14 ms·

I stopped following the news

187 points by mertbio 8mo ago

mooktakim 8mo ago
It's easy to ignore news of things happening far away and the luxury that comes with it. But when your people are the direct cause of the problems far away it's clear how such atrocities were allowed to happen in WW2. Blissful ignorance and silence.
p0w3n3d 8mo ago
I have ups and downs, and the downs happen coincidentally when I read more news. It is quite clear to me that my bad days are correlated with the amount of manipulation that comes from the media. However, when being clean for long, I wonder how could I go voting, not understanding what happens in my country. Also not being interested in politics doesn't make me excluded from the laws that are being created, which affect me more and more.
voidUpdate 8mo ago
My entire existence is politically controversial. I pretty much have to at least be aware of recent political developments since they could affect my ability to live as myself
- M95D 8mo ago
  Then why read news and not directly read the new laws and regulations that were voted and passed, or new proposed laws under discussion? https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives_en https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...
  - goncalo-r 8mo ago
    News gives you a heads up on what could be coming before laws were passed, or overall sentiment of the population or the politicians. Sometimes it's not about new laws, but about new interpretations, enforcements, court rulings etc.
  - Arainach 8mo ago
    There's way too much going on to follow all of it, and most of the important stuff isn't written down. By the time the text of bills is available, the politicians and influencers have been discussing things for a long time and the opportunity to do anything about it is nearly gone. Perhaps we could pay people to follow important topics, politicians, important lobbyists and see what they're doing and claiming they want to do. They could send us summaries to save us time. We could call those people journalists.
    - M95D 8mo ago
      But then, some rich people could pay them more to focus on certain subjects and ignore others.
  - Deklomalo 8mo ago
    Because it doesn't give you the Zeitgeist?
  - Ralfp 8mo ago
    Because not everything is done as EU law. Frequently its an executive order or a directive passed down from national minister or other govt official to their branch or other branches to make their base happy at expense of people currently blamed for govt’s failures. Eg. no law in Poland regulates legal gender change process. But there is a series of directves for courts on how this should be addressed issued by whoever is in the govt at the moment. One govt issued a directive that those are low prority, other that spouse and children should have a power to veto, another that actually those are high priority and then govt-appointed judges in the supreme court decided to veto the veto and implement new procedure altogether. And none of this is in the law - just directives for judges from pliticans and higher judges.
    - M95D 8mo ago
      1) So we should just read the news? 2) It was just an example. Each person should study their aplicable law-making process.
  - PurpleRamen 8mo ago
    Threats are not necessarily originating from laws or their execution. And not everyone has the time to read all laws, or is able to fully understand them and their impact on your well-being.
    - hagbard_c 8mo ago
      It probably takes less time to read those laws than it does to follow the hyperbole pushed by the media. Read them, discuss them with others - like-minded as well as those with a different view - and try to form your own opinions. If you rely on the media to curate your opinions you're just being groomed by one party or the other. In that case at least follow both the media which you most often agree with as well as those which you disagree and try to find out the truth behind the half-truths and lies pushed by them.
  - voidUpdate 8mo ago
    Because I live in the UK, and we aren't part of the EU anymore
  - StefanBatory 8mo ago
    Anti-LGBT zones in Poland were not officially introduced via state law. Neither were out bishops speaking about rainbow disease and calling us all ideology, not people. You are privileged if you can afford to only rely on official sources.
- croisillon 8mo ago
  i agree, it's probably comfortable to "not read the news" or "not be into politics" or whatever, except when politics is into you
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- berrycan 8mo ago
  Your entire existence? That sounds kind of hyperbolic, unless you're being targeted by genocide.
  - voidUpdate 8mo ago
    I'm trans. I live in the UK. I know it's not as bad as some middle eastern countries, but I'm still being actively legislated against
    - berrycan 8mo ago
      Do you mean the Supreme Court case last year? I thought that just covered interpretation of equalities law for single-sex exemptions, not actively legislating against anyone.
    - bigstrat2003 8mo ago
      Unless there are laws proposing to execute trans people (which I very much doubt but I'm not exactly following UK politics), your "entire existence" is not up for debate. Saying so is just a hyperbole which muddies the waters.
      - deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
  - StefanBatory 8mo ago
    Tell me you're in majority without saying you're in majority.
  - jjav 8mo ago
    > Your entire existence? That sounds kind of hyperbolic In the USA today (and many other places, but I'm in the US), anyone of any kind of minority is the target of beatings, kidnappings and possibly public executions by the government right now. Not exactly something you can ignore.
    - 8mo ago
thinkingemote 8mo ago
The news is what's new, uncommon, strange, interesting. Shiny, attractive, shocking, raging: dopamine raising and cortisol antagonising. The news doesn't describe our actual lives. But the news does sometimes contain information relevant to our lives! I find I will hear about the relevant things from people and events around me, whether or not I follow the news. The news doesn't have any actual bearing on my life but the news does have a few stories that do have bearing. So theres no downside of not following the news. I will hear what I need to and want to hear about from people around me or other sources. Some think that in not consuming what they think I should consume, that this is a morally wrong thing to do. They will be personally offended, how can they ignore my story? There is a case that if we all stopped following the news then how can the other sources inform us, so there would still be a benefit to reporting... Consider two anthropologists examining a culture. One only has remote access to every news source the culture produces for itself, the other can only talk face to face with people. Which one will understand the people more?
sjw987 8mo ago
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 presentation of news, especially on TV detracts from the message it's trying to convey a lot of the time. After reading some of Neil Postman's books (notably Amusing Ourselves to Death), I find it strange to watch televised news whereby one minute I'm watching footage of a disaster, then the next minute I'm seeing sports news updates or an advert. Just like normal learning, I think news demands longer form content for proper understanding. Reading the news on a low frequency basis also gives time for news stories to properly develop. Breaking news can be filled with speculation and incorrect details, which even if you keep up with, you can miss later corrections or crucial details. Not to mention the stress involved in it. Chances are if some real breaking news happens, like a natural disaster or war, I'll hear somebody else tell me.
- Deanallen 8mo ago
  Wouldn’t print newspapers also show you disaster on one page and sports on the next? I just began reading amusing ourselves to death.
  - sjw987 8mo ago
    Depends on the publication. I read The Economist, which doesn't cover sports at all. It's mostly 1-2 page long articles for each story, blocked into categories (UK, Europe, US, The Americas, Asia, China, Business, Finance, Tech, Culture at the end).
- conductr 8mo ago
  Older men in my family jokingly called it “the history” instead of “the news” and I feel it’s much more preferable than trying to keep a real time pulse in everything going on in the world
  - 8mo ago
anigbrowl 8mo ago
This is a reasonable choice, but of course also one that is only people who can be pretty confident of not being personally affected by newsworthy events.
VBprogrammer 8mo ago
I've recently been trying to avoid news. Particularly US political news. Sadly for some reason blocking sites on my Eero router doesn't seem to work. Thankfully Facebook recently put up a modal dialog asking me to subscribe or accept personalised ads (pretty sure the GDPR explicitly forbids that but whatever, everyone is doing it), it's doing a good job of preventing me seeing the usual feed of news there. At some point I'll put PiHole on my NAS and take care of Reddit etc.
GardenLetter27 8mo ago
Don't worry about things you can't change. That said, you do notice it when the currency crashes.
