I have found myself worrying about global politics, climate change, microplastics and whole lot of other things. Things that I have no control over. Don’t get me wrong it’s good to be informed about these things but constant influx of such information is not helping anyone. It’s critical to regulate what we consume on web because our brains have a tendency to think about what we consume. Our thoughts get influenced by what information we are consuming. Seriously ditch the feed that someone else is curating for you!
I've come to a similar conclusion. I'm reconsidering the relative importance of different kinds of info I consume(timely and otherwise). I've concluded I've become way too passive in that decision, and that's clearly unhealthy.
It's not that I want to be completely ignorant of e.g. US politics, but maybe I try a 30 minutes summary of concrete facts per week, rather than what I used to get when I would drop onto national news sites as a distraction or focus break.
If I could just figure out a browser extension that intercepts search result links to reddit and gives me a quick LLM summary of the post and discussion instead, I will have cut out most of these sources of distraction.
In that vein I mostly consume the Wikipedia current events portal [1] for my global and national news. It’s relatively neutral and the pinned topics at the top give a good overview of the important stuff with the option to dive into more specific articles or primary sources. It still suffers from selection bias (i.e. Notre Dame reopening is at the top while the Syrian regime falling is a footnote at the moment) but it feels like the right signal to noise ratio.
> It's not that I want to be completely ignorant of e.g. US politics
For me, given I don't live on the continent let alone the country, I wish I was as ignorant of US politics as of Chinese politics.
US tech news is relevant, and to an extent politics influences tech, but I really don't need to know when e.g. Florida has a fight with Disney.
> If I could just figure out a browser extension that intercepts search result links to reddit and gives me a quick LLM summary of the post and discussion instead, I will have cut out most of these sources of distraction.
Possibly a silly question, but presumably you've tried asking the LLM to write the browser extension?
The problem is thinking that you have no control, an awful meme that is depressing - almost the definition of depressing - and self-fulfillingly self-defeating.
The most powerful force in the world is public opinion in Western countries, especially in the US - that's why so many powerful parties invest so much to manipulate it. There are many entire news organizations, endless opinion writers/etc., influence campaigns run by everyone from corporations to political organizations to state intelligence agencies, etc. What are they all working so hard at, investing so much in, if it doesn't matter?
Public opinion is formed by you acquiring information (including mis-info or dis-info), analyzing it, and communicating socially with others about it. Because many others don't do that, and most who do just repeat from received narratives, if you do it - if you form narratives - you have even more power.
No single person ever accomplished anything - everything worthwhile has been done by humans in groups. We are social creatures, not lone wolves - that's how we operate; if you act like a lone wolf then yes, you will be mostly powerless. But if you act within a group, and especially if you act intentionally and intelligently, you have significant power.
To support you, I will provide an example. Canada's health care system was started by just one person. His activism and relentlessness is what forced Canada to adopt it.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." — Margaret Mead
Of course it is. Knowing the events shaping your world have repercussions on your personal decisions. What should I eat? What should I learn? What career should I embark upon? What should I invest in?
To think that you can shield yourself from the world is one of the biggest yet most foolish ideas of individualistic cultures
> our brains have a tendency to think about what we consume
True, and I use this to my advantage for constructive things. I bias my consumption towards things I aspire to. You can't always change yourself, but you can change your environment, which in turn changes you.
The last part reminds me of this Quote from the movie The End of The Tour about DFW.
“We're going to have to develop some real machinery inside of our guts to turn off pure, unadulterated pleasure, or I don't know about you, I'm going to have to leave the planet.”
“Why?”
“Because the technology is just going to get better and better, and it's going to get easier and more and more convenient to sit alone with images on a screen, given to us by people that do not love us but want money. And that's fine in low doses. But if it's the basic main staple of your diet, you're going to die.”
There's worrying about things, then there's seeing the truth and reacting appropriately, whether you worry or not about it. It's a common refrain to criticize people who spend time on nutrition and health are obsessive or orthorexic or whatever, then subsequently spend 4 hours digging into game of thrones lore or how to host Plex while eating doritos. Health is only the foundation of everything, that's all.
"God give me the serenity to accept things which cannot be changed; Give me courage to change things which must be changed; And the wisdom to distinguish one from the other."
