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Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed
81–90 of 980 posts
Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're a citizen of a democracy and you only focus on you, then when it comes time to vote you'll be voting randomly. Or maybe you don't vote and thereby cede control to your neighbors to make decisions for you over the environment in which you live. Assuming you decide to vote then, and since you don't live in a vacuum, your vote will be based on whatever random stuff leaked through to you during the time you wer…
Democracy works if everyone votes for the thing(s) they care about. You likely don’t need a news site for information about that.
Except in most "democracies" there is no direct voting on issues. Instead you vote for parties or people who you believe align with your values.
To find out about those people/parties you probably need "news"
Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed
#83One 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 find LinkedIn a healthy collection of professional accomplishments with minimal news. It’s also not very addictive. However, shitty newsfeeds like Google news are my bane. I can’t stop.
I find LinkedIn to be the worse of the social media sites. My feed is full of wannabe “thought leaders”, people posting about a meaningless vendor certificate they got, recruiters giving advice, people who can’t get a job or were recently laid off, etc.
But now, politics is getting involved because people are having government job offers rescinded and the entire federal government is in a free fall like a 3rd world banana republic.
Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the way. I was a director of the community team at deviantart when it got going and I remember so many times thinking "if we get one of these apps for everything people are going to drown themselves in the internet" - because I used to have to actively check in on community members who we deemed addicted. Sure enough, here we are, except it seems nobody is looking out for the best interests of their communiti…
> I was a director of the community team at deviantart (...) I used to have to actively check in on community members who we deemed addicted This sounds so interesting to me - was it your responsibility? How did you detect if someone was addicted? And most importantly, how did you scale it?
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 love, nurture, protect and grow your community" - and then there were things we were taught to watch out for or check in on. Backend you could see pretty much everything about the user, plus you just got used to the users in your communities, so "additive like behavior" was not difficult to detect, literally I would just see some users online ALL THE TIME, so we would always check in to make sure everything is ok, and tell them they're probably spending too much time on the site (it was a bit harder for me because I was one of the people responsible for communities generally.) I don't know how actively other GDs did this, but it was a widly discussed topic in our staff only irc channel very frequently. This all came from the teams want to be mindful to avoid hurting other people using the internet, most of us building it genuinely gave 2 shits and genuinely cared about our users. This was the same playbook I then used to build devrel at DigitalOcean in the beginning, I had devrel structured per community with the same instruction Scott gave me back in the day. (I think it's part of why y'all originally picked us! so thanks!)
Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed
#85Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed
#86While limiting your exposure to "outrage" isn't bad advice, it's just more of the ignoring of the issues that she herself calls out in the beginning of the article.
She mentions that people are using "outrage" issues (abortion, gay rights, critical race theory) "as kind of wedge issues to convince people to vote in ways that might be against their own self-interest"...
GREAT! We need more tips on how to train yourself to recognize when that's happening and not get outraged. It boils down to emotional control. If politicians can't use outrage as a tool of control then they'll have to move on (to something better hopefully, but probably not ;).
Here's one tip. If Trump enrages you every time you see him, watch him in a way that allows you to appreciate something about him! He is a cool cucumber. He sheds attacks like water off an umbrella. (whatever, you come up something)... Remember, the goal here is to not let him control your emotions. This isn't about the facts or morality or how he "lies".
Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed
#87Propagandists are now going to tell you to ignore what you're hearing and seeing. Just put the news away and relax! The same people spent the last four years telling you to be outraged about things that never happened. A man won the women's boxing at the olympics! Outrage!
I don't think it's true that Scientific American spent the last four years telling you to be outraged about things that never happened.
I was referring to a noticeable subgroup of HN commenters.
Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed
#88If you're outraged by anything that does not directly impact your life you're doing life wrong. We all have limited time and energy. I have never been able to understand people who get emotional over things they read online that have no impact on their day to day life.
Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can do all three: (1) focus on you etc, (2) take an interest in global events, and (3) not get outraged. It really is possible.
Perhaps it depends on the individual, but I never found it possible. The news just made me sad, sad and angry most of the time, it's just a stream of 24/7 misery and if there's not enough misery going on locally the news will find misery from around the world to fill the run time.
What helped me is to realize: Sadness and anger come from within, not from the outside. Nobody can "make" you mad. They will do what they do, and it's up to us to decide if and how to emotionally respond to it. We are not amoebas that simply respond to stimulus. We have agency over our own thoughts and feelings. This is something I try to teach my kid, and I think it's also helped her deal with others who she would previously say "made her mad."
Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed
#90I've been an avid news consumer since ~2016 and early on I remember getting very outraged at articles, tweets and other pieces of news I read. Over time I realized that these articles want you to be outraged, and that the outrage is a form of control. Over time though I picked up on these "outrage triggers" and that's helped me be much more objective about news I'm reading. I'll be reading an article and I can usuall…
Twenty+ years ago an aunt of mine regularly called our local news on channel four the Channel Fear news.