I prefer Not to follow COVID related news.
Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?
181–190 of 222 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?
#182News is like heroin, also earns billions. Also addictive as porn, coffee, cigarettes etc.
One of the easiest way to leave that way - force yourself to create something, not consume everything.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
> no longer reading the papers and watching television This is what I do, in addition to no social media except for certain personal alerts. I ask my partner to relay any significant news/events to me. I do support my local media group The Colorado Sun with a membership and sometimes read through their articles, which don't have advertisements so they are not incentivised to produce click-bait headlines and sponsored…
You don't consider HN to be social media?
The big difference I see between HN, Reddit, and traditional message boards on one hand and Facebook/Twitter/Instagram style social media on the other is the relative prominence of personalities vs topics. HN/Reddit/boards are topic focused, whereas the other social media sites are personality focused, with the specific accounts that you follow determining your overall experience of the site and the topics that you are shown. In order to have an experience on those latter sites you must connect yourself into the graph.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?
#184Seems like a good time to revisit this blog post by the late-Aaron Schwartz about removing news from your information diet: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
Removing news is a solution that screams privilege though, isn't it? If I'm a DREAMer, or a woman who works for a private company, or a person recently laid off due to COVID, I kind of need to follow along to help me understand how I'm going to make it the next 30 days.
You really think those people wouldn’t hear about it any other way?
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?
#185It's all about gaining social status, about knowing more than that other bloke and potentially gaining some economic advantage so as to attract an attractive female etc.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 asy…
I found the article [1]. Looks like they crossed Coronavirus off the bingo card too.
Like I said, it's perfectly on-brand for them.
My wife and I have a running joke (which I think I've seen pop up elsewhere too) about how Terry Gross picks her interview guests based on how many items the guest ticks on the "diversity checklist"
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/871625210/you-can-either-be-a...
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?
#187I stopped reading Apple News and Google News. Life is much better now.
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?
#188Seems 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…
Why allow yourself be tormented by something you have no control over?
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?
#189Earlier 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.
HN has the word “news” in its name, but I think that’s where most of the similarities end. Looking at the front page right now, I count maybe 4 items that are attempts at journalism. The rest are interesting subjects resurrected from 6+ years ago, tech guides, user-submitted questions/content, etc. The ones that seem like news items don’t really pertain to today’s hot news, they’re press releases from NASA etc. HN is…
For me, HN counts too. Yes, the quality is different compared to classical news pages, but I think it serves the same desire to find something new.
From my perspective, giving in to this desire is part of the problem. When I start my day consuming content, the whole day becomes a lot less productive (concentrating becomes very hard). But if I start the day engaging my brain in a concentrated mode, the first few hours become very productive.
So my solution for avoiding to constantly visit HN in the search for something new, is that I have a new tab page in my browser, that lists, the top 3 HN news from the best list, if I haven't read them already. That way I fight the fear of missing out.
Maybe I should add that it always shows an empty list for the first 12 hours of the day ;-)
Re: Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?
#190I was a huge news junkie in college. And at one point, I don't know where maybe at a doctor's office, I saw the cover of Newsweek magazine with a shocking statement of impending doom. I grabbed it and read the article and was worried. Then I saw the cover date was about a year old.
That moment was hugely influential to me. I still follow the news but at an arm's length. I learned that in news, as in everything, there are a few overarching stories and a lot of minutiae. A little signal, lots of noise. The signal takes a long time to build, it's not daily news. But when it comes, all the daily news changes to reflect it.