sticks out in my mind is they did a piece on immigration detention centers a few weeks back (no qualms there). The person they chose to interview was a transgender Guatamalen.
It's basically the most on-brand thing the reporter could have done. Talking about immigration? Better throw in some LGBT issues as well.
It's too much I guess to expect a news organization to just report on the news.
When I get feeling really irritated about it, I calm myself down by rationalizing that I like the music they play in the evenings.
Like I said, it's perfectly on-brand for them.
My wife and I have a running joke (which I think I've seen pop up elsewhere too) about how Terry Gross picks her interview guests based on how many items the guest ticks on the "diversity checklist"
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/871625210/you-can-either-be-a...
This is what I do, in addition to no social media except for certain personal alerts.
I ask my partner to relay any significant news/events to me.
I do support my local media group The Colorado Sun with a membership and sometimes read through their articles, which don't have advertisements so they are not incentivised to produce click-bait headlines and sponsored/addictive/entertainment content.
It sounds like you've partly outsourced the problem to your partner then. What does your partner do?
Many people refresh HN multiple times per day and spend hours arguing about the same things over and over (seriously, I've seen the same arguments for 5+ years). I'm sure all of us have caught ourselves closing HN and then opening it again a few mins later.
This goes for all forums ever, so it's more of a personal change than anything 'wrong' with HN or others.
2 ways that I've found some refuge in the chaos that is the hyper-modern world:
1) More news. Flood your brain. Find all the news sources you can in your chosen language. Most big-time newspapers have an English-language resource. Look at those. Once, I put the online English version of the top 100 newspapers in the world (by circulation and if they had an English version) in my morning readings. I'd have to open them all at once and then go through each of the 100 tabs and skim them and close each one. You get really good skimming the world's news that way and really seeing what is important internationally: US politics, cyclones/hurricanes/weather, sports, etc.
2) Read a book. Books tend to draw you in much better than the news. At least the better-ish books. Though it's not as easy as chewing the candy that is Twitter, the 'classics' are a great jumping in point. Struggling to read and grok a few pages of Dante's Inferno does become preferable after a time. Lists of classic literature abound and nearly any of them are top-notch.
Non-fiction books have driven my world opinions more than any other source (besides I suppose lived experience).
One sad thing about the past few months is I no longer find time to read. My wife does ebooks, but I just can't get into them.
On the plus side, I'm getting a lot of projects done around that house.
Daily news watchers now seem like such ineffective people to me, and I’m reminded of the know-nothings from my teenage years rambling about conspiracy theories. The entire time they’re talking about whatever is happening in the news, I’m just thinking: “Who decided that this was important to you, and why did you let them decide that?”
I have family members that can’t pay their rent on time or remember to feed their kids breakfast, but they’ve got the geopolitical dynamics of the US and Russia all figured out. They solved it.
Others talk endlessly about their opinions about all subjects deemed important by the news. They speak with passion as if the opinions and convictions are their own, yet every single stance they take conveniently mirrors whatever was favored in whatever media they consumed.
None of them ever express an original thought. Every single one of them just chooses a selection of things they heard and repeats it.
I’ve been doing this long enough that I think I can see how this is going to turn out for me long-term. Name anything that happened 5 years ago. If it’s significant, I remember it. If it isn’t, I never heard about it at all, and nobody else remembers it either.
I’m by farrrrrrrr the happiest person I know, to the point that I literally feel guilty about it sometimes. I just have so much time for my career that I’ve zipped past everybody, so much time for family.
It might be the single best decision I’ve ever made in my life. I’m really thankful that I figured it out this young.
How do these square? How is it that you become informed?
To me, it seems that was lies strong opinions and without context.
I'm doubting that a person could be well-informed by what's going on recently with the Trump adminstration, or BLM protests, or recent Covid news, from reading books alone.
I'm guessing that people who don't read the news might respond that the latest scandal from the government isn't important, and why they stopped reading the news.
At which point, "informed" might simply mean "the things I know about, because I think they're important."
This opens up a lot more time and effort to explore the 2% that does matter.
