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I stopped following the news

mertbulan.com

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Re: I stopped following the news

#161

Post by 936966931646863 »

oridentity wrote: post #76
keiferski wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that this is downvoted really says it all. "I don't read the news" is pretty much dependent on one's profession being insulated from changing events. Which is not surprising why it's a popular opinion amongst technocrats that would rather not have democracy in the first place.

> on one's profession being insulated Even this is privilege. Try "one's identity". Last year, legal immigrants were fine. Today, their kids are kidnapped and used as bait to take them to Alcatraz. And that's not even the identity I'm mostly referring to. Very cool stance OOP, thank you for identifying yourself as the type of centrist heaven will reject at the gate and angels will never get tired of the reaction to t…

[flagged]

Re: I stopped following the news

#162

Post by mcdeltat »

danmaz74 wrote: post #9

I completely understand why, but on the other hand democracy relies on citizens being informed about what's happening. The risk is that one day, you wake up and there is no democracy any more.

On one hand I can see where you can draw this argument from. But on the other hand I don't think daily consumption of the huge quantity of news that exists is necessary for having a decent political opinion, especially given that most news is inflammatory junk (at least in my country). I just don't need a 5 page breakdown of every single event that some corpo decided to shove down our throats.

Also - and maybe I'm naive for this - I don't really need news to inform my political opinion because the current state of affairs is so far from my ideal world. Like no matter what could reasonably occur in the news, I still know who I'm voting for on polling day.

Re: I stopped following the news

#163

Post by mghackerlady »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #157
m463 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you could read wikipedia news: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

How does Wikipedia rank compared to news gathered by professional journalists and editors such as those at The Economist as mentioned?

Wikipedia editor here! I'd imagine not that far off as we use sources like the economist to write the articles

Re: I stopped following the news

#164

Post by mghackerlady »

appplication wrote: post #49
pendenthistory wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like a weekly physical Sunday paper with some general news and printed substack articles tailored to me.

I’ve been kicking around an idea for a while now that’s basically a no-headlines, curated (generally long-form) media aggregation site. No algorithm, no personalization, no AI. Just topics you can choose to follow. The basic idea is you get one article at a time fed to you (no headline scrolling like Reddit or HN), and doesn’t let you proceed to the next article until you’ve scrolled through at least x% of the curren…

I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to write an RSS reader that does this

Re: I stopped following the news

#165

Post by mghackerlady »

pendenthistory wrote: post #31
sjw987 wrote: post #4

I think it's important to keep reading the news occasionally. Personally, I, as a programmer, read the news in the same way as my grandad who was a farmer. I read a printed weekly publication (in my case The Economist) on Sunday morning. Outside of Sunday morning I don't read the news at all. I prefer printed news to media-supported news, because I think the imagery (I acknowledge The Economist still has images) and…

I would like a weekly physical Sunday paper with some general news and printed substack articles tailored to me.

Subscribe to a few RSS feeds you like, and set up a cron job or something to send an assortment of them to your printer every sunday

Re: I stopped following the news

#166

Post by mghackerlady »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #146
sjw987 wrote: post #4

I think it's important to keep reading the news occasionally. Personally, I, as a programmer, read the news in the same way as my grandad who was a farmer. I read a printed weekly publication (in my case The Economist) on Sunday morning. Outside of Sunday morning I don't read the news at all. I prefer printed news to media-supported news, because I think the imagery (I acknowledge The Economist still has images) and…

"Outside of Sunday morning I don't read the news at all." Excerpt from comment submitted to Hacker News, an online news aggregator On Wednesday Is Hacker News news

It's a domain specific news I guess

Re: I stopped following the news

#168

Post by Tarq0n »

m463 wrote: post #140
sjw987 wrote: post #4

I think it's important to keep reading the news occasionally. Personally, I, as a programmer, read the news in the same way as my grandad who was a farmer. I read a printed weekly publication (in my case The Economist) on Sunday morning. Outside of Sunday morning I don't read the news at all. I prefer printed news to media-supported news, because I think the imagery (I acknowledge The Economist still has images) and…

you could read wikipedia news: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

While the presentation has merit, the events listed on this page at the time of this comment don't meet the my bar of one of:

1) Essential to not have missed for everyday conversation;

2) Will affect my decision making in some way;

3) Will be remembered a year later.

There is simply far too much news.

Re: I stopped following the news

#169

Post by insane_dreamer »

I can relate and if I'm honest, I need to do this. I can't say I benefit from following the news, including tech news and forums like HN, every day.

I still want to be informed and be involved especially in matters that do impact me and the country I live in; I feel strongly about democracy and that rests on an educated and participatory citizenship. But I don't need to wade through shit every day to have enough of an understanding of it.

I like tech and I'm curious, but just today before reading this article I was thinking about how much do I really gain from this cursory reading on so many subjects (as one might find on HN), instead of using the time to more deeply dive into certain ones. At some point it can become a bunch of clutter that has little value.

(I already stopped watching TV news many years ago, and dropped Facebook and Reddit a few years ago as well. I'm mostly down to Instagram and HN, plus the NYT and a few magazines (MIT Tech Review, that one is excellent; Wired, was planning on dropped anyway; Atlantic, good but I don't need that much of it; The New Yorker has great longform every once in a while.)

Re: I stopped following the news

#170

Post by senko »

I try to balance being informed and ignoring the mostly irrelevant hot topics du jour.

My approach:

* world: weekly Economist coverage of world/biz/general topics (audio via app) - keeps me generally up to date

* local: daily digest mail of notable news from yesterday from my country (which is too insignificant to appear in the Economist); scraped from multiple sources, digest by an LLM

* Hacker News digest mail, top 50 posts from the previous day (drawback is I'm often late to the discussion, like with this one, but can also be a blessing)

* ArsTechnica digest - used to be a subscriber but nowadays just grab new article links once a day

I read the digests as my "morning paper", and skip most of the links there (from ~100 in total I end up reading ~10), but am still "in the loop"

I also find about stuff in conversations with friends and social media (x/bsky/li for me). I also try to minimize the latter, but that's for another comment :)

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