Personally, I fixed the problem by not bothering with "staying informed" at all. I ditched media outside of local news entirely, and just don't engage with things that I can't do anything about. It would boil down to "focus on things you can control." Sure, it's fun to be outraged together with your friends about "X leader in Y country does Z crazy thing" but.. can you do anything about it? Does your opinion matter? Is there value in engaging with it? Turns out the answer is almost always no (unless you're suffering from main-character-syndrome, of course), so what's the point?
Focus on you. What are you doing today? What do you need to reflect on from yesterday? What do you need to plan for tomorrow? Don't waste cycles on things that are out of your scope.
There is an equilibrium to find. democracy isn't just showing up every 4 or 5 years to drop a piece of paper in a box.
Most countries have rights to protest, organise, strike, for a reason. Most of these rights were gained after long fights in which single individual was meaningless but together they moved contains. You have to know when to pull back but you also have to know when to dive in
> It would boil down to "focus on things you can control"
If it only was so simple. How to define such things? Case in point: the biggest "outrage factor" seems to be politics. Well - _can_ you control your country's government? Yes, you can - however not directly. And this means that "I don't care about politics" stance is bad.
It's an excellent point, but is there value in you (as an American, I presume) being around-the-clock outraged for the next four years? Or does it make sense for you to do some research and make a decision in the few weeks leading up to an election? What can you "control" here in the other 206 weeks of the current term?
I'm not saying you shouldn't care about politics at all. But politics in a country you're not a citizen of are irrelevant. And politics in your own country only really matter when it's time to vote, right? So what's the value in "staying informed" outside of that narrow window?
> And politics in your own country only really matter when it's time to vote, right?
Not really, since by the time you get to vote, it might, for example, so happen that there are no real opposition candidates, because they are effectively blocked from running. Or the opposition is there, but is locked out from all the usual mass propaganda outlets (TV etc).
You can control it. But if you're controlling it based on the media's interpretation then you are the one being controlled. Turn off the TV and vote based on how things affect you locally. I think that's what the previous commenter means.
Not that it would've ever changed my vote, but the candidate was going to win my state regardless of how I voted. Even if I and every other person who is psychologically capable of choosing the other candidate... they were always going to win this state. So no, I can't control my government. I've known this a long while now, I'm not a fool.
>es, you can - however not directly. And this means that "I don't care about politics" stance is bad.
Though you might not be aware of it, you're repeating propaganda that actually aids some nebulous group of people. It seeks to recruit me and my efforts to further their purposes, none of which overlap my own significantly. I can't exert significant indirect influence either. And if I were to pool my insignificant influence with others (such as you suggest) to influence government, it would almost certainly be towards ends I do not agree with. I can be used by others, so to speak, but no one's on my side.
I might get to watch one group I don't agree with go killdozer on another group I don't agree with, and it will be entertaining to watch supposing I can maintain enough distance from the carnage.
Of course you can affect your country’s government. You can take five minutes every few years to decide who to vote for (spending more on that seems like a waste of time considering the payoff).
More than that though. You can protest and organize however much you like. There’s no cap on that.
And that is how insidious “news” is. The news broadcasts the hegemonic mindset. The same mindset that says that citizens’ only role is to vote every few years. Other than that they are supposed to stay home. Certainly not make a ruckus or anything.
And that’s what many conclude. That they are only supposed to be political in a direct, consequential sense by voting. Then it is clearly absurd, from a cost-benefit analysis standpoint, to stay ever-constantly informed on politics all the time.
Perhaps it depends on the individual, but I never found it possible.
The news just made me sad, sad and angry most of the time, it's just a stream of 24/7 misery and if there's not enough misery going on locally the news will find misery from around the world to fill the run time.
What helped me is to realize: Sadness and anger come from within, not from the outside. Nobody can "make" you mad. They will do what they do, and it's up to us to decide if and how to emotionally respond to it. We are not amoebas that simply respond to stimulus. We have agency over our own thoughts and feelings. This is something I try to teach my kid, and I think it's also helped her deal with others who she would previously say "made her mad."
I think "deciding whether to emotionally respond" to something... isn't emotion?
Emotion is something you feel, not something you decide to allow yourself to feel.
Like, if I hear about someone being raped or murdered, how am I not going to have an emotional reaction of sadness or anger to that? And ultimately what use was that emotion? I cannot prevent the event happening, it has already happened, I am just a voyeur to someone else's tragedy.
Most of the news is like that. It's events that have already happened, that I can do nothing about but I'm vaguely meant to be up to date with because.... reasons? Some vague concept that everyone is meant to have an inch deep understanding of current events so they've got something to gossip about?
> Emotion is something you feel, not something you decide to allow yourself to feel.
Recognizing your emotions when you are making a decision is key. The emotions you feel will largely be outside your control but you can catch a thought you disagree with when you have it and wonder what triggered that thought. If the trigger was an emotion, you can wonder what triggered the emotion. Ask "five whys" (google it if you don't know what I mean). You have more control over this than you seem to think; you will just have to practice exercising it.
The simplest way to control your inner life is to not let whatever miserable output in. In other words turn it off.
It’s really entitled (by whom? who knows) to say that people have control over their inner lives as a response to the News being misery-inducing (according to them). Yeah. So turn it off. You don’t own the outside world your attention.
What am I doing today? Taking care of my son. Trying to have another child. What do I need to plan for tomorrow? How am I going to vaccinate my child next year? How do I get my wife medical care if she has another unviable pregnancy? How small of a life you must lead that you can just not engage.
So your argument to not engaging is that my argument isn’t sufficiently updated to the onslaught of news today? RFK passed committee yesterday. Trump planning to use our military for a middle east genocide isn’t something that I should worry about?!? Where were you on 9/11?
Definitionally there is no action that you will or can take about the things I said not to worry about, since I made that the condition. Comon man, at least read the comment.
If you're a citizen of a democracy and you only focus on you, then when it comes time to vote you'll be voting randomly. Or maybe you don't vote and thereby cede control to your neighbors to make decisions for you over the environment in which you live. Assuming you decide to vote then, and since you don't live in a vacuum, your vote will be based on whatever random stuff leaked through to you during the time you were "focusing on you". Actually it's not random. It's whoever spent the most time and money on the propaganda that influences/buys your vote.
Except in most "democracies" there is no direct voting on issues. Instead you vote for parties or people who you believe align with your values.
To find out about those people/parties you probably need "news"
How on earth do you need a newspaper to tell you which political party aligns with your values?
Depending on where you live, there’s 2-10 parties. You know who they are and what they want. If you want to affect the outcome you can get involved in your local politics; being glued to NYT.com all day isn’t changing one thing except wasting time.
> when it comes time to vote you'll be voting randomly
Not at all, I think citizens have an obligation to vote, and an obligation to do their research when it's time to vote. But let's say that takes you a week. Why bother being focused on the outrage during the rest of the term? What value is there to you being mad at whatever politician on week 15 of their 208 week term? If anything, I'd say "staying informed" is a hinderance, because you'll always just be focused on the issue-of-the-day and build mental biases rather than being able to take a wider view of what the politician implemented, and how it played out over a period of time afterwards.
Whether you're influenced by facts or "propaganda" unfortunately depends entirely on your own research and critical thinking skills, and has little to do with timing.
There might not be much of a difference in your mental health condensing 2-4 years' of rage into just one week.
Perhaps another strategy could be to maintain an awareness of the motivations and tactics of publishers/content creators, and that could be enough as an inoculation.
I imagine a clown on the street trying to enrage me, and I being aware of what it's trying to do, instead just laugh at it.
Today I walked into a restaurant with a cable TV news channel blaring on about the "invasion of men" into women's college sports. They offered no proof, just a continuous barrage of commentary. As I waited for my sandwich I watched one after another, with just continuous outrage. No proof, no on-site reporters, no B tape, nothing at all to support the claims being made. It was like watching bad science fiction of an alternate universe. I chuckled nervously as I looked around and wondered if the others there actually believed it. None of them were laughing.
Do you know about referendums? Recall elections? Snap elections? Midterm elections? Strikes and protests? Or how about just letting your representative know how you'll vote in their next election to deter bad behavior they're conducting in the current moment?
Must be nice for the current American administration to have 4 years of no democratic oversight to do whatever they want.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure that it is a viable strategy long term.
When you finally decide to pay attention, there is a chance that you will not be able to easily absorb everything that leads to the situation so you will lack any perspective of the past events.
We live in an extremely dense and complex times, staying informed is very difficult as it is even when you try to pay attention.
> That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him. […]
> What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.
These quotes and articles are awful. Both sides are so insanely annoying to me. The media has gotten completely out of touch with reality and with people.
Since you're asking, yes they are. Johnson is a right wing populist, and Liz Truss recently spoke at a far right conference, complaining about the deep state thwarting her plan. They're Trump without the funny accent.
This happens in the US too [1,2,3]. In fact, regarding freedom of the press, they rank 55th in the world, well behind the UK, which ranks 23rd [4]. And if you think Trump is anything but the standard neoliberal order accelerated, I've got a bridge to sell you. For example look at the Laken Riley act. A blatant and complete teardown of judicial order (punishment for being _suspected_ of crimes), and 58 democrats helped pass it. Trump is par for the course, he's just a bit rude about it.
One thing is read the article, not just the headline. Get the nuance, learn what’s actually happening, see what people are doing to react. You’ll not feel as frozen if you understand that a fluid situation has many directions it can take and it’s not set in stone.
"In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention"
Platforms have realized this long ago, that as info explodes people pay attention to the easiest things to pay attention too not the hardest, so they move resources to designing things like reels and shorts and tweets etc etc. Every earnings call they gloat about how shorter form content is exploding and how thrilled they are about it.
The long form stuff only holds attention of the majority if you keep throwing Novelty on the table every two sentences.
Platforms are basically running an animal domestication program, where people have been rewarded with high rep and status for extremely low cognitive work.
So that entire group that has benefited doesn't see any need for nuance and depth in anything. "Cause look how many likes, clicks, views and followers I have accumulated without it"
As one of the seemingly few people who actually do read the article and not just the headline, it makes all the discussion people have around news infuriating.
Most articles I come across have a very fiery headline, then you dig in to the article and the facts are different, and/or the sources are dubious, and/or there's historical precedent for the thing that makes it not seem so strange this time, and/or the article doesn't dive deeply enough in to the details, etc.
Political biases and current events aside, it all sucks! It's so annoying that I have to do the legwork of reading through the article carefully and following through in factchecking outside of the article to get the meat of it out, and after all that, it feels like no one else does the same.
If you ever read an article about something you are knowledgeable about you might find that the content is just as misleading or downright wrong as the headline.
A recent financial report on the media industry noted The Onion is on the verge of collapse due to, quote, “not being able to able to make sh*t up that is more idiotic than current reality.”
Those of us in the west tend to forget that much of what we see is a form of propaganda, whether by governments or businesses, or even a large number of people. When you keep this in mind, everything you see becomes an opinion and your mind can comfortably (or at least not emotionally/hurriedly) form your own opinion over time.
Easier said than done. Bear in mind that the way information is served is meant to trigger strong emotional responses, skip the prefrontal cortex and tickle your amygdala. You can limit how much it impacts you, say, through reducing exposure, but you can't reason your way out of it.
(this is a response to the comment, not the article)
I agree that most messaging is propaganda, but that doesn't really counter the real pain that is being inflicted upon large populations of people by these government (and corporate) moves, and being cheered on by pretty large masses of people. The propaganda is like environmental pollution -- hard not to breathe it in. That said, I have no answer here..
my advice to you that cant breathe it in is leave your fantasy where propaganda is pollution and join reality where it does not impact you. also if you live in reality instead of the fantasy, you will just be less outraged in general.
The aim of propaganda is not anywhere near singular. Much of it is also aimed at convincing you that minor things are "terrible acts" that you need to be outraged about.
How about you read actual news, not already half-digested propaganda vomit? You do not have to live in polluted wasteland of western media propaganda! Big media failed 1000x since war on terror, and Bush lies, yet you still consume their shit!
Simplest way is to read media from independent country. India is good, perhaps Arabic countries.
Next level are independent channels on Telegram and Youtube. 10 min daily summary on war situation goes very long way.
> Simplest way is to read media from independent country. India is good, perhaps Arabic countries.
It's interesting that you listed India first. The English-language news source that pops up most often via Google News is the Hindustan Times, which is hot garbage. Are there any Indian sources that are much, much better than that which you recommend?
Honestly no idea, I followed this rabbit hole many years ago.
Hindustan times seems like a rag, like British Sun.
I guess I would recommend to take some event that happened 2 years ago, find how some papers wrote about it back then, and if you like it, follow them.
My point is there is no reason to stay in toxic relationship. There is no reason to read news if you do not get any rewards. Even monthly AI summaries will be better, and you will stay "informed".
For example all the Trump shit today, he wants legal precedents from constitutional court, 90% of this shit is irrelevant.
Dude, lets be real here: most people would say the economy is shit, while still being comfortable with their lives. Anyone's general assessment of the economy based on gut, is meaningless. Unless you were on food banks/stamps, you were doing pretty good for all intents and purposes.
There is a massive amount of evidence that Americans basically think everyone else is having a terrible time, but asked to review their own living situation things are going well. Here’s a decent summary from late 2024: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/23/opinion/biden-trump-vibec...
Instead of engaging in the data, opponents usually yell the equivalent of what you put “You’re just out of touch!” Or throw in an anecdote like “well my cousin is having a terrible time!”.
What’s going on the US is weirder than a “normal” economic problem. That’s what makes it so frustrating and politically polarizing.
Sorry but quoting the NYTimes as evidence would be no different from a Republican quoting Fox News as evidence to you.
Here's an old quote from the author, the esteemable Paul Krugman
“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
If you stick up a liquor and kill a couple of people you go to jail for life.
If you advocate for polices that destroy the local economies of middle America with all the ills that ensue...social breakdown, drug addiction/overdoses, crime etc. Well you get to write a mea culpa and then head off to a nice dinner at your favorite NY restaurant I guess.
I linked this article because it summarizes why the data is weird and links to multiple sources, and frames the problem in a way that can be engaged with in a relatively short format.
I find it telling that instead of arguing with data, points presented, or any source of counter argument, you act like the only argument in this article is “it’s right because I say so.”
Much easier to dismiss a position as “can’t be right because you were wrong on something before” than actually think I guess.
Clearly the American people did see a problem with inflation and voted accordingly. And no matter how they try to spin it to support a particular political narrative, that won't change.
There are so many ways to spin the numbers to make them support an argument. I'm not an economist so am in no position to assess (and I'm guessing neither are you).
But given the track record (bias) of the NYT, I'm always going to be a bit suspicious.
Honestly I wasn’t even approaching this with right vs left in mind. I spend most of my voice on this subject talking down my liberal friends off a cliff. The right and the left tend to think the economy has never been worse and it’s all X fault.
If you want the thoughtful, smart, very right wing source on it, then check out the Cato institute: https://www.cato.org/commentary/americans-grim-views-decent-.... Which tries to explain it as basically “people get really mad about inflation even if technically as a whole they are better off”. But the Cato economists still concede that overall the economy is/was doing extremely well and things are improving for people that by standard economic measures looks really good.
So far we've mentioned 3 parties in this scenario...the NY Times, Cato Institute and the voting public. There used to be a time where we'd give priority to the "experts" despite how consistently wrong they seem to be about almost everything. I think what's changed is we now have so many credible sources for comparison, that they are no longer able to gaslight people. So their opinions, quite rightly, have far less value than they used to.
So yeah, I'II go with the voting public on this one.
"What we uncovered shocked us. The bottom line is that, for 20 years or more, including the months prior to the election, voter perception was more reflective of reality than the incumbent statistics. Our research revealed that the data collected by the various agencies is largely accurate. Moreover, the people staffing those agencies are talented and well-intentioned. But the filters used to compute the headline statistics are flawed. As a result, they paint a much rosier picture of reality than bears out on the ground..."
Statements like this seem to originate in that environment polluted by propaganda that the previous comment mentions. For example, I genuinely don't know how someone can look at something like the dismantling of USAID as anything but an increase in "large pain". Sure, there are almost certainly individual programs within that organization that are wasteful and aren't the best use of our tax dollars, but there is (or at least was as of a few weeks ago) broad bipartisan support for this type of investment in humanity and stopping it will clearly inflict pain on people and this administration is at best indifferent to that pain.
Just using your example tho, I feel there are two kinds of framing.
1. This is literally a worse outcome than the alternative you prefer. You should care enough to try to fight it politically, especially if you are well positioned to do so.
2. This case (and 99% of cases of political outrage I see on the news) is trivial in the context of what is “normal” for human political history, even the political history that many people alive today were around for.
Will this even register as a trivia question in 100 years? Is a framing I ask myself when I’m mad about something in the world.
I think a lot of people walked from a world where they had no idea what the normal tumult of human political society is like, even normal American political messiness, and into the world of 24/7 current political news without any context what came before. It’s like, the sausage has always been made this way, you’re just now finding out.
I say these things and it always pisses people off. But I don’t recommend not caring, the world moves forward one micrometer at a time by caring, it’s just not worth the existential angst I see so often.
>2. This case (and 99% of cases of political outrage I see on the news) is trivial in the context of what is “normal” for human political history, even the political history that many people alive today were around for.
>Will this even register as a trivia question in 100 years? Is a framing I ask myself when I’m mad about something in the world.
To me, this is an utterly nihilistic framing that renders one's entire life meaningless because the logic doesn't just apply to bad things. Like why did you even leave this comment? Maybe you or I remember for a little while. Maybe a handful of other people who read it will too. But no one is going to remember it, let alone genuinely care about what either of us said 100 years from now.
How are you making the jump from calibrating your emotional response to distant political changes that have no immediate significance on your own life, are par for humanity, and don’t matter in the long run, to nihilism in your immediate experience of meaning?
I don’t connect distant political to my own personal experience of meaning in the world, so i can’t follow this line of reasoning.
>How are you making the jump from calibrating your emotional response to distant political changes that have no immediate significance on your own life, are par for humanity, and don’t matter in the long run, to nihilism in your immediate experience of meaning?
The primary difference I see between these two is how you define "your immediate experience". At what distance does something become "distant political changes" that can be ignored? Because almost all of us lead "par for humanity" lives that "don’t matter in the long run" so why care about any of it if that is the extent of what matters?
I’m not advocating for ignoring the world. I’m advocating for contextualizing it so that your emotional response is sane. I think I put it in another post, but someone I know closely has become catatonically depressed this year because of what political news he reads on Reddit. He makes statements like “there has literally never been a worse time to be alive”. His personal life was great, there was nothing in it to suggest the US president’s decisions affect him, but his emotional response to Reddit news is about as extreme as if his wife died. He stopped going to work and won’t get out of bed most days, which will actually impact his life and give him things to be depressed about.
Caring should not be binary. If in your life, caring about things is all or nothing, and a political event that is extremely common and minor in the context of political history feels as acute as the death of a loved one, then I’m really sorry for you. The world will always be a miserable place for you.
>there was nothing in it to suggest the US president’s decisions affect him, but his emotional response to Reddit news is about as extreme as if his wife died.
Do you not realize that you are judging what "decisions affect him" exclusively from your own perspective? You clearly have some established distance in your mind in which you think someone's suffering is immaterial to you. You seem to imply that this reaction might be appropriate for a partner dying, but what about for other people? Would it be appropriate to be depressed because of a friend's suffering? What about a distant cousin? A neighbor? A coworker? An acquaintance? What about the parent of one of your kid's friends who you haven't even met before?
You don't seem to actually be objecting to the reaction your friend is having, you seem to be reacting that your friend just has a larger circle of people he empathizes with than you and therefore more people have the potential to "affect him".
> Will this even register as a trivia question in 100 years?
My family could be murdered in front of me and it wouldn't qualify as a trivia question for you or most other people in one year. This feels like a version of stoicism that missed the point of stoicism.
You’re making such an absurd comparison in situations. The death of your own family has an immediate and extreme impact on you personally.
99% of what you see on the news you would never know happened if it wasn’t presented to you.
And I’m not saying not to care. I’m saying put big things into perspective. You don’t need to become catatonically depressed because the US changed its foreign aid in a way that you would never know about unless presented to you.
As I write this I’m thinking about one of my best friends, who literally has been so depressed because of world news he reads on Reddit this year that he can’t get out of bed, stopped going to work and got fired. There are appropriate and healthy levels to care about things.
> You’re making such an absurd comparison in situations. The death of your own family has an immediate and extreme impact on you personally.
> 99% of what you see on the news you would never know happened if it wasn’t presented to you.
What I'm hearing is that if the government kills someone, only their immediate family members are allowed to protest. We shouldn't protest when the government is killing people who aren't related to us, even if our relatives could be next.
You seem very emotionally uncalibrated if the first place you go is that the majority of news must mean your family is going to die. I’m not going to stop you from becoming emotionally destroyed by impossibly-worst-case-scenario perseverating any time something doesn’t politically go your way. I’m also not going to stop you from blowing 99% of political events so far out of proportion that you can’t sleep at night. I’m not going to stop you from existing in a constant cycle of mental angst because the world isn’t perfect by your vision (and because someone on the news tells you 24/7 just how imperfect the world is, because your angst is their profit).
That sounds like a nightmare existence to me. But if you really want it, maybe because it makes you feel righteous in your pain and holy in your angst, then go for it I guess.
A lot of political news is that my government is torturing or mass-murdering other people's families in a distant land. I understand your comment to say that I shouldn't feel bad about it unless (until) they're killing *my* family. This idea leads to losing by a thousand cuts, as in "First they came for the socialists..."
> And I’m not saying not to care. I’m saying put big things into perspective. You don’t need to become catatonically depressed because the US changed its foreign aid in a way that you would never know about unless presented to you.
Here in the UK in 2016 we had a referendum to leave the EU, which is a pooled sovereignty union to create a more integrated Europe.
I raised the same questions to those who wanted to leave the EU, who complained about "diktats from Brussels" as if pooling sovereignty meant we now had dictators instead of elected officials.
My questions were about how their daily lives were impacted by these "diktats". 99% of people avoided the question. For them, it wasn't about any practical reality. They just wanted to vote to leave the EU. The reasons for it seemed to be post-hoc justifications of an emotionally made decision.
I haven’t seen anyone arguing against these claims. They just say “oh but it’s helping poor people” without answering whether or not it’s been doing covert work for the CIA under the pretense that it’s aid.
Are you arguing that USAID is entirely some CIA operation or are you arguing for throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Because this is not evidence that the entire organization is a net negative for the world.
It is. It's just tip of the iceberg. All they do is foment troubles in other countries while providing high paid employment for nepo babies. It's amazing how Americans downplay direct interference in other countries internal affairs with long lasting negative impacts (like people attacking government healthcare workers during vaccine drive) while claiming russians spending 10k usd on an election cycle in which parties spent billion+ was WW3.
Al though the current US admin is just bringing in USAID within the admin controls, USAID is massive net negative (as it is with any other american influence/aid) for the world.
I don't think anyone is saying that the US shouldn't have an organisation that distributes aid. But I think it is right to pause it when it is doing things like funding Politico magazine.
If you are trans, you were just de-personed by executive order and your passport was invalidated. If you also happened to be an incarcerated female, you are being transferred to male facilities. These are actions which will have life-altering consequences.
That's only one thing among many others (ICE immigrant raids which also sweep up legal immigrants and citizens who don't "look American") just in the first few days. What "large pain" are you talking about?
so things that affect less than 1% in the former and less than 0.01% in the latter, of the population, that's what we're basing "large pain" on? I'm not entirely sure you want to play this game.
Any percentage of people being de-personed is bad. If the state is permitted to withhold travel documents of people indefinitely (and the supporting documents they sent in to get their passport renewed[1]), do you really live in a free state?
Also, and I know people knee-jerk at the comparison, but historically speaking Jews comprised less than 1% of the population of Weimar Germany.[2] The smallness of the percentage shouldn't be cause to dismiss the harm of their discrimination as "no big deal." It's been shown where that leads.
No US citizen is unable to get a passport. The only issue is that their passport needs to reflect their biological sex rather than their gender identity. I personally think this policy is excessive but nobody is being "de-personed".
I’m more curious about what you think the “large pain” the previous administration was inflicting on people than learning about your indifference to minorities
Some Americans were left behind in Afghanistan, and thirteen Marines were killed there due to the incompetent execution of the withdrawal. Other Americans were taken hostage by Hamas with next to no serious effort to recover them. Many were fired from their jobs or discharged from the military if they refused to take an experimental vaccine. Others who took the vaccine suffered myocarditis and other vaccine injuries. Many people have overdosed on fentanyl or fallen victim to gangs like Tren de Aragua that simply walked across the open southern border. Tens of thousands of US construction jobs were destroyed by the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline. I can keep going but I think I've made my point.
And if you're not just counting US citizens, there's a war in Ukraine that's killed over a million people and another war in Gaza, the latter of which was precipitated by the bloodiest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust.
Yeah we seem to have rhetorical escalation. Opinions are propaganda, beliefs are narratives, etc, etc. It's a way to devalue messages one disagrees with; they aren't just wrong, they're nefarious.
In my book any furthering of any position is propaganda. It’s not just when you do it in a dishonest or underhanded way. That’s the old-school definition.
Now what started this was the bald assertion that all most messaging is propaganda. Okay. People went with it, including the person I replied to. And that’s not objectionable according to my own definition. But if it is only “nefarious” messaging which is propaganda then you set yourself up for throwing stones in a glasshouse. Because a lot of comments (including the one I replied to) contain at least assumptions that further a world view. I don’t have to make an outright statement. I just have to hint at an assumption. And yeah, that’s what they did too.
I must agree, but I think the global public's awareness has been shocked into growth. I find the biggest problem with social media is actually user error. Unfortunately social media apps have become so complex that many have given up on curating their feeds. This is critical. If you can tune your social media to show you _interesting_ things, you can stay informed, possibly get good context, and not lose your mind.
