Hacker News Reader

Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

> I asked my 16 year old nephew 6 months ago how he accesses the news. His answer: Snapchat.

I mean, I'm 29 and I get all my news from Twitter, Imgur, and HackerNews. Panders to a different demographic, but is ultimately just as bad.

Most news is garbage anyway. Designed to make you anxious so you'll buy more stuff. At least HackerNews doesn't have that motive so it's more interesting on average.

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>At least HackerNews doesn't have that motive so it's more interesting on average.

Didn't realize Y Combinator was a charity. HN most definitely exists to sell shit just like everything else. They're pretty good at obfuscating it but it's there all the same.

In Germany (and the same applies to many other countries as well) the majority of people watch public broadcast news every day. It's financed by tax money so there is no profit motive and it's reasonably unbiased. I think a major reason for the current political divide in the US is that both camps have their own sources of information.

From the perspective of a German who follows a lot of american news this seems to be exactly right. I would love to hear from someone originally from the US who follows German news/lives in Germany.

Interestingly there is -in my opinion- an unreasonably high number of people in Germany who are against paying for this state funded broadcast. I think many people don't realize how lucky we are that our media is not (consciously or unconsciously) driving us apart to generate more views/clicks etc.

Just because it doesn't have private shareholders doesn't mean there's no income motive. Executives want to maximize the money they can pay themselves regardless of whether the company distributes dividends.

That's true. I actually don't know how the incentives are structured for executives in the German broadcast but they seem to reward creating quality, unbiased news.

If you look at the most popular newspaper in Germany which is essentially a tabloid it's clear it's not because there is less demand for that kind of trash in Germany.

I'm going to question the reasonably unbiased claim. In the U.S. we have PBS and NPR which are both well left of center and never call into question the size of federal government. If your fundamental political persuasion focuses on individual freedom, responsibility and limited government then state run media is considered very dangerous.

For what it's worth, we do have PBS ("Public Broadcasting Service") over here, which is funded via a combination of taxes and donations. A lot of folks dismiss it as being "left-leaning", though.

The thing is, the crowd that gets their news from Snapchat would agree with you that most news is garbage. Which is why they get it on snap.

I love HN as much as you do, but the stories here equally pander to a demographic. It's just closer to ours.

It's important to distinguish between entertainment and news.

Do news outlets even make that distinction? Because I don't think they do. At least not in the broad sense of entertainment as "Content you consume despite complete lack of actionable information"

some news you find out and you're like "Holy shit, I gotta do X and Y and instantly change my behavior". Examples of such news are, "Tsunami barreling towards your city" or "Nukes detected en route to your town" or "Air raid incoming" or even "Draft starting for your target demographic". Or something more benign like "So and so VC is starting a fund for thing you're doing"

Most news, however, gets a reaction closer to "Oh, neat." or "That is outrageous! I must write a Facebook post about how this affects me so people don't forget that I exist in light o this tragedy". Examples of news like this: "Bowie dies" or "Terrorist attack in city 8000km away" or "US gets involved in yet another war that doesn't affect you" or benign things like "VC starts a fund for thing you have zero interest in"

> Most news, however, gets a reaction closer to "Oh, neat." or "That is outrageous! I must write a Facebook post about how this affects me so people don't forget that I exist in light o this tragedy".

Seems like getting most of ones news from "Twitter, Imgur, and HackerNews" would be the primary contributing factor to this myopic worldview.

The main reason I switched to "Twitter, Imgur, and HackerNews" was growing up with watching broadcast news every day. Never once did they report something actionable. Mostly manufactured outrage over things nobody cares about until they see them on the news and then suddenly it's a huge deal.

Here's a more thought out essay on the topic: https://blog.bufferapp.com/the-power-of-ignoring-mainstream-...

> News is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind.

> —Rolf Dobelli

And a nice quote from Thomas Jefferson on the topic of news:

> “I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.”

Why does information have to be immediately actionable? What happened to being generally informed and educated? Jefferson also said:

> > The cornerstone of democracy rests on the foundation of an educated electorate.

Celebrity gossip is attention spam, but terrorism and war seem extremely relevant to tax-paying citizens. The corresponding philosophical and ethical questions are also important to consider and debate, those discussions are what change our nation's policies (not elections).

I'll grant that cable news is largely fluff... "President tweets" turns into 8 hours of rehashing the same narrative with a dozen "correspondents" while ignoring the power grab by Venezuela's constituent assembly (interesting parallels in Turkey, and the US) or the progress of different legislation in Congress... but, low quality news still falls in a different category than the endless mindless Snaps and Imgur memes.

Dobelli is talking about that low-quality media: infotainment. The processing, sanitization, and refinement of news into bite-sized dopamine triggers. Hollow snippets that only serve to feed the Dunning–Kruger effect... magnified by commenting and social media, the worst of the worst.

My approach is just to cap the time spent on news. 2x 30 minutes a day I'll dedicate myself to reading news from reputable news agencies, often with a paid subscription, otherwise I just completely ignore news.

> Dobelli is talking about that low-quality media: infotainment.

Yep that's what I was getting at. Non actionable news/information is entertainment.

And I find that the "philosophical and ethical discussion" that comes out of most news is surprisingly shallow and mostly comprised of unchangeable predetermined beliefs and knee-jerk reactions.

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