I have cut out the vast majority of news and social media since the beginning of 2025.
My mental health is noticeably better, and I would readily attribute this to not being tuned in to the ongoings of the globe that I have zero control over. Instead, I have been more focused on my local life and community.
But I regularly feel guilty about not being keyed in to the flirtations with/forays into authoritarianism in my country.
Ignorance is bliss, eh? But don't come and pull off the "we didn't know anything" excuse that the Germans used in droves after 1945.
And no, that's not exclusive to Trump and what ICE has been up to, vanishing people into deportation camps. Climate change, the increasing frequency of pandemics, PFAS/forever chemicals, the list of stuff being swept under the rug instead of being acted against grows longer by the day.
I believe Hannah Arendt made the point that politicians lie not so much as to get away with the issue at hand but rather as a long term strategy to nullify any interest in politics overall in order to get away with absolute everything on their agenda. This might be the most recent iteration of this, aided by an often complicit media.
This is really rich coming from The Guardian, a publication that, while not nearly on the same level of degeneracy as the usual rags, is hardly a bastion of factual reporting [1] (and, to be clear, I'm talking about factuality, not political bias, but downvote anyhow I guess). The last story I read from them was linked from here on HN and riddled with bad facts in a naked attempt to support the author's narrative. News flash (pun intended): if something is dire enough to be newsworthy then it doesn't need editorial embellishment. It's the metaphorical equivalent of a reporter making airplane noises while zooming a spoon of food around their readership's head like they're a hungry baby.
If you want hard hitting public interest pieces then ProPublica [2] and Democracy Now! [3] are both far better choices. I can't say that they'll make you feel better about the wacky world we live in but at least they treat you like an adult.
I remember that for years following 9/11 I would compulsively refresh Drudge every 1/2 hr expecting some other horror to unfold, and eventually just deleted the bookmark to prevent myself from doing that.
Nowadays I get my daily news from a quick scan of the headlines on Google news, as well as Drudge (from Google search history - no bookmark!), but of course it's mostly sensationalist and partisan garbage, and only minimally informative about actual events/developments of interest. I only click through a very small number of headlines.
For those complaining about the news sites being sensationalist, why not just read Reuters? You will miss out on local news, but it's pretty reliable for international news.
My social circle has shrank to almost nothing, and I go to work and pursue my hobbies. It's not clear to me that knowing about world or political events has much impact. To the extent that I'm well informed, it mostly just allows me to have political conversations in my head, with no one, sometimes my wife, and very occasionally a fried or two. And there's no reason to think that those political conversations are doing anything positive for the relationships. (I don't lean into politics with people since it can be so divisive, but if people are so inclined, it can be fun intellectually.
I don't generally feel like there's much in the news that either discusses anything I care about. Or, to the extent that issues I care about are discussed, they come at it from such a strange angle that the discourse is mostly frustrating, or disappointing. (quick example, I heard a piece on NPR about how people are turning to LLMs for therapy. The commentator's solution? We NEED robust LLMs that are trained in psychology datasets and have the right guardrails for psychology.) For the rest of the HN crowd, imagine any news story from a mainstream outlet about issues of privacy or security. The commentary is completely worthless, except perhaps for informing you about where some of the general public may be on the issue.
In other words, for me personally, it's not sure that following politics has very much real utility value. I can just research a candidate when I go to vote. The only direct referendums I can vote on are town-level and have nothing to do with national matters. I donate to a few causes I like, and otherwise I have effectively zero say in how these things turn out. This means I'd be far better off reading a book, doing chores, or thinking about how I can improve the quality of my life than paying attention to the news whatsoever.
I cut down my “news intake” significantly as well… most stuff that’s happening is outside my control anyway. If there’s something major (eg: another pandemic) the news will reach me anyway.
If you want to keep a light pulse on national news without the clickbait and doomscrolling, I recommend https://text.npr.org
It’s text-only, no photos or videos. Updates only once or twice a day. No comments section or any other distractions.
That’s been my main change to my news diet. Deleting the NYTimes app and replacing it with that site has made me much happier.
I still read a lot of local news (San Francisco things that affect my life) but I just realize that national political news is not something I need to track 24/7
I think in this age of information wars where my country's administration is unironically posting memes about their policy: it's almost as important to be informed of the "pulse" people have towards news as it is to understand the news itself. In a increasingly post-truth society, being informed of reality isn't enough.
