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Comment by clay_the_ripper | Hacker News Reader

Did the same thing about 4 years ago and haven’t looked back. I find though that a lot of people are actually offended by it since I have no clue what thing they and everyone else is outraged about. I get accused of not caring, being disengaged, blah blah blah. It’s difficult to explain to people who are still deep in outrage mode, so I mostly avoid taking about it.

My life is so much better since cutting out the news. I am happier, more focused and able to actually concentrate on the things that I care about.

I prefer to think about how I can positively impact people around me and my local community, rather than embracing the culture of outrage about things happening thousands of miles away that are ultimately irrelevant.

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I did the same 1-2 years ago, and haven't regretted it. Interestingly, I've experienced the same thing where others seem offended by decision, and I also get accused of being insular and "living in my own little bubble". I just don't get this though - what exactly am I losing out on?

Being stressed out and dying early is what you're losing out on. Also being in pain and unhappy.

Being stressed out and dying early is also a likely result for an apathetic population.

I do agree that paying too much attention to the crazy that’s going on is not constructive or healthy. But you can definitely overcorrect.

If you completely disconnect you have no data with which to make your decisions come election time. A lot of what’s happening in politics does affect you directly. Changes to tax code, the budget, deregulation of industries (e.g. net neutrality).

And some of it may not affect you directly but affects people in the communities you live in. A Supreme Court nominee had allegations of sexual assault and gambling problems brought against him. Regardless of what you believe, it behooves you to be aware that this is happening. If the accusations were true don’t you want to know? It affects the women in your life to have someone like that be given a lifelong appointment to the most powerful court of the land. If the accusations weren’t, wouldn’t that be important too?

If you’re taking a break to maintain sanity I can understand that. But if you’re simply shrugging your shoulders at what’s happening simply because it doesn’t affect you right now—and trust me, some of the policies this administration is adopting are having a big impact on some—then I think that’s a pretty shitty, selfish attitude to have.

> And some of it may not affect you directly but affects people in the communities you live in. A Supreme Court nominee had allegations of sexual assault and gambling problems brought against him. Regardless of what you believe, it behooves you to be aware that this is happening. If the accusations were true don’t you want to know? It affects the women in your life to have someone like that be given a lifelong appointment to the most powerful court of the land. If the accusations weren’t, wouldn’t that be important too?

This example is exactly why someone should ignore the news. This was pure partisan bickering and mud slinging. Not once during the whole episode were Kavanaugh's actual positions discussed. Just rumors, gossip, fighting and soundbites. No one came out ahead paying attention to this story.

I understand your frustration, but I think this logic is easily exploited. Part of democracy is keeping our elected officials in check. If we mentally check out whenever they put on a circus show, we’re rewarding bad behavior.

I see it more as by paying attention to the circus you’re rewarding bad behavior (circus creation). Being immune to the histrionics makes it harder to be exploited.

It works the other way too. No amount of leftist outrage managed to bring Trump to heel. Checking out of the news cycle and only getting involved when it seems to be particularly relevant seems like the saner strategy, particularly as our time and cognitive resources are the most precious ones we have.

Why blow it all on generating outrage when it'll just get manipulated into a bottom third talking point?

> If you completely disconnect you have no data with which to make your decisions come election time.

Nothing has happened in the last 10 years to change who I vote for. And this is the same for the majority of people.

How do you know?

Do you really need to read the news to know who to vote for given your views on those issues?

News is the here and now presentation of events (and basically press releases/packages), which one absolutely does not need to consume daily in order to do informed voting.

What you want to be reading is aggregate analysis, and quality articles of that kind are found on sites which mostly avoid feeding you the other bullshit. Publications like Economist, Atlantic, Politico, etc.

Publications like those you named are tuned to your particular brand of "bs" but they have just as much bias as publications you find distasteful. That is the state of our news these days. I can't think of a mainstream news org on that level that is without significant bias.

I really disagree with the consume daily part. I consume news most days, but why can't I just spend some time doing research on the various candidates and what they did over the past several years that was newsworthy in the few weeks immediately before an election? If anything I'd think that would be better as they won't have to worry about having forgotten some dick move some candidate pulled three years ago

The Supreme Court example isn't very good, because you can't act on the outcome in a sensible democratic way.

