[HN Gopher] Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed
___________________________________________________________________
Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed
Author : headalgorithm
Score : 414 points
Date : 2025-02-05 14:55 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| parliament32 wrote:
| Personally, I fixed the problem by not bothering with "staying
| informed" at all. I ditched media outside of local news entirely,
| and just don't engage with things that I can't do anything about.
| It would boil down to "focus on things you can control." Sure,
| it's fun to be outraged together with your friends about "X
| leader in Y country does Z crazy thing" but.. can you do anything
| about it? Does your opinion matter? Is there value in engaging
| with it? Turns out the answer is almost always no (unless you're
| suffering from main-character-syndrome, of course), so what's the
| point?
|
| Focus on you. What are you doing today? What do you need to
| reflect on from yesterday? What do you need to plan for tomorrow?
| Don't waste cycles on things that are out of your scope.
| lm28469 wrote:
| There is an equilibrium to find. democracy isn't just showing
| up every 4 or 5 years to drop a piece of paper in a box.
|
| Most countries have rights to protest, organise, strike, for a
| reason. Most of these rights were gained after long fights in
| which single individual was meaningless but together they moved
| contains. You have to know when to pull back but you also have
| to know when to dive in
| baal80spam wrote:
| > It would boil down to "focus on things you can control"
|
| If it only was so simple. How to define such things? Case in
| point: the biggest "outrage factor" seems to be politics. Well
| - _can_ you control your country's government? Yes, you can -
| however not directly. And this means that "I don't care about
| politics" stance is bad.
|
| edit: spelling
| parliament32 wrote:
| It's an excellent point, but is there value in you (as an
| American, I presume) being around-the-clock outraged for the
| next four years? Or does it make sense for you to do some
| research and make a decision in the few weeks leading up to
| an election? What can you "control" here in the other 206
| weeks of the current term?
|
| I'm not saying you shouldn't care about politics at all. But
| politics in a country you're not a citizen of are irrelevant.
| And politics in your own country only really matter when it's
| time to vote, right? So what's the value in "staying
| informed" outside of that narrow window?
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| You can control it. But if you're controlling it based on the
| media's interpretation then you are the one being controlled.
| Turn off the TV and vote based on how things affect you
| locally. I think that's what the previous commenter means.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Not that it would've ever changed my vote, but the candidate
| was going to win my state regardless of how I voted. Even if
| I and every other person who is psychologically capable of
| choosing the other candidate... they were always going to win
| this state. So no, I can't control my government. I've known
| this a long while now, I'm not a fool.
|
| >es, you can - however not directly. And this means that "I
| don't care about politics" stance is bad.
|
| Though you might not be aware of it, you're repeating
| propaganda that actually aids some nebulous group of people.
| It seeks to recruit me and my efforts to further their
| purposes, none of which overlap my own significantly. I can't
| exert significant indirect influence either. And if I were to
| pool my insignificant influence with others (such as you
| suggest) to influence government, it would almost certainly
| be towards ends I do not agree with. I can be used by others,
| so to speak, but no one's on _my side_.
|
| I might get to watch one group I don't agree with go
| killdozer on another group I don't agree with, and it will be
| entertaining to watch supposing I can maintain enough
| distance from the carnage.
| keybored wrote:
| Of course you can affect your country's government. You can
| take five minutes every few years to decide who to vote for
| (spending more on that seems like a waste of time considering
| the payoff).
|
| More than that though. You can protest and organize however
| much you like. There's no cap on that.
|
| And that is how insidious "news" is. The news broadcasts the
| hegemonic mindset. The same mindset that says that citizens'
| only role is to vote every few years. Other than that they
| are supposed to stay home. Certainly not make a ruckus or
| anything.
|
| And that's what many conclude. That they are only supposed to
| be political in a direct, consequential sense by voting. Then
| it is clearly absurd, from a cost-benefit analysis
| standpoint, to stay ever-constantly informed on politics all
| the time.
| cal85 wrote:
| You can do all three: (1) focus on you etc, (2) take an
| interest in global events, and (3) not get outraged. It really
| is possible.
| dageshi wrote:
| Perhaps it depends on the individual, but I never found it
| possible.
|
| The news just made me sad, sad and angry most of the time,
| it's just a stream of 24/7 misery and if there's not enough
| misery going on locally the news will find misery from around
| the world to fill the run time.
| ryandrake wrote:
| What helped me is to realize: Sadness and anger come from
| within, not from the outside. Nobody can "make" you mad.
| They will do what they do, and it's up to us to decide if
| and how to emotionally respond to it. We are not amoebas
| that simply respond to stimulus. We have agency over our
| own thoughts and feelings. This is something I try to teach
| my kid, and I think it's also helped her deal with others
| who she would previously say "made her mad."
| dageshi wrote:
| I think "deciding whether to emotionally respond" to
| something... isn't emotion?
|
| Emotion is something you feel, not something you decide
| to allow yourself to feel.
|
| Like, if I hear about someone being raped or murdered,
| how am I not going to have an emotional reaction of
| sadness or anger to that? And ultimately what use was
| that emotion? I cannot prevent the event happening, it
| has already happened, I am just a voyeur to someone
| else's tragedy.
|
| Most of the news is like that. It's events that have
| already happened, that I can do nothing about but I'm
| vaguely meant to be up to date with because.... reasons?
| Some vague concept that everyone is meant to have an inch
| deep understanding of current events so they've got
| something to gossip about?
|
| I truly don't see the point or the benefit.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > Emotion is something you feel, not something you decide
| to allow yourself to feel.
|
| Recognizing your emotions when you are making a decision
| is key. The emotions you feel will largely be outside
| your control but you can catch a thought you disagree
| with when you have it and wonder what triggered that
| thought. If the trigger was an emotion, you can wonder
| what triggered the emotion. Ask "five whys" (google it if
| you don't know what I mean). You have more control over
| this than you seem to think; you will just have to
| practice exercising it.
| keybored wrote:
| The simplest way to control your inner life is to not let
| whatever miserable output in. In other words turn it off.
|
| It's really entitled (by whom? who knows) to say that
| people have control over their inner lives as a response
| to the News being misery-inducing (according to them).
| Yeah. So turn it off. You don't own the outside world
| your attention.
| DasCorCor wrote:
| What am I doing today? Taking care of my son. Trying to have
| another child. What do I need to plan for tomorrow? How am I
| going to vaccinate my child next year? How do I get my wife
| medical care if she has another unviable pregnancy? How small
| of a life you must lead that you can just not engage.
| parliament32 wrote:
| All fair points. I'm having trouble understanding how this
| relates to the outrage-centered media, however.
|
| Current top stories on the CNN frontpage are:
|
| > Trump's effort to end birthright citizenship is blocked
| nationwide
|
| > Trump's Gaza plan is the most outlandish in region's
| peacemaking history
|
| > China is building a giant laser to generate the energy of
| the stars, satellite images appear to show
|
| Is your child not a citizen? Are you child's vaccines related
| to Gaza, somehow? Will China's laser affect your wife's
| pregnancy?
|
| Why do you feel the need to engage with this?
| DasCorCor wrote:
| So your argument to not engaging is that my argument isn't
| sufficiently updated to the onslaught of news today? RFK
| passed committee _yesterday_. Trump planning to use our
| military for a middle east genocide isn't something that I
| should worry about?!? Where were you on 9 /11?
| Novosell wrote:
| Will worrying stop Trump? I believe that is the
| overarching point here.
|
| Stressing over things you can't/won't impact is largely a
| waste of time and energy. Your worry wont help Gaza.
| Lendal wrote:
| If you're a citizen of a democracy and you only focus on you,
| then when it comes time to vote you'll be voting randomly. Or
| maybe you don't vote and thereby cede control to your neighbors
| to make decisions for you over the environment in which you
| live. Assuming you decide to vote then, and since you don't
| live in a vacuum, your vote will be based on whatever random
| stuff leaked through to you during the time you were "focusing
| on you". Actually it's not random. It's whoever spent the most
| time and money on the propaganda that influences/buys your
| vote.
|
| So it's not really that simple is it?
| FredPret wrote:
| Democracy works if everyone votes for the thing(s) they care
| about. You likely don't need a news site for information
| about that.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| Except in most "democracies" there is no direct voting on
| issues. Instead you vote for parties or people who you
| believe align with your values. To find out about those
| people/parties you probably need "news"
| FredPret wrote:
| How on earth do you need a newspaper to tell you which
| political party aligns with your values?
|
| Depending on where you live, there's 2-10 parties. You
| know who they are and what they want. If you want to
| affect the outcome you can get involved in your local
| politics; being glued to NYT.com all day isn't changing
| one thing except wasting time.
| parliament32 wrote:
| > when it comes time to vote you'll be voting randomly
|
| Not at all, I think citizens have an obligation to vote, and
| an obligation to do their research when it's time to vote.
| But let's say that takes you a week. Why bother being focused
| on the outrage during the rest of the term? What value is
| there to you being mad at whatever politician on week 15 of
| their 208 week term? If anything, I'd say "staying informed"
| is a hinderance, because you'll always just be focused on the
| issue-of-the-day and build mental biases rather than being
| able to take a wider view of what the politician implemented,
| and how it played out over a period of time afterwards.
|
| Whether you're influenced by facts or "propaganda"
| unfortunately depends entirely on your own research and
| critical thinking skills, and has little to do with timing.
| Lendal wrote:
| There might not be much of a difference in your mental
| health condensing 2-4 years' of rage into just one week.
|
| Perhaps another strategy could be to maintain an awareness
| of the motivations and tactics of publishers/content
| creators, and that could be enough as an inoculation.
|
| I imagine a clown on the street trying to enrage me, and I
| being aware of what it's trying to do, instead just laugh
| at it.
|
| Today I walked into a restaurant with a cable TV news
| channel blaring on about the "invasion of men" into women's
| college sports. They offered no proof, just a continuous
| barrage of commentary. As I waited for my sandwich I
| watched one after another, with just continuous outrage. No
| proof, no on-site reporters, no B tape, nothing at all to
| support the claims being made. It was like watching bad
| science fiction of an alternate universe. I chuckled
| nervously as I looked around and wondered if the others
| there actually believed it. None of them were laughing.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| Do you know about referendums? Recall elections? Snap
| elections? Midterm elections? Strikes and protests? Or how
| about just letting your representative know how you'll vote
| in their next election to deter bad behavior they're
| conducting in the current moment?
|
| Must be nice for the current American administration to
| have 4 years of no democratic oversight to do whatever they
| want.
| hkpack wrote:
| Unfortunately, I'm not sure that it is a viable strategy long
| term.
|
| When you finally decide to pay attention, there is a chance
| that you will not be able to easily absorb everything that
| leads to the situation so you will lack any perspective of the
| past events.
|
| We live in an extremely dense and complex times, staying
| informed is very difficult as it is even when you try to pay
| attention.
| throw0101c wrote:
| >> _It 's been like what, only two weeks? This shit is exhausting
| already._
|
| > _It 's meant to exhaust you._
|
| * https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1886247034664964548
|
| Ezra Klein:
|
| > _That is the tension at the heart of Trump's whole strategy:
| Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like
| a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality.
| He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only
| happen if we believe him. [...]_
|
| > _What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command.
| What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have
| some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do
| not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a
| strategy unto itself -- that it is, in a sense, a replacement for
| a real strategy. Don't believe them._
|
| * https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| These quotes and articles are awful. Both sides are so insanely
| annoying to me. The media has gotten completely out of touch
| with reality and with people.
| bende511 wrote:
| What do you mean both sides???? only one side has empowered a
| teenager who goes by "BigBalls" online to rewrite sensitive
| Treasury payments processes with no oversight. The media is
| out of touch with reality by not making this coup front page
| news everyday
| yostrovs wrote:
| But what about the people who wrote the previous Treasury
| payments processes? What were their nicknames? What were
| their real names? Were you ever aware of how Treasury
| processes payments before last week? Yet you seem to defend
| those people and their actions.
| bende511 wrote:
| lol what the hell are you talking about
| dgacmu wrote:
| That's the point: We didn't need to, because they had a
| process they followed and it worked. It was probably
| fairly bureaucratic, which is reasonable when we're
| talking about trillions of dollars. Treasury moves slowly
| but they do move in the right direction - TreasuryDirect
| was kinda early and had an absolute klunker of an
| interface, but it's been improved a bit over time and is
| now usable if still chonky. Federal and treasury-mediated
| transfers went through. People's confidential payment
| information wasn't disclosed. That's kind of what I and
| most others ask of the treasury -- even if I occasionally
| took to social media to scream about their terrible
| password entry interface and the annoyance of dealing
| with medallion guarantees. :-) And they got on FedNow
| pretty quickly once it rolled out, though of course I
| wish either the treasury or the fed had provided an
| instant payments system like a decade earlier. (But
| that's on the fed.)
|
| But I'm OK with the idea that change speed is somewhat
| inversely proportional to value at risk. Might be better
| if it was 1/log(value).
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Were you ever aware of how Treasury processes payments
| before last week?_
|
| Why _should_ anyone _have_ to care about the Treasury 's
| Bureau of the Fiscal Service?
|
| Are people aware of of how the Internet works? Are people
| aware of how water and sewage work? The electrical grid?
|
| If someone who just graduated high school started
| flipping breakers at a substation would people think
| that's a good idea?