danmaz74 8mo ago
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.
- keiferski 8mo ago
  The fact that this is downvoted really says it all. "I don't read the news" is pretty much dependent on one's profession being insulated from changing events. Which is not surprising why it's a popular opinion amongst technocrats that would rather not have democracy in the first place.
  - ben_w 8mo ago
    Excerpt from link: For the rest of the news, I am considering subscribing to a magazine that covers important events in Germany, the EU, or the world every few months. This kind of format filters out short-term noise and fear-driven stories. Elections happen even less frequently than this. If your democracy disintegrates with less than a few months of warning, you were probably invaded and noticed even without the news; At this point, that would probably lead to a civil emergency notification on your phone, and by design that happens even without any apps installed. As we said in the UK in my childhood, "Today’s news is tomorrow’s chip* paper". * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_and_chips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_and_chips
    - keiferski 8mo ago
      Just because news orgs are incentivized to be controversial and attention-seeking doesn’t mean that the world isn’t changing rapidly. Personally I think once a week magazines / reviews are a good compromise. I’m not sure how useful reading 3 month old news will be.
    - matthewdgreen 8mo ago
      In October 2024 I would not have guessed that we'd ever see masked agents killing people on the streets of major US cities, or the US administration immediately accusing the victims of being armed terrorists. Things can change rapidly. By allowing things to get this bad, we have unfortunately forfeited our right to pretend things can't change rapidly. Let's plug in; fix this situation; and then folks can go back to ignoring the news.
nhatcher 8mo ago
Aaron Swartz has a nice blog post about it[1]. It's been discussed several times on HN[2]. I had periods I go through without news. It's been harder to do that lately. [1]: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews [2]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=i+hate+the+news https://hn.algolia.com/?q=i+hate+the+news
c16 8mo ago
I've done somewhat similar for the same reasons. I realised that if I exclusively read business news I can avoid a good amount of the fluff and sensationalism. I made a browser extension which pushes the headlines from Bloomberg, Financial times Euronews Business and a few others on to my new tab from their RSS, and it's more than enough to give me a nugget of what's going on in the world without being overloaded. 1 item per new tab. End result is: I don't read the news, but I still know what's going on without the need for Social Media's hot take.
- EffrafaxOfWug 8mo ago
  Sounds very interesting. Have you published this extension (or the source code)? I think I would like to try it out.
  - c16 8mo ago
    Yeah, it's available here https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/start-screen-a-business-f/maacoelocidgmgllhcflcdjakihpkmjj https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/start-screen-a-busi.... Can't say it's the best extension in the world, but it scratches my own itch and I'm happy with it. Sometimes that's good enough.
    - EffrafaxOfWug 8mo ago
      Thanks :)
paraknight 8mo ago
I came to a similar realisation about world news a few years ago and live a much less stressful life now. Especially since most of the news was about the US, and I don't even live there and there's nothing I can do about it. If something really important happens, eventually I find out from friends or family. Same when it comes to staying on top of tech news -- almost everything is a flash in the pan. I used to bookmark cool new products, never revisit them, and then a year later realise half of the links are now dead. One thing I realised though is I still need to mindlessly browse an endless feed every once in a while for some downtime. One way or another I'll want to fill that time with something, so it's a question of being mindful what goes in it. So my drugs of choice are Hacker News, and carefully curated YouTube subscriptions.
keiferski 8mo ago
The news is one of those markets where the following is true: 1) a large number of people are dissatisfied with the current product 2) but aren’t willing to pay for an alternative which solves the problem in the ideal way (for them) There have been dozens of attempts at weekly news summary newsletters, minimal news sites, etc. over the years. None ever seem to go anywhere because no one wants to pay for something they are deliberately deciding has little value. It makes me think of budget airlines: constantly critiqued for being uncomfortable and using dark patterns to get every last dollar - yet people consistently just book the cheapest flight possible.
kornaki 8mo ago
I’ve had similar experiences. These days I only visit Hacker News to read some tech-related stuff. For me, not reading the news to the point where I ask my mom to turn off the TV when I visit is important, because I want to avoid hearing anything about wars, etc. As someone who lives in Poland, I followed so much news about the war in Ukraine in 2022 and 2023, and it was really bad for my well-being and my behavior. A few examples come to mind: not being proactive and creative when it comes to taking care of my house and family, not being present when playing with my son, being less productive at work, and literally feeling angry after consuming news — like the feeling after eating fast food and having bloating. But I’m grateful for the people who do follow the news, read it, protest against the bullshit, and participate more in the democratic process than I do.
- nicbou 8mo ago
  It’s unfortunate that American news slip into the HN feed, and that Americans get indignant when it gets flagged. I took so much flak for saying that I already know where to hear about US politics, and don’t need it forced into every unrelated forum.
  - popalchemist 8mo ago
    I sympathize, and the attitude may be annoying, but you've got to realize you can not bury your head in the sand about the global rise in fascism, nor the fact that what happens in America affects the entire world. Imagine if you were to transfer your comment back to WWII era, perhaps you're French and you're saying that you're tired of hearing about this little kerfuffle between Germany and Austria... well, clearly the disinterest did not pay off.
    - defrost 8mo ago
      I read their comment and at no point did I get the impression they were burying their head in the sand. They explicitly stated they knew where to read / hear about US politics and did not see the need to have that news domain echoed across every forum.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
BoredPositron 8mo ago
Like an ostrich in an 80s comic.
stringsandchars 8mo ago
I think the only wise thing Elon Musk ever said was "Generally newspapers seem to try to answer the question, 'What is the worst thing that happened on the Earth today?'"
- zabzonk 8mo ago
  probably him
jeffwass 8mo ago
At my cousin’s company there are TV’s in the lobby. They used to show news channels. He said clients would come in all stressed out. So they changed to a home improvement channel.
- ivolimmen 8mo ago
  The one featuring Tim Allen? Or is there an actual channel with home improvements in the USA?
  - acuozzo 8mo ago
    https://www.hgtv.com/shows/tv-schedule https://www.hgtv.com/shows/tv-schedule "Home & Garden Television". Lots of shows about flipping houses, etc. It used to be far more instructional (Julia Child-esque) before it and Food Network got swept up in the reality TV craze. It still has the "bones" of its former self though.
PieTime 8mo ago
I think it’s not news that’s the problem. It’s the sources of news are often biased and spend very little time explaining events in context. I much prefer an hour long news program or multi-page article that details events and perspectives going years into the past. We have a surprising large amount of influence on events around the world. Everything from the companies you support to your politics can vastly change world events. I really dislike the notion that events outside of your country are somehow not important.
cjs_ac 8mo ago
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 reader. The web has destroyed that business model, because the news industry now controls far less advertising space, so there is no longer enough advertising revenue to support quality journalism. The broadsheets are in real financial trouble, and most have turned to tabloid-style articles (albeit ones that promote more sophisticated worldviews) in order to pull in those social-media clicks. I find myself increasingly interested in publications like The Economist and The Financial Times, simply because their readerships have financial interest in actually knowing what's going on in the world, and so they can charge a subscription price that supports quality journalism.
- mountainb 8mo ago
  The WSJ effectively became a lifestyle tabloid. Its devolution has been shocking.