That is not entirely true. First, you can reduce your personal contribution to pollution. Second, you can vote for parties or candidates that can make the larger change, or the minimal change needed.
What happens if everybody says "there's nothing I can do"? Nothing. It's basically the attitude that got us here.
> Don’t get me wrong it’s good to be informed about these things
Why?
Why is the problem the feed? Why isn't the problem the very fact of wanting and trying to be informed of things far away out of your control in the first place?
I can say for myself that seeing the wars have had a detrimental impact on my life & faith in humanity. Hearing people try to justify a genocide makes me completely checkout. The algorithms also don't help when you keep seeing kids & families decimated constantly on your reddit, instagram & x feed with genocide drones. I'm convinced that we are living in one of the most regrettable times in our century.
I had to remove reddit, CNN, nytimes, fnews, fb. And honestly I'm a lot happier.
I'm sad because I no longer an doing my civic duty to stay informed and have an educated opinion but part of gaining that opinion I would get materially angry at the otherside that they were "being so stupid, obviously you shouldn't think like that".
It got bad enough it was affecting me personally and how I interacted with my family.
I'll start up again eventually because it matters to me but for now I need to stay happier.
> I'm sad because I no longer an doing my civic duty to stay informed and have an educated opinion
At the same time, you must have been questioning whether you were staying informed, or was used as a democracy puppet by lobbyists. It takes a lot more energy to stay informed than to just read news.
Here in Switzerland, the people vote on lots of things, four times a year. But the participation rates are always 40-60%. It's almost like people only need to stay informed about the particular questions they care about. I find it a refreshing organisation, compared to my native Sweden. When I only vote for politicians, I need to know their opinions on everything. That, I find, is exhausting.
In Switzerland you still have to vote for politicians who take decisions on their own. It is only on some specific questions where the population can vote. So it means you have to keep track of more, both the politicians you vote for and some of the questions you can vote on.
A bit of a drawback with having the general public vote on some of these questions is that it is difficult for the general public to be well informed about these questions so they vote to keep things as is or they take the easy path. That's probably why Switzerland often are behind on many questions, for example voting for women, environment etc.
> compared to my native Sweden. When I only vote for politicians, I need to know their opinions on everything. That, I find, is exhausting.
I am surprised to hear this. For most parliamentary democracies, political parties publish a political platform statement before each election. Isn't the summary enough to make a decision?
Funny enough, Hacker News is the only place I've been going to get my news for about a year now, and ever since I started experiencing anxiety bad enough to where I needed to start limiting my exposure to it. But like you said, focusing on family, friends, and local things happening in your immediate community definitely help, and only recently have I realized that. A friend and I were discussing this recently, and he put it very succinctly: "the view from high above is great, but it's hard to not worry about falling."
> I'm sad because I no longer an doing my civic duty to stay informed and have an educated opinion
To me, and I know not everyone agrees, but I feel nearly all forms of news media (particularly the ones you listed) are way too biased and have agendas to consider the information you consume from them helping you "stay informed and have an educated opinion".
Rather, they're opinion is forming your opinion.
I think it's nearly impossible to stay truly informed these days, unfortunately. I've seen some comments in this thread talk about consuming only boring facts, and I think this is our best bet.
Because most of the time, the truth is boring.
So if you find yourself being negatively impacted, ask yourself if you're hearing unbiased facts, or if you're actually just hearing opinionated agenda.
I also think this is a large root of "the otherside being so stupid". Except it happens to all sides.
> To me, and I know not everyone agrees, but I feel nearly all forms of news media (particularly the ones you listed) are way too biased and have agendas to consider the information you consume from them helping you "stay informed and have an educated opinion".
Strong agree. The goal is to make money by keeping your eyeballs on the ads. And they keep you coming back with all this shocking stuff.
What I would like, and probably with the GP would like, was a news source that just stuck to the facts. It could be consumed in a very short time, and if you wanted to know more, you can go find it.
Such a news source is bound to fail in the face of the grab-your-eyeballs news sources. It's just going to be boring because it doesn't hit your brain in the same way.
One thing I noticed when I switched to Mastodon was that it was actually kind of "dull", for lack of a better word. I follow tons of hashtags I'm interested in, and the feed has good stuff in it. But after scrolling for 10 minutes, I kind of feel like doing something else.
