Ask HN: Do you read news daily?

We were in the era of "social" a decade ago, then had some years of "notifications" as a spammy parasocial interaction, and now we're entering the era of "filler".

Its an open debate how "filler" relates to genres such as legacy TV morning variety "news" shows that are mostly press releases for brick and mortar retail intermixed with a rotation of lasagna recipes, vs filler as in some talented charismatic youtubers can take a concept that a talented speaker skilled in brevity could express crystal clearly in perhaps two minutes and stretch that out to fifteen minutes of ad revenue filler.

We're entering an era of rapidly thinning information density. Kind of like the inflation phase of Big Bang theory.

Some demographic groups already polarize their votes over 90%, the goal of the people in charge is to get ALL demographic groups polarized over 90% then we can get rid of pesky elections and nobody will care or notice.

To some extent, for a surprisingly large fraction of the population, its already true that they only get to vote when they decide to have a child.

The way to overthrow a democracy is not upfront violence but to make it irrelevant. Right now if we did away with uncontested municipal elections nobody would care, for example.

It really takes only few minutes to go through headlines and read only what I am interested in, it's actually quite underwhelming since I am not really interested to read The Current Thing propaganda, for instance now I completely ignore news about Ukraine, Zelensky and Putin or homo agenda, though I followed COVID scaremongering in MSM since that was affecting my day to day life. Reading comments to news take me maybe more time than actual news.

I skim also through propaganda at r/Europe (not much to read there) and to stay in touch what's going on also in r/China (much more interesting content), I don't read subs for my home and current countries since those are full of NPCs always supporting The Current Thing they are told by MSM and there can be hardly any information I haven't read in MSM.

So is it worth suffering declining mental health from consuming news for 2 years, just to give a meaningless vote in a sham election every other year? Probably not.

I read news daily (tech and general) and it is a) unhealthy, b) not useful in the long run. As for the "creating a better worldview", well it's a good thing but the price is too high for too small benefit. Price is a wasted time and mental impact. And dropping binge reading is probably as hard as dropping smoking.

JUST DON'T.