For example, the Twitter hack has made its rounds here but, say, Kanye having a political meltdown hasn’t necessarily (or at least I haven’t seen it) despite it being a prominent trend on Twitter.
I've had good discussions, but I can feel the pull of the karma counter ticking up.
I don't know if it was worth the trade.
About 5 years ago it just started to fade.. probably as I started to click less on the new JS libraries etc, and more on the obscure interesting learnings (but also could be due to the content that makes the front page.
Every once and a while I jump on, look at a few links, read a few articles, and feel a bit disappointed that I don't have my rush anymore... I think its healthier, less addictive, but what happened to my good ol' junkie-hit days? :)
I’m actually glad the engagement is minimal. It helps me disengage. It feels like a FPS game against all the youngsters.
The moral of the story is to never read the comments. So what does that really mean? It means, be the article, not a comment.
We are just grist in the wind.
Also great insights on comments.
90% I go for the comments and skip the link. That's where te pearls are
Looking at the front page right now, I count maybe 4 items that are attempts at journalism. The rest are interesting subjects resurrected from 6+ years ago, tech guides, user-submitted questions/content, etc. The ones that seem like news items don’t really pertain to today’s hot news, they’re press releases from NASA etc.
HN is a discussion board, and the topics are almost always relevant to my career and interests. I mostly read the comments though. HN informs discussions I have with people at work and tech-related decisions in and out of work. I think it’s worthwhile.
From my perspective, giving in to this desire is part of the problem. When I start my day consuming content, the whole day becomes a lot less productive (concentrating becomes very hard). But if I start the day engaging my brain in a concentrated mode, the first few hours become very productive.
So my solution for avoiding to constantly visit HN in the search for something new, is that I have a new tab page in my browser, that lists, the top 3 HN news from the best list, if I haven't read them already. That way I fight the fear of missing out.
Maybe I should add that it always shows an empty list for the first 12 hours of the day ;-)
What you've discovered and described is called "NPC" by meme culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPC_(meme)
It convinces people that something that has enough truthiness and is funny enough is true.
I am unsure if you are saying not watching the news makes him an NPC, or if the people who just parrot the news are the NPCs.
I am leaning toward the latter, but based on your wording and the wording of the parent post, that's not what I initially expected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Internet...
>> "A very basic description of the topic. Can be well-written, but may also have significant content issues."
That means someone wrote it up on a whim and no one's come to address prior art in a way that suits the standards of Wikipedia.
I don't agree in your main argument, which seems to be based on the idea that whatever makes you feel better is good. I, for one, prefer to read the news and watch the occasional clip online. It makes you better informed, which is essential for many things, including business and informed voting.
Trying to be happy all the time is overrated.
Completely agree.
“[B]y restoring grief to soul work, we are freed from our one-dimensional obsession with emotional progress. This “psychological moralism” places enormous pressure on us to always be improving, feeling good, and rising above our problems.2 Happiness has become the new mecca, and anything short of that often leaves us feeling that we have done something wrong or failed to live up to the acknowledged standard. This forces sorrow, pain, fear, weakness, and vulnerability into the underworld, where they fester and mutate into contorted expressions of themselves, often coated in a mantle of shame. People in my practice routinely apologize for their tears or for feeling sad.
I am an advocate for a soul psychology that senses vitality in every emotion, whatever life offers to us in the moment. We will have times of being happy, which is cause for celebration. We will, however, also have times of sorrow and loneliness. Moods will come upon us and events will occur that evoke anger and outrage in us. In fact, archetypal psychologist James Hillman once noted that being outraged is a sure sign that our soul is awake. Each of these emotions and experiences has vitality in it, and that is our work: to be alive and to be a good host to whoever arrives at the door of our house. Happiness, then, becomes a reflection of our ability to hold complexity and contradiction, to stay fluid and accept whatever arises, even sorrow.”
—Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow
I loved that the Onion article, thanks for sharing it!
Thank you for that comment... I'm now going to turn on my news blackhole hosts file, which I disabled long ago. I remember being far more content back then so I'm not sure why I reverted back.
