Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?
I say “most” because you’re reading this on HN.
I haven’t had FB for over 6 years and I don’t use Twitter. I primarily find the internet to be a distraction these days and considering just phasing out news all together for weeks at a time. Has anyone done something similar?
In the past people have been harsh to call me ill informed for not being up to date on all things media, but to what end does this actually benefit the individual? My argument is that it’s mostly a detriment given the state of the world.
For those that have experimented with “going dark” in a sense, how was it, what did you do and what’s a good balance?
261 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadI’m in a double sandwich: Since Covid, I have utter disdain for real-life people, who would miss no opportunity to destroy our lives, such as borrowing a trillion and endebt us for generations just to fuel a stay-at-home policy that destroys social links and physical health, and more generally play the class warfare game (I live in France); and at the same time, if I stop scrolling on TikTok to keep my mind occupied, I immediately have dark thoughts because I’m unoccupied at home.
That’s it. I’m in the post-virtual world. Connections with other humans not necessary. Nor pleasant. Youtube tells me stories before I go to sleep. HN wakes me up with news. My main goal in life is to move the needle on the dashboard of my revenue at work. I’m a caricature.
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.
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.
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.
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
Indeed, I always check to see if my name is in it.
[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
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
Democracy doesn’t work in uninformed passive society.
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.
I don't agree fully, but it has stuck with me.
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.
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
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
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 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.
There are some exceptions of course, like the long form articles in the Atlantic for example.
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.
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.
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).