I still use Mastodon. That's how I'like my news to be, as well. The closest I found is wikipedia, like some people have said, and the raw news feeds from news syndicates (I'm not sure if anyone hosts these anymore).
Another thing to make news less insane is to just go to the local news. In my town of 100,000, it's news that actually impacts me, isn't sensationalistic, and is low traffic. I have a deep link to get there that just bypasses the front page of the news site. Also their comment section is horrible, so I've turned off JavaScript for it.
Everything is designed to invoke negative emotions because negative emotions are engaging and engagement is money. Be less informed on international affairs and more involved in your own communities.
And stress destroys impulse control, which can lend to users buying things they don't need, spending more time interacting, etc. Doom news and advertising is a sinister combination.
One of the best things someone can do to improve their mental health is to ignore and refuse media, particularly news/"journalism" and "influencers".
Life is short, are you really going to spend it worrying about some guys on the other side of the world you'll never meet in a country you'll never so much as visit just so the Sensation Industrial Complex can make money?
I like knowing what's going on, and I'm not chronically anxious.
I'm especially interested in new historic events and new ideas (including bad ideas). I want to know what people around the world are up to.
The news stories I avoid are human interest stories, local news, and "fluff" pieces. Except when they involve actual fluffy animals, I read those. But generally if something has already happened a million times before, like some murders, an explosion, some pollution, I don't care. Noticing these doesn't make me feel bad, though, unless my time was wasted by clickbait.
Shit happens. A lot of commenters here are saying "if it doesn't affect you, why read about it," but I think that should be understood only as a message for anxious people who are going to feel affected by things they ought to feel blasé about. And often these are stories about the same old grind anyway.
I'm going to flip the message around: "since it doesn't affect me, and I know it, and yet it's globally significant, I'm going to have a cosy time reading about it."
Spoiler: it's all negative content on social media. That's why we all think we're doomed, even though, objectively, we're incredibly lucky to be alive when we are
Related: "I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom" by Jason Pargin
Information is a virus. The cure is censorship. This may sound odd, but it's the truth.
When you read a negative word, even passingly, imagine all sorts of complex interactions that happen with the neurons inside your brain. Ban the words. Block everything. Keep your mouth shut. Create a chamber insulated from negativity.
Negativity is spam. Nobody asks for it and nobody wants it, yet people can't stop themselves from sharing it, forcing negative thoughts onto others' sight. This has to stop.
I don't go to the Internet to hear about the world's problems. The world doesn't have a right to waste my bandwidth to force me to see its propaganda. All I want is cat pictures. If it isn't a cat picture, I don't want to see it.
I don't care how many countries are at war right now. I'll learn about it at my pace, when I want to. Who gave war the right to invade the privacy of my feed? To appear there, unsolicited? To demand my attention, constantly, as if it were entitled to it?
It truly doesn't make any sense when you think about it.
I can't do anything about the world's problems. Go bother someone else.
I do agree that sometimes you have to consume less negative content or else you can become pretty doomy after reading about it.
But dont forget that sometimes you need to feel bad to understand that you are sick. If you were sick without feeling bad, you could die, because you did not take action!
Dont sugar coat the world! If you feel shitty, maybe there is a reason for it, a reason within or outside you!!
the next step is to look for causes of the sickness that you can actually do something about. you probably can't solve global problems but you can help with local ones like racism or other forms of prejudice and intolerance, and you can make small contributions towards some of the global ones, like climate change.
once you have an idea for which kind of problems you would like to work on you can focus your news reading on that and ignore everything else.
I notice a lot of tabloid news websites surface negative local content from across the globe. They make headlines out of "YOUNG/OLD PERSON ASSAULTED IN RISING TENSIONS" and it takes a few paragraphs for me to realise it's in a different country. Every societal imbalance is being trumpeted into every suburb, until it becomes a reality there.
Readit News
RSS is all you need https://rohanrd.xyz/posts/why-rss/
P.S. I haven't been able to ditch hacker news like I wanted to.
It's not that I want to be completely ignorant of e.g. US politics, but maybe I try a 30 minutes summary of concrete facts per week, rather than what I used to get when I would drop onto national news sites as a distraction or focus break.
If I could just figure out a browser extension that intercepts search result links to reddit and gives me a quick LLM summary of the post and discussion instead, I will have cut out most of these sources of distraction.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
For me, given I don't live on the continent let alone the country, I wish I was as ignorant of US politics as of Chinese politics.