I also subscribe to https://hackernewsletter.com/ which is a list of all the interesting articles from hacker news from that week. (it comes out on Friday, thus I unblock on the site on my computer on Fridays)
Ha! That's awesome. That's an in-your-face "hey you, focus!"
OP has heard of COVID. It would be impossible not to. I follow a similar approach (avoiding news as much as possible) and I still am exposed to much more information about COVID than is useful.
I love this, thanks.
However, it is possible to have a view contrarian to whatever is being published. For the life of me, I cannot seem to find any news source that I feel comfortable with or even trust.
Also - it's actually important that some people pay attention. The 'real news' is in the details, and it takes attention. Right now, there's a minor scandal in the Canadian government, but really it cuts very deep, to the point where the PM and the Minister of Finance are compromised, the later possibly in point blank illegal graft. These are the kinds of things that rot democratic institutions, and the manner in which they are conceived is usually quite subtle. The government sponsored news in Canada, is somewhat compromised by the fact that their source of funding comes from the source - and very unfortunately, some of the most detailed reporting is coming from the otherwise, low-grade daily tabloids. The only way to parse through the scandal is to read it all - and the only way for the electorate to solve the problem is to put enough political pressure, or, to vote them out. This is an unfortunate paradox, it does take quite a lot of attention on the part of the plebes to make sure things work well.
It's really surprising how vague sometimes corruption can be: if the oversight board doesn't raise a huge fuss, and neither do the mainstream press - then it's simply 'not corruption'. It's weirdly a matter of interpretation and spin, sadly. 'Friends doing business with friends' is normal, the line that gets crossed is sometimes very grey.
That said, it's 95% rubbish.
As soon as I entered the workforce @ 21 I cut out 2 things from my diet, sugar and news.
This habit has compounded so much, not saying its been 100% perfect because I still read reddit, twitter (very selective following and blocking all outlets that end up on my TL) and HN (this place is a total bubble of smart, high IQ people, I enjoy the comments here, I don't get to interact with such smart people on a day to day).
Any interesting developments will filter through my social circle, someone will bring it up.
I stopped watching TV altogether, I stream the occasional show though.
Oh--wait--MiniTruth is saying something about Eastasia...
(All seriousness aside, you do have a point.)
And if there's an upcoming election, you can always just read the candidate's stated policies and record of voting.
Later, these two paragraphs capture Simic's mood more completely and that mood cuts into the "bliss" of being unencumbered by news:
> I mustn’t forget, either, that I was surrounded by political exiles in my youth, many of whom, after having lived either under Stalin or Hitler, or in some cases both, never lost their vigilance. Even after twenty or thirty years in the United States, they gave the impression of keeping a suitcase packed under their beds, ready to flee at a moment’s notice should hippies or some variety of American fascists come power.
> Lucky for them, they are all long dead, so they can’t read some opinion piece or hear a congressman or a senator today clamor for the very same police state measures they barely escaped from. Watching the government of the country they grew to love curtailing liberties, spying on its citizens, militarizing its police forces, imprisoning both foreigners and Americans indefinitely without having to prove their guilt, and coming to admire the mindset of authoritarian regimes it used to despise, would have been both terrifying and depressing. They could not help but note that some of their fellow Americans who cheer for the death penalty and for torture, and call the people demonstrating against Wall Street lice-infested misfits and degenerates, are no better than the ones they knew back home and are as eager to persecute, imprison, and even commit murder should they be called upon (I think people who clap for death, love war without end, and adore guns are perfectly capable of it). My mother, who never recalled anything but trouble, and was sure the worst was yet to come, would be saying, I told you so, all day long.
For the HN crowd, we survive and thrive on what we know. We're in an industry that moves rapidly, and we perceive that successful people thrive on knowing more, or knowing first. Of course that's only partly true. Successful people know just enough, and then actually get the job done. Knowing where to draw the line between reading about what others have done and doing stuff ourselves is really hard. It's always easier to read about what others have done, and it feels productive, but past a certain point it really isn't.
