I think it's important to keep reading the news occasionally.
Personally, I, as a programmer, read the news in the same way as my grandad who was a farmer. I read a printed weekly publication (in my case The Economist) on Sunday morning. Outside of Sunday morning I don't read the news at all.
I prefer printed news to media-supported news, because I think the imagery (I acknowledge The Economist still has images) and presentation of news, especially on TV detracts from the message it's trying to convey a lot of the time. After reading some of Neil Postman's books (notably Amusing Ourselves to Death), I find it strange to watch televised news whereby one minute I'm watching footage of a disaster, then the next minute I'm seeing sports news updates or an advert. Just like normal learning, I think news demands longer form content for proper understanding.
Reading the news on a low frequency basis also gives time for news stories to properly develop. Breaking news can be filled with speculation and incorrect details, which even if you keep up with, you can miss later corrections or crucial details. Not to mention the stress involved in it. Chances are if some real breaking news happens, like a natural disaster or war, I'll hear somebody else tell me.
If anyone is interested in keeping up with current events in a manner closer to "reading the history" rather than reading the news, check out Wikipedia's Current Events portal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
I read a few days down and stopped once I realized that absolute zero percent of any of it was useful information for me as a Northern European and all of it was terrible news. I don't think it's helpful for anybody that I know these things, while it is actually detrimental for my ability to be of service to other because of how it drains me.
Older men in my family jokingly called it “the history” instead of “the news” and I feel it’s much more preferable than trying to keep a real time pulse in everything going on in the world
I think it's worth keeping something like the serenity prayer in mind, there's a wide range in how relevant different types of news are to each of us, and how it affects us or we affect it. Between the various types 24 hour news they seem to encourage a mindset that you need to stay on the firehose and be informed, which stepping back a bit any profession will try to highlight what they offer is of utmost importance. What underlies that and makes me uncomfortable is news as entertainment, even if it's in the background as opposed to something like music, the constant drip feed of negativity or hazard.
I’ve been kicking around an idea for a while now that’s basically a no-headlines, curated (generally long-form) media aggregation site. No algorithm, no personalization, no AI. Just topics you can choose to follow.
The basic idea is you get one article at a time fed to you (no headline scrolling like Reddit or HN), and doesn’t let you proceed to the next article until you’ve scrolled through at least x% of the current article or spent a minimum time threshold reading it. Maybe allow a limited number of “skips” per day if the content really isn’t for you. Basically the idea is to force you to slow down and actually engage with the content by removing mechanisms that promote mindless scrolling and dopamine rush.
I read The Economist, which doesn't cover sports at all.
It's mostly 1-2 page long articles for each story, blocked into categories (UK, Europe, US, The Americas, Asia, China, Business, Finance, Tech, Culture at the end).
It's easy to ignore news of things happening far away and the luxury that comes with it. But when your people are the direct cause of the problems far away it's clear how such atrocities were allowed to happen in WW2. Blissful ignorance and silence.
I’ve had similar experiences. These days I only visit Hacker News to read some tech-related stuff. For me, not reading the news to the point where I ask my mom to turn off the TV when I visit is important, because I want to avoid hearing anything about wars, etc. As someone who lives in Poland, I followed so much news about the war in Ukraine in 2022 and 2023, and it was really bad for my well-being and my behavior. A few examples come to mind: not being proactive and creative when it comes to taking care of my house and family, not being present when playing with my son, being less productive at work, and literally feeling angry after consuming news — like the feeling after eating fast food and having bloating. But I’m grateful for the people who do follow the news, read it, protest against the bullshit, and participate more in the democratic process than I do.
It’s unfortunate that American news slip into the HN feed, and that Americans get indignant when it gets flagged. I took so much flak for saying that I already know where to hear about US politics, and don’t need it forced into every unrelated forum.
> and that Americans get indignant when it gets flagged
It's not exclusively (or mostly) U.S.A. residents who complain about contemporary politics topics getting flagged. We see plenty of complaints from Europe and elsewhere.
We've long accepted that there is a large overlap between politics and technology. The Snowden leaks in 2013 were huge on HN, as were several other Wikileaks releases well before that.
HN has never been a politics-free zone. It’s just subject to the same standard as everything else on HN: there has to be some “significant new information” to the story.
I think that the current guidelines are very reasonable. Some news are relevant to hackers and foster the sort of discussions that make this website so great.
I am upset when stories that are critical of the country that has threatened to annex my country are spiked by people who don’t want us to pay attention to the actions of the American government that is aided by American tech corporations and the people who work for them.
From my perspective we’re not talking about politics, we’re talking about an existential threat and we shouldn’t be letting these people’s inability to talk about these current events constructively be the reason why we can’t talk about them at all.
We should continue to talk about things like open source, self hosted software, digital sovereignty, defeating DRM, surveillance, and sousveillance and the real world reasons why these things matter.
We shouldn’t let people with brainrot stop us from talking about these very important things.
I'm Canadian too. You can tapk about these things everywhere else. There are political discussions that fit this website - as the ones you listed - but regular US news belong elsewhere.
This might be an open door, but I use the amazing HN-reader app called Hack which offers a filter that hides posts via a list of keywords you can manage. Of course some false negatives happen this way, but I don't mind about that.
Front page consists of 30 links. If one of those 30 is related to politics I don't see the problem. Just don't click on it.
Right now I see two posts about Rust (don't program in it, don't care), Kyber is hiring (retired, not interested in a job), etc. That's fine though, I just don't visit those links/comments.
> If one of those 30 is related to politics I don't see the problem. Just don't click on it.
I think it's a fair issue for people trying to avoid triggering news topics. Sometimes the headlines can be really inflammatory. Avoiding them might be feasible for you and me but may be tougher for others. For example, the top post right now is titled, "ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants", which is tricky because it is tech related and straddles the line of politics and tech. But I can see how someone might get triggered by reading that. Telling someone, "Just don't click on it", may be akin to telling an alcoholic, "Just don't drink that poured beer" in this case.
It would be nice if you could unsubscribe from certain tags like you can on Tildes. That way, you would have slight control over what you see while allowing others to keep what they want to see.
I thought the question was about you reading the news, not about you preventing everyone else from reading the news.
Surely the answer is, when you see news related keywords in an article title, to simply not click through. Same as when there’s so bit of technology or corporation that doesn’t interest you.
I believe that this space was created with a purpose and a set of guidelines. Some news are off-topic in that space. You can't scream in a library and tell people they should just wear earplugs if they don't like it.
OK well, it's been my experience that even well informed people from around the world do not understand a lot of American news, so cutting down on it probably doesn't help the nuance building. Aside from that there are a lot of Americans on HN, it's reasonable that they expect to be able to discuss what effects them.
I haven't really noticed politics of other countries get flagged that much, does it? Other than stuff that looks like propaganda from one country against another, that seems to get quickly flagged.
Finally I don't know what makes you think that HN is an unrelated to American politics forum, given that the guidelines of what the forum is for is quite lax.
Do you think maybe people from around the world dont necessarily care? The USA is not the center of the universe. If its tech related cool, otherwise let people find it somewhere else if they want it? Personally as a brit it does impact me quite a lot, so I try to keep up to date, but expecting the world to care about US news is kind of egomaniacal.
the last bit of my post should have indicated that while tech related things do tend to have a predominant position on HN, tech is not the sole purpose of the forum.
Currently on the front page I see three stories that are not tech related, if I expand the definition of tech to include anything math or science related, there is really only one story, ironically this one that you posted in.
Often however I can find as many as 6 stories on the front page that are not tech and not any politics, as HN also handles art, history, and writing quite well.
But for some reason you seem to think it's a place for tech, and American politics should be kept out, which I find somewhat funny.
It sounds like he touched a nerve but I don't think the comment to which you replied was suggesting it's everyone's duty to follow American politics, and complaining that we're egomaniacs because we discuss such topics here is akin to me whining that Panorama[1] on BBC One devotes too much time to the royals. In America, we have a common piece of advice for avoiding that problem, popularized by one of our past presidents (very different from the guy somehow in office today). It goes, "if you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen."
also I'm not sure why you think I expect the world to care about US news or why you would use the word egomaniacal, as it should be clear from my original post that I am not American.
> it's been my experience that even well informed people from around the world do not understand a lot of American news
I do not care to understand American news. I don't give a fuck. I follow your politics in the same way I watch a circus, but I do not need to "understand" it.
I second that and I think the HN moderation (@dang) here should do a better job keeping things on topic. That is actually super important because HN will eventually just be another reddit. Quality of conversation here has been deteriorating already significantly in the past years due to more and more people with insignificant curiosity about technology and science but all the more interest for engaging in pointless political debates.
There are other platforms for discussing Trump and his shenanigans. Reddit for example.
If the last couple of weeks are anything to go by, I'd strongly argue the quality of discourse on any ICE/Trump/Tariffs-related topics have been at exactly Reddit-level, along with the most upvoted opinions mirroring those on Reddit almost to a tee.
I vaguely remember checking one of those ICE posts out the other day, and there was not a single comment going against the grain that was neither flagged nor heavily downvoted, out of over a hundred. Nuance/dissent wasn't even vaguely on the cards.
I don't know what your definition of Reddit-like is, but that's mine.
Nuanced understanding of a thing does not necessary ends up with opinion in the middle. Sometimes, understanding the nuance will make you walk away with "yep, this is bad and dangerous" conclusion.
Overwhelming majority of people concluding that shooting protesters to back or head is a bad thing does not imply lack of nuance or low quality of the discussion. Overwhelming majority of people concluding that political repressions and fear based government are bad thing does not not imply lack of nuance or low quality of the discussion either.
The both sides and truth in the middle knee jerk is does not represent nuance or meaningful discussion. It frequently muddles nuances, creates false equivalences and makes the discussion loose the substance.
Reddit comments would focus on the headline—essentially confirming they never read the article. And of course add a sprinkling of "Cheeto Emperor" or whatever. I've not seen that (that wasn't also then heavily "disappeared" on HN).
Regarding the past couple of weeks, I think it's rather difficult to find nuance when we all saw the videos of protesters being killed by a federal police force. Anyone trying to take the Administration's side is, I imagine, going to come across as shrill.
On the more nuanced political issues though I have been happy to see opposing viewpoints well reasoned—even when I disagreed with them. There was a time when reddit was young that you might have found the same level of discussions.
> Nuance/dissent wasn't even vaguely on the cards.
Not all topics are nuanced when discussed by an educated, well-intended audience. Is the world flat? Does evolution lead to speciation? Dissent is for the sake of dissent, and nothing else.
I've largely stopped commenting here because I feel the community is broken. There's definitely truth to what you say, that an educated audience can have a consensus. But one thing makes the HN community (and many Reddit communities) particularly bad: A lot of these threads have repetitive comments with insults or silly name calling get upvoted. Even if consensus is around the earth being round, there's no need to pettily insult flat earthers. We just ignore them and move on leaving their content to languish at the bottom. On the other hand these threads bring a lot of childish insults that get upvoted just because they hit the right buttons.
This to me is one (of many) sign that the community here cannot healthily discuss these topics. IMO the community here isn't healthy at all. That's why I don't post here much anymore. It's a sign to me that too many discussions in this community are about seeking emotional catharsis. And I'm sorry but for my own mental health, I'm not going to listen to someone else's panic attack resulting from political uncertainty.