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Their nicknames were "I have been through thorough
| background checks and I am a professional who runs my
| changes through review and testing before they eventually
| get deployed."
|
| Seriously, do you know who does repairs on the sewer
| lines where you live? No. Does that mean you're so
| oblivious that you wouldn't be concerned by seeing half a
| dozen young men without any safety gear or official logos
| digging a six foot trench across the road outside your
| house?
| 33MHz-i486 wrote:
| yes guy who won an election making changes to a department
| within his purview is a "coup"
|
| the media and people who take their bait are insufferable
| DFHippie wrote:
| > a department within his purview
|
| That's not how it works in the U.S. If an executive
| branch department was created by the legislature, it is
| up to the legislature whether or not it exists, not the
| executive. If the legislature has passed laws regarding
| how its resources are to be used, its employees treated,
| the executive is not free to disregard those laws.
|
| The legislature is the source of laws in the U.S., not
| the executive. The irony is that the Republicans control
| the legislature as well. They could pass laws to achieve
| what Musk wants. It would be slow, but it would be legal.
|
| A coup is seizing power outside the legal mechanism for
| doing so.
| zo1 wrote:
| Playing by those rules, it's nearly impossible to change
| any big law or enact any drastic change to an existing
| law unless you have some world-changing event. The rest
| is just the slow march towards the mean which is
| controlled by the people that can bully others into
| silence and agreement. The mean is controlled by those
| that control the conversation and by those career
| politicians and bureaucrats that "play the game". Look
| how magically everyone is agreeing to deporting violent
| criminals, yet somehow we didn't all think that was the
| right answer 6 months ago?
|
| It's beyond me how so many of us think that continuously
| ignoring the will of the people is "OK". Either tell me
| my choice doesn't matter, or just shut up with the drama
| and enact safe and fair referendums on _every single hot
| topic_ so we can all get to the right answer and then if
| we find we 're in the minority, we'll shut up.
|
| It should be clear as day to anyone that is unbiased that
| fixing the US/Mexican border was ridiculously easy (it's
| essentially been done in 2 weeks and they didn't even
| have to finish building their stupid wall). The only
| reason it didn't happen till now was precisely because
| the whole thing is broken and not really an expression of
| the peoples' will. It was rather an expression of an
| amalgamation of a giant mindless mass of bureaucrats, and
| you can't fix it unless you do what they are doing now.
| Not to single you out sorry, but opinions like yours ("we
| gotta do it the legal way and according to rules x, y, z,
| and 500 other rules") are precisely why nothing ever got
| done or fixed properly. And I say that as someone that is
| absolutely on board with following every rule to the T,
| with no exceptions.
| dralley wrote:
| >It should be clear as day to anyone that is unbiased
| that fixing the US/Mexican border was ridiculously easy
| (it's essentially been done in 2 weeks and they didn't
| even have to finish building their stupid wall). The only
| reason it didn't happen till now was precisely because
| the whole thing is broken and not really an expression of
| the peoples' will.
|
| Fixing the border happened 8 months ago. Nothing
| meaningful has changed at the border since June 2024. The
| only reason it took so long is that Biden wanted Congress
| to do it rather than using probably-illegal executive
| fiat powers, and eventually Biden got tired of waiting
| and did it anyway after Trump told Congress to axe the
| bipartisan border deal that bascially everybody but the
| extremists on either side was on board with.
|
| You can make an argument that Biden should have done it
| by executive fiat even earlier, and that's your
| prerogative. But the fact of the matter is that even once
| a legislative fix was ready, _Trump_ and the Republicans
| threw it away for no good reason, so that he could
| continue campaigning on immigration. That, by the way, is
| exactly "not an expression of the peoples' will". That's
| refusing to fix a problem for the sole purpose of
| campaigning on that problem.
|
| Much of Trump's governance is like an episode of reality
| TV or WWE. Loud, flashy and mostly fake. Creating his own
| problems to "solve" by changing nothing. Threaten Canada
| and Mexico with tariffs then cancel them and declare
| victory when they say they'll do something they were
| already doing, e.g. Mexico deployed 10,000 Mexican troops
| to their border years ago under an agreement with Biden.
| Columbia accepted hundreds of deportation flights under
| Biden, then Trump tries to use military aircraft to do it
| and they say no, he makes threats then he declares
| massive victory when the arrangement reverts to exactly
| what was happening before.
| DFHippie wrote:
| > Playing by those rules
|
| I agree that our system of government makes it extremely
| difficult to enact large changes. That is by design,
| however well considered that design might be.
| Nevertheless, _those are the rules_. Which means the
| president can 't _legally_ do whatever he wishes to
| anything "under his purview" upon gaining power.
|
| Or rather, that was the case until the SCOTUS decided
| there are no laws the president need respect. What they
| have not pronounced upon is whether the law binds anyone
| acting under the direction of the president. Does their
| invention merely protect the president from prosecution
| or does it abrogate all laws he finds inconvenient? I
| find it hard to believe they'll take the second step, but
| we'll probably find out pretty soon. Is Musk a monarch or
| merely our president?
| 33MHz-i486 wrote:
| we were talking about operational access to the payment
| system. you are conflating the situation at USAID which
| may or may not by illegal, idk.
|
| the legislative branch can form administrative
| departments and prescribe their function however the
| president has already defined powers to impound funds and
| remove senior administrative officers and appoint/remove
| low-level staff. how these things intersect will be
| sorted be the courts.
|
| executive actions (by-passing what should be legislation)
| have been increasing the last few decades. the various
| media companies plainly do make choices to portray some
| actions as nothingburger or crisis depending on their
| political alignment with the party in power.
|
| the issue with the left-media and Trump is they outrage
| clickbait a bunch of events that are insignificant in
| terms of outcomes. Should they alarm about Jan6 yes.
| should they alarm over minor personnel at treasury or
| some dumb unserious thing Trump said at a press
| conference, no. This is how the media loses all trust in
| themselves broadly.
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| It's actually not up to the legislature anymore. And
| that's a huge problem in this country. The legislature
| exited stage left by handing way too many powers and
| responsibilities over to the executive branch. Now the
| courts determine if the executive branch has been
| previously allowed by congress to do something stupid or
| not. By the time the legislature can agree on exercising
| power on one item or another, the shit has already hit
| the fan.
|
| It doesn't need to be a coup. Congress sold us out to
| presidents long before most of us were born.
| okeuro49 wrote:
| Looking at the States from the UK. I would love to have Trump.
|
| Exhilarating and optimistic change from the horrible oppression
| that has existed for a long time.
|
| In the UK you lose your job, or get a policeman showing up at
| the door if you post the wrong opinion online.
|
| What I particularly like about Trump, is he is defunding the
| anti-democratic NGO industrial complex.
|
| Regular people have to exist in the real economy, and have
| political opinions in their own time. The NGO complex, on the
| other hand, creates jobs for activist who campaign using tax
| money, isolated from any consequences of their decisions. It's
| a big problem in the UK too.
| bende511 wrote:
| you already had Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. what more
| immiseration could you really be hoping for
| okeuro49 wrote:
| They're nothing like Trump? You should research what
| happened to Liz Truss.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| Since you're asking, yes they are. Johnson is a right
| wing populist, and Liz Truss recently spoke at a far
| right conference, complaining about the deep state
| thwarting her plan. They're Trump without the funny
| accent.
| dboreham wrote:
| Parent is probably noting that neither is now in office,
| in part or whole due to their stupidity and criminality.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| The guys a fan of Tommy Robinson (at least from a glance
| over his post history) so y'know they probably weren't
| extreme enough.
| bende511 wrote:
| well yeah, i was gonna say, with an actual Nazi (like
| Tommy), add some mid-stage dementia, and there you go.
| Also, Elon is getting pretty involved in the UK, so this
| piece of shit will probably be pretty happy by the end of
| the year
| bloopernova wrote:
| What sort of opinions?
| okeuro49 wrote:
| Have a look at Free Speech Union UK for some examples.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Why not just paste some and link to their source?
| kaimac wrote:
| These days if you say you're English you'll be arrested and
| thrown in jail
| philk10 wrote:
| total bollocks
| kaimac wrote:
| You can't say anything these days Phil
| xnorswap wrote:
| These days, if you say you're English, you get arrested and
| thrown in jail.
|
| ( - Stewart Lee's taxi driver, over a decade ago. )
| philk10 wrote:
| total bollocks
| xnorswap wrote:
| I think Stewart Lee knew and understood that when he
| incorporated it into his comedy routine.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| This happens in the US too [1,2,3]. In fact, regarding
| freedom of the press, they rank 55th in the world, well
| behind the UK, which ranks 23rd [4]. And if you think Trump
| is anything but the standard neoliberal order accelerated,
| I've got a bridge to sell you. For example look at the Laken
| Riley act. A blatant and complete teardown of judicial order
| (punishment for being _suspected_ of crimes), and 58
| democrats helped pass it. Trump is par for the course, he's
| just a bit rude about it.
|
| [1] https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/10/texas-ut-
| lecturer-ar...
|
| [2] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240425-more-
| than-100...
|
| [3] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-
| officers-us...
|
| [4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index
| okeuro49 wrote:
| I'm comparing the UK with ten years ago.
| philk10 wrote:
| Thatcher was bad enough as was Boris and you want worse than
| them?
| softwaredoug wrote:
| One thing is read the article, not just the headline. Get the
| nuance, learn what's actually happening, see what people are
| doing to react. You'll not feel as frozen if you understand that
| a fluid situation has many directions it can take and it's not
| set in stone.
| smgit wrote:
| "In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means
| a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that
| information consumes. What information consumes is rather
| obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a
| wealth of information creates a poverty of attention"
|
| Platforms have realized this long ago, that as info explodes
| people pay attention to the easiest things to pay attention too
| not the hardest, so they move resources to designing things
| like reels and shorts and tweets etc etc. Every earnings call
| they gloat about how shorter form content is exploding and how
| thrilled they are about it.
|
| The long form stuff only holds attention of the majority if you
| keep throwing Novelty on the table every two sentences.
|
| Platforms are basically running an animal domestication
| program, where people have been rewarded with high rep and
| status for extremely low cognitive work.
|
| So that entire group that has benefited doesn't see any need
| for nuance and depth in anything. "Cause look how many likes,
| clicks, views and followers I have accumulated without it"
| etblg wrote:
| As one of the seemingly few people who actually do read the
| article and not just the headline, it makes all the discussion
| people have around news infuriating.
|
| Most articles I come across have a very fiery headline, then
| you dig in to the article and the facts are different, and/or
| the sources are dubious, and/or there's historical precedent
| for the thing that makes it not seem so strange this time,
| and/or the article doesn't dive deeply enough in to the
| details, etc.
|
| Political biases and current events aside, it all sucks! It's
| so annoying that I have to do the legwork of reading through
| the article carefully and following through in factchecking
| outside of the article to get the meat of it out, and after all
| that, it feels like no one else does the same.
| macrocosmos wrote:
| If you ever read an article about something you are
| knowledgeable about you might find that the content is just
| as misleading or downright wrong as the headline.
| Fin_Code wrote:
| Just view a topic on Reddit then on X. You can't be outraged both
| ways and it should cancel out.
| darthrupert wrote:
| This more than doubles the outrage. You'll have to hate
| yourself for being so mistaken before.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| I basically just get my news from the onion now.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| Onion news are just news from the future.
| smcnally wrote:
| A recent financial report on the media industry noted The Onion
| is on the verge of collapse due to, quote, "not being able to
| able to make sh*t up that is more idiotic than current
| reality."
| yowayb wrote:
| Those of us in the west tend to forget that much of what we see
| is a form of propaganda, whether by governments or businesses, or
| even a large number of people. When you keep this in mind,
| everything you see becomes an opinion and your mind can
| comfortably (or at least not emotionally/hurriedly) form your own
| opinion over time.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Easier said than done. Bear in mind that the way information is
| served is meant to trigger strong emotional responses, skip the
| prefrontal cortex and tickle your amygdala. You can limit how
| much it impacts you, say, through reducing exposure, but you
| can't reason your way out of it.
|
| (this is a response to the comment, not the article)
| browningstreet wrote:
| I agree that most messaging is propaganda, but that doesn't
| really counter the real pain that is being inflicted upon large
| populations of people by these government (and corporate)
| moves, and being cheered on by pretty large masses of people.
| The propaganda is like environmental pollution -- hard not to
| breathe it in. That said, I have no answer here..
| breakingrules3 wrote:
| my advice to you that cant breathe it in is leave your
| fantasy where propaganda is pollution and join reality where
| it does not impact you. also if you live in reality instead
| of the fantasy, you will just be less outraged in general.
| anticorporate wrote:
| You realize that pursuading people to accept terrible acts
| as normal and not outrageous is the primary aim of much
| propaganda, correct?
| seneca wrote:
| The aim of propaganda is not anywhere near singular. Much
| of it is also aimed at convincing you that minor things
| are "terrible acts" that you need to be outraged about.
| torstenvl wrote:
| Name one.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Name one... what?
| watwut wrote:
| So you say, do exactly what authors of propaganda are
| trying to achieve and let them do what they want.
|
| Also, I am impacted by legal system, by lawlessness for
| some, by environment pollution, by Healthcare system ...
| jfkrrorj wrote:
| How about you read actual news, not already half-digested
| propaganda vomit? You do not have to live in polluted
| wasteland of western media propaganda! Big media failed 1000x
| since war on terror, and Bush lies, yet you still consume
| their shit!
|
| Simplest way is to read media from independent country. India
| is good, perhaps Arabic countries.
|
| Next level are independent channels on Telegram and Youtube.
| 10 min daily summary on war situation goes very long way.
| justin66 wrote:
| > Simplest way is to read media from independent country.
| India is good, perhaps Arabic countries.
|
| It's interesting that you listed India first. The English-
| language news source that pops up most often via Google
| News is the Hindustan Times, which is hot garbage. Are
| there any Indian sources that are much, much better than
| that which you recommend?
| jfkrrorj wrote:
| Honestly no idea, I followed this rabbit hole many years
| ago.
|
| Hindustan times seems like a rag, like British Sun.
|
| I guess I would recommend to take some event that
| happened 2 years ago, find how some papers wrote about it
| back then, and if you like it, follow them.
|
| My point is there is no reason to stay in toxic
| relationship. There is no reason to read news if you do
| not get any rewards. Even monthly AI summaries will be
| better, and you will stay "informed".
|
| For example all the Trump shit today, he wants legal
| precedents from constitutional court, 90% of this shit is
| irrelevant.
| gadders wrote:
| There was just as much "large pain" being inflicted on people
| in the previous 4 years, it just didn't affect you
| personally.
| braiamp wrote:
| Dude, lets be real here: most people would say the economy
| is shit, while still being comfortable with their lives.
| Anyone's general assessment of the economy based on gut, is
| meaningless. Unless you were on food banks/stamps, you were
| doing pretty good for all intents and purposes.
| lazyeye wrote:
| This statement is ridiculously out of touch.
| HEmanZ wrote:
| There is a massive amount of evidence that Americans
| basically think everyone else is having a terrible time,
| but asked to review their own living situation things are
| going well. Here's a decent summary from late 2024:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/23/opinion/biden-trump-
| vibec...
|
| Instead of engaging in the data, opponents usually yell
| the equivalent of what you put "You're just out of
| touch!" Or throw in an anecdote like "well my cousin is
| having a terrible time!".
|
| What's going on the US is weirder than a "normal"
| economic problem. That's what makes it so frustrating and
| politically polarizing.
| lazyeye wrote:
| Sorry but quoting the NYTimes as evidence would be no
| different from a Republican quoting Fox News as evidence
| to you.
|
| Here's an old quote from the author, the esteemable Paul
| Krugman
|
| "The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the
| flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'--which states that the number of
| potential connections in a network is proportional to the
| square of the number of participants--becomes apparent:
| most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or
| so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on
| the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."
| slg wrote:
| Statements like this seem to originate in that environment
| polluted by propaganda that the previous comment mentions.
| For example, I genuinely don't know how someone can look at
| something like the dismantling of USAID as anything but an
| increase in "large pain". Sure, there are almost certainly
| individual programs within that organization that are
| wasteful and aren't the best use of our tax dollars, but
| there is (or at least was as of a few weeks ago) broad
| bipartisan support for this type of investment in humanity
| and stopping it will clearly inflict pain on people and
| this administration is at best indifferent to that pain.
| HEmanZ wrote:
| Just using your example tho, I feel there are two kinds
| of framing.
|
| 1. This is literally a worse outcome than the alternative
| you prefer. You should care enough to try to fight it
| politically, especially if you are well positioned to do
| so.
|
| 2. This case (and 99% of cases of political outrage I see
| on the news) is trivial in the context of what is
| "normal" for human political history, even the political
| history that many people alive today were around for.
|
| Will this even register as a trivia question in 100
| years? Is a framing I ask myself when I'm mad about
| something in the world.
|
| I think a lot of people walked from a world where they
| had no idea what the normal tumult of human political
| society is like, even normal American political
| messiness, and into the world of 24/7 current political
| news without any context what came before. It's like, the
| sausage has always been made this way, you're just now
| finding out.
|
| I say these things and it always pisses people off. But I
| don't recommend not caring, the world moves forward one
| micrometer at a time by caring, it's just not worth the
| existential angst I see so often.
| slg wrote:
| >2. This case (and 99% of cases of political outrage I
| see on the news) is trivial in the context of what is
| "normal" for human political history, even the political
| history that many people alive today were around for.
|
| >Will this even register as a trivia question in 100
| years? Is a framing I ask myself when I'm mad about
| something in the world.
