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Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

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

#81

Post by georgeburdell »

I stopped reading/listening to most news around the time of the George Floyd riots. There was just too much rage bait. I now only pay attention to tech news (as in, technical things, not normal news that happens to be about tech companies) and local stations. Local news tends to be a little fluffy, but it’s intentionally inoffensive, which I like.

Also slowly whittled my social media presence down to LinkedIn, and that’ll be gone once I’ve firmed up my retirement plans in a few years

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

#82

Post by socialismisok »

drak0n1c wrote: post #58
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #18

I’m going darker by the day. I don’t seek out news, and when I do read it, I tend to feel disturbed by how little it presents as reporting, and instead, how much it appears to have an agenda. I could do better. I followed the Ukraine-Russia war for a while, and although I wasn’t glued to it, I put too much focus on it. There is literally nothing that happens if I know what’s going on there. Nothing at all. It distrac…

Just today I ran across this widely promoted ABC/CBS article claiming that "Texas, Oklahoma ranked among least safest states in the country". The type of supposedly non-opinion flavor piece syndicated above-the-fold in Windows 11 Search, Apple News, Android home pages, and Reddit/Twitter defaults. https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/texas-oklahoma-ranked-among... It turns out that it is wholly based on a corporate PR pu…

Drug overdoses are probably a pretty minor impact to safety though, right? And vaccination rates are a pretty standard way to indicate the safety of a community against a virus...

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

#83

Post by sofixa »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #67
olkyts wrote: 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.

Oryx (blog and Twitter) provides good raw open source intelligence data.

I've found The Guardian's reporting and FT's analysis to be quite good. They report based on verifiable facts and also claims by both sides, with explicit mentions if there's corroborating sources or not. The Guardian also have a daily "what's new" so that's useful to keep up.

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

#84

Post by yackback »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #67
olkyts wrote: 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.

Bellingcat

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

#85

Post by iansowinski »

I am a news junkie as I'm really into politics. I even studied sociology with focus on propaganda. From some time I started to implement "less is more" in the news aspect. I buy weekly newspaper (printed, helps me focus on reading), listing to one politics podcast a week. It really cleared my mind and I am still well informed. Maybe even better informed as I filtered out low quality information.

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

#86

Post by karaokeyoga »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #67
olkyts wrote: 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oryx_(website)

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

#87

Post by oezi »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #67
olkyts wrote: 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.

This seems to be a core problem of a lot of people. The inability to discern that not everything has an agenda and is propaganda.

Most western media (Murdock/Berlusconi type oligarch media aside) is fairly factual. It doesn't have 'spin' or 'agenda' in the sense that the journalists conspire to mislead (they don't have time for this).

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

#88

Post by nvln »

I've limited my content consumption to hacker news, selected followers on twitter and I've blocked all unnecessary twitter appendages (trending, who to follow etc) with stylus. Quite long-term-ish work, lots of family time, art and poetry has been my antidote.

I occasionally fire up google news to make sure nothing horrible is going on locally. This has helped me recover somewhat from post-pandemic negativity.

Just like what is said about gmail (Even if you don't use gmail, google has all your email because everyone else does), most people are consuming news and they are bringing their triggered-selves to the other parts of the existence. I'm finding it very hard to spot spaces that are purely creative, informative and joyous hubs.

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

#89

Post by int_19h »

lukevp wrote: post #30

I’ve found that text.npr.org is really good for me. They don’t have pagination, only a handful of new articles a day, and no images. The lack of images really helps with some graphic stories being less emotionally impactful. Other than that, I just check hackernews.

There's a wonderful service that picks the few most important news stories daily and texts links and brief summaries. On most days, I only read the summaries.

https://thenewpaper.co/

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

#90

Post by kukkeliskuu »

I have gone dark earlier, 5+ years ago, but not recently. It was very healthy.

My experience was that surprisingly I often understood more about current issues than people that were constantly reading the news.

Much of news is just noise. If you read all the news, all the time, you are acting as a noise filter. If you let other people work as your noise filter, and start listening what they say about the current events, the important things will bubble up, and you will know about them practically as soon as everybody else.

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