I had used ublock-origin on youtube to disable the right-hand sidebar of "recommended" videos so that I could just view the stuff in my subscriptions. A couple of years ago, they started detecting and blocking ublock-origin, so I stopped using it (ublock).
It's not really the ads that bother me. It's the "recommended videos". Is there a way to customize my view of youtube to avoid the shit I don't need to see?
The thing about youtube is that it's very easy for propaganda/click-bait to creep in during moments of weakness.
Maybe it's time to go cold-turkey? Failing that, maybe it's worth it to try and take some control over the experience?
Slide the right side of the window off the screen, maybe? Dirty tricks are allowed.
I'm very aggressive with the "not interested" and "don't recommend this channel" buttons, and over time it does mostly get rid of the most obnoxious recs. Right now it's also not recommending much good stuff, either, so YMMV.
For youtube, you can put the video in theater mode, which makes the video the full width of your window, and pushes recommendations down below it. With this I only ever see recommendations at the end of the video.
As a general solution for us techies, you can have user defined style sheets that selectively override the site's CSS, either using a plugin like Stylus, or Firefox's built-in userContent.css. Inspect the website, find the id name (or class if it is unique enough) for the content you want to go away and put the following in your user CSS.
#<id> {
display: hidden;
}
I have so many of these. There is some upkeep with redesign, and for some sites with high churn I've given up, but in general it makes the web much more tolerable.
there's actually a great "hidden" way to disable the youtube homepage and shorts across platforms - turn off youtube's watch history feature (myactivity.google.com > youtube history)
I've found that over time this chokes the recommendation system - makes it boring and it now finally refuses to show me any video recommendations on my youtube homepage - just a message asking me to turn history on. of course, you lose your watch history, but I just bookmark the videos I like anyway.
Videos related to the one you're watching may appear, but imo these tend to be based on your subscriptions / more focused / less rabbit-holey (and you can disable those with extensions and such as well).
It's so disappointing, because "recommended" used to be brilliant to find stuff similar-ish to what you're watching.
But these days half of it is outrage bait, ranging from "WOKE LIBTARD GETS DESTROYED" to "TRUMP LOSES HIS MIND", or malicious clickbait like "you won't believe what the cast if $tv_show looks like now" with some AI generated thing of one cast member being horribly maimed. Even on stuff that has nothing to do with any of that, like some music video.
And whether "Trump loses his mind" is something you agree or disagree with doesn't even matter – I'm just here to listen to some music, maybe watch a funny video or two. To take a break from all of that. It's become so pervasive that it's just exhausting.
So normal people like you or me just withdraw. And the only people who don't are the hyper-politicised who never grow tired of talking of $favourite_issue, which tend to be rather less reasonable or open to nuance. And this feedback loop just makes things worse and worse.
This, in a nutshell, is why you need moderation. People talk about "enshittification" of platforms, but IMO the bigger problem is more the "cuntification" of platforms, where a small number of extremely unpleasant and vitriolic people chase off many people who don't want to deal with that. X.com is a well-known example, but also online games where you're matched with random people (where you very quickly learn a great deal about your mother's sex life).
> But these days half of it is outrage bait, ranging from "WOKE LIBTARD GETS DESTROYED" to "TRUMP LOSES HIS MIND", or malicious clickbait like "you won't believe what the cast if $tv_show looks like now" with some AI generated thing of one cast member being horribly maimed. Even on stuff that has nothing to do with any of that, like some music video.
I don't know what I'm doing differently than you, but I don't see ANY of that. The worst, most clickbaity Youtube content I see is poorly done rip-offs of Primitive Technology.
Unfortunately my regular internet has an outage and I need to rely on a mobile hotspot which YouTube seems to throttle with 20 second delays on everything, so looking for more examples is a bit painful at the moment. But having 1 to 3 of this kind of thing is common.
Clear your history often. My youtube is actually incredible, massive variety and useful topics.
I clear it about once every 2 weeks or month depending on how many of the same topics I see.
It works really well in that if you ignore the content you saw before it forces the algorithm to find unique content because it thinks you don't like the stuff you've seen.
That and cleaning your subscription list. Easily the best platform I have as of now because of that.
I go to extremes compared to most others, but I log into YT with a browser profile where history is not kept and don't log in. The front page is basically empty. I have a local web page with links to creators whose content I enjoy. I check out one of my favorite creators and see what new videos they have to offer. The benefit of this is that the first few rounds of recommendations are actually mildly useful since the algorithm knows nothing about you and you haven't showed it much for it to use since I'm usually logging in through a vpn.
It's crazy that the best experience (for me, anyway) is achieved by giving it the least amount of information possible.
If everything I read online [that I don't pay for] is a form of propaganda, then the only choice I have is to either:
1) weight all information equally
2) bias information based on [personal beliefs XYZ]
I'm trying hard to do #1, mainly because #2 is confirmation bias (and reinforces it).
You could for instance consider actual facts? Because 100% of what you read online is in fact not propaganda.
Then you might find that some sources are filled with lies and others contain a lot more facts.
Then you'd naturally weight facts from the more trustworthy source higher.
The next step is a "web of trust" where a new source will be more trustworthy if it's linked to by other trustworthy sources.
So in the end you'd rank information from Russia Today (one of Russia's main propaganda channels) as very low, a comment from a random redditor low, and a comment on physics by a renowned physicist as very high trustworthiness.
> Because 100% of what you read online is in fact not propaganda.
This isn't even close to true. Facts are facts, and stories are propaganda. What we call "news" is largely just "stories" (opinion/editorials) about facts -- the story is the propaganda - the story weaves the facts together in a narrative, the narrative tells us how to feel and think. Stories cost $$$, and those promoting them are absolutely promoting some stories over others. They have a message to send -- that message is propaganda.
You mention a comment from a "random redditor" is low value -- I'm suggesting that nearly every "major" narrative spun on Reddit has been largely placed there by forces with deep pockets and axes to grind, and the true believers and other useful idiots that follow blindly. It's all astroturfing, and Reddit is an absolute garbage dump of discussion. Anyone that goes there thinking they're getting an accurate picture of the world around them is seriously deluded. I'm convinced those that run Reddit do this by design. We know who runs Twitter, and Facebook. No one talks about who is running Reddit.
A "comment on physics by a renowned physicist" is still just a comment -- there are facts in physics, and theories. Even renowned physicists can be wrong when it comes to the theories they back. And honestly [coming back to the point of the article] that's not what's causing people to feel outrage -- they're not doom scrolling physics forums outraged about dark matter or a theory of everything -- they're doom scrolling an endless stream of political/cultural propaganda designed to outrage them and keep them addicted.
The world isn't nearly as black and white as the internet would have you believe it is.
Point me to a source of political/cultural news that you believe is full of fact and not just another site full of opinions pieces and editorializing around the facts.
3) Use your first-hand experience as an anchor. Propaganda is often easy to see through in concrete situations. Even as a kid, it was easy to tell the difference between the quality of life in the USSR and Western Europe.
4) If you don't see it in the real world, you probably don't need an opinion on it.
5) And the same applies to other people as well. Prioritize the opinions of the people the issue actually concerns over abstract word salad.
> everything you see becomes an opinion and your mind can comfortably (or at least not emotionally/hurriedly) form your own opinion over time
I agree (I've done this), but it's much easier said than done. Requires a lot of mental work/training.
More importantly, it requires a sort of mental "enlightenment" to the true state of things.. That everything you read for free on the internet is being paid for by someone, with their own motivation and intents, and that these forces don't have your best interest in mind. The saying "If you're watching it, then it was intended for you" comes to mind. Once this breakthrough occurs and you begin to see the world this way, everything else usually follows.
As you begin to realize that most of your facts and opinions are those planted there by other powerful ($$$) forces, you start to recognize that what you think is largely what they want you to think. But the scariest part of the awakening is that you begin to realize how little you truly know about the world outside your direct experience. You feel much less certain about the world and your place in it.
Most of the people I know recognize this, and I can have sane conversation with them. You can tell those that are caught up in the propaganda because they largely sound like parrots, and it's impossible to talk to them reasonably. A few friends of mine are in this category, and the one common denominator between them is that they are deeply unhappy, riddled with anxiety, and glued to their devices. The true human casualties of the new technological information age we've birthed. It appears that this is by design, as those that control the flow for information know exactly the power they have and what they intend to do with it.
For those that are stuck, I wish I knew how to open their eyes up and look around them. It's not too bad when you look at the world outside of the internet. I've tried to listen empathetically to people that are stuck, but it mostly doesn't help. Their minds are hamsters spinning on wheels, unable to stop or hear any thing else from the outside. One or two have woken up only after the anxiety it produces begins to interfere with their real lives and relationships, It's a form of addiction, and unfortunately many people are stubborn and will double down on their addiction time after time until they hit rock bottom.
We're in the middle of a massive mental health crisis. I hate knowing that a not-insignificant portion of our fellow citizens are rapidly heading towards some sort of mental/emotional rock bottom caused by technology... I feel powerless to do anything about it as I've watched it slowly unfold over the last decade or so -- it's nearly impossible to reach the friends and family members that you're actually close to. I don't know what can be done other than sit back and wait for them to crash, and help them pick up the pieces when that time comes.
Let yourself be sad about it. It is sad. Our potential as a species is being squandered for the sake of unmitigated greed. On a personal level, it's deeply depressing how things could have been so different for our loved ones.
If you have at least one close friend who can still listen and think for themselves, then you're doing okay. It's when you can't talk about this stuff that it gets most toxic. - if that ever happens, there's still books, movies... They Live is a good one.. Anything to remind you that you're not alone.
Even seeing people express these ideas is a relief, so thanks for that.
Also, there are good reasons to be hopeful, or at least stoic. Karma is inevitable. It may be that all this was necessary in some way... Like how the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs made room for mammals. Those loopholes in human nature which are being abused; they won't work for ever. And surprises can be surprising - unpredictable phase shifts can turn things around in unforeseeable ways.
In any case, we're responsible for the effort; not the outcome. Be good
"The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth." -Garry Kasparov.
And
"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore."
This latter quote is, rather ironically, a false quote! (falsely attributed to Hannah Arendt). But I still think it contains truth.
This, plus the A/B testing of headlines to maximize clicks has lead inexorably to the current information environment.
Our intuitions, outrage, and knee-jerk reactions are being weaponized to gain clicks, votes, donations, and "action".
Many a dictatorship has fallen in the wake of social media revolutions. I wonder how long democracy can last?
In a would-be-funny-if-it-weren't-tragic ironic twist both of the two main US parties see themselves as the last guardians of democracy and frame their opponents as Evil, against which "any means necessary" is the only reasonable course of action.
(Yes, the party you disagree with is way worse and it's all their fault, this whataboutism indeed has to end, absolutely)
Selective truth is far more effective, and more common, propaganda. Not in omitting important context from a story, but by omitting or burying (or simply never seeking out) entirely stories you don't want heard, and emphasizing stories you do want heard. In essence, holding up a funhouse mirror to society.
This is the propaganda you get when all your reporters think they are being honest and uncensored, but they all deeply care about the same set of issues, and are deeply ambivalent about another set.
I was looking for a take on this that was more than just finding ways not to be inundated.
You don't have to get outraged about something when you think about how that particular article might be trying to fan those flames and how what is reported might just be highlighting the points that push our buttons (but the real set of facts might not be as bad when looked into). Even the things that really are that bad don't have to lead to outrage. I take a wait-and-see attitude about a lot of this stuff we see in the media. There are trolls everywhere, we'll see if anything comes of it. I'm also capable of not liking something strongly without feeling rage with regards to it, while still wanting to combat it if I have a say in it at all.
Of course, "just don't let it get to you" is easy to say but hard to implement. I think it's the only real path that allows the inclusion of social media in our lives, though.
Avoid following the news constantly. Check in every once in a while—a couple times a week at most. Get your news from long articles, not tweets. Actually read the articles, don't just learn about the world from hot takes.
> ... people have found that, actually, outrage can be useful. It actually can help you identify a problem and react to it. But it can also be harmful if you’re experiencing it all the time and become overwhelmed by it.
I'm reading that as meaning something more like identify a problem and act on it. Outrage itself is a reaction, just not a positive one. There's no shortage of people reacting to things.
> Avoid following the news constantly. Check in every once in a while—a couple times a week at most.
Agreed. I personally believe that checking the news everyday is akin to something like a ‘news overdose’. There’s nothing wrong with spending just 15 minutes per week. At least for me, that’s a far healthier dose.
I wish there were more news sources that enabled this. There is so much focus being first to cover a story, and dripping out information. My local newspaper had a website redesign a couple years ago, and completely eliminated the chronological story view. I literally have no idea how to browse stories older than what is currently on their main page for the day. There are some great national weekly papers but they all assume you've already heard the daily news and instead focus on supplementing it with deep dives on selected issues, and don't provide any summary that can be used as a primary news source.
Someone I spoke with recently mentioned that it used to be that you could read a newspaper end-to-end and feel like you were informed. Now, it's an endless stream of information. I would posit that our brains weren't intended to consume that much information, but I'll leave that as uninformed speculation.
"used to be"? when? I had an L.A. Times subscription in high school and there was no way, even with 2 hours of bus ride a day plus lunch and breaks to finish that paper.
I think a lot of discourse is colored by the midwest. The midwest influenced movies (what does a US neighborhood look like? are there hills/trees/snow?), TV, radio, and literature. I imagine midwest newspapers to be like southern newspapers, 2-3 broadsheets per section if that.
I wonder how many words i can write on this subject
> it used to be that you could read a newspaper end-to-end and feel like you were informed
Of course, the downside of that approach is that the people who control the (relatively few) major newspapers effectively get to define what "informed" means - and, most importantly, what it does _not_ include.
> Actually read the articles, don't just learn about the world from hot takes.
Or, even more difficult: Actually read the science paper, or the court ruling, or the executive order, or the proposed legislation, rather than the journalist's hot take. A lot of these journalists takes boil down to "tweets with more words."
>Avoid following the news constantly. Check in every once in a while—a couple times a week at most. Get your news from long articles, not tweets. Actually read the articles, don't just learn about the world from hot takes.
This 100%. If a piece of news is truly important, then it'll be important tomorrow or even a week from now. You'll even get clarifications and corrections along the way.
I like to use Pocket to build a list of long-form articles I want to read, then EpubPress (https://epub.press/) to compile that into a weekly EPUB that I can read in-full on a distraction-free e-book reader. It's a much less stressful way of consuming media than the whole neverending drug-frenzied quick-hits world of online news.
> Since 2018, Time has been owned by Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, who acquired it from Meredith Corporation. Benioff currently publishes the magazine through the company Time USA, LLC.
You can schedule periodic content pulls in Calibre, and I believe you can also automate sending the resulting EPUB to an email address (like the Kindle's send-to-email feature). I would use this, but I prefer EpubPress's formatting and I'm too lazy to tweak Calibre's.
I think one of the fundamental problems is that "news" fundamentally doesn't tell you very much about what's happening.
A perfect example is a plane crash- you hear right away that a plane has crashed. It is reported on because it is an exceptional event. But, the "real" effects, the ones that actually affect you personally, or the world systemically, won't play out until months later. (for example the Boeing MCAS 777-max thing). How much good does it really do you to know about the plane crash now vs. informing yourself about the context of the plane crash 3--6 months later?
>I'm reading that as meaning something more like identify a problem and act on it.
we can't always act on it the way we want to. The Treasury is 3000 miles away. I know complaining at my rep isn't the solution people want, but it's all I can do.
To add, find the source itself; submissions to HN are sometimes guilty of this (and often get corrected), posting an article about an article instead of the article itself, the meta-article telling you how to feel and think about the source instead of the source sticking to the facts. And the headline on HN itself priming you as well (but there's the policy that titles on HN should not be editoralised).
It's why I like kinda "boring" news outlets like Reuters. I don't know for sure but our national news thing (NOS) feels fair as well, it doesn't have an overt political alignment and will often report on both sides - even if I'm very much inclined to dismiss one side, but I won't claim to be unbiased.
That's the point: We didn't need to, because they had a process they followed and it worked. It was probably fairly bureaucratic, which is reasonable when we're talking about trillions of dollars. Treasury moves slowly but they do move in the right direction - TreasuryDirect was kinda early and had an absolute klunker of an interface, but it's been improved a bit over time and is now usable if still chonky. Federal and treasury-mediated transfers went through. People's confidential payment information wasn't disclosed. That's kind of what I and most others ask of the treasury -- even if I occasionally took to social media to scream about their terrible password entry interface and the annoyance of dealing with medallion guarantees. :-) And they got on FedNow pretty quickly once it rolled out, though of course I wish either the treasury or the fed had provided an instant payments system like a decade earlier. (But that's on the fed.)
But I'm OK with the idea that change speed is somewhat inversely proportional to value at risk. Might be better if it was 1/log(value).
Their nicknames were “I have been through thorough background checks and I am a professional who runs my changes through review and testing before they eventually get deployed.”
Seriously, do you know who does repairs on the sewer lines where you live? No. Does that mean you’re so oblivious that you wouldn’t be concerned by seeing half a dozen young men without any safety gear or official logos digging a six foot trench across the road outside your house?
Personal attacks will get you banned here. Moreover, we've had to warn you more than once before about breaking the site guidelines. I don't want to ban you but if you keep doing this, we'll end up having to.
Personal attacks will get you banned here. Moreover, we've had to warn you more than once before about breaking the site guidelines. I don't want to ban you but if you keep doing this, we'll end up having to.
That's not how it works in the U.S. If an executive branch department was created by the legislature, it is up to the legislature whether or not it exists, not the executive. If the legislature has passed laws regarding how its resources are to be used, its employees treated, the executive is not free to disregard those laws.
The legislature is the source of laws in the U.S., not the executive. The irony is that the Republicans control the legislature as well. They could pass laws to achieve what Musk wants. It would be slow, but it would be legal.
A coup is seizing power outside the legal mechanism for doing so.
Playing by those rules, it's nearly impossible to change any big law or enact any drastic change to an existing law unless you have some world-changing event. The rest is just the slow march towards the mean which is controlled by the people that can bully others into silence and agreement. The mean is controlled by those that control the conversation and by those career politicians and bureaucrats that "play the game". Look how magically everyone is agreeing to deporting violent criminals, yet somehow we didn't all think that was the right answer 6 months ago?
It's beyond me how so many of us think that continuously ignoring the will of the people is "OK". Either tell me my choice doesn't matter, or just shut up with the drama and enact safe and fair referendums on every single hot topic so we can all get to the right answer and then if we find we're in the minority, we'll shut up.
It should be clear as day to anyone that is unbiased that fixing the US/Mexican border was ridiculously easy (it's essentially been done in 2 weeks and they didn't even have to finish building their stupid wall). The only reason it didn't happen till now was precisely because the whole thing is broken and not really an expression of the peoples' will. It was rather an expression of an amalgamation of a giant mindless mass of bureaucrats, and you can't fix it unless you do what they are doing now. Not to single you out sorry, but opinions like yours ("we gotta do it the legal way and according to rules x, y, z, and 500 other rules") are precisely why nothing ever got done or fixed properly. And I say that as someone that is absolutely on board with following every rule to the T, with no exceptions.
>It should be clear as day to anyone that is unbiased that fixing the US/Mexican border was ridiculously easy (it's essentially been done in 2 weeks and they didn't even have to finish building their stupid wall). The only reason it didn't happen till now was precisely because the whole thing is broken and not really an expression of the peoples' will.
Fixing the border happened 8 months ago. Nothing meaningful has changed at the border since June 2024. The only reason it took so long is that Biden wanted Congress to do it rather than using probably-illegal executive fiat powers, and eventually Biden got tired of waiting and did it anyway after Trump told Congress to axe the bipartisan border deal that bascially everybody but the extremists on either side was on board with.
You can make an argument that Biden should have done it by executive fiat even earlier, and that's your prerogative. But the fact of the matter is that even once a legislative fix was ready, Trump and the Republicans threw it away for no good reason, so that he could continue campaigning on immigration. That, by the way, is exactly "not an expression of the peoples' will". That's refusing to fix a problem for the sole purpose of campaigning on that problem.
Much of Trump's governance is like an episode of reality TV or WWE. Loud, flashy and mostly fake. Creating his own problems to "solve" by changing nothing. Threaten Canada and Mexico with tariffs then cancel them and declare victory when they say they'll do something they were already doing, e.g. Mexico deployed 10,000 Mexican troops to their border years ago under an agreement with Biden. Columbia accepted hundreds of deportation flights under Biden, then Trump tries to use military aircraft to do it and they say no, he makes threats then he declares massive victory when the arrangement reverts to exactly what was happening before.
Data obtained by fox news suggested that migrant arrivals at the southern border declined by 60% in the first week of Trump’s presidency compared to the last week of Biden’s administration. However, this figure differs from Trump’s 93% claim.
Biden 2021: 1,734,686 (378.68% from previous year)
Biden 2022: 2,378,944 (137.14% from previous year)
Biden 2023: 2,475,669 (104.07% from previous year)
Biden 2024: 2,135,005 (86.24% from previous year)
I couldn't find older that 2019, but it's clear that in trumps last year, it more than halfed from his previous year. Then it more than tripled in the first year under Biden. Then almost doubled again in the subsequent year under Biden, and then grew a bit in 2023. Then only in 2024, did it reduce by a tiny 14%. Notably a 14% of what is effectively a number 5 times higher than what Trump got it down to before he left office.
And yeah you could argue (like some of the journalist did) that "oh this is just because Trump created a backlog". Well that's what people wanted, and it stopped the flow of people over the border. That's solving the problem, and really just shows that Biden literally just opened the doors, let it grow huge, and then "claimed success" when it started going back down to it's pre-Trump average. This is why we can't discuss this, we have so many supposedly "smart" people arguing and using the supposed "data" to twist the truth, and then dismissing what every can see plain as day (and is in this case supported by the data).
Oh and let's also not mention that it surged quite a bit in the last few months of 2024 when people I would assume started to flood the border in anticipation of Trump's arrival. So all that supposed work the Biden team did somehow didn't apply then? Of course, because they did nothing and the numbers reflect the fact that the border just lets them go through.
I agree that our system of government makes it extremely difficult to enact large changes. That is by design, however well considered that design might be. Nevertheless, those are the rules. Which means the president can't legally do whatever he wishes to anything "under his purview" upon gaining power.
Or rather, that was the case until the SCOTUS decided there are no laws the president need respect. What they have not pronounced upon is whether the law binds anyone acting under the direction of the president. Does their invention merely protect the president from prosecution or does it abrogate all laws he finds inconvenient? I find it hard to believe they'll take the second step, but we'll probably find out pretty soon. Is Musk a monarch or merely our president?
we were talking about operational access to the payment system. you are conflating the situation at USAID which may or may not by illegal, idk.
the legislative branch can form administrative departments and prescribe their function however the president has already defined powers to impound funds and remove senior administrative officers and appoint/remove low-level staff. how these things intersect will be sorted be the courts.
executive actions (by-passing what should be legislation) have been increasing the last few decades. the various media companies plainly do make choices to portray some actions as nothingburger or crisis depending on their political alignment with the party in power.
the issue with the left-media and Trump is they outrage clickbait a bunch of events that are insignificant in terms of outcomes. Should they alarm about Jan6 yes. should they alarm over minor personnel at treasury or some dumb unserious thing Trump said at a press conference, no. This is how the media loses all trust in themselves broadly.
It's actually not up to the legislature anymore. And that's a huge problem in this country. The legislature exited stage left by handing way too many powers and responsibilities over to the executive branch. Now the courts determine if the executive branch has been previously allowed by congress to do something stupid or not. By the time the legislature can agree on exercising power on one item or another, the shit has already hit the fan.
It doesn't need to be a coup. Congress sold us out to presidents long before most of us were born.
You can't attack other users like that here, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. Worse, you've been doing this repeatedly in other places:
I don't want to ban you because your commenting history before that looks (mostly) fine. But if you keep breaking the site rules, we won't have much choice, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.
What is actually outrageous is that Scientific American publishes articles like this. It's an institution that, like so many, is destroying itself by getting into politics, especially the politics of outrage.
I call spades, spades. It's not my job to prove to you the object is actually a spade. At some point you have to tell disingenuous people spouting nonsense to go eff off. You're not obligated to provide counterexamples to their nonsense. Time is valuable. You're not obligated to let idiots waste it.
> It's not my job to prove to you the object is actually a spade.
> Time is valuable. You're not obligated to let idiots waste it.
Right on both counts!
However: If insufficiently many people put in the effort to explain their proof/reasoning to others, then we shouldn't be surprised when that side loses.
It depends on the amount of effort required and the impact of what's being discussed. I'm not going to argue with people that grass is green, or the earth is round. SM started to engage in politics in the mid 20th century, and I even provided some examples of topics they've covered in that period. They then got pissy and demanded evidence, which in the context of what's being discussed, is a dick move. So, I told him where to get off.
In cases where the discussion is actually important, such as anthropogenic climate change for example, or issues with Test-Driven Development, I provide the receipts.
The Internet Archive records suggest that they didn’t “get into politics” in the way implied by the GP, as opposed to covering subjects that have political implications, until 2021, as implied by the presence of a dedicated “politics” category.
Today it’s under “Behavior”, which for a time was referred to as “Behavior and Society”, a section that appears to often be used as a place to put more overt political pieces, along with the Opinion section:
Scientific American also had a report (what looks like a page that collects articles under a same theme of special interest) on The Black Lives Matter Movement.
Can you point to any article published by them in the last 70 years as absurd as this?
I don’t think that the implicit distinction between “getting into politics” (implying the outlet is adopting a noticeable ideological stance) and “addressing political issues” (that can arguably be described as scientific topics with political implications, as opposed to vice versa) warrants the color of your responses.
Maybe you’re just floating in the same tide as them.
