Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

news.ycombinator.com

111–120 of 262 posts

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#111
post #8

Check out the Wikipedia "Current Events" page. It's been my main source of news for the past few years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events The nice thing is that you don't get the usual heavily US-centric political bias, and instead just see stuff happening around the world. The obituaries are on the side as well, which is convenient because, being Wikipedia, you can easily read about them.

> The obituaries are on the side as well, which is convenient

Indeed, I always check to see if my name is in it.

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#112
post #61

I live in Ukraine. From 2015 till 2022 I didn’t read or watched news and no social media or blogs or analytics. Then war started. Now I follow news everyday, because I have to take care of my family’s security. I follow analytics of battlefields progress so if I see warning signs I would have to take decisions to move my family further to the western part. I follow news on volunteers who help military so I can take a…

What sources of news are reliable on the conflict? I can't find anything which doesn't reek of propaganda: Western or Russian.

The War on the Rocks podcast is good, in particular the regular analysis from Michael Kofman. https://open.spotify.com/show/5ec5TBvVh3w4aobgx0qgYj

The Institute for the Study of War aggregates open source intel into daily control of terrain maps. https://twitter.com/thestudyofwar

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#113

Very opiniated answer here : I now rely mostly on Wikipedia, cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events Most news look to me as entertainment, not information. Articles detail what B.Spears has done or what hominous unacceptable sentence has been said by CongressMan X or Y. Spoiler : I don't want entertainment, I don't want to be outraged (most people do and won't really admit it). I want the state of the…

How do you find topics to read up on via Wikipedia? In particular news topics. I’m a frequent user of visiting the site but unfamiliar with the idea of using it to stay informed on the dynamic world we live in.

Front page after language choice has highlights.

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to like NPR a lot. I listened every single day on the way to work and back home. It seemed around 2013 or so the agenda became far less neutral and far more one-sided. I haven't really found a source that is truly neutral. Reuters does an okay job and that's about it. Journalism is more-or-less dead in the era of eyeballs.

There is no such thing as a neutral news source. The act of editing a publication necessarily requires you to choose which stories you publish and whose viewpoints you leave out. Furthermore, most folks don't really want a neutral news outlet - do I want to see equal time given to white supremacists and Black civil rights leaders? No, I'm just not interested in any "neutral" discussion of human rights. I don't want t…

> No, I'm just not interested in any "neutral" discussion of human rights. I don't want to read or listen to nationalists, incels, or whoever offering up opinions on the "great replacement theory" or whatever.

You pick an extreme example to make the same point anyone says about "free speech". I do find it funny that you left out the other side of the extreme. I am equally uninterested in listening to climate extremists who spray oil on businesses, rioters, antifa, anti-gunners, etc. Turns out, the extremes don't groove well with journalistic integrity because they don't believe in truth anyway. In fact, many of these extremes are created by the exact "journalism" we are complaining about here.

I do want neutrality in the truest sense. If news could be a list of facts derived by good journalism with sources, interviews, etc then I would be content. I don't want spin, I don't want an editorial disguised as a front page article. I want a person with a mundane droning monotone voice to tell me what happened, read off the interviews, and then close out the show. I want a set of facts that I can then derive my own conclusion from. This leaping off point would let me take this to my friends or family and have a meaningful discussion on what they think, or how it effects people, etc. Instead everything is an emergency. Everything is extreme. Every news outlet on whatever side you believe is telling you what to think, not what happened. You can't even listen to the big 3 news outlets in America, average their opinions, and end up anywhere closer to the truth. Coincidentally, this is the same problem with so-called "fact checkers", which is just a clever rebranding of yellow journalism, where the "fact check" is just a re-link to another disguised editorial or speculation on the meaning of something with enough filler to feel "truthy".

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#115
I recommend Memeorandum[0] if you can't pull the plug entirely. It's "an auto-generated summary of the stories that US political commentators are discussing online right now.", and you've got a zillion sources right there at your fingertips if you want to see the various sides of any given issue.

My wife asked me about this just today; she's trying to wean herself off of Twitter, but it's useful to her for keeping on top of "news" (you can get it to do that if you set your feed just so). I didn't really have a good answer for how she might do that without Twitter other than something like Reddit; the mix of human interest + culture + news is hard to reproduce.

I've got an itch in the back of my brain telling me the next winning "social" media app will be one that can capture that "news feed" aspect of Reddit, Twitter and Facebook, but without enabling the direct interaction that ruins those platforms, but I'm kind of "terminally online" at this point so my PoV is likely skewed.

(Because I'm terminally online) Kind of like somehow disabling /all chat in LoL -- a way to consume the news/content without the toxic infighting and abuse the Internet apparently triggers in people.

[0] https://www.memeorandum.com/

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#116
The only authentic news source for me now, is two private twitter lists I maintain, one named "left" and the other, named "right." These are loose terms - not fully indicative of the accounts that form the lists. These two feeds give me a range of perspectives on any current happenings from (loosely again) far left to far right, with everything in-between. And then, from that and the counter-arguments that I see on both sides, I can mostly tell what actually happened.

The mainstream media's coverage is often worse than those feeds, and definitely and deliberately lacking in the truth, with a clear intent to skew public opinion to one of those sides, depending on the publication. The ones that pretend to be neutral are somewhat worse than those that wear their biases on their sleeves, because of an additional layer of deception.

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#117
I have stopped following national and world news. I do learn about major events such as wars at some point but other than that here is the type of news I follow:

Tech/science news, local/city news, reddit threads on specific topics/hobbies

National news is full of sensational drama and I don't have much influence on the outcomes anyway.

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#118

Very opiniated answer here : I now rely mostly on Wikipedia, cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events Most news look to me as entertainment, not information. Articles detail what B.Spears has done or what hominous unacceptable sentence has been said by CongressMan X or Y. Spoiler : I don't want entertainment, I don't want to be outraged (most people do and won't really admit it). I want the state of the…

How do you find topics to read up on via Wikipedia? In particular news topics. I’m a frequent user of visiting the site but unfamiliar with the idea of using it to stay informed on the dynamic world we live in.

I'll try to repeat ? read this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

> How do you find topics to read up on via Wikipedia?

The above link is the "News Portal" of Wikipedia. I'll assume that -like me at 1st- you didn't even imagine it could exist.

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#119
I have pruned my feeds so I get almost no news about celebrities, sports, or random market movements.

For other news, I try to keep things balanced as far as the culture war goes, and I try to keep in mind the ultimate sources of the stories I read (press release, leak from government employee, etc).

Re: Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you find topics to read up on via Wikipedia? In particular news topics. I’m a frequent user of visiting the site but unfamiliar with the idea of using it to stay informed on the dynamic world we live in.

I'll try to repeat ? read this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events > How do you find topics to read up on via Wikipedia? The above link is the "News Portal" of Wikipedia. I'll assume that -like me at 1st- you didn't even imagine it could exist.

Comments also promoting / proposing Wikipedia's Current Events [1] [2] [3] [4]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417715

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417336

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417454

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417439

Post reply on HN