|
| To me, this is an utterly nihilistic framing that renders
| one's entire life meaningless because the logic doesn't
| just apply to bad things. Like why did you even leave
| this comment? Maybe you or I remember for a little while.
| Maybe a handful of other people who read it will too. But
| no one is going to remember it, let alone genuinely care
| about what either of us said 100 years from now.
| HEmanZ wrote:
| How are you making the jump from calibrating your
| emotional response to distant political changes that have
| no immediate significance on your own life, are par for
| humanity, and don't matter in the long run, to nihilism
| in your immediate experience of meaning?
|
| I don't connect distant political to my own personal
| experience of meaning in the world, so i can't follow
| this line of reasoning.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _Will this even register as a trivia question in 100
| years?_
|
| My family could be murdered in front of me and it
| wouldn't qualify as a trivia question for you or most
| other people in one year. This feels like a version of
| stoicism that missed the point of stoicism.
| HEmanZ wrote:
| You're making such an absurd comparison in situations.
| The death of your own family has an immediate and extreme
| impact on you personally.
|
| 99% of what you see on the news you would never know
| happened if it wasn't presented to you.
|
| And I'm not saying not to care. I'm saying put big things
| into perspective. You don't need to become catatonically
| depressed because the US changed its foreign aid in a way
| that you would never know about unless presented to you.
|
| As I write this I'm thinking about one of my best
| friends, who literally has been so depressed because of
| world news he reads on Reddit this year that he can't get
| out of bed, stopped going to work and got fired. There
| are appropriate and healthy levels to care about things.
| guelo wrote:
| I need examples
| scelerat wrote:
| Examples, please.
|
| If you are trans, you were just de-personed by executive
| order and your passport was invalidated. If you also
| happened to be an incarcerated female, you are being
| transferred to male facilities. These are actions which
| will have life-altering consequences.
|
| That's only one thing among many others (ICE immigrant
| raids which also sweep up legal immigrants and citizens who
| don't "look American") just in the first few days. What
| "large pain" are you talking about?
| genewitch wrote:
| so things that affect less than 1% in the former and less
| than 0.01% in the latter, of the population, that's what
| we're basing "large pain" on? I'm not entirely sure you
| want to play this game.
|
| edit: and vis a vis the USAID thing the former president
| of Kenya summed it up "Why you are crying? you don't pay
| american taxes! we need to take care of ourselves!"
| https://www.msn.com/en-xl/africa/other/us-aid-suspension-
| wak...
| ldipj wrote:
| It's only incarcerated males who are being moved to the
| male prison estate, in accordance with their sex.
| keybored wrote:
| Is your comment propaganda?
| crispyambulance wrote:
| I had used ublock-origin on youtube to disable the right-hand
| sidebar of "recommended" videos so that I could just view the
| stuff in my subscriptions. A couple of years ago, they started
| detecting and blocking ublock-origin, so I stopped using it
| (ublock).
|
| It's not really the ads that bother me. It's the "recommended
| videos". Is there a way to customize my view of youtube to
| avoid the shit I don't need to see?
|
| The thing about youtube is that it's very easy for
| propaganda/click-bait to creep in during moments of weakness.
|
| Maybe it's time to go cold-turkey? Failing that, maybe it's
| worth it to try and take some control over the experience?
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Slide the right side of the window off the screen, maybe?
| Dirty tricks are allowed.
|
| I'm very aggressive with the "not interested" and "don't
| recommend this channel" buttons, and over time it does mostly
| get rid of the most obnoxious recs. Right now it's also not
| recommending much good stuff, either, so YMMV.
| pavon wrote:
| For youtube, you can put the video in theater mode, which
| makes the video the full width of your window, and pushes
| recommendations down below it. With this I only ever see
| recommendations at the end of the video.
|
| As a general solution for us techies, you can have user
| defined style sheets that selectively override the site's
| CSS, either using a plugin like Stylus, or Firefox's built-in
| userContent.css. Inspect the website, find the id name (or
| class if it is unique enough) for the content you want to go
| away and put the following in your user CSS.
| #<id> { display: hidden; }
|
| I have so many of these. There is some upkeep with redesign,
| and for some sites with high churn I've given up, but in
| general it makes the web much more tolerable.
| ranger207 wrote:
| There's a browser addon, Enhancer for Youtube, that lets you
| hide recommended videos, among other things
| teddyh wrote:
| I recommend: <https://lawrencehook.com/rys/>
| adishy wrote:
| there's actually a great "hidden" way to disable the youtube
| homepage and shorts across platforms - turn off youtube's
| watch history feature (myactivity.google.com > youtube
| history)
|
| I've found that over time this chokes the recommendation
| system - makes it boring and it now finally refuses to show
| me any video recommendations on my youtube homepage - just a
| message asking me to turn history on. of course, you lose
| your watch history, but I just bookmark the videos I like
| anyway.
|
| Videos related to the one you're watching may appear, but imo
| these tend to be based on your subscriptions / more focused /
| less rabbit-holey (and you can disable those with extensions
| and such as well).
| arp242 wrote:
| It's so disappointing, because "recommended" used to be
| brilliant to find stuff similar-ish to what you're watching.
|
| But these days half of it is outrage bait, ranging from "WOKE
| LIBTARD GETS DESTROYED" to "TRUMP LOSES HIS MIND", or
| malicious clickbait like "you won't believe what the cast if
| $tv_show looks like now" with some AI generated thing of one
| cast member being horribly maimed. Even on stuff that has
| nothing to do with any of that, like some music video.
|
| And whether "Trump loses his mind" is something you agree or
| disagree with doesn't even matter - I'm just here to listen
| to some music, maybe watch a funny video or two. To take a
| break from all of that. It's become so pervasive that it's
| just exhausting.
|
| So normal people like you or me just withdraw. And the only
| people who don't are the hyper-politicised who never grow
| tired of talking of $favourite_issue, which tend to be rather
| less reasonable or open to nuance. And this feedback loop
| just makes things worse and worse.
|
| This, in a nutshell, is why you need moderation. People talk
| about "enshittification" of platforms, but IMO the bigger
| problem is more the "cuntification" of platforms, where a
| small number of extremely unpleasant and vitriolic people
| chase off many people who don't want to deal with that. X.com
| is a well-known example, but also online games where you're
| matched with random people (where you very quickly learn a
| great deal about your mother's sex life).
| jkubicek wrote:
| > But these days half of it is outrage bait, ranging from
| "WOKE LIBTARD GETS DESTROYED" to "TRUMP LOSES HIS MIND", or
| malicious clickbait like "you won't believe what the cast
| if $tv_show looks like now" with some AI generated thing of
| one cast member being horribly maimed. Even on stuff that
| has nothing to do with any of that, like some music video.
|
| I don't know what I'm doing differently than you, but I
| don't see ANY of that. The worst, most clickbaity Youtube
| content I see is poorly done rip-offs of Primitive
| Technology.
| arp242 wrote:
| First example I tried:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLF-f4kUtAw
|
| 7th recommended is " "YOU WILL BE INDICTED AND JAILED! "
| Jim Jordan SILENCE Overconfident Hillary Clinton"
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbqHVba3Ohs)
|
| I'm not logged in. I don't save cookies.
|
| Unfortunately my regular internet has an outage and I
| need to rely on a mobile hotspot which YouTube seems to
| throttle with 20 second delays on everything, so looking
| for more examples is a bit painful at the moment. But
| having 1 to 3 of this kind of thing is common.
| bashfulpup wrote:
| Clear your history often. My youtube is actually incredible,
| massive variety and useful topics.
|
| I clear it about once every 2 weeks or month depending on how
| many of the same topics I see.
|
| It works really well in that if you ignore the content you
| saw before it forces the algorithm to find unique content
| because it thinks you don't like the stuff you've seen.
|
| That and cleaning your subscription list. Easily the best
| platform I have as of now because of that.
| godshatter wrote:
| I go to extremes compared to most others, but I log into YT
| with a browser profile where history is not kept and don't
| log in. The front page is basically empty. I have a local web
| page with links to creators whose content I enjoy. I check
| out one of my favorite creators and see what new videos they
| have to offer. The benefit of this is that the first few
| rounds of recommendations are actually mildly useful since
| the algorithm knows nothing about you and you haven't showed
| it much for it to use since I'm usually logging in through a
| vpn.
|
| It's crazy that the best experience (for me, anyway) is
| achieved by giving it the least amount of information
| possible.
| lawn wrote:
| The danger with this way of thinking is that it's easy to start
| weighing all information equally, while that's _very_ far from
| the reality.
| lordfrito wrote:
| If everything I read online [that I don't pay for] is a form
| of propaganda, then the only choice I have is to either: 1)
| weight all information equally 2) bias information based on
| [personal beliefs XYZ]
|
| I'm trying hard to do #1, mainly because #2 is confirmation
| bias (and reinforces it).
|
| What other options are there?
| lawn wrote:
| You could for instance consider actual facts? Because 100%
| of what you read online is in fact not propaganda.
|
| Then you might find that some sources are filled with lies
| and others contain a lot more facts.
|
| Then you'd naturally weight facts from the more trustworthy
| source higher.
|
| The next step is a "web of trust" where a new source will
| be more trustworthy if it's linked to by other trustworthy
| sources.
|
| So in the end you'd rank information from Russia Today (one
| of Russia's main propaganda channels) as very low, a
| comment from a random redditor low, and a comment on
| physics by a renowned physicist as very high
| trustworthiness.
| lordfrito wrote:
| > Because 100% of what you read online is in fact not
| propaganda.
|
| This isn't even close to true. Facts are facts, and
| stories are propaganda. What we call "news" is largely
| just "stories" (opinion/editorials) about facts -- the
| story is the propaganda - the story weaves the facts
| together in a narrative, the narrative tells us how to
| feel and think. Stories cost $$$, and those promoting
| them are absolutely promoting some stories over others.
| They have a message to send -- that message is
| propaganda.
|
| You mention a comment from a "random redditor" is low
| value -- I'm suggesting that nearly every "major"
| narrative spun on Reddit has been largely placed there by
| forces with deep pockets and axes to grind, and the true
| believers and other useful idiots that follow blindly.
| It's all astroturfing, and Reddit is an absolute garbage
| dump of discussion. Anyone that goes there thinking
| they're getting an accurate picture of the world around
| them is seriously deluded. I'm convinced those that run
| Reddit do this by design. We know who runs Twitter, and
| Facebook. No one talks about who is running Reddit.
|
| A "comment on physics by a renowned physicist" is still
| just a comment -- there are facts in physics, and
| theories. Even renowned physicists can be wrong when it
| comes to the theories they back. And honestly [coming
| back to the point of the article] that's not what's
| causing people to feel outrage -- they're not doom
| scrolling physics forums outraged about dark matter or a
| theory of everything -- they're doom scrolling an endless
| stream of political/cultural propaganda designed to
| outrage them and keep them addicted.
|
| The world isn't nearly as black and white as the internet
| would have you believe it is.
|
| Point me to a source of political/cultural news that you
| believe is full of fact and not just another site full of
| opinions pieces and editorializing around the facts.
| root_axis wrote:
| Would you consider your own comment to be a form of propaganda?
| I'm genuinely asking.
| lordfrito wrote:
| > everything you see becomes an opinion and your mind can
| comfortably (or at least not emotionally/hurriedly) form your
| own opinion over time
|
| I agree (I've done this), but it's much easier said than done.
| Requires a lot of mental work/training.
|
| More importantly, it requires a sort of mental "enlightenment"
| to the true state of things.. That everything you read for free
| on the internet is being paid for by someone, with their own
| motivation and intents, and that these forces don't have your
| best interest in mind. The saying "If you're watching it, then
| it was intended for _you_ " comes to mind. Once this
| breakthrough occurs and you begin to see the world this way,
| everything else usually follows.
|
| As you begin to realize that most of your facts and opinions
| are those planted there by other powerful ($$$) forces, you
| start to recognize that what you think is largely what they
| want you to think. But the scariest part of the awakening is
| that you begin to realize how little you _truly_ know about the
| world outside your direct experience. You feel much less
| certain about the world and your place in it.
|
| Most of the people I know recognize this, and I can have sane
| conversation with them. You can tell those that are caught up
| in the propaganda because they largely sound like parrots, and
| it's impossible to talk to them reasonably. A few friends of
| mine are in this category, and the one common denominator
| between them is that they are deeply unhappy, riddled with
| anxiety, and glued to their devices. The true human casualties
| of the new technological information age we've birthed. It
| appears that this is by design, as those that control the flow
| for information know exactly the power they have and what they
| intend to do with it.
|
| For those that are stuck, I wish I knew how to open their eyes
| up and look around them. It's not too bad when you look at the
| world outside of the internet. I've tried to listen
| empathetically to people that are stuck, but it mostly doesn't
| help. Their minds are hamsters spinning on wheels, unable to
| stop or hear any thing else from the outside. One or two have
| woken up only after the anxiety it produces begins to interfere
| with their real lives and relationships, It's a form of
| addiction, and unfortunately many people are stubborn and will
| double down on their addiction time after time until they hit
| rock bottom.
|
| We're in the middle of a massive mental health crisis. I hate
| knowing that a not-insignificant portion of our fellow citizens
| are rapidly heading towards some sort of mental/emotional rock
| bottom caused by technology... I feel powerless to do anything
| about it as I've watched it slowly unfold over the last decade
| or so -- it's nearly impossible to reach the friends and family
| members that you're actually close to. I don't know what can be
| done other than sit back and wait for them to crash, and help
| them pick up the pieces when that time comes.
|
| Anyone got any good advice?
| Epa095 wrote:
| This reminds me of two quotes:
|
| "The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push
| an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to
| annihilate truth." -Garry Kasparov.
|
| And
|
| "This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe
| a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore."
| This latter quote is, rather ironically, a false quote!
| (falsely attributed to Hannah Arendt). But I still think it
| contains truth.
| godshatter wrote:
| I was looking for a take on this that was more than just
| finding ways not to be inundated.
|
| You don't have to get outraged about something when you think
| about how that particular article might be trying to fan those
| flames and how what is reported might just be highlighting the
| points that push our buttons (but the real set of facts might
| not be as bad when looked into). Even the things that really
| are that bad don't have to lead to outrage. I take a wait-and-
| see attitude about a lot of this stuff we see in the media.
| There are trolls everywhere, we'll see if anything comes of it.
| I'm also capable of not liking something strongly without
| feeling rage with regards to it, while still wanting to combat
| it if I have a say in it at all.
|
| Of course, "just don't let it get to you" is easy to say but
| hard to implement. I think it's the only real path that allows
| the inclusion of social media in our lives, though.
| genewitch wrote:
| It ostensibly used to be better in the US, and then the smith--
| mundt act was changed/repealed and now who knows.
|
| I do like the "that's just like, your opinion, man" as an
| answer to news stories, though.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Avoid following the news constantly. Check in every once in a
| while--a couple times a week at most. Get your news from long
| articles, not tweets. Actually read the articles, don't just
| learn about the world from hot takes.
|
| > ... people have found that, actually, outrage can be useful. It
| actually can help you identify a problem and react to it. But it
| can also be harmful if you're experiencing it all the time and
| become overwhelmed by it.
|
| I'm reading that as meaning something more like _identify a
| problem and act on it_. Outrage itself is a reaction, just not a
| positive one. There 's no shortage of people reacting to things.
| joshdavham wrote:
| > Avoid following the news constantly. Check in every once in a
| while--a couple times a week at most.