Yep, Scientific American took a huge swing towards activism after the 2016 elections. The other comments claiming it has always been political are gaslighting. It got captured the same way much of mainstream media was. This article is just the latest proof of it.
I've been an avid news consumer since ~2016 and early on I remember getting very outraged at articles, tweets and other pieces of news I read. Over time I realized that these articles want you to be outraged, and that the outrage is a form of control.
Over time though I picked up on these "outrage triggers" and that's helped me be much more objective about news I'm reading. I'll be reading an article and I can usually pick up the "tricks" writers use to generate outrage. I often find myself reading an article and go "oh look you want me to feel outraged right now".
Nowdays when I try to be informed about a story I will read an NYT report, a CNN report, a Fox News or other right leaning report, and then maybe one from DailyWire of Bannon's War Room. Skimming every article I often see spots where the outlet is trying to outrage their readers. NYT will report something that will outrage the left and as you "go right" on the reports you will start to see outrage directed to the right.
I’ve generally found that overtly biased outlets on the right aren’t a huge source of outrage for me because their spin is so blatant—once I notice the propaganda, it’s easy to tune out. The bigger frustration is knowing how many people take that coverage at face value. It’s not quite the same “outrage” the article describes, though.
By contrast, the NYT often feels more subtle and therefore more effective at stoking that sense of constant agitation. They’re meticulously fact-based, but their editorial choices—what they highlight, the framing they use—can seem designed to provoke a reaction rather than just inform. It’s not only about the content of the stories; sometimes it’s also about how they present or prioritize them. If you haven’t encountered this firsthand, checking out “NYTimes pitch bot” on Bluesky can illustrate how their style can veer into outrage territory. It’s a satirical account, but it often points out the patterns in the Times’ headlines and story angles that might otherwise go unnoticed.
You're absolutely correct, but you're missing an important detail.
I'm assuming you're more aligned politically with the left. If you're not, I apologize for the assumption. To someone who is more right-wing, the bias of e.g. NYT is just as blatant as Fox News is to you, and Fox may come off as "fair". This is because the propaganda is specifically intended to land with their own audience. It's tuned to your sensibilities.
It's very much a "fish in water" scenario. Trying to read articles from multiple sources can help, and questioning why you agree with one take over another. In the end, these are pretty sophisticated operations, and they know how to prey on their targets.
Subreddits are a great place to see the result of this . . . it's incredible how much utter shite and misinformation is just taken for granted as "the way things are" and how much the details of said misinformation depend on your political leanings.
And of course everyone is convinced that they have the rational truth and it's the other guy who's the "low-information voter" being taken by the propaganda.
To someone who is more right-wing, the bias of e.g. NYT is just as blatant as Fox News is to you, and Fox may come off as "fair". This is because the propaganda is specifically intended to land with their own audience. It's tuned to your sensibilities.
This isn't really a matter of subjective opinion, though. Objective surveys have consistently shown that Fox News viewers are worse-informed than people who don't pay attention to any conventional news sources. NYT readers are a long way up from there.
That’s not really comparing apples-to-apples though: a cable TV network aimed at the undereducated masses versus a prestigious broadsheet newspaper pitched at the educated classes
There’s plenty of right-of-centre magazines and websites aimed at educated right-wingers: e.g. First Things, Commentary, The American Conservative, the Spectator
Right, but I think their point was that they are both biased just in opposite directions, and bringing the orthogonal difference in target audience education level into it is arguably confusing things
Maybe a better demonstration of their point might be comparing NYT/WaPo to the WSJ
I read a book on the history of the NYT. They would market themselves to advertisers with "our readers have the highest disposable income of aby news source in America".
It's an interesting reflection on the modern Democrat party and politics in general, that the NYT now leans left.
By the way, I read Fox News as a comparison for NYT. Reading the comments on Fox News articles is a very weird experience. You'll get this mixture of comments from "I support Trump but this particular idea is terrible" to "We must do everything Trump says to bring about the next revolution" to what appears to be blatant propaganda/manipulation from foreign agents and literal outright racism and sexism. What you don't see is nuanced communication, while in the NY Times, comments are often from knowledgeable people who have experience communicating online, can make good arguments, and back up their ideas with facts.
If the fox news comments in any way represent true opinions of trump supporters, then our country is truly screwed.
Honestly, I think most Trump supporters are never heard from online. They're just people who go about their daily lives without putting a lot of thought into politics. They checked the box on their ballot corresponding to a name they'd heard a lot lately.
I suspect they will have good reasons to pay more attention next time, if there is a next time.
Trump supporters watch Fox News, and listens to Joe Rogan. They are pretty in tune with the current politics, but they just don't try to go online and fight against the left.
After this past election cycle I don't see how people can make that comment with a straight face.
Media in general is very right leaning. Some like CNN and NYT are maybe slightly more left than far right fox news, but there aren't many "left leaning" mass market news sources that are essentially felating one party for millions of people.
NYT and CNN, etc are all very critical of democrats when there is a controversy. This is stark contrast to fox news which essentially is willful ignorance of anything bad republicans / trump has done.
The "normalization" of Trump's corruption by media in general should be enough to see which way they lean.
Its just that if anybody is slightly less than full blown fox news conservative they get labeled as left leaning by everyone in the media so there is some idea of "balance" but conservative media (fox news, conservative podcasts, etc) are overwhelmingly mass market and the majority.
Interesting to be around for the birth of a false fact like "the media is right leaning". Overnight you see people start parroting something that's clearly untrue.
Maybe you haven't been paying attention the past 5 years, but there has been a dramatic shift to the right in media. Companies change ownership and the new owners take advantage of the historical left leaning nature of the media.
The magic trick fox news and conservatives has pulled is by being so far right that center/slightly right parties look far left. The normalization of the MAGA movement is evidence of this right leaning media machine.
Look at who owns the "left leaning" media companies. CNN is owned by conservatives.
Joe Rogan, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson audience dwarf most other channels these days. fox news has almost 3-4 times the viewership of CNN which is the preferred example of a "left leaning" network to balance them.
The rights constant raging against mainstream media is an attempt to distract from the fact that mainstream media is in fact conservative.
Wow. You don't need to be very right leaning to feel the complete opposite. I'm simply amazed someone could feel that way, as nearly all media is very left-leaning (to my perspective).
And there's the core of issue. If you use vague terms like "left" and "right", then different people in the discussion will be using different definitions. You're using them to mean socialism vs capitalism, whereas others mean Democrats vs Republicans. Some are even using liberal vs conservative. Occasionally, I've seen it as authoritarian vs libertarian, even though that should be an orthogonal axis. If you're going to commit to the logical sin of the false dichotomy, at least say what you mean.
You have many misunderstandings that you should probably have right first before continuing
CNN leans pretty far left, but not as left as MSNBC
NYT leans pretty far left, similarly to CNN
Reddit leans very far left, so does Facebook and Instagram
Media in general is very left leaning. For example, Youtube, Disney, Netflix are the biggest online video content house, and they all lean heavily left. Even Max leans slightly left. There is no right leaning online content house. And all contents are moving to online.
What you're calling "left" is center-right in the rest of the developed world. None of those are left leaning. They are all pro-corporate, pro-capitalist, anti-worker "infinite growth forever" media. Some of the journalists who work for them are left, but the owners are largely conservative and force them to cover Democratic scandals just as much as Republican ones, while Fox News and other conservative media outlets just outright ignore Republican scandals entirely.
If mainstream media in America was left, Bernie would have just finished up his second term.
I agree. Came on here to say that doing your own research is one way to reduce outrage stress. After reading a top political story in NYT, I hardly ever learn a valid point made by “the other side”. Researching with ChatGPT, or reading conservative media, I can usually find some. This makes the other side a little more rational in my imagination and reduces the stress.
Steelman your opponent’s arguments! It’s not just good for thinking, it’s relaxing!
I had to give up news altogether before I could notice this, but yeah, news exists for the sole purpose of creating outrage in order to generate ad impressions. When you get outraged by one story, you’re more likely to click on the next related headline. We’re destroying our society so we can make less than a penny per page.
> news exists for the sole purpose of creating outrage in order to generate ad impressions
I like the idea of distinguishing news from journalism. If we say they're distinct, then yeh I think I can agree that news is–via weird unintentional evolution of incentives–an outrage machine, but true journalism is a wondrous and professional exercise of human scrutiny on centres of otherwise unchecked power. We need that.
One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together. I’m technically gen z and I’ve been off of social media (aside from HN, WhatsApp and discord) for years and you wouldn’t believe how great it’s been for my overall state of mind.
Reddit, instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, etc are all the equivalent of digital junk food and I’d argue that we’re all a lot more negatively affected by it than we think. There’s a reason ‘brain rot’ was word of the year.
I find LinkedIn to be the worse of the social media sites. My feed is full of wannabe “thought leaders”, people posting about a meaningless vendor certificate they got, recruiters giving advice, people who can’t get a job or were recently laid off, etc.
But now, politics is getting involved because people are having government job offers rescinded and the entire federal government is in a free fall like a 3rd world banana republic.
In principal it's a great method to get back to normal, however there are key areas (subreddits, local groups, etc.) that really do provide information, expertise, and news content that isn't available anywhere else online. It's a double edged sword. The best way I've found is to be in there with a read-only mindset or perhaps only participating inside those key areas where political discussions are strictly prohibited.
This has been my exact issue with giving up reddit. It's really hard to replace very niche topics without it, since many online forums are dead. I also append so many searches on google with "reddit" because the top results are generally SEO spam.
Reading "You should quit reddit" helped a little. The author tries to reframe your hidden beliefs about reddit like "finding useful information" or "it's filled with experts." Helped me to realize I was spending more time reading about my hobbies than actually doing them. Though I understand it's not that simple, doing requires more energy, etc.
My approach, finally mostly successful after over a decade, is just "no main feed or subreddit pages." Reading a thread off a Google search or whatever because it has information I want is fine.
I have found this to be completely untrue. Yes, maybe not at the same scale that Reddit is, but if you dig, there's a community for everything. You can find what you're looking for.
That said, I recognize that I am speaking completely for myself in regards to my own interests. YMMV.
I think too that one thing that's important is to decide beforehand -- what can I do? What would I be willing to do?
That is to say, some people really are willing to be activists. They will organize protests and boycotts and things like that.
Other people are in marginalized communities and are trying to get a feel for whether they should move to a different region or even a different country.
Some folks don't really have a plan but they want to stay informed. If at some point a magical line is crossed, they might suddenly say, "That's IT! I can't take it anymore! I have to DO SOMETHNG!" and that's when they'll become activists.
But some folks are realistically never going to lift a finger to help themselves or anybody else. They'll just bitch online and/or be stressed.
What I'm working on is figuring out in what ways I might, in the right situation, be moved to contribute. If things get really bad (and they will), what will I realistically be doing? I'm disabled, so I can't be out in the streets. If things get even worse, I might write about the niche public health / politics topics I've accidentally become an expert in. And if something happens where medicare and medicaid are shut off, well then all hospitals everywhere will basically be non-functional. This will be a crisis for all but most immediately for the chronically ill -- any of us at that point who are able to will be leaving the country ASAP.
In other words, I need to know enough to keep writing (which I would do anyways) and I need to know when things are hopeless enough that a person with a messed up spine should travel out of the country anyways. That is currently all I need to know because it's all that is actionable for me.
There is a massive temptation to doomscroll into infinity, but that merely serves the enemies of sanity. I know what happens next because I've read Sarah Kendzior and Hannah Arendt. It's not good. But I also know that one of the first things that happened during the anti-semitic purges in Nazi Germany was that a ton of Jews got appendicitis from stress. Sometimes the body wants to align with power so badly, it aligns even with evil power and against its own interests. We have to be very careful not to poison ourselves and make evil's job easier.
You can potentially rely on friends or family members to source such information (e.g., only one member of the household really needs to be checking the local group, etc...)
This is the way. I was a director of the community team at deviantart when it got going and I remember so many times thinking "if we get one of these apps for everything people are going to drown themselves in the internet" - because I used to have to actively check in on community members who we deemed addicted. Sure enough, here we are, except it seems nobody is looking out for the best interests of their communities anymore. Thank god for dang.
Well early deviantart was pretty small, and I don't think anyone building it was over 25y/o at the time, so we all had lots of free time to work on it. Deviantart was arranged in a way we all had communities we were responsible for, it changed a lot after it reached million+ users scale, but in the beginning at 100k or so users it was very manageable. Your responsibility per Scott Jarkoff who lead that team was "to love, nurture, protect and grow your community" - and then there were things we were taught to watch out for or check in on. Backend you could see pretty much everything about the user, plus you just got used to the users in your communities, so "additive like behavior" was not difficult to detect, literally I would just see some users online ALL THE TIME, so we would always check in to make sure everything is ok, and tell them they're probably spending too much time on the site (it was a bit harder for me because I was one of the people responsible for communities generally.) I don't know how actively other GDs did this, but it was a widly discussed topic in our staff only irc channel very frequently. This all came from the teams want to be mindful to avoid hurting other people using the internet, most of us building it genuinely gave 2 shits and genuinely cared about our users. This was the same playbook I then used to build devrel at DigitalOcean in the beginning, I had devrel structured per community with the same instruction Scott gave me back in the day. (I think it's part of why y'all originally picked us! so thanks!)
I think sadly the scale becomes less about the size per say and more about the unpredictability. The "vibes" on the internet late 90s early 2000s where very... on point, so it didn't feel like emotional labour. I can imagine being someone who cares about someone on the internet in 2025 would be, frankly, exhausting, in 2002 it was just fun.
Corporate social media does not care about its users. They are just biomass to fuel various goals: ad revenue, political influence, etc. In fact, the more addicted you are, the better.
1. a community is simply an abstract place people meet around the intersection of a shared interest. It's important to first recognize that. 2. Communities are not people who are all the same, they just commune together for reasons. 3. communities form, they are not built. 4. communities are ultimately selfless, however, good communities know what they are and why they exist, this can be a learning process and can be malleable, but at any given moment in time that should be understood. 5. Good communities enforce strong rules strongly. Community steering and moderation should be as diffuse as possible without losing the next point in fact keeping it central: 6. Good communities look to proactively raise up people who energetically build the community for the sake of the community not for the sake of themselves, for themselves should be the second order effect of any raising up within a community, this is subtle and community leaders need to spend time understanding this. I think that is all.
> Sure enough, here we are, except it seems nobody is looking out for the best interests of their communities anymore. Thank god for dang.
Here's to dang! Even when you do things I might not agree with if I knew about them, this is a place where interesting things can be shared and found without all the blah-blah.
I agree. My Reddit outrage addiction flares up every now and then and it makes my mental health objectively shitty. Doesn’t matter if there’s some good content and connection on there, it’s just not worth the (mental) cost.
Reddit is overwhelmingly fake information and covert ads. Investigate any random post on the front page of /r/all, even if it's just like a cute gif of an old person, then go to the comments. Like 75% chance there is something fake or made up about the title or context. It's such a mind pollutant, I can't stand it.
In my opinion reddit is still such a great community if you subscribe to topics that interest you and leave the default subreddits. There's plenty of subreddits that I would not be able to find a good alternative forum for, maybe a Facebook group exists here and there but is that really better?
This is to be expected for /r/all. But who cares because why would anyone want to go there in the first place? In general once something becomes a certain size wrt users, its value to those users plummets. The only thing to do is leave.
The services go through phases (I suspect depending on botnet activity)...Middle of the day, Threads is a fun place to hang, 9pm? It's a wall of anxiety producing ragebait, 2am? It's even worse.
Looking at it on my phone, if I can see three entries and 2 are anxiety inducing, I close the app. (I'm 99% certain they get that telemetry too)
That said, I also had days where I doomscrolled instagram and thought 'it's been 20 minutes and I haven't seen anything entertaining yet.' And that's when I decided to drop it. (It was the only app I could chat with my kids with...we've since moved to other methods)
I haven't cut it out completely, but I'm not hyper aware of how I'm consuming it.
Alternatively carefully curate your social media accounts. My reddit home page is all books and formula 1. I'm quick to hit 'show me less like this' when anything drifts in from the front page.
My Facebook feed is all friends and family who don't discuss politics and ads for nerd shirts. I've purchased a few. It is also easy and effective to hit show me less of this.
I agree about LinkedIn and don't go there unless I'm actively job hunting, something I hope never to do again. I don't feel any bitterness when I see friends and family on FB go on expensive vacations, but I do feel an unhealthy and indefensible jealousy sometimes when I see former coworkers getting new jobs or promotions.
I totally understand the desire to avoid politics on all these platforms but in some way I always expect the greater powers want to destroy these platforms and make us even more hopeless.
Indeed. I've unsubscribed from all subreddits that have become infested with political content, and I've "unfollowed" all of my acquaintances on Facebook and LinkedIn who post anything political. So much more enjoyable.
This is how I've dealt with Instagram. My IG account is literally nothing but cats. it's actually very refreshing to look at for five or ten minutes. But it takes work. IG wants to keep feeding me their BS reels. Sometimes I don't think it's worth it, they really make you put up a fight.
I used to have the same thing (other less wholesome content has made its way back, I've not been strong enough). It was a better experience than what my feed was like before or after, but I'd still waste hours watching cat videos! Trying to stay off the feeds entirely, now.
Yeah, I you should see the curation totally from the top, so fully dropping certain platforms is part of the curation. I mean, in essence we all already do that as certain platforms are not even considered a candidate in our 'portfolio'.
I reduced my news intake to a daily email from reuters + HN. Special thanks go to AI, as reddit and others no longer allow reading content without login.
I quit reddit too recently, I still look at it for info but I'm not logged in/scrolling through it
I find myself reaching for something when I have YouTube/chilling at my desk at the end of the day, can't code anymore/make something just on till I sleep. Sometimes have the desire to play a video game (I have a gaming rig too funny how that works)
I've been trying to read HN or IEEE, TechCrunch stuff like that as my "lazy fun"
I will miss posting stuff like "what is this car" or being part of the car talk for a sporty car I drive but idk kind of want to just live too
It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something
Anyway my main goal in life right now is getting out of debt/staying fit and work on projects
The Instagram dating thing is because, in the heteronormative sense, a guy without one odd WAY more likely to be cheating. If you’re in a relationship, even if you don’t post, your significant other will likely tag you in their posts.
I’ve never really understood doomscrolling on Twitter or Reddit. The only social media I find remotely useful out entertaining is actually TikTok. The comments are IME the least toxic and most entertaining. And I’ve gone down fascinating rabbit holes of things that have absolutely no relevance to my life like medical residency TikTok.
My reddit scrolling wasn't doom for my case. I was either personal topics I liked (cars, computing, software, photography, etc...) or brain rot/stupid shi that's the main reason I've left because I could be more productive than looking at an endless supply of that stuff
You can mute subreddits and not see them anymore
Funny you have to purge the algo on things like YouTube if you click on a thubmnail with some hot chick, boom your feed is nothing but click bait of hot women
Agreed, but we are getting thrown in with the people who have an insta account, but say they don't so they don't get fact-checked on their relationship status.
One healthy way to consume Reddit that I recently learned about is creating a "custom feed" (see left margin of new UI).
You can just add subs that are of interest that lack the torrent of bad news and only ever visit that custom feed. It doesn't ever algorithmically add posts from subs you don't manually include, as far as I've seen.
User groups you would be interested in get hijacked by whatever the overall sentiment of Reddit is. Threads that aren't political suddenly get political for no reason. It's completely dead in there - content quality is brutally low.
Politicisation happens, though slowly. Therewasanattempt used to be funny pictures/videos and is now purely TDS. My city's sub used to have useful local content and is now about 50% national politics.
> You can just add subs that are of interest that lack the torrent of bad news and only ever visit that custom feed.
I still use old.reddit and this is the only way I've ever used Reddit. My homepage only shows me posts from Reddits I follow and nothing else. I don't see all the craziness people here are talking about.
Yes, that's exactly the same as what I do. When I tried new reddit, it looked awful to use and look at, so I always stayed at old reddit. Like you I don't see any of the crazy stuff. Just discussions in the subreddits I follow.
>It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one
Outside of reddit/discord/hn, I haven't had any social media since roughly 2010, and I don't use reddit or discord for anything remotely "social media"-ish.
While I still get the occasional look as if I'm wearing a tinfoil hat when I say "I don't have FB. No, no insta either. No... not snapchat either", I find it's a lot less common now, thankfully. When I first left social media in ~2010, it was rough. Not only dating scene wise, but I lost out on a few job opportunities (at least a few, probably more than I know) as well.
Now you're just considered kind of weird/fringe, instead of being borderline insane. Moving (slowly) in the right direction, I think.
I wouldn't care a whole lot if someone told me they weren't in IG, FB, Snap, Twitter, etc. However, if someone told me they never bothered with Linkedin, it would be hard for me to resist bowing at their feet.
Out of all the social media I don't have, that's the one that has lost me the most job opportunities for sure. I probably would have caved and signed up if I didn't end up getting a job through some old-fashioned (face-to-face) networking.
We were required to make linkedin profiles as part of the computer science career preparedness class. I got an internship out of that career day though so it was a win for me
Wait, really? I must be old. I technically have a LinkedIn but haven't really been on the site since the last time I was in the job market 8 yeras ago.
Very occasionally a potential client messages me through it but they are almost very low quality contacts.
Headhunters are trying to be influencers, they have games, news feeds are full of junk or agenda pushing (lots of anti-WFH pieces because the wealthy owners need to keep their commercial property prices up), etc.
I can only recommend it if you are independently wealthy, want to become an ascetic, or more broadly, your goal is to never be hired or really even evaluated for much in the business world again.
None of the rest of the social networks serve as a sanity check on your resume/application/meeting.
It is scary that one platform has so much control over people's lives. If LinkedIn were to ban me for whatever reason tomorrow, finding a job would become virtually impossible.
I could still get a job but it would require more effort. I keep my network updated on what I'm doing and new opportunities, not just jobs, present themselves to me. People who avoid LinkedIn remind of those who scoff at the stock market. Yes, it sucks if you hold it wrong.
I've round linkedin extremely useful recently for finding a new job after being made redundant. It's where the recruiters are, and where the jobs are posted, at least here in the UK. I even paid for a couple of months enhanced membership, or whatever they call it, as a career investment. I'd say its worth the money over the short-term.
As for maintaining an up-to-date profile, I think its worth dialing-down the access unless you're actively looking for a new job.
But the bs that people post to try to get "engagement" makes my head hurt. I'm about to start a new job in a few weeks and it'll be a relief not to have to bother with linkedin again for a few (hopefully many) years.
I know that people here on HN love to dump on LinkedIn. That said, for some industries, it is the primary way to connect with headhunters and future employers. For me, I don't use any of the social aspect. I only post my CV details and wait for headhunters to contact me directly. It works well.
Are there any women (in highly developed countries) under 40 who aren't on some form of social media? I never met any. I think it would be more difficult than men for social reasons.
I have no idea how. But after I quit social media I managed to convince my wife to give it a go. That was 4 years ago. Has linkedin for work, and goes to a couple of sports related subreddits, but that's it.
It's not the miracle you seem to imagine! I deleted my linkedin account at least fifteen years ago now, disgusted by their spammy, underhanded recruitment tactics, and I have never had any trouble finding interesting work.
I understand that some people find it reassuring to receive a constant stream of recruiter inquiries, but from what I hear these messages are mostly low-effort, shotgun-blast attempts to fill undesirable positions, so I don't feel like I am missing out.
The first step in the resume vetting process was looking the applicant up on LinkedIn. If they didn't exist, the resume goes in the bin. I doubt it's that severe still as more and more people move away from having social media (it's been awhile since I've been on either side of job hunt/hiring).
On more than one occasion the direct feedback of why I didn't move further in the hiring process was a lack of internet presence.
But, again, keep in mind this was early 2010s. Social media hadn't had as much time to show the world how poisonous it is.
> I will miss posting stuff like "what is this car" or being part of the car talk for a sporty car I drive but idk kind of want to just live too
I used to waste so much time posting about cars on Reddit. I'd open my computer at 11pm, reply a few times to a single post on Reddit, and before long, I'd see 1:45am on the clock.
Not posting anything has been a massive time saver.
Same, except i reply on the drugs and harm reduction subreddit trying to help kids make decisions that dont destroy their lives. It's really difficult to leave because i remember when i needed those people and sometimes it feels like all the adults left the room and I'm the only one left. Who's gonna help these kids? Seems futile to attempt to stem the tide of gen alpha tiktok brainrot idiocy but sometimes people actually listen to me and their life improves. I've given myself a time that I'll work down to 15 minutes a day to try to consolidate that extra time. Recently I've been using some of my addiction advice on myself to quit reddit
I checked reddit recently for the first time in a while, and I was shocked by how radicalized its become. An echo chamber of hateful people and perhaps GPTs that are agitating the big subreddits. The contrast is stark with all the "no place for hate" in the rules and endless banning of microaggressions.
I saw dozens of death threats. Even an explicit death threat thread with over 40,000 upvotes before reddit stepped in and shut the whole subreddit down.
It reminded me of Ghostbusters 2 with all the aggressively angry people and the ooze pouring out of the sewers, all building upon itself.
Agreed. There is exactly one way to think and believe on Reddit. The "outrage" might be tolerable or even informative in some cases if it was equally distributed.
It's disheartening when the one-track politics infects every square inch. It's a good point about bots because 1) they can be sold or rented to advertisers, 2) they are more valuable with higher karma, and 3) the easiest way to get a bot to harvest karma is by agreeing with the hive. So they're amplifying "the message" without even intending to.
That particular subreddit isn't shut down, it was temporarily suspended as the moderators simply got overwhelmed. There's no indication of bad faith from either the mod team nor the reddit admins, the floodgate was just too much for them to handle. It pretty much says so in the ban message, admins are gonna help them take back control and it will be up within a couple of days.
