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Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#251

Post by lazyeye »

skissane wrote: post #185
CamperBob2 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To someone who is more right-wing, the bias of e.g. NYT is just as blatant as Fox News is to you, and Fox may come off as "fair". This is because the propaganda is specifically intended to land with their own audience. It's tuned to your sensibilities. This isn't really a matter of subjective opinion, though. Objective surveys have consistently shown that Fox News viewers are worse-informed than people who don't pay…

That’s not really comparing apples-to-apples though: a cable TV network aimed at the undereducated masses versus a prestigious broadsheet newspaper pitched at the educated classes There’s plenty of right-of-centre magazines and websites aimed at educated right-wingers: e.g. First Things, Commentary, The American Conservative, the Spectator

I read a book on the history of the NYT. They would market themselves to advertisers with "our readers have the highest disposable income of aby news source in America". It's an interesting reflection on the modern Democrat party and politics in general, that the NYT now leans left.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#252

Post by dbtc »

ge96 wrote: post #123
joshdavham wrote: post #42

One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together. I’m technically gen z and I’ve been off of social media (aside from HN, WhatsApp and discord) for years and you wouldn’t believe how great it’s been for my overall state of mind. Reddit, instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, etc are all the equivalent of digital junk food and I’d argu…

I quit reddit too recently, I still look at it for info but I'm not logged in/scrolling through it I find myself reaching for something when I have YouTube/chilling at my desk at the end of the day, can't code anymore/make something just on till I sleep. Sometimes have the desire to play a video game (I have a gaming rig too funny how that works) I've been trying to read HN or IEEE, TechCrunch stuff like that as my "…

My suggestion: music! Give the eyes a break.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#253

Post by 33MHz-i486 »

DFHippie wrote: post #111
33MHz-i486 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> a department within his purview That's not how it works in the U.S. If an executive branch department was created by the legislature, it is up to the legislature whether or not it exists, not the executive. If the legislature has passed laws regarding how its resources are to be used, its employees treated, the executive is not free to disregard those laws. The legislature is the source of laws in the U.S., not the…

we were talking about operational access to the payment system. you are conflating the situation at USAID which may or may not by illegal, idk.

the legislative branch can form administrative departments and prescribe their function however the president has already defined powers to impound funds and remove senior administrative officers and appoint/remove low-level staff. how these things intersect will be sorted be the courts.

executive actions (by-passing what should be legislation) have been increasing the last few decades. the various media companies plainly do make choices to portray some actions as nothingburger or crisis depending on their political alignment with the party in power.

the issue with the left-media and Trump is they outrage clickbait a bunch of events that are insignificant in terms of outcomes. Should they alarm about Jan6 yes. should they alarm over minor personnel at treasury or some dumb unserious thing Trump said at a press conference, no. This is how the media loses all trust in themselves broadly.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#255

Post by neom »

fifilura wrote: post #217
neom wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well early deviantart was pretty small, and I don't think anyone building it was over 25y/o at the time, so we all had lots of free time to work on it. Deviantart was arranged in a way we all had communities we were responsible for, it changed a lot after it reached million+ users scale, but in the beginning at 100k or so users it was very manageable. Your responsibility per Scott Jarkoff who lead that team was "to l…

Interesting. Would this be implementable today but on a larger scale? "Someone who cares about you on the internet" instead of "Something that prevents you from posting hate/snuff/nude on the internet" Obviously lots of problems, tons of them, and 1984 vibes, but still, the basic idea. A bit more like humans were meant to interact?

