News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less dep... by godelski on Thursday February 13, 2020 @05:35PM (#22322107)
May I suggest consuming news through text rather than video? In fact, the more boring the better.

I see a big issue is that the news is frequently emotive based. In some cases this is helpful, when terrible stuff is going on. Other cases it makes mundane things seem worse. Or it makes things that don't affect us and/or we have no control over emotionally important. The latter is particularly harmful, imo. A lot of these make you feel like you are more informed than you are, because you're highly emotionally invested. I think video really promotes the emotional investment.

But the boring stuff allows you to become emotionally invested in what __you__ care about. Then the lack of emotional forcing makes you feel less informed, so if you care you spend time finding out more. This prevents people from being "armchair researchers" and fighting.

Re:Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less dep... by PTOB on Thursday February 13, 2020 @05:51PM (#22322205)
Where do you get the boring stuff? Please, I'm drowning here.
Re:Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less dep... by godelski on Thursday February 13, 2020 @06:03PM (#22322282)
To be honest, most of the major news sources have the boring stuff. The actual issue is that what goes viral and is passed around are opinion articles. I particularly like Reuters, they seem more middle of the road in terms of bias. But I think one of the keys is to read from both sides. You don't have to agree with the side that you don't lean towards, but it is extremely helpful to know the content that those people are ingesting. If you want nuance, you really have to try to see things from other peoples' perspectives. This is pretty hard. I think being "so connected" this is actually more challenging, because it is easier to find your niche inside of a niche inside of a niche and stay there, instead of having to deal with different niches.
Re:Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less dep... by gen220 on Thursday February 13, 2020 @07:36PM (#22322838)
Short form, Reuters and AP. PBS NewsHour is excellent if you prefer an audiovisual presentation.

Personally, I find all of that to be too much of a firehouse, and prefer longer form reads.

For those, I’d recommend subscribing to physical copies of magazines (or digital copies of the physical copies).

Something about the pieces of paper or emails in my inbox beckons me to read. Some magazines (New Yorker, Economist, even WIRED) have first rate long form journalism.

They’ll usually have at least one substantial article that’s deeply or tangentially related to current news blurbs, so you stay “in the loop”.

Magazines are nice because they seem to respect the reader’s autonomy and intellectual curiosity, by avoiding tantrums, outrage, and diatribes, and focusing instead on nuance and themes. It’s a more literary way of digesting current events than twitter or what have you, and it can even be relaxing!

Re:Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less dep... by cbhl on Thursday February 13, 2020 @06:18PM (#22322359)
Audio also works well. I've been listening to the NPR News Now podcast, as well as NPR's Planet Money.

When I'm feeling a little more capacity for the news cycle, I might also listen to NPR's Up First, NYT's The Daily, and NPR's The Indicator.

Re:Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less dep... by pmichaud on Thursday February 13, 2020 @06:16PM (#22322343)
Reuters and AP are the news wire services from which most new networks get their news. They are both super boring and terse, and there are RSS feeds for both.
Re:Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less dep... by perl4ever on Saturday February 15, 2020 @07:50PM (#22339111)
Local papers?