|
| Agreed. I personally believe that checking the news everyday is
| akin to something like a 'news overdose'. There's nothing wrong
| with spending just 15 minutes per week. At least for me, that's
| a far healthier dose.
| pavon wrote:
| I wish there were more news sources that enabled this. There
| is so much focus being first to cover a story, and dripping
| out information. My local newspaper had a website redesign a
| couple years ago, and completely eliminated the chronological
| story view. I literally have no idea how to browse stories
| older than what is currently on their main page for the day.
| There are some great national weekly papers but they all
| assume you've already heard the daily news and instead focus
| on supplementing it with deep dives on selected issues, and
| don't provide any summary that can be used as a primary news
| source.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Indeed, 40 years ago, if we weren't getting our news from the
| TV, we quite often got it via weekly news magazines and
| Sunday newspapers.
| jonathanlb wrote:
| Someone I spoke with recently mentioned that it used to be
| that you could read a newspaper end-to-end and feel like
| you were informed. Now, it's an endless stream of
| information. I would posit that our brains weren't intended
| to consume that much information, but I'll leave that as
| uninformed speculation.
| genewitch wrote:
| "used to be"? when? I had an L.A. Times subscription in
| high school and there was no way, even with 2 hours of
| bus ride a day plus lunch and breaks to finish that
| paper.
|
| I think a lot of discourse is colored by the midwest. The
| midwest influenced movies (what does a US neighborhood
| look like? are there hills/trees/snow?), TV, radio, and
| literature. I imagine midwest newspapers to be like
| southern newspapers, 2-3 broadsheets per section if that.
|
| I wonder how many words i can write on this subject
| nosioptar wrote:
| I swore off all television news except PBS Newshour. It's way
| less stressful than having cable/local news on in the
| background all the time.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Actually read the articles, don't just learn about the world
| from hot takes.
|
| Or, even more difficult: Actually read the science paper, or
| the court ruling, or the executive order, or the proposed
| legislation, rather than the journalist's hot take. A lot of
| these journalists takes boil down to "tweets with more words."
| nosioptar wrote:
| Another bonus is that you get accurate into that way. I've
| lost count of how many times the tweet/article gets it
| completely wrong.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >Avoid following the news constantly. Check in every once in a
| while--a couple times a week at most. Get your news from long
| articles, not tweets. Actually read the articles, don't just
| learn about the world from hot takes.
|
| This 100%. If a piece of news is truly important, then it'll be
| important tomorrow or even a week from now. You'll even get
| clarifications and corrections along the way.
|
| I like to use Pocket to build a list of long-form articles I
| want to read, then EpubPress (https://epub.press/) to compile
| that into a weekly EPUB that I can read in-full on a
| distraction-free e-book reader. It's a much less stressful way
| of consuming media than the whole neverending drug-frenzied
| quick-hits world of online news.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| If that could somehow be automated that would be cool
| genewitch wrote:
| you mean like Time magazine or LA Weekly?
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| I meant a curated list of interesting articles for me
| sent as an epub to my kindle weekly...
| the_snooze wrote:
| I looked into that recently, and Calibre with this plugin
| is a viable option. https://github.com/mmagnus/Pocket-Plus-
| Calibre-Plugin
|
| You can schedule periodic content pulls in Calibre, and I
| believe you can also automate sending the resulting EPUB to
| an email address (like the Kindle's send-to-email feature).
| I would use this, but I prefer EpubPress's formatting and
| I'm too lazy to tweak Calibre's.
| dschuessler wrote:
| I've implemented this into my life via the "In the news"
| section of the Wikipedia start page. It served me well the last
| couple of months.
| icedrift wrote:
| Am I on the wrong page or were there only 4 articles on North
| America for all of January?
| hecanjog wrote:
| This is the one I like to use:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
| awongh wrote:
| I think one of the fundamental problems is that "news"
| fundamentally doesn't tell you very much about what's
| happening.
|
| A perfect example is a plane crash- you hear right away that a
| plane has crashed. It is reported on because it is an
| exceptional event. But, the "real" effects, the ones that
| actually affect you personally, or the world systemically,
| won't play out until months later. (for example the Boeing MCAS
| 777-max thing). How much good does it really do you to know
| about the plane crash now vs. informing yourself about the
| context of the plane crash 3--6 months later?
| yostrovs wrote:
| What is actually outrageous is that Scientific American publishes
| articles like this. It's an institution that, like so many, is
| destroying itself by getting into politics, especially the
| politics of outrage.
| taylodl wrote:
| Scientific American started "getting into politics" in the mid
| 20th century, so your comment is about 70 years late.
| yostrovs wrote:
| Please provide some evidence. It was only in 2020 that SciAm
| endorsed a candidate for president for the first time in its
| 170+ year history.
| munchler wrote:
| I grew up reading SciAm in the 70's and 80's, and I don't
| remember a single article about politics.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I've been an avid news consumer since ~2016 and early on I
| remember getting very outraged at articles, tweets and other
| pieces of news I read. Over time I realized that these articles
| want you to be outraged, and that the outrage is a form of
| control.
|
| Over time though I picked up on these "outrage triggers" and
| that's helped me be much more objective about news I'm reading.
| I'll be reading an article and I can usually pick up the "tricks"
| writers use to generate outrage. I often find myself reading an
| article and go "oh look you want me to feel outraged right now".
|
| Nowdays when I try to be informed about a story I will read an
| NYT report, a CNN report, a Fox News or other right leaning
| report, and then maybe one from DailyWire of Bannon's War Room.
| Skimming every article I often see spots where the outlet is
| trying to outrage their readers. NYT will report something that
| will outrage the left and as you "go right" on the reports you
| will start to see outrage directed to the right.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Twenty+ years ago an aunt of mine regularly called our local
| news on channel four the Channel Fear news.
| jquery wrote:
| I've generally found that overtly biased outlets on the right
| aren't a huge source of outrage for me because their spin is so
| blatant--once I notice the propaganda, it's easy to tune out.
| The bigger frustration is knowing how many people take that
| coverage at face value. It's not quite the same "outrage" the
| article describes, though.
|
| By contrast, the NYT often feels more subtle and therefore more
| effective at stoking that sense of constant agitation. They're
| meticulously fact-based, but their editorial choices--what they
| highlight, the framing they use--can seem designed to provoke a
| reaction rather than just inform. It's not only about the
| content of the stories; sometimes it's also about how they
| present or prioritize them. If you haven't encountered this
| firsthand, checking out "NYTimes pitch bot" on Bluesky can
| illustrate how their style can veer into outrage territory.
| It's a satirical account, but it often points out the patterns
| in the Times' headlines and story angles that might otherwise
| go unnoticed.
| seneca wrote:
| You're absolutely correct, but you're missing an important
| detail.
|
| I'm assuming you're more aligned politically with the left.
| If you're not, I apologize for the assumption. To someone who
| is more right-wing, the bias of e.g. NYT is just as blatant
| as Fox News is to you, and Fox may come off as "fair". This
| is because the propaganda is specifically intended to land
| with their own audience. It's tuned to your sensibilities.
|
| It's very much a "fish in water" scenario. Trying to read
| articles from multiple sources can help, and questioning why
| you agree with one take over another. In the end, these are
| pretty sophisticated operations, and they know how to prey on
| their targets.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Subreddits are a great place to see the result of this . .
| . it's incredible how much utter shite and misinformation
| is just taken for granted as "the way things are" and how
| much the details of said misinformation depend on your
| political leanings.
|
| And of course everyone is convinced that they have the
| rational truth and it's the other guy who's the "low-
| information voter" being taken by the propaganda.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _To someone who is more right-wing, the bias of e.g. NYT is
| just as blatant as Fox News is to you, and Fox may come off
| as "fair". This is because the propaganda is specifically
| intended to land with their own audience. It's tuned to
| your sensibilities._
|
| This isn't really a matter of subjective opinion, though.
| Objective surveys have consistently shown that Fox News
| viewers are worse-informed than people who don't pay
| attention to _any_ conventional news sources. NYT readers
| are a long way up from there.
| skissane wrote:
| That's not really comparing apples-to-apples though: a
| cable TV network aimed at the undereducated masses versus
| a prestigious broadsheet newspaper pitched at the
| educated classes
|
| There's plenty of right-of-centre magazines and websites
| aimed at educated right-wingers: e.g. First Things,
| Commentary, The American Conservative, the Spectator
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Fair point, but it was the OP who first mentioned Fox
| News and the NYT in the same sentence.
| skissane wrote:
| Right, but I think their point was that they are both
| biased just in opposite directions, and bringing the
| orthogonal difference in target audience education level
| into it is arguably confusing things
|
| Maybe a better demonstration of their point might be
| comparing NYT/WaPo to the WSJ
| lazyeye wrote:
| I read a book on the history of the NYT. They would
| market themselves to advertisers with "our readers have
| the highest disposable income of aby news source in
| America". It's an interesting reflection on the modern
| Democrat party and politics in general, that the NYT now
| leans left.
| torstenvl wrote:
| "Objective surveys" by whom?
| dekhn wrote:
| By the way, I read Fox News as a comparison for NYT.
| Reading the comments on Fox News articles is a very weird
| experience. You'll get this mixture of comments from "I
| support Trump but this particular idea is terrible" to
| "We must do everything Trump says to bring about the next
| revolution" to what appears to be blatant
| propaganda/manipulation from foreign agents and literal
| outright racism and sexism. What you don't see is nuanced
| communication, while in the NY Times, comments are often
| from knowledgeable people who have experience
| communicating online, can make good arguments, and back
| up their ideas with facts.
|
| If the fox news comments in any way represent true
| opinions of trump supporters, then our country is truly
| screwed.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Honestly, I think most Trump supporters are never heard
| from online. They're just people who go about their daily
| lives without putting a lot of thought into politics.
| They checked the box on their ballot corresponding to a
| name they'd heard a lot lately.
|
| I suspect they will have good reasons to pay more
| attention next time, if there is a next time.
| macrocosmos wrote:
| Objective surveys.
| hansonkd wrote:
| > NYT is just as blatant as Fox News is to you
|
| After this past election cycle I don't see how people can
| make that comment with a straight face.
|
| Media in general is very right leaning. Some like CNN and
| NYT are maybe slightly more left than far right fox news,
| but there aren't many "left leaning" mass market news
| sources that are essentially felating one party for
| millions of people.
|
| NYT and CNN, etc are all very critical of democrats when
| there is a controversy. This is stark contrast to fox news
| which essentially is willful ignorance of anything bad
| republicans / trump has done.
|
| The "normalization" of Trump's corruption by media in
| general should be enough to see which way they lean.
|
| Its just that if anybody is slightly less than full blown
| fox news conservative they get labeled as left leaning by
| everyone in the media so there is some idea of "balance"
| but conservative media (fox news, conservative podcasts,
| etc) are overwhelmingly mass market and the majority.
| sandspar wrote:
| Interesting to be around for the birth of a false fact
| like "the media is right leaning". Overnight you see
| people start parroting something that's clearly untrue.
| hansonkd wrote:
| > clearly untrue
|
| Maybe you haven't been paying attention the past 5 years,
| but there has been a dramatic shift to the right in
| media. Companies change ownership and the new owners take
| advantage of the historical left leaning nature of the
| media.
|
| The magic trick fox news and conservatives has pulled is
| by being so far right that center/slightly right parties
| look far left. The normalization of the MAGA movement is
| evidence of this right leaning media machine.
|
| Look at who owns the "left leaning" media companies. CNN
| is owned by conservatives.
|
| Joe Rogan, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson audience dwarf
| most other channels these days. fox news has almost 3-4
| times the viewership of CNN which is the preferred
| example of a "left leaning" network to balance them.
|
| The rights constant raging against mainstream media is an
| attempt to distract from the fact that mainstream media
| is in fact conservative.
| tayo42 wrote:
| In the last week what headline and story do you think was
| overblown by the NYT?
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| > _meticulously fact-based_
|
| Interesting...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_York_Times_con.
| ..
|
| I'm not picking on them specifically. If you'd said this
| about any news outlet, I wouldn't believe you.
| dimal wrote:
| I had to give up news altogether before I could notice this,
| but yeah, news exists for the sole purpose of creating outrage
| in order to generate ad impressions. When you get outraged by
| one story, you're more likely to click on the next related
| headline. We're destroying our society so we can make less than
| a penny per page.
| FredPret wrote:
| If you truly need to know breaking news, one of the following is
| probably true:
|
| - you have a team that will brief you on it
|
| - you will get the news that apply to you from the source
|
| You won't get either of these from a news website.
|
| As a civilian, you can stay completely up to date with a quick
| weekly / monthly headline scan.
| joshdavham wrote:
| One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to
| online outrage is to just quit social media all together. I'm
| technically gen z and I've been off of social media (aside from
| HN, WhatsApp and discord) for years and you wouldn't believe how
| great it's been for my overall state of mind.
|
| Reddit, instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, etc
| are all the equivalent of digital junk food and I'd argue that
| we're all a lot more negatively affected by it than we think.
| There's a reason 'brain rot' was word of the year.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I find LinkedIn a healthy collection of professional
| accomplishments with minimal news. It's also not very
| addictive.
|
| However, shitty newsfeeds like Google news are my bane. I can't
| stop.
| gbin wrote:
| I have seen an increasing amount of Trump non sense popping
| up more and more from the VC community the past 6 months on
| LI
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I find LinkedIn to be the worse of the social media sites. My
| feed is full of wannabe "thought leaders", people posting
| about a meaningless vendor certificate they got, recruiters
| giving advice, people who can't get a job or were recently
| laid off, etc.
|
| But now, politics is getting involved because people are
| having government job offers rescinded and the entire federal
| government is in a free fall like a 3rd world banana
| republic.