I feel for dang and tomhow. It seems that most of their work is doing emotional labor. And emotional labor can grind a person down quickly.
Some topics can't be ignored. Vaccine effectiveness, for example, require a consensus from a large fraction of the population. That larger societal consensus begins with discussion in smaller subsets, of which HN is one.
Agreed. HN has proven time and time again that it is incapable of having a good discussion on politics, or at least American politics. The threads are always chock full of flamebait, outgroup-bashing, and unwillingness to consider other points of view. I flag every single post I see about American politics at this point because they are always, without fail, extremely low quality threads.
On reddit they used to say "the down vote is not a disagree button" but that's not the case here. I've been specifically corrected when I assumed that.
So if the prevailing opinion is that ice is committing murder, it makes sense a contrary comment would be heavily down voted.
I agree that hn is heavily liberal and holds a lot of the toxic leftist anti-thought patterns that are prevalent on reddit. But I think it's more of a symptom of the country and perhaps the West being wound-up over "things".
I sympathize, and the attitude may be annoying, but you've got to realize you can not bury your head in the sand about the global rise in fascism, nor the fact that what happens in America affects the entire world. Imagine if you were to transfer your comment back to WWII era, perhaps you're French and you're saying that you're tired of hearing about this little kerfuffle between Germany and Austria... well, clearly the disinterest did not pay off.
They may be aware of it, but others who frequent this particular forum may have HN as THEIR source. When someone like the above commenter tries to gatekeep areas where discussion, particularly of things like fascism or other forms of oppression, takes place, it only serves and furthers the goals of the oppressor. There is no domain of life which is not intrinsically political. When we act like there is -- such as when we pretend politics should be off the table for discussion -- we are simply ceding ground, casting away our part in the story, and abdicating our responsibility to take that part seriously.
> There is no domain of life which is not intrinsically political.
There are a great many such domains, and the insistence that everything is political is one of the chief problems with modern society. We can, and should, be able to enjoy some things together without bringing up bickering and strife. If you drag politics into a politics free zone you aren't taking responsibility for anything, you are just being a jerk.
Do you also believe you should discuss every other topic under the sun in the belief that not discussing it is "ceding ground" to a viewpoint or action of others?
It would seem that in your view, we should be discussing all things at all times due to this "oppressor" mindset.
You're clearly being facetious. I will simply say that the rise of Naziism/Authoritarianism in the west is a preeminent threat to all human beings on the planet, especially when the king of all nazis has access to the nuclear missiles. It obviously demands a sense of urgency that other topics don't.
If you disagree with that, be explicit about exactly what part.
GP hinted at that if you read the rest of their comment, but it took a serious nose-dive during the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, and kinda petered out with Franco.
If you are really interested in data, you might check out the Freedom House website. They have been rating countries around the world on things like free elections and civil rights since 1973, and their take is that things have been going downhill since about 2006, with countries becoming more autocratic.
> But I’m grateful for the people who do follow the news, read it, protest against the bullshit, and participate more in the democratic process than I do.
This is a completely human response to the horrible things happening the world both domestic and abroad.
It’s also history repeating itself: doing nothing when bad things are happening in our communities is what allows them to happen.
Think what the villages around the concentration camps must have known and yet did nothing.
Sure you could just focus on tech. You alone can’t stop Donald Trump or Stephen Miller from their racist move toward autocracy usurping norms and the world order … but you can join in with others who are trying to make a difference.
Apathy is a human emotion to such dire things. But we are better than that.
> Think what the villages around the concentration camps must have known and yet did nothing.
If you mean extermination camps, they knew. They were also part of occupied, conquered and heavily terrorized lands. They occasionally did something, terrorist attack against Germans here and there, usually retaliated against by killing a lot of random citizens. Usually motivated by plight of own people.
Extermination camps were located in Poland - German plans involved moving away and killing all Polish, so that they can be replaced by Germans. Germans seen Jews as primary danger to be exterminated fast, Slavic as secondary lower value being to be exterminated slowly in time. Polish army lost the war. And random villagers were not in position to do anything about the highly violent occupying army.
(And yes, Jews were at danger of being denounced by anti semitic locals too. Turned out one could be subject of racial oppression and being oppressor himself).
That’s what I meant yes. Then we are weaker and less brave than they. DHS is kicking in doors and jailing children and people are being killed in the streets and there’s not mass rioting in the streets or anything.
When the world is on fire and people are suffering, we have a moral obligation to be aware of it and take part in the healing. To turn off your access to the media is a temporary solution that may well be justified in the short term, but you do not have the luxury of forgoing your part in this world, because if you do, it will burn all the way to your doorstep.
If you already have a prepared list then fair enough, but what are you personally doing to take part in the healing of society that consuming mainstream news media helps with? The person you're replying to hasn't said they live as a hermit and don't engage in any part of their local society.
I fully agree that it all seems fucked and there is no point in following anything other than specific tech stuff I'm interested in. Anything else actually important someone else in my life will probably mention it to me. Or the explosion will vaporise me and knowing it's coming won't have helped much.
I'm not necessarily advocating for "consuming mainstream news," more for "not unplugging from discourse." Those can go together, but they don't have to. We still have a responsibility to know what's going on in the world even if we reject certain means of receiving that information.
> When the world is on fire and people are suffering
The problem is that the world is always on fire and people are always suffering.
Especially so because now we hear about the whole world’s problems, and no matter how peaceful a state the world is in there’s always a war or something happening somewhere. It’s been like that for all of human history and I don’t expect it to change any time soon.
I don’t think it’s healthy to live your whole live hearing about these problems that you have no ability to affect at all. In my experience it only has negative effects on your life and whether you’re tapped into the real time news feed or not, it doesn’t actually change these events in any way.
You can still be a proponent of change and discuss these changes with local politicians and what not without being on a 24 hour news IV.
However, looking at the current political climate in my own country, I too have lost faith in them solving local and global issues. When the people I can vote for don't actually solve pressing societal problems, then what's the point? Now factor in the influence of people in large countries that are in power that I can't even vote for...
There is a glimmer of hope that the EU now seems to have finally found some balls somewhere though, with their response to the Greenland situation. Maybe they've finally learned that a strategy of appeasement does not work for strongmen in power (hey, that sounds familiar...)
I completely understand why, but on the other hand democracy relies on citizens being informed about what's happening. The risk is that one day, you wake up and there is no democracy any more.
Reading the news and being informed are two separate things. Being an informed citizen, the kind that democracies need to survive, also requires 1) being informed of history and 2) understanding issues in depth.
People who consume a lot of news tend to have very shallow understanding of a broad range of current events. Worse they tend to be passive receivers of news instead of active seekers of information with intent to understand the world.
As a result, they are very susceptible to manipulation through selection of what makes the news they tend to consume. They become passive pawns in political power struggles.
I'd like to get a little pedantic here and suggest it's not reading the news that's so problematic, it's 1) watching it, and 2) scrolling it. Not that print can't be effective propaganda, but it's less optimized to the task than 1 and 2. The passive pawns can't get enough of either.
On one hand I can see where you can draw this argument from. But on the other hand I don't think daily consumption of the huge quantity of news that exists is necessary for having a decent political opinion, especially given that most news is inflammatory junk (at least in my country). I just don't need a 5 page breakdown of every single event that some corpo decided to shove down our throats.
Also - and maybe I'm naive for this - I don't really need news to inform my political opinion because the current state of affairs is so far from my ideal world. Like no matter what could reasonably occur in the news, I still know who I'm voting for on polling day.
> I completely understand why, but on the other hand democracy relies on citizens being informed about what's happening.
The point being made by the author is that "following the news" nowadays has nothing to do with being informed. Instead, it became about being constantly bombarded by a barrage of noise and nonsense to constantly grab your attention.
So instead, by finding a monthly publication giving him an overview of the local, European and world news, the author is looking for a filter removing all the unnecessary noise. And the month granularity should be more than enough to allow him to be informed about important changes.
I completely agree. The author is incredibly naive on the "I asked myself how much of this actually affects my daily life". If there's one thing that absolutely affects your life, it's politics. Maybe not today, and maybe not immediately in a meaningful way, but it will affect you.
I completely disagree. The past 50-70yr of "people ought to care and be involved" type sentiment has resulted in mostly only the people who have nothing better to do and no serious problems having an outsize effect and in some subject areas completely dominating the political discourse to the detriment of literally everyone else and western society generally.
You mangled Jefferson a bit. He wrote about education, not news. He didn't imagine the the non-stop firehose of slop and advertising and propaganda we endure and call news. What passes for news today describes the opposite of critical thinking and education.
No evidence supports your sentiment. Find an example of democracy that arose from citizens "being informed about what's happening." The Athenians limited democratic participation to a small educated elite. The American Founders had the same instinct, excluding more people than they included.
Demoracy dies in front of our eyes right now, in the USA, the most media-saturated culture in history. You might blame that on an ignorant and uncritical population. You might call them uninformed, or misinformed. As Jefferson understood the problem doesn't come from people not reading the news, but rather people not educated enough to understand, think critically, or even care.
I feel like this, I honestly wish newspapers weren't bunk and there was a good "week in review" way to get the news. I find myself Doom scrolling to much.
The fact that this is downvoted really says it all. "I don't read the news" is pretty much dependent on one's profession being insulated from changing events. Which is not surprising why it's a popular opinion amongst technocrats that would rather not have democracy in the first place.
For the rest of the news, I am considering subscribing to a magazine that covers important events in Germany, the EU, or the world every few months. This kind of format filters out short-term noise and fear-driven stories.
Elections happen even less frequently than this. If your democracy disintegrates with less than a few months of warning, you were probably invaded and noticed even without the news; At this point, that would probably lead to a civil emergency notification on your phone, and by design that happens even without any apps installed.
As we said in the UK in my childhood, "Today’s news is tomorrow’s chip* paper".
In October 2024 I would not have guessed that we'd ever see masked agents killing people on the streets of major US cities, or the US administration immediately accusing the victims of being armed terrorists. Things can change rapidly. By allowing things to get this bad, we have unfortunately forfeited our right to pretend things can't change rapidly. Let's plug in; fix this situation; and then folks can go back to ignoring the news.
Last year, legal immigrants were fine. Today, their kids are kidnapped and used as bait to take them to Alcatraz. And that's not even the identity I'm mostly referring to.
Very cool stance OOP, thank you for identifying yourself as the type of centrist heaven will reject at the gate and angels will never get tired of the reaction to the shrug.
Traditionally, the news industry has been divided into tabloids, which were more sensationalist and aimed at a less sophisticated readership, and broadsheets, which were more analytical and aimed at a more sophisticated readership. From a business perspective, the articles and opinion pieces were just bait to draw in a particular class of reader; the real money came from advertising to those particular classes of reader.
The web has destroyed that business model, because the news industry now controls far less advertising space, so there is no longer enough advertising revenue to support quality journalism. The broadsheets are in real financial trouble, and most have turned to tabloid-style articles (albeit ones that promote more sophisticated worldviews) in order to pull in those social-media clicks.
I find myself increasingly interested in publications like The Economist and The Financial Times, simply because their readerships have financial interest in actually knowing what's going on in the world, and so they can charge a subscription price that supports quality journalism.
