Ask HN: Where do you escape for non-clickbait thoughtful/informational content?
The amount of dramatic clickbaity hollow content is only getting worse and kinda saddening me.
My only escape is RSS with few hand-picked blogs. But, it seems like the chance of finding new thoughtful and cool blogs are getting closer to zero. I'm worried I might be putting myself in a bubble here.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadHonestly I don’t have answers but here’s a few ways I’ve found cool people:
- via “slow-grow” communities like lobste.rs
- if someone writes a good comment or tweet or whatever, check out if they have a blog
- Sometimes I subscribe to a bunch of things that seem promising, and then follow a “three strikes and they’re out” policy to extend the reach
- start reading papers from conferences. It’s a heavier format than blogs, but it’s reviewed and novel, at least if you pick good conferences.
The trick is to use non-algorithmic platforms or aggregators with chronological feeds that deliver ALL the entries from ALL the sources I follow or subscribe to. As indoorskier noted, clicking links and exploring further sources (especially blogs and books) is another key tool.
- @chronrevisited@mastodon.social - @elb@mastodon.sdf.org - @ZephyrZ80@mastodon.technology - @robert588@mastodon.sdf.org - @EdS@mastodon.sdf.org
Most of it also goes on his Micro.blog page: https://notes.baldurbjarnason.com/
You can follow either through Mastodon (or anything that supports the right ActivityPub objects) or RSS.
Starting there, I add and remove people according to my preferences.
Some higher quality publications exist on the internet, such as nautilus, IEEE spectrum, No Tech magazine, The Baffler, Quanta magazine, Aeon, Le Monde Diplomatique, Current Affairs, The Public Domain Review, Spiegel International, writings by The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Foreign Policy, New Scientist, Science magazine, The Economist, etc.
While not perfect, these might keep you busy for a while and give you a broader perspective.
Separately, is there a good web+mobile ebook reader (to transition from laptop to mobile)? Does Kindle app work for that?
You don't need to be a content creator to create good stuff, and unsurprisingly, you find a lot of great things when you have a specific topic you're trying to get information about/research.
Filler/white-noise/empty content is inevitable on any source. HackerNews has tons of advertisements that masquerade as thoughtful posts and the comments aren't always gold. (though the HackerNews moderators deserve huge credit for maintaining a pretty nice balance of freedom to say whatever and maintaining civility/reasonableness)
The best articles I've read have come from non-content creators, just some person somewhere that decided to write or do a video on a subject they happen to be really passionate about. The quality of videos isn't super high (talking about production value), but the content is solid. Not every release from the same person needs to be a million+ views piece, just understand that they have some good thoughts on some subjects and are worth checking in on.
When I'm doing some research for something I want to write about or share or learn, these pieces usually come about somehow after sifting through forums or the 2nd/later pages of search results.
Click-bait articles/videos are not new by any means, it's just easier to publish them now. It was always necessary to sift through it before, and learning to sort such information is a skill that you need to practice. But I can almost guarantee you that trying your own hand at creating something helps reduce that pressure of "it's all clickbait". Don't just copy and summarize, try to make something and just dive in on the process, even if no one ever sees it.
Totally agree, this is my approach right now and I find a lot of hidden gems but this feels like leaving it to luck. I'm trying to see if there's a more systemic way, similar to HN but small and more focused (maybe curated newsletters)
The name may mislead you. Ostensibly, the articles are book reviews, but barely. The books reviewed are more starting points into long-form articles on their subject matter.
The articles are uniformly fantastic, though obviously not uniformly interesting to everyone. I find that every issue carries about three to five articles I find really interesting.
Just to give some examples, in the last week they published lengthy articles all with charts on topics as varied as a European private equity company's IPO, Ben & Jerry's activism, and tech companies shredding old memory disks.
[1] https://substack.com/discover
[2] https://www.apricitas.io/
2. To supplement above I read the referenced papers. And long form articles.
3. I have created a nice Twitter bubble which serves me as a catchment area. It also enables me to engage in thoughtful conversations.
4. HN.
I stay away from mainstream news in all forms. I’m typically behind the current affairs by about 6 months.
What is current topic you are reading about and the books . Curious :)
That said these are my current readings.
1. The Currency of Politics [1]
2. A Treatise on Money [2]
3. Towards Anthropological Theory of Value [3]
4. The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Order [4]
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58933308-the-currency-of...
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7637190-a-treatise-on-mo...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toward_an_Anthropological_Theo...
[4] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58986869-the-rise-and-fa...
So if you're looking for more thoughtful things - which take time to produce - your options are:
1. Pay for publications that produce these. Ad-supported publications are unlikely to be able to budget for in-depth content. Just look at how eg BuzzFeed shut down their investigative reporting (which was unusually good). It just made no business sense to produce those articles when a meme piece or two would generate more ad revenue, while being 100x cheaper to produce.
In the tech world, publications that fall into the “paid and in-depth” category can be likes of The Information, IEEE, MIT Technology Review, and many newsletters, tech publications etc. Look for ones where ads is not their main business model.
2. Another source are people who do this for free... because they have a main job, and it's not a business for them to share their thoughts on things. These will typically be blogs, YouTube channels and other places. Based on your interests, you should be able to find plenty. Also, see this Hacker News thread about interesting blogs [1]. The only real downside is you won’t get these on a schedule, as it’s not a job for these folks.
3. Books and podcasts. Books are straightforward enough: they're meant to be deep, and reviews help do some justice on them. Podcasts are usually based on ad-based models, but most ads are less intrusive, and the format lends itself for thoughtful commentary. It's more time-consuming to listen to them over reading, of course.
