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Comment by jasonv | Hacker News Reader

I keep a long list of blocked words in Twitter, Feedly, and I try... as much as I can, to only consume news on reuters.com (and 4 print weeklies). I block CNN and Facebook in my hosts file.

And yet, I'm barraged on the web with celebrity news, popular news, Tiger King (never clicked on it, never wanted it, can't get away from it), whatever the foamy coffee thing that's big right now.

I know about the shelters in place. I knew not to bring my re-usable bags to the grocery this morning.

The whole of media, content, everything you see when you open your browser and leave the house, is a monumental barrage of trending, overwhelming, unavoidable content. Memes you can't get away from but which you'll see hundreds, thousands of times.

Whatever people need to do to get away from it... you'll still get it, but if you choose and are aware of the filters you use, by all means.

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I stopped reading the news entirely. Doesnt even matter what they're saying, I'll hear about it eventually.

If you go outside you need to know what is legal or not and that could change day to day though. Your city could have a curfew, require a form justifying your errands or whatnot. I normally don't read news at all but in this specific times some type of awareness is required.

You should read that sort of info directly from the source. eg. your city or goverment web page. Not spoon fed by facebook, news sites, et.al.

which source? do I have to scour all of the following on a rolling basis: city, county, state federal websites? Which departments at each level? seems a lot easier to just visit <mylocalnews>.com and get info displayed in order of (relative) importance.

edit: a word

My address is well documented. If the government wants to tell me something, they know where to find me.

Frankly, that's why I consume nothing but torrents. There's no other way to avoid being assaulted by ads for the trash you describe.

Torrents help you to _avoid_ ads? I must've been using them wrong back when I did. Sounds like you know the right site/app/workflow to use.

Stremio and popcorn time. It's netflix for torrent. No popups or animation. I think there is one banner somewhere, but it's so discrete I don't even remember.

uTorrent has a search tab for example.

Not sure how you consume yours but I do the same old search on pirate Bay + download with Deluge.

Deluge is a good torrent app, the frogs boiled slowly with uTorrent and BitTorrent as they were overcome, but deluge still appears to be ad free!

We have come a long way from Limewire apparently.

I saw the first episode of Tiger King, expecting to see some epic, thrilling dramatic series, given all the buzz. I was severely disappointed. Is this really what humans love to watch?

I'm on episode 4 as we speak, taking it for what it is (low brow entertainment). Still waiting for it to live up to the hype. I've seen far more engaging junk.

It only gets worthwhile in the last episode when he’s giving the eulogy

I wasn't super impressed with the first episode. But if you are generally into documentaries and true crime, the series as a whole is great.

It was a bit of a letdown at the end. I was expecting more to it than just, well he's in prison how. Very anti-climatic.

Gotta throw on one more to the pile here. My wife and I have had one episode left for a while now, not sure if/when we'll watch it. Mostly I'm wondering why they didn't just shrink this down to 1.5 hours of content. We basically knew about all the crazy stuff from the trailer.

The best description I read was that is was a perfect "Human Zoo"

Tangentially: I have a ton of fun trying to figure out various events based on the memes and other references I'm exposed to. The most recent is Tiger King. My best guess at the moment is that he's a guy who went to prison for liking tigers the wrong way.

Surely there's other people who do this or some term for it. I feel like there's a fruitful cultural idea here. Kind of reminds me of how I know most of my dad's childhood TV shows because of the Simpsons.

I used to watch the political discourse on tv during lunch in the hopes I'd find out what they're actually talking about before my lunch was over. Often I didn't guess. Was a fun game when a worked alone from home at the time.

I don't use: Twitter, Feedly and have my main account of FB on another browser. HN is my only news website as it gave better aggregate content than my 200+ Feedly subscriptions.

That's how I do it.

Oh and I use YouTube for entertainment with 300+ subscriptions, sometimes news comes through. But my recommendation feed is more fun anyway.

Genuinely asking out of curiosity, but at what point does it not become easier to just get off of those services than to maintain something to make them useable (only just by the sounds of it in your case)?

What we need is an AI agent that runs locally, crawls the web, figures out what you want to see, and turns off any javascript when you look at it.

I rely on the intelligence of my own mind to do exactly that, beeing able to observe yourself while you do things can be a invaluable skill (and it is in fact the foundation of all artistic skill)

The problem is connections to other people using those services as information sources. For example, there is some genuinely valuable stuff on HN, so I stay, but a lot of noise leaks in as well, and it’s non-trivial to separate. (And people vary on what they consider signal.)

Pi-hole has done wonders for my (and my family/friends) internet browsing experience. Just threw it up on a DO droplet and very occasionally ssh in to update.

I feel the same. Talking about my angst with fellow tech workers leads to a similar conclusion: we have nobody to blame but ourselves. We’ve all made this.

Not sure you meant to respond here?

It sounds like a subscription to The Economist is what you're looking for, vs the noise online.

This makes me think that you could use the Treendly site recently posted (discovers trends on the Internet) as a blacklist. :]

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