My entire existence is politically controversial. I pretty much have to at least be aware of recent political developments since they could affect my ability to live as myself
Because not everything is done as EU law. Frequently its an executive order or a directive passed down from national minister or other govt official to their branch or other branches to make their base happy at expense of people currently blamed for govt’s failures.
Eg. no law in Poland regulates legal gender change process. But there is a series of directves for courts on how this should be addressed issued by whoever is in the govt at the moment. One govt issued a directive that those are low prority, other that spouse and children should have a power to veto, another that actually those are high priority and then govt-appointed judges in the supreme court decided to veto the veto and implement new procedure altogether. And none of this is in the law - just directives for judges from pliticans and higher judges.
Threats are not necessarily originating from laws or their execution. And not everyone has the time to read all laws, or is able to fully understand them and their impact on your well-being.
It probably takes less time to read those laws than it does to follow the hyperbole pushed by the media. Read them, discuss them with others - like-minded as well as those with a different view - and try to form your own opinions. If you rely on the media to curate your opinions you're just being groomed by one party or the other. In that case at least follow both the media which you most often agree with as well as those which you disagree and try to find out the truth behind the half-truths and lies pushed by them.
News gives you a heads up on what could be coming before laws were passed, or overall sentiment of the population or the politicians. Sometimes it's not about new laws, but about new interpretations, enforcements, court rulings etc.
There's way too much going on to follow all of it, and most of the important stuff isn't written down. By the time the text of bills is available, the politicians and influencers have been discussing things for a long time and the opportunity to do anything about it is nearly gone.
Perhaps we could pay people to follow important topics, politicians, important lobbyists and see what they're doing and claiming they want to do. They could send us summaries to save us time.
> Your entire existence? That sounds kind of hyperbolic
In the USA today (and many other places, but I'm in the US), anyone of any kind of minority is the target of beatings, kidnappings and possibly public executions by the government right now. Not exactly something you can ignore.
That is not remotely true. We can have a discussion about the government's excesses, but in no way is everyone of all minorities subject to such things. The vast majority of people in the US, minority or otherwise, are living their lives peacefully without any sort of threat hanging over them.
Unless there are laws proposing to execute trans people (which I very much doubt but I'm not exactly following UK politics), your "entire existence" is not up for debate. Saying so is just a hyperbole which muddies the waters.
Do you mean the Supreme Court case last year? I thought that just covered interpretation of equalities law for single-sex exemptions, not actively legislating against anyone.
I don't think mainstream news is news anymore, its just become pseudo high brow reality tv with various organizations panhandling for your attention with whatever outrageous thing they can. There is that exercise of looking at the headlines from a month ago and realizing that most of them didn't matter at all or had very little effect on ones daily life. Its no wonder things are getting more extreme when every news outlet is falling over each other to farm that engagement.
I hear you, but spending an hour to research every name on the ballot come election time will make you better informed than most people.
If you want to do more, you can find some protests to participate in. Or do something other than protest like clean a local park or feed hungry people.
If I spend 3 hours on a random Tuesday consuming the news, that doesn't help anyone. It does the opposite; it makes me less able to focus, and makes me have less personal power and discipline to affect change in the world.
Maybe, but some groups are banking on you having "news fatigue". So maybe they don't feel that way. And doing it in spite of them is something that balances out my anxiety for me.
I keep reading this point of view, that not being glued to the news is "privilege".
I completely disagree.
Refreshing your feed all day long, getting angry at all the news, does not make someone superior. I'm not going to travel to support the iranian uprising, or going hide illegal immigrants in a Minneapolis basement, and it is likely that neither are you. So the end result is the same, except the person consuming and reacting to the news is wasting more time. Worst, they become radicalized and are now part of the extremism that keep being pushed.
I research policy and vote when asked. In between, there's too much going on in my life to spend it with daily news
Billionaires and/or other oligarchic dictators love it when the zone is flooded, consent is manufactured, the people are divided and conquered, and the people no longer pay attention to meaningful signals nor travesties. This gives them maximum power when the people ignore everything and obey in advance or suffer from learned helplessness.
I come from one of the most disturbed and violent states in India. During high school and college, I worked with a few local Newspaper Publishers, finishing up layouts in Aldus PageMaker. Along with the reporters, I was involved in many parts of the final decisions that made the news mellowed/changed when printed in the Paper in the morning, making it more consumable for readers. I have seen photos of bloodshed and mutilations that trained my brain to normalize rotten.com in later years of my life. The ones printed in the morning paper were always curated; the ones that got away unprinted were things we would keep under key and lock.
More than a decade ago, I stopped following general news and learn about things asynchronously. However, I had picked up a few topics that I like to follow and do follow them. Since the Pandemic, I had settled on just a few niche areas of Tech and Science to follow — which, of course, quite a few of them land on Hacker News when I submit them.
Around the end of 2025, I picked up the actual printed Physical Newspaper again. A lot of the news seems like yesterday’s Jam to me. I’m going to continue reading the newspaper, Slow and Smooth, picking the ones I want to read and ignoring everything else.
I think it’s not news that’s the problem. It’s the sources of news are often biased and spend very little time explaining events in context. I much prefer an hour long news program or multi-page article that details events and perspectives going years into the past. We have a surprising large amount of influence on events around the world. Everything from the companies you support to your politics can vastly change world events.
I really dislike the notion that events outside of your country are somehow not important.
Once you start noticing how often you see content that references e.g. anything that's happening in the US right now (I'm in the UK), you realise how 'news' is everywhere.
If you go on reddit, unless you've curated your subreddits and never touch /all or /popular, it's very heavy with 'news'. The Google app, a left-swipe by default on your Android phone is all 'news'. Twxtter/Bluesky/etc. are full of news. Avoiding news entirely is almost impossible on today's internet.
I have had success with this approach too, but key to all this is being careful about where you go online to minimise exposure. These days I don't use any 'social media' platforms, but I do visit HN and BBC news (both of which are of higher quality than most places, and crucially only have a few stories on a typical day - the rate of new content is low). This way I stay informed without falling down rabbit holes about every twist and turn of every (mostly awful/depressing) thing happening in the World.
There's two kinds of news I read, both of which I've found give a "good enough" / "middle ground" picture of things.
1) Financial news, specifically the Financial Times - middle, Bloomberg - slightly left leaning, and the Economist, slightly right leaning. I've found that they have incentives to keep their news as close to just presenting the pure information as possible, as their readers are often making investment decisions based on the quality of the information, resulting in wanting zero "spin". This isn't the case for the NYT or WSJ, which have an incentive misalignment.
2) Anything that shows up on Hacker News. I trust that if something is important enough to get posted here (and make the front page), then I should probably be aware of it. The comments are for the most part measured, analytical, and thought-provoking.
I came to a similar realisation about world news a few years ago and live a much less stressful life now. Especially since most of the news was about the US, and I don't even live there and there's nothing I can do about it. If something really important happens, eventually I find out from friends or family.
Same when it comes to staying on top of tech news -- almost everything is a flash in the pan. I used to bookmark cool new products, never revisit them, and then a year later realise half of the links are now dead.
One thing I realised though is I still need to mindlessly browse an endless feed every once in a while for some downtime. One way or another I'll want to fill that time with something, so it's a question of being mindful what goes in it. So my drugs of choice are Hacker News, and carefully curated YouTube subscriptions.
This is a reasonable choice, but of course also one that is only people who can be pretty confident of not being personally affected by newsworthy events.
I think if it's stressing you out then it's fair to step back from reading the news for a bit. It's still worth at least trying to form an understanding and an opinion on various issues - whether local, regional or international - if you're going to be voting or even just talking about them with friends and family.
"Home & Garden Television". Lots of shows about flipping houses, etc.
It used to be far more instructional (Julia Child-esque) before it and Food Network got swept up in the reality TV craze. It still has the "bones" of its former self though.
The news is what's new, uncommon, strange, interesting. Shiny, attractive, shocking, raging: dopamine raising and cortisol antagonising. The news doesn't describe our actual lives. But the news does sometimes contain information relevant to our lives!
I find I will hear about the relevant things from people and events around me, whether or not I follow the news. The news doesn't have any actual bearing on my life but the news does have a few stories that do have bearing.
So theres no downside of not following the news. I will hear what I need to and want to hear about from people around me or other sources.
Some think that in not consuming what they think I should consume, that this is a morally wrong thing to do. They will be personally offended, how can they ignore my story? There is a case that if we all stopped following the news then how can the other sources inform us, so there would still be a benefit to reporting...
Consider two anthropologists examining a culture. One only has remote access to every news source the culture produces for itself, the other can only talk face to face with people. Which one will understand the people more?
The author of this piece has set himself on a course towards lower blood pressure, better world outlook, and better chances of longevity. If you meet him on the street, he will probably be smiling, this year or thirty years from now.
I try to balance being informed and ignoring the mostly irrelevant hot topics du jour.
My approach:
* world: weekly Economist coverage of world/biz/general topics (audio via app) - keeps me generally up to date
* local: daily digest mail of notable news from yesterday from my country (which is too insignificant to appear in the Economist); scraped from multiple sources, digest by an LLM
* Hacker News digest mail, top 50 posts from the previous day (drawback is I'm often late to the discussion, like with this one, but can also be a blessing)
* ArsTechnica digest - used to be a subscriber but nowadays just grab new article links once a day
I read the digests as my "morning paper", and skip most of the links there (from ~100 in total I end up reading ~10), but am still "in the loop"
I also find about stuff in conversations with friends and social media (x/bsky/li for me). I also try to minimize the latter, but that's for another comment :)
I've cut a lot of news out for mental health reasons. I don't want to know all the awful shit that's going on. Helps a lot.
I used to do this for maybe two to six weeks at a stretch. It's become more of a default state, now. I don't know if or when that will change, but I'm extremely cynical so…
I'd recommend anyone who is distressed about the state of things and, (this is key) fortunate enough not to be at risk by not paying attention, unplug and see how it goes. I only read tech news and blogs and it's improved my state of mind. It might work for you, too.
I subscribe to this model as well, with the caveat that I try to only look at local news to my city and my field.
I can’t do anything about the nonsense at a national level, I can do my part in the local context.
In particular LLM summaries are great for this. Introduces risk of hallucinations which is not awesome, but it does tend to neutralise the rage bait tone and tricks that are pervasive these days. Tradeoff but one that has been working for me
Rolf Dobelli wrote an excellent book on this topic called "Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life". He addresses directly many of the objections raised in these comments.
I have set up ntfy on a Pi at home, and use it to send me Android notifications of headlines every morning.
This is by a bash script in a cron job that reads RSS feeds and grabs the headlines and links to articles, so I can get a flurry of tech news and general news headlines without having to go into detail on each topic (which in news terms is typically slanted with some sort of bias).
So I can stay up to date on general happenings, speedily. It is fairly simple to set up - a LLM will write a suitable bash script to parse RSS XML and grab links and headlines in moments.
I used to work in television and radio news back when the newscasters were often former newspaper men. I do not watch television news anymore (or radio for that matter).
To me it's just a long bitch fest now. They show stories about people bitchin' about somebody else or suggest that you should be bitchin' about it. If I want to hear people bitch at me I'll turn to my wife.
Well, good thing for him that it's only other people who will be affected by the things reported on in the news! And they don't add much value to his life, anyway.
