Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

Very opiniated answer here : I now rely mostly on Wikipedia, cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

Most news look to me as entertainment, not information. Articles detail what B.Spears has done or what hominous unacceptable sentence has been said by CongressMan X or Y.

Spoiler : I don't want entertainment, I don't want to be outraged (most people do and won't really admit it). I want the state of the world, at least a comprehensive and kinda global one.

Did you know there is a war in tigray (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigray_War) ? Well wikipedia has been reporting it for a year. Most news outlet focus only on Ukraine (yes it's important) and on the latest hookup of celebrity Z.

> to what end does this actually benefit the individual?

Agreed, entertainment does not improve my global thinking. News does.

> For those that have experimented with “going dark” in a sense, how was it, what did you do and what’s a good balance?

Completely dark, no FB, no Insta, no twitter/reddit/name_it . It's almost boringly peaceful. Craving is only the first half a year. Now I feel like I can describe some "shape" of the world - but of course in parties I can't relate to the (useless) "Did you see this guy sneezing coca cola on tiktok - yeah right, gross, it was all over the news for a week".

PS: happy with it.

Yes. It wasn't a conscious decision - I used to be obsessed with what was going on - but I have almost completely checked out. It's especially difficult to know what the current affairs are with WFH. Sometimes I'm a little embarrassed when trying to make small talk with someone who brings up [huge news story everyone has been talking about for the last week] and it's the first I'm hearing of it.

Throughout the pandemic my girlfriend would occasionally give me updates, for example about having to wear a mask or being barred from businesses for not being vaccinated.

I do have an RSS feed set up for 4chan that I check on occasionally as it's proven to be a great source for things that I'd like to actively know more about. It's an indictment of the MSM that you may hear from them about a "lone wolf with no known motive" with a doctored photo, meanwhile 4chan has his entire biography, photos, religious affiliations, criminal record, and analysed his entire social media history in a fraction of the time.

I love Wikipedia's "Current Events" portal so much that I have built a search engine for it: https://pastevents.org/

PastEvents is my entry point to the news nowadays. It updates daily and I can look at source material and relevant articles linked directly from the event, as well as search the past for related events to understand chronology.

> 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)

A practice that’s been good for my psychological health is to imagine how a good person would come to hold the ideas I disagree with. I’ve never failed, unless the subject is someone really beyond the pale like a mass murderer.

You can come up with multiple explanations, that range from “they are ignorant” to “they know something I don’t” and everything in between.

To try to engage with the example you gave, I’d imagine this about the people who support the lockdown:

1. They believe covid is extremely dangerous, and they want to protect people from dying. They don’t like that the lockdown is an inhibition of personal freedom, but they believe it’s justified due to the extreme circumstances (kind of like how it’s OK for the government to force people to evacuate their homes if the area is about to be flooded). Probably if covid had a 5% death rate, you’d support lockdown too. A poll found that over 35% of US adults believe covid has a death rate of 5% or more! [1]

2. They may think that the economy can just go back to the way it was before when lockdown ends, the government makes the money, and it can just pay people enough to buy what they need for now.

3. They may understand the economic cost of the lockdown, and they know it will make life more difficult in the future, but they believe the sacrifice is worth it (kind of like how the government went into debt in WWII).

I’m not saying these people are right about the facts - I’m just saying their motivations are not evil. You and them both want the world to be a good place, you are just working from different premises that lead to you different ways of achieving that.

Now, if you want to be some kind of political activist, you can go through life trying to convince people they are wrong about things. That could be noble.

But if you are just trying to enjoy life, it’s good to be able to walk around and look at the people you meet and have positive feelings about them. It will make you happier, and it sounds like that is something you want.

[1] https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/co...

i dont read the news. I see more benefit in reading about economics, history, philosophy, sociology or engaging in active entertainment. The more you know about these fields, the more the news seems less like news and more like literal brainwashing. Powerful megalomaniacs want huge swaths of people to talk about Kanye's outbursts, my favourite Aussie catch-phrase "the cost of living", or some equally hot-topic...meanwhile, the world continues to turn as it always has, billions of SE Asian nobodies die in yearly tragic events without but a blink of an eye of the Western media.