I'm much more interested in actively filtering it than cutting it. Think yahoo pipes except DIY and more sophisticated. That'll take time to build though.
In the near term I've found that asking an LLM with search/deep research to summarize news helps. Obviously zero shielding from bias, but at least its concise & all in one place
There is also kagi and newsminimalist for out of the box semi-filtered:
I'd rather just drink from the hose directly, personally. I've been doing an "anti-pomodoro" timer, myself. Set 30 or 60 minutes, and just scroll around as I usually do. aggregators (including here on the rare occasion a post isn't flagged), various news feeds, etc. when the timer ends, I get out of the hypnosis and move on to whatever the day needs.
I think being anxious in these times is important. But the anxiety has middling returns. I want to do more, but I know spending hours worrying over stuff I can't control is futile.
I have tuned the news out as much as possible, as soon as I've realized it's mostly show biz.
The News, like any other media, is in the business of producing content and being watched/read/listened to, as much as possible. Not in the business of keeping me informed about what's going on in the world (that's relevant to me).
I don't want to bury my head in the sand. I do read/watch/listen to some of it. Usually weeklies, like The Economist, and I have a daily digest newsletter that dedupes and sends me local news from the day before. Between that and what I hear on the grapevine / from my friends, I trust that I am informed enough.
I switched mostly to using an RSS reader to see the headlines, and then read what is interesting. Plus I follow several writers that I trust (eg. Heather Cox Richardson).
I’ve reduced my news intake to broadly just AP News, with color commentary/opinion/perspectives coming from The Guardian and Al Jazeera as needed. For local news, it’s my NPR station (WBUR) and Universal Hub in RSS format.
The good news is I spend significantly less time doomscrolling (down, on average I’d say, over 90%). My anxiety levels are largely gone, and when they do spool up I’m equipped with the tools to interrupt or stop them.
The downside to this has been an increased reliance on my news intake by others who have abandoned it wholesale or only consume opinion pieces like the “nightly news”. It’s a markedly different kind of anxiety, because now I also have to be ready to teach these other people about things they really should be building habits for themselves - but if I bail out, they just rely on ChatGPT instead to explain complex topics while remaining bereft of nuance and historical contexts.
The current landscape sucks, because everyone is chasing bullshit KPIs (engagement metrics, attention economy, advertising revenue, etc) instead of just delivering high-quality journalism at rates the common man can’t afford to pass up (i.e., affordable). I do not blame people from noping out, but I remain angry that everyone basically abandoned RSS feeds and digestible news in lieu of clickbait, algorithms, and walled gardens.
> I remain angry that everyone basically abandoned RSS feeds and digestible news in lieu of clickbait, algorithms, and walled gardens.
Well one of them had billions to advertise and make dark patterns to keep people on. And people still don't realize those tricks in at play.
This is sadly why proper regulation is needed. We didn't cut down o Yellow Journalism in press last century by simply informing the populace better. In many ways, the honest people need enough power to punish the dishonest people. Shame that 2025 is not the year of honesty.
Somewhere in the 2010s, social media turned news into spam. I guess it was a long time coming, I remember news commercials in the 90s fear-baiting constantly, demanding you tune in at 11pm to find out more.
I recommend Wikipedia frontpage, maybe Wikinews. It has to come from a nonprofit at this point.
The vast majority of news consumption is for feeling amusement, outrage, tribal-solidarity, etc. It almost never leads to a change in action by the consumer.
Non-entertainment news: articles that change future actions, e.g. trade publications related to one's career/job.
Need information to vote? Wait 4 weeks before the election and then go to one of the many websites that track candidates' quotes to determine as best one can what their positions are on the issues you care about. For example: https://www.ontheissues.org/
Entertainment is fine and dandy! But don't make the mistake of thinking it's productive or better/nobler than alternatives just because "journalism."
>Wait 4 weeks before the election and then go to one of the many websites that track candidates' quotes
So just hear carefully curated words and not see the actions they did? Yeah, that's pretty much how my country got into this situation.
There's plenty of fluff, but lets not pretend that there isn't actual reporting out there for stuff that does or will affect your daily life. 1000x so with local policy where it is so excruciatingly difficult to find any real information on. Just
1) be honest about when you want either the dryest, direct report, or you want a show to go with it. I'm definitely in the middle myself, slightly skewed towards dry.
2) Understand the balance of relevance, impact, importance, and fun to your life. We can be honest and admit there some important news out there that simply isn't a fight you want to participate nor follow closely.