I tried the same. 2 weeks after I started I attended a party where people mentioned that it was sad that Michael Jackson had died. I thought they were joking, but turned out they didn’t. It was in late June 2009. I started reading the news again.
But today I read them differently. I read news site, with some curation (e.g., settings for threshold for articles that comes up in various fields) together with a few favorite sites (e.g., HN)
"I have watched TV twice in my life. I am frankly not terribly interested in TV anyway. Certainly I do not pretend that by simply refusing to keep up with the latest news I am therefore unaffected by what goes on, or free of it all. Certainly events happen and they effect me as they do other people. It is important for me to know about them too: but I refrain from trying to know them in their fresh condition as "news." When they reach me they have become slightly stale. I eat the same tragedies as others, but in the form of tasteless crusts. The news reaches me in the long run through books and magazines, and no longer as a stimulant. Living without news is like living without cigarettes (another peculiarity of the monastic life). The need for this habitual indulgence quickly disappears. So, when you hear news without the "need" to hear it, it treats you differently. And you treat it differently too." - Thomas Merton
> I am considering subscribing to a magazine that covers important events in Germany, the EU, or the world every few months
I've posted the same message so many time I could get banned but if you live in the UK then Private Eye is what you want here. It's every fortnight, very funny and a bastion of genuine journalism (see the Paul Foot Award they give out each year)
I used to have a subscription to Private Eye but cancelled it as it got so depressing from being too aware of all the corruption. Worse than browsing the news.
I think if the news feels unbearable, the problem may not be the information but the fact that reality is moving against the assumpftions on which the person has anchored their happiness ... environemt, relgion, polticial views etc etc ..
I realised that if I exclusively read business news I can avoid a good amount of the fluff and sensationalism. I made a browser extension which pushes the headlines from Bloomberg, Financial times Euronews Business and a few others on to my new tab from their RSS, and it's more than enough to give me a nugget of what's going on in the world without being overloaded. 1 item per new tab.
End result is: I don't read the news, but I still know what's going on without the need for Social Media's hot take.
it is just noise that does not really matter for your life (and mine too). This is pretty-well described in "Antifragile" by Nassim Taleb, consider reading.
Different people have different levels of what matters. If I didn't read the news, I wouldn't know that my country would search my phone at airport and prosecute for acts it didn't like. Or which countries are safe for get together with family. Or that I may lose the chance to renew my passport in third country and have to urgently renew it, otherwise risking a trip to hostile homeland and potential residency permit issues.
I'd read a distant planet's news, from light years away, if it had a culture and I could see the latest updates.
I note that the complaint "I can't do anything about it" throws doubt on "it doesn't affect me". But both of those seem to me to miss the point, which is to get new ideas.
The news is one of those markets where the following is true:
1) a large number of people are dissatisfied with the current product
2) but aren’t willing to pay for an alternative which solves the problem in the ideal way (for them)
There have been dozens of attempts at weekly news summary newsletters, minimal news sites, etc. over the years. None ever seem to go anywhere because no one wants to pay for something they are deliberately deciding has little value.
It makes me think of budget airlines: constantly critiqued for being uncomfortable and using dark patterns to get every last dollar - yet people consistently just book the cheapest flight possible.
The Dutch term for the German 'neurgierig' is 'nieuwsgierig' which translates to 'greedy for news' and as such is even closer to the subject of this post. I also use an RSS reader - Nextcloud News - to follow the 'news' (including this here site, HN) and I sometimes feel the same about what is pushed by the legacy media and its more recent competition. Much of what is published is tailored to fit some political agenda, often a 'progressive' one for most of the legacy news media and - due to my conscious choices - a more 'conservative' one for the more recent counterparts. I made this choice to get a somewhat more balanced view of what actual facts the stuff published by 'left' and 'right' seems to be based on but... man, is it often tiring to see 'both' sides go on and on and on pushing their agendas.
Even more tiring is to see how useful idiots [1] happily take the propaganda pushed by the media and trumpet it as if it were pure gospel, often with dire consequences. Should I just quit following the legacy media and the more recent anti-dotes and try to live here in quiet and solitude on the farm? Well, no, I don't think I should. I will be confronted with te results of the media poisoning the minds of their victims the next time I go to a city and find the roads blocked by a crowd of people shouting inane slogans. Where did they get those from, what are they blathering about, why does this crowd of screechy weasels hollering about some supposed misdeed performed by some government somewhere far from here occupy the station? Almost invariably it comes down to the propaganda pushed by the media - nowadays usually some on-line version which is amplified up by the legacy dinosaurs and trumpeted by the other titles which are more often than not owned by the same conglomerate - which the useful idiots uncritically pick up and use as their guide star. I read this stuff because I want to know what ideas the media is trying to amplify and which they are attempting to suppress. I read it because I sometimes have to quench whatever fuse has been lit by them in the heads of my children. So, tiring as it is I'll keep the feeds running and try to follow my way through the mire of deceptions, half-truths, outright lies and other propaganda which is what goes for 'news'.
I also joined the club recently. Global newsfeeds from social media have become infested with AI slop, near constant Trump/ICE BS spam in addition to existing clickbait vids and ads. News media front pages are essentially Trump outlets and this guy puts out an insane amount of BS thrash that only ennervates and creates discord. There's not that much happening so blank pages are just filled with something to make it look like news. I'm no longer informed from all of this. It just feels like being a living spam folder.
I can relate and if I'm honest, I need to do this. I can't say I benefit from following the news, including tech news and forums like HN, every day.
I still want to be informed and be involved especially in matters that do impact me and the country I live in; I feel strongly about democracy and that rests on an educated and participatory citizenship. But I don't need to wade through shit every day to have enough of an understanding of it.
I like tech and I'm curious, but just today before reading this article I was thinking about how much do I really gain from this cursory reading on so many subjects (as one might find on HN), instead of using the time to more deeply dive into certain ones. At some point it can become a bunch of clutter that has little value.
(I already stopped watching TV news many years ago, and dropped Facebook and Reddit a few years ago as well. I'm mostly down to Instagram and HN, plus the NYT and a few magazines (MIT Tech Review, that one is excellent; Wired, was planning on dropped anyway; Atlantic, good but I don't need that much of it; The New Yorker has great longform every once in a while.)
I think the only wise thing Elon Musk ever said was "Generally newspapers seem to try to answer the question, 'What is the worst thing that happened on the Earth today?'"
YouTube is the new news and TV replacement altogether.
It is not hard to filter out AI slop, stick with channels known for being true and unbiased, specially stick with independent journalists channel and known podcast.
Everything else is a lost cause, main stream media?? Suuuuuure
Social media, the more time spent at it, the more depressed and brain washed you get, just bad news after bad news.
Ditch those and follow YouTube to notice a positive response, you keep up to date without feeling like WW3 is happening tomorrow.
I've recently been trying to avoid news. Particularly US political news. Sadly for some reason blocking sites on my Eero router doesn't seem to work. Thankfully Facebook recently put up a modal dialog asking me to subscribe or accept personalised ads (pretty sure the GDPR explicitly forbids that but whatever, everyone is doing it), it's doing a good job of preventing me seeing the usual feed of news there. At some point I'll put PiHole on my NAS and take care of Reddit etc.
I would suggest following the news with a delay, for example you can subscribe to a monthly publication like Le Monde Diplomatique[1] that'll give you a relatively fresh analysis of news but without the noise. They invite experts to contribute and give a saner perspective to world event, with more context.
I think it's important to keep reading the news occasionally.
Personally, I, as a programmer, read the news in the same way as my grandad who was a farmer. I read a printed weekly publication (in my case The Economist) on Sunday morning. Outside of Sunday morning I don't read the news at all.
I prefer printed news to media-supported news, because I think the imagery (I acknowledge The Economist still has images) and presentation of news, especially on TV detracts from the message it's trying to convey a lot of the time. After reading some of Neil Postman's books (notably Amusing Ourselves to Death), I find it strange to watch televised news whereby one minute I'm watching footage of a disaster, then the next minute I'm seeing sports news updates or an advert. Just like normal learning, I think news demands longer form content for proper understanding.
Reading the news on a low frequency basis also gives time for news stories to properly develop. Breaking news can be filled with speculation and incorrect details, which even if you keep up with, you can miss later corrections or crucial details. Not to mention the stress involved in it. Chances are if some real breaking news happens, like a natural disaster or war, I'll hear somebody else tell me.
If anyone is interested in keeping up with current events in a manner closer to "reading the history" rather than reading the news, check out Wikipedia's Current Events portal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
I read a few days down and stopped once I realized that absolute zero percent of any of it was useful information for me as a Northern European and all of it was terrible news. I don't think it's helpful for anybody that I know these things, while it is actually detrimental for my ability to be of service to other because of how it drains me.
I talk to enough people to tell me when something is important enough to know. I assume that's how news used to be transferred.
I think it's hard to claim you're not getting news other than on Sunday in print, if your posting to HN mid-week.
Older men in my family jokingly called it “the history” instead of “the news” and I feel it’s much more preferable than trying to keep a real time pulse in everything going on in the world
Good point. My grandad used to call it the history as well!
I think it's worth keeping something like the serenity prayer in mind, there's a wide range in how relevant different types of news are to each of us, and how it affects us or we affect it. Between the various types 24 hour news they seem to encourage a mindset that you need to stay on the firehose and be informed, which stepping back a bit any profession will try to highlight what they offer is of utmost importance. What underlies that and makes me uncomfortable is news as entertainment, even if it's in the background as opposed to something like music, the constant drip feed of negativity or hazard.
you could read wikipedia news:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
While the presentation has merit, the events listed on this page at the time of this comment don't meet the my bar of one of:
1) Essential to not have missed for everyday conversation;
2) Will affect my decision making in some way;
3) Will be remembered a year later.
There is simply far too much news.
How does Wikipedia rank compared to news gathered by professional journalists and editors such as those at The Economist as mentioned?
Wikipedia editor here! I'd imagine not that far off as we use sources like the economist to write the articles
So you are not journalists by degree, training or other experience.
Nope! We just summmarize what reliable sources say. Same as the rest of wikipedia
TIL, thanks!
I would like a weekly physical Sunday paper with some general news and printed substack articles tailored to me.
Subscribe to a few RSS feeds you like, and set up a cron job or something to send an assortment of them to your printer every sunday
I’ve been kicking around an idea for a while now that’s basically a no-headlines, curated (generally long-form) media aggregation site. No algorithm, no personalization, no AI. Just topics you can choose to follow.
The basic idea is you get one article at a time fed to you (no headline scrolling like Reddit or HN), and doesn’t let you proceed to the next article until you’ve scrolled through at least x% of the current article or spent a minimum time threshold reading it. Maybe allow a limited number of “skips” per day if the content really isn’t for you. Basically the idea is to force you to slow down and actually engage with the content by removing mechanisms that promote mindless scrolling and dopamine rush.
I don't use it, but I saw this similar idea on here before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35795388
I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to write an RSS reader that does this
the closest thing is doing that to an epub to be sent to your e-paper device.
Wouldn’t print newspapers also show you disaster on one page and sports on the next?
I just began reading amusing ourselves to death.
Depends on the publication.
I read The Economist, which doesn't cover sports at all.