US tech news is relevant, and to an extent politics influences tech, but I really don't need to know when e.g. Florida has a fight with Disney.
> If I could just figure out a browser extension that intercepts search result links to reddit and gives me a quick LLM summary of the post and discussion instead, I will have cut out most of these sources of distraction.
Possibly a silly question, but presumably you've tried asking the LLM to write the browser extension?
The problem is thinking that you have no control, an awful meme that is depressing - almost the definition of depressing - and self-fulfillingly self-defeating.
The most powerful force in the world is public opinion in Western countries, especially in the US - that's why so many powerful parties invest so much to manipulate it. There are many entire news organizations, endless opinion writers/etc., influence campaigns run by everyone from corporations to political organizations to state intelligence agencies, etc. What are they all working so hard at, investing so much in, if it doesn't matter?
Public opinion is formed by you acquiring information (including mis-info or dis-info), analyzing it, and communicating socially with others about it. Because many others don't do that, and most who do just repeat from received narratives, if you do it - if you form narratives - you have even more power.
No single person ever accomplished anything - everything worthwhile has been done by humans in groups. We are social creatures, not lone wolves - that's how we operate; if you act like a lone wolf then yes, you will be mostly powerless. But if you act within a group, and especially if you act intentionally and intelligently, you have significant power.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." — Margaret Mead
There's an issue and communicate around almost every single geopolitical or global issue and it can make people feel like they can't fix everything.
That's an interesting assumption. Is it really?
I suspect that informed citizens are better for society, but it might be worse for the the individuals.
To think that you can shield yourself from the world is one of the biggest yet most foolish ideas of individualistic cultures
Deleted Comment
True, and I use this to my advantage for constructive things. I bias my consumption towards things I aspire to. You can't always change yourself, but you can change your environment, which in turn changes you.
Logging into Feedly was like going back in time!
I must have imported all my Google Reader feeds into Feedly.
It's a Time Capsule of a bygone age! :-D
“We're going to have to develop some real machinery inside of our guts to turn off pure, unadulterated pleasure, or I don't know about you, I'm going to have to leave the planet.”
“Why?”
“Because the technology is just going to get better and better, and it's going to get easier and more and more convenient to sit alone with images on a screen, given to us by people that do not love us but want money. And that's fine in low doses. But if it's the basic main staple of your diet, you're going to die.”
— Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCfpOugmd9E
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer
That is not entirely true. First, you can reduce your personal contribution to pollution. Second, you can vote for parties or candidates that can make the larger change, or the minimal change needed.
What happens if everybody says "there's nothing I can do"? Nothing. It's basically the attitude that got us here.
Why?
Why is the problem the feed? Why isn't the problem the very fact of wanting and trying to be informed of things far away out of your control in the first place?
I had to remove reddit, CNN, nytimes, fnews, fb. And honestly I'm a lot happier.
I'm sad because I no longer an doing my civic duty to stay informed and have an educated opinion but part of gaining that opinion I would get materially angry at the otherside that they were "being so stupid, obviously you shouldn't think like that".
It got bad enough it was affecting me personally and how I interacted with my family.
I'll start up again eventually because it matters to me but for now I need to stay happier.
At the same time, you must have been questioning whether you were staying informed, or was used as a democracy puppet by lobbyists. It takes a lot more energy to stay informed than to just read news.
Here in Switzerland, the people vote on lots of things, four times a year. But the participation rates are always 40-60%. It's almost like people only need to stay informed about the particular questions they care about. I find it a refreshing organisation, compared to my native Sweden. When I only vote for politicians, I need to know their opinions on everything. That, I find, is exhausting.
A bit of a drawback with having the general public vote on some of these questions is that it is difficult for the general public to be well informed about these questions so they vote to keep things as is or they take the easy path. That's probably why Switzerland often are behind on many questions, for example voting for women, environment etc.
To me, and I know not everyone agrees, but I feel nearly all forms of news media (particularly the ones you listed) are way too biased and have agendas to consider the information you consume from them helping you "stay informed and have an educated opinion".
Rather, they're opinion is forming your opinion.
I think it's nearly impossible to stay truly informed these days, unfortunately. I've seen some comments in this thread talk about consuming only boring facts, and I think this is our best bet.
