Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?

I'm dipping in an out of complete darkness and have been for a while. I rather like it! I find that news mostly serve to increase my stress levels, and most of the things I read about are stuff that I am completely helpless towards (like current war in Ukraine).

I find ignorance really is bliss, however there are drawbacks. I usually hear about big stuff from friends talking about them, so I have yet to miss an election for example, but I have on multiple occasions found myself on election day not knowing who is even running. I have on those occasions asked a trusted friend who to vote for as there simply wasn't enough time to read up on all the politicians running.

I guess I come across as a bit clueless at times, but it's usually when the topic of conversation is centered around either celebrities of some sort, or recent politics.

I find I'm not actually very interested in those topics anyway so I'm ok with being clueless there.

Whenever I do come out of complete darkness I usually stick to tech focused sites, like HN and arstechnica, as I find they usually have less stressful content than "regular" news sources.

We live in a stakeholder's world. A world where it requires 5 million or 10 million or sometimes many more individuals to come together in order to undo some truly heinous initiative of a handful of stakeholders. These stakeholders own all the major information outlets and the last thing they want is to have a return to truly representative democracy. The masses are to be fed but not nurtured.

So I would argue that there is no news anymore. Not in the sense of news being factual and unbiased.

If I read news on a topic that interests me, I only do so to find the links to the source material and explore that without reading the bias surrounding it. Takes more time but is infinitely more rewarding.

A number of comments here suggest getting involved locally. Good advice; it's much harder to introduce spin and bias at such a level of granularity.

Seems like interesting website, but judging just by this article it seems to be lacking context and correct information plus quite outdated info:

"78 people dead and several injured as a recently renovated 100-year-old suspension bridge in the Indian state of Gujarat collapses, officials say the bridge could not bear the weight of the people standing on it, committee formed to probe the incident"

There were more than 130+ people dead reported already yesterday and maybe if those people were not aholes actively swinging the bridge (videos available on twitter/reddit) then it could bear their weight.

The Economist has a page, "World in Brief"

https://www.economist.com/the-world-in-brief

which contains seven pieces of news in a paragraph, then a "fact of the day", then five slightly longer analyses in two paragraphs. Closed by a quiz and a daily quotation.

I recommend, if you have little time, to just read that page - or find a similar equivalent - up to the level you need.

As European I read news from various sources, international news from France24, BBC, RT, Epoch Times, Al Jazeera and Channel News Asia, none of these are US centric and I can find articles which are interesting plus I follow few selected national sites to see news from my current and home country, though I am well aware of agenda they are pushing, but at least some of them have comments section so that's fun. It's for sure more fun than reading heavily censored r/worldnews or r/europe where you can't say anything against reddit hivemind without being downvoted into oblivion (not that HN would be very different from it, I find actually national news sites to have more tolerant people against diverse opinions than Reddit/HN).

I don't really take news that seriously considering quality of MSM, so I don't see it as detriment, it's fun and waste of time. Sure if you have better things to do and enjoy them more then you hardly need to follow any news and spend more than 5-10 minutes per day to stay informed.

I went dark during travel when you have obviously much better things to do and it's not really important toi stay in picture other than know current border situation in your location, but since I am settled now I take news as fun and I don't mind. If I felt bad about what I read I would stop reading it, I am not masochist. I don't really use Twitter and don't have FB for many years.