It's mostly 1-2 page long articles for each story, blocked into categories (UK, Europe, US, The Americas, Asia, China, Business, Finance, Tech, Culture at the end).
"Outside of Sunday morning I don't read the news at all."
Excerpt from comment submitted to Hacker News, an online news aggregator
On Wednesday
Is Hacker News news
It's a domain specific news I guess
no it's propaganda for a startup factory
> The Economist
Speaking of an anger-inducing publication..
The Economist rocks. They also have a wonderful daily summary of the news that takes five mins to read.
Would that be this? Just checking:
https://www.economist.com/the-world-in-brief
Yep, at least that’s what I know of. They refresh it several times per day, but it’s more than enough to check it once per day.
It's easy to ignore news of things happening far away and the luxury that comes with it. But when your people are the direct cause of the problems far away it's clear how such atrocities were allowed to happen in WW2. Blissful ignorance and silence.
I’ve had similar experiences. These days I only visit Hacker News to read some tech-related stuff. For me, not reading the news to the point where I ask my mom to turn off the TV when I visit is important, because I want to avoid hearing anything about wars, etc. As someone who lives in Poland, I followed so much news about the war in Ukraine in 2022 and 2023, and it was really bad for my well-being and my behavior. A few examples come to mind: not being proactive and creative when it comes to taking care of my house and family, not being present when playing with my son, being less productive at work, and literally feeling angry after consuming news — like the feeling after eating fast food and having bloating. But I’m grateful for the people who do follow the news, read it, protest against the bullshit, and participate more in the democratic process than I do.
It’s unfortunate that American news slip into the HN feed, and that Americans get indignant when it gets flagged. I took so much flak for saying that I already know where to hear about US politics, and don’t need it forced into every unrelated forum.
> and that Americans get indignant when it gets flagged
It's not exclusively (or mostly) U.S.A. residents who complain about contemporary politics topics getting flagged. We see plenty of complaints from Europe and elsewhere.
We've long accepted that there is a large overlap between politics and technology. The Snowden leaks in 2013 were huge on HN, as were several other Wikileaks releases well before that.
HN has never been a politics-free zone. It’s just subject to the same standard as everything else on HN: there has to be some “significant new information” to the story.
I think that the current guidelines are very reasonable. Some news are relevant to hackers and foster the sort of discussions that make this website so great.
Others are just regular politics.
As a Canadian I have a different perspective.
I am upset when stories that are critical of the country that has threatened to annex my country are spiked by people who don’t want us to pay attention to the actions of the American government that is aided by American tech corporations and the people who work for them.
From my perspective we’re not talking about politics, we’re talking about an existential threat and we shouldn’t be letting these people’s inability to talk about these current events constructively be the reason why we can’t talk about them at all.
We should continue to talk about things like open source, self hosted software, digital sovereignty, defeating DRM, surveillance, and sousveillance and the real world reasons why these things matter.
We shouldn’t let people with brainrot stop us from talking about these very important things.
I'm Canadian too. You can tapk about these things everywhere else. There are political discussions that fit this website - as the ones you listed - but regular US news belong elsewhere.
This might be an open door, but I use the amazing HN-reader app called Hack which offers a filter that hides posts via a list of keywords you can manage. Of course some false negatives happen this way, but I don't mind about that.
Front page consists of 30 links. If one of those 30 is related to politics I don't see the problem. Just don't click on it.
Right now I see two posts about Rust (don't program in it, don't care), Kyber is hiring (retired, not interested in a job), etc. That's fine though, I just don't visit those links/comments.
> If one of those 30 is related to politics I don't see the problem. Just don't click on it.
I think it's a fair issue for people trying to avoid triggering news topics. Sometimes the headlines can be really inflammatory. Avoiding them might be feasible for you and me but may be tougher for others. For example, the top post right now is titled, "ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants", which is tricky because it is tech related and straddles the line of politics and tech. But I can see how someone might get triggered by reading that. Telling someone, "Just don't click on it", may be akin to telling an alcoholic, "Just don't drink that poured beer" in this case.
It would be nice if you could unsubscribe from certain tags like you can on Tildes. That way, you would have slight control over what you see while allowing others to keep what they want to see.
I like the idea of tags and filtering.
I thought the question was about you reading the news, not about you preventing everyone else from reading the news.
Surely the answer is, when you see news related keywords in an article title, to simply not click through. Same as when there’s so bit of technology or corporation that doesn’t interest you.
I believe that this space was created with a purpose and a set of guidelines. Some news are off-topic in that space. You can't scream in a library and tell people they should just wear earplugs if they don't like it.
OK well, it's been my experience that even well informed people from around the world do not understand a lot of American news, so cutting down on it probably doesn't help the nuance building. Aside from that there are a lot of Americans on HN, it's reasonable that they expect to be able to discuss what effects them.
I haven't really noticed politics of other countries get flagged that much, does it? Other than stuff that looks like propaganda from one country against another, that seems to get quickly flagged.
Finally I don't know what makes you think that HN is an unrelated to American politics forum, given that the guidelines of what the forum is for is quite lax.
Do you think maybe people from around the world dont necessarily care? The USA is not the center of the universe. If its tech related cool, otherwise let people find it somewhere else if they want it? Personally as a brit it does impact me quite a lot, so I try to keep up to date, but expecting the world to care about US news is kind of egomaniacal.
the last bit of my post should have indicated that while tech related things do tend to have a predominant position on HN, tech is not the sole purpose of the forum.
Currently on the front page I see three stories that are not tech related, if I expand the definition of tech to include anything math or science related, there is really only one story, ironically this one that you posted in.
Often however I can find as many as 6 stories on the front page that are not tech and not any politics, as HN also handles art, history, and writing quite well.
But for some reason you seem to think it's a place for tech, and American politics should be kept out, which I find somewhat funny.
It sounds like he touched a nerve but I don't think the comment to which you replied was suggesting it's everyone's duty to follow American politics, and complaining that we're egomaniacs because we discuss such topics here is akin to me whining that Panorama[1] on BBC One devotes too much time to the royals. In America, we have a common piece of advice for avoiding that problem, popularized by one of our past presidents (very different from the guy somehow in office today). It goes, "if you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen."
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panorama_(British_TV_programme
also I'm not sure why you think I expect the world to care about US news or why you would use the word egomaniacal, as it should be clear from my original post that I am not American.
> it's been my experience that even well informed people from around the world do not understand a lot of American news
I do not care to understand American news. I don't give a fuck. I follow your politics in the same way I watch a circus, but I do not need to "understand" it.
I second that and I think the HN moderation (@dang) here should do a better job keeping things on topic. That is actually super important because HN will eventually just be another reddit. Quality of conversation here has been deteriorating already significantly in the past years due to more and more people with insignificant curiosity about technology and science but all the more interest for engaging in pointless political debates.
There are other platforms for discussing Trump and his shenanigans. Reddit for example.
This comment is specifically called out as a “do not” in the HN guidelines.
It’s the very last line:
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
FWIW, dang et al do a great job and don’t deserve this slander.
PS: you were the first person I saw mention that politician’s name in this thread
Reddit is a shit platform for discussing politics. The users on this site have much more interesting things to say about politics from my experience.
If the last couple of weeks are anything to go by, I'd strongly argue the quality of discourse on any ICE/Trump/Tariffs-related topics have been at exactly Reddit-level, along with the most upvoted opinions mirroring those on Reddit almost to a tee.
I vaguely remember checking one of those ICE posts out the other day, and there was not a single comment going against the grain that was neither flagged nor heavily downvoted, out of over a hundred. Nuance/dissent wasn't even vaguely on the cards.
I don't know what your definition of Reddit-like is, but that's mine.
Nuanced understanding of a thing does not necessary ends up with opinion in the middle. Sometimes, understanding the nuance will make you walk away with "yep, this is bad and dangerous" conclusion.
Overwhelming majority of people concluding that shooting protesters to back or head is a bad thing does not imply lack of nuance or low quality of the discussion. Overwhelming majority of people concluding that political repressions and fear based government are bad thing does not not imply lack of nuance or low quality of the discussion either.
The both sides and truth in the middle knee jerk is does not represent nuance or meaningful discussion. It frequently muddles nuances, creates false equivalences and makes the discussion loose the substance.
Reddit comments would focus on the headline—essentially confirming they never read the article. And of course add a sprinkling of "Cheeto Emperor" or whatever. I've not seen that (that wasn't also then heavily "disappeared" on HN).
Regarding the past couple of weeks, I think it's rather difficult to find nuance when we all saw the videos of protesters being killed by a federal police force. Anyone trying to take the Administration's side is, I imagine, going to come across as shrill.
On the more nuanced political issues though I have been happy to see opposing viewpoints well reasoned—even when I disagreed with them. There was a time when reddit was young that you might have found the same level of discussions.
> Nuance/dissent wasn't even vaguely on the cards.
Not all topics are nuanced when discussed by an educated, well-intended audience. Is the world flat? Does evolution lead to speciation? Dissent is for the sake of dissent, and nothing else.
I've largely stopped commenting here because I feel the community is broken. There's definitely truth to what you say, that an educated audience can have a consensus. But one thing makes the HN community (and many Reddit communities) particularly bad: A lot of these threads have repetitive comments with insults or silly name calling get upvoted. Even if consensus is around the earth being round, there's no need to pettily insult flat earthers. We just ignore them and move on leaving their content to languish at the bottom. On the other hand these threads bring a lot of childish insults that get upvoted just because they hit the right buttons.
This to me is one (of many) sign that the community here cannot healthily discuss these topics. IMO the community here isn't healthy at all. That's why I don't post here much anymore. It's a sign to me that too many discussions in this community are about seeking emotional catharsis. And I'm sorry but for my own mental health, I'm not going to listen to someone else's panic attack resulting from political uncertainty.
I feel for dang and tomhow. It seems that most of their work is doing emotional labor. And emotional labor can grind a person down quickly.
Some topics can't be ignored. Vaccine effectiveness, for example, require a consensus from a large fraction of the population. That larger societal consensus begins with discussion in smaller subsets, of which HN is one.
Agreed. HN has proven time and time again that it is incapable of having a good discussion on politics, or at least American politics. The threads are always chock full of flamebait, outgroup-bashing, and unwillingness to consider other points of view. I flag every single post I see about American politics at this point because they are always, without fail, extremely low quality threads.
On reddit they used to say "the down vote is not a disagree button" but that's not the case here. I've been specifically corrected when I assumed that.
So if the prevailing opinion is that ice is committing murder, it makes sense a contrary comment would be heavily down voted.
I agree that hn is heavily liberal and holds a lot of the toxic leftist anti-thought patterns that are prevalent on reddit. But I think it's more of a symptom of the country and perhaps the West being wound-up over "things".
I sympathize, and the attitude may be annoying, but you've got to realize you can not bury your head in the sand about the global rise in fascism, nor the fact that what happens in America affects the entire world. Imagine if you were to transfer your comment back to WWII era, perhaps you're French and you're saying that you're tired of hearing about this little kerfuffle between Germany and Austria... well, clearly the disinterest did not pay off.
I read their comment and at no point did I get the impression they were burying their head in the sand.
They explicitly stated they knew where to read / hear about US politics and did not see the need to have that news domain echoed across every forum.
