Ask HN: What is your content discovery daily routine?

I gave up on Twitter, as even after massive ongoing curation the signal/noise is far too low. There's no way to filter tweets from sources I'm following, and it's a constant source of anxiety leading to compulsive reloading of the feed. Other social networks are worse. Life's too short for this.

I've also cut down on the web sources I follow, as information overload is a real thing, and we rapidly run into diminishing returns.

For news, I now just peruse the FT, Guardian and Atlantic (+HN via http://hckrnews.com/ using the 'top 50%' setting) a couple of times a day, and Politico Magazine once per week. This covers a decent section of the political spectrum and if there's anything important going on I'll find it amongst those sources. I probably read half a dozen full articles each day.

For non-immediate information, I browse A&L Daily, and I have print subscriptions to the following: The Atlantic, Harper's, Sky & Telescope, American Scientist, Foreign Affairs, Philosophy Now, and The Philosophers' Magazine.

Additionally, I listen to a selection of podcasts when I'm in the car. These cover international relations and news analysis, history, philosophy and comedy.

That just about covers it; since I hit 40 and had a son my priorities changed, as did my outlook on life. Other than my family, I'm spending much more of my time on real hobbies and interests (in my case a bit of astronomy and photography, occasional writing, some cooking, and a lot of cycling and serious reading (books)), and less on time-wasting activities (social networks, web forums, television and video games).

It's amazing how much extra time you can find if you cut useless things out of your life.

>> Twitter on the train >> Internal chatroom & microblog platform once in the office >> HN in a permatab in Chrome thorughout the day on a 10min refresh

Daily:

- Messenger

- Email

- Hacker News

- Reddit

Weekly:

- YouTube

- Pocket

- Chrome tabs

I always was a religious RSS user and put all the interesting feeds in there. But I realized that it just becomes too much work to get to "inbox zero".

So now I have some feeds left with acceptable volume (games: Eurogamer, Polygon, Kotaku..; Apple feeds; Webcomics; Deals).

The rest I just browse throughout the day: Guardian, Arstechnica, Reddit.. Little exception for HN: I use hckrnews.com now because there I can choose whether I want to see all homepage entries or -if I don't have the time- only the top 20%. (every site should have that!)

I used to use bookmarks as well but now I just dump it into iOS Notes although I'm not fully happy with that.

I've found Blendle quite good (after HN). Based on your interests, it offers a somewhat curated selection of articles from a variety of magazines and newspapers via micropayments so you don't need a load of subscriptions. I think it's better reading a few in-depth articles than trying to keep up with the random fire-hose of social media.