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| > My feed is full of wannabe "thought leaders"
|
| Block them, it's easy. I have only close friends and
| coworkers that I don't hate on that site.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| In principal it's a great method to get back to normal, however
| there are key areas (subreddits, local groups, etc.) that
| really do provide information, expertise, and news content that
| isn't available anywhere else online. It's a double edged
| sword. The best way I've found is to be in there with a read-
| only mindset or perhaps only participating inside those key
| areas where political discussions are strictly prohibited.
| codinhood wrote:
| This has been my exact issue with giving up reddit. It's
| really hard to replace very niche topics without it, since
| many online forums are dead. I also append so many searches
| on google with "reddit" because the top results are generally
| SEO spam.
|
| Reading "You should quit reddit" helped a little. The author
| tries to reframe your hidden beliefs about reddit like
| "finding useful information" or "it's filled with experts."
| Helped me to realize I was spending more time reading about
| my hobbies than actually doing them. Though I understand it's
| not that simple, doing requires more energy, etc.
| gipp wrote:
| My approach, finally mostly successful after over a decade,
| is just "no main feed or subreddit pages." Reading a thread
| off a Google search or whatever because it has information
| I want is fine.
| jjulius wrote:
| I have found this to be completely untrue. Yes, maybe not at
| the same scale that Reddit is, but if you dig, there's a
| community for everything. You can find what you're looking
| for.
|
| That said, I recognize that I am speaking completely for
| myself in regards to my own interests. YMMV.
| neom wrote:
| This is the way. I was a director of the community team at
| deviantart when it got going and I remember so many times
| thinking "if we get one of these apps for everything people are
| going to drown themselves in the internet" - because I used to
| have to actively check in on community members who we deemed
| addicted. Sure enough, here we are, except it seems nobody is
| looking out for the best interests of their communities
| anymore. Thank god for dang.
| bartekpacia wrote:
| > I was a director of the community team at deviantart (...)
| I used to have to actively check in on community members who
| we deemed addicted
|
| This sounds so interesting to me - was it your
| responsibility? How did you detect if someone was addicted?
| And most importantly, how did you scale it?
| neom wrote:
| Well early deviantart was pretty small, and I don't think
| anyone building it was over 25y/o at the time, so we all
| had lots of free time to work on it. Deviantart was
| arranged in a way we all had communities we were
| responsible for, it changed a lot after it reached million+
| users scale, but in the beginning at 100k or so users it
| was very manageable. Your responsibility per Scott Jarkoff
| who lead that team was "to love, nurture, protect and grow
| your community" - and then there were things we were taught
| to watch out for or check in on. Backend you could see
| pretty much everything about the user, plus you just got
| used to the users in your communities, so "additive like
| behavior" was not difficult to detect, literally I would
| just see some users online ALL THE TIME, so we would always
| check in to make sure everything is ok, and tell them
| they're probably spending too much time on the site (it was
| a bit harder for me because I was one of the people
| responsible for communities generally.) I don't know how
| actively other GDs did this, but it was a widly discussed
| topic in our staff only irc channel very frequently. This
| all came from the teams want to be mindful to avoid hurting
| other people using the internet, most of us building it
| genuinely gave 2 shits and genuinely cared about our users.
| This was the same playbook I then used to build devrel at
| DigitalOcean in the beginning, I had devrel structured per
| community with the same instruction Scott gave me back in
| the day. (I think it's part of why y'all originally picked
| us! so thanks!)
| lemonberry wrote:
| This is amazing! I needed to read it today. Thank you.
| fifilura wrote:
| Interesting. Would this be implementable today but on a
| larger scale?
|
| "Someone who cares about you on the internet"
|
| instead of
|
| "Something that prevents you from posting hate/snuff/nude
| on the internet"
|
| Obviously lots of problems, tons of them, and 1984 vibes,
| but still, the basic idea. A bit more like humans were
| meant to interact?
| neom wrote:
| I think sadly the scale becomes less about the size per
| say and more about the unpredictability. The "vibes" on
| the internet late 90s early 2000s where very... on point,
| so it didn't feel like emotional labour. I can imagine
| being someone who cares about someone on the internet in
| 2025 would be, frankly, exhausting, in 2002 it was just
| fun.
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| Yes: "Better Living Through Algorithms" -
| https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_05_23/
|
| It's an interesting relevant short story. Won the 2024
| Hugo Award. It was posted a few months ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263876
| archagon wrote:
| Corporate social media does not care about its users.
| They are just biomass to fuel various goals: ad revenue,
| political influence, etc. In fact, the more addicted you
| are, the better.
| et-al wrote:
| Wow, thanks for the sharing this lovely tidbit!
| barbazoo wrote:
| I agree. My Reddit outrage addiction flares up every now and
| then and it makes my mental health objectively shitty. Doesn't
| matter if there's some good content and connection on there,
| it's just not worth the (mental) cost.
| 93po wrote:
| Reddit is overwhelmingly fake information and covert ads.
| Investigate any random post on the front page of /r/all, even
| if it's just like a cute gif of an old person, then go to the
| comments. Like 75% chance there is something fake or made up
| about the title or context. It's such a mind pollutant, I
| can't stand it.
| mavamaarten wrote:
| In my opinion reddit is still such a great community if you
| subscribe to topics that interest you and leave the default
| subreddits. There's plenty of subreddits that I would not
| be able to find a good alternative forum for, maybe a
| Facebook group exists here and there but is that really
| better?
| barbazoo wrote:
| Good for you for being able to ignore /r/all, /r/popular,
| etc. I just can't, I always end up relapsing.
| andelink wrote:
| This is to be expected for /r/all. But who cares because
| why would anyone want to go there in the first place? In
| general once something becomes a certain size wrt users,
| its value to those users plummets. The only thing to do is
| leave.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| The services go through phases (I suspect depending on botnet
| activity)...Middle of the day, Threads is a fun place to hang,
| 9pm? It's a wall of anxiety producing ragebait, 2am? It's even
| worse.
|
| Looking at it on my phone, if I can see three entries and 2 are
| anxiety inducing, I close the app. (I'm 99% certain they get
| that telemetry too)
|
| That said, I also had days where I doomscrolled instagram and
| thought 'it's been 20 minutes and I haven't seen anything
| entertaining yet.' And that's when I decided to drop it. (It
| was the only app I could chat with my kids with...we've since
| moved to other methods)
|
| I haven't cut it out completely, but I'm not hyper aware of how
| I'm consuming it.
| nineplay wrote:
| Alternatively carefully curate your social media accounts. My
| reddit home page is all books and formula 1. I'm quick to hit
| 'show me less like this' when anything drifts in from the front
| page.
|
| My Facebook feed is all friends and family who don't discuss
| politics and ads for nerd shirts. I've purchased a few. It is
| also easy and effective to hit show me less of this.
|
| I agree about LinkedIn and don't go there unless I'm actively
| job hunting, something I hope never to do again. I don't feel
| any bitterness when I see friends and family on FB go on
| expensive vacations, but I do feel an unhealthy and
| indefensible jealousy sometimes when I see former coworkers
| getting new jobs or promotions.
| gleenn wrote:
| I totally understand the desire to avoid politics on all
| these platforms but in some way I always expect the greater
| powers want to destroy these platforms and make us even more
| hopeless.
| nineplay wrote:
| The greater powers control these platforms and want to keep
| us engaged so we believe what they want us to believe.
| teuobk wrote:
| Indeed. I've unsubscribed from all subreddits that have
| become infested with political content, and I've "unfollowed"
| all of my acquaintances on Facebook and LinkedIn who post
| anything political. So much more enjoyable.
| lbarron6868 wrote:
| This is how I've dealt with Instagram. My IG account is
| literally nothing but cats. it's actually very refreshing to
| look at for five or ten minutes. But it takes work. IG wants
| to keep feeding me their BS reels. Sometimes I don't think
| it's worth it, they really make you put up a fight.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I reduced my news intake to a daily email from reuters + HN.
| Special thanks go to AI, as reddit and others no longer allow
| reading content without login.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| Interesting. What's your setup ?
| ge96 wrote:
| I quit reddit too recently, I still look at it for info but I'm
| not logged in/scrolling through it
|
| I find myself reaching for something when I have
| YouTube/chilling at my desk at the end of the day, can't code
| anymore/make something just on till I sleep. Sometimes have the
| desire to play a video game (I have a gaming rig too funny how
| that works)
|
| I've been trying to read HN or IEEE, TechCrunch stuff like that
| as my "lazy fun"
|
| I will miss posting stuff like "what is this car" or being part
| of the car talk for a sporty car I drive but idk kind of want
| to just live too
|
| It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a
| girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one,
| I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried
| using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something
|
| Anyway my main goal in life right now is getting out of
| debt/staying fit and work on projects
| jmyeet wrote:
| The Instagram dating thing is because, in the heteronormative
| sense, a guy without one odd WAY more likely to be cheating.
| If you're in a relationship, even if you don't post, your
| significant other will likely tag you in their posts.
|
| I've never really understood doomscrolling on Twitter or
| Reddit. The only social media I find remotely useful out
| entertaining is actually TikTok. The comments are IME the
| least toxic and most entertaining. And I've gone down
| fascinating rabbit holes of things that have absolutely no
| relevance to my life like medical residency TikTok.
| ge96 wrote:
| My reddit scrolling wasn't doom for my case. I was either
| personal topics I liked (cars, computing, software,
| photography, etc...) or brain rot/stupid shi that's the
| main reason I've left because I could be more productive
| than looking at an endless supply of that stuff
|
| You can mute subreddits and not see them anymore
|
| Funny you have to purge the algo on things like YouTube if
| you click on a thubmnail with some hot chick, boom your
| feed is nothing but click bait of hot women
| jordanpg wrote:
| One healthy way to consume Reddit that I recently learned
| about is creating a "custom feed" (see left margin of new
| UI).
|
| You can just add subs that are of interest that lack the
| torrent of bad news and only ever visit that custom feed. It
| doesn't ever algorithmically add posts from subs you don't
| manually include, as far as I've seen.
| boringg wrote:
| User groups you would be interested in get hijacked by
| whatever the overall sentiment of Reddit is. Threads that
| aren't political suddenly get political for no reason. It's
| completely dead in there - content quality is brutally low.
| awfulneutral wrote:
| I just bookmark subreddits for things I'm interested in,
| and visit them individually. I hardly ever see any
| political content doing that.
| bombcar wrote:
| The key is to stay in smaller, dedicated subreddits and
| avoid _anything_ remotely popular or generic.
| matwood wrote:
| > You can just add subs that are of interest that lack the
| torrent of bad news and only ever visit that custom feed.
|
| I still use old.reddit and this is the only way I've ever
| used Reddit. My homepage only shows me posts from Reddits I
| follow and nothing else. I don't see all the craziness
| people here are talking about.
| stevage wrote:
| Yeah I just use old Reddit, which still works like that.
|
| Cannot stand unsolicited content.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _It 's unfortunate people expect you to have social media
| like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not
| have one_
|
| Outside of reddit/discord/hn, I haven't had any social media
| since roughly 2010, and I don't use reddit or discord for
| anything remotely "social media"-ish.
|
| While I still get the occasional look as if I'm wearing a
| tinfoil hat when I say _" I don't have FB. No, no insta
| either. No... not snapchat either"_, I find it's a lot less
| common now, thankfully. When I first left social media in
| ~2010, it was rough. Not only dating scene wise, but I lost
| out on a few job opportunities (at _least_ a few, probably
| more than I know) as well.
|
| Now you're just considered kind of weird/fringe, instead of
| being borderline insane. Moving (slowly) in the right
| direction, I think.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Maybe you're just iteratively refining your friend group.
| throwaway4220 wrote:
| I agree. In my 40s and at work most people my age do have
| fb instagram and TikTok but everyone's super understanding
| when I say I like my privacy
| AznHisoka wrote:
| I wouldn't care a whole lot if someone told me they weren't
| in IG, FB, Snap, Twitter, etc. However, if someone told me
| they never bothered with Linkedin, it would be hard for me
| to resist bowing at their feet.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Out of all the social media I don't have, that's the one
| that has lost me the most job opportunities for sure. I
| probably would have caved and signed up if I didn't end
| up getting a job through some old-fashioned (face-to-
| face) networking.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| We were required to make linkedin profiles as part of the
| computer science career preparedness class. I got an
| internship out of that career day though so it was a win
| for me
| stevage wrote:
| Wait, really? I must be old. I technically have a
| LinkedIn but haven't really been on the site since the
| last time I was in the job market 8 yeras ago.
|
| Very occasionally a potential client messages me through
| it but they are almost very low quality contacts.
| XorNot wrote:
| I mean that's the correct way to use LinkedIn: it's a job
| board.
| svnt wrote:
| I deleted my LinkedIn several years ago.
|
| I can only recommend it if you are independently wealthy,
| want to become an ascetic, or more broadly, your goal is
| to never be hired or really even evaluated for much in
| the business world again.
|
| None of the rest of the social networks serve as a sanity
| check on your resume/application/meeting.
| switchbak wrote:
| How did you miss out on job opportunities by not being on
| social media?
| ziddoap wrote:
| The first step in the resume vetting process was looking
| the applicant up on LinkedIn. If they didn't exist, the
| resume goes in the bin. I doubt it's that severe still as
| more and more people move away from having social media
| (it's been awhile since I've been on either side of job
| hunt/hiring).
|
| On more than one occasion the direct feedback of why I
| didn't move further in the hiring process was a lack of
| internet presence.
|
| But, again, keep in mind this was early 2010s. Social
| media hadn't had as much time to show the world how
| poisonous it is.
| switchbak wrote:
| Oh I see. I've never found LinkedIn useful, but I still
| have a profile for some reason. I suppose I've never
| fallen into that particular trap.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > I will miss posting stuff like "what is this car" or being
| part of the car talk for a sporty car I drive but idk kind of
| want to just live too
|
| I used to waste so much time posting about cars on Reddit.
| I'd open my computer at 11pm, reply a few times to a single
| post on Reddit, and before long, I'd see 1:45am on the clock.
|
| Not posting anything has been a massive time saver.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Same, except i reply on the drugs and harm reduction
| subreddit trying to help kids make decisions that dont
| destroy their lives. It's really difficult to leave because
| i remember when i needed those people and sometimes it
| feels like all the adults left the room and I'm the only
| one left. Who's gonna help these kids? Seems futile to
| attempt to stem the tide of gen alpha tiktok brainrot
| idiocy but sometimes people actually listen to me and their
| life improves. I've given myself a time that I'll work down
| to 15 minutes a day to try to consolidate that extra time.
| Recently I've been using some of my addiction advice on
| myself to quit reddit
| niceice wrote:
| I checked reddit recently for the first time in a while, and
| I was shocked by how radicalized its become. An echo chamber
| of hateful people and perhaps GPTs that are agitating the big
| subreddits. The contrast is stark with all the "no place for
| hate" in the rules and endless banning of microaggressions.
|
| I saw dozens of death threats. Even an explicit death threat
| thread with over 40,000 upvotes before reddit stepped in and
| shut the whole subreddit down.
|
| It reminded me of Ghostbusters 2 with all the aggressively
| angry people and the ooze pouring out of the sewers, all
| building upon itself.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Agreed. There is exactly one way to think and believe on
| Reddit. The "outrage" might be tolerable or even
| informative in some cases if it was equally distributed.
|
| It's disheartening when the one-track politics infects
| every square inch. It's a good point about bots because 1)
| they can be sold or rented to advertisers, 2) they are more
| valuable with higher karma, and 3) the easiest way to get a
| bot to harvest karma is by agreeing with the hive. So
| they're amplifying "the message" without even intending to.
| input_sh wrote:
| That particular subreddit isn't shut down, it was
| temporarily suspended as the moderators simply got
| overwhelmed. There's no indication of bad faith from either
| the mod team nor the reddit admins, the floodgate was just
| too much for them to handle. It pretty much says so in the
| ban message, admins are gonna help them take back control
| and it will be up within a couple of days.
| nonchalantsui wrote:
| This is just the consequence of the API protests. Despite
| people claiming it had no lasting impact, admins coming in
| and making sweeping changes to mod teams replacing them
| with loyalists, alongside ramping up centralized feeds to
| serve more ads onto meant content quality took a nosedive.
| This is obvious in most subs if you actually look at who is
| submitting the threads (something the app and All/Popular
| pages hides in several views), most of these subs are
| dominated by a handful of accounts. It's a cycle too,
| because often they'll continue spamming subs in order to
| get on All/Popular, or make up weird stories to do so,
| effectively karma farming taken very seriously, with mods
| encouraging it because of the aforementioned loyalists.
|
| It's all just driveby anger and reposts. Maybe some smaller
| subs with good communities here and there, but that often
| requires a mod team putting in substantial hours and
| remaining under the radar from All/Popular in any shape.
|
| Forgot to mention, Reddit also started paying these
| accounts for posting. So a literal financial incentive to
| ragebait. It' called the "Contributor Program".
| godshatter wrote:
| I just stick to the niche subreddits (games, interests,
| whatever). The main subreddits have been especially
| aggressive echo chambers for a long time now.
