Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

I've practically have "gone dark" for the last 20+ years.

I do read up some sporting news and watch some sports, and I will read up on a particular event of a major scale (say, the war in Ukraine), but I do not follow much of anything really.

> My argument is it’s mostly a detriment giving the state of the world.

I would argue differently: the world is pretty much what it always was, we are just hyper-informed, and especially with negative stories.

Part of that is natural psychology ("husband amd wife were enjoying a beautiful walk and game with their kids" is not much of a "story", whereas "husband and wife have stabbed each other" is). But for the most part, it's what sells and keeps people engaged: nothing gets the money as well as inducing conflict, tribal behaviour and keeps them coming back for more.

Eg. all the US gunfight violence news in Europe only makes us Europeans think how we are better than the people in US, whereas I know from experience that people in US are just as lovely and welcoming as everywhere else I've been. It's a clear example of pitting one group against another even though they are largely similar, and while this hasn't been put to use to divide us yet, a sufficiently motivated politician has a "tool" ready to fire the masses up.

I am still proud when someone is surprised how I am not in the daily loop, but when they share whatever news with me, and I show them how that's nothing any of us can do something about, they end up being more confused.

I do find I miss the local news (this road is getting closed, a flooding rain is coming, these streets are getting electricity cuts for maintenance...), but I try to find direct sources for those and "pull" from them instead.

I don't read "the news" anymore, but I do read/consume a lot of primary sources. So full videos/transcripts of speeches, white house press briefing almost daily, congressional hearings, debates (in full, not clips) etc.

My cycle is usually:

1) See some news event spawning on twitter/reddit/news frontpages.

2) Research it (by that I mean: look for a primary source that the news article being shared was based on and read that)

3) Despair at how the aforementioned are trying to use these events as wedges to drive people further towards hatred for one another.

I’ve booked a psychologist appointment for my TikTok addiction. I spend 1 to 4hrs a day on it, and about half that on various other news like HN.

I’m in a double sandwich: Since Covid, I have utter disdain for real-life people, who would miss no opportunity to destroy our lives, such as borrowing a trillion and endebt us for generations just to fuel a stay-at-home policy that destroys social links and physical health, and more generally play the class warfare game (I live in France); and at the same time, if I stop scrolling on TikTok to keep my mind occupied, I immediately have dark thoughts because I’m unoccupied at home.

That’s it. I’m in the post-virtual world. Connections with other humans not necessary. Nor pleasant. Youtube tells me stories before I go to sleep. HN wakes me up with news. My main goal in life is to move the needle on the dashboard of my revenue at work. I’m a caricature.

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 distracts me from my family, friends, work, and myself. I have no interesting insights or original thoughts about it, and if I did, absolutely no one would care. So why read it?

I think it’s worth getting a sense of where things are every quarter or so? Over time I feel myself moving further towards that kind of pattern, and I spend far more time interested in my little corner of the world. I read relatively more local reporting and look at what’s happening with my municipality, the mayoral and council proceedings, try to find out what’s changing with local problems, etc. But even that isn’t a requirement.

I’m getting involved with a 50 year plan to help restore a watershed. Things like this seem infinitely more important and worthwhile than the news.

Yes, I have done exactly what you described recently. I live in Ukraine and all our mass media are wartime-censoured, so I got rid of them first. Russian media which are speaking not from Russia usually are good source of info about war but I seem to be overloaded with war news, so I got rid of it next. Russian IT sources like habrahabr.ru are steadily degrading in quality of content and fraction of content per adware, so I got rid of it as soon as I understood I really can read HN without a translator which happened this year. Other parts of Cyrillic Internets were degraded way earlier and there is just nothing to read except of torrents with old books which I use to read very often. For me there is easy to stop reading news in my mother language because our culture is dying.

So, except of HN I have only Youtube time sucker and I really miss the times when my Internet connection used to be too slow to watch videos. But I appreciate YT for be a source of information from both camps, I use to consume roughly equally amount of war information from both camps for not get polarized. Consuming really low amount of information and not having a smartphone allows me to read a lot of books and even keep progressing in Mathematics not because of job but because of joy.