Likewise, we're on a tech forum right now and I'm sure while many of us would read about a distributed GPU runtime that we also all know it's not necessarily the most important thing in life right now (unless that is indeed your career right now).
Awareness can do a lot to drive behavior by itself. We just first need to be honest about it.
I like to take a tiered approach, placing way more importance on news 1s of miles away from me than 100s or 1000s of miles away from me. If there's a water main break or police activity or interesting new construction happening near me, that's the news that matters. What happens on the opposite end of the country has little bearing on my day-to-day life, so why give it a disproportionate amount of attention? It's trivia for all intents and purposes.
This is me over the last year or two. Anxiety and creeping horror, interrupted sleep and low mood. Ukraine, Gaza, Trump, authoritarianism everywhere...
I try to avoid online news sources, because there's an infinite amount to doomscroll. I use leechblock [1] in firefox to introduce just enough friction to visiting a news site, without hard-blocking them. Because sometimes I still need to know what's going on.
I check the ten minute news summary on BBC Radio 4 as I'm driving to work. Its time-bounded, and pretty reliable imo - although I lean towards a Guardian perspective. Sometimes I hang around for the big interview afterwards, other times I go back to music on a usb stick. Or just drive.
I used to read the newspaper every morning over breakfast as a teenager. At one point I noticed that it just made me angry at the stuff going on in the world, but without me actually being able to do anything about it. So I stopped consuming the news. It's been 25 years now and I have zero regrets about this. On occasion I miss something I would like to know about, but in general I will find out about any truly important news out from other people.
And that was before the current age of yellow journalism. The news is 10x worse now than it was then; I strongly recommend that everyone unplugs from it for the sake of their own mental health.
I've been thinking of running all the news headlines through a (local) AI to filter out stuff that is actually important, aiming for about 1% of headines or so.
49 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 68.7 ms ] threadMy mental health is noticeably better, and I would readily attribute this to not being tuned in to the ongoings of the globe that I have zero control over. Instead, I have been more focused on my local life and community.
But I regularly feel guilty about not being keyed in to the flirtations with/forays into authoritarianism in my country.
And no, that's not exclusive to Trump and what ICE has been up to, vanishing people into deportation camps. Climate change, the increasing frequency of pandemics, PFAS/forever chemicals, the list of stuff being swept under the rug instead of being acted against grows longer by the day.
If you want hard hitting public interest pieces then ProPublica [2] and Democracy Now! [3] are both far better choices. I can't say that they'll make you feel better about the wacky world we live in but at least they treat you like an adult.
[1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/
[2] https://www.propublica.org/
[3] https://www.democracynow.org/
Nowadays I get my daily news from a quick scan of the headlines on Google news, as well as Drudge (from Google search history - no bookmark!), but of course it's mostly sensationalist and partisan garbage, and only minimally informative about actual events/developments of interest. I only click through a very small number of headlines.
I don't generally feel like there's much in the news that either discusses anything I care about. Or, to the extent that issues I care about are discussed, they come at it from such a strange angle that the discourse is mostly frustrating, or disappointing. (quick example, I heard a piece on NPR about how people are turning to LLMs for therapy. The commentator's solution? We NEED robust LLMs that are trained in psychology datasets and have the right guardrails for psychology.) For the rest of the HN crowd, imagine any news story from a mainstream outlet about issues of privacy or security. The commentary is completely worthless, except perhaps for informing you about where some of the general public may be on the issue.
In other words, for me personally, it's not sure that following politics has very much real utility value. I can just research a candidate when I go to vote. The only direct referendums I can vote on are town-level and have nothing to do with national matters. I donate to a few causes I like, and otherwise I have effectively zero say in how these things turn out. This means I'd be far better off reading a book, doing chores, or thinking about how I can improve the quality of my life than paying attention to the news whatsoever.
It’s text-only, no photos or videos. Updates only once or twice a day. No comments section or any other distractions.
That’s been my main change to my news diet. Deleting the NYTimes app and replacing it with that site has made me much happier.
I still read a lot of local news (San Francisco things that affect my life) but I just realize that national political news is not something I need to track 24/7
I think in this age of information wars where my country's administration is unironically posting memes about their policy: it's almost as important to be informed of the "pulse" people have towards news as it is to understand the news itself. In a increasingly post-truth society, being informed of reality isn't enough.