To be even more precise, here's the message from the source;
> This community has been banned
> This subreddit has been temporarily banned due to a prevalence of violent content. Inciting and glorifying violence or doxing are against Reddit’s platform-wide Rules. It will reopen in 72 hours, during which Reddit will support moderators and provide resources to keep Reddit a healthy place for discussion and debate.
This is just the consequence of the API protests. Despite people claiming it had no lasting impact, admins coming in and making sweeping changes to mod teams replacing them with loyalists, alongside ramping up centralized feeds to serve more ads onto meant content quality took a nosedive. This is obvious in most subs if you actually look at who is submitting the threads (something the app and All/Popular pages hides in several views), most of these subs are dominated by a handful of accounts. It's a cycle too, because often they'll continue spamming subs in order to get on All/Popular, or make up weird stories to do so, effectively karma farming taken very seriously, with mods encouraging it because of the aforementioned loyalists.
It's all just driveby anger and reposts. Maybe some smaller subs with good communities here and there, but that often requires a mod team putting in substantial hours and remaining under the radar from All/Popular in any shape.
Forgot to mention, Reddit also started paying these accounts for posting. So a literal financial incentive to ragebait. It' called the "Contributor Program".
It's wild how bad it has gotten since the election. It's important to remember that free speech does not protect directly inciting violence and it does not protect advocating for the murder of anyone, even a politician. These are generally illegal
So what Reddit has morphed into, is an illegal content factory - there has already been a comment or two about it from the government and the Trump admin is not one that is likely to sit on my sidelines over this.
Whatever your politics may be, I'm just saying this is going to burn Reddit bad.
> It's important to remember that free speech does not protect directly inciting violence and it does not protect advocating for the murder of anyone, even a politician. These are generally illegal
Under US first amendment rights, it's actually sometimes legal.
For example, "Watts v. United States" established that if an anti-draft speaker tells a crowd "If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ" that's political hyperbole.
So if a crowd were to set up a guillotine outside congress and chant "hang mike pence" it's not necessarily illegal.
The only thing not covered by the concept (and law) of freedom of speech with regard to violence are direct, clear incitements to immediately commit violence. E.g. egging someone on to go lynch another person right now is not legal.
Saying “I think this person should be killed” is legally free speech.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but respect of law and norms is being thrown out of the window. That was the old USA and the paradigm is wildly shifting.
I just stick to the niche subreddits (games, interests, whatever). The main subreddits have been especially aggressive echo chambers for a long time now.
I tried that with work. I created an account where I can just follow a few things related to my job. The problem is that reddit will start showing you things you didn't subscribe to. It's a battle to keep them at bay. If you look at my work account feed it's all mycology, bad tattoos, what-is-this-thing. I never subscribed to any of them. Yea, they are interesting but that's not what I wanted or need at work.
Old Reddit still doesn't have any suggested posts. Also, the Reddit API works just fine within limit. It's unusable for scraping but as a single user it works fine.
/r/worldnews is one of the most astroturfed places on the internet. Some of those commenters are so nationalist and bloodthirsty they unnerve me. The ban hammer is extremely active on this sub, and for saying completely innocuous political statements about personal preference. I'm absolutely sure this is broader than just that sub but I've probably heard this specific complaint from probably a dozen other people too.
I will say, the subreddit system does a decent job of quarantining the dysfunction to that sub. The mod quality is everything and the mod drama is an absolute dumpster fire. (Extremely curiously, Ghislaine Maxwell seems to have been one of the most prolific of the mods, and one of her suspected accounts may be one of the most successful (karma-wise) posters of all reddit.) But on the flipside, /r/askhistorians is still one of the best resources on the internet. Many of the specialty subreddits I frequent (Aviation, UkraineRussiaReport, video game subs, several miscellaneous african subs) are still functioning fine.
The concern is understandable, I suppose. It's just a convenient way to see clips from both sides of the conflict, and it's the best source for combat footage clips anywhere. I do have a working brain and can use it to identify when people have a polemic. I prefer it to telegram, which is the alternative. The comments are indeed... uh, very strident in their support for either side. So I'm not sure if it's "propaganda" so much as people regurgitating propaganda at each other at full volume.
Anyway, it's a war. Propaganda is essentially impossible to avoid without ignoring the topic entirely. Still, it's what we have to work with. And to be clear my sympathies lie with the ukrainian people.
Propaganda is big on mixing just enough 'both sides' to lend legitimacy. Again, if I'm remembering correctly this dude was called out on another sub and ended up creating this one specifically to continue his propaganda narrative. There's a lot better subs to work with on Reddit than that sub
/r/UkraineRussiaReport is basically the only forum on the whole site where anything that isn't 100% cheerleading for Ukraine is allowed to be posted. It seems like pro-Russian propaganda only in contrast to the rest of Reddit where the pro-Ukraine bias is actively enforced by the mods. You say the creator was "called out" on other subs which is why he created the alternative. But that just lends legitimacy to the sub, if you're interested in anything approaching an unbiased source of information.
> Wasn't it formed when the mod got called out in a different sub?
Most subreddits gets formed by someone who's tired of the existing subs, gets into one too many arguments with a mod, and thinks they can do better. I don't know anything about these specific subs but I wouldn't see "this guy formed this sub after getting called out by a mod in another sub" as any kind of red flag.
Reddit, by far, is one of the worst echo chambers on the internet. I've seen hundreds of death threats at one political group on there, but if any veiled threat is made against the "reddit approved party" it is instantly removed or accounts suspended. This really peaked during 2020, when open calls for violence stayed up, some with reddit admin approvals.
It used to be a good site, but that was many years ago.
Likely take a break from social media and talk with some real people. Lots of people voted for trump aren’t radical actually none that i know are. I come from a small town in a red state and yes they completely disagree with democrats on pretty much everything but the stuff you read on reddit is so far fetched and extreme I don’t know how anyone would take it seriously.
They believe people hate Americans and everyone should be ashamed traveling overseas. As someone who travels all the time to multiple continents not just Europe i have never encountered anyone who asked or even cared. Most people don’t live in a political bubble where they need to stop being friends with people over politics.
Anyway a lot people are choosing to live in an angry little bubble. It is really sad to see.
> Lots of people voted for trump aren’t radical actually none that i know are.
The same can be said for the supporters of many radical and terrible historical regimes. I'm not radical, I'm simply pushing this radical boulder along, and I can stop it whenever I wan tooo-oops."
No need for histrionics, it's simple: Someone doesn't need to actively desire a terrible outcome to be morally culpable of making bad choices, ones they should-have-known would enable or encourage it to happen. Multiple such people can and do form groups.
It's not limited to politics either, which is how we get idioms like "playing with fire."
Notably, people will also be nearly universally angry at anyone who points out the inevitable consequences of their actions in cases like this. Especially if they know you’re right.
Near as I can tell, the biggest failure of the left (and one that keeps getting repeated) is thinking words/knowledge matter in situations like this.
You realise this works both ways? The average left leaning person doesn't have 700 pronouns and isn't calling for a communist revolution. They're not paid by Soros. They don't have blue hair and have a meltdown at the slightest upset.
The online charicatures are just that. In both directions.
Real talk though: the US, via the current administration, is trashing its international reputation. With tariffs and lashing out at (former?) allies. Or with Musk demanding regime change in the UK, for instance. On a personal level people will still be chill no doubt, but you should be prepared for some negative attitudes towards the US if things continue unabated.
I’ve seen this sequence of events play out before.
In many was ‘go outside’ is dismissive of what many people feel is happening, that to within 15 days of this new presidency. This is a low key way of saying you don’t like people protesting.
While at the same time others are saying people aren’t protesting enough.
If you aren’t ok with all of this, I strongly suggest deleting all social media, including hacker news. Take your advice and go outside. Be good to your neighbors and your mental health.
There is zero space for passive consumption when one of the biggest cultural and economic forces in English speaking Internet land is dismantling itself.
There is going to be very little space for any tolerance of nuance - because Trump is going to continue to escalate. He is going to follow a plan which was known, and it aims at gutting the US, and justifying it with DEI or whatever the cassus belli of the month is.
This is eventually going to result in ‘riots.’
Which will feed the righteousness of the conservatives, which will result in a new round of “well you were so happy when the year started, where are you now.”
It will escalate into attacks on democrats as the devil. And HN will swing from left outrage to right outrage.
At that time the roles will be reversed, and the positions will switch.
Again - If you or anyone reading these comments is tired on Feb 6th - leave the internet right now. This is your tornado / natural disaster warning.
This isn’t meant to be hurtful to you, or to be any defense of anything.
I always assume I am wrong, and I hope I can look back at these comments with embarrassment over what looks like histrionics.
The problem I have is that i deal with social media and online safety as work and as research. Papers on this topic are my fun reading when my brain isn’t fogged up.
This is going to be worse than brexit. And that’s if we are all lucky.
I was asking bankers if there’s any slack in the financial system in November - and I asked this in multiple countries.
The answer was no. So when the trade shocks start hitting the system, expect a downturn.
This is aside from the walking dead syndrome which america will face after gutting multiple systems in-flight.
I was in Europe for a while starting right after 9/11 and there was a lot of shame and no lack of pointed questions. The locals didn’t hate us, but there was a decent amount of “what the hell is wrong with you guys?” It was not uncommon for American travelers to put Canadian flag pins on their backpacks to try to deflect attention or curry favor.
It’s surely ten times worse now. Trump makes W look like a statesman, and we could at least plead that W didn’t win a majority and only became president because the system is stupid.
I think it's more that there is nothing to be gained about asking an American in Europe about Trump. Most likely, they think he's a douchenozzle too so why bring him up and ruin a vacationer's day. On the off chance they are a Trump supporter, now the European has to listen to an idiot spout Newsmax nonsense until they can get away.
> Subreddits like r/pics are packed full of thinly veiled death threats towards the sitting president or Elon Musk.
This is just blatant misinformation. Since r/pics is the only example you've chosen to give us, let's evaluate it: I've scrolled through the current first 50 posts in Hot, and 0 of them are death threats, thinly veiled or otherwise. "Packed full", indeed.
And here, so it isn't simply my word vs. his; these are the current posts:
Protest, "Musk Stole Your Tax Data"
Picture of Nazi being punched after making a Nazi salute
Protest, "The Whole World is Watching"
Painting over values at the FBI
McConnell in a wheelchair
Flag upside down outside State Dept.
Kid covering ears with politician in foreground
"Buy Canadian Instead" sign in CA store
Protest, no visible message, flag with corp logos instead of stars
German anti-fascism protest
UFC fight match post KO [KO'd opponent is a neo-Nazi]
US Marine holding flag in distress position
Protestor, "No kings in America", dressed as Cap. America, mouth taped over
Protest "Nobody voted for Elon"
Protest "Stop Musk's Takeover"
Picture of Trudeau
Protest "Smells like Fascism"
… none of which are death threats. I could scroll all night and not see any examples.
Yeah "packed full" is probably a bit too heavy here. To pick a few examples though:
- The nazi punching thread had several moderated comments ranked near the top which were presumably calls to violence.
- The Mitch McConnal thread has many people looking forward to his death, hoping he goes to hell, and a few deleted comments.
- A musk thread has "eat the rich" and storm the capitol. Not super highly ranked.
I didn't go through all of them but it certainly is a bit odious.
Also note though how there's only 1 non political thread and the remainder are anti trump. This is on a general interest sub and what is likely to be an unremarkable day in the administration!
That helped the issue click into place - NONE of the past 15 days are unremarkable. And again, ITS BEEN 15 Days!
If you stop your thought at just “people are losing their shit”, thats seeing half the world.
I’d say thats disingenuous, because it misses or dismisses the incredibly alarming actions that have precipitated them.
If you genuinely care about it, then you might be interested in knowing why people are responding like this. For example, people generally hate Nazis, and punching Nazis is a popular idea.
DO people expect themselves to be polite when the see a takeover and destruction of their government? “it looks like pre WW2 Germany out there, do pass the salt dear.”
Let me put it another way. Trump is likely to try many outrageous and unexpected things.
As someone who tries to be non partisan, and isn't even american, I am fatigued by all of the claims that the world within the USA is ending. Whenever I take the time to examine any of the claims they tend to be fairly hollow or making slippery slope arguments.
As an international user of reddit, there are many of us I presume, I want the outrage to be saved for Trumps undeniable and worst offenses. In my eyes the memecoin was worse than anything which has happened since he became president and yet it has completely left the collective focus. Everything since then has just been a mix of people allowing trump to dictate the media cycle and the deep state deploying its immune system.
If we review democracies through history that have at some point become less democratic, I think describing the process of how that actually happens as being a slippery slope is quite apt. I’d say it’s more of a fallacy to assume that democracy is a secure default state of being rather than an ideal that we must collectively support or lose entirely—that we can safely “slip” a little without risking a slide further down the slope.
The reason why a slippery slope is a fallacy is that the starting point is an arbitrary threshold. Nothing here indicates the end of democracy to me. To someone looking to find some indication, anything can look like the beginning of the end.
Many of the circumstances being called out as concerning in recent weeks map well to historical examples—the framing of the argument alone doesn’t inherently invalidate it when we have good examples of comparable events (e.g. purge and installation of unqualified loyalists) precipitating critical, difficult to recover from outcomes (democratic backsliding) in other societies. When the stakes are so high, vigilance is rational.
Personally I enjoy slippery slope arguments which is why I didn't use the term fallacy. What I dislike is the reddit framing of having already slipped!
I’m a researcher working at a supposedly prestigious university and I can see homeless people with rotting limbs if I step off my campus and don’t look the other way. Some of my colleagues recently were awarded significant private funds to push a compound for a currently incurable dementia to clinical trials. They attended an instructional conference with other awardees and found that several were not there because they are at the NIH and so are under a gag order and travel ban. I am pretty sure Mitch “McConnal,” who spent his career obstructing any progress on the issues I describe below and who paved the way for current events, is actually dying of either a related dementia or the one they are working on, btw. So, what do you recommend Americans do? Never reveal we might have some anger towards being at the whims of people who would rather die themselves than help others? Don’t get me started on the genius who invented the single-person subway or et al.
You are misattributing American madness to the people it is being inflicted on rather than the instigators. We have oil wells behind our homes and schools and the white picket fence chemists I knew and looked up to as a kid are the reason we all have PFAs in our blood. Our president vacillates between saber-rattling at our closest allies, starting a new war in the Middle East, and causing constitutional crises every other day. We don’t have a single-payer healthcare option like every other developed country and our “social safety nets” are so impacted and difficult to get, they might as well not exist for most people. We do, however, have some very, very profitable oligopolies (some which make very tasty fish sandwiches) and higher income inequality than India or Russia.
There is a reason people are angry and the truth is Musk/trump have gone too far. It's bizarre to say but we are watching the downfall of the USA in real time. The country has been captured by criminals who are working to destroy it–folks are going to be angry about that.
Are you for real? Is this seriously a good faith argument? My man, you may be a true believer, and that is no compliment. Course correct. Try to steelman a bit.
The nazi salute is a fact, the question is where do you draw the line. Is his nazism okay because it's a joke? Not that big a deal for other reasons? I admit it's difficult for me to steelman here because the best arguments I can come up with for him are unconvincing.
If you feel the need to defend the salute I would suggest digging into that.
Merely looking forward to someone’s death is now going too far? I get why overt threats are bad, but that’s getting ridiculous. Public figures are going to get some hate and that’s within the boundaries of what should be acceptable. Are we supposed to pretend there aren’t a bunch of destructive people in power we’d like to see gone?
It feels like everyone forgot Reddit's roots as far as its politics are concerned. Namely, the place was Libertarian Central on the internet until 2015 when it got astroturfed basically overnight to swing the other way. I was there to witness it and the whiplash was something fierce.
Reddit has been basically unusable for anything concerning politics since, and nowadays with politics leaking out into every damn sub possible it definitely has a problem.
It’s not a Reddit thing. I also remember the days when everyone online was a libertarian. But Conservatives then turned to nationalist ideologies that don’t emphasize the free market, that are anti-immigration, and that take a dim view of personal sexual freedom. There are fewer people expressing libertarian points of view all over the shop. There’s a good article about it here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/05/the-individual...
Libertarianism was never my thing, but I get the impression that it's not as popular with people in their teens and twenties now as it was in the 2000s.
The only way to round up the numbers Trump wants to round up at this point is by going to job sites. You may think differently, but I don't think criminal gang members are typically working construction, in meat packing plants or picking crops. They are busy doing...you know, criminal things.
Also, Biden has already addressed the numbers coming across the border [1]. So again, the people who are left are mostly hard working people trying to make a life.
> after this liberals are going to be proud members of the NRA.
I grew up an active NRA member, shooting since I was 6. I have long since disassociated myself with the group but want to make it clear - a lot of liberals have guns and regularly practice using them.
We don't need the NRA (a Putin funded organization) to do that!
I think it's ironic that people are up in arms about random posts on Reddit while many of those same people cheer at pardoning those who attacked the capital and brought actual violence on police officers. Will people letting off steam on Reddit lead to a violent insurrection?
The temperature is so high right now, and it's only continuing to rise because there seems to be zero accountability for what's happening whether it's pardons or Musk running unfettered through government accounts. Unfortunately, it's natural for people to keep escalating when they see no other avenue.
You're missing the point. The real issue is that r/pics, a subreddit that should be about photography enthusiasm, has become so hyperfocused on politics, that it only features posts that are critical of Musk and Trump. As is evident from the list of active topics you posted.
Is r/pics explicitly apolitical? Does it tend to feature current events and is that lineup just proportional to the magnitude of what's happening right now?
> You're missing the point. The real issue is that r/pics, a subreddit that should be about photography enthusiasm, has become so hyperfocused on politics,
No, I'm not. I'm making a statement about a particular claim: that Reddit is overwhelmed with leftist death threats.
I said nothing about r/pics being apolitical, and I'm not taking a stance in this comment chain about whether I think r/pics should or should not be apolitical. That's a different claim, and you're moving the goalposts.
There is a certain point where the calls for calmness come across as "stop making noise about the coup in progress". People should be calling out the people blatantly breaking the law and undermining the foundations of society.
the_donald was very hateful but I wouldn't call them violent. They were a cultish meme sub like /r/Conservative is. They got banned was for brigading not for being violent and hateful.
I would go as far as to say it was a childish meme sub (edit: and cultish, ye). I wonder if it was like that Flat Earth Society started. Once the "Qanon" type of guys turn up the memes become dogma.
I might have a different threshold for hateful on the internets or I didn't look closely enough.
> I checked reddit recently for the first time in a while, and I was shocked by how radicalized its become.
Reddit has always had these elements, but they were previously isolated to certain subreddits.
I noticed the biggest change when the app and website became aggressive about getting people to join other subreddits and inserting posts from other subreddits into people's feeds. Suddenly the isolated subreddits I followed were full of low effort content and angry comments.
Reddit's front page is shockingly bad. The amount of misinformation and ragebait that gets upvoted to the front page is almost hard to believe.
It's also interesting that many subreddits have embraced the ragebait. Subreddits like /r/AITA have been clear about how they don't care if stories are real or not, but legions of Redditors engage with obvious ChatGPT spam as if it was a real situation they need to weigh in on.
I discovered the same recently and have abandoned it. It's unfortunate because the potential is there for a real city wide or nation wide group discussion platform. But who moderates the moderators?
I don’t have too much issue with Reddits politics at the moment, but I do think it’s odd that such a powerful platform in society is managed by volunteer (mostly) anonymous moderators.
I will be explicit in that I am not condoning doxxing Reddit mods. I just don’t think we’d be fine with this in normal day to day life.
Do you know the editors at your local TV stations? The local radio stations? The people who curate the datasets that train the YouTube recommendation model?
Slightly off-topic: Do you know if Spotify (and other music streaming services) are allowed to accept payment to play/recommend songs for users? I am unsure if payola rules in the United States are strictly for radio stations.
They openly allow you to pay to put your songs in playlists, but they're marked as sponsored songs and users can opt out. Supposedly that's them following the rules; there are rumours of shadier deals going on as well, but there always are in the music industry.
Nah, what we are seeing is that they just leave the site, and the site becomes more radicalized overall.
Banning the_donald was the beginning of the end for Reddit, at least as far as balanced discourse went. At that time, the r/all was relatively balanced and you'd see major news stories from both POVs.
Now it's a hysterical echo chamber full of thinly veiled death threats towards the sitting president.
Oh please. Posts from /r/conservative show up in /r/popular all the time, and it remains a hotbed of conspiracy theorists, grifters, and old fashioned racists.
The ratio is what matters. Easily 95%+ of r/all is far-left content, typically with "rage-bait" headlines that fail to expose the nuance of the situation.
This can't be healthy, for two reasons:
(1) The health of the company. As an investor in RDDT, I am not a fan of the site's landing page alienating 50% of Americans right off the bat.
(2) The health of public discourse. We should all be against the creation of echo chambers and weaponization of headlines.
What’s odd is when you read popular Reddit comments, you find the userbase believes that the site is full of pro-Trump bots and shills.
My politics are to the left of the American left, but I’d be crazy to believe that the mountains of the anti-Trump posts are organic & the spoonfuls of pro-Trump posts are paid, especially after an election where Trump won the popular vote.
The English speaking world outside of the US is left of Democrats and generally hates Trump, and not everyone on Reddit is USAmerican. Reddit is going to be left of the US and also not representative of the US.
I have music/noise on all the time, rarely in silence. I play the same playlist/song over and over when focusing. Unfortunately working in an open office it sucks people having conversions (to each other or to computer)
If I don't have music playing, a song will play in my head. Over and over....
I'm always growing my "playlist" though. One room of the house is where I auditioning new music. Another room plays my entire music catalog on shuffle.
They're clearly not talking about their car, let's chill out. They're just saying they're always listening to their own music or (white?) noise, because their open office is noisy from conversations.
It's even possible the places that people then move to (such as HN) also get more radical if the leavers have higher levels of radicalism than the place they join.
> It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something
Probably worth Googling something like [men who don't have social media] to think what women think about this, it's more positive than you might think :)
> It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something
It's not about scoping you out. Asking for your Instagram is like what asking for your number was in the past. It's flirting, it's that they want to get in touch again, set up a date.
If you say "I don't have Instagram", the girl will assume that you don't like her, not that you don't have Instagram.
So just make an empty Instagram (with a normal profile photo) for connecting with people. And say so when sharing it with a girl. If it's somebody who wants to "scope you out", you're already dealing with a person who you don't want to deal with.
> Asking for your Instagram is like what asking for your number was in the past. It's flirting, it's that they want to get in touch again, set up a date.
Personal website is the way to go. Preferably a static site built with a home-made templating engine written in Ruby and running on a non-mainstream budget cloud provider. The chicks dig it man.
> It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something
I actually feel really good when people expect me to be on social media and I tell them Im not.
Kind of similar to the feeling when I say that I quit cigarettes. Im still surprised by it and talking about it makes me feel very blessed to be free of it.
Not sure if you’ve intentionally omitted it but I would also include YouTube in this list. YouTube can be very addictive with all the clickbait thumbnails etc.
haha yeah that's where you inject custom CSS on the page to hide thumbnails, come to YouTube to see something? no thumbnails to distract your original intent
> Not sure if you’ve intentionally omitted it but I would also include YouTube in this list
Yeah I did conciously omit it actually, but only because I consider Youtube to be basic internet infrastructure and quite valuable if used right.
However, for me personally, I've actually blocked Youtube from Chrome when not in incognito mode to keep me signed out by default and I've also completely blocked the site from my iPad (and ofc I also don't have the app installed).
I unfortunately struggle with some form of social media addiction and I've made pretty dramatic changes to keep myself away from these sites.
> I've also developed a keen eye for headlines that lead to "outrage articles" which I avoid.
That's critical. My YouTube rule these days is to block any channel with a video name or thumbnail that says something like "This is why you fail at XYZ" or other statements designed to evoke an emotional response from me. And on top of that, I try to only click on videos where the title/thumbnail is properly informative, exposing the content rather than trying to hide it behind a vague hook. Hooks like "You won't believe this one trick!" and fluff like that, titles/thumbnails that should introduce the trick, not just allude to it.
<< One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together.
Yes. I still have to be at least aware of what is happening for work reasons, but removing social media was one of the better decisions for my sanity ( I stil comment on HN, but the quality of conversations was degrading as well, which in itself is a concern suggesting further digital landscape deterioration ).
I considered some more obvious solutions ( from buying subscription to WSJ/FT to personal news aggregator -- and objective/neutral observer rewrite using LLM and they all are not exactly ideal ).
Here is the good news. All this chaos is an opportunity to stand something useful up. And I mean something useful that cannot be so easily dismantled by powers that be ( and there are already heavy indications they are aware people may try going outside the defined paths ).
> I stil comment on HN, but the quality of conversations was degrading as well
Yeah I agree that many HN comments are unfortunately pretty bad, but I think this should only motivate people like you and me to try harder to make HN a better place with constructive, useful comments :)
Why do you exclude HN from your list? It is literally social media, but with the dial turned down a little. Yet, you don't have to dig to deeply to see flamewars, outrage, and trolling. I mean, look at many of the garbage comments in this very thread that are on par with /.,xchan.
Yes, but it’s the old skool version of social media and the conversations here are generally higher quality and more genuine. I strongly disagree that it’s “on par with /.,xchan”
HN also doesn’t seem to be as susceptible to rage-baiting / outrage-attention-seeking behavior. Not sure exactly what by this is the case but I’d venture a guess it has a lot to do with (1) “dang”s moderation, and (2) not having a personalized algorithm feed.
I’m increasingly of the view that personalized algorithm feeds generated to select the maximum attention grabbing content for each person is a truly dangerous idea.
Frankly, HN is not that engaging (by modern standards). In fact, probably 60-70% of the articles on the front page are boring to me on any given day. I view this as a feature and not a bug. Why should I expect that everything I look at must be maximally engaging?
There is still a lot of taboo subjects and comments you can make on HN, just look through your comment history on all the things downvoted to hell that you still believe are true. Like a good sheep I now refuse to defend anything that will leave me open to this.