A better example would be news that brings X to attention, so you can voice concern to the government. Or in the case where politicians are the focus of attention, it can affect your voting choice.

E.g. the internet filter law proposal in Europe. It's not practical for me to review every individual piece of legislation, so I rely on journalists/news platforms to highlight the important bits. As a consequence of the MEP vote I have now blacklisted one political party I considered moderate before. They will never get a vote or a good word from me again, ever.

Other examples you could have mentioned are stuff like the Panama papers and Wikileaks. If I heard a local construction company was funneling money to tax havens, I'd email my municipality and/or IRS.

I think you can act in democratic ways. Like 1. donating 20 dollars to susan collin's opponent for instance 2. voting against your senator

I think the bigger thing is that it is a TORRENT that overwhelms.

Well, the good news is that you guys aren't losing out on it!

You're on HN. Which means you get your daily dose of "outrage porn" like anyone else. I think many people don't think of HN as, basically, a "News" site. With a large percentage of the front page dedicated to "outrage porn". "Big Tech Helping China." "US Workers Highly Taxed." Etc etc etc. And those are just the more, kind of, moderate examples. I think yesterday's: "San Francisco's Slow Motion Suicide" was an example that went a bit further. And there have been discussions on here that just tend to devolve into extremism relatively quickly. (I guess the San Fran post from yesterday devolved into extremism relatively quickly as well. But I suppose I'm talking about discussions that tend to devolve right away.)

At any rate, yeah, if we're on HN, we can't realistically claim to have sworn off news, or "outrage porn". We're just, kind of, comfortable with the "outrage porn" that we get from Hacker News. So much so that some of us, apparently, don't even recognize it as news, or "outrage porn".

This is a good point. However, I think the major difference is the proportion of the content that is "outrage porn". I would argue that HN has a notably lower proportion.

Just took a look at my main "Go to", the BBC.

It's difficult to tell, because the front page of BBC has so many more articles on it than the front page of HN, but the "outrage porn" proportion seems about equal to me. Right around 1/4 or 1/5 of the articles I would classify that way. Seems about the same as HN.

Just for context, at the moment on HN, I'd say these are the "news"-y and "outrage porn"-y posts on the front page.

"Amazon Workers Are Listening To What You Tell Alexa" - Obligatory "outrage porn" post for FAANG company. (Generally a minimum of one is always present on the front page.)

"Urgent Quest For Slower, Better News"

"Most Prestigious Journals Publishing Least Reliable Science"

"New Human Species Found In Philippines" - (Predictable descent into extreme views on evolution. No more "Out of Africa", all that "scientific evidence" stuff is nonsense.)

"Startup Stock Options - Good Deal Gone Bad"

"Logic of Political Survival"

And that doesn't even count the posts on the front page that are borderline.

For starters, I think you're being extremely cynical.

Second, unlike other news sources, HN tends to have moderate to high quality discussion. I come to HN because I tend to learn things and grow here. That's not to say that it's perfect of course, but I think you're being more than a bit dishonest when you compare HN to mainstream media news.

>> compare HN to mainstream media news

HN is a aggregator of (mainstream) media news. It is in a position where it should be able to achieve a better ratio between clickbait and non-clickbait than others. Parent suggested it doesn't. I agree. Huston, we have a problem.

Am I outraged over the fact? Not at all. Because I do not expect HN to be better than mainstream. And in fact it isn't. HN is just a different pie.

"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

It's not supposed to be an aggregator of mainstream news. Unfortunatley, it has become that.

> Second, unlike other news sources, HN tends to have moderate to high quality discussion.

I firmly oppose to this view. What you are perceiving as "moderate to high quality" is actually just the suppression of mean words, that is good by itself but does not equate to the quality.

I too classify about one fifth of the HN front page as "outrage porns"; they tend to be visibly biased and their discussions are significantly worse in my humble opinion. For that portion of HN I believe they are no better than the mainstream media. If you want remaining four fifths, good! But you have to learn to filter the problematic fifth out.

I think most of the political discussions on HN have a clear side that the commenters take. To disagree with the consensus invites down-votes into oblivion, so almost no one disagrees with the consensus.

Exactly. I've seen many ridiculous stories, nonsense etc on HN which existed purely to fuel outrage among the more tech-oriented crowd.