walthamstow 8mo ago
> I am considering subscribing to a magazine that covers important events in Germany, the EU, or the world every few months I've posted the same message so many time I could get banned but if you live in the UK then Private Eye is what you want here. It's every fortnight, very funny and a bastion of genuine journalism (see the Paul Foot Award they give out each year)
- berrycan 8mo ago
  I used to have a subscription to Private Eye but cancelled it as it got so depressing from being too aware of all the corruption. Worse than browsing the news.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
gyanchawdhary 8mo ago
I think if the news feels unbearable, the problem may not be the information but the fact that reality is moving against the assumpftions on which the person has anchored their happiness ... environemt, relgion, polticial views etc etc ..
Havoc 8mo ago
I’ve been focusing more on filtered news. In particular LLM summaries are great for this. Introduces risk of hallucinations which is not awesome, but it does tend to neutralise the rage bait tone and tricks that are pervasive these days. Tradeoff but one that has been working for me
smcl 8mo ago
I think if it's stressing you out then it's fair to step back from reading the news for a bit. It's still worth at least trying to form an understanding and an opinion on various issues - whether local, regional or international - if you're going to be voting or even just talking about them with friends and family.
zhisme 8mo ago
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.
- Klaster_1 8mo ago
  Different people have different levels of what matters. If I didn't read the news, I wouldn't know that my country would search my phone at airport and prosecute for acts it didn't like. Or which countries are safe for get together with family. Or that I may lose the chance to renew my passport in third country and have to urgently renew it, otherwise risking a trip to hostile homeland and potential residency permit issues.
fredley 8mo ago
Once you start noticing how often you see content that references e.g. anything that's happening in the US right now (I'm in the UK), you realise how 'news' is everywhere. If you go on reddit, unless you've curated your subreddits and never touch /all or /popular, it's very heavy with 'news'. The Google app, a left-swipe by default on your Android phone is all 'news'. Twxtter/Bluesky/etc. are full of news. Avoiding news entirely is almost impossible on today's internet. I have had success with this approach too, but key to all this is being careful about where you go online to minimise exposure. These days I don't use any 'social media' platforms, but I do visit HN and BBC news (both of which are of higher quality than most places, and crucially only have a few stories on a typical day - the rate of new content is low). This way I stay informed without falling down rabbit holes about every twist and turn of every (mostly awful/depressing) thing happening in the World.
tpoacher 8mo ago
As that famous Mark Twain quote goes, "If you don't read the news, you're uninformed; if you do read the news, you're misinformed." And these days, you're misinformed with a good dose of dramatic Hans-Zimmer-like soundtrack and visuals designed to evoke fear and outrage.
crnkofe 8mo ago
I also joined the club recently. Global newsfeeds from social media have become infested with AI slop, near constant Trump/ICE BS spam in addition to existing clickbait vids and ads. News media front pages are essentially Trump outlets and this guy puts out an insane amount of BS thrash that only ennervates and creates discord. There's not that much happening so blank pages are just filled with something to make it look like news. I'm no longer informed from all of this. It just feels like being a living spam folder.
nialv7 8mo ago
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.
- josfredo 8mo ago
  The consequences are exactly the same, unless you hold an enormously influential platform.
  - alserio 8mo ago
    Maybe, but some groups are banking on you having "news fatigue". So maybe they don't feel that way. And doing it in spite of them is something that balances out my anxiety for me.
    - chucksta 8mo ago
      So the third party gets annoyed either way? Gee I wonder why we see posts like this
- nicbou 8mo ago
  What good is awareness without action?
- Buttons840 8mo ago
  I hear you, but spending an hour to research every name on the ballot come election time will make you better informed than most people. 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.
- nicbou 8mo ago
  What good is awareness without action? Things happening across the ocean are just out of scope.
dandanua 8mo ago
How timely
- StefanBatory 8mo ago
  I wonder what one agenda in posting that right now would be, ehh? And to think Americans used to take pride in being nation of freedom.
  - dandanua 8mo ago
    To be fair, not everything is someone's agenda. Indifference, ignorance and stupidity exist by their own. But hostile forces do like to multiply them. You may not follow the news right until they start knocking on your door, or just obliterate your house in a rocket strike.
    - uejcjsjdowndj 8mo ago
      [dead]
  - TACIXAT 8mo ago
    Non participation is an exercise of one's freedom.
throwaway315314 8mo ago
I don't think mainstream news is news anymore, its just become pseudo high brow reality tv with various organizations panhandling for your attention with whatever outrageous thing they can. There is that exercise of looking at the headlines from a month ago and realizing that most of them didn't matter at all or had very little effect on ones daily life. Its no wonder things are getting more extreme when every news outlet is falling over each other to farm that engagement.
duskdozer 8mo ago
Well, good thing for him that it's only other people who will be affected by the things reported on in the news! And they don't add much value to his life, anyway.
mkirsten 8mo ago
I tried the same. 2 weeks after I started I attended a party where people mentioned that it was sad that Michael Jackson had died. I thought they were joking, but turned out they didn’t. It was in late June 2009. I started reading the news again. 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)
yomismoaqui 8mo ago
We don't walk on the street picking random things from the ground and putting them in our mouth, right? So we shouldn't do the same with things we read on the internet and our brain.
- card_zero 8mo ago
  I walk around the streets picking up any folding currency I see, so I do the same as I go around the internet picking up any intriguing news stories.
72deluxe 8mo ago
I have set up ntfy on a Pi at home, and use it to send me Android notifications of headlines every morning. This is by a bash script in a cron job that reads RSS feeds and grabs the headlines and links to articles, so I can get a flurry of tech news and general news headlines without having to go into detail on each topic (which in news terms is typically slanted with some sort of bias). So I can stay up to date on general happenings, speedily. It is fairly simple to set up - a LLM will write a suitable bash script to parse RSS XML and grab links and headlines in moments.
Olmhinlu 8mo ago
"I have watched TV twice in my life. I am frankly not terribly interested in TV anyway. Certainly I do not pretend that by simply refusing to keep up with the latest news I am therefore unaffected by what goes on, or free of it all. Certainly events happen and they effect me as they do other people. It is important for me to know about them too: but I refrain from trying to know them in their fresh condition as "news." When they reach me they have become slightly stale. I eat the same tragedies as others, but in the form of tasteless crusts. The news reaches me in the long run through books and magazines, and no longer as a stimulant. Living without news is like living without cigarettes (another peculiarity of the monastic life). The need for this habitual indulgence quickly disappears. So, when you hear news without the "need" to hear it, it treats you differently. And you treat it differently too." - Thomas Merton
card_zero 8mo ago
I'd read a distant planet's news, from light years away, if it had a culture and I could see the latest updates. I note that the complaint "I can't do anything about it" throws doubt on "it doesn't affect me". But both of those seem to me to miss the point, which is to get new ideas.
Brajeshwar 8mo ago
I come from one of the most disturbed and violent states in India. During high school and college, I worked with a few local Newspaper Publishers, finishing up layouts in Aldus PageMaker. Along with the reporters, I was involved in many parts of the final decisions that made the news mellowed/changed when printed in the Paper in the morning, making it more consumable for readers. I have seen photos of bloodshed and mutilations that trained my brain to normalize rotten.com in later years of my life. The ones printed in the morning paper were always curated; the ones that got away unprinted were things we would keep under key and lock. More than a decade ago, I stopped following general news and learn about things asynchronously. However, I had picked up a few topics that I like to follow and do follow them. Since the Pandemic, I had settled on just a few niche areas of Tech and Science to follow — which, of course, quite a few of them land on Hacker News when I submit them. Around the end of 2025, I picked up the actual printed Physical Newspaper again. A lot of the news seems like yesterday’s Jam to me. I’m going to continue reading the newspaper, Slow and Smooth, picking the ones I want to read and ignoring everything else. https://brajeshwar.com/2026/newspaper/ https://brajeshwar.com/2026/newspaper/
