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Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?

#161

Post by stevenbedrick »

war1025 wrote: post #136
yetanta wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News is not news. It is entertainment. Pick your flavor and let them tell you how to feel. It is designed to be addictive. Either by accident or deliberate is up for debate. I have my opinion on it but it is just that. They use your own feelings to manipulate you into watching/clicking for more. Facts matter little, feelings do in this segment of our world. Mr. Bernays should be proud of the monster he set loose upon…

> Even the vaunted NPR does this. I recently upped my monthly donation to my local NPR station, and I feel like if anything it's made me more critical of them. Probably most of it is that I lean politically Right, and they lean Left. But it feels like sometimes they just go out of their way to try to check all the boxes of "woke" culture, whatever the hell that is. The example that sticks out in my mind is they did a…

Without having listened to that piece, it occurs to me that one reason for specifically including the perspective of a transgender individual in the radio segment may have been that under the current administration there have been _major_ changes to our country's policies around asylum. "Fear of persecution for sexual orientation or transgender status" is one of the one of the more common reasons that people seek asylum in the US, after all. Just a thought...

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?

#162

Post by drenvuk »

pb7 wrote: post #118
dencodev wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does being on HN not count? Feel like I see lots of news on HN. It's in the name after all.

Definitely cheating and I’m not the GP, but I would argue HN is curated enough to filter out most guilty pleasure outrage news cycles. Still in the same realm though. For example, the Twitter hack has made its rounds here but, say, Kanye having a political meltdown hasn’t necessarily (or at least I haven’t seen it) despite it being a prominent trend on Twitter.

I'm going to be blunt here and say that you're wrong. There is no difference. The news may be curated and may be for a specific audience but the odds that it's just as useless to you as mainstream news is still very high. I don't say this to criticize, mind you. I'm here as well.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?

#163

Post by bluntfang »

yetanta wrote: post #97
frereubu wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me personally, it's the volume. If you concentrate on your local area, particularly if you live somewhere smaller than a city, there are crimes and tragedies, but even if some of them are horrible they're relatively few and far between, and can be processed mentally. If you take the entire world of 7+ billion people you could spend your entire waking hours reading about brutality, tragedy and horror from around t…

I live thousands of miles away from New York city. A few months ago I was reading about someone getting into an argument in central park. Why am I being show that? It was to provoke an emotional response out of me. They are using our emotions to manipulate us.

are you talking about the time when a white woman tried to weaponize the police on a black man?

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?

#164

Post by Shoreleave »

SamBam wrote: post #113
tossthere wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I figured this out a few years ago and completely stopped all news watching/reading entirely. I have nothing but positive things to say about that decision, and surprisingly I seem to be better-informed and feel like I have a worldview that more accurately reflects reality than most of the people who follow news daily. Daily news watchers now seem like such ineffective people to me, and I’m reminded of the know-nothi…

> I completely stopped all news watching/reading entirely. ... I seem to be better-informed. How do these square? How is it that you become informed?

Better-informed implies useful knowledge. Stop with the news for a month and you'll realize that 98% of it doesn't provide you with any information that stays with you for more than a day or so. It doesn't matter that you read it. It only has negative effects on you.

This opens up a lot more time and effort to explore the 2% that does matter.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?

#165

Post by peruvian »

Fiveplus wrote: post #85
tgb wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't consider HN to be social media?

I consider internet boards like HN a pre-cursor to all dark-pattern-laden "social" "media" today. So yes in a sense, we're all communicating and this is social media. Now, we wait while someone comes to dispute my personal interpretation of the words, but yeah my $0.02 have been deposited.

HN may not have teams dedicated to getting you addicted like Twitter or IG does, but it's still addictive.

Many people refresh HN multiple times per day and spend hours arguing about the same things over and over (seriously, I've seen the same arguments for 5+ years). I'm sure all of us have caught ourselves closing HN and then opening it again a few mins later.

This goes for all forums ever, so it's more of a personal change than anything 'wrong' with HN or others.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?

#166

Post by ericsoderstrom »

darkerside wrote: post #160
tossthere wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I figured this out a few years ago and completely stopped all news watching/reading entirely. I have nothing but positive things to say about that decision, and surprisingly I seem to be better-informed and feel like I have a worldview that more accurately reflects reality than most of the people who follow news daily. Daily news watchers now seem like such ineffective people to me, and I’m reminded of the know-nothi…

I'm a little confused. I agree with some of your sentiment, but are developments w/r/t COVID not important?

> Name anything that happened 5 years ago. If it’s significant, I remember it. If it isn’t, I never heard about it at all, and nobody else remembers it either.

OP has heard of COVID. It would be impossible not to. I follow a similar approach (avoiding news as much as possible) and I still am exposed to much more information about COVID than is useful.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?

#167

Post by shireboy »

tossthere wrote: post #109
frereubu wrote: post #21

Seems an appropriate time to post my favourite piece on news addiction by Charles Simic in the NYRB. "I’m having trouble deciding whether I understand the world better now that I’m in my seventies than I did when I was younger, or whether I’m becoming more and more clueless every day. The truth is somewhere in between, I suspect, but that doesn’t make me rest any easier at night. Like others growing old, I had expect…

I figured this out a few years ago and completely stopped all news watching/reading entirely. I have nothing but positive things to say about that decision, and surprisingly I seem to be better-informed and feel like I have a worldview that more accurately reflects reality than most of the people who follow news daily. Daily news watchers now seem like such ineffective people to me, and I’m reminded of the know-nothi…

Can I ask _how_ you did this? I've done some things like block sites on various devices, etc. But I do find myself still - when I'm waiting for a build to complete or whatever - sliding over to whateveroutragesite.com almost compulsively.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?

#168

Post by SamBam »

peterkelly wrote: post #156
SamBam wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I completely stopped all news watching/reading entirely. ... I seem to be better-informed. How do these square? How is it that you become informed?

Books

Well, I'm guessing this whole conversation them hinges on what we mean by "informed."

I'm doubting that a person could be well-informed by what's going on recently with the Trump adminstration, or BLM protests, or recent Covid news, from reading books alone.

I'm guessing that people who don't read the news might respond that the latest scandal from the government isn't important, and why they stopped reading the news.

At which point, "informed" might simply mean "the things I know about, because I think they're important."

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?

#170

Post by pb7 »

drenvuk wrote: post #162
pb7 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely cheating and I’m not the GP, but I would argue HN is curated enough to filter out most guilty pleasure outrage news cycles. Still in the same realm though. For example, the Twitter hack has made its rounds here but, say, Kanye having a political meltdown hasn’t necessarily (or at least I haven’t seen it) despite it being a prominent trend on Twitter.

I'm going to be blunt here and say that you're wrong. There is no difference. The news may be curated and may be for a specific audience but the odds that it's just as useless to you as mainstream news is still very high. I don't say this to criticize, mind you. I'm here as well.

Perfectly fine — I’m only arguing for the sake of discussion. When I have gone on no-information binges, I included HN in them. Over time, I realized HN upsets (upsets may not be the right word — maybe mentally clouds or distracts?) me a considerable amount less. The links I look at are informative and inspire creativity; the discussions push me towards explaining my thoughts carefully rather than resorting to status games, false sense of superiority, and mob rule. HN is news, and as such, it is addicting and sometimes does upset me depending on the subject matter and how many people take on views that oppose mine, but I still think it’s an order of magnitude less so than things like Twitter.
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