| taurknaut wrote:
| /r/worldnews is one of the most astroturfed places on the
| internet. Some of those commenters are so nationalist and
| bloodthirsty they unnerve me. The ban hammer is extremely
| active on this sub, and for saying completely innocuous
| political statements about personal preference. I'm
| absolutely sure this is broader than just that sub but I've
| probably heard this specific complaint from probably a
| dozen other people too.
|
| I will say, the subreddit system does a decent job of
| quarantining the dysfunction to that sub. The mod quality
| is everything and the mod drama is an absolute dumpster
| fire. (Extremely curiously, Ghislaine Maxwell seems to have
| been one of the most prolific of the mods, and one of her
| suspected accounts may be one of the most successful
| (karma-wise) posters of all reddit.) But on the flipside,
| /r/askhistorians is still one of the best resources on the
| internet. Many of the specialty subreddits I frequent
| (Aviation, UkraineRussiaReport, video game subs, several
| miscellaneous african subs) are still functioning fine.
| urda wrote:
| Reddit, by far, is one of the worst echo chambers on the
| internet. I've seen hundreds of death threats at one
| political group on there, but if any veiled threat is made
| against the "reddit approved party" it is instantly removed
| or accounts suspended. This really peaked during 2020, when
| open calls for violence stayed up, some with reddit admin
| approvals.
|
| It used to be a good site, but that was many years ago.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I checked reddit recently for the first time in a while,
| and I was shocked by how radicalized its become.
|
| Reddit has always had these elements, but they were
| previously isolated to certain subreddits.
|
| I noticed the biggest change when the app and website
| became aggressive about getting people to join other
| subreddits and inserting posts from other subreddits into
| people's feeds. Suddenly the isolated subreddits I followed
| were full of low effort content and angry comments.
|
| Reddit's front page is shockingly bad. The amount of
| misinformation and ragebait that gets upvoted to the front
| page is almost hard to believe.
|
| It's also interesting that many subreddits have embraced
| the ragebait. Subreddits like /r/AITA have been clear about
| how they don't care if stories are real or not, but legions
| of Redditors engage with obvious ChatGPT spam as if it was
| a real situation they need to weigh in on.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Reddit is the worst. It has devolved into a massive echo
| chamber that only welcomes one side of politics. The
| aggression of mods and how they run their fiefdoms is a turn
| off even for those who share in those politics.
| tejohnso wrote:
| I discovered the same recently and have abandoned it. It's
| unfortunate because the potential is there for a real city
| wide or nation wide group discussion platform. But who
| moderates the moderators?
| Klonoar wrote:
| I don't have too much issue with Reddits politics at the
| moment, but I do think it's odd that such a powerful
| platform in society is managed by volunteer (mostly)
| anonymous moderators.
|
| I will be explicit in that I am not condoning doxxing
| Reddit mods. I just don't think we'd be fine with this in
| normal day to day life.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Do you know the editors at your local TV stations? The
| local radio stations? The people who curate the datasets
| that train the YouTube recommendation model?
| wholinator2 wrote:
| > who moderates the moderators?
|
| Advertisers currently
| tapoxi wrote:
| Users moderate the moderators, if they don't like the
| tone of a subreddit they split off into another
| subreddit.
| dbtc wrote:
| My suggestion: music! Give the eyes a break.
| ge96 wrote:
| I have music/noise on all the time, rarely in silence. I
| play the same playlist/song over and over when focusing.
| Unfortunately working in an open office it sucks people
| having conversions (to each other or to computer)
| concordDance wrote:
| One unfortunate aspect of this phenomena is that as reddit
| "evaporatively cools" (ala https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQ
| G9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ... ) as the more level headed
| people leave reddit gets even more radical.
|
| It's even possible the places that people then move to (such
| as HN) also get more radical if the leavers have higher
| levels of radicalism than the place they join.
| natnat wrote:
| > It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media
| like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not
| have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but
| when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post
| about something
|
| Probably worth Googling something like [men who don't have
| social media] to think what women think about this, it's more
| positive than you might think :)
| su8898 wrote:
| Not sure if you've intentionally omitted it but I would also
| include YouTube in this list. YouTube can be very addictive
| with all the clickbait thumbnails etc.
| ge96 wrote:
| haha yeah that's where you inject custom CSS on the page to
| hide thumbnails, come to YouTube to see something? no
| thumbnails to distract your original intent
| analog31 wrote:
| I thank myself for having avoided social media so far. I've
| also developed a keen eye for headlines that lead to "outrage
| articles" which I avoid.
| ysavir wrote:
| > I've also developed a keen eye for headlines that lead to
| "outrage articles" which I avoid.
|
| That's critical. My YouTube rule these days is to block any
| channel with a video name or thumbnail that says something
| like "This is why you fail at XYZ" or other statements
| designed to evoke an emotional response from me. And on top
| of that, I try to only click on videos where the
| title/thumbnail is properly informative, exposing the content
| rather than trying to hide it behind a vague hook. Hooks like
| "You won't believe this one trick!" and fluff like that,
| titles/thumbnails that should introduce the trick, not just
| allude to it.
| analog31 wrote:
| Another dead giveaway is "X is outraged by Y."
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| << One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive
| to online outrage is to just quit social media all together.
|
| Yes. I still have to be at least aware of what is happening for
| work reasons, but removing social media was one of the better
| decisions for my sanity ( I stil comment on HN, but the quality
| of conversations was degrading as well, which in itself is a
| concern suggesting further digital landscape deterioration ).
|
| I considered some more obvious solutions ( from buying
| subscription to WSJ/FT to personal news aggregator -- and
| objective/neutral observer rewrite using LLM and they all are
| not exactly ideal ).
|
| Here is the good news. All this chaos is an opportunity to
| stand something useful up. And I mean something useful that
| cannot be so easily dismantled by powers that be ( and there
| are already heavy indications they are aware people may try
| going outside the defined paths ).
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Same, I participate is very curated, self-selected communities
| online and that's it. I don't know how others who don't can do
| it.
|
| Good luck out there.
| sporkydistance wrote:
| Why do you exclude HN from your list? It is literally social
| media, but with the dial turned down a little. Yet, you don't
| have to dig to deeply to see flamewars, outrage, and trolling.
| I mean, look at many of the garbage comments in this very
| thread that are on par with /.,xchan.
| xorvoid wrote:
| Yes, but it's the old skool version of social media and the
| conversations here are generally higher quality and more
| genuine. I strongly disagree that it's "on par with /.,xchan"
|
| HN also doesn't seem to be as susceptible to rage-baiting /
| outrage-attention-seeking behavior. Not sure exactly what by
| this is the case but I'd venture a guess it has a lot to do
| with (1) "dang"s moderation, and (2) not having a
| personalized algorithm feed.
|
| I'm increasingly of the view that personalized algorithm
| feeds generated to select the maximum attention grabbing
| content for each person is a truly dangerous idea.
|
| Frankly, HN is not that engaging (by modern standards). In
| fact, probably 60-70% of the articles on the front page are
| boring to me on any given day. I view this as a feature and
| not a bug. Why should I expect that everything I look at must
| be maximally engaging?
|
| I wish more sites were old skool like HN.
| jbombadil wrote:
| Not GP, but feel similarly. I'll offer my 2 cents:
|
| > but with the dial turned down a little.
|
| Exactly for this reason. Yes, HN is a social network. And if
| it follows the same enshittification path as the others, I
| will be gone from here too. But until then, to me (YMMV) it
| still provides a bit of entertainment and news without
| rotting my brain.
|
| Even the analogy works. Fast food is not that bad... in
| moderate quantities (/"with the dial turned down a little")
| seattle_spring wrote:
| HN remains distinct from Reddit almost entirely due to
| dang's hard work moderating the site. Spend a few minutes
| with showdead turned on and you'll see real quick what that
| site might turn into without effective moderation. The site
| would be _full_ of politics and flamewars.
|
| I believe a good portion of Reddit could have had been the
| same. However, the way moderators are chosen-- in other
| words, whoever creates the sub first gets to rule the
| roost-- has left that site with almost universally
| unqualified moderation.
| vaylian wrote:
| If HN is social media, then old online forums from the time
| before "social media" are also social media.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Well, yes.
|
| That's not really a gotcha statement.
| vaylian wrote:
| But that makes the term "social media" a very broad
| category that doesn't tell you much.
| switchbak wrote:
| Sure, but it's also not a useful distinction.
|
| There's a clear difference of kind between modern social
| media and the forums/usenet of old.
| sporkydistance wrote:
| I really would like to know what exactly you consider a
| "clear difference" between how Usenet and differ
| conceptually (e.g., ignoring the GUI, the # of users, and
| mechanics, [e.g., usenet updates diffused around the
| globe because we didn't have cloud servers]).
|
| Please back that statement up with some facts.
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| I'm here to talk about technology and it's usage. I'm not
| here to socialize, I don't know your name, don't care, and
| haven't even looked at your username. You're just a sentence
| to me. It's more impersonal than the old newsgroups. How is
| it social?
| sporkydistance wrote:
| We're literally socializing right now. We're a special
| interest group meeting to communicate about special
| interests. The opposite of socialization is isolation. If
| you hadn't posted, you wouldn't be socializing, but here we
| are, socializing.
| dudu24 wrote:
| For better or worse, news flows through social media, so this
| approach basically amounts to ignoring all the bad stuff going
| on. If you read HN, chances are you can probably safely get
| through the next four years doing this. But as the saying goes,
| "first they came for the communists..."
| daft_pink wrote:
| I find that just muting anyone who has anything to do with
| politics on facebook works well for me. I go on facebook to see
| your cutesy images and how your life is going not for long
| political diatribes.
| myth2018 wrote:
| For some short time, that worked for me, until facebook
| noticed that I was spending less time on it. Then, they
| started to push posts from other politics-related accounts
| (especially from ones at the side of the spectrum I used to
| antagonize most with). That was 4 years ago. I left that crap
| and didn't look back.
| samspot wrote:
| If you decide not to totally quit a network, do what I do:
|
| 1. Turn off all notifications, especially for replies, likes,
| and content suggestions.
|
| 2. Train yourself not to look for feedback on the things you do
| post as a matter of habit. Intentionally check on the important
| discussions IFF you _remember_ to do so.
|
| 3. If possible, hide or remove any karma-like indications. Your
| life is better if the internet points aren't visible.
| prpl wrote:
| Just use the webapp too, when possible. Remove all native
| apps on your phones. Don't read emails.
| amelius wrote:
| 4. If you do scroll social media and you see a bad post then
| "punish" the platform by leaving.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| I did the same. I have some exceptions for technical topics on
| Reddit. I also still use Facebook in a very drilled down state
| (looking into it every 3-5 months and checking in with some
| remote friends). I have also set up my own Mastodon server,
| which is fine for niche topics and I can reach out to
| interesting people directly, where other channels fail (email).
| I heavily rely on RSS, particularly from people that I trust or
| who gained my trust over longer periods.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Is WhatsApp really considered social media? I mainly use it as
| my sms alternative.
| lukan wrote:
| Depends how you use it. Once there were groups, it became
| quite similar - but since Telegram became so much better at
| it and I used it for some special groups and contacts - I now
| suddenly had lots of groups with subgroups and notifications
| for people liking my posts or replying to it - that suddenly
| I had social media again. What works for me is uninstalling
| it once in a while and only come back if I feel a specific
| need.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I basically agree, which is why it's kind of funny to see all
| the discussion in other threads here with people arguing about
| why can't ban AI or how Facebook was good because it created
| market value or whatever. Most of those platforms would be
| better off just outright banned.
|
| I do think, though, that for at least some platforms it's
| possible to use them in a limited way where you confine
| yourself to relatively small communities that are focused on
| some common interest that genuinely brings together people who
| enjoy sharing it. You mentioned Discord for instance and that's
| one, if you can find the right servers. I think it's possible
| to do that on Reddit too. You just have to never visit the
| "front page" and stick only to subreddits that you actually get
| value out of. It's harder approaching impossible with ones like
| Facebook that are more doggedly algorithm-driven and don't put
| moderation in the control of users in the same way.
|
| Of course, the lurking issue is that putting moderation in the
| control of users is building the platform on free labor and
| those good subcommunities are at risk of imploding when cracks
| emerge in the dike separating them from the wider platform
| userbase. And that's likely to happen because even those
| "safely usable" platforms are ultimately beholden to VC money
| that's going to demand enshittification eventually.
|
| Cohost was by far the best attempt I've seen for many years,
| but sadly couldn't make a go of it in the toxic ecosystem we've
| got.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| > Most of those platforms would be better off just outright
| banned.
|
| In general, the goal should be improvement of humans, not
| avoidance of negative stimuli. Something has to exist where
| humans are rewarded for aligning to truth and reality, rather
| than emotion.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > Something has to exist where humans are rewarded for
| aligning to truth and reality, rather than emotion.
|
| I more or less agree. Thus the humans who created and
| enshittified such platforms should be correspondingly
| punished for their disalignment to truth and reality. It's
| not just about rewarding "consumers" of stimuli; the
| creators and promulgators of stumili also need to be
| incentivized (and disincentivized) in just the manner you
| mention.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My take is almost the opposite, that it's important to develop
| healthy social networking insofar as there is some alternative
| to the outrage. It takes effort though.
|
| I'm going to offer my two accounts as examples
|
| https://mastodon.social/@UP8
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social
|
| both of these are 'cyborg' accounts in that I have my RSS
| reader, classifier and autoposter. I am looking to build a lot
| more automation.
|
| My Mastodon feed took a large set of rules to block out #uspol
| and certain communities of miserable people. My feed has stayed
| outrage-free since last month.
|
| My measurements showed that Bluesky's 'Discover' feed blocked
| about 75% of emotionally negative material before Jan 20, since
| then people are inflamed but looking closely at my feed it
| seems they are deliberately trying to help certain people who
| felt stuck on X to migrate, that is, giving huge amounts of
| visibility to journalists, journalism professors, activists,
| and such so that they can run up 200k+ follower counts.
|
| I understand. (I've been brainstorming ideas about "how to get
| people off X" with a friend and tonight I'm going to tell him
| that Bluesky has it) I've used "less like this", "unfollow"
| [1], "mute", "block" and such and my discover feed is getting
| good again.
|
| I have two classifiers in the development pipeline, one to
| detect "screenshots of text" and "image memes", also a text
| classifier that is better at sentiment than my current one (I
| think ModernBERT + LSTM should be possible to train reliably,
| unlike fine-tuned BERTs.) I'm not so much interested in
| classifying posts as I am in classifying people; some of them
| are easy, there are 40,000 people who have a certain image meme
| pinned that I know I never want to follow. Just recently I
| figured out how to make training sets for these things without
| having to look too closely at a lot of toxic content.
|
| I'm also eliminating the dependencies that are keeping this
| from being open sourced or commercialized so I may I have
| something to share this summer.
|
| [1] one strike for an outrage post
| sneak wrote:
| Discord suffers from the same problems; censorship platforms in
| general have the same cancer everywhere.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Have more self respect and consume a better information diet of
| printed media.
| nicbou wrote:
| I need social media for work.
|
| What I did was unfollow everyone and everything, and block all
| suggested content. The front page is literally empty. Nothing
| on those websites captures my attention unless I specifically
| look for it.
|
| This was very effective. These websites have effectively become
| write-only media for me. They're still here if I need them, but
| I end up browsing just one page of /r/curatedtumblr and then
| doing something else.