In the near term I've found that asking an LLM with search/deep research to summarize news helps. Obviously zero shielding from bias, but at least its concise & all in one place
There is also kagi and newsminimalist for out of the box semi-filtered:
https://www.newsminimalist.com/
https://kite.kagi.com/
I think being anxious in these times is important. But the anxiety has middling returns. I want to do more, but I know spending hours worrying over stuff I can't control is futile.
The News, like any other media, is in the business of producing content and being watched/read/listened to, as much as possible. Not in the business of keeping me informed about what's going on in the world (that's relevant to me).
I don't want to bury my head in the sand. I do read/watch/listen to some of it. Usually weeklies, like The Economist, and I have a daily digest newsletter that dedupes and sends me local news from the day before. Between that and what I hear on the grapevine / from my friends, I trust that I am informed enough.
I don't want to get my news from social media.
The good news is I spend significantly less time doomscrolling (down, on average I’d say, over 90%). My anxiety levels are largely gone, and when they do spool up I’m equipped with the tools to interrupt or stop them.
The downside to this has been an increased reliance on my news intake by others who have abandoned it wholesale or only consume opinion pieces like the “nightly news”. It’s a markedly different kind of anxiety, because now I also have to be ready to teach these other people about things they really should be building habits for themselves - but if I bail out, they just rely on ChatGPT instead to explain complex topics while remaining bereft of nuance and historical contexts.
The current landscape sucks, because everyone is chasing bullshit KPIs (engagement metrics, attention economy, advertising revenue, etc) instead of just delivering high-quality journalism at rates the common man can’t afford to pass up (i.e., affordable). I do not blame people from noping out, but I remain angry that everyone basically abandoned RSS feeds and digestible news in lieu of clickbait, algorithms, and walled gardens.
Well one of them had billions to advertise and make dark patterns to keep people on. And people still don't realize those tricks in at play.
This is sadly why proper regulation is needed. We didn't cut down o Yellow Journalism in press last century by simply informing the populace better. In many ways, the honest people need enough power to punish the dishonest people. Shame that 2025 is not the year of honesty.
1) I thought most people got their “news” from social media (x, BlueSky, TikTok). TikTok esp does not really give link backs as well.
2) was this part of the “flood the zone” strategy, to get people to just be overwhelmed and not pay attention?
I recommend Wikipedia frontpage, maybe Wikinews. It has to come from a nonprofit at this point.
But we are here giving self help guides on how to tune out the sounds of dying kids instead of demanding consequences from our government.
The vast majority of news consumption is for feeling amusement, outrage, tribal-solidarity, etc. It almost never leads to a change in action by the consumer.
Non-entertainment news: articles that change future actions, e.g. trade publications related to one's career/job.
Need information to vote? Wait 4 weeks before the election and then go to one of the many websites that track candidates' quotes to determine as best one can what their positions are on the issues you care about. For example: https://www.ontheissues.org/
Entertainment is fine and dandy! But don't make the mistake of thinking it's productive or better/nobler than alternatives just because "journalism."
So just hear carefully curated words and not see the actions they did? Yeah, that's pretty much how my country got into this situation.
There's plenty of fluff, but lets not pretend that there isn't actual reporting out there for stuff that does or will affect your daily life. 1000x so with local policy where it is so excruciatingly difficult to find any real information on. Just
1) be honest about when you want either the dryest, direct report, or you want a show to go with it. I'm definitely in the middle myself, slightly skewed towards dry.
2) Understand the balance of relevance, impact, importance, and fun to your life. We can be honest and admit there some important news out there that simply isn't a fight you want to participate nor follow closely.
Likewise, we're on a tech forum right now and I'm sure while many of us would read about a distributed GPU runtime that we also all know it's not necessarily the most important thing in life right now (unless that is indeed your career right now).
Awareness can do a lot to drive behavior by itself. We just first need to be honest about it.
I try to avoid online news sources, because there's an infinite amount to doomscroll. I use leechblock [1] in firefox to introduce just enough friction to visiting a news site, without hard-blocking them. Because sometimes I still need to know what's going on.
I check the ten minute news summary on BBC Radio 4 as I'm driving to work. Its time-bounded, and pretty reliable imo - although I lean towards a Guardian perspective. Sometimes I hang around for the big interview afterwards, other times I go back to music on a usb stick. Or just drive.
[1] https://github.com/proginosko/LeechBlock
Also available for chrome and edge
And that was before the current age of yellow journalism. The news is 10x worse now than it was then; I strongly recommend that everyone unplugs from it for the sake of their own mental health.