I think sadly the scale becomes less about the size per say and more about the unpredictability. The "vibes" on the internet late 90s early 2000s where very... on point, so it didn't feel like emotional labour. I can imagine being someone who cares about someone on the internet in 2025 would be, frankly, exhausting, in 2002 it was just fun.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#256

Post by yakhinvadim »

starik36 wrote: post #191
yakhinvadim wrote: post #119

I tried to solve this problem by making AI rank the stories by significance and rewriting the news titles in a boring, factual style. I think it worked quite well, there's only about 10 headlines a day (out of 15k+) that get a significance rating higher than of 5.5 out of 10. It also helps avoiding the overfocus on western issues and actually learn what's happening around the world. https://www.newsminimalist.com/

That's a pretty cool website! What prompt do you use to determine what is and isn't significant?

Can't share the full prompt, but I share methodology on the about page: https://www.newsminimalist.com/about

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#257

Post by tejohnso »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #235
ge96 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quit reddit too recently, I still look at it for info but I'm not logged in/scrolling through it I find myself reaching for something when I have YouTube/chilling at my desk at the end of the day, can't code anymore/make something just on till I sleep. Sometimes have the desire to play a video game (I have a gaming rig too funny how that works) I've been trying to read HN or IEEE, TechCrunch stuff like that as my "…

[flagged]

I discovered the same recently and have abandoned it. It's unfortunate because the potential is there for a real city wide or nation wide group discussion platform. But who moderates the moderators?

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#258

Post by lawn »

lordfrito wrote: post #240
lawn wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The danger with this way of thinking is that it's easy to start weighing all information equally, while that's very far from the reality.

If everything I read online [that I don't pay for] is a form of propaganda, then the only choice I have is to either: 1) weight all information equally 2) bias information based on [personal beliefs XYZ] I'm trying hard to do #1, mainly because #2 is confirmation bias (and reinforces it). What other options are there?

You could for instance consider actual facts? Because 100% of what you read online is in fact not propaganda.

Then you might find that some sources are filled with lies and others contain a lot more facts.

Then you'd naturally weight facts from the more trustworthy source higher.

The next step is a "web of trust" where a new source will be more trustworthy if it's linked to by other trustworthy sources.

So in the end you'd rank information from Russia Today (one of Russia's main propaganda channels) as very low, a comment from a random redditor low, and a comment on physics by a renowned physicist as very high trustworthiness.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#259

Post by arp242 »

crispyambulance wrote: post #47
yowayb wrote: post #9

Those of us in the west tend to forget that much of what we see is a form of propaganda, whether by governments or businesses, or even a large number of people. When you keep this in mind, everything you see becomes an opinion and your mind can comfortably (or at least not emotionally/hurriedly) form your own opinion over time.

I had used ublock-origin on youtube to disable the right-hand sidebar of "recommended" videos so that I could just view the stuff in my subscriptions. A couple of years ago, they started detecting and blocking ublock-origin, so I stopped using it (ublock). It's not really the ads that bother me. It's the "recommended videos". Is there a way to customize my view of youtube to avoid the shit I don't need to see? The th…

It's so disappointing, because "recommended" used to be brilliant to find stuff similar-ish to what you're watching.

But these days half of it is outrage bait, ranging from "WOKE LIBTARD GETS DESTROYED" to "TRUMP LOSES HIS MIND", or malicious clickbait like "you won't believe what the cast if $tv_show looks like now" with some AI generated thing of one cast member being horribly maimed. Even on stuff that has nothing to do with any of that, like some music video.

And whether "Trump loses his mind" is something you agree or disagree with doesn't even matter – I'm just here to listen to some music, maybe watch a funny video or two. To take a break from all of that. It's become so pervasive that it's just exhausting.

So normal people like you or me just withdraw. And the only people who don't are the hyper-politicised who never grow tired of talking of $favourite_issue, which tend to be rather less reasonable or open to nuance. And this feedback loop just makes things worse and worse.

This, in a nutshell, is why you need moderation. People talk about "enshittification" of platforms, but IMO the bigger problem is more the "cuntification" of platforms, where a small number of extremely unpleasant and vitriolic people chase off many people who don't want to deal with that. X.com is a well-known example, but also online games where you're matched with random people (where you very quickly learn a great deal about your mother's sex life).

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