| huijzer wrote:
| I'm still on social media (HN, YouTube and Reddit), but blocked
| all other news sites. They're mostly about outrage too.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| Yeah it sure is nice this way isn't it! It's pretty boring, but
| you get to form your own opinions about things, and aren't
| constantly mad about things that don't affect you. I'll admit
| to scrolling HN a lot, but I at least get a lot of very useful
| info out of it, it has leveled me up in unexpected ways over
| the years.
| IBCNU wrote:
| Thanks for your comment. Same here, Gen X. Off social media
| since pandemic. As Nassim Taleb says if it's really important
| someone will tell you. I feel like I'm on an island. I'm never
| outraged at all. Of course I hope there's more justice and
| equity in the world, but I am at peace with things and have no
| hatred or rage compared to when I was glued to social media.
| jjice wrote:
| Completely agree. Sounds like we're similarly on the older end
| of Gen Z, and getting off social media in my first year of
| college was excellent. I get messages in my group chats from
| friends being pissed off (often rightfully) by things that our
| out of their control, but they're force-fed it on social media.
|
| It doesn't help to stare at rage/anxiety inducing things - it
| doesn't mean you're actually informed all the time.
|
| Plus I'd argue that most things you'll see end up being hogwash
| and the important stuff will rise to the top and you're
| generally hear about it anyway.
| stevage wrote:
| The challenge for me is that there is useful stuff in there
| that I want to access.
|
| There are neighbourhood groups and other really useful forums
| on Facebook. There are tech discussions on BlueSky.
|
| But it's annoyingly hard to run the gauntlet of politics and
| outrage bait to get to the stuff I actually want.
| lykahb wrote:
| I think that the social media is okay as long as no algorithmic
| feed gets involved. Visiting a few select tech subreddits
| doesn't affect me negatively. On other platforms the feed can't
| be avoided as easily.
| djh85 wrote:
| True. Curate who you follow carefully, and stay away from
| that "for you" tab
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| digital junk food. I haven't stumbled across this term and I
| gotta say as someone whose right on the edge between millenial
| and genz this term summarizes what most "public" social media
| is. I'm old enough to have grown up mostly with TV, with
| Internet being my escape hatch and
| twitter/facebook/tiktok/insta feel waaaay closer to old schoold
| programming TV than Internet. Anyway I'm an Internet person,
| not a TV person, so I've quit using all of them (I do have some
| "just in case" unused in years accounts everywhere because I
| suffer from a bad case of FOMO...)
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Isn't this how they win? I mean the people in Germany in 1930
| just said , this is crazy , it doesn't feel right, but hey I
| have outrage fatigue so the concentration camps are just fine
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Much of the German population in the 1930s and 1940s was not
| aware of concentration camps, and learned of them once the
| Allies arrived.
| mckirk wrote:
| I can recommend https://newsasfacts.com for at least having a
| news source that, thanks to its matter-of-fact tone and lack of
| imagery, is useful for staying informed without getting
| overwhelmed so easily.
|
| It also puts things into a bit of a global perspective, when you
| realize how much stuff is going on around the world all the time.
| Though this of course also means you'll learn things that are on
| the news everywhere in your country only after they've become
| relevant enough to register on a global level.
| RIMR wrote:
| A little weird to see the Bitcoin price listed top-and-center,
| when it is a hype-driven security. Watching the market,
| especially crypto markets in real-time is also quite stressful.
| I don't see the point of having it listed first, before the
| news...
| tofof wrote:
| At least the toggles even for free users let you immediately
| disable market stuff, right alongside changing theme.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| Nice but I find the summary too short without any expansion if
| you want to learn more
| tofof wrote:
| I assume you have a subscription? Does that let you turn on or
| off different topics? I am not interested in the large amount
| of space devoted to armed conflicts globally, for example.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Propagandists are now going to tell you to ignore what you're
| hearing and seeing. Just put the news away and relax! The same
| people spent the last four years telling you to be outraged about
| things that never happened. A man won the women's boxing at the
| olympics! Outrage!
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I don't think it's true that Scientific American spent the last
| four years telling you to be outraged about things that never
| happened.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I was referring to a noticeable subgroup of HN commenters.
| gsaines wrote:
| TLDR Summary: limit your intake of social media and news.
| nomilk wrote:
| Optimism might be bland but I can't help it!
|
| Prior to social media, we all had incredibly conflicting views,
| just wasn't in our faces all the time to get outraged about! So
| the trick is to remember, by having these
| discussions/disagreements, we're actually making progress. We
| hear the loudest voices, but there's always smart and sincere
| people quietly reading and learning, which is a brilliant
| outcome!
|
| If you find yourself getting outraged, be disciplined and switch
| activities (exercise, go for a walk, or turn off the source).
|
| I definitely wouldn't leave social media though! Instead, harness
| them! Train those algos to give you science, book clubs,
| fascinating music niches, travel, culture - go deep, explore, and
| 'follow' liberally - you can very easily remove yourself from a
| group/page. I've found _insanely_ interesting chemistry and
| physics pages, not to mention domains I never even knew existed,
| like color theory and a handful of others. Once you start
| clicking on politics, you 'll only get more of it. Click on the
| good stuff!
| barbazoo wrote:
| > I definitely wouldn't leave social media though! Instead,
| harness them! Train those algos to give you science, book
| clubs, fascinating music niches, travel, culture - go deep,
| explore, and 'follow' liberally - you can very easily remove
| yourself from a group/page. I've found insanely interesting
| chemistry and physics pages, not to mention domains I never
| even knew existed, like color theory and a handful of others.
| Once you start clicking on politics, you'll only get more of
| it. Click on the good stuff!
|
| Sorry, but that last paragraph sounds like AI generated Meta
| PR.
| nomilk wrote:
| Ha, fair! 'Sounding like an LLM' might be the ~2025
| equivalent of being called an NPC. But it could also imply
| good grammar.
|
| To put it another way, ditching a medium entirely is the
| incorrect strategy; akin to refusing to read books just
| because there's many bad ones - obviously, instead, we select
| the good ones and read those. Same goes for social media
| pages/groups/profiles
| yergi wrote:
| Would love to post an honest comment on this topic, but this
| place has gone reddit-tier woke, and I can't.
|
| Unfortunate, but true. "The bubble of opinion" in is a real
| thing.
| localghost3000 wrote:
| After November I totally stopped looking at any and all news and
| social media with the exception of HN. My reasoning being that
| you are not actually getting informed by any of those sources.
| They are geared towards engagement which makes them
| entertainment. Also, I have absolutely no power to change
| anything happening right now so knowing about it is just going to
| make me upset. It's a lose lose IMO. A lot of folks have gotten
| upset with me about this which I find a bit baffling. Like, what
| does knowing every minute detail do for me?
|
| The net effect of my news/social media fast has been fairly
| dramatic. I suddenly have an attention span again. When a persons
| opinion differs from mine, I generally don't immediately assume
| they are part of the third reich (although if they keep talking a
| while I might get there lol).
|
| To be clear I absolutely despise whats happening in the US right
| now. Enough information makes it to me through friends and family
| (and HN) that I feel a deep sense of despair. I am just not sure
| what minute by minute updates on the fuckery happening right now
| gets me.
| ourmandave wrote:
| This exactly, even before November.
|
| I finally saw the futility when there were 10,000 articles
| about Trump tweeting "covfefe".
| xorvoid wrote:
| I think I did something similar. I decided to severely control
| my information diet after November and switch to only RSS feeds
| that I have selected manually and HN. It's gone better than I
| expected and I feel very little urge to go back.
|
| At the same time, I'm definitely less informed. Though I'm
| quite surprised how much still permeates despite me not "going
| looking".
|
| Generally, I think it's more healthy to focus on what you can
| control and what you have agency over. You can choose what to
| be outraged over national/global events (and do nothing) or you
| can instead focus that energy on Doing Something closer to home
| that's important to you. Which is the better trade?
|
| I'm somewhat conflicted on being less informed esp with big
| changes happening. And even more conflicted about what kind of
| world we'd have if everyone chose this strategy. But, it's not
| unprincipled. The principle is Focus on What You Can Control/Do
| and put all your energy into that.
| throw7 wrote:
| While limiting your exposure to "outrage" isn't bad advice, it's
| just more of the ignoring of the issues that she herself calls
| out in the beginning of the article.
|
| She mentions that people are using "outrage" issues (abortion,
| gay rights, critical race theory) "as kind of wedge issues to
| convince people to vote in ways that might be against their own
| self-interest"...
|
| GREAT! We need more tips on how to train yourself to recognize
| when that's happening and not get outraged. It boils down to
| emotional control. If politicians can't use outrage as a tool of
| control then they'll have to move on (to something better
| hopefully, but probably not ;).
|
| Here's one tip. If Trump enrages you every time you see him,
| watch him in a way that allows you to appreciate something about
| him! He is a cool cucumber. He sheds attacks like water off an
| umbrella. (whatever, you come up something)... Remember, the goal
| here is to not let him control your emotions. This isn't about
| the facts or morality or how he "lies".
| morpheos137 wrote:
| If you're outraged by anything that does not directly impact your
| life you're doing life wrong. We all have limited time and
| energy. I have never been able to understand people who get
| emotional over things they read online that have no impact on
| their day to day life.
| easymodex wrote:
| I know, but what do I do about global warming and
| microplastics? Our leaders don't seem to care.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| Assuming this is not a joke, do whatever makes you feel best
| knowing that you as an individual have negligible impact on
| the outcome. Personally I don't worry one bit about these two
| issues because (1) they do not seem to effect my daily life
| except when I need to drink through a crappy cardboard straw
| (2) I do not expect them to impact my daily life in the
| foreseeable future (3) most important I as an individual can
| not change the way things are and I find I am happiest when I
| don't worry about things I can't control so I choose not to
| worry and some how despite my indolent individual choice the
| world goes on and the sky doesn't fall. (4) I personally
| believe the harms of these two things have been greatly
| exaggerated by people with an interest in doing so. (5) my
| time on earth is limited why waste it being manipulated by
| words and pictures I see on a screen to be pointlessly
| anxious or outraged for someone else's benefit at the cost of
| my own happiness?
| DFHippie wrote:
| > If you're outraged by anything that does not directly impact
| your life you're doing life wrong.
|
| This is a pointless truism. Everything relies on "does not
| directly impact your life", and there's no useful guidance on
| that point.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| It's not pointless at all- it's the core idea behind Stoic
| philosophy aka "the dichotomy of control," and has proven
| very effective at improving people's mental health through
| modern therapy methods like CBT and ACT.
|
| One can still do everything in their power to prepare for,
| and mitigate things outside their control, while still
| keeping in mind what is in your control and isn't so you
| don't become emotionally dependent on outcomes outside your
| control, which is ruinous for mental health.
|
| Having empathy, and caring about doing the right thing
| actually work better when you stop obsessing over and wasting
| all of your energy on things you cannot control.
| kccoder wrote:
| > I have never been able to understand people who get emotional
| over things they read online that have no impact on their day
| to day life.
|
| Maybe they have more empathy for the plight of others?
|
| Also, it is often the case that the events of today which don't
| directly affect you, if not stopped, will affect you before you
| know it, at which point it is too late to do anything about.
| marban wrote:
| It will not lessen your outrage, but I recently built a news
| search engine that pulls from 200 selected sources for a more
| limited, spam-free experience. https://mozberg.com
| 65 wrote:
| Saying "just quit social media" or something doesn't work. You
| have to have the mindset that you cannot control what happens in
| the vast majority of news stories. If the federal government does
| something I don't like, it's not worth my time to be angry and
| let it linger in my head for the day, which only hurts me.
| Outrage seems to come from a lack of control over a situation.
|
| Shift your focus to things you can possibly control, e.g. the
| news that's happening in your local community where you have a
| say in how things are done.
| nineplay wrote:
| Been there, done that. I've tried to stay informed but not
| outraged for the last 8 years and it didn't make a damn bit of
| difference. I got involved in local issues, I phone banked, I
| tried to put my money where it would do the most good.
|
| I'm out. I'm hiding away and hoping nothing affects me
| personally, and if it does I'm not going to think there's
| anything I could have done about it.
|
| We're not in control anymore. Not unless there are any tech
| billionaires lurking on HN, and they don't give a shit about us.
| fransje26 wrote:
| > Not unless there are any tech billionaires lurking on HN, and
| they don't give a shit about us.
|
| If I understand correctly, they are mostly busy taking over the
| country at the moment. No time for HN..
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| > And this just really has been accelerating, I guess, in the
| last few years because of our political polarization and other
| world events.
|
| Feels like the causality might be the other way around.
| yakhinvadim wrote:
| I tried to solve this problem by making AI rank the stories by
| significance and rewriting the news titles in a boring, factual
| style.
|
| I think it worked quite well, there's only about 10 headlines a
| day (out of 15k+) that get a significance rating higher than of
| 5.5 out of 10.
|
| It also helps avoiding the overfocus on western issues and
| actually learn what's happening around the world.
|
| https://www.newsminimalist.com/
| j_bum wrote:
| I love the idea of this tool, but there are serious issues with
| using LLMs to summarize articles and text. Re: Apple's
| Notification Summary Debacle
|
| For example, this headline with a score > 5 is flatly
| incorrect.
|
| "China launches innovative flying robot to explore Moon's south
| pole for water resources"
|
| Every article listed in the summary says the launch is planned
| for 2026.
| yakhinvadim wrote:
| Thanks! Good point.
|
| I think there will always be some hallucinations until
| they're solved on a model level, but I'll also try to nudge
| AI now to be more precise with the headlines.
| josefresco wrote:
| Neat! Sounds similar to another app I've used:
| https://www.boringreport.org
| starik36 wrote:
| That's a pretty cool website! What prompt do you use to
| determine what is and isn't significant?
| yakhinvadim wrote:
| Can't share the full prompt, but I share methodology on the
| about page: https://www.newsminimalist.com/about
| gdubya wrote:
| That transcription reads very much like a NotebookLM "podcast"
| summarising the actual article at
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/outrage-fatigue-i...
| jsbg wrote:
| Why is it an axiom that we need to "stay informed"? The vast
| majority of news is things that don't affect you, and of the
| things that do affect you, the vast majority of that is things
| you can't do anything about. And if they do affect you you're
| sure to find out without following the news. The news is tailored
| to make you feel outraged so that you will consume more of it.
|
| As far as social media goes, just don't follow accounts that are
| annoying. If some accounts are friends in real life but
| insufferable online, just mute them. Other than friends I follow
| accounts about food and pottery, I don't see any reason to get
| off social media, I love it.
| breaker-kind wrote:
| First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--
| because I was not a socialist.
|
| Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out
| --because I was not a trade unionist.
|
| Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--because I
| was not a Jew.
|
| Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for
| me.
|
| --Martin Niemoller
|
| the goal of fascist political propaganda is to convince you
| that you can't do anything about the state of the world.
| clearly, it worked on you.
| jsbg wrote:
| > the goal of fascist political propaganda is to convince you
| that you can't do anything about the state of the world
|
| What are you doing about it?
| sporkydistance wrote:
| Isn't this something that marginalized groups have had to deal
| with since their existence? I mean, there's a reason why in the
| US black men die at higher rates from heart disease and stress-
| related illnesses. Is this getting attention now because white
| people are feeling it? I grew up in the 70's, and the hatred
| toward gays that erupted in the 80's due to Reagan was impossible
| to explain to someone born in 2000 who grew up seeing gay people
| everwhere. Not saying it doesn't need attention, but I think we
| could probably turned to marginalized groups for tips! (RIP my
| karma.)