A problem with downvoting on many sites (perhaps HN to some extent) is that people seem to just use it as a generic "I don't like this" button or as part of an upvote/downvote war to make sure that their preferred comment "wins."
Not GP, but feel similarly. I'll offer my 2 cents:
> but with the dial turned down a little.
Exactly for this reason. Yes, HN is a social network. And if it follows the same enshittification path as the others, I will be gone from here too.
But until then, to me (YMMV) it still provides a bit of entertainment and news without rotting my brain.
Even the analogy works. Fast food is not that bad... in moderate quantities (/"with the dial turned down a little")
HN remains distinct from Reddit almost entirely due to dang's hard work moderating the site. Spend a few minutes with showdead turned on and you'll see real quick what that site might turn into without effective moderation. The site would be full of politics and flamewars.
I believe a good portion of Reddit could have had been the same. However, the way moderators are chosen-- in other words, whoever creates the sub first gets to rule the roost-- has left that site with almost universally unqualified moderation.
I really would like to know what exactly you consider a "clear difference" between how Usenet and differ conceptually (e.g., ignoring the GUI, the # of users, and mechanics, [e.g., usenet updates diffused around the globe because we didn't have cloud servers]).
"social" implies that relationships between users are a core part of the platform. I can't follow another user or mark them as a "friend" on HN.
HN users put a lot less emphasis on who says something and we focus more on what they say. There are exceptions of course, because we have our own share of renowned experts posting here. But for the most part, people don't take note of what username writes a post.
Ah, thanks. That's a good answer. I was coming at it from the discussion angle only. However, both Usenet and HN don't allow you to friend people, like other social media. I see I accidentally dropped the term HN, which makes my question unclear. I still don't see spiritual difference between HN and Usenet when framed around your response, though.
I'm here to talk about technology and it's usage. I'm not here to socialize, I don't know your name, don't care, and haven't even looked at your username. You're just a sentence to me. It's more impersonal than the old newsgroups. How is it social?
We're literally socializing right now. We're a special interest group meeting to communicate about special interests. The opposite of socialization is isolation. If you hadn't posted, you wouldn't be socializing, but here we are, socializing.
I learned much from just scrolling HN. Technical articles help me know the latest updates in various areas, dive deep into a topic, or develop new skills. I applied quite a few things I learned in my job. Fundamentally, most links on HN are articles, many of which are quite long, which tend to be more focused and informative.
Completely non-technical ones are few, and you can always choose to ignore them.
The feed is also non-personalized. It's not going to show a few more article on politics just because you linked on one.
By comparison, reddit is much, much worse, almost the opposite of HN. Just a bit better than Twitter, maybe. Most of my reddit browsing/participation falls into tech/hobby, yet I always find that spend more time than I'd like on meaningless stuff, and reddit keeps pushing/promoting political content (even in the context of technology).
My solution? Don't browse reddit unless I really need to for some reason (or if I really don't have anything else to do at that time).
For better or worse, news flows through social media, so this approach basically amounts to ignoring all the bad stuff going on. If you read HN, chances are you can probably safely get through the next four years doing this. But as the saying goes, "first they came for the communists..."
I find that just muting anyone who has anything to do with politics on facebook works well for me. I go on facebook to see your cutesy images and how your life is going not for long political diatribes.
For some short time, that worked for me, until facebook noticed that I was spending less time on it. Then, they started to push posts from other politics-related accounts (especially from ones at the side of the spectrum I used to antagonize most with). That was 4 years ago. I left that crap and didn't look back.
If you decide not to totally quit a network, do what I do:
1. Turn off all notifications, especially for replies, likes, and content suggestions.
2. Train yourself not to look for feedback on the things you do post as a matter of habit. Intentionally check on the important discussions IFF you _remember_ to do so.
3. If possible, hide or remove any karma-like indications. Your life is better if the internet points aren't visible.
I did the same. I have some exceptions for technical topics on Reddit. I also still use Facebook in a very drilled down state (looking into it every 3-5 months and checking in with some remote friends). I have also set up my own Mastodon server, which is fine for niche topics and I can reach out to interesting people directly, where other channels fail (email). I heavily rely on RSS, particularly from people that I trust or who gained my trust over longer periods.
Depends how you use it. Once there were groups, it became quite similar - but since Telegram became so much better at it and I used it for some special groups and contacts - I now suddenly had lots of groups with subgroups and notifications for people liking my posts or replying to it - that suddenly I had social media again. What works for me is uninstalling it once in a while and only come back if I feel a specific need.
I basically agree, which is why it's kind of funny to see all the discussion in other threads here with people arguing about why can't ban AI or how Facebook was good because it created market value or whatever. Most of those platforms would be better off just outright banned.
I do think, though, that for at least some platforms it's possible to use them in a limited way where you confine yourself to relatively small communities that are focused on some common interest that genuinely brings together people who enjoy sharing it. You mentioned Discord for instance and that's one, if you can find the right servers. I think it's possible to do that on Reddit too. You just have to never visit the "front page" and stick only to subreddits that you actually get value out of. It's harder approaching impossible with ones like Facebook that are more doggedly algorithm-driven and don't put moderation in the control of users in the same way.
Of course, the lurking issue is that putting moderation in the control of users is building the platform on free labor and those good subcommunities are at risk of imploding when cracks emerge in the dike separating them from the wider platform userbase. And that's likely to happen because even those "safely usable" platforms are ultimately beholden to VC money that's going to demand enshittification eventually.
Cohost was by far the best attempt I've seen for many years, but sadly couldn't make a go of it in the toxic ecosystem we've got.
> Most of those platforms would be better off just outright banned.
In general, the goal should be improvement of humans, not avoidance of negative stimuli. Something has to exist where humans are rewarded for aligning to truth and reality, rather than emotion.
> Something has to exist where humans are rewarded for aligning to truth and reality, rather than emotion.
I more or less agree. Thus the humans who created and enshittified such platforms should be correspondingly punished for their disalignment to truth and reality. It's not just about rewarding "consumers" of stimuli; the creators and promulgators of stumili also need to be incentivized (and disincentivized) in just the manner you mention.
My take is almost the opposite, that it's important to develop healthy social networking insofar as there is some alternative to the outrage. It takes effort though.
both of these are 'cyborg' accounts in that I have my RSS reader, classifier and autoposter. I am looking to build a lot more automation.
My Mastodon feed took a large set of rules to block out #uspol and certain communities of miserable people. My feed has stayed outrage-free since last month.
My measurements showed that Bluesky's 'Discover' feed blocked about 75% of emotionally negative material before Jan 20, since then people are inflamed but looking closely at my feed it seems they are deliberately trying to help certain people who felt stuck on X to migrate, that is, giving huge amounts of visibility to journalists, journalism professors, activists, and such so that they can run up 200k+ follower counts.
I understand. (I've been brainstorming ideas about "how to get people off X" with a friend and tonight I'm going to tell him that Bluesky has it) I've used "less like this", "unfollow" [1], "mute", "block" and such and my discover feed is getting good again.
I have two classifiers in the development pipeline, one to detect "screenshots of text" and "image memes", also a text classifier that is better at sentiment than my current one (I think ModernBERT + LSTM should be possible to train reliably, unlike fine-tuned BERTs.) I'm not so much interested in classifying posts as I am in classifying people; some of them are easy, there are 40,000 people who have a certain image meme pinned that I know I never want to follow. Just recently I figured out how to make training sets for these things without having to look too closely at a lot of toxic content.
I'm also eliminating the dependencies that are keeping this from being open sourced or commercialized so I may I have something to share this summer.
What I did was unfollow everyone and everything, and block all suggested content. The front page is literally empty. Nothing on those websites captures my attention unless I specifically look for it.
This was very effective. These websites have effectively become write-only media for me. They're still here if I need them, but I end up browsing just one page of /r/curatedtumblr and then doing something else.
Yeah it sure is nice this way isn’t it! It’s pretty boring, but you get to form your own opinions about things, and aren’t constantly mad about things that don’t affect you. I’ll admit to scrolling HN a lot, but I at least get a lot of very useful info out of it, it has leveled me up in unexpected ways over the years.
Thanks for your comment. Same here, Gen X. Off social media since pandemic. As Nassim Taleb says if it's really important someone will tell you. I feel like I'm on an island. I'm never outraged at all. Of course I hope there's more justice and equity in the world, but I am at peace with things and have no hatred or rage compared to when I was glued to social media.
Completely agree. Sounds like we're similarly on the older end of Gen Z, and getting off social media in my first year of college was excellent. I get messages in my group chats from friends being pissed off (often rightfully) by things that our out of their control, but they're force-fed it on social media.
It doesn't help to stare at rage/anxiety inducing things - it doesn't mean you're actually informed all the time.
Plus I'd argue that most things you'll see end up being hogwash and the important stuff will rise to the top and you're generally hear about it anyway.
I think that the social media is okay as long as no algorithmic feed gets involved. Visiting a few select tech subreddits doesn't affect me negatively. On other platforms the feed can't be avoided as easily.
digital junk food. I haven't stumbled across this term and I gotta say as someone whose right on the edge between millenial and genz this term summarizes what most "public" social media is.
I'm old enough to have grown up mostly with TV, with Internet being my escape hatch and twitter/facebook/tiktok/insta feel waaaay closer to old schoold programming TV than Internet.
Anyway I'm an Internet person, not a TV person, so I've quit using all of them (I do have some "just in case" unused in years accounts everywhere because I suffer from a bad case of FOMO...)
Isn’t this how they win? I mean the people in Germany in 1930 just said , this is crazy , it doesn’t feel right, but hey I have outrage fatigue so the concentration camps are just fine
Early 30s, sure. Late 30s and 40s? You should qualify your statement with “this is a heated historical debate, but some people argue that…” Keep in mind the significant incentives to not seek out information, to disbelieve the information one did come across, and to lie after the war was over.
One of my neighbors when I grew up was part of Hitler Youth, and had moved to the US after the war. (for time context, I'm in my mid 30s, and he died a decade ago at IIRC 95 or 96, and I asked him about it maybe 20 years ago.)
I asked him if he and his fellow youths knew of anything. He said at first, no, but pretty quickly when all the jewish-owned businesses vanished almost overnight, everyone knew something was up. Did they know about the camps? Debatable. But even the kids knew that they jewish population was kicked out of society.
Laughably false, camps like Dachau were on newspapers and newsreels. Almost every Germans were aware that they were rounding up Jews and murdering them in camps.
You can get just as outraged by diving deep into official government PDFs and finding out by yourself from the source what they are doing.
Sticking your head in the sand is of course a "solution", but that is willfully choosing to be nothing more than a subject to the rulers.
Another solution is to limit your news intake and your political passion to the things that have the most real implications on your life and on the people you care about, while limiting your own exposure and vulnerability to governments as much as possible.
I really hate this one in particular. Why did the biggest Job board become another Facebook (but more blatantly trying to sell you stuff)? This is a hard one to leave unless you're very comfortable in your job prospects.
I think Minimum Effective Dose applies. I quit most media for 4 years. The next 2 years were 2 hrs/day on Reddit for jokes. It was the best.
But 1 year into that, I read an article by Swyx on how to use social media. I tried but gave up for another 2 years. But the end of that last 2 years was the election...and I was curious...so I went to X.
Within 3 days my opinion of the outcome flipped.
And...since I already read Swyx's article, I was ready to effectively navigate other topics of interest.
But the key to effective media usage is to ALWAYS be on guard. Your mental filters have to be running all the time. The second you drop your guard, you're vulnerable because the stream never lets up.
But when you do this, you find that you quickly run out of truly interesting things to read. Luckily I've also got physical hobbies. I now spend a TOTAL of 2 hrs/day across all media, and my mental health is just fine!
But also I find it highly rewarding in many areas such as investing, history (the X format works so well!), international (language, culture, politics).
I also highly recommend taking a second to put each post in scale or context. This does 2 things: helps decide importance of post, and slows scrolling so your brain doesn't get DDOSed into a mental health crisis.
And the (increasingly cheap, powerful and ubiquitous) LLMs can be used to either save time or power you further into the conversations.
I have tried to quit social media many times, but I end up using something again after a few weeks. It usually happens when I'm too tired to think about anything like games, or to read an article, or when I have a lot of waiting time without a lot of entertainment (eg airports). I wonder what do you do during those times?
Just want to add that, while Reddit is a huge time sink, it is pretty easy to just see the good parts of it:
- Mute any subreddit you do not enjoy
- Generously block any asshole in the comments
- Subscribe to the subreddits you do enjoy
- Create one or more themed multireddits of the subreddits you enjoy
My Reddit experience is cheesy feel good clips, cool videos of skilled people or weird occurences, funny niche humor and nerdy niche hobbies. No drama.
Good on you. I have been pushing the idea of leaving social media to people for well over a decade now, for the same of people learning to communicate with each other in more meaningful ways and improve their mental health. It worked for me and everyone that actually listened to me.
But the emotionally violent resistance I get from people who are embedded in it is wild. I've commented on here before and subsequently pissed people off, but it is an addiction and needs to be treated like one.
Unironically, my friends, family and colleagues. If anything truly important happens that ends up being relevant to me, the probability that one of them tells me is close to 100%. I don’t need the news or social media for that.
> One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together.
This is hard to overstate. Checkout Jonathan Haidts research into social medias role in skyrocketing mental health problems in kids over the past decade.
The junkfood comparison is great. It feels good now but makes you extremely unhealthy long term. Its deceptive because it doesnt look that bad, but it displaces things that you actually need to be healthy.
I love that guy! He generally makes the rounds as a guest on most of the large podcasts and I’d recommend anyone listen to at least one podcast where he’s a guest.
I hope he becomes more influential. He is the tip of the spear in terms of combating the negative effects of social media and improving youth mental health.
In my personal experience from X, Facebook, Reddit and HN:
The place with the worst takes, most rage inducing, most filled with conspiracy theories, falsehoods and misinformation is HN.
Just be aware than while HN appears to carry a wide range of interesting topics and discussions both the community and mods do have biases. It presents an incomplete and skewed perspective and has to be consumed in moderation as part of a balanced diet.
A lot of submissions are flagged every day. Some of them are well offtopic, repetitive or judged to be too biased or political and clearly if the site allowed all submissions it would break.
The act of curation is a form of censorship and while it is often justified, many posts about topical developments that have a technical/financial angle, perhaps even posted by technical/financial media or bloggers and featuring people who are well known in the technical/financial field appear to be getting flagged in ways that could appear to be politically motivated.
Pointless outrage over trivialities isn't good for us but when issues of genuine concern arise we shouldn't go out of our way to avoid them because they make us feel bad. We are supposed to feel bad when things are bad as it provokes us to action. The media/tech industry exploits our behavioral quirks to keep us engaged on their platforms but the fatique caused by the fire hose could numb us to real dangers. Disconnecting is very good for personal wellbeing but not to the point of dangerous ignorance.
Yes. However I occasionally hop on LinkedIn for its job board, YouTube to watch a tutorial or Reddit when I’ve made something that I wanna share like a project or a meme. Other than that, I avoid these sites like the absolute plague. I virtually never browse them for fun.
I can recommend https://newsasfacts.com for at least having a news source that, thanks to its matter-of-fact tone and lack of imagery, is useful for staying informed without getting overwhelmed so easily.
It also puts things into a bit of a global perspective, when you realize how much stuff is going on around the world all the time. Though this of course also means you'll learn things that are on the news everywhere in your country only after they've become relevant enough to register on a global level.
A little weird to see the Bitcoin price listed top-and-center, when it is a hype-driven security. Watching the market, especially crypto markets in real-time is also quite stressful. I don't see the point of having it listed first, before the news...
There usually are links to the news articles and the corresponding Wikipedia articles. (Though sometimes it's redirected me to some nirvana-page that just shows '[object Object]', not sure what that's about.)
I assume you have a subscription? Does that let you turn on or off different topics? I am not interested in the large amount of space devoted to armed conflicts globally, for example.
Propagandists are now going to tell you to ignore what you're hearing and seeing. Just put the news away and relax! The same people spent the last four years telling you to be outraged about things that never happened. A man won the women's boxing at the olympics! Outrage!
Prior to social media, we all had incredibly conflicting views, just wasn't in our faces all the time to get outraged about! So the trick is to remember, by having these discussions/disagreements, we're actually making progress. We hear the loudest voices, but there's always smart and sincere people quietly reading and learning, which is a brilliant outcome!
If you find yourself getting outraged, be disciplined and switch activities (exercise, go for a walk, or turn off the source).
I definitely wouldn't leave social media though! Instead, harness them! Train those algos to give you science, book clubs, fascinating music niches, travel, culture - go deep, explore, and 'follow' liberally - you can very easily remove yourself from a group/page. I've found insanely interesting chemistry and physics pages, not to mention domains I never even knew existed, like color theory and a handful of others. Once you start clicking on politics, you'll only get more of it. Click on the good stuff!
> I definitely wouldn't leave social media though! Instead, harness them! Train those algos to give you science, book clubs, fascinating music niches, travel, culture - go deep, explore, and 'follow' liberally - you can very easily remove yourself from a group/page. I've found insanely interesting chemistry and physics pages, not to mention domains I never even knew existed, like color theory and a handful of others. Once you start clicking on politics, you'll only get more of it. Click on the good stuff!
Sorry, but that last paragraph sounds like AI generated Meta PR.
Ha, fair! 'Sounding like an LLM' might be the ~2025 equivalent of being called an NPC. But it could also imply good grammar.
To put it another way, ditching a medium entirely is the incorrect strategy; akin to refusing to read books just because there's many bad ones - obviously, instead, we select the good ones and read those. Same goes for social media pages/groups/profiles
Well, this "semi-noob" has only been here since 2007. I can see it for what it is. People simply aren't free to speak their minds here any longer due to hivemind bubble. If you think trying to point out a serious issue is "sneering", well, you're just proving my point. People simply can't bare to hear dissenting opinions any longer, and won't due to downvoting anything that impinges on their own sense of cognitive dissonance. This post's topic was "outrage fatigue". I am on topic with my original assertion.
After November I totally stopped looking at any and all news and social media with the exception of HN. My reasoning being that you are not actually getting informed by any of those sources. They are geared towards engagement which makes them entertainment. Also, I have absolutely no power to change anything happening right now so knowing about it is just going to make me upset. It's a lose lose IMO. A lot of folks have gotten upset with me about this which I find a bit baffling. Like, what does knowing every minute detail do for me?
The net effect of my news/social media fast has been fairly dramatic. I suddenly have an attention span again. When a persons opinion differs from mine, I generally don't immediately assume they are part of the third reich (although if they keep talking a while I might get there lol).
To be clear I absolutely despise whats happening in the US right now. Enough information makes it to me through friends and family (and HN) that I feel a deep sense of despair. I am just not sure what minute by minute updates on the fuckery happening right now gets me.
I think I did something similar. I decided to severely control my information diet after November and switch to only RSS feeds that I have selected manually and HN. It’s gone better than I expected and I feel very little urge to go back.
At the same time, I’m definitely less informed. Though I’m quite surprised how much still permeates despite me not “going looking”.
Generally, I think it’s more healthy to focus on what you can control and what you have agency over. You can choose what to be outraged over national/global events (and do nothing) or you can instead focus that energy on Doing Something closer to home that’s important to you. Which is the better trade?
I’m somewhat conflicted on being less informed esp with big changes happening. And even more conflicted about what kind of world we’d have if everyone chose this strategy. But, it’s not unprincipled. The principle is Focus on What You Can Control/Do and put all your energy into that.
Well said. Something that occurred to me after writing the parent comment is that this is also an act of protest. Really the only one at my disposal. By depriving these news outlets of my eyeballs I am no longer participating in the incentive structure that created them. Furthermore, our current president is a well-known attention seeker who doesn't care what you think as long as it's about him. The biggest middle finger I can give that asshole is my total lack of interest or attention in anything he's doing.
While limiting your exposure to "outrage" isn't bad advice, it's just more of the ignoring of the issues that she herself calls out in the beginning of the article.
She mentions that people are using "outrage" issues (abortion, gay rights, critical race theory) "as kind of wedge issues to convince people to vote in ways that might be against their own self-interest"...
GREAT! We need more tips on how to train yourself to recognize when that's happening and not get outraged. It boils down to emotional control. If politicians can't use outrage as a tool of control then they'll have to move on (to something better hopefully, but probably not ;).
Here's one tip. If Trump enrages you every time you see him, watch him in a way that allows you to appreciate something about him! He is a cool cucumber. He sheds attacks like water off an umbrella. (whatever, you come up something)... Remember, the goal here is to not let him control your emotions. This isn't about the facts or morality or how he "lies".
If you're outraged by anything that does not directly impact your life you're doing life wrong. We all have limited time and energy. I have never been able to understand people who get emotional over things they read online that have no impact on their day to day life.
Assuming this is not a joke, do whatever makes you feel best knowing that you as an individual have negligible impact on the outcome. Personally I don't worry one bit about these two issues because (1) they do not seem to effect my daily life except when I need to drink through a crappy cardboard straw (2) I do not expect them to impact my daily life in the foreseeable future (3) most important I as an individual can not change the way things are and I find I am happiest when I don't worry about things I can't control so I choose not to worry and some how despite my indolent individual choice the world goes on and the sky doesn't fall. (4) I personally believe the harms of these two things have been greatly exaggerated by people with an interest in doing so. (5) my time on earth is limited why waste it being manipulated by words and pictures I see on a screen to be pointlessly anxious or outraged for someone else's benefit at the cost of my own happiness?
It's not pointless at all- it's the core idea behind Stoic philosophy aka "the dichotomy of control," and has proven very effective at improving people's mental health through modern therapy methods like CBT and ACT.
One can still do everything in their power to prepare for, and mitigate things outside their control, while still keeping in mind what is in your control and isn't so you don't become emotionally dependent on outcomes outside your control, which is ruinous for mental health.
Having empathy, and caring about doing the right thing actually work better when you stop obsessing over and wasting all of your energy on things you cannot control.
Of course you do, that's the whole point: to focus on what you actually can control- your own actions, which absolutely includes using your own ingenuity and effort to influence things for the better.
> I have never been able to understand people who get emotional over things they read online that have no impact on their day to day life.
Maybe they have more empathy for the plight of others?
Also, it is often the case that the events of today which don't directly affect you, if not stopped, will affect you before you know it, at which point it is too late to do anything about.
It will not lessen your outrage, but I recently built a news search engine that pulls from 200 selected sources for a more limited, spam-free experience.
https://mozberg.com
Saying "just quit social media" or something doesn't work. You have to have the mindset that you cannot control what happens in the vast majority of news stories. If the federal government does something I don't like, it's not worth my time to be angry and let it linger in my head for the day, which only hurts me. Outrage seems to come from a lack of control over a situation.
Shift your focus to things you can possibly control, e.g. the news that's happening in your local community where you have a say in how things are done.
Been there, done that. I've tried to stay informed but not outraged for the last 8 years and it didn't make a damn bit of difference. I got involved in local issues, I phone banked, I tried to put my money where it would do the most good.
I'm out. I'm hiding away and hoping nothing affects me personally, and if it does I'm not going to think there's anything I could have done about it.
We're not in control anymore. Not unless there are any tech billionaires lurking on HN, and they don't give a shit about us.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 534 ms ] threadFocus on you. What are you doing today? What do you need to reflect on from yesterday? What do you need to plan for tomorrow? Don't waste cycles on things that are out of your scope.
Most countries have rights to protest, organise, strike, for a reason. Most of these rights were gained after long fights in which single individual was meaningless but together they moved contains. You have to know when to pull back but you also have to know when to dive in
If it only was so simple. How to define such things? Case in point: the biggest "outrage factor" seems to be politics. Well - _can_ you control your country's government? Yes, you can - however not directly. And this means that "I don't care about politics" stance is bad.
edit: spelling
I'm not saying you shouldn't care about politics at all. But politics in a country you're not a citizen of are irrelevant. And politics in your own country only really matter when it's time to vote, right? So what's the value in "staying informed" outside of that narrow window?
Not really, since by the time you get to vote, it might, for example, so happen that there are no real opposition candidates, because they are effectively blocked from running. Or the opposition is there, but is locked out from all the usual mass propaganda outlets (TV etc).
>es, you can - however not directly. And this means that "I don't care about politics" stance is bad.
Though you might not be aware of it, you're repeating propaganda that actually aids some nebulous group of people. It seeks to recruit me and my efforts to further their purposes, none of which overlap my own significantly. I can't exert significant indirect influence either. And if I were to pool my insignificant influence with others (such as you suggest) to influence government, it would almost certainly be towards ends I do not agree with. I can be used by others, so to speak, but no one's on my side.
I might get to watch one group I don't agree with go killdozer on another group I don't agree with, and it will be entertaining to watch supposing I can maintain enough distance from the carnage.
More than that though. You can protest and organize however much you like. There’s no cap on that.
And that is how insidious “news” is. The news broadcasts the hegemonic mindset. The same mindset that says that citizens’ only role is to vote every few years. Other than that they are supposed to stay home. Certainly not make a ruckus or anything.
And that’s what many conclude. That they are only supposed to be political in a direct, consequential sense by voting. Then it is clearly absurd, from a cost-benefit analysis standpoint, to stay ever-constantly informed on politics all the time.
The news just made me sad, sad and angry most of the time, it's just a stream of 24/7 misery and if there's not enough misery going on locally the news will find misery from around the world to fill the run time.
Emotion is something you feel, not something you decide to allow yourself to feel.
Like, if I hear about someone being raped or murdered, how am I not going to have an emotional reaction of sadness or anger to that? And ultimately what use was that emotion? I cannot prevent the event happening, it has already happened, I am just a voyeur to someone else's tragedy.
Most of the news is like that. It's events that have already happened, that I can do nothing about but I'm vaguely meant to be up to date with because.... reasons? Some vague concept that everyone is meant to have an inch deep understanding of current events so they've got something to gossip about?
