> I don't read the news, mostly, why bother? It does much more harm than good.

It's weird that this is a minority opinion (I happen to agree with you). Some 20 years ago we lacked the ability to consume even 10% of the news we are exposed to today if we just open Twitter, and democracy wasn't collapsing.

(some argue we are in a worse spot today, though I disagree - strife does not equal inequality)

The cable news cycle combined with social media with the majority of people thinking that their opinion is worth something has led to some interesting results. I expect the next generation of people in the United States to mostly get over this bug in the system via selective apathy.

I... think it's important to know what's up. It especially helps to give a reason to participate in the electoral process.

But soooooo much political reporting nowadays is basically gossip columns. They talk a lot of inside baseball and completely neglect the "the thing happening is actually bad!" aspect. Instead of debating policy, people want to debate the optics of policies.

Cable news is awful about this, but I think newspapers are even worse with their opinion pages. People getting paid 6-digit salaries to just say what their opinion on a thing is! And of course with basically no fact checking. They're just bloggers!

Meanwhile the journalists twist themselves into knots to give the benefit of the doubt to the most cynical leaders we've had in decades. Unless one of them insults journalism, in which case it's a holy war. But if the discussion is just a policy position, there's no issue.

If I hadn’t gotten mildly addicted to Twitter (with my fairly well curated list of people I’m following) I’d not have spent the ~700 bucks to start my naturalization process so that I will finally have the right to vote after 34 years living here as a permanent resident (well it’ll be 35 since naturalization takes a while).

I realized that my running joke of the last 18 years: “I can’t vote, but at least I don’t have to do jury duty” is recklessly irresponsible and I will do the research and be an informed voter in every election for the rest of my life.

[edit: admittedly this was largely inspired by indisputable things that happened a little more than 2 years ago and the following aftermath, but my twitter feed was my window to them - I do not watch cable news]

Yeah I think that Twitter has been a major gateway drug to remember that Politics Matter.

But after you've reached that point, Twitter becomes the place where you read the same take 20 times over. Then you get the push notification from whatever news app you have installed on your phone.

There's a huge amount of diminishing returns to following journalists on Twitter if you're already convinced that stuff is important. But it sure helped to establish the feeling that everything is on fire (and.... kind of always have been but right now's not great)

> with the majority of people thinking that their opinion is worth something has led to some interesting results

What do you mean?

Everybody is shouting at each other about how right they are and not listening to what others are saying to try to understand their point of view. The net result being giant echo chambers clashing against one another and the media using that for fun and profit.

> My next step is to make a personal website with some contact details and a scraper script for the links in the HN top 30-40 that I can run as a cronjob.

About a year ago I was 30 minutes into creating exactly such a script, and then I found https://hckrnews.com, which lists all the posts that reach the frontpage (or are top 10/20/50%).

I do quite like hckrnews, though there's still not enough of a disconnect for me. The comment section is too juicy. I'm probably going to symlink the output of the script as a source for $HOME/.newsboat/urls [1]

[1] https://newsboat.org/

I do the same. The only reason for me keeping Hacker News and Reddit is that I often find more up to date information and more information then say Stack Overflow (e.g. site:reddit.com/r/golang <search terms>). Otherwise, I would unsubscribe and put them in `/etc/hosts` file.

I also don't read the news (who's the president? Kidding...), at least in the typical sense. My colleagues seemed to really be shocked when I told them that, but when I inquired why they could not give me a good reason. I only remember them saying to discuss current events. I figured if it's big enough deal and important enough I would hear about from other sources.

I read Ars Technica, Hacker News, and I am subscribed to a few Subreddits (Games, AnimeDubs, Vita, Nintendo, GameDev and related, but that's it). I have a multireddit for Programming, Startups, and Netflix/Amazon Prime movies/shows for when I need to put the computer down.

Heya, I run https://hndigest.com - you can configure it to email you the top n posts over a certain period (daily up to weekly). Check it out, it might suit your needs.

Another strategy that works for me is rather than cutting news entirely, strictly stop going on sites that are sectionalist/ overly politically biased.

Have you tried hckrnews.com? You can filter by top 10, 20, 50% of articles.