Ultimately when people say they've dropped out of a specific news bubble: that means they've just started ignoring things that don't personally affect them or they don't care about. It's essentially as another commentator said meant that you're in favor of the status quo, which means you shouldn't be surprised if you encounter someone who is negatively affected by the status quo and calls you out on being OK with it.

Still, HN is an order of magnitude more thoughtful than the clowns at Fox/CNN/etc news. Just the fact that it is mostly text is one factor.

I don't read the articles on HN. Just here because I often learn about new things (not news) from the discussion.

You never read any articles on HN? Maybe you shouldn't be commenting if you've literally never read a single one?

Doesn't mean parent isn't aware of the topic or hasn't heard about it from somewhere else.

Man, things have changed. I used to be on Slashdot, where it was a badge of honor if you didn't RTFA (read the fine article).

How would you define outrage porn? I think that we have to be careful with definitions. Just as we do not define everything that produces sexual arousal as porn because we would have to call even meaningful relationships porn, we should be careful not to call everything that might produce a certain level of disagreement "outrage porn". If there is a well reasoned and substantiated article about something that is bad and should be fixed, what is your metric to distinguish it from outrage porn?

How do you know whom to vote for?

I understand the US doesn't have a lot of choice on the ballot, political news is highly polarized and latest/developing news is probably not worth following. But somewhat keeping up with what your government does so you can hold it accountable seems like a civic duty to me. And what better way to do this than news?

When it comes time to vote I research each candidate and ballot measure and make an informed decision with the information that I find. I don't need to be plugged into to every daily scandal to know that I fundamentally disagree with Trump's policies, a few minutes of research will tell me that just fine.

You'd be surprised how even fascists can portray themselves as reasonable on their own websites, or how lacking wikipedia is on some parties.

Ballot measures only address a small subset of policies, and they don't exist in many places. From what I understand making a 360 turn on them after being elected isn't uncommon either.

So your 'informed' decision is probably just as biased as someone who bases their decision on news.

I would never use someone's own website as my sole source of information, that's just begging for trouble. I search out as many different sources as I can find, including voting history, town hall transcripts, interviews, endorsements, etc. etc.

I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make. Are you saying nobody can ever know enough to vote responsibly?

I'd say the easiest source is the archive of a reputable news site, since journalists are historically responsible for collecting and refining this information. Thus we are back at the initial question: How to get Slower, Better News?

When all the major parties have completely stopped serving your interests, following big media is pointless as it neglects the minor parties. You need to research it yourself or subscribe to fringe media, and you have more time to do that and are better informed if you don't waste your time with big media.

I understand the US doesn't have a lot of choice on the ballot

That is not at all true. Sure there may only be two parties with one candidate each on the national level (assuming you don't get involved with the primaries), but in the US a lot more local positions are elected (which in many ways have a much greater effect on your day to day life) and local referendums (or ballot initiatives) are very common.

I prefer to think about how I can positively impact people around me and my local community

Given that, isn't (local) news still relevant?

Sometimes, sort of. If you think about the things you read on the news, you'll notice that 99%+ ends up being of no consequence for anything. A lot of what people get outraged about daily is total bullshit, and it gets forgotten the very next day, but even the more important-seeming issues really average out to zero impact on the community. In terms of information, the news is a channel with absurdly low signal/noise ratio. If you want to positively impact people, your first job should be finding a channel with higher SNR.

There's a secondary value to news (or rather primary, in terms of value delivered) - social objects. Most people know what's currently on the news, so even though the raw information value is near-zero, it becomes a great conversation starter.

Local news is how I find out about ballot issues, restaurant closures and openings, new public works projects, etc, as well as more sordid things like failed health inspections or the deep dysfunction at a neighborhood school we might have sent our kid to... The SNR might not be super high but it seems useful.

Most items of local news are highly relevant to a small proportion of locals. E.g. roadworks probably just affect a few % of people using that road.

Then there are shock-news stories like violent crime. How is it relevant to know some kid from my street stabbed another kid over a pack of gum? If I want to know how safe my area is I'd look at crime statistics collected over years and compare it to other areas.

Not reading anything will not allow you the relevance of climate change.

I prefer to read specific things to stay in the loop and I see it as a responsibility to be aware of things as my position in our society allows me to do so.

Wouldn't a better solution be to read news but not be outraged by it?

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