They may be aware of it, but others who frequent this particular forum may have HN as THEIR source. When someone like the above commenter tries to gatekeep areas where discussion, particularly of things like fascism or other forms of oppression, takes place, it only serves and furthers the goals of the oppressor. There is no domain of life which is not intrinsically political. When we act like there is -- such as when we pretend politics should be off the table for discussion -- we are simply ceding ground, casting away our part in the story, and abdicating our responsibility to take that part seriously.
> There is no domain of life which is not intrinsically political.
There are a great many such domains, and the insistence that everything is political is one of the chief problems with modern society. We can, and should, be able to enjoy some things together without bringing up bickering and strife. If you drag politics into a politics free zone you aren't taking responsibility for anything, you are just being a jerk.
Whatever domain you think is apolitical is political because bad politics can happen anywhere and ruin the thing you love.
Get it? Bad people in power = you don't get to do the things you love, at some point.
Do you also believe you should discuss every other topic under the sun in the belief that not discussing it is "ceding ground" to a viewpoint or action of others?
It would seem that in your view, we should be discussing all things at all times due to this "oppressor" mindset.
This simply cannot be true.
You're clearly being facetious. I will simply say that the rise of Naziism/Authoritarianism in the west is a preeminent threat to all human beings on the planet, especially when the king of all nazis has access to the nuclear missiles. It obviously demands a sense of urgency that other topics don't.
If you disagree with that, be explicit about exactly what part.
“global rise in fascism” implies a baseline ... when was fascism declining exactly? curious what point you're measuring this rise from
GP hinted at that if you read the rest of their comment, but it took a serious nose-dive during the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, and kinda petered out with Franco.
That’s not an answer, it’s historical hand waving .. "global rise in fascism" it seems .. lol
If you are really interested in data, you might check out the Freedom House website. They have been rating countries around the world on things like free elections and civil rights since 1973, and their take is that things have been going downhill since about 2006, with countries becoming more autocratic.
Interesting. They seem to be a D.C based NGO .. but i'll check them out.
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> But I’m grateful for the people who do follow the news, read it, protest against the bullshit, and participate more in the democratic process than I do.
This is a completely human response to the horrible things happening the world both domestic and abroad.
It’s also history repeating itself: doing nothing when bad things are happening in our communities is what allows them to happen.
Think what the villages around the concentration camps must have known and yet did nothing.
Sure you could just focus on tech. You alone can’t stop Donald Trump or Stephen Miller from their racist move toward autocracy usurping norms and the world order … but you can join in with others who are trying to make a difference.
Apathy is a human emotion to such dire things. But we are better than that.
"doing nothing when bad things are happening in our communities is what allows them to happen…"
Sounds familiar. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (Attribution appears to be a matter of debate.)
> Think what the villages around the concentration camps must have known and yet did nothing.
If you mean extermination camps, they knew. They were also part of occupied, conquered and heavily terrorized lands. They occasionally did something, terrorist attack against Germans here and there, usually retaliated against by killing a lot of random citizens. Usually motivated by plight of own people.
Extermination camps were located in Poland - German plans involved moving away and killing all Polish, so that they can be replaced by Germans. Germans seen Jews as primary danger to be exterminated fast, Slavic as secondary lower value being to be exterminated slowly in time. Polish army lost the war. And random villagers were not in position to do anything about the highly violent occupying army.
(And yes, Jews were at danger of being denounced by anti semitic locals too. Turned out one could be subject of racial oppression and being oppressor himself).
That’s what I meant yes. Then we are weaker and less brave than they. DHS is kicking in doors and jailing children and people are being killed in the streets and there’s not mass rioting in the streets or anything.
With the news being so biased it could very well make you less able to participate in democracy effectively.
Maybe the villages around concentration camps did nothing because they were consuming nazi propaganda.
Contrasted to that they had the smell of the furnaces. And we have first hand video of citizens being shot by DHS.
Anyone downvoting this is either ostrich or a fan of Trump.
When the world is on fire and people are suffering, we have a moral obligation to be aware of it and take part in the healing. To turn off your access to the media is a temporary solution that may well be justified in the short term, but you do not have the luxury of forgoing your part in this world, because if you do, it will burn all the way to your doorstep.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXgWZyb_HgE
If you already have a prepared list then fair enough, but what are you personally doing to take part in the healing of society that consuming mainstream news media helps with? The person you're replying to hasn't said they live as a hermit and don't engage in any part of their local society.
I fully agree that it all seems fucked and there is no point in following anything other than specific tech stuff I'm interested in. Anything else actually important someone else in my life will probably mention it to me. Or the explosion will vaporise me and knowing it's coming won't have helped much.
I'm not necessarily advocating for "consuming mainstream news," more for "not unplugging from discourse." Those can go together, but they don't have to. We still have a responsibility to know what's going on in the world even if we reject certain means of receiving that information.
> When the world is on fire and people are suffering
The problem is that the world is always on fire and people are always suffering.
Especially so because now we hear about the whole world’s problems, and no matter how peaceful a state the world is in there’s always a war or something happening somewhere. It’s been like that for all of human history and I don’t expect it to change any time soon.
I don’t think it’s healthy to live your whole live hearing about these problems that you have no ability to affect at all. In my experience it only has negative effects on your life and whether you’re tapped into the real time news feed or not, it doesn’t actually change these events in any way.
You can still be a proponent of change and discuss these changes with local politicians and what not without being on a 24 hour news IV.
However, looking at the current political climate in my own country, I too have lost faith in them solving local and global issues. When the people I can vote for don't actually solve pressing societal problems, then what's the point? Now factor in the influence of people in large countries that are in power that I can't even vote for...
There is a glimmer of hope that the EU now seems to have finally found some balls somewhere though, with their response to the Greenland situation. Maybe they've finally learned that a strategy of appeasement does not work for strongmen in power (hey, that sounds familiar...)
I completely understand why, but on the other hand democracy relies on citizens being informed about what's happening. The risk is that one day, you wake up and there is no democracy any more.
Reading the news and being informed are two separate things. Being an informed citizen, the kind that democracies need to survive, also requires 1) being informed of history and 2) understanding issues in depth.
People who consume a lot of news tend to have very shallow understanding of a broad range of current events. Worse they tend to be passive receivers of news instead of active seekers of information with intent to understand the world.
As a result, they are very susceptible to manipulation through selection of what makes the news they tend to consume. They become passive pawns in political power struggles.
I'd like to get a little pedantic here and suggest it's not reading the news that's so problematic, it's 1) watching it, and 2) scrolling it. Not that print can't be effective propaganda, but it's less optimized to the task than 1 and 2. The passive pawns can't get enough of either.
Yes that’s a good point.
On one hand I can see where you can draw this argument from. But on the other hand I don't think daily consumption of the huge quantity of news that exists is necessary for having a decent political opinion, especially given that most news is inflammatory junk (at least in my country). I just don't need a 5 page breakdown of every single event that some corpo decided to shove down our throats.
Also - and maybe I'm naive for this - I don't really need news to inform my political opinion because the current state of affairs is so far from my ideal world. Like no matter what could reasonably occur in the news, I still know who I'm voting for on polling day.
Yes. "The news" isn't information. It's just junk food for the mind.
There's nothing in the daily news cycle that is helpful for you, whilst there's lots that is bad for you.
There are other better ways to stay informed than to follow "the news".
> I completely understand why, but on the other hand democracy relies on citizens being informed about what's happening.
The point being made by the author is that "following the news" nowadays has nothing to do with being informed. Instead, it became about being constantly bombarded by a barrage of noise and nonsense to constantly grab your attention.
So instead, by finding a monthly publication giving him an overview of the local, European and world news, the author is looking for a filter removing all the unnecessary noise. And the month granularity should be more than enough to allow him to be informed about important changes.
I completely agree. The author is incredibly naive on the "I asked myself how much of this actually affects my daily life". If there's one thing that absolutely affects your life, it's politics. Maybe not today, and maybe not immediately in a meaningful way, but it will affect you.
I completely disagree. The past 50-70yr of "people ought to care and be involved" type sentiment has resulted in mostly only the people who have nothing better to do and no serious problems having an outsize effect and in some subject areas completely dominating the political discourse to the detriment of literally everyone else and western society generally.
You mangled Jefferson a bit. He wrote about education, not news. He didn't imagine the the non-stop firehose of slop and advertising and propaganda we endure and call news. What passes for news today describes the opposite of critical thinking and education.
No evidence supports your sentiment. Find an example of democracy that arose from citizens "being informed about what's happening." The Athenians limited democratic participation to a small educated elite. The American Founders had the same instinct, excluding more people than they included.
Demoracy dies in front of our eyes right now, in the USA, the most media-saturated culture in history. You might blame that on an ignorant and uncritical population. You might call them uninformed, or misinformed. As Jefferson understood the problem doesn't come from people not reading the news, but rather people not educated enough to understand, think critically, or even care.
I feel like this, I honestly wish newspapers weren't bunk and there was a good "week in review" way to get the news. I find myself Doom scrolling to much.
The fact that this is downvoted really says it all. "I don't read the news" is pretty much dependent on one's profession being insulated from changing events. Which is not surprising why it's a popular opinion amongst technocrats that would rather not have democracy in the first place.
Excerpt from link:
Elections happen even less frequently than this. If your democracy disintegrates with less than a few months of warning, you were probably invaded and noticed even without the news; At this point, that would probably lead to a civil emergency notification on your phone, and by design that happens even without any apps installed.As we said in the UK in my childhood, "Today’s news is tomorrow’s chip* paper".
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_and_chips
In October 2024 I would not have guessed that we'd ever see masked agents killing people on the streets of major US cities, or the US administration immediately accusing the victims of being armed terrorists. Things can change rapidly. By allowing things to get this bad, we have unfortunately forfeited our right to pretend things can't change rapidly. Let's plug in; fix this situation; and then folks can go back to ignoring the news.
Just because news orgs are incentivized to be controversial and attention-seeking doesn’t mean that the world isn’t changing rapidly.
Personally I think once a week magazines / reviews are a good compromise. I’m not sure how useful reading 3 month old news will be.
> on one's profession being insulated
Even this is privilege. Try "one's identity".
Last year, legal immigrants were fine. Today, their kids are kidnapped and used as bait to take them to Alcatraz. And that's not even the identity I'm mostly referring to.
Very cool stance OOP, thank you for identifying yourself as the type of centrist heaven will reject at the gate and angels will never get tired of the reaction to the shrug.
I'm not sure it's a good idea to be intellectually dishonest if you care about seeing the change you want to see.
Kidnapping kids is what they are doing?
Can't wait for your apocalyptic cult to wither and be forgotten.
Traditionally, the news industry has been divided into tabloids, which were more sensationalist and aimed at a less sophisticated readership, and broadsheets, which were more analytical and aimed at a more sophisticated readership. From a business perspective, the articles and opinion pieces were just bait to draw in a particular class of reader; the real money came from advertising to those particular classes of reader.
The web has destroyed that business model, because the news industry now controls far less advertising space, so there is no longer enough advertising revenue to support quality journalism. The broadsheets are in real financial trouble, and most have turned to tabloid-style articles (albeit ones that promote more sophisticated worldviews) in order to pull in those social-media clicks.
I find myself increasingly interested in publications like The Economist and The Financial Times, simply because their readerships have financial interest in actually knowing what's going on in the world, and so they can charge a subscription price that supports quality journalism.