I truly don't see the point or the benefit.
Recognizing your emotions when you are making a decision is key. The emotions you feel will largely be outside your control but you can catch a thought you disagree with when you have it and wonder what triggered that thought. If the trigger was an emotion, you can wonder what triggered the emotion. Ask "five whys" (google it if you don't know what I mean). You have more control over this than you seem to think; you will just have to practice exercising it.
It’s really entitled (by whom? who knows) to say that people have control over their inner lives as a response to the News being misery-inducing (according to them). Yeah. So turn it off. You don’t own the outside world your attention.
Current top stories on the CNN frontpage are:
> Trump's effort to end birthright citizenship is blocked nationwide
> Trump’s Gaza plan is the most outlandish in region’s peacemaking history
> China is building a giant laser to generate the energy of the stars, satellite images appear to show
Is your child not a citizen? Are you child's vaccines related to Gaza, somehow? Will China's laser affect your wife's pregnancy?
Why do you feel the need to engage with this?
Stressing over things you can't/won't impact is largely a waste of time and energy. Your worry wont help Gaza.
I didn't say "never worry about anything ever".
So it's not really that simple is it?
Depending on where you live, there’s 2-10 parties. You know who they are and what they want. If you want to affect the outcome you can get involved in your local politics; being glued to NYT.com all day isn’t changing one thing except wasting time.
Not at all, I think citizens have an obligation to vote, and an obligation to do their research when it's time to vote. But let's say that takes you a week. Why bother being focused on the outrage during the rest of the term? What value is there to you being mad at whatever politician on week 15 of their 208 week term? If anything, I'd say "staying informed" is a hinderance, because you'll always just be focused on the issue-of-the-day and build mental biases rather than being able to take a wider view of what the politician implemented, and how it played out over a period of time afterwards.
Whether you're influenced by facts or "propaganda" unfortunately depends entirely on your own research and critical thinking skills, and has little to do with timing.
Perhaps another strategy could be to maintain an awareness of the motivations and tactics of publishers/content creators, and that could be enough as an inoculation.
I imagine a clown on the street trying to enrage me, and I being aware of what it's trying to do, instead just laugh at it.
Today I walked into a restaurant with a cable TV news channel blaring on about the "invasion of men" into women's college sports. They offered no proof, just a continuous barrage of commentary. As I waited for my sandwich I watched one after another, with just continuous outrage. No proof, no on-site reporters, no B tape, nothing at all to support the claims being made. It was like watching bad science fiction of an alternate universe. I chuckled nervously as I looked around and wondered if the others there actually believed it. None of them were laughing.
Must be nice for the current American administration to have 4 years of no democratic oversight to do whatever they want.
When you finally decide to pay attention, there is a chance that you will not be able to easily absorb everything that leads to the situation so you will lack any perspective of the past events.
We live in an extremely dense and complex times, staying informed is very difficult as it is even when you try to pay attention.
> It's meant to exhaust you.
* https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1886247034664964548
Ezra Klein:
> That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him. […]
> What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
( - Stewart Lee's taxi driver, over a decade ago. )
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/10/texas-ut-lecturer-ar...
[2] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240425-more-than-100...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-us...
[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index
Platforms have realized this long ago, that as info explodes people pay attention to the easiest things to pay attention too not the hardest, so they move resources to designing things like reels and shorts and tweets etc etc. Every earnings call they gloat about how shorter form content is exploding and how thrilled they are about it.
The long form stuff only holds attention of the majority if you keep throwing Novelty on the table every two sentences.
Platforms are basically running an animal domestication program, where people have been rewarded with high rep and status for extremely low cognitive work.
So that entire group that has benefited doesn't see any need for nuance and depth in anything. "Cause look how many likes, clicks, views and followers I have accumulated without it"
Most articles I come across have a very fiery headline, then you dig in to the article and the facts are different, and/or the sources are dubious, and/or there's historical precedent for the thing that makes it not seem so strange this time, and/or the article doesn't dive deeply enough in to the details, etc.
Political biases and current events aside, it all sucks! It's so annoying that I have to do the legwork of reading through the article carefully and following through in factchecking outside of the article to get the meat of it out, and after all that, it feels like no one else does the same.
(this is a response to the comment, not the article)
Also, I am impacted by legal system, by lawlessness for some, by environment pollution, by Healthcare system ...
Simplest way is to read media from independent country. India is good, perhaps Arabic countries.
Next level are independent channels on Telegram and Youtube. 10 min daily summary on war situation goes very long way.
It's interesting that you listed India first. The English-language news source that pops up most often via Google News is the Hindustan Times, which is hot garbage. Are there any Indian sources that are much, much better than that which you recommend?
Hindustan times seems like a rag, like British Sun.
I guess I would recommend to take some event that happened 2 years ago, find how some papers wrote about it back then, and if you like it, follow them.
My point is there is no reason to stay in toxic relationship. There is no reason to read news if you do not get any rewards. Even monthly AI summaries will be better, and you will stay "informed".
For example all the Trump shit today, he wants legal precedents from constitutional court, 90% of this shit is irrelevant.
Instead of engaging in the data, opponents usually yell the equivalent of what you put “You’re just out of touch!” Or throw in an anecdote like “well my cousin is having a terrible time!”.
What’s going on the US is weirder than a “normal” economic problem. That’s what makes it so frustrating and politically polarizing.
Here's an old quote from the author, the esteemable Paul Krugman
“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
What Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization https://archive.md/DrJKm
If you stick up a liquor and kill a couple of people you go to jail for life. If you advocate for polices that destroy the local economies of middle America with all the ills that ensue...social breakdown, drug addiction/overdoses, crime etc. Well you get to write a mea culpa and then head off to a nice dinner at your favorite NY restaurant I guess.
I find it telling that instead of arguing with data, points presented, or any source of counter argument, you act like the only argument in this article is “it’s right because I say so.”
Much easier to dismiss a position as “can’t be right because you were wrong on something before” than actually think I guess.
Here’s the same jist from the economist: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/10/17/americas-econom...
If you want the thoughtful, smart, very right wing source on it, then check out the Cato institute: https://www.cato.org/commentary/americans-grim-views-decent-.... Which tries to explain it as basically “people get really mad about inflation even if technically as a whole they are better off”. But the Cato economists still concede that overall the economy is/was doing extremely well and things are improving for people that by standard economic measures looks really good.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/11/democrats-...
1. This is literally a worse outcome than the alternative you prefer. You should care enough to try to fight it politically, especially if you are well positioned to do so.
2. This case (and 99% of cases of political outrage I see on the news) is trivial in the context of what is “normal” for human political history, even the political history that many people alive today were around for.
Will this even register as a trivia question in 100 years? Is a framing I ask myself when I’m mad about something in the world.
I think a lot of people walked from a world where they had no idea what the normal tumult of human political society is like, even normal American political messiness, and into the world of 24/7 current political news without any context what came before. It’s like, the sausage has always been made this way, you’re just now finding out.
I say these things and it always pisses people off. But I don’t recommend not caring, the world moves forward one micrometer at a time by caring, it’s just not worth the existential angst I see so often.
>Will this even register as a trivia question in 100 years? Is a framing I ask myself when I’m mad about something in the world.
To me, this is an utterly nihilistic framing that renders one's entire life meaningless because the logic doesn't just apply to bad things. Like why did you even leave this comment? Maybe you or I remember for a little while. Maybe a handful of other people who read it will too. But no one is going to remember it, let alone genuinely care about what either of us said 100 years from now.
I don’t connect distant political to my own personal experience of meaning in the world, so i can’t follow this line of reasoning.
The primary difference I see between these two is how you define "your immediate experience". At what distance does something become "distant political changes" that can be ignored? Because almost all of us lead "par for humanity" lives that "don’t matter in the long run" so why care about any of it if that is the extent of what matters?
Caring should not be binary. If in your life, caring about things is all or nothing, and a political event that is extremely common and minor in the context of political history feels as acute as the death of a loved one, then I’m really sorry for you. The world will always be a miserable place for you.
Do you not realize that you are judging what "decisions affect him" exclusively from your own perspective? You clearly have some established distance in your mind in which you think someone's suffering is immaterial to you. You seem to imply that this reaction might be appropriate for a partner dying, but what about for other people? Would it be appropriate to be depressed because of a friend's suffering? What about a distant cousin? A neighbor? A coworker? An acquaintance? What about the parent of one of your kid's friends who you haven't even met before?
You don't seem to actually be objecting to the reaction your friend is having, you seem to be reacting that your friend just has a larger circle of people he empathizes with than you and therefore more people have the potential to "affect him".
My family could be murdered in front of me and it wouldn't qualify as a trivia question for you or most other people in one year. This feels like a version of stoicism that missed the point of stoicism.
99% of what you see on the news you would never know happened if it wasn’t presented to you.
And I’m not saying not to care. I’m saying put big things into perspective. You don’t need to become catatonically depressed because the US changed its foreign aid in a way that you would never know about unless presented to you.
As I write this I’m thinking about one of my best friends, who literally has been so depressed because of world news he reads on Reddit this year that he can’t get out of bed, stopped going to work and got fired. There are appropriate and healthy levels to care about things.
> 99% of what you see on the news you would never know happened if it wasn’t presented to you.
What I'm hearing is that if the government kills someone, only their immediate family members are allowed to protest. We shouldn't protest when the government is killing people who aren't related to us, even if our relatives could be next.
That sounds like a nightmare existence to me. But if you really want it, maybe because it makes you feel righteous in your pain and holy in your angst, then go for it I guess.
Here in the UK in 2016 we had a referendum to leave the EU, which is a pooled sovereignty union to create a more integrated Europe.
I raised the same questions to those who wanted to leave the EU, who complained about "diktats from Brussels" as if pooling sovereignty meant we now had dictators instead of elected officials.
My questions were about how their daily lives were impacted by these "diktats". 99% of people avoided the question. For them, it wasn't about any practical reality. They just wanted to vote to leave the EU. The reasons for it seemed to be post-hoc justifications of an emotionally made decision.
I guess it is like that for most people.
Maybe try asking people why they think it’s bad?
Here’s people arguing it’s doing all kinds of destructive behavior, - like setting up a fake vaccine clinic for the CIA.
https://youtu.be/wtgT_u2rWs0?si=bFX476_JgC81vJuM
I haven’t seen anyone arguing against these claims. They just say “oh but it’s helping poor people” without answering whether or not it’s been doing covert work for the CIA under the pretense that it’s aid.
Al though the current US admin is just bringing in USAID within the admin controls, USAID is massive net negative (as it is with any other american influence/aid) for the world.
If you are trans, you were just de-personed by executive order and your passport was invalidated. If you also happened to be an incarcerated female, you are being transferred to male facilities. These are actions which will have life-altering consequences.
That's only one thing among many others (ICE immigrant raids which also sweep up legal immigrants and citizens who don't "look American") just in the first few days. What "large pain" are you talking about?
edit: and vis a vis the USAID thing the former president of Kenya summed it up "Why you are crying? you don't pay american taxes! we need to take care of ourselves!" https://www.msn.com/en-xl/africa/other/us-aid-suspension-wak...
Also, and I know people knee-jerk at the comparison, but historically speaking Jews comprised less than 1% of the population of Weimar Germany.[2] The smallness of the percentage shouldn't be cause to dismiss the harm of their discrimination as "no big deal." It's been shown where that leads.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2025/01/28/state-... [2] https://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/JEW_RELIGIONZUG...
And if you're not just counting US citizens, there's a war in Ukraine that's killed over a million people and another war in Gaza, the latter of which was precipitated by the bloodiest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust.
In my book any furthering of any position is propaganda. It’s not just when you do it in a dishonest or underhanded way. That’s the old-school definition.
Now what started this was the bald assertion that all most messaging is propaganda. Okay. People went with it, including the person I replied to. And that’s not objectionable according to my own definition. But if it is only “nefarious” messaging which is propaganda then you set yourself up for throwing stones in a glasshouse. Because a lot of comments (including the one I replied to) contain at least assumptions that further a world view. I don’t have to make an outright statement. I just have to hint at an assumption. And yeah, that’s what they did too.
It's not really the ads that bother me. It's the "recommended videos". Is there a way to customize my view of youtube to avoid the shit I don't need to see?
The thing about youtube is that it's very easy for propaganda/click-bait to creep in during moments of weakness.
Maybe it's time to go cold-turkey? Failing that, maybe it's worth it to try and take some control over the experience?
I'm very aggressive with the "not interested" and "don't recommend this channel" buttons, and over time it does mostly get rid of the most obnoxious recs. Right now it's also not recommending much good stuff, either, so YMMV.
As a general solution for us techies, you can have user defined style sheets that selectively override the site's CSS, either using a plugin like Stylus, or Firefox's built-in userContent.css. Inspect the website, find the id name (or class if it is unique enough) for the content you want to go away and put the following in your user CSS.
I have so many of these. There is some upkeep with redesign, and for some sites with high churn I've given up, but in general it makes the web much more tolerable.I've found that over time this chokes the recommendation system - makes it boring and it now finally refuses to show me any video recommendations on my youtube homepage - just a message asking me to turn history on. of course, you lose your watch history, but I just bookmark the videos I like anyway.
Videos related to the one you're watching may appear, but imo these tend to be based on your subscriptions / more focused / less rabbit-holey (and you can disable those with extensions and such as well).
But these days half of it is outrage bait, ranging from "WOKE LIBTARD GETS DESTROYED" to "TRUMP LOSES HIS MIND", or malicious clickbait like "you won't believe what the cast if $tv_show looks like now" with some AI generated thing of one cast member being horribly maimed. Even on stuff that has nothing to do with any of that, like some music video.
And whether "Trump loses his mind" is something you agree or disagree with doesn't even matter – I'm just here to listen to some music, maybe watch a funny video or two. To take a break from all of that. It's become so pervasive that it's just exhausting.
So normal people like you or me just withdraw. And the only people who don't are the hyper-politicised who never grow tired of talking of $favourite_issue, which tend to be rather less reasonable or open to nuance. And this feedback loop just makes things worse and worse.
This, in a nutshell, is why you need moderation. People talk about "enshittification" of platforms, but IMO the bigger problem is more the "cuntification" of platforms, where a small number of extremely unpleasant and vitriolic people chase off many people who don't want to deal with that. X.com is a well-known example, but also online games where you're matched with random people (where you very quickly learn a great deal about your mother's sex life).
I don't know what I'm doing differently than you, but I don't see ANY of that. The worst, most clickbaity Youtube content I see is poorly done rip-offs of Primitive Technology.
7th recommended is " "YOU WILL BE INDICTED AND JAILED! " Jim Jordan SILENCE Overconfident Hillary Clinton" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbqHVba3Ohs)
I'm not logged in. I don't save cookies.
Unfortunately my regular internet has an outage and I need to rely on a mobile hotspot which YouTube seems to throttle with 20 second delays on everything, so looking for more examples is a bit painful at the moment. But having 1 to 3 of this kind of thing is common.
(If I use my normal session, it's still all music, but skewed more towards my personal tastes.)
I suspect the GP comment is tainted by the video history by IP associations of
> I need to rely on a mobile hotspot
I clear it about once every 2 weeks or month depending on how many of the same topics I see.
It works really well in that if you ignore the content you saw before it forces the algorithm to find unique content because it thinks you don't like the stuff you've seen.
That and cleaning your subscription list. Easily the best platform I have as of now because of that.
It's crazy that the best experience (for me, anyway) is achieved by giving it the least amount of information possible.
I'm trying hard to do #1, mainly because #2 is confirmation bias (and reinforces it).
What other options are there?
Then you might find that some sources are filled with lies and others contain a lot more facts.
Then you'd naturally weight facts from the more trustworthy source higher.
The next step is a "web of trust" where a new source will be more trustworthy if it's linked to by other trustworthy sources.
So in the end you'd rank information from Russia Today (one of Russia's main propaganda channels) as very low, a comment from a random redditor low, and a comment on physics by a renowned physicist as very high trustworthiness.
This isn't even close to true. Facts are facts, and stories are propaganda. What we call "news" is largely just "stories" (opinion/editorials) about facts -- the story is the propaganda - the story weaves the facts together in a narrative, the narrative tells us how to feel and think. Stories cost $$$, and those promoting them are absolutely promoting some stories over others. They have a message to send -- that message is propaganda.
You mention a comment from a "random redditor" is low value -- I'm suggesting that nearly every "major" narrative spun on Reddit has been largely placed there by forces with deep pockets and axes to grind, and the true believers and other useful idiots that follow blindly. It's all astroturfing, and Reddit is an absolute garbage dump of discussion. Anyone that goes there thinking they're getting an accurate picture of the world around them is seriously deluded. I'm convinced those that run Reddit do this by design. We know who runs Twitter, and Facebook. No one talks about who is running Reddit.
A "comment on physics by a renowned physicist" is still just a comment -- there are facts in physics, and theories. Even renowned physicists can be wrong when it comes to the theories they back. And honestly [coming back to the point of the article] that's not what's causing people to feel outrage -- they're not doom scrolling physics forums outraged about dark matter or a theory of everything -- they're doom scrolling an endless stream of political/cultural propaganda designed to outrage them and keep them addicted.
The world isn't nearly as black and white as the internet would have you believe it is.
Point me to a source of political/cultural news that you believe is full of fact and not just another site full of opinions pieces and editorializing around the facts.
4) If you don't see it in the real world, you probably don't need an opinion on it.
5) And the same applies to other people as well. Prioritize the opinions of the people the issue actually concerns over abstract word salad.
I agree (I've done this), but it's much easier said than done. Requires a lot of mental work/training.
More importantly, it requires a sort of mental "enlightenment" to the true state of things.. That everything you read for free on the internet is being paid for by someone, with their own motivation and intents, and that these forces don't have your best interest in mind. The saying "If you're watching it, then it was intended for you" comes to mind. Once this breakthrough occurs and you begin to see the world this way, everything else usually follows.
As you begin to realize that most of your facts and opinions are those planted there by other powerful ($$$) forces, you start to recognize that what you think is largely what they want you to think. But the scariest part of the awakening is that you begin to realize how little you truly know about the world outside your direct experience. You feel much less certain about the world and your place in it.
Most of the people I know recognize this, and I can have sane conversation with them. You can tell those that are caught up in the propaganda because they largely sound like parrots, and it's impossible to talk to them reasonably. A few friends of mine are in this category, and the one common denominator between them is that they are deeply unhappy, riddled with anxiety, and glued to their devices. The true human casualties of the new technological information age we've birthed. It appears that this is by design, as those that control the flow for information know exactly the power they have and what they intend to do with it.
For those that are stuck, I wish I knew how to open their eyes up and look around them. It's not too bad when you look at the world outside of the internet. I've tried to listen empathetically to people that are stuck, but it mostly doesn't help. Their minds are hamsters spinning on wheels, unable to stop or hear any thing else from the outside. One or two have woken up only after the anxiety it produces begins to interfere with their real lives and relationships, It's a form of addiction, and unfortunately many people are stubborn and will double down on their addiction time after time until they hit rock bottom.
We're in the middle of a massive mental health crisis. I hate knowing that a not-insignificant portion of our fellow citizens are rapidly heading towards some sort of mental/emotional rock bottom caused by technology... I feel powerless to do anything about it as I've watched it slowly unfold over the last decade or so -- it's nearly impossible to reach the friends and family members that you're actually close to. I don't know what can be done other than sit back and wait for them to crash, and help them pick up the pieces when that time comes.
Anyone got any good advice?
Let yourself be sad about it. It is sad. Our potential as a species is being squandered for the sake of unmitigated greed. On a personal level, it's deeply depressing how things could have been so different for our loved ones.
If you have at least one close friend who can still listen and think for themselves, then you're doing okay. It's when you can't talk about this stuff that it gets most toxic. - if that ever happens, there's still books, movies... They Live is a good one.. Anything to remind you that you're not alone.
Even seeing people express these ideas is a relief, so thanks for that.
Also, there are good reasons to be hopeful, or at least stoic. Karma is inevitable. It may be that all this was necessary in some way... Like how the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs made room for mammals. Those loopholes in human nature which are being abused; they won't work for ever. And surprises can be surprising - unpredictable phase shifts can turn things around in unforeseeable ways.
In any case, we're responsible for the effort; not the outcome. Be good
"The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth." -Garry Kasparov.
And
"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore." This latter quote is, rather ironically, a false quote! (falsely attributed to Hannah Arendt). But I still think it contains truth.
Our intuitions, outrage, and knee-jerk reactions are being weaponized to gain clicks, votes, donations, and "action".
Many a dictatorship has fallen in the wake of social media revolutions. I wonder how long democracy can last?
In a would-be-funny-if-it-weren't-tragic ironic twist both of the two main US parties see themselves as the last guardians of democracy and frame their opponents as Evil, against which "any means necessary" is the only reasonable course of action.
(Yes, the party you disagree with is way worse and it's all their fault, this whataboutism indeed has to end, absolutely)
And here we all are.
Selective truth is far more effective, and more common, propaganda. Not in omitting important context from a story, but by omitting or burying (or simply never seeking out) entirely stories you don't want heard, and emphasizing stories you do want heard. In essence, holding up a funhouse mirror to society.
This is the propaganda you get when all your reporters think they are being honest and uncensored, but they all deeply care about the same set of issues, and are deeply ambivalent about another set.
You don't have to get outraged about something when you think about how that particular article might be trying to fan those flames and how what is reported might just be highlighting the points that push our buttons (but the real set of facts might not be as bad when looked into). Even the things that really are that bad don't have to lead to outrage. I take a wait-and-see attitude about a lot of this stuff we see in the media. There are trolls everywhere, we'll see if anything comes of it. I'm also capable of not liking something strongly without feeling rage with regards to it, while still wanting to combat it if I have a say in it at all.
Of course, "just don't let it get to you" is easy to say but hard to implement. I think it's the only real path that allows the inclusion of social media in our lives, though.
I do like the "that's just like, your opinion, man" as an answer to news stories, though.
> ... people have found that, actually, outrage can be useful. It actually can help you identify a problem and react to it. But it can also be harmful if you’re experiencing it all the time and become overwhelmed by it.
I'm reading that as meaning something more like identify a problem and act on it. Outrage itself is a reaction, just not a positive one. There's no shortage of people reacting to things.
Agreed. I personally believe that checking the news everyday is akin to something like a ‘news overdose’. There’s nothing wrong with spending just 15 minutes per week. At least for me, that’s a far healthier dose.
I think a lot of discourse is colored by the midwest. The midwest influenced movies (what does a US neighborhood look like? are there hills/trees/snow?), TV, radio, and literature. I imagine midwest newspapers to be like southern newspapers, 2-3 broadsheets per section if that.
I wonder how many words i can write on this subject
Of course, the downside of that approach is that the people who control the (relatively few) major newspapers effectively get to define what "informed" means - and, most importantly, what it does _not_ include.
Or, even more difficult: Actually read the science paper, or the court ruling, or the executive order, or the proposed legislation, rather than the journalist's hot take. A lot of these journalists takes boil down to "tweets with more words."
This 100%. If a piece of news is truly important, then it'll be important tomorrow or even a week from now. You'll even get clarifications and corrections along the way.
I like to use Pocket to build a list of long-form articles I want to read, then EpubPress (https://epub.press/) to compile that into a weekly EPUB that I can read in-full on a distraction-free e-book reader. It's a much less stressful way of consuming media than the whole neverending drug-frenzied quick-hits world of online news.
> Since 2018, Time has been owned by Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, who acquired it from Meredith Corporation. Benioff currently publishes the magazine through the company Time USA, LLC.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(magazine)
You can schedule periodic content pulls in Calibre, and I believe you can also automate sending the resulting EPUB to an email address (like the Kindle's send-to-email feature). I would use this, but I prefer EpubPress's formatting and I'm too lazy to tweak Calibre's.
A perfect example is a plane crash- you hear right away that a plane has crashed. It is reported on because it is an exceptional event. But, the "real" effects, the ones that actually affect you personally, or the world systemically, won't play out until months later. (for example the Boeing MCAS 777-max thing). How much good does it really do you to know about the plane crash now vs. informing yourself about the context of the plane crash 3--6 months later?
Alternatively I glance at Google News occasionally. Normally the headlines are dull enough not to read the article.
we can't always act on it the way we want to. The Treasury is 3000 miles away. I know complaining at my rep isn't the solution people want, but it's all I can do.
It's why I like kinda "boring" news outlets like Reuters. I don't know for sure but our national news thing (NOS) feels fair as well, it doesn't have an overt political alignment and will often report on both sides - even if I'm very much inclined to dismiss one side, but I won't claim to be unbiased.
But I'm OK with the idea that change speed is somewhat inversely proportional to value at risk. Might be better if it was 1/log(value).
Why should anyone have to care about the Treasury's Bureau of the Fiscal Service?
Are people aware of of how the Internet works? Are people aware of how water and sewage work? The electrical grid?
If someone who just graduated high school started flipping breakers at a substation would people think that's a good idea?
Seriously, do you know who does repairs on the sewer lines where you live? No. Does that mean you’re so oblivious that you wouldn’t be concerned by seeing half a dozen young men without any safety gear or official logos digging a six foot trench across the road outside your house?
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
p.s. Also, please don't use HN primarily for political or ideological battle. That's another line at which we ban accounts (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...).
If you didn't intend it that way, it would probably be better to have expressed your point in a way that made that clearer. Past explanations about this, in case helpful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I guess I interpret personal attack as something like "your an idiot", which I don't think I was doing.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
p.s. Also, please don't use HN primarily for political or ideological battle. That's another line at which we ban accounts (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...).
That's not how it works in the U.S. If an executive branch department was created by the legislature, it is up to the legislature whether or not it exists, not the executive. If the legislature has passed laws regarding how its resources are to be used, its employees treated, the executive is not free to disregard those laws.
The legislature is the source of laws in the U.S., not the executive. The irony is that the Republicans control the legislature as well. They could pass laws to achieve what Musk wants. It would be slow, but it would be legal.