Zealotux 8mo ago
I would suggest following the news with a delay, for example you can subscribe to a monthly publication like Le Monde Diplomatique[1] that'll give you a relatively fresh analysis of news but without the noise. They invite experts to contribute and give a saner perspective to world event, with more context. [1] https://mondediplo.com/ https://mondediplo.com/
lippihom 8mo ago
There's two kinds of news I read, both of which I've found give a "good enough" / "middle ground" picture of things. 1) Financial news, specifically the Financial Times - middle, Bloomberg - slightly left leaning, and the Economist, slightly right leaning. I've found that they have incentives to keep their news as close to just presenting the pure information as possible, as their readers are often making investment decisions based on the quality of the information, resulting in wanting zero "spin". This isn't the case for the NYT or WSJ, which have an incentive misalignment. 2) Anything that shows up on Hacker News. I trust that if something is important enough to get posted here (and make the front page), then I should probably be aware of it. The comments are for the most part measured, analytical, and thought-provoking.
RickJWagner 8mo ago
The author of this piece has set himself on a course towards lower blood pressure, better world outlook, and better chances of longevity. If you meet him on the street, he will probably be smiling, this year or thirty years from now. Smart guy.
hagbard_c 8mo ago
The Dutch term for the German 'neurgierig' is 'nieuwsgierig' which translates to 'greedy for news' and as such is even closer to the subject of this post. I also use an RSS reader - Nextcloud News - to follow the 'news' (including this here site, HN) and I sometimes feel the same about what is pushed by the legacy media and its more recent competition. Much of what is published is tailored to fit some political agenda, often a 'progressive' one for most of the legacy news media and - due to my conscious choices - a more 'conservative' one for the more recent counterparts. I made this choice to get a somewhat more balanced view of what actual facts the stuff published by 'left' and 'right' seems to be based on but... man, is it often tiring to see 'both' sides go on and on and on pushing their agendas. Even more tiring is to see how useful idiots [1] happily take the propaganda pushed by the media and trumpet it as if it were pure gospel, often with dire consequences. Should I just quit following the legacy media and the more recent anti-dotes and try to live here in quiet and solitude on the farm? Well, no, I don't think I should. I will be confronted with te results of the media poisoning the minds of their victims the next time I go to a city and find the roads blocked by a crowd of people shouting inane slogans. Where did they get those from, what are they blathering about, why does this crowd of screechy weasels hollering about some supposed misdeed performed by some government somewhere far from here occupy the station? Almost invariably it comes down to the propaganda pushed by the media - nowadays usually some on-line version which is amplified up by the legacy dinosaurs and trumpeted by the other titles which are more often than not owned by the same conglomerate - which the useful idiots uncritically pick up and use as their guide star. I read this stuff because I want to know what ideas the media is trying to amplify and which they are attempting to suppress. I read it because I sometimes have to quench whatever fuse has been lit by them in the heads of my children. So, tiring as it is I'll keep the feeds running and try to follow my way through the mire of deceptions, half-truths, outright lies and other propaganda which is what goes for 'news'. [1] https://wordhistories.net/2021/03/26/useful-idiot/ https://wordhistories.net/2021/03/26/useful-idiot/
judahmeek 8mo ago
Everyone should know that they can view HN posts ranked by activity without the flag filter through https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active Personally, I see no reason that the active page shouldn't be added to the navigation menu above.
h02 8mo ago
Rolf Dobelli wrote an excellent book on this topic called "Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life". He addresses directly many of the objections raised in these comments.
h4kunamata 8mo ago
YouTube is the new news and TV replacement altogether. It is not hard to filter out AI slop, stick with channels known for being true and unbiased, specially stick with independent journalists channel and known podcast. Everything else is a lost cause, main stream media?? Suuuuuure Social media, the more time spent at it, the more depressed and brain washed you get, just bad news after bad news. Ditch those and follow YouTube to notice a positive response, you keep up to date without feeling like WW3 is happening tomorrow.
- uejcjsjdowndj 8mo ago
  [dead]
ath3nd 8mo ago
[dead]
assimpleaspossi 8mo ago
I used to work in television and radio news back when the newscasters were often former newspaper men. I do not watch television news anymore (or radio for that matter). To me it's just a long bitch fest now. They show stories about people bitchin' about somebody else or suggest that you should be bitchin' about it. If I want to hear people bitch at me I'll turn to my wife.
alsetmusic 8mo ago
I've cut a lot of news out for mental health reasons. I don't want to know all the awful shit that's going on. Helps a lot. I used to do this for maybe two to six weeks at a stretch. It's become more of a default state, now. I don't know if or when that will change, but I'm extremely cynical so… I'd recommend anyone who is distressed about the state of things and, (this is key) fortunate enough not to be at risk by not paying attention, unplug and see how it goes. I only read tech news and blogs and it's improved my state of mind. It might work for you, too.
- jmhammond 8mo ago
  I subscribe to this model as well, with the caveat that I try to only look at local news to my city and my field. I can’t do anything about the nonsense at a national level, I can do my part in the local context.
simplexion 8mo ago
We have an English word for it too. Neophile.
insane_dreamer 8mo ago
I can relate and if I'm honest, I need to do this. I can't say I benefit from following the news, including tech news and forums like HN, every day. I still want to be informed and be involved especially in matters that do impact me and the country I live in; I feel strongly about democracy and that rests on an educated and participatory citizenship. But I don't need to wade through shit every day to have enough of an understanding of it. I like tech and I'm curious, but just today before reading this article I was thinking about how much do I really gain from this cursory reading on so many subjects (as one might find on HN), instead of using the time to more deeply dive into certain ones. At some point it can become a bunch of clutter that has little value. (I already stopped watching TV news many years ago, and dropped Facebook and Reddit a few years ago as well. I'm mostly down to Instagram and HN, plus the NYT and a few magazines (MIT Tech Review, that one is excellent; Wired, was planning on dropped anyway; Atlantic, good but I don't need that much of it; The New Yorker has great longform every once in a while.)
senko 8mo ago
I try to balance being informed and ignoring the mostly irrelevant hot topics du jour. My approach: * world: weekly Economist coverage of world/biz/general topics (audio via app) - keeps me generally up to date * local: daily digest mail of notable news from yesterday from my country (which is too insignificant to appear in the Economist); scraped from multiple sources, digest by an LLM * Hacker News digest mail, top 50 posts from the previous day (drawback is I'm often late to the discussion, like with this one, but can also be a blessing) * ArsTechnica digest - used to be a subscriber but nowadays just grab new article links once a day I read the digests as my "morning paper", and skip most of the links there (from ~100 in total I end up reading ~10), but am still "in the loop" I also find about stuff in conversations with friends and social media (x/bsky/li for me). I also try to minimize the latter, but that's for another comment :)
ensocode 8mo ago
There is a great book about this from Rolf Dobelli "Stop Reading The News" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48581422-stop-reading-the-news https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48581422-stop-reading-th...
bloppe 8mo ago
Does this count as news?

