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Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#91

Post by flyinghamster »

joshdavham wrote: post #26
karaterobot wrote: post #17

Avoid following the news constantly. Check in every once in a while—a couple times a week at most. Get your news from long articles, not tweets. Actually read the articles, don't just learn about the world from hot takes. > ... people have found that, actually, outrage can be useful. It actually can help you identify a problem and react to it. But it can also be harmful if you’re experiencing it all the time and beco…

> Avoid following the news constantly. Check in every once in a while—a couple times a week at most. Agreed. I personally believe that checking the news everyday is akin to something like a ‘news overdose’. There’s nothing wrong with spending just 15 minutes per week. At least for me, that’s a far healthier dose.

Indeed, 40 years ago, if we weren't getting our news from the TV, we quite often got it via weekly news magazines and Sunday newspapers.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#92

Post by FredPret »

master-lincoln wrote: post #82
FredPret wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

How on earth do you need a newspaper to tell you which political party aligns with your values?

Depending on where you live, there’s 2-10 parties. You know who they are and what they want. If you want to affect the outcome you can get involved in your local politics; being glued to NYT.com all day isn’t changing one thing except wasting time.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#94

Post by easymodex »

morpheos137 wrote: post #88

If 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.

I know, but what do I do about global warming and microplastics? Our leaders don't seem to care.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#98

Post by pavon »

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…

For youtube, you can put the video in theater mode, which makes the video the full width of your window, and pushes recommendations down below it. With this I only ever see recommendations at the end of the video.

As a general solution for us techies, you can have user defined style sheets that selectively override the site's CSS, either using a plugin like Stylus, or Firefox's built-in userContent.css. Inspect the website, find the id name (or class if it is unique enough) for the content you want to go away and put the following in your user CSS.

   # {
      display: hidden;
   }
I have so many of these. There is some upkeep with redesign, and for some sites with high churn I've given up, but in general it makes the web much more tolerable.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#99

Post by the_snooze »

karaterobot wrote: post #17

Avoid following the news constantly. Check in every once in a while—a couple times a week at most. Get your news from long articles, not tweets. Actually read the articles, don't just learn about the world from hot takes. > ... people have found that, actually, outrage can be useful. It actually can help you identify a problem and react to it. But it can also be harmful if you’re experiencing it all the time and beco…

>Avoid following the news constantly. Check in every once in a while—a couple times a week at most. Get your news from long articles, not tweets. Actually read the articles, don't just learn about the world from hot takes.

This 100%. If a piece of news is truly important, then it'll be important tomorrow or even a week from now. You'll even get clarifications and corrections along the way.

I like to use Pocket to build a list of long-form articles I want to read, then EpubPress (https://epub.press/) to compile that into a weekly EPUB that I can read in-full on a distraction-free e-book reader. It's a much less stressful way of consuming media than the whole neverending drug-frenzied quick-hits world of online news.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#100

Post by ranger207 »

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…

There's a browser addon, Enhancer for Youtube, that lets you hide recommended videos, among other things
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