A coup is seizing power outside the legal mechanism for doing so.
It's beyond me how so many of us think that continuously ignoring the will of the people is "OK". Either tell me my choice doesn't matter, or just shut up with the drama and enact safe and fair referendums on every single hot topic so we can all get to the right answer and then if we find we're in the minority, we'll shut up.
It should be clear as day to anyone that is unbiased that fixing the US/Mexican border was ridiculously easy (it's essentially been done in 2 weeks and they didn't even have to finish building their stupid wall). The only reason it didn't happen till now was precisely because the whole thing is broken and not really an expression of the peoples' will. It was rather an expression of an amalgamation of a giant mindless mass of bureaucrats, and you can't fix it unless you do what they are doing now. Not to single you out sorry, but opinions like yours ("we gotta do it the legal way and according to rules x, y, z, and 500 other rules") are precisely why nothing ever got done or fixed properly. And I say that as someone that is absolutely on board with following every rule to the T, with no exceptions.
Fixing the border happened 8 months ago. Nothing meaningful has changed at the border since June 2024. The only reason it took so long is that Biden wanted Congress to do it rather than using probably-illegal executive fiat powers, and eventually Biden got tired of waiting and did it anyway after Trump told Congress to axe the bipartisan border deal that bascially everybody but the extremists on either side was on board with.
You can make an argument that Biden should have done it by executive fiat even earlier, and that's your prerogative. But the fact of the matter is that even once a legislative fix was ready, Trump and the Republicans threw it away for no good reason, so that he could continue campaigning on immigration. That, by the way, is exactly "not an expression of the peoples' will". That's refusing to fix a problem for the sole purpose of campaigning on that problem.
Much of Trump's governance is like an episode of reality TV or WWE. Loud, flashy and mostly fake. Creating his own problems to "solve" by changing nothing. Threaten Canada and Mexico with tariffs then cancel them and declare victory when they say they'll do something they were already doing, e.g. Mexico deployed 10,000 Mexican troops to their border years ago under an agreement with Biden. Columbia accepted hundreds of deportation flights under Biden, then Trump tries to use military aircraft to do it and they say no, he makes threats then he declares massive victory when the arrangement reverts to exactly what was happening before.
That's a big lie. border encounters dropped 60-90% since 1/20. https://newsfactsnetwork.com/fact-check/fact-vs-fiction-did-...
Data obtained by fox news suggested that migrant arrivals at the southern border declined by 60% in the first week of Trump’s presidency compared to the last week of Biden’s administration. However, this figure differs from Trump’s 93% claim.
That's why I said 60-90%
Go look at how much the numbers dropped from 2022 to 2024. The problem was effectively solved already.
https://www.cbp.gov/document/stats/southwest-land-border-enc...
And I don't know how you claim such things:
Trump 2019: 977,509
Trump 2020: 458,088 (46.86% from previous year)
Biden 2021: 1,734,686 (378.68% from previous year)
Biden 2022: 2,378,944 (137.14% from previous year)
Biden 2023: 2,475,669 (104.07% from previous year)
Biden 2024: 2,135,005 (86.24% from previous year)
I couldn't find older that 2019, but it's clear that in trumps last year, it more than halfed from his previous year. Then it more than tripled in the first year under Biden. Then almost doubled again in the subsequent year under Biden, and then grew a bit in 2023. Then only in 2024, did it reduce by a tiny 14%. Notably a 14% of what is effectively a number 5 times higher than what Trump got it down to before he left office.
And yeah you could argue (like some of the journalist did) that "oh this is just because Trump created a backlog". Well that's what people wanted, and it stopped the flow of people over the border. That's solving the problem, and really just shows that Biden literally just opened the doors, let it grow huge, and then "claimed success" when it started going back down to it's pre-Trump average. This is why we can't discuss this, we have so many supposedly "smart" people arguing and using the supposed "data" to twist the truth, and then dismissing what every can see plain as day (and is in this case supported by the data).
Oh and let's also not mention that it surged quite a bit in the last few months of 2024 when people I would assume started to flood the border in anticipation of Trump's arrival. So all that supposed work the Biden team did somehow didn't apply then? Of course, because they did nothing and the numbers reflect the fact that the border just lets them go through.
I agree that our system of government makes it extremely difficult to enact large changes. That is by design, however well considered that design might be. Nevertheless, those are the rules. Which means the president can't legally do whatever he wishes to anything "under his purview" upon gaining power.
Or rather, that was the case until the SCOTUS decided there are no laws the president need respect. What they have not pronounced upon is whether the law binds anyone acting under the direction of the president. Does their invention merely protect the president from prosecution or does it abrogate all laws he finds inconvenient? I find it hard to believe they'll take the second step, but we'll probably find out pretty soon. Is Musk a monarch or merely our president?
the legislative branch can form administrative departments and prescribe their function however the president has already defined powers to impound funds and remove senior administrative officers and appoint/remove low-level staff. how these things intersect will be sorted be the courts.
executive actions (by-passing what should be legislation) have been increasing the last few decades. the various media companies plainly do make choices to portray some actions as nothingburger or crisis depending on their political alignment with the party in power.
the issue with the left-media and Trump is they outrage clickbait a bunch of events that are insignificant in terms of outcomes. Should they alarm about Jan6 yes. should they alarm over minor personnel at treasury or some dumb unserious thing Trump said at a press conference, no. This is how the media loses all trust in themselves broadly.
It doesn't need to be a coup. Congress sold us out to presidents long before most of us were born.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42953461
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42950095
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42923346
I don't want to ban you because your commenting history before that looks (mostly) fine. But if you keep breaking the site rules, we won't have much choice, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Time is valuable. You're not obligated to let idiots waste it.
Right on both counts!
However: If insufficiently many people put in the effort to explain their proof/reasoning to others, then we shouldn't be surprised when that side loses.
In cases where the discussion is actually important, such as anthropogenic climate change for example, or issues with Test-Driven Development, I provide the receipts.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211007051559/https://www.scien...
Then there’s “Diversity”, another section that has only been on the record as active since 2021:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220623091738/https://www.scien...
Here’s “Inequality”:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210926013845/https://www.scien...
We’re only one letter away from completing our “Forbidden Non-State 3-Letter Agency” bingo card.
Here’s a topic directory from 2014:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140531173853/http://www.scient...
Where would you file this story in 2014?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-civil-rights...
Today it’s under “Behavior”, which for a time was referred to as “Behavior and Society”, a section that appears to often be used as a place to put more overt political pieces, along with the Opinion section:
https://archive.is/QpKLI
Scientific American also had a report (what looks like a page that collects articles under a same theme of special interest) on The Black Lives Matter Movement.
Can you point to any article published by them in the last 70 years as absurd as this?
https://archive.is/H8hJw
Or this?
https://archive.is/fa88J
I don’t think that the implicit distinction between “getting into politics” (implying the outlet is adopting a noticeable ideological stance) and “addressing political issues” (that can arguably be described as scientific topics with political implications, as opposed to vice versa) warrants the color of your responses.
Maybe you’re just floating in the same tide as them.
Over time though I picked up on these "outrage triggers" and that's helped me be much more objective about news I'm reading. I'll be reading an article and I can usually pick up the "tricks" writers use to generate outrage. I often find myself reading an article and go "oh look you want me to feel outraged right now".
Nowdays when I try to be informed about a story I will read an NYT report, a CNN report, a Fox News or other right leaning report, and then maybe one from DailyWire of Bannon's War Room. Skimming every article I often see spots where the outlet is trying to outrage their readers. NYT will report something that will outrage the left and as you "go right" on the reports you will start to see outrage directed to the right.
By contrast, the NYT often feels more subtle and therefore more effective at stoking that sense of constant agitation. They’re meticulously fact-based, but their editorial choices—what they highlight, the framing they use—can seem designed to provoke a reaction rather than just inform. It’s not only about the content of the stories; sometimes it’s also about how they present or prioritize them. If you haven’t encountered this firsthand, checking out “NYTimes pitch bot” on Bluesky can illustrate how their style can veer into outrage territory. It’s a satirical account, but it often points out the patterns in the Times’ headlines and story angles that might otherwise go unnoticed.
I'm assuming you're more aligned politically with the left. If you're not, I apologize for the assumption. To someone who is more right-wing, the bias of e.g. NYT is just as blatant as Fox News is to you, and Fox may come off as "fair". This is because the propaganda is specifically intended to land with their own audience. It's tuned to your sensibilities.
It's very much a "fish in water" scenario. Trying to read articles from multiple sources can help, and questioning why you agree with one take over another. In the end, these are pretty sophisticated operations, and they know how to prey on their targets.
And of course everyone is convinced that they have the rational truth and it's the other guy who's the "low-information voter" being taken by the propaganda.
This isn't really a matter of subjective opinion, though. Objective surveys have consistently shown that Fox News viewers are worse-informed than people who don't pay attention to any conventional news sources. NYT readers are a long way up from there.
There’s plenty of right-of-centre magazines and websites aimed at educated right-wingers: e.g. First Things, Commentary, The American Conservative, the Spectator
Maybe a better demonstration of their point might be comparing NYT/WaPo to the WSJ
1 - https://adfontesmedia.com/
2 - https://adfontesmedia.com/methodology/
There are a couple other groups out there too:
- https://www.allsides.com/media-bias
- https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/
If the fox news comments in any way represent true opinions of trump supporters, then our country is truly screwed.
I suspect they will have good reasons to pay more attention next time, if there is a next time.
After this past election cycle I don't see how people can make that comment with a straight face.
Media in general is very right leaning. Some like CNN and NYT are maybe slightly more left than far right fox news, but there aren't many "left leaning" mass market news sources that are essentially felating one party for millions of people.
NYT and CNN, etc are all very critical of democrats when there is a controversy. This is stark contrast to fox news which essentially is willful ignorance of anything bad republicans / trump has done.
The "normalization" of Trump's corruption by media in general should be enough to see which way they lean.
Its just that if anybody is slightly less than full blown fox news conservative they get labeled as left leaning by everyone in the media so there is some idea of "balance" but conservative media (fox news, conservative podcasts, etc) are overwhelmingly mass market and the majority.
Maybe you haven't been paying attention the past 5 years, but there has been a dramatic shift to the right in media. Companies change ownership and the new owners take advantage of the historical left leaning nature of the media.
The magic trick fox news and conservatives has pulled is by being so far right that center/slightly right parties look far left. The normalization of the MAGA movement is evidence of this right leaning media machine.
Look at who owns the "left leaning" media companies. CNN is owned by conservatives.
Joe Rogan, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson audience dwarf most other channels these days. fox news has almost 3-4 times the viewership of CNN which is the preferred example of a "left leaning" network to balance them.
The rights constant raging against mainstream media is an attempt to distract from the fact that mainstream media is in fact conservative.
Wow. You don't need to be very right leaning to feel the complete opposite. I'm simply amazed someone could feel that way, as nearly all media is very left-leaning (to my perspective).
CNN leans pretty far left, but not as left as MSNBC
NYT leans pretty far left, similarly to CNN
Reddit leans very far left, so does Facebook and Instagram
Media in general is very left leaning. For example, Youtube, Disney, Netflix are the biggest online video content house, and they all lean heavily left. Even Max leans slightly left. There is no right leaning online content house. And all contents are moving to online.
If mainstream media in America was left, Bernie would have just finished up his second term.
If these are the topics that you feel define the "right", it's no wonder society is confused how this administration was elected.
Interesting...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_York_Times_con...
I'm not picking on them specifically. If you'd said this about any news outlet, I wouldn't believe you.
Steelman your opponent’s arguments! It’s not just good for thinking, it’s relaxing!
Today's episode, for example: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/february-5-2025-pbs-news-h...
I like the idea of distinguishing news from journalism. If we say they're distinct, then yeh I think I can agree that news is–via weird unintentional evolution of incentives–an outrage machine, but true journalism is a wondrous and professional exercise of human scrutiny on centres of otherwise unchecked power. We need that.
- you have a team that will brief you on it
- you will get the news that apply to you from the source
You won’t get either of these from a news website.
As a civilian, you can stay completely up to date with a quick weekly / monthly headline scan.
It fails to account for the majority of outrage-inducing news where the stupidity is at the source.
Reddit, instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, etc are all the equivalent of digital junk food and I’d argue that we’re all a lot more negatively affected by it than we think. There’s a reason ‘brain rot’ was word of the year.
However, shitty newsfeeds like Google news are my bane. I can’t stop.
But now, politics is getting involved because people are having government job offers rescinded and the entire federal government is in a free fall like a 3rd world banana republic.
Block them, it's easy. I have only close friends and coworkers that I don't hate on that site.
For me, it's quite addictive unfortunately, even though I agree that it's pretty dull.
Reading "You should quit reddit" helped a little. The author tries to reframe your hidden beliefs about reddit like "finding useful information" or "it's filled with experts." Helped me to realize I was spending more time reading about my hobbies than actually doing them. Though I understand it's not that simple, doing requires more energy, etc.
https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator
That said, I recognize that I am speaking completely for myself in regards to my own interests. YMMV.
That is to say, some people really are willing to be activists. They will organize protests and boycotts and things like that.
Other people are in marginalized communities and are trying to get a feel for whether they should move to a different region or even a different country.
Some folks don't really have a plan but they want to stay informed. If at some point a magical line is crossed, they might suddenly say, "That's IT! I can't take it anymore! I have to DO SOMETHNG!" and that's when they'll become activists.
But some folks are realistically never going to lift a finger to help themselves or anybody else. They'll just bitch online and/or be stressed.
What I'm working on is figuring out in what ways I might, in the right situation, be moved to contribute. If things get really bad (and they will), what will I realistically be doing? I'm disabled, so I can't be out in the streets. If things get even worse, I might write about the niche public health / politics topics I've accidentally become an expert in. And if something happens where medicare and medicaid are shut off, well then all hospitals everywhere will basically be non-functional. This will be a crisis for all but most immediately for the chronically ill -- any of us at that point who are able to will be leaving the country ASAP.
In other words, I need to know enough to keep writing (which I would do anyways) and I need to know when things are hopeless enough that a person with a messed up spine should travel out of the country anyways. That is currently all I need to know because it's all that is actionable for me.
There is a massive temptation to doomscroll into infinity, but that merely serves the enemies of sanity. I know what happens next because I've read Sarah Kendzior and Hannah Arendt. It's not good. But I also know that one of the first things that happened during the anti-semitic purges in Nazi Germany was that a ton of Jews got appendicitis from stress. Sometimes the body wants to align with power so badly, it aligns even with evil power and against its own interests. We have to be very careful not to poison ourselves and make evil's job easier.
This sounds so interesting to me - was it your responsibility? How did you detect if someone was addicted? And most importantly, how did you scale it?
"Someone who cares about you on the internet"
instead of
"Something that prevents you from posting hate/snuff/nude on the internet"
Obviously lots of problems, tons of them, and 1984 vibes, but still, the basic idea. A bit more like humans were meant to interact?
It's an interesting relevant short story. Won the 2024 Hugo Award. It was posted a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263876
It is obviously a completely unfinished thought.
But something about humans innate tendency to self-organise into tribes and villages.
Here's to dang! Even when you do things I might not agree with if I knew about them, this is a place where interesting things can be shared and found without all the blah-blah.
Looking at it on my phone, if I can see three entries and 2 are anxiety inducing, I close the app. (I'm 99% certain they get that telemetry too)
That said, I also had days where I doomscrolled instagram and thought 'it's been 20 minutes and I haven't seen anything entertaining yet.' And that's when I decided to drop it. (It was the only app I could chat with my kids with...we've since moved to other methods)
I haven't cut it out completely, but I'm not hyper aware of how I'm consuming it.
My Facebook feed is all friends and family who don't discuss politics and ads for nerd shirts. I've purchased a few. It is also easy and effective to hit show me less of this.
I agree about LinkedIn and don't go there unless I'm actively job hunting, something I hope never to do again. I don't feel any bitterness when I see friends and family on FB go on expensive vacations, but I do feel an unhealthy and indefensible jealousy sometimes when I see former coworkers getting new jobs or promotions.
Otters, dogs, cats, snow leopards, red pandas whatever floats your boat.
Also, as you say the big platforms will still try and get you into an outrage loop.
I unfollowed/unfriended anybody who kept posting political stuff. I did the same for anybody I didn’t interact with in real-life regularly.
That basically left my parents, and about 5 friends. None of whom post anything regularly.
So, now my feed is just random shitposts and memes from “influencers”.
So, I deactivated my Meta accounts. And I’m still alive. And probably saner.
I find myself reaching for something when I have YouTube/chilling at my desk at the end of the day, can't code anymore/make something just on till I sleep. Sometimes have the desire to play a video game (I have a gaming rig too funny how that works)
I've been trying to read HN or IEEE, TechCrunch stuff like that as my "lazy fun"
I will miss posting stuff like "what is this car" or being part of the car talk for a sporty car I drive but idk kind of want to just live too
It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something
Anyway my main goal in life right now is getting out of debt/staying fit and work on projects
I’ve never really understood doomscrolling on Twitter or Reddit. The only social media I find remotely useful out entertaining is actually TikTok. The comments are IME the least toxic and most entertaining. And I’ve gone down fascinating rabbit holes of things that have absolutely no relevance to my life like medical residency TikTok.
You can mute subreddits and not see them anymore
Funny you have to purge the algo on things like YouTube if you click on a thubmnail with some hot chick, boom your feed is nothing but click bait of hot women
You can just add subs that are of interest that lack the torrent of bad news and only ever visit that custom feed. It doesn't ever algorithmically add posts from subs you don't manually include, as far as I've seen.
In fact NFL teams are specifically banned from having bluesky accounts as an official media channel, and r/nfl still banned X/Twitter.
sigh
https://www.nbcsports.com/nfl/profootballtalk/rumor-mill/new...
Presumably there’s some money that needs to change hands between the NFL and a social media site.
I still use old.reddit and this is the only way I've ever used Reddit. My homepage only shows me posts from Reddits I follow and nothing else. I don't see all the craziness people here are talking about.
Cannot stand unsolicited content.
Outside of reddit/discord/hn, I haven't had any social media since roughly 2010, and I don't use reddit or discord for anything remotely "social media"-ish.
While I still get the occasional look as if I'm wearing a tinfoil hat when I say "I don't have FB. No, no insta either. No... not snapchat either", I find it's a lot less common now, thankfully. When I first left social media in ~2010, it was rough. Not only dating scene wise, but I lost out on a few job opportunities (at least a few, probably more than I know) as well.
Now you're just considered kind of weird/fringe, instead of being borderline insane. Moving (slowly) in the right direction, I think.
Very occasionally a potential client messages me through it but they are almost very low quality contacts.
Headhunters are trying to be influencers, they have games, news feeds are full of junk or agenda pushing (lots of anti-WFH pieces because the wealthy owners need to keep their commercial property prices up), etc.
I can only recommend it if you are independently wealthy, want to become an ascetic, or more broadly, your goal is to never be hired or really even evaluated for much in the business world again.
None of the rest of the social networks serve as a sanity check on your resume/application/meeting.
As for maintaining an up-to-date profile, I think its worth dialing-down the access unless you're actively looking for a new job.
But the bs that people post to try to get "engagement" makes my head hurt. I'm about to start a new job in a few weeks and it'll be a relief not to have to bother with linkedin again for a few (hopefully many) years.
Are there any women (in highly developed countries) under 40 who aren't on some form of social media? I never met any. I think it would be more difficult than men for social reasons.
I understand that some people find it reassuring to receive a constant stream of recruiter inquiries, but from what I hear these messages are mostly low-effort, shotgun-blast attempts to fill undesirable positions, so I don't feel like I am missing out.
On more than one occasion the direct feedback of why I didn't move further in the hiring process was a lack of internet presence.
But, again, keep in mind this was early 2010s. Social media hadn't had as much time to show the world how poisonous it is.
I used to waste so much time posting about cars on Reddit. I'd open my computer at 11pm, reply a few times to a single post on Reddit, and before long, I'd see 1:45am on the clock.
Not posting anything has been a massive time saver.
I saw dozens of death threats. Even an explicit death threat thread with over 40,000 upvotes before reddit stepped in and shut the whole subreddit down.
It reminded me of Ghostbusters 2 with all the aggressively angry people and the ooze pouring out of the sewers, all building upon itself.
It's disheartening when the one-track politics infects every square inch. It's a good point about bots because 1) they can be sold or rented to advertisers, 2) they are more valuable with higher karma, and 3) the easiest way to get a bot to harvest karma is by agreeing with the hive. So they're amplifying "the message" without even intending to.
> This community has been banned
> This subreddit has been temporarily banned due to a prevalence of violent content. Inciting and glorifying violence or doxing are against Reddit’s platform-wide Rules. It will reopen in 72 hours, during which Reddit will support moderators and provide resources to keep Reddit a healthy place for discussion and debate.
It's all just driveby anger and reposts. Maybe some smaller subs with good communities here and there, but that often requires a mod team putting in substantial hours and remaining under the radar from All/Popular in any shape.
Forgot to mention, Reddit also started paying these accounts for posting. So a literal financial incentive to ragebait. It' called the "Contributor Program".
So what Reddit has morphed into, is an illegal content factory - there has already been a comment or two about it from the government and the Trump admin is not one that is likely to sit on my sidelines over this.
Whatever your politics may be, I'm just saying this is going to burn Reddit bad.
Under US first amendment rights, it's actually sometimes legal.
For example, "Watts v. United States" established that if an anti-draft speaker tells a crowd "If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ" that's political hyperbole.
So if a crowd were to set up a guillotine outside congress and chant "hang mike pence" it's not necessarily illegal.
Saying “I think this person should be killed” is legally free speech.
I will say, the subreddit system does a decent job of quarantining the dysfunction to that sub. The mod quality is everything and the mod drama is an absolute dumpster fire. (Extremely curiously, Ghislaine Maxwell seems to have been one of the most prolific of the mods, and one of her suspected accounts may be one of the most successful (karma-wise) posters of all reddit.) But on the flipside, /r/askhistorians is still one of the best resources on the internet. Many of the specialty subreddits I frequent (Aviation, UkraineRussiaReport, video game subs, several miscellaneous african subs) are still functioning fine.
Anyway, it's a war. Propaganda is essentially impossible to avoid without ignoring the topic entirely. Still, it's what we have to work with. And to be clear my sympathies lie with the ukrainian people.
Most subreddits gets formed by someone who's tired of the existing subs, gets into one too many arguments with a mod, and thinks they can do better. I don't know anything about these specific subs but I wouldn't see "this guy formed this sub after getting called out by a mod in another sub" as any kind of red flag.
It used to be a good site, but that was many years ago.
What do people think others will do, when they see that the_donald behavior gets rewarded by electoral and political support?
If its not clear, everyone is going to radicalize, because its getting success.
They believe people hate Americans and everyone should be ashamed traveling overseas. As someone who travels all the time to multiple continents not just Europe i have never encountered anyone who asked or even cared. Most people don’t live in a political bubble where they need to stop being friends with people over politics.
Anyway a lot people are choosing to live in an angry little bubble. It is really sad to see.
The same can be said for the supporters of many radical and terrible historical regimes. I'm not radical, I'm simply pushing this radical boulder along, and I can stop it whenever I wan tooo-oops."
No need for histrionics, it's simple: Someone doesn't need to actively desire a terrible outcome to be morally culpable of making bad choices, ones they should-have-known would enable or encourage it to happen. Multiple such people can and do form groups.
It's not limited to politics either, which is how we get idioms like "playing with fire."
Near as I can tell, the biggest failure of the left (and one that keeps getting repeated) is thinking words/knowledge matter in situations like this.
You're the one who's been making all the personal condemnations of evil intent, stop with the psychological projection.
Whose morals? What morals?
The online charicatures are just that. In both directions.
Real talk though: the US, via the current administration, is trashing its international reputation. With tariffs and lashing out at (former?) allies. Or with Musk demanding regime change in the UK, for instance. On a personal level people will still be chill no doubt, but you should be prepared for some negative attitudes towards the US if things continue unabated.
I’ve seen this sequence of events play out before.
In many was ‘go outside’ is dismissive of what many people feel is happening, that to within 15 days of this new presidency. This is a low key way of saying you don’t like people protesting.
While at the same time others are saying people aren’t protesting enough.
If you aren’t ok with all of this, I strongly suggest deleting all social media, including hacker news. Take your advice and go outside. Be good to your neighbors and your mental health.
There is zero space for passive consumption when one of the biggest cultural and economic forces in English speaking Internet land is dismantling itself.
There is going to be very little space for any tolerance of nuance - because Trump is going to continue to escalate. He is going to follow a plan which was known, and it aims at gutting the US, and justifying it with DEI or whatever the cassus belli of the month is.
This is eventually going to result in ‘riots.’
Which will feed the righteousness of the conservatives, which will result in a new round of “well you were so happy when the year started, where are you now.”
It will escalate into attacks on democrats as the devil. And HN will swing from left outrage to right outrage.
At that time the roles will be reversed, and the positions will switch.
Again - If you or anyone reading these comments is tired on Feb 6th - leave the internet right now. This is your tornado / natural disaster warning.
This isn’t meant to be hurtful to you, or to be any defense of anything.
I always assume I am wrong, and I hope I can look back at these comments with embarrassment over what looks like histrionics.
The problem I have is that i deal with social media and online safety as work and as research. Papers on this topic are my fun reading when my brain isn’t fogged up.
This is going to be worse than brexit. And that’s if we are all lucky.
I was asking bankers if there’s any slack in the financial system in November - and I asked this in multiple countries.
The answer was no. So when the trade shocks start hitting the system, expect a downturn.
This is aside from the walking dead syndrome which america will face after gutting multiple systems in-flight.
I wish you luck and the very best. Sorry.
It’s surely ten times worse now. Trump makes W look like a statesman, and we could at least plead that W didn’t win a majority and only became president because the system is stupid.