187 points by mertbio 8mo ago

It's easy to ignore news of things happening far away and the luxury that comes with it. But when your people are the direct cause of the problems far away it's clear how such atrocities were allowed to happen in WW2. Blissful ignorance and silence.

p0w3n3d 8mo ago

I have ups and downs, and the downs happen coincidentally when I read more news. It is quite clear to me that my bad days are correlated with the amount of manipulation that comes from the media. However, when being clean for long, I wonder how could I go voting, not understanding what happens in my country. Also not being interested in politics doesn't make me excluded from the laws that are being created, which affect me more and more.

voidUpdate 8mo ago

My entire existence is politically controversial. I pretty much have to at least be aware of recent political developments since they could affect my ability to live as myself

M95D 8mo ago
Then why read news and not directly read the new laws and regulations that were voted and passed, or new proposed laws under discussion? https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives_en https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...
- goncalo-r 8mo ago
  News gives you a heads up on what could be coming before laws were passed, or overall sentiment of the population or the politicians. Sometimes it's not about new laws, but about new interpretations, enforcements, court rulings etc.
- Arainach 8mo ago
  There's way too much going on to follow all of it, and most of the important stuff isn't written down. By the time the text of bills is available, the politicians and influencers have been discussing things for a long time and the opportunity to do anything about it is nearly gone. Perhaps we could pay people to follow important topics, politicians, important lobbyists and see what they're doing and claiming they want to do. They could send us summaries to save us time. We could call those people journalists.
  - M95D 8mo ago
    But then, some rich people could pay them more to focus on certain subjects and ignore others.
- Deklomalo 8mo ago
  Because it doesn't give you the Zeitgeist?
- Ralfp 8mo ago
  Because not everything is done as EU law. Frequently its an executive order or a directive passed down from national minister or other govt official to their branch or other branches to make their base happy at expense of people currently blamed for govt’s failures. Eg. no law in Poland regulates legal gender change process. But there is a series of directves for courts on how this should be addressed issued by whoever is in the govt at the moment. One govt issued a directive that those are low prority, other that spouse and children should have a power to veto, another that actually those are high priority and then govt-appointed judges in the supreme court decided to veto the veto and implement new procedure altogether. And none of this is in the law - just directives for judges from pliticans and higher judges.
  - M95D 8mo ago
    1) So we should just read the news? 2) It was just an example. Each person should study their aplicable law-making process.
- PurpleRamen 8mo ago
  Threats are not necessarily originating from laws or their execution. And not everyone has the time to read all laws, or is able to fully understand them and their impact on your well-being.
  - hagbard_c 8mo ago
    It probably takes less time to read those laws than it does to follow the hyperbole pushed by the media. Read them, discuss them with others - like-minded as well as those with a different view - and try to form your own opinions. If you rely on the media to curate your opinions you're just being groomed by one party or the other. In that case at least follow both the media which you most often agree with as well as those which you disagree and try to find out the truth behind the half-truths and lies pushed by them.
- voidUpdate 8mo ago
  Because I live in the UK, and we aren't part of the EU anymore
- StefanBatory 8mo ago
  Anti-LGBT zones in Poland were not officially introduced via state law. Neither were out bishops speaking about rainbow disease and calling us all ideology, not people. You are privileged if you can afford to only rely on official sources.
croisillon 8mo ago
i agree, it's probably comfortable to "not read the news" or "not be into politics" or whatever, except when politics is into you
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
berrycan 8mo ago
Your entire existence? That sounds kind of hyperbolic, unless you're being targeted by genocide.
- voidUpdate 8mo ago
  I'm trans. I live in the UK. I know it's not as bad as some middle eastern countries, but I'm still being actively legislated against
  - berrycan 8mo ago
    Do you mean the Supreme Court case last year? I thought that just covered interpretation of equalities law for single-sex exemptions, not actively legislating against anyone.
  - bigstrat2003 8mo ago
    Unless there are laws proposing to execute trans people (which I very much doubt but I'm not exactly following UK politics), your "entire existence" is not up for debate. Saying so is just a hyperbole which muddies the waters.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
- StefanBatory 8mo ago
  Tell me you're in majority without saying you're in majority.
- jjav 8mo ago
  > Your entire existence? That sounds kind of hyperbolic In the USA today (and many other places, but I'm in the US), anyone of any kind of minority is the target of beatings, kidnappings and possibly public executions by the government right now. Not exactly something you can ignore.
  - 8mo ago

thinkingemote 8mo ago

The news is what's new, uncommon, strange, interesting. Shiny, attractive, shocking, raging: dopamine raising and cortisol antagonising. The news doesn't describe our actual lives. But the news does sometimes contain information relevant to our lives! I find I will hear about the relevant things from people and events around me, whether or not I follow the news. The news doesn't have any actual bearing on my life but the news does have a few stories that do have bearing. So theres no downside of not following the news. I will hear what I need to and want to hear about from people around me or other sources. Some think that in not consuming what they think I should consume, that this is a morally wrong thing to do. They will be personally offended, how can they ignore my story? There is a case that if we all stopped following the news then how can the other sources inform us, so there would still be a benefit to reporting... Consider two anthropologists examining a culture. One only has remote access to every news source the culture produces for itself, the other can only talk face to face with people. Which one will understand the people more?

sjw987 8mo ago

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 presentation of news, especially on TV detracts from the message it's trying to convey a lot of the time. After reading some of Neil Postman's books (notably Amusing Ourselves to Death), I find it strange to watch televised news whereby one minute I'm watching footage of a disaster, then the next minute I'm seeing sports news updates or an advert. Just like normal learning, I think news demands longer form content for proper understanding. Reading the news on a low frequency basis also gives time for news stories to properly develop. Breaking news can be filled with speculation and incorrect details, which even if you keep up with, you can miss later corrections or crucial details. Not to mention the stress involved in it. Chances are if some real breaking news happens, like a natural disaster or war, I'll hear somebody else tell me.

Deanallen 8mo ago
Wouldn’t print newspapers also show you disaster on one page and sports on the next? I just began reading amusing ourselves to death.
- sjw987 8mo ago
  Depends on the publication. I read The Economist, which doesn't cover sports at all. It's mostly 1-2 page long articles for each story, blocked into categories (UK, Europe, US, The Americas, Asia, China, Business, Finance, Tech, Culture at the end).
conductr 8mo ago
Older men in my family jokingly called it “the history” instead of “the news” and I feel it’s much more preferable than trying to keep a real time pulse in everything going on in the world
- 8mo ago

anigbrowl 8mo ago

This is a reasonable choice, but of course also one that is only people who can be pretty confident of not being personally affected by newsworthy events.

VBprogrammer 8mo ago

I've recently been trying to avoid news. Particularly US political news. Sadly for some reason blocking sites on my Eero router doesn't seem to work. Thankfully Facebook recently put up a modal dialog asking me to subscribe or accept personalised ads (pretty sure the GDPR explicitly forbids that but whatever, everyone is doing it), it's doing a good job of preventing me seeing the usual feed of news there. At some point I'll put PiHole on my NAS and take care of Reddit etc.