The WSJ effectively became a lifestyle tabloid. Its devolution has been shocking.
My entire existence is politically controversial. I pretty much have to at least be aware of recent political developments since they could affect my ability to live as myself
Then why read news and not directly read the new laws and regulations that were voted and passed, or new proposed laws under discussion?
https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...
Because not everything is done as EU law. Frequently its an executive order or a directive passed down from national minister or other govt official to their branch or other branches to make their base happy at expense of people currently blamed for govt’s failures.
Eg. no law in Poland regulates legal gender change process. But there is a series of directves for courts on how this should be addressed issued by whoever is in the govt at the moment. One govt issued a directive that those are low prority, other that spouse and children should have a power to veto, another that actually those are high priority and then govt-appointed judges in the supreme court decided to veto the veto and implement new procedure altogether. And none of this is in the law - just directives for judges from pliticans and higher judges.
1) So we should just read the news?
2) It was just an example. Each person should study their aplicable law-making process.
Threats are not necessarily originating from laws or their execution. And not everyone has the time to read all laws, or is able to fully understand them and their impact on your well-being.
It probably takes less time to read those laws than it does to follow the hyperbole pushed by the media. Read them, discuss them with others - like-minded as well as those with a different view - and try to form your own opinions. If you rely on the media to curate your opinions you're just being groomed by one party or the other. In that case at least follow both the media which you most often agree with as well as those which you disagree and try to find out the truth behind the half-truths and lies pushed by them.
News gives you a heads up on what could be coming before laws were passed, or overall sentiment of the population or the politicians. Sometimes it's not about new laws, but about new interpretations, enforcements, court rulings etc.
There's way too much going on to follow all of it, and most of the important stuff isn't written down. By the time the text of bills is available, the politicians and influencers have been discussing things for a long time and the opportunity to do anything about it is nearly gone.
Perhaps we could pay people to follow important topics, politicians, important lobbyists and see what they're doing and claiming they want to do. They could send us summaries to save us time.
We could call those people journalists.
But then, some rich people could pay them more to focus on certain subjects and ignore others.
Because it doesn't give you the Zeitgeist?
Anti-LGBT zones in Poland were not officially introduced via state law.
Neither were out bishops speaking about rainbow disease and calling us all ideology, not people.
You are privileged if you can afford to only rely on official sources.
Because I live in the UK, and we aren't part of the EU anymore
i agree, it's probably comfortable to "not read the news" or "not be into politics" or whatever, except when politics is into you
Your entire existence? That sounds kind of hyperbolic, unless you're being targeted by genocide.
> Your entire existence? That sounds kind of hyperbolic
In the USA today (and many other places, but I'm in the US), anyone of any kind of minority is the target of beatings, kidnappings and possibly public executions by the government right now. Not exactly something you can ignore.
That is not remotely true. We can have a discussion about the government's excesses, but in no way is everyone of all minorities subject to such things. The vast majority of people in the US, minority or otherwise, are living their lives peacefully without any sort of threat hanging over them.
I'm trans. I live in the UK. I know it's not as bad as some middle eastern countries, but I'm still being actively legislated against
Unless there are laws proposing to execute trans people (which I very much doubt but I'm not exactly following UK politics), your "entire existence" is not up for debate. Saying so is just a hyperbole which muddies the waters.
Do you mean the Supreme Court case last year? I thought that just covered interpretation of equalities law for single-sex exemptions, not actively legislating against anyone.
Tell me you're in majority without saying you're in majority.
I don't think mainstream news is news anymore, its just become pseudo high brow reality tv with various organizations panhandling for your attention with whatever outrageous thing they can. There is that exercise of looking at the headlines from a month ago and realizing that most of them didn't matter at all or had very little effect on ones daily life. Its no wonder things are getting more extreme when every news outlet is falling over each other to farm that engagement.
What a privilege, what a luxury, to be able to turn a blind eye to all the injustice that's currently happening in the world...
Sure, do what you want, ignore news if that makes you feel better, but do realise for many, they are not afforded this kind of luxury.
I hear you, but spending an hour to research every name on the ballot come election time will make you better informed than most people.
If you want to do more, you can find some protests to participate in. Or do something other than protest like clean a local park or feed hungry people.
If I spend 3 hours on a random Tuesday consuming the news, that doesn't help anyone. It does the opposite; it makes me less able to focus, and makes me have less personal power and discipline to affect change in the world.
The consequences are exactly the same, unless you hold an enormously influential platform.
Maybe, but some groups are banking on you having "news fatigue". So maybe they don't feel that way. And doing it in spite of them is something that balances out my anxiety for me.
So the third party gets annoyed either way? Gee I wonder why we see posts like this
What good is awareness without action?
What good is awareness without action? Things happening across the ocean are just out of scope.
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I keep reading this point of view, that not being glued to the news is "privilege".
I completely disagree.
Refreshing your feed all day long, getting angry at all the news, does not make someone superior. I'm not going to travel to support the iranian uprising, or going hide illegal immigrants in a Minneapolis basement, and it is likely that neither are you. So the end result is the same, except the person consuming and reacting to the news is wasting more time. Worst, they become radicalized and are now part of the extremism that keep being pushed.
I research policy and vote when asked. In between, there's too much going on in my life to spend it with daily news
Billionaires and/or other oligarchic dictators love it when the zone is flooded, consent is manufactured, the people are divided and conquered, and the people no longer pay attention to meaningful signals nor travesties. This gives them maximum power when the people ignore everything and obey in advance or suffer from learned helplessness.
I come from one of the most disturbed and violent states in India. During high school and college, I worked with a few local Newspaper Publishers, finishing up layouts in Aldus PageMaker. Along with the reporters, I was involved in many parts of the final decisions that made the news mellowed/changed when printed in the Paper in the morning, making it more consumable for readers. I have seen photos of bloodshed and mutilations that trained my brain to normalize rotten.com in later years of my life. The ones printed in the morning paper were always curated; the ones that got away unprinted were things we would keep under key and lock.
More than a decade ago, I stopped following general news and learn about things asynchronously. However, I had picked up a few topics that I like to follow and do follow them. Since the Pandemic, I had settled on just a few niche areas of Tech and Science to follow — which, of course, quite a few of them land on Hacker News when I submit them.
Around the end of 2025, I picked up the actual printed Physical Newspaper again. A lot of the news seems like yesterday’s Jam to me. I’m going to continue reading the newspaper, Slow and Smooth, picking the ones I want to read and ignoring everything else.
https://brajeshwar.com/2026/newspaper/
I think it’s not news that’s the problem. It’s the sources of news are often biased and spend very little time explaining events in context. I much prefer an hour long news program or multi-page article that details events and perspectives going years into the past. We have a surprising large amount of influence on events around the world. Everything from the companies you support to your politics can vastly change world events.
I really dislike the notion that events outside of your country are somehow not important.
Once you start noticing how often you see content that references e.g. anything that's happening in the US right now (I'm in the UK), you realise how 'news' is everywhere.
If you go on reddit, unless you've curated your subreddits and never touch /all or /popular, it's very heavy with 'news'. The Google app, a left-swipe by default on your Android phone is all 'news'. Twxtter/Bluesky/etc. are full of news. Avoiding news entirely is almost impossible on today's internet.
I have had success with this approach too, but key to all this is being careful about where you go online to minimise exposure. These days I don't use any 'social media' platforms, but I do visit HN and BBC news (both of which are of higher quality than most places, and crucially only have a few stories on a typical day - the rate of new content is low). This way I stay informed without falling down rabbit holes about every twist and turn of every (mostly awful/depressing) thing happening in the World.
There's two kinds of news I read, both of which I've found give a "good enough" / "middle ground" picture of things.
1) Financial news, specifically the Financial Times - middle, Bloomberg - slightly left leaning, and the Economist, slightly right leaning. I've found that they have incentives to keep their news as close to just presenting the pure information as possible, as their readers are often making investment decisions based on the quality of the information, resulting in wanting zero "spin". This isn't the case for the NYT or WSJ, which have an incentive misalignment.
2) Anything that shows up on Hacker News. I trust that if something is important enough to get posted here (and make the front page), then I should probably be aware of it. The comments are for the most part measured, analytical, and thought-provoking.
I came to a similar realisation about world news a few years ago and live a much less stressful life now. Especially since most of the news was about the US, and I don't even live there and there's nothing I can do about it. If something really important happens, eventually I find out from friends or family.
Same when it comes to staying on top of tech news -- almost everything is a flash in the pan. I used to bookmark cool new products, never revisit them, and then a year later realise half of the links are now dead.
One thing I realised though is I still need to mindlessly browse an endless feed every once in a while for some downtime. One way or another I'll want to fill that time with something, so it's a question of being mindful what goes in it. So my drugs of choice are Hacker News, and carefully curated YouTube subscriptions.
This is a reasonable choice, but of course also one that is only people who can be pretty confident of not being personally affected by newsworthy events.
I think if it's stressing you out then it's fair to step back from reading the news for a bit. It's still worth at least trying to form an understanding and an opinion on various issues - whether local, regional or international - if you're going to be voting or even just talking about them with friends and family.
There is a great book about this from Rolf Dobelli "Stop Reading The News" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48581422-stop-reading-th...
At my cousin’s company there are TV’s in the lobby.
They used to show news channels.
He said clients would come in all stressed out. So they changed to a home improvement channel.
The one featuring Tim Allen? Or is there an actual channel with home improvements in the USA?
https://www.hgtv.com/shows/tv-schedule
"Home & Garden Television". Lots of shows about flipping houses, etc.
It used to be far more instructional (Julia Child-esque) before it and Food Network got swept up in the reality TV craze. It still has the "bones" of its former self though.
We don't walk on the street picking random things from the ground and putting them in our mouth, right?
So we shouldn't do the same with things we read on the internet and our brain.
I walk around the streets picking up any folding currency I see, so I do the same as I go around the internet picking up any intriguing news stories.
The news is what's new, uncommon, strange, interesting. Shiny, attractive, shocking, raging: dopamine raising and cortisol antagonising. The news doesn't describe our actual lives. But the news does sometimes contain information relevant to our lives!
I find I will hear about the relevant things from people and events around me, whether or not I follow the news. The news doesn't have any actual bearing on my life but the news does have a few stories that do have bearing.
So theres no downside of not following the news. I will hear what I need to and want to hear about from people around me or other sources.
Some think that in not consuming what they think I should consume, that this is a morally wrong thing to do. They will be personally offended, how can they ignore my story? There is a case that if we all stopped following the news then how can the other sources inform us, so there would still be a benefit to reporting...
Consider two anthropologists examining a culture. One only has remote access to every news source the culture produces for itself, the other can only talk face to face with people. Which one will understand the people more?
The author of this piece has set himself on a course towards lower blood pressure, better world outlook, and better chances of longevity. If you meet him on the street, he will probably be smiling, this year or thirty years from now.
Smart guy.
I try to balance being informed and ignoring the mostly irrelevant hot topics du jour.