| metalman wrote:
| Active Balancing Habits. Reminders to self of thd things that as
| an indivual you/I are doing that offset the enshitification. Like
| I am now extra happy that I cant stand the taste of store bought
| eggs, and hope that others can get past thete outrage at the
| prices, and thrn evauate if they actualy feel better, just by not
| eating the sulferous nasty things. And more selfish, me time,
| personal care, foooood, foooood, yummy fooood. and pushing myself
| to work harder and use my creativity to overcome the inane
| obsticles to,..... everything finnishing all the things on my
| list having a lot of lists crumpling up, checked off lists, and
| useing the paper to light my stove, which heats my tea and so
| when I do face the shitstorm of events, I have the energy to take
| it, get mad and put that energy back into the things on my list,
| or one of the many random, oh.....that needs doing.....now!
| miki123211 wrote:
| I wish there was a modern "news wire" service to help with this
| problem.
|
| I'm thinking tweet-sized news stories, a few per day at most, no
| threads, no images, no links, nothing but 140 characters of pure
| text. You could even deliver them as texts or unclickable push
| notifications.
|
| That format heavily discourages clickbait (because there are no
| clicks to be had) and forces journalists to only include the
| information that actually matters, with no fluff about how they
| were sipping hot cocoa in a nice indie restaurant in Montana when
| talking to the subject of the story, a 38-year-old man wearing a
| polo shirt.
|
| You could run an operation like this on a shoestring budget, with
| one or two individuals regurgitating news stories from mainstream
| sources in a much denser format, minus the outrage. Many,
| including me, would probably be willing to subscribe.
| lannisterstark wrote:
| Or you could just read actual wire services. AP/Reuters etc
| have close to no clickbait.
| cenamus wrote:
| Yeah, news ticker sounds like the perfect solution. If
| something relevant comes up you can still look up some full
| articles
| carbocation wrote:
| The front page of Reuters right now is a story about a
| major presidential proposal[1]. I think that is certainly
| headline news in the traditional sense. Still, it would be
| nice if there were _additionally_ a news wire that didn 't
| cover statements, only events.
|
| 1 = (Not describing the content because that's not the
| point.)
| yakhinvadim wrote:
| I'm sorry for plugging my project twice in this thread.
|
| But what you're asking sounds extremely close to what I made:
| https://www.newsminimalist.com/
|
| If you want fewer stories (by default it shows about 25 a day),
| adjust the slider to a higher significance threshold.
| biophysboy wrote:
| There are email newsletters, but there is no unbiased source.
| Even a dry, "moderate" source is biased, in that it chooses to
| ignore taking a stance, and thus requires ignoring some details
| altogether
| roguecoder wrote:
| Part of the problem is that good journalism is expensive, and
| has been systematically undermined by monied interests around
| the world.
|
| What is needed is a sustainable business model for quality
| journalism, set up in a way that is resistant to income
| inequality.
| teamonkey wrote:
| I subscribed to International Intrigue, which sends a
| digestible summary by email every day.
|
| https://www.internationalintrigue.io/
| arp242 wrote:
| This seems completely pointless as the entire reason of news is
| to be informed of what's going on, and you can't do that in
| "tweet-sized news stories". For starters, simple "fact"-based
| news like "X happened" is really not bias-free, as there is a
| lot of context on why "X happened", or things leading up to it,
| or stuff like that.
|
| Never mind of course there is an inherent bias in choosing what
| to publish and what not to publish.
|
| So it's not forcing journalists to "only include the
| information that actually matters", it's forcing journalists to
| exclude tons of information that really does matter. In fact,
| it's worse than pointless: it's actively harmful to mislead
| people with these "unbiased facts", because they're not.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Google's attack on RSS has been quite successful. Not a single
| mention here in the 150+ comments. I would think the HN crowd
| would be savvy enough to recommend it on this subject.
| roguecoder wrote:
| Tiny Tiny RSS is still awesome, twelve years later. It is
| super-easy to self-host: https://tt-rss.org/
| redeux wrote:
| > ...limiting yourself to checking the news a couple times a day
| instead of, like, every hour or, you know, getting those alerts
| on your phone all the time.
|
| A couple times a day? Who needs to check the news that often?
| I've not checked the news at all this year and it hasn't
| negatively impacted me at all.
| snapcaster wrote:
| I think "being informed" is very overrated in general. Often it
| means being informed about palace intrigue and intelligence
| service/corporate narratives. I would say that in general media
| consumption or "staying informed" should be seen as a vice not a
| virtue
| declan_roberts wrote:
| Self proclaimed "news junkies" are some of the most
| insufferable people I know.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| "If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do
| read the newspaper, you are misinformed." -- Col. Jack O'Neill
| (with 2 Ls)
| stackedinserter wrote:
| It's not overrated, it's often confused with "to understand
| what's happening".
|
| To "be informed" is like to take a look at a chess or go board:
| positions are clear, black and white pieces are here and there,
| but it takes skill to really understand the current dynamics of
| a game.
|
| Add media bias ("let's show the board at this angle that looks
| better for our side") and now we have "informed" population
| that's being surprised by reality every day.
| UberFly wrote:
| I have a New Yorker (I think that's where it's from) cartoon on
| my wall. It's a man and woman walking down the street and she's
| saying "My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with
| my desire to remain sane." It's a good daily reminder for me.
| matteoraso wrote:
| Why is it even important to stay informed? In virtually all
| cases, there's very little that I can do about anything, so I'm
| just wasting energy by looking at the news.
| verisimi wrote:
| > Why is it even important to stay informed?
|
| So that you stay in formation with everyone else, of course!
| jpollock wrote:
| Because the behavior of your chosen leaders reflects on you?
| Ostracism is a thing.
|
| From the "greed" point of view - because your chosen leaders
| can have dramatic and immediate impact on your net wealth.
|
| Even if hedonistic, "I have no assets", your chosen leaders
| will choose how comfortable your life is.
| settsu wrote:
| That's your right and I can understand why you might feel that
| way, but you should probably understand the compromises that
| are being made in doing so.
| roguecoder wrote:
| Why do you believe there is very little you can do? What
| collaborations have you tried so far?
|
| One of the reasons I love reading history is realizing the
| agency individual humans have when we get together. Individuals
| can't change much alone, but we don't have to do things alone.
|
| You can choose not to use your agency, but that is still a
| choice to support the status quo.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| To predict future and make your decisions, e.g. on where to
| live, what skills to learn and what to do in general.
|
| If you're on HN, it's most likely you can't control reality
| much, but you can navigate it better.
| ck2 wrote:
| > _Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a
| little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for
| one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a
| shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't
| want to act, or even talk alone; you don't want to "go out of
| your way to make trouble." Why not?--Well, you are not in the
| habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing
| alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty_
|
| > _Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of
| decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in
| the general community, "everyone" is happy. One hears no protest,
| and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues,
| some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They
| say, "It's not so bad" or "You're seeing things" or "You're an
| alarmist."_
|
| > _But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of
| thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty.
| If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come
| immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes,
| millions, would have been sufficiently shocked--if, let us say,
| the gassing of the Jews in '43 had come immediately after the
| "German Firm" stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33.
| But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all
| of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each
| of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is
| not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand
| at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D._
| - From "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
| awfulneutral wrote:
| Yes, this is really tricky, because nowadays we have people
| shouting from the rooftops continuously, and half of them are
| shouting the exact opposite thing as the other half. WWII was
| openly racist, so from a modern perspective it would be easy to
| recognize and condemn some of the early behavior, but these
| days it's more about dog whistling and thought crimes. Probably
| the signs we would all recognize are not going to happen. But
| we have already moved a dramatic amount in terms of normalized
| behavior, from 20 years ago.
| flocciput wrote:
| Similarly:
|
| _If you're waiting for a moment where you're like "this is
| it," I'm telling you, it never comes. Nobody comes on TV and
| says "things are officially bad." There's no launch party for
| decay. It's just a pileup of outrages and atrocities in between
| friendships and weddings and perhaps an unusual amount of
| alcohol._
|
| from "I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There."
| https://gen.medium.com/i-lived-through-collapse-america-is-a...
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I mainly read Reuters now. It's refreshingly boring.
| munchler wrote:
| Scientific American used to be a great magazine and should get
| back to what made it so valuable: Covering important ideas in
| science without watering them down. Their website now describes
| it as "the essential guide to the most awe-inspiring advances in
| science and technology". Blech.
| fritzo wrote:
| Have you tried Science News? I currently read neither, but at
| one point I switched from the fluffy Scientific American to the
| no-nonsense Science News.
| munchler wrote:
| Thank you for the suggestion. I will give it a try.
| gadders wrote:
| Scientific American: "It's so bad that we live in such polarised
| times."
|
| Also Scientific American:
|
| Science journal editor resigns after calling Gen X fascists over
| Trump win
|
| Laura Helmuth leaves Scientific American following controversial
| social media posts in which she lashed out at 'bigoted' voters
|
| https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2024/11/15/laura-helmuth...
| vlan0 wrote:
| Happiness is an inside job. Sitting with your emotions is very
| important. That's not to say we can tolerate an unlimited amount
| of information. But rather to highlight that we can become the
| observer of our emotions, rather than be consumed by them.
| glial wrote:
| I tried blocking all social media and news sites and instead
| subscribing to the print version of The Week. Honestly, it was
| great. But eventually the siren song of internet-fueled dopamine
| eventually lured me back...
| logifail wrote:
| > "No matter what you believe, I'm willing to bet you've been
| feeling a lot of outrage lately. To me personally, it feels
| unavoidable: I can't look down at my phone or glance up at a TV
| without seeing something that makes me upset."
|
| Umm no, I've not felt any outrage.
|
| Not because I'm particularly satisfied with any recent political
| events, but because I've stopped consuming daily news from
| outlets where generating outrage has become a financial
| incentive.
|
| I'm not on FB, my only use of social media is to help co-ordinate
| my kids' lives. I never watch TV, I've no idea what today's
| mainstream media clickbait stories are, I'm just not that
| interested.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > Feltman: Yeah, and what is it about outrage that helps
| misinformation spread?
|
| > Lewis: So I think part of it is the fact that it's more
| engaging. It, you know, activates your emotions, and so people
| are more primed to respond to that.
|
| This is why upvote-style forums, like Hacker News, need to be
| treated with heavy scrutiny. They are hard-wired to bubble out of
| control when an opinion is the right combination of popular and
| passionate.
|
| One way we can improve this situation, as contributors, is to try
| to stick to more logical, dispassionate responses. This is
| difficult to do because we all feel like what we are writing is
| the most important thing in the world and everyone else needs to
| read it.
| daedrdev wrote:
| I just feel like there are a few recent things to actually be
| outraged about
| unnamed76ri wrote:
| Is your outrage changing anything? Is your outrage helping or
| hurting your mental health? Is your outrage helping or hurting
| your relationships?
|
| Choose a different path
| Glyptodon wrote:
| I don't have outrage fatigue. Outrages are outrages and they are
| what they are. Are there many exaggerations and fake outrages?
| Sure. But things like the USA's current constitutional crisis are
| real.
|
| What I struggle with isn't fatigue at outrage, it's knowing what
| to do about it.
|
| I think violence is going to become more common, but I don't
| particularly think it will be effective.
|
| So less so than outrage, it's the feeling that we're trapped in a
| real life doom loop with no clear off ramp that I struggle with.
|
| I would like to do something... But what?
| philomath_mn wrote:
| > I think violence is going to become more common
|
| What kind and why?
| Glyptodon wrote:
| Stuff like the Thompson or Abe assassinations.
|
| That said, I think the why is more complicated. At least in
| the US I think there's a general sense that the world is
| backsliding, and that people feel like any bump on the road
| of life risks turning into a complete derailment. But this
| doesn't lead to any one particular ideology or course of
| action, so much as externalization of angst, whether against
| individuals, systems, or the "nobody pays attention to our
| angst let's burn it all down" attitude that's somewhat
| widespread.
| genewitch wrote:
| for the record, not everyone in the US thinks the sky is
| falling. it's the same extremely vocal groups as before
| that do, from what i can see.
|
| Some of us are cautiously optimistic.
| cowfriend wrote:
| > that people feel like any bump on the road of life risks
| turning into a complete derailment.
|
| Maybe because in many ways it can be?
|
| Unexpected medical condition -> crushing debt
|
| Police stop goes bad
|
| Job loss for reasons outside of your control
|
| Wildfires burn your house down, or some other natural
| disaster
| blooalien wrote:
| > So less so than outrage, it's the feeling that we're trapped
| in a real life doom loop with no clear off ramp that I struggle
| with.
|
| Glad I'm not alone, but knowing that doesn't change the
| situation. Still unable to wake from the nightmare... :(
| starky wrote:
| Last week I realized that this is bringing up the same
| feelings of anxiety as early 2020 where I'm living through
| something that I have little ability to change and don't know
| how bad it actually is going to get.
| dayofthedaleks wrote:
| Consider watching Paul Shraeder's _First Reformed_.
|
| We're all nearly powerless but our choices do matter.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I decided that other people are far more organized than I am
| and can respond more effectively, so I'm outsourcing political
| action in the form of donations. I've earmarked 3% of my income
| every month for a list of selected charities that currently
| includes the ACLU, the HRC, and a short list of smaller ones.
|
| I encourage you to do the same!
| returningfory2 wrote:
| Edit: decided I don't want to engage on this issue.
| palmotea wrote:
| > I've earmarked 3% of my income every month for a list of
| selected charities that currently includes the ACLU, the HRC,
| and a short list of smaller ones.
|
| I don't think that's a good investment, considering how badly
| those organizations failed in order to bring us to today.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| How did these organisations make people vote for Donald
| Trump?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I am happy to learn about better alternatives.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| That's exactly where the fatigue comes from. Knowing how bad
| things are without knowing what to do about it.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| Those who have outrage are the same people that think they are
| calm, reasonable, considerate and don't have outrage, at all.
| anthk wrote:
| https://neuters.de
|
| Simple, no ads, and with just the headlines it's enough.
| cess11 wrote:
| "Lately"?
|
| The genocide in Gaza has been going intensely for more than a
| year, dead and mutilated children streamed out pretty much every
| day. Now it has moved to the West Bank.
|
| Similarly a genocidal process has been ongoing in Sudan,
| perpetrated by a proxy of the UAE, close partner to the US.
|
| Do usians not see these images and only just now with the new
| administration's inauguration entered a mood of distress?
| toasterlovin wrote:
| I think it's always worth keeping in mind that every single piece
| of media you consume was created primarily to benefit its creator
| and almost always the relationship is parasitic (you're the
| host). Only rarely does media engage in mutualism.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| Not exactly a social network but I am kind of addicted to the
| Google Home curated list of news - that thing on Android (maybe
| just Pixel?) when you swipe all the way to the left.
|
| I read it every morning in bed.
|
| It contains all the topics I'm interested in as it knows me
| probably better than I know myself.
| Venkatesh10 wrote:
| Consuming quality content over overconsumption is the key. Plus
| if you have already crossed multiple levels of outrage fatigue,
| then at that point you should be aware of it, hence becoming more
| calm in future. If you see what is in front of you and know you
| cannot change anything, why outrage? why fatigue? just move on.
| nanreh wrote:
| This is not a good article. Shocked that it got so much attention
| here. It's full of garden variety common sense.
| modeless wrote:
| "Mute words" goes a long way. Every platform should have it.
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