GardenLetter27 8mo ago

Don't worry about things you can't change. That said, you do notice it when the currency crashes.

danmaz74 8mo ago

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.

keiferski 8mo ago
The fact that this is downvoted really says it all. "I don't read the news" is pretty much dependent on one's profession being insulated from changing events. Which is not surprising why it's a popular opinion amongst technocrats that would rather not have democracy in the first place.
- ben_w 8mo ago
  Excerpt from link: For the rest of the news, I am considering subscribing to a magazine that covers important events in Germany, the EU, or the world every few months. This kind of format filters out short-term noise and fear-driven stories. Elections happen even less frequently than this. If your democracy disintegrates with less than a few months of warning, you were probably invaded and noticed even without the news; At this point, that would probably lead to a civil emergency notification on your phone, and by design that happens even without any apps installed. As we said in the UK in my childhood, "Today’s news is tomorrow’s chip* paper". * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_and_chips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_and_chips
  - keiferski 8mo ago
    Just because news orgs are incentivized to be controversial and attention-seeking doesn’t mean that the world isn’t changing rapidly. Personally I think once a week magazines / reviews are a good compromise. I’m not sure how useful reading 3 month old news will be.
  - matthewdgreen 8mo ago
    In October 2024 I would not have guessed that we'd ever see masked agents killing people on the streets of major US cities, or the US administration immediately accusing the victims of being armed terrorists. Things can change rapidly. By allowing things to get this bad, we have unfortunately forfeited our right to pretend things can't change rapidly. Let's plug in; fix this situation; and then folks can go back to ignoring the news.

nhatcher 8mo ago

Aaron Swartz has a nice blog post about it[1]. It's been discussed several times on HN[2]. I had periods I go through without news. It's been harder to do that lately. [1]: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews [2]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=i+hate+the+news https://hn.algolia.com/?q=i+hate+the+news

c16 8mo ago

I've done somewhat similar for the same reasons. I realised that if I exclusively read business news I can avoid a good amount of the fluff and sensationalism. I made a browser extension which pushes the headlines from Bloomberg, Financial times Euronews Business and a few others on to my new tab from their RSS, and it's more than enough to give me a nugget of what's going on in the world without being overloaded. 1 item per new tab. End result is: I don't read the news, but I still know what's going on without the need for Social Media's hot take.

EffrafaxOfWug 8mo ago
Sounds very interesting. Have you published this extension (or the source code)? I think I would like to try it out.
- c16 8mo ago
  Yeah, it's available here https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/start-screen-a-business-f/maacoelocidgmgllhcflcdjakihpkmjj https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/start-screen-a-busi.... Can't say it's the best extension in the world, but it scratches my own itch and I'm happy with it. Sometimes that's good enough.
  - EffrafaxOfWug 8mo ago
    Thanks :)

paraknight 8mo ago

I came to a similar realisation about world news a few years ago and live a much less stressful life now. Especially since most of the news was about the US, and I don't even live there and there's nothing I can do about it. If something really important happens, eventually I find out from friends or family. Same when it comes to staying on top of tech news -- almost everything is a flash in the pan. I used to bookmark cool new products, never revisit them, and then a year later realise half of the links are now dead. One thing I realised though is I still need to mindlessly browse an endless feed every once in a while for some downtime. One way or another I'll want to fill that time with something, so it's a question of being mindful what goes in it. So my drugs of choice are Hacker News, and carefully curated YouTube subscriptions.

keiferski 8mo ago

The news is one of those markets where the following is true: 1) a large number of people are dissatisfied with the current product 2) but aren’t willing to pay for an alternative which solves the problem in the ideal way (for them) There have been dozens of attempts at weekly news summary newsletters, minimal news sites, etc. over the years. None ever seem to go anywhere because no one wants to pay for something they are deliberately deciding has little value. It makes me think of budget airlines: constantly critiqued for being uncomfortable and using dark patterns to get every last dollar - yet people consistently just book the cheapest flight possible.

kornaki 8mo ago

I’ve had similar experiences. These days I only visit Hacker News to read some tech-related stuff. For me, not reading the news to the point where I ask my mom to turn off the TV when I visit is important, because I want to avoid hearing anything about wars, etc. As someone who lives in Poland, I followed so much news about the war in Ukraine in 2022 and 2023, and it was really bad for my well-being and my behavior. A few examples come to mind: not being proactive and creative when it comes to taking care of my house and family, not being present when playing with my son, being less productive at work, and literally feeling angry after consuming news — like the feeling after eating fast food and having bloating. But I’m grateful for the people who do follow the news, read it, protest against the bullshit, and participate more in the democratic process than I do.

nicbou 8mo ago
It’s unfortunate that American news slip into the HN feed, and that Americans get indignant when it gets flagged. I took so much flak for saying that I already know where to hear about US politics, and don’t need it forced into every unrelated forum.
- popalchemist 8mo ago
  I sympathize, and the attitude may be annoying, but you've got to realize you can not bury your head in the sand about the global rise in fascism, nor the fact that what happens in America affects the entire world. Imagine if you were to transfer your comment back to WWII era, perhaps you're French and you're saying that you're tired of hearing about this little kerfuffle between Germany and Austria... well, clearly the disinterest did not pay off.
  - defrost 8mo ago
    I read their comment and at no point did I get the impression they were burying their head in the sand. They explicitly stated they knew where to read / hear about US politics and did not see the need to have that news domain echoed across every forum.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

BoredPositron 8mo ago

Like an ostrich in an 80s comic.

stringsandchars 8mo ago

I think the only wise thing Elon Musk ever said was "Generally newspapers seem to try to answer the question, 'What is the worst thing that happened on the Earth today?'"

zabzonk 8mo ago
probably him

jeffwass 8mo ago

At my cousin’s company there are TV’s in the lobby. They used to show news channels. He said clients would come in all stressed out. So they changed to a home improvement channel.

ivolimmen 8mo ago
The one featuring Tim Allen? Or is there an actual channel with home improvements in the USA?
- acuozzo 8mo ago
  https://www.hgtv.com/shows/tv-schedule https://www.hgtv.com/shows/tv-schedule "Home & Garden Television". Lots of shows about flipping houses, etc. It used to be far more instructional (Julia Child-esque) before it and Food Network got swept up in the reality TV craze. It still has the "bones" of its former self though.

PieTime 8mo ago

I think it’s not news that’s the problem. It’s the sources of news are often biased and spend very little time explaining events in context. I much prefer an hour long news program or multi-page article that details events and perspectives going years into the past. We have a surprising large amount of influence on events around the world. Everything from the companies you support to your politics can vastly change world events. I really dislike the notion that events outside of your country are somehow not important.

cjs_ac 8mo ago

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 reader. The web has destroyed that business model, because the news industry now controls far less advertising space, so there is no longer enough advertising revenue to support quality journalism. The broadsheets are in real financial trouble, and most have turned to tabloid-style articles (albeit ones that promote more sophisticated worldviews) in order to pull in those social-media clicks. I find myself increasingly interested in publications like The Economist and The Financial Times, simply because their readerships have financial interest in actually knowing what's going on in the world, and so they can charge a subscription price that supports quality journalism.

mountainb 8mo ago
The WSJ effectively became a lifestyle tabloid. Its devolution has been shocking.

walthamstow 8mo ago

> I am considering subscribing to a magazine that covers important events in Germany, the EU, or the world every few months I've posted the same message so many time I could get banned but if you live in the UK then Private Eye is what you want here. It's every fortnight, very funny and a bastion of genuine journalism (see the Paul Foot Award they give out each year)

berrycan 8mo ago
I used to have a subscription to Private Eye but cancelled it as it got so depressing from being too aware of all the corruption. Worse than browsing the news.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]

gyanchawdhary 8mo ago

I think if the news feels unbearable, the problem may not be the information but the fact that reality is moving against the assumpftions on which the person has anchored their happiness ... environemt, relgion, polticial views etc etc ..