It seems to be mainly European neoliberals that are more upset about Trump.
This is just blatant misinformation. Since r/pics is the only example you've chosen to give us, let's evaluate it: I've scrolled through the current first 50 posts in Hot, and 0 of them are death threats, thinly veiled or otherwise. "Packed full", indeed.
And here, so it isn't simply my word vs. his; these are the current posts:
… none of which are death threats. I could scroll all night and not see any examples.- The nazi punching thread had several moderated comments ranked near the top which were presumably calls to violence.
- The Mitch McConnal thread has many people looking forward to his death, hoping he goes to hell, and a few deleted comments.
- A musk thread has "eat the rich" and storm the capitol. Not super highly ranked.
I didn't go through all of them but it certainly is a bit odious.
Also note though how there's only 1 non political thread and the remainder are anti trump. This is on a general interest sub and what is likely to be an unremarkable day in the administration!
If you stop your thought at just “people are losing their shit”, thats seeing half the world.
I’d say thats disingenuous, because it misses or dismisses the incredibly alarming actions that have precipitated them.
If you genuinely care about it, then you might be interested in knowing why people are responding like this. For example, people generally hate Nazis, and punching Nazis is a popular idea.
DO people expect themselves to be polite when the see a takeover and destruction of their government? “it looks like pre WW2 Germany out there, do pass the salt dear.”
As someone who tries to be non partisan, and isn't even american, I am fatigued by all of the claims that the world within the USA is ending. Whenever I take the time to examine any of the claims they tend to be fairly hollow or making slippery slope arguments.
As an international user of reddit, there are many of us I presume, I want the outrage to be saved for Trumps undeniable and worst offenses. In my eyes the memecoin was worse than anything which has happened since he became president and yet it has completely left the collective focus. Everything since then has just been a mix of people allowing trump to dictate the media cycle and the deep state deploying its immune system.
If we review democracies through history that have at some point become less democratic, I think describing the process of how that actually happens as being a slippery slope is quite apt. I’d say it’s more of a fallacy to assume that democracy is a secure default state of being rather than an ideal that we must collectively support or lose entirely—that we can safely “slip” a little without risking a slide further down the slope.
They also map to historical counter-examples.
You don't have to go far. Take hysterical false positives like #RussiaGate, which turned out to be a manufactured hoax.
They did not do this. Everyone can read the post that you’re responding to.
You are misattributing American madness to the people it is being inflicted on rather than the instigators. We have oil wells behind our homes and schools and the white picket fence chemists I knew and looked up to as a kid are the reason we all have PFAs in our blood. Our president vacillates between saber-rattling at our closest allies, starting a new war in the Middle East, and causing constitutional crises every other day. We don’t have a single-payer healthcare option like every other developed country and our “social safety nets” are so impacted and difficult to get, they might as well not exist for most people. We do, however, have some very, very profitable oligopolies (some which make very tasty fish sandwiches) and higher income inequality than India or Russia.
I also had trouble with all the far right wingers who kept talking about civil war.
Or you didn't experience, or don't know what they are, what they think and what they want ; neither the aftermath.
There is a reason people are angry and the truth is Musk/trump have gone too far. It's bizarre to say but we are watching the downfall of the USA in real time. The country has been captured by criminals who are working to destroy it–folks are going to be angry about that.
Are you for real? Is this seriously a good faith argument? My man, you may be a true believer, and that is no compliment. Course correct. Try to steelman a bit.
If you feel the need to defend the salute I would suggest digging into that.
Reddit has been basically unusable for anything concerning politics since, and nowadays with politics leaking out into every damn sub possible it definitely has a problem.
Then I realized that my kindergarten teacher was onto something when she told us we should be nice and share our toys, and I grew up.
Hacker News is radicalizing, and is very likely going to have to decide if it’s going to be pro MAGA or not.
What did people think the response was going to be once Trump did everything he said he would? People would lie back and let things happen?
In America? The land of the second amendment? I mean people should be happy, after this liberals are going to be proud members of the NRA.
As well as thousands who are normal hard-working people.
> taken back Panama Canal from Chinese dictatorship
By using threats of force like a dictatorship.
> attempted to shrink the size of the government and American tax burden
In illegal, non-democratic ways.
> put more tariffs on Chinese dictatorship
As well as more democratic allies.
> focused US on AI
Without understanding the huge risks involved for all of humanity.
> taken over Gaza to prevent another war between Israel and Hamas
By doing ethnic cleansing.
> gotten Mexico and Canada to finally own up to protecting the border
And in the process lost the trust and respect of allies.
Do you have sources for that? Honestly trying to find out. Thanks!
Also, Biden has already addressed the numbers coming across the border [1]. So again, the people who are left are mostly hard working people trying to make a life.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36e41dx425o
I grew up an active NRA member, shooting since I was 6. I have long since disassociated myself with the group but want to make it clear - a lot of liberals have guns and regularly practice using them.
We don't need the NRA (a Putin funded organization) to do that!
The temperature is so high right now, and it's only continuing to rise because there seems to be zero accountability for what's happening whether it's pardons or Musk running unfettered through government accounts. Unfortunately, it's natural for people to keep escalating when they see no other avenue.
No, as evidenced by the "Politics" flair. (But also no, the rules of the sub do not forbid political images.)
> Does it tend to feature current events and is that lineup just proportional to the magnitude of what's happening right now?
Yep.
No, I'm not. I'm making a statement about a particular claim: that Reddit is overwhelmed with leftist death threats.
I said nothing about r/pics being apolitical, and I'm not taking a stance in this comment chain about whether I think r/pics should or should not be apolitical. That's a different claim, and you're moving the goalposts.
Reddit has in general got way worse since 2016. The amount of bloodthirst and hate is very unsettling.
I might have a different threshold for hateful on the internets or I didn't look closely enough.
Reddit has always had these elements, but they were previously isolated to certain subreddits.
I noticed the biggest change when the app and website became aggressive about getting people to join other subreddits and inserting posts from other subreddits into people's feeds. Suddenly the isolated subreddits I followed were full of low effort content and angry comments.
Reddit's front page is shockingly bad. The amount of misinformation and ragebait that gets upvoted to the front page is almost hard to believe.
It's also interesting that many subreddits have embraced the ragebait. Subreddits like /r/AITA have been clear about how they don't care if stories are real or not, but legions of Redditors engage with obvious ChatGPT spam as if it was a real situation they need to weigh in on.
Please be specific.
I will be explicit in that I am not condoning doxxing Reddit mods. I just don’t think we’d be fine with this in normal day to day life.
Not personally, but their names are public, and if they were taking backhanders there would be a scandal. Remember the payola lawsuits?
Advertisers currently
Banning the_donald was the beginning of the end for Reddit, at least as far as balanced discourse went. At that time, the r/all was relatively balanced and you'd see major news stories from both POVs.
Now it's a hysterical echo chamber full of thinly veiled death threats towards the sitting president.
Disclaimer: I have money invested in RDDT.
This can't be healthy, for two reasons:
(1) The health of the company. As an investor in RDDT, I am not a fan of the site's landing page alienating 50% of Americans right off the bat.
(2) The health of public discourse. We should all be against the creation of echo chambers and weaponization of headlines.
My politics are to the left of the American left, but I’d be crazy to believe that the mountains of the anti-Trump posts are organic & the spoonfuls of pro-Trump posts are paid, especially after an election where Trump won the popular vote.
I'm always growing my "playlist" though. One room of the house is where I auditioning new music. Another room plays my entire music catalog on shuffle.
Fun fact: No one is impressed by your "sports" car, but I'll bet 100% don't want hear it and wish the worst upon you.
I know some places are testing sound ticketing, which I cannot wait to see implemented everywhere.
https://www.autoweek.com/news/technology/a39906304/californi...
I hope you get over your noise addiction sooner than later. Or, go broke in the process.
It's even possible the places that people then move to (such as HN) also get more radical if the leavers have higher levels of radicalism than the place they join.
Probably worth Googling something like [men who don't have social media] to think what women think about this, it's more positive than you might think :)
It's not about scoping you out. Asking for your Instagram is like what asking for your number was in the past. It's flirting, it's that they want to get in touch again, set up a date.
If you say "I don't have Instagram", the girl will assume that you don't like her, not that you don't have Instagram.
So just make an empty Instagram (with a normal profile photo) for connecting with people. And say so when sharing it with a girl. If it's somebody who wants to "scope you out", you're already dealing with a person who you don't want to deal with.
> So just make an empty Instagram
Why not, instead, say "I don't have Instagram, here's my [ bluesky handle / phone number / email address ]"?
Just tell her you are an Arch Linux admin and skip the flirting.
> phone number
Yes, in regions where people use phone numbers / WhatsApp numbers in that way.
> email address
Just tell her you wanna sell her a time share and skip the flirting.
Personal website is the way to go. Preferably a static site built with a home-made templating engine written in Ruby and running on a non-mainstream budget cloud provider. The chicks dig it man.
Even a hint of Wordpress is social death.
/s
I actually feel really good when people expect me to be on social media and I tell them Im not.
Kind of similar to the feeling when I say that I quit cigarettes. Im still surprised by it and talking about it makes me feel very blessed to be free of it.
you don't have to release the extension, you just load it unpackaged by developer mode in the extensions settings
Yeah I did conciously omit it actually, but only because I consider Youtube to be basic internet infrastructure and quite valuable if used right.
However, for me personally, I've actually blocked Youtube from Chrome when not in incognito mode to keep me signed out by default and I've also completely blocked the site from my iPad (and ofc I also don't have the app installed).
I unfortunately struggle with some form of social media addiction and I've made pretty dramatic changes to keep myself away from these sites.
That's critical. My YouTube rule these days is to block any channel with a video name or thumbnail that says something like "This is why you fail at XYZ" or other statements designed to evoke an emotional response from me. And on top of that, I try to only click on videos where the title/thumbnail is properly informative, exposing the content rather than trying to hide it behind a vague hook. Hooks like "You won't believe this one trick!" and fluff like that, titles/thumbnails that should introduce the trick, not just allude to it.
Yes. I still have to be at least aware of what is happening for work reasons, but removing social media was one of the better decisions for my sanity ( I stil comment on HN, but the quality of conversations was degrading as well, which in itself is a concern suggesting further digital landscape deterioration ).
I considered some more obvious solutions ( from buying subscription to WSJ/FT to personal news aggregator -- and objective/neutral observer rewrite using LLM and they all are not exactly ideal ).
Here is the good news. All this chaos is an opportunity to stand something useful up. And I mean something useful that cannot be so easily dismantled by powers that be ( and there are already heavy indications they are aware people may try going outside the defined paths ).
Yeah I agree that many HN comments are unfortunately pretty bad, but I think this should only motivate people like you and me to try harder to make HN a better place with constructive, useful comments :)
Good luck out there.
HN also doesn’t seem to be as susceptible to rage-baiting / outrage-attention-seeking behavior. Not sure exactly what by this is the case but I’d venture a guess it has a lot to do with (1) “dang”s moderation, and (2) not having a personalized algorithm feed.
I’m increasingly of the view that personalized algorithm feeds generated to select the maximum attention grabbing content for each person is a truly dangerous idea.
Frankly, HN is not that engaging (by modern standards). In fact, probably 60-70% of the articles on the front page are boring to me on any given day. I view this as a feature and not a bug. Why should I expect that everything I look at must be maximally engaging?
I wish more sites were old skool like HN.
> but with the dial turned down a little.
Exactly for this reason. Yes, HN is a social network. And if it follows the same enshittification path as the others, I will be gone from here too. But until then, to me (YMMV) it still provides a bit of entertainment and news without rotting my brain.
Even the analogy works. Fast food is not that bad... in moderate quantities (/"with the dial turned down a little")
I believe a good portion of Reddit could have had been the same. However, the way moderators are chosen-- in other words, whoever creates the sub first gets to rule the roost-- has left that site with almost universally unqualified moderation.
That’s not really a gotcha statement.
There’s a clear difference of kind between modern social media and the forums/usenet of old.
Please back that statement up with some facts.
2. Algorithms driving ever-increasing "engagement" to deliver advertising
3. Surveillance capitalism
1. HN is centralized, but not for-profit.
2. HN does not drive engagement, AFAIK
3. HN is not surveillance capitalism.
You haven't demonstrated how Usenet differs from HN, but since my question had a typo and omitted HN, I can see how that is confusing.
HN users put a lot less emphasis on who says something and we focus more on what they say. There are exceptions of course, because we have our own share of renowned experts posting here. But for the most part, people don't take note of what username writes a post.
No, there isn't.
it's similar to how you can go to a bar and just say "I'm here to watch the game". You can be asosial in a social community.
To me, HN is more like an online forum.
IMHO for a service to be defined as Social Media it needs to at least have a 'social graph' of some kind.
HN has never suggested an account to follow, or tried to suggest trending posts or topics to me.
Yes, HN does have a voting system. But that to me doesn't make it social media. HN posts are not measured and promoted based on engagement.
I didn't exlude it from my list. See here:
> I’ve been off of social media (aside from HN, WhatsApp and discord) for years
I did, however, leave it out of this list
> Reddit, instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, etc are all the equivalent of digital junk food
because I don't consider HN to be digital junk food.
Completely non-technical ones are few, and you can always choose to ignore them.
The feed is also non-personalized. It's not going to show a few more article on politics just because you linked on one.
By comparison, reddit is much, much worse, almost the opposite of HN. Just a bit better than Twitter, maybe. Most of my reddit browsing/participation falls into tech/hobby, yet I always find that spend more time than I'd like on meaningless stuff, and reddit keeps pushing/promoting political content (even in the context of technology).
My solution? Don't browse reddit unless I really need to for some reason (or if I really don't have anything else to do at that time).
1. Turn off all notifications, especially for replies, likes, and content suggestions.
2. Train yourself not to look for feedback on the things you do post as a matter of habit. Intentionally check on the important discussions IFF you _remember_ to do so.
3. If possible, hide or remove any karma-like indications. Your life is better if the internet points aren't visible.
I do think, though, that for at least some platforms it's possible to use them in a limited way where you confine yourself to relatively small communities that are focused on some common interest that genuinely brings together people who enjoy sharing it. You mentioned Discord for instance and that's one, if you can find the right servers. I think it's possible to do that on Reddit too. You just have to never visit the "front page" and stick only to subreddits that you actually get value out of. It's harder approaching impossible with ones like Facebook that are more doggedly algorithm-driven and don't put moderation in the control of users in the same way.
Of course, the lurking issue is that putting moderation in the control of users is building the platform on free labor and those good subcommunities are at risk of imploding when cracks emerge in the dike separating them from the wider platform userbase. And that's likely to happen because even those "safely usable" platforms are ultimately beholden to VC money that's going to demand enshittification eventually.
Cohost was by far the best attempt I've seen for many years, but sadly couldn't make a go of it in the toxic ecosystem we've got.
In general, the goal should be improvement of humans, not avoidance of negative stimuli. Something has to exist where humans are rewarded for aligning to truth and reality, rather than emotion.
I more or less agree. Thus the humans who created and enshittified such platforms should be correspondingly punished for their disalignment to truth and reality. It's not just about rewarding "consumers" of stimuli; the creators and promulgators of stumili also need to be incentivized (and disincentivized) in just the manner you mention.
I'm going to offer my two accounts as examples
https://mastodon.social/@UP8
https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social
both of these are 'cyborg' accounts in that I have my RSS reader, classifier and autoposter. I am looking to build a lot more automation.
My Mastodon feed took a large set of rules to block out #uspol and certain communities of miserable people. My feed has stayed outrage-free since last month.
My measurements showed that Bluesky's 'Discover' feed blocked about 75% of emotionally negative material before Jan 20, since then people are inflamed but looking closely at my feed it seems they are deliberately trying to help certain people who felt stuck on X to migrate, that is, giving huge amounts of visibility to journalists, journalism professors, activists, and such so that they can run up 200k+ follower counts.
I understand. (I've been brainstorming ideas about "how to get people off X" with a friend and tonight I'm going to tell him that Bluesky has it) I've used "less like this", "unfollow" [1], "mute", "block" and such and my discover feed is getting good again.
I have two classifiers in the development pipeline, one to detect "screenshots of text" and "image memes", also a text classifier that is better at sentiment than my current one (I think ModernBERT + LSTM should be possible to train reliably, unlike fine-tuned BERTs.) I'm not so much interested in classifying posts as I am in classifying people; some of them are easy, there are 40,000 people who have a certain image meme pinned that I know I never want to follow. Just recently I figured out how to make training sets for these things without having to look too closely at a lot of toxic content.
I'm also eliminating the dependencies that are keeping this from being open sourced or commercialized so I may I have something to share this summer.
[1] one strike for an outrage post
What I did was unfollow everyone and everything, and block all suggested content. The front page is literally empty. Nothing on those websites captures my attention unless I specifically look for it.
This was very effective. These websites have effectively become write-only media for me. They're still here if I need them, but I end up browsing just one page of /r/curatedtumblr and then doing something else.
Yeah! That's one of the cool things I first noticed when I stopped consuming as much news: I started to form my own unique and nuanced opinions.
It's actually pretty surprising when you learn about how many of your opinions were just absorbed through culture and media and not really 'your own'.
It doesn't help to stare at rage/anxiety inducing things - it doesn't mean you're actually informed all the time.
Plus I'd argue that most things you'll see end up being hogwash and the important stuff will rise to the top and you're generally hear about it anyway.
There are neighbourhood groups and other really useful forums on Facebook. There are tech discussions on BlueSky.
But it's annoyingly hard to run the gauntlet of politics and outrage bait to get to the stuff I actually want.
I asked him if he and his fellow youths knew of anything. He said at first, no, but pretty quickly when all the jewish-owned businesses vanished almost overnight, everyone knew something was up. Did they know about the camps? Debatable. But even the kids knew that they jewish population was kicked out of society.
Sticking your head in the sand is of course a "solution", but that is willfully choosing to be nothing more than a subject to the rulers.
Another solution is to limit your news intake and your political passion to the things that have the most real implications on your life and on the people you care about, while limiting your own exposure and vulnerability to governments as much as possible.
I really hate this one in particular. Why did the biggest Job board become another Facebook (but more blatantly trying to sell you stuff)? This is a hard one to leave unless you're very comfortable in your job prospects.
I know! I'm currently looking for work so have been forced to use it a bit, but once I find my next position, I'm out!
I wouldn't have known that my best friend from middle school lost her house.
I wouldn't have known that a family member was pregnant.
But yeah, I feel like news stuff is better curated elsewhere, because outrage keeps eyeballs viewing, so algorithmic feeds tend to highlight it.
Wait... how?
Your family only communicate via facebook?
I'm not judging here, I'm genuinely curious
But 1 year into that, I read an article by Swyx on how to use social media. I tried but gave up for another 2 years. But the end of that last 2 years was the election...and I was curious...so I went to X.
Within 3 days my opinion of the outcome flipped.
And...since I already read Swyx's article, I was ready to effectively navigate other topics of interest.
But the key to effective media usage is to ALWAYS be on guard. Your mental filters have to be running all the time. The second you drop your guard, you're vulnerable because the stream never lets up.
But when you do this, you find that you quickly run out of truly interesting things to read. Luckily I've also got physical hobbies. I now spend a TOTAL of 2 hrs/day across all media, and my mental health is just fine!
But also I find it highly rewarding in many areas such as investing, history (the X format works so well!), international (language, culture, politics).
I also highly recommend taking a second to put each post in scale or context. This does 2 things: helps decide importance of post, and slows scrolling so your brain doesn't get DDOSed into a mental health crisis.
And the (increasingly cheap, powerful and ubiquitous) LLMs can be used to either save time or power you further into the conversations.
Take a breather, compose your emotions, take off hours or a days, but then re-engage, interact, observe, document, etc.
Reddit - hobbies
Instagram - catching up with friends
LinkedIn - Job Search
When I’m really brain-tired but have downtime, I’ll 1) do nothing and just think in silence, 2) listen to a podcast or music or 3) watch Netflix.
Spotify and Netflix are definitely media apps but they don’t quite have that same negative and addictive effect that normal social media apps do.
- Mute any subreddit you do not enjoy
- Generously block any asshole in the comments
- Subscribe to the subreddits you do enjoy
- Create one or more themed multireddits of the subreddits you enjoy
My Reddit experience is cheesy feel good clips, cool videos of skilled people or weird occurences, funny niche humor and nerdy niche hobbies. No drama.
But the emotionally violent resistance I get from people who are embedded in it is wild. I've commented on here before and subsequently pissed people off, but it is an addiction and needs to be treated like one.
Love it! Well, I hate that this situation exists, but the metaphor is great.
Unironically, my friends, family and colleagues. If anything truly important happens that ends up being relevant to me, the probability that one of them tells me is close to 100%. I don’t need the news or social media for that.
This is hard to overstate. Checkout Jonathan Haidts research into social medias role in skyrocketing mental health problems in kids over the past decade.
The junkfood comparison is great. It feels good now but makes you extremely unhealthy long term. Its deceptive because it doesnt look that bad, but it displaces things that you actually need to be healthy.
I love that guy! He generally makes the rounds as a guest on most of the large podcasts and I’d recommend anyone listen to at least one podcast where he’s a guest.
A lot of submissions are flagged every day. Some of them are well offtopic, repetitive or judged to be too biased or political and clearly if the site allowed all submissions it would break.
The act of curation is a form of censorship and while it is often justified, many posts about topical developments that have a technical/financial angle, perhaps even posted by technical/financial media or bloggers and featuring people who are well known in the technical/financial field appear to be getting flagged in ways that could appear to be politically motivated.
Pointless outrage over trivialities isn't good for us but when issues of genuine concern arise we shouldn't go out of our way to avoid them because they make us feel bad. We are supposed to feel bad when things are bad as it provokes us to action. The media/tech industry exploits our behavioral quirks to keep us engaged on their platforms but the fatique caused by the fire hose could numb us to real dangers. Disconnecting is very good for personal wellbeing but not to the point of dangerous ignorance.
It also puts things into a bit of a global perspective, when you realize how much stuff is going on around the world all the time. Though this of course also means you'll learn things that are on the news everywhere in your country only after they've become relevant enough to register on a global level.
Prior to social media, we all had incredibly conflicting views, just wasn't in our faces all the time to get outraged about! So the trick is to remember, by having these discussions/disagreements, we're actually making progress. We hear the loudest voices, but there's always smart and sincere people quietly reading and learning, which is a brilliant outcome!
If you find yourself getting outraged, be disciplined and switch activities (exercise, go for a walk, or turn off the source).
I definitely wouldn't leave social media though! Instead, harness them! Train those algos to give you science, book clubs, fascinating music niches, travel, culture - go deep, explore, and 'follow' liberally - you can very easily remove yourself from a group/page. I've found insanely interesting chemistry and physics pages, not to mention domains I never even knew existed, like color theory and a handful of others. Once you start clicking on politics, you'll only get more of it. Click on the good stuff!
Sorry, but that last paragraph sounds like AI generated Meta PR.
To put it another way, ditching a medium entirely is the incorrect strategy; akin to refusing to read books just because there's many bad ones - obviously, instead, we select the good ones and read those. Same goes for social media pages/groups/profiles
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What’s that saying… “you aren’t stuck in traffic; you are the traffic.”
The net effect of my news/social media fast has been fairly dramatic. I suddenly have an attention span again. When a persons opinion differs from mine, I generally don't immediately assume they are part of the third reich (although if they keep talking a while I might get there lol).
To be clear I absolutely despise whats happening in the US right now. Enough information makes it to me through friends and family (and HN) that I feel a deep sense of despair. I am just not sure what minute by minute updates on the fuckery happening right now gets me.
I finally saw the futility when there were 10,000 articles about Trump tweeting "covfefe".
At the same time, I’m definitely less informed. Though I’m quite surprised how much still permeates despite me not “going looking”.
Generally, I think it’s more healthy to focus on what you can control and what you have agency over. You can choose what to be outraged over national/global events (and do nothing) or you can instead focus that energy on Doing Something closer to home that’s important to you. Which is the better trade?
I’m somewhat conflicted on being less informed esp with big changes happening. And even more conflicted about what kind of world we’d have if everyone chose this strategy. But, it’s not unprincipled. The principle is Focus on What You Can Control/Do and put all your energy into that.
She mentions that people are using "outrage" issues (abortion, gay rights, critical race theory) "as kind of wedge issues to convince people to vote in ways that might be against their own self-interest"...
GREAT! We need more tips on how to train yourself to recognize when that's happening and not get outraged. It boils down to emotional control. If politicians can't use outrage as a tool of control then they'll have to move on (to something better hopefully, but probably not ;).
Here's one tip. If Trump enrages you every time you see him, watch him in a way that allows you to appreciate something about him! He is a cool cucumber. He sheds attacks like water off an umbrella. (whatever, you come up something)... Remember, the goal here is to not let him control your emotions. This isn't about the facts or morality or how he "lies".
This is a pointless truism. Everything relies on "does not directly impact your life", and there's no useful guidance on that point.
One can still do everything in their power to prepare for, and mitigate things outside their control, while still keeping in mind what is in your control and isn't so you don't become emotionally dependent on outcomes outside your control, which is ruinous for mental health.
Having empathy, and caring about doing the right thing actually work better when you stop obsessing over and wasting all of your energy on things you cannot control.
Maybe they have more empathy for the plight of others?
Also, it is often the case that the events of today which don't directly affect you, if not stopped, will affect you before you know it, at which point it is too late to do anything about.
Shift your focus to things you can possibly control, e.g. the news that's happening in your local community where you have a say in how things are done.
I'm out. I'm hiding away and hoping nothing affects me personally, and if it does I'm not going to think there's anything I could have done about it.
We're not in control anymore. Not unless there are any tech billionaires lurking on HN, and they don't give a shit about us.
If I understand correctly, they are mostly busy taking over the country at the moment. No time for HN..
Feels like the causality might be the other way around.