I collect RSS feeds of both my paid publications, and thoughtful blogs using a reader (I use Feedly) and find this works pretty well.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27302195
Seriously, you will start seeing this everywhere
Thought provoking and certainly true in it's central conceit as a piece - I do wish more people spent the time to think in terms of systems dynamics. It's such an incredibly bright flashlight in the dark closet that is the complexity of the current information landscape.
I would like to add what I feel is a missing part of the analysis, though - the problem of centralization. One of the primary factors compounding the social effects that article describes.
It's like we've forgotten what the early Internet was and what made it great - it was a patchwork of lovely, golden inefficiency that meant that no matter how wrong you were, only so many people would be exposed to that wrong so it really didn't matter so much. Like we take for granted that there's "the one search engine", "the one social media platform", "the one medical site" et al.
I extend this thinking to our pre-Internet institutions as well - the larger and more centralized and older an institution gets, the more rot it's subject to. Efficiency doesn't just accelerate the good stuff - it accelerates every outcome of the process.
Banks 'too big to fail' broadcast economic crises to every corner. Highly liquid markets and scalable financial products accelerate recursive processes towards that failure.
Monolithic news networks and social platforms bind information signals together so that the loudest (not necessarily the most true) have the furthest reach, which recurses to a fever pitch. This process is accelerated by the efficiency of information gathering that is googling.
It feels like what's needed is a refragmenting of our systems in general - a dissolution of large, tightly bound systems into disparate, inefficient clusters that slow the churn and isolate components from toxic vectors.. but that leaves a bad taste in many people's mouths.
I think the main problem is that we lack better tools to communicate (and simulate) those systems. The existing ones are hard to use or require technical knowledge. And without them, we can only tackle very simple problems, our minds are not limitless.
For example, multiple times I've had a system design in my head, which I was convinced I knew how it worked, until I tried to express it in details in english, or code it.
But all the figures I've seen suggest that printing/distribution/remainders/etc. are in the low single digits so that even if you ignore any of the costs that are unique to ebooks, there is no reason for ebooks (or for that matter paperbacks) to be significantly cheaper than hardcovers other than price discrimination.
Even before ebooks, it used to be standard for hardcovers to sell at list price for a year or so at which point they came out as paperbacks selling for maybe half the price.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson
[1]: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ335/out/lighthouse.pdf - page 359, first paragraph
Thanks for the interesting blogs link will check it out.
That doesn’t mean you’re not still the product. They can resell your information and use the journal as propaganda just as much as before, well, even more, since they have your full ID and address.
No, we need ethics in journalism, but this train has long gone. Can’t remember the last time I saw both sides of a story in the same article, that must have been decades ago.
I don't read it cover to cover. There's a fair bit of international detail that I just don't find very interesting or relevant but it covers so many things that there's plenty to read about.
Or their main job is paying them in part, even if often informally, to produce thoughtful externally-facing content but no one is strictly evaluating them on the basis of pageviews. Which is actually fairly common in the tech field.
>It's more time-consuming to listen to them over reading, of course.
For me, consuming podcasts is just a different mode. I listen to them mostly in a car when I can't read. I rarely listen to them otherwise.
2. tons of clickbait there too, plus he mentioned there are very few quality blogs left
3. books... oh my god... need to dig through a pile of poop for days just to find one quality book these days
Typical ads pulled in insufficient revenue, so they started selling ad space to sponsors. This was only possible because they built credibility. Credibility based journalism is different to eyeballs and views.
From that credibility, they started selling merchandise and sports equipment.
And yes, paying for good journalism is inevitable if you want quality. Just, if the crowd picks up the tab, nobody needs to listen to ads.
The "tech" company "business model" is selling ads. 100%. The "tech" company produces zero content. To use a popular "tech" company example, according to Zuckerberg, Facebook is a "platform" not a publisher. Here, "platform" means intermediary.
Looking to "tech" companies as a "source" of high quality content is therefore a failing endeavour. To the extent publishers use a "tech" company as an intermediary for "reach", as anyone can see, the quality of the content is not going to be high.
Eliminating the intermediary and returning to real business models that are not 100% advertising-based ("tech" is out) is one way to return to a world with more high quality content. "Tech" companies have no way to make money besides operating as intermediaries and selling advertising services, so they will continue to facilitate clickbait "content" for their own benefit.
For some topics i also found out that there are really interesting deeper discussions in the FidoNet
Close second, "War on the Rocks" podcast: https://warontherocks.com/podcasts/
Lot of "National Security / Foreign politics" content has been a breath of fresh air, because while this is clearly biased toward an American viewpoint, there is an intellectual respect toward other peoples/states situation, objectives, and possibility of getting to those objective.
In practice, that means that when talking about Putin, they debates around why Putin is doing that, and why Putin would be doing it that way, what are the possible outcomes, and how the US/NATO/other parties can try to act or react in a way that's beneficial for them.
Another example: Lawfare where highly critical of the Trump administration, but they always approached their analysis by asking "What is his thought process" and "What is he gaining by doing that".
Once you get used to hear a bunch of smart people articulating their thought in that way, it's painful to listen back to a discourse centered around "our good values vs. their bad intentions", which is unfortunately the norm.
Totally different subject, but if one is interested in religions, I highly recommend the Youtube channels "Religion for Breakfast" and "Let's talk religion", who goes deep into a variety of subjects, while disclosing what is still contentious in the academic term, and try to be as unopinionated as possible.
It seems like the people who could create it have no need to discover more thoughtful content.