Because most of the time, the truth is boring.
So if you find yourself being negatively impacted, ask yourself if you're hearing unbiased facts, or if you're actually just hearing opinionated agenda.
I also think this is a large root of "the otherside being so stupid". Except it happens to all sides.
Strong agree. The goal is to make money by keeping your eyeballs on the ads. And they keep you coming back with all this shocking stuff.
What I would like, and probably with the GP would like, was a news source that just stuck to the facts. It could be consumed in a very short time, and if you wanted to know more, you can go find it.
Such a news source is bound to fail in the face of the grab-your-eyeballs news sources. It's just going to be boring because it doesn't hit your brain in the same way.
One thing I noticed when I switched to Mastodon was that it was actually kind of "dull", for lack of a better word. I follow tons of hashtags I'm interested in, and the feed has good stuff in it. But after scrolling for 10 minutes, I kind of feel like doing something else.
I still use Mastodon. That's how I'like my news to be, as well. The closest I found is wikipedia, like some people have said, and the raw news feeds from news syndicates (I'm not sure if anyone hosts these anymore).
Another thing to make news less insane is to just go to the local news. In my town of 100,000, it's news that actually impacts me, isn't sensationalistic, and is low traffic. I have a deep link to get there that just bypasses the front page of the news site. Also their comment section is horrible, so I've turned off JavaScript for it.
Life is short, are you really going to spend it worrying about some guys on the other side of the world you'll never meet in a country you'll never so much as visit just so the Sensation Industrial Complex can make money?
I'm especially interested in new historic events and new ideas (including bad ideas). I want to know what people around the world are up to.
The news stories I avoid are human interest stories, local news, and "fluff" pieces. Except when they involve actual fluffy animals, I read those. But generally if something has already happened a million times before, like some murders, an explosion, some pollution, I don't care. Noticing these doesn't make me feel bad, though, unless my time was wasted by clickbait.
Shit happens. A lot of commenters here are saying "if it doesn't affect you, why read about it," but I think that should be understood only as a message for anxious people who are going to feel affected by things they ought to feel blasé about. And often these are stories about the same old grind anyway.
I'm going to flip the message around: "since it doesn't affect me, and I know it, and yet it's globally significant, I'm going to have a cosy time reading about it."
Related: "I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom" by Jason Pargin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203578812-i-m-starting-t...
2 modes - block only matches, or, block surrounding text (too).
Create as many rules as you like, it will block anything.
I entered it into Google Built-in AI hackathon the other day.
Uses local LLM to scan blocked content to determine if regex was too trigger happy, then lets user unblock.
Not really sentiment analysis purely, though thats something I want to add.
When I'm on hackernews, I'm tired of coming across comments about:
- Donald Trump, Xi, Zelensky, Putin, Musk (Other people)
- China / Russia / Ukraine / USA etc
- Alcohol/drugs/gambling etc
So I basically block all that content
Needs some tidying up, and you need to figure out how to run the "AI" by following this article [1]
[0] - https://github.com/con-dog/context-aware-pattern-blocker
[1] - https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/ai/prompt-api
When you read a negative word, even passingly, imagine all sorts of complex interactions that happen with the neurons inside your brain. Ban the words. Block everything. Keep your mouth shut. Create a chamber insulated from negativity.
Negativity is spam. Nobody asks for it and nobody wants it, yet people can't stop themselves from sharing it, forcing negative thoughts onto others' sight. This has to stop.
I don't go to the Internet to hear about the world's problems. The world doesn't have a right to waste my bandwidth to force me to see its propaganda. All I want is cat pictures. If it isn't a cat picture, I don't want to see it.
I don't care how many countries are at war right now. I'll learn about it at my pace, when I want to. Who gave war the right to invade the privacy of my feed? To appear there, unsolicited? To demand my attention, constantly, as if it were entitled to it?
It truly doesn't make any sense when you think about it.
I can't do anything about the world's problems. Go bother someone else.
But dont forget that sometimes you need to feel bad to understand that you are sick. If you were sick without feeling bad, you could die, because you did not take action!
Dont sugar coat the world! If you feel shitty, maybe there is a reason for it, a reason within or outside you!!
once you have an idea for which kind of problems you would like to work on you can focus your news reading on that and ignore everything else.