61–70 of 205 posts
What a privilege, what a luxury, to be able to turn a blind eye to all the injustice that's currently happening in the world... Sure, do what you want, ignore news if that makes you feel better, but do realise for many, they are not afforded this kind of luxury.
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…
What a privilege, what a luxury, to be able to turn a blind eye to all the injustice that's currently happening in the world... Sure, do what you want, ignore news if that makes you feel better, but do realise for many, they are not afforded this kind of luxury.
If you want to do more, you can find some protests to participate in. Or do something other than protest like clean a local park or feed hungry people.
If I spend 3 hours on a random Tuesday consuming the news, that doesn't help anyone. It does the opposite; it makes me less able to focus, and makes me have less personal power and discipline to affect change in the world.
Traditionally, the news industry has been divided into tabloids , which were more sensationalist and aimed at a less sophisticated readership, and broadsheets , which were more analytical and aimed at a more sophisticated readership. From a business perspective, the articles and opinion pieces were just bait to draw in a particular class of reader; the real money came from advertising to those particular classes of r…
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.
The point being made by the author is that "following the news" nowadays has nothing to do with being informed. Instead, it became about being constantly bombarded by a barrage of noise and nonsense to constantly grab your attention.
So instead, by finding a monthly publication giving him an overview of the local, European and world news, the author is looking for a filter removing all the unnecessary noise. And the month granularity should be more than enough to allow him to be informed about important changes.
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.
People who consume a lot of news tend to have very shallow understanding of a broad range of current events. Worse they tend to be passive receivers of news instead of active seekers of information with intent to understand the world.
As a result, they are very susceptible to manipulation through selection of what makes the news they tend to consume. They become passive pawns in political power struggles.
What a privilege, what a luxury, to be able to turn a blind eye to all the injustice that's currently happening in the world... Sure, do what you want, ignore news if that makes you feel better, but do realise for many, they are not afforded this kind of luxury.
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…
it is just noise that does not really matter for your life (and mine too). This is pretty-well described in "Antifragile" by Nassim Taleb, consider reading.
But today I read them differently. I read news site, with some curation (e.g., settings for threshold for articles that comes up in various fields) together with a few favorite sites (e.g., HN)