Perhaps it's hitting the reward centers of our brain that is designed to validate productive behaviour. Although as we know there's a fine line when it comes to consumption of so-called news as to wheter it is actually productive.
I guess like any addictive "substance" it can be difficult to regulate and control.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24911320/
On top of that, bad "news" sources are designed in such a way that you do get addicted (e.g. endless scrolling, getting notifications on new article while still reading one, clickbait and so on).
I definitely found myself wasting more time recently scrolling through Twitter e.g. in the evening or when compiling code. I actually quite like the site but I find there's more and more irrelevant stuff on my feed so I don't really like feel like I get as much value from it, yet the addictive nature of the feed still makes you refresh it.
I was aware I was doing this but didn't do anything about it until I was prompted by this article, which I think was posted on here recently: https://craigmod.com/essays/how_i_got_my_attention_back/. For me it really hit the nail on the head about wanting to reclaim your attention a bit, but that these companies have thousands of people working on systems to try and claim your attention for themselves, so it's no wonder it's hard.
I made a few small changes as a result of this:
- I used Screen Time on my iPhone to block all apps except essential ones (clock, calendar, notes, Philips Hue) for the first hour of my day
- I logged out of Twitter on my Firefox and instead logged into it in a container tab, which takes a few extra clicks to open
- I logged out of Twitter on my iPhone, so I have to log in to access it
- I didn't install Twitter on my new iPad
I've found these changes have made a big difference - I think particularly blocking apps in the morning. It feels like if you can "control" your attention a bit more in the first part of your day, that continues somewhat throughout the day, then adding in the slight hurdles to access the site throughout the day causes you to stop and think "do I really want to do this?" when your reflex to just open a new tab and type "tw<enter>" or to scroll while you're stood in a queue or whatever kicks in.
I still do browse Twitter and other time wasting sites a little bit, which I'm fine with, but I feel like I'm doing it more conciously - sometimes after a long day I'll think "I just fancy sitting on the sofa and reading the news and looking on Twitter" and I'm fine with that, as it's something I've chosen to do.
It's only been a few weeks so I don't want to speak too soon, but I'm feeling really happy with this approach so far, without having to go atomic and delete Twitter entirely as I do get some value from it.
you hate to talk, but get you going on a subject you read about yesterday and nobody can shut you up...
For those of us lower on the spectrum we're not super focused on one area but multiples, for me that's tech/programming/politics/science and lately viruses for obvious reasons.
That's how they get views, ad revenue, and user-generated comments - out of an army of addicted people.
There is some news that matters, in terms of how you or those that matter to you can be impacted. For example, the state of the economy as pertains to your employment can help you forecast interruptions in work. Or in other economic cases, enable you to forecast where good investments will be. Or someone you admire passing away.
In political terms, changes in direction of leadership can forecast changes in lifestyle. Many nations could be given as an example, Iran, Syria, Turkey.
What does not matter, ever, as far as I can tell, is the type of 'rare incident' such as a shark attack killing a surfer, or a wildfire in another country that killed some unfortunate people, or locust swarms in Asia when you've never left South America. It matters to people directly affected, of course, but if you're half a world away, every day some bad event is going to transpire somewhere that could literally never affect your life. Does it benefit you to be aware of this?
...and entirely destructive to political discourse.
Of course all this mostly just fed into my fears and just exacerbated my anxiety-induced hyper vigilance and paranoia, but I really think that there was a part of me that saw benefit in being aware of the state of the world through news (both mainstream and alternative).
Even with what we consider useful knowledge, how much of it is really useful? Yes, it is fun learning new stuff, making connections between seemingly disjointed topics etc, but how much of it has direct influence on our daily lives? I've learned a lot from HN, but I often wonder if I should have spent all that time elsewhere, carefully picking up only those knowledge and skills that benefit me in my life and that I can use to help others.
This isn't an answer to your question, because I don't know the answer. I've the same question as you. My one guess is that everything that is made today is made with the explicit intention of getting users hooked - from fast food to social media, including news.
Maybe there is hope that too much news just exhausts everyone.