Havoc 8mo ago

I’ve been focusing more on filtered news. In particular LLM summaries are great for this. Introduces risk of hallucinations which is not awesome, but it does tend to neutralise the rage bait tone and tricks that are pervasive these days. Tradeoff but one that has been working for me

smcl 8mo ago

I think if it's stressing you out then it's fair to step back from reading the news for a bit. It's still worth at least trying to form an understanding and an opinion on various issues - whether local, regional or international - if you're going to be voting or even just talking about them with friends and family.

zhisme 8mo ago

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.

Klaster_1 8mo ago
Different people have different levels of what matters. If I didn't read the news, I wouldn't know that my country would search my phone at airport and prosecute for acts it didn't like. Or which countries are safe for get together with family. Or that I may lose the chance to renew my passport in third country and have to urgently renew it, otherwise risking a trip to hostile homeland and potential residency permit issues.

fredley 8mo ago

Once you start noticing how often you see content that references e.g. anything that's happening in the US right now (I'm in the UK), you realise how 'news' is everywhere. If you go on reddit, unless you've curated your subreddits and never touch /all or /popular, it's very heavy with 'news'. The Google app, a left-swipe by default on your Android phone is all 'news'. Twxtter/Bluesky/etc. are full of news. Avoiding news entirely is almost impossible on today's internet. I have had success with this approach too, but key to all this is being careful about where you go online to minimise exposure. These days I don't use any 'social media' platforms, but I do visit HN and BBC news (both of which are of higher quality than most places, and crucially only have a few stories on a typical day - the rate of new content is low). This way I stay informed without falling down rabbit holes about every twist and turn of every (mostly awful/depressing) thing happening in the World.

tpoacher 8mo ago

As that famous Mark Twain quote goes, "If you don't read the news, you're uninformed; if you do read the news, you're misinformed." And these days, you're misinformed with a good dose of dramatic Hans-Zimmer-like soundtrack and visuals designed to evoke fear and outrage.

crnkofe 8mo ago

I also joined the club recently. Global newsfeeds from social media have become infested with AI slop, near constant Trump/ICE BS spam in addition to existing clickbait vids and ads. News media front pages are essentially Trump outlets and this guy puts out an insane amount of BS thrash that only ennervates and creates discord. There's not that much happening so blank pages are just filled with something to make it look like news. I'm no longer informed from all of this. It just feels like being a living spam folder.

nialv7 8mo ago

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.

josfredo 8mo ago
The consequences are exactly the same, unless you hold an enormously influential platform.
- alserio 8mo ago
  Maybe, but some groups are banking on you having "news fatigue". So maybe they don't feel that way. And doing it in spite of them is something that balances out my anxiety for me.
  - chucksta 8mo ago
    So the third party gets annoyed either way? Gee I wonder why we see posts like this
nicbou 8mo ago
What good is awareness without action?
Buttons840 8mo ago
I hear you, but spending an hour to research every name on the ballot come election time will make you better informed than most people. 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.
nicbou 8mo ago
What good is awareness without action? Things happening across the ocean are just out of scope.

dandanua 8mo ago

How timely

StefanBatory 8mo ago
I wonder what one agenda in posting that right now would be, ehh? And to think Americans used to take pride in being nation of freedom.
- dandanua 8mo ago
  To be fair, not everything is someone's agenda. Indifference, ignorance and stupidity exist by their own. But hostile forces do like to multiply them. You may not follow the news right until they start knocking on your door, or just obliterate your house in a rocket strike.
  - uejcjsjdowndj 8mo ago
    [dead]
- TACIXAT 8mo ago
  Non participation is an exercise of one's freedom.

throwaway315314 8mo ago

I don't think mainstream news is news anymore, its just become pseudo high brow reality tv with various organizations panhandling for your attention with whatever outrageous thing they can. There is that exercise of looking at the headlines from a month ago and realizing that most of them didn't matter at all or had very little effect on ones daily life. Its no wonder things are getting more extreme when every news outlet is falling over each other to farm that engagement.

duskdozer 8mo ago

Well, good thing for him that it's only other people who will be affected by the things reported on in the news! And they don't add much value to his life, anyway.

mkirsten 8mo ago

I tried the same. 2 weeks after I started I attended a party where people mentioned that it was sad that Michael Jackson had died. I thought they were joking, but turned out they didn’t. It was in late June 2009. I started reading the news again. 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)

yomismoaqui 8mo ago

We don't walk on the street picking random things from the ground and putting them in our mouth, right? So we shouldn't do the same with things we read on the internet and our brain.

card_zero 8mo ago
I walk around the streets picking up any folding currency I see, so I do the same as I go around the internet picking up any intriguing news stories.

72deluxe 8mo ago

I have set up ntfy on a Pi at home, and use it to send me Android notifications of headlines every morning. This is by a bash script in a cron job that reads RSS feeds and grabs the headlines and links to articles, so I can get a flurry of tech news and general news headlines without having to go into detail on each topic (which in news terms is typically slanted with some sort of bias). So I can stay up to date on general happenings, speedily. It is fairly simple to set up - a LLM will write a suitable bash script to parse RSS XML and grab links and headlines in moments.

Olmhinlu 8mo ago

"I have watched TV twice in my life. I am frankly not terribly interested in TV anyway. Certainly I do not pretend that by simply refusing to keep up with the latest news I am therefore unaffected by what goes on, or free of it all. Certainly events happen and they effect me as they do other people. It is important for me to know about them too: but I refrain from trying to know them in their fresh condition as "news." When they reach me they have become slightly stale. I eat the same tragedies as others, but in the form of tasteless crusts. The news reaches me in the long run through books and magazines, and no longer as a stimulant. Living without news is like living without cigarettes (another peculiarity of the monastic life). The need for this habitual indulgence quickly disappears. So, when you hear news without the "need" to hear it, it treats you differently. And you treat it differently too." - Thomas Merton

card_zero 8mo ago

I'd read a distant planet's news, from light years away, if it had a culture and I could see the latest updates. I note that the complaint "I can't do anything about it" throws doubt on "it doesn't affect me". But both of those seem to me to miss the point, which is to get new ideas.