My approach:
* world: weekly Economist coverage of world/biz/general topics (audio via app) - keeps me generally up to date
* local: daily digest mail of notable news from yesterday from my country (which is too insignificant to appear in the Economist); scraped from multiple sources, digest by an LLM
* Hacker News digest mail, top 50 posts from the previous day (drawback is I'm often late to the discussion, like with this one, but can also be a blessing)
* ArsTechnica digest - used to be a subscriber but nowadays just grab new article links once a day
I read the digests as my "morning paper", and skip most of the links there (from ~100 in total I end up reading ~10), but am still "in the loop"
I also find about stuff in conversations with friends and social media (x/bsky/li for me). I also try to minimize the latter, but that's for another comment :)
Don't worry about things you can't change.
That said, you do notice it when the currency crashes.
I've cut a lot of news out for mental health reasons. I don't want to know all the awful shit that's going on. Helps a lot.
I used to do this for maybe two to six weeks at a stretch. It's become more of a default state, now. I don't know if or when that will change, but I'm extremely cynical so…
I'd recommend anyone who is distressed about the state of things and, (this is key) fortunate enough not to be at risk by not paying attention, unplug and see how it goes. I only read tech news and blogs and it's improved my state of mind. It might work for you, too.
I subscribe to this model as well, with the caveat that I try to only look at local news to my city and my field. I can’t do anything about the nonsense at a national level, I can do my part in the local context.
I’ve been focusing more on filtered news.
In particular LLM summaries are great for this. Introduces risk of hallucinations which is not awesome, but it does tend to neutralise the rage bait tone and tricks that are pervasive these days. Tradeoff but one that has been working for me
Rolf Dobelli wrote an excellent book on this topic called "Stop Reading the News: A Manifesto for a Happier, Calmer and Wiser Life". He addresses directly many of the objections raised in these comments.
I have set up ntfy on a Pi at home, and use it to send me Android notifications of headlines every morning.
This is by a bash script in a cron job that reads RSS feeds and grabs the headlines and links to articles, so I can get a flurry of tech news and general news headlines without having to go into detail on each topic (which in news terms is typically slanted with some sort of bias).
So I can stay up to date on general happenings, speedily. It is fairly simple to set up - a LLM will write a suitable bash script to parse RSS XML and grab links and headlines in moments.
I used to work in television and radio news back when the newscasters were often former newspaper men. I do not watch television news anymore (or radio for that matter).
To me it's just a long bitch fest now. They show stories about people bitchin' about somebody else or suggest that you should be bitchin' about it. If I want to hear people bitch at me I'll turn to my wife.
Well, good thing for him that it's only other people who will be affected by the things reported on in the news! And they don't add much value to his life, anyway.
I tried the same. 2 weeks after I started I attended a party where people mentioned that it was sad that Michael Jackson had died. I thought they were joking, but turned out they didn’t. It was in late June 2009. I started reading the news again.
But today I read them differently. I read news site, with some curation (e.g., settings for threshold for articles that comes up in various fields) together with a few favorite sites (e.g., HN)
Everyone should know that they can view HN posts ranked by activity without the flag filter through https://news.ycombinator.com/active
Personally, I see no reason that the active page shouldn't be added to the navigation menu above.
"I have watched TV twice in my life. I am frankly not terribly interested in TV anyway. Certainly I do not pretend that by simply refusing to keep up with the latest news I am therefore unaffected by what goes on, or free of it all. Certainly events happen and they effect me as they do other people. It is important for me to know about them too: but I refrain from trying to know them in their fresh condition as "news." When they reach me they have become slightly stale. I eat the same tragedies as others, but in the form of tasteless crusts. The news reaches me in the long run through books and magazines, and no longer as a stimulant. Living without news is like living without cigarettes (another peculiarity of the monastic life). The need for this habitual indulgence quickly disappears. So, when you hear news without the "need" to hear it, it treats you differently. And you treat it differently too." - Thomas Merton
> I am considering subscribing to a magazine that covers important events in Germany, the EU, or the world every few months
I've posted the same message so many time I could get banned but if you live in the UK then Private Eye is what you want here. It's every fortnight, very funny and a bastion of genuine journalism (see the Paul Foot Award they give out each year)
I used to have a subscription to Private Eye but cancelled it as it got so depressing from being too aware of all the corruption. Worse than browsing the news.
I think if the news feels unbearable, the problem may not be the information but the fact that reality is moving against the assumpftions on which the person has anchored their happiness ... environemt, relgion, polticial views etc etc ..
As that famous Mark Twain quote goes, "If you don't read the news, you're uninformed; if you do read the news, you're misinformed."
And these days, you're misinformed with a good dose of dramatic Hans-Zimmer-like soundtrack and visuals designed to evoke fear and outrage.
Aaron Swartz has a nice blog post about it[1].
It's been discussed several times on HN[2]. I had periods I go through without news. It's been harder to do that lately.
[1]: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
[2]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=i+hate+the+news
I've done somewhat similar for the same reasons.
I realised that if I exclusively read business news I can avoid a good amount of the fluff and sensationalism. I made a browser extension which pushes the headlines from Bloomberg, Financial times Euronews Business and a few others on to my new tab from their RSS, and it's more than enough to give me a nugget of what's going on in the world without being overloaded. 1 item per new tab.
End result is: I don't read the news, but I still know what's going on without the need for Social Media's hot take.
Sounds very interesting. Have you published this extension (or the source code)? I think I would like to try it out.
Yeah, it's available here https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/start-screen-a-busi....
Can't say it's the best extension in the world, but it scratches my own itch and I'm happy with it. Sometimes that's good enough.
Thanks :)
Does this count as news?
it is just noise that does not really matter for your life (and mine too). This is pretty-well described in "Antifragile" by Nassim Taleb, consider reading.
Different people have different levels of what matters. If I didn't read the news, I wouldn't know that my country would search my phone at airport and prosecute for acts it didn't like. Or which countries are safe for get together with family. Or that I may lose the chance to renew my passport in third country and have to urgently renew it, otherwise risking a trip to hostile homeland and potential residency permit issues.
I'd read a distant planet's news, from light years away, if it had a culture and I could see the latest updates.
I note that the complaint "I can't do anything about it" throws doubt on "it doesn't affect me". But both of those seem to me to miss the point, which is to get new ideas.
The news is one of those markets where the following is true:
1) a large number of people are dissatisfied with the current product
2) but aren’t willing to pay for an alternative which solves the problem in the ideal way (for them)
There have been dozens of attempts at weekly news summary newsletters, minimal news sites, etc. over the years. None ever seem to go anywhere because no one wants to pay for something they are deliberately deciding has little value.
It makes me think of budget airlines: constantly critiqued for being uncomfortable and using dark patterns to get every last dollar - yet people consistently just book the cheapest flight possible.
Like an ostrich in an 80s comic.
The Dutch term for the German 'neurgierig' is 'nieuwsgierig' which translates to 'greedy for news' and as such is even closer to the subject of this post. I also use an RSS reader - Nextcloud News - to follow the 'news' (including this here site, HN) and I sometimes feel the same about what is pushed by the legacy media and its more recent competition. Much of what is published is tailored to fit some political agenda, often a 'progressive' one for most of the legacy news media and - due to my conscious choices - a more 'conservative' one for the more recent counterparts. I made this choice to get a somewhat more balanced view of what actual facts the stuff published by 'left' and 'right' seems to be based on but... man, is it often tiring to see 'both' sides go on and on and on pushing their agendas.
Even more tiring is to see how useful idiots [1] happily take the propaganda pushed by the media and trumpet it as if it were pure gospel, often with dire consequences. Should I just quit following the legacy media and the more recent anti-dotes and try to live here in quiet and solitude on the farm? Well, no, I don't think I should. I will be confronted with te results of the media poisoning the minds of their victims the next time I go to a city and find the roads blocked by a crowd of people shouting inane slogans. Where did they get those from, what are they blathering about, why does this crowd of screechy weasels hollering about some supposed misdeed performed by some government somewhere far from here occupy the station? Almost invariably it comes down to the propaganda pushed by the media - nowadays usually some on-line version which is amplified up by the legacy dinosaurs and trumpeted by the other titles which are more often than not owned by the same conglomerate - which the useful idiots uncritically pick up and use as their guide star. I read this stuff because I want to know what ideas the media is trying to amplify and which they are attempting to suppress. I read it because I sometimes have to quench whatever fuse has been lit by them in the heads of my children. So, tiring as it is I'll keep the feeds running and try to follow my way through the mire of deceptions, half-truths, outright lies and other propaganda which is what goes for 'news'.
[1] https://wordhistories.net/2021/03/26/useful-idiot/
I also joined the club recently. Global newsfeeds from social media have become infested with AI slop, near constant Trump/ICE BS spam in addition to existing clickbait vids and ads. News media front pages are essentially Trump outlets and this guy puts out an insane amount of BS thrash that only ennervates and creates discord. There's not that much happening so blank pages are just filled with something to make it look like news. I'm no longer informed from all of this. It just feels like being a living spam folder.
I can relate and if I'm honest, I need to do this. I can't say I benefit from following the news, including tech news and forums like HN, every day.
I still want to be informed and be involved especially in matters that do impact me and the country I live in; I feel strongly about democracy and that rests on an educated and participatory citizenship. But I don't need to wade through shit every day to have enough of an understanding of it.
I like tech and I'm curious, but just today before reading this article I was thinking about how much do I really gain from this cursory reading on so many subjects (as one might find on HN), instead of using the time to more deeply dive into certain ones. At some point it can become a bunch of clutter that has little value.
(I already stopped watching TV news many years ago, and dropped Facebook and Reddit a few years ago as well. I'm mostly down to Instagram and HN, plus the NYT and a few magazines (MIT Tech Review, that one is excellent; Wired, was planning on dropped anyway; Atlantic, good but I don't need that much of it; The New Yorker has great longform every once in a while.)
We have an English word for it too. Neophile.
I think the only wise thing Elon Musk ever said was "Generally newspapers seem to try to answer the question, 'What is the worst thing that happened on the Earth today?'"
probably him
YouTube is the new news and TV replacement altogether.
It is not hard to filter out AI slop, stick with channels known for being true and unbiased, specially stick with independent journalists channel and known podcast.
Everything else is a lost cause, main stream media?? Suuuuuure
Social media, the more time spent at it, the more depressed and brain washed you get, just bad news after bad news. Ditch those and follow YouTube to notice a positive response, you keep up to date without feeling like WW3 is happening tomorrow.
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I've recently been trying to avoid news. Particularly US political news. Sadly for some reason blocking sites on my Eero router doesn't seem to work. Thankfully Facebook recently put up a modal dialog asking me to subscribe or accept personalised ads (pretty sure the GDPR explicitly forbids that but whatever, everyone is doing it), it's doing a good job of preventing me seeing the usual feed of news there. At some point I'll put PiHole on my NAS and take care of Reddit etc.
How timely
I wonder what one agenda in posting that right now would be, ehh?
And to think Americans used to take pride in being nation of freedom.
To be fair, not everything is someone's agenda. Indifference, ignorance and stupidity exist by their own. But hostile forces do like to multiply them.
You may not follow the news right until they start knocking on your door, or just obliterate your house in a rocket strike.
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Non participation is an exercise of one's freedom.
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I would suggest following the news with a delay, for example you can subscribe to a monthly publication like Le Monde Diplomatique[1] that'll give you a relatively fresh analysis of news but without the noise. They invite experts to contribute and give a saner perspective to world event, with more context.
[1] https://mondediplo.com/