Brajeshwar 8mo ago

I come from one of the most disturbed and violent states in India. During high school and college, I worked with a few local Newspaper Publishers, finishing up layouts in Aldus PageMaker. Along with the reporters, I was involved in many parts of the final decisions that made the news mellowed/changed when printed in the Paper in the morning, making it more consumable for readers. I have seen photos of bloodshed and mutilations that trained my brain to normalize rotten.com in later years of my life. The ones printed in the morning paper were always curated; the ones that got away unprinted were things we would keep under key and lock. More than a decade ago, I stopped following general news and learn about things asynchronously. However, I had picked up a few topics that I like to follow and do follow them. Since the Pandemic, I had settled on just a few niche areas of Tech and Science to follow — which, of course, quite a few of them land on Hacker News when I submit them. Around the end of 2025, I picked up the actual printed Physical Newspaper again. A lot of the news seems like yesterday’s Jam to me. I’m going to continue reading the newspaper, Slow and Smooth, picking the ones I want to read and ignoring everything else. https://brajeshwar.com/2026/newspaper/ https://brajeshwar.com/2026/newspaper/

Zealotux 8mo ago

I would suggest following the news with a delay, for example you can subscribe to a monthly publication like Le Monde Diplomatique[1] that'll give you a relatively fresh analysis of news but without the noise. They invite experts to contribute and give a saner perspective to world event, with more context. [1] https://mondediplo.com/ https://mondediplo.com/

lippihom 8mo ago

There's two kinds of news I read, both of which I've found give a "good enough" / "middle ground" picture of things. 1) Financial news, specifically the Financial Times - middle, Bloomberg - slightly left leaning, and the Economist, slightly right leaning. I've found that they have incentives to keep their news as close to just presenting the pure information as possible, as their readers are often making investment decisions based on the quality of the information, resulting in wanting zero "spin". This isn't the case for the NYT or WSJ, which have an incentive misalignment. 2) Anything that shows up on Hacker News. I trust that if something is important enough to get posted here (and make the front page), then I should probably be aware of it. The comments are for the most part measured, analytical, and thought-provoking.

RickJWagner 8mo ago

The author of this piece has set himself on a course towards lower blood pressure, better world outlook, and better chances of longevity. If you meet him on the street, he will probably be smiling, this year or thirty years from now. Smart guy.

hagbard_c 8mo ago

The Dutch term for the German 'neurgierig' is 'nieuwsgierig' which translates to 'greedy for news' and as such is even closer to the subject of this post. I also use an RSS reader - Nextcloud News - to follow the 'news' (including this here site, HN) and I sometimes feel the same about what is pushed by the legacy media and its more recent competition. Much of what is published is tailored to fit some political agenda, often a 'progressive' one for most of the legacy news media and - due to my conscious choices - a more 'conservative' one for the more recent counterparts. I made this choice to get a somewhat more balanced view of what actual facts the stuff published by 'left' and 'right' seems to be based on but... man, is it often tiring to see 'both' sides go on and on and on pushing their agendas. Even more tiring is to see how useful idiots [1] happily take the propaganda pushed by the media and trumpet it as if it were pure gospel, often with dire consequences. Should I just quit following the legacy media and the more recent anti-dotes and try to live here in quiet and solitude on the farm? Well, no, I don't think I should. I will be confronted with te results of the media poisoning the minds of their victims the next time I go to a city and find the roads blocked by a crowd of people shouting inane slogans. Where did they get those from, what are they blathering about, why does this crowd of screechy weasels hollering about some supposed misdeed performed by some government somewhere far from here occupy the station? Almost invariably it comes down to the propaganda pushed by the media - nowadays usually some on-line version which is amplified up by the legacy dinosaurs and trumpeted by the other titles which are more often than not owned by the same conglomerate - which the useful idiots uncritically pick up and use as their guide star. I read this stuff because I want to know what ideas the media is trying to amplify and which they are attempting to suppress. I read it because I sometimes have to quench whatever fuse has been lit by them in the heads of my children. So, tiring as it is I'll keep the feeds running and try to follow my way through the mire of deceptions, half-truths, outright lies and other propaganda which is what goes for 'news'. [1] https://wordhistories.net/2021/03/26/useful-idiot/ https://wordhistories.net/2021/03/26/useful-idiot/

judahmeek 8mo ago

Everyone should know that they can view HN posts ranked by activity without the flag filter through https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active Personally, I see no reason that the active page shouldn't be added to the navigation menu above.

h02 8mo ago

Rolf Dobelli wrote an excellent book on this topic called "Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life". He addresses directly many of the objections raised in these comments.

h4kunamata 8mo ago

YouTube is the new news and TV replacement altogether. It is not hard to filter out AI slop, stick with channels known for being true and unbiased, specially stick with independent journalists channel and known podcast. Everything else is a lost cause, main stream media?? Suuuuuure Social media, the more time spent at it, the more depressed and brain washed you get, just bad news after bad news. Ditch those and follow YouTube to notice a positive response, you keep up to date without feeling like WW3 is happening tomorrow.

uejcjsjdowndj 8mo ago
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ath3nd 8mo ago

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assimpleaspossi 8mo ago

I used to work in television and radio news back when the newscasters were often former newspaper men. I do not watch television news anymore (or radio for that matter). To me it's just a long bitch fest now. They show stories about people bitchin' about somebody else or suggest that you should be bitchin' about it. If I want to hear people bitch at me I'll turn to my wife.

alsetmusic 8mo ago

I've cut a lot of news out for mental health reasons. I don't want to know all the awful shit that's going on. Helps a lot. I used to do this for maybe two to six weeks at a stretch. It's become more of a default state, now. I don't know if or when that will change, but I'm extremely cynical so… I'd recommend anyone who is distressed about the state of things and, (this is key) fortunate enough not to be at risk by not paying attention, unplug and see how it goes. I only read tech news and blogs and it's improved my state of mind. It might work for you, too.

jmhammond 8mo ago
I subscribe to this model as well, with the caveat that I try to only look at local news to my city and my field. I can’t do anything about the nonsense at a national level, I can do my part in the local context.

simplexion 8mo ago

We have an English word for it too. Neophile.

insane_dreamer 8mo ago

I can relate and if I'm honest, I need to do this. I can't say I benefit from following the news, including tech news and forums like HN, every day. I still want to be informed and be involved especially in matters that do impact me and the country I live in; I feel strongly about democracy and that rests on an educated and participatory citizenship. But I don't need to wade through shit every day to have enough of an understanding of it. I like tech and I'm curious, but just today before reading this article I was thinking about how much do I really gain from this cursory reading on so many subjects (as one might find on HN), instead of using the time to more deeply dive into certain ones. At some point it can become a bunch of clutter that has little value. (I already stopped watching TV news many years ago, and dropped Facebook and Reddit a few years ago as well. I'm mostly down to Instagram and HN, plus the NYT and a few magazines (MIT Tech Review, that one is excellent; Wired, was planning on dropped anyway; Atlantic, good but I don't need that much of it; The New Yorker has great longform every once in a while.)

senko 8mo ago

I try to balance being informed and ignoring the mostly irrelevant hot topics du jour. My approach: * world: weekly Economist coverage of world/biz/general topics (audio via app) - keeps me generally up to date * local: daily digest mail of notable news from yesterday from my country (which is too insignificant to appear in the Economist); scraped from multiple sources, digest by an LLM * Hacker News digest mail, top 50 posts from the previous day (drawback is I'm often late to the discussion, like with this one, but can also be a blessing) * ArsTechnica digest - used to be a subscriber but nowadays just grab new article links once a day I read the digests as my "morning paper", and skip most of the links there (from ~100 in total I end up reading ~10), but am still "in the loop" I also find about stuff in conversations with friends and social media (x/bsky/li for me). I also try to minimize the latter, but that's for another comment :)

ensocode 8mo ago

There is a great book about this from Rolf Dobelli "Stop Reading The News" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48581422-stop-reading-the-news https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48581422-stop-reading-th...

bloppe 8mo ago

Does this count as news?