Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?

333 pointssom215 comments

I've been offline since last Wednesday, driving and camping throughout northern outback australia (escaping the vid!). I have a second rate carrier and tonight I hear my phone ping for the first time since I left. I've had reception before, but usually only while driving, usually passing through a larger town. This time I'm sitting next to the fire, near a town called Nhulunbuy in East Arnhem, aboriginal land, one of the more remote regions on the planet. I'm on a small red cliff overlooking the ocean, I've spotted a largish croc on the sand below only an hour before, and I can see the entire milky way above me (it's a new moon). As i'm writing this I just looked up and saw a satellite. The sky's been pretty similar the last week, but still it's spectacular. Anyway my phone pings and I pick it up and I end up reading the news and checking HN (for the first time in two weeks .. same old stories). What gives?

View on HN

Seems an appropriate time to post my favourite piece on news addiction by Charles Simic in the NYRB.

"I’m having trouble deciding whether I understand the world better now that I’m in my seventies than I did when I was younger, or whether I’m becoming more and more clueless every day. The truth is somewhere in between, I suspect, but that doesn’t make me rest any easier at night. Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet. My late father, in the final year of his life, claimed that he finally found that long-sought serenity by no longer reading the papers and watching television. Even then, and I was thirty years younger than he, I knew what he meant. What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day."

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/12/05/goodbye-serenity/

Edit: Charles Simic is a Serbian-American poet who lived through WWII and saw some really grisly things, some described briefly in the article, hence "after everything I had lived through and learned in my life..."

I figured this out a few years ago and completely stopped all news watching/reading entirely. I have nothing but positive things to say about that decision, and surprisingly I seem to be better-informed and feel like I have a worldview that more accurately reflects reality than most of the people who follow news daily.

Daily news watchers now seem like such ineffective people to me, and I’m reminded of the know-nothings from my teenage years rambling about conspiracy theories. The entire time they’re talking about whatever is happening in the news, I’m just thinking: “Who decided that this was important to you, and why did you let them decide that?”

I have family members that can’t pay their rent on time or remember to feed their kids breakfast, but they’ve got the geopolitical dynamics of the US and Russia all figured out. They solved it.

Others talk endlessly about their opinions about all subjects deemed important by the news. They speak with passion as if the opinions and convictions are their own, yet every single stance they take conveniently mirrors whatever was favored in whatever media they consumed.

None of them ever express an original thought. Every single one of them just chooses a selection of things they heard and repeats it.

I’ve been doing this long enough that I think I can see how this is going to turn out for me long-term. Name anything that happened 5 years ago. If it’s significant, I remember it. If it isn’t, I never heard about it at all, and nobody else remembers it either.

I’m by farrrrrrrr the happiest person I know, to the point that I literally feel guilty about it sometimes. I just have so much time for my career that I’ve zipped past everybody, so much time for family.

It might be the single best decision I’ve ever made in my life. I’m really thankful that I figured it out this young.

Does being on HN not count? Feel like I see lots of news on HN. It's in the name after all.

Definitely cheating and I’m not the GP, but I would argue HN is curated enough to filter out most guilty pleasure outrage news cycles. Still in the same realm though.

For example, the Twitter hack has made its rounds here but, say, Kanye having a political meltdown hasn’t necessarily (or at least I haven’t seen it) despite it being a prominent trend on Twitter.

I'm going to be blunt here and say that you're wrong. There is no difference. The news may be curated and may be for a specific audience but the odds that it's just as useless to you as mainstream news is still very high. I don't say this to criticize, mind you. I'm here as well.

Perfectly fine — I’m only arguing for the sake of discussion. When I have gone on no-information binges, I included HN in them. Over time, I realized HN upsets (upsets may not be the right word — maybe mentally clouds or distracts?) me a considerable amount less. The links I look at are informative and inspire creativity; the discussions push me towards explaining my thoughts carefully rather than resorting to status games, false sense of superiority, and mob rule. HN is news, and as such, it is addicting and sometimes does upset me depending on the subject matter and how many people take on views that oppose mine, but I still think it’s an order of magnitude less so than things like Twitter.

HN provides the same dopamine surge.

I have read HN every morning for the last ten years, and I think for the first 5 years of my HN life I felt a huge rush when _something_ new came out. That could be a new "groundbreaking" app, JS library, Mac distro etc.

About 5 years ago it just started to fade.. probably as I started to click less on the new JS libraries etc, and more on the obscure interesting learnings (but also could be due to the content that makes the front page.

Every once and a while I jump on, look at a few links, read a few articles, and feel a bit disappointed that I don't have my rush anymore... I think its healthier, less addictive, but what happened to my good ol' junkie-hit days? :)

I started with slashdot, it was ok until I realized I couldn’t comment and have anyone reply. I went to Reddit when it started but I never found a community. Maybe b/c HN became that community.. kind of. I actually have an earlier account I abandoned because I had been so addicted. But HN has similar slashdot issues and other issues too. I never took to digg.. did anyone? Twitter for me is a new thing but it has similar issues... no engagement. And anywhere I am expert or have a contribution I get downvoted. That’s weird. Kinda like how people feel if they’ve been profiled in the newspaper. Some of it is right but specific details and nuance are wrong. I can see why people feel it’s fake news in some sense. But that’s the nature of the fame.

I’m actually glad the engagement is minimal. It helps me disengage. It feels like a FPS game against all the youngsters.

The moral of the story is to never read the comments. So what does that really mean? It means, be the article, not a comment.

We are just grist in the wind.

Yup. I kinda regret creating my account for this reason.

I've had good discussions, but I can feel the pull of the karma counter ticking up.

I don't know if it was worth the trade.

I have found a lot of wortwhile projects on HN.

Also great insights on comments.

90% I go for the comments and skip the link. That's where te pearls are

I find myself doing that as well. To my taste, the discussion is much more valuable than the article. In fact, for most cases, I see the article as simply a prompt for discussion with very little valuable insight found in the article itself.

Some of is technical content and useful for staying relevant in a fast paced industry. Some of it is garbage.

HN has the word “news” in its name, but I think that’s where most of the similarities end.

Looking at the front page right now, I count maybe 4 items that are attempts at journalism. The rest are interesting subjects resurrected from 6+ years ago, tech guides, user-submitted questions/content, etc. The ones that seem like news items don’t really pertain to today’s hot news, they’re press releases from NASA etc.

HN is a discussion board, and the topics are almost always relevant to my career and interests. I mostly read the comments though. HN informs discussions I have with people at work and tech-related decisions in and out of work. I think it’s worthwhile.

For me, HN counts too. Yes, the quality is different compared to classical news pages, but I think it serves the same desire to find something new.

From my perspective, giving in to this desire is part of the problem. When I start my day consuming content, the whole day becomes a lot less productive (concentrating becomes very hard). But if I start the day engaging my brain in a concentrated mode, the first few hours become very productive.

So my solution for avoiding to constantly visit HN in the search for something new, is that I have a new tab page in my browser, that lists, the top 3 HN news from the best list, if I haven't read them already. That way I fight the fear of missing out.

Maybe I should add that it always shows an empty list for the first 12 hours of the day ;-)

I would say that an important distinction is that there are enough interesting articles posted in here which are not news related that make it worth while. But obviously I am biased here.

Right. Posts like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23917131 keep me coming back. Hard to find such focused discussions elsewhere in my opinion.

I feel the exact same way. If there's something really important, it'll make its way to me. If there's something I want to know, I'll make my way to it. Otherwise it probably wasn't worth my time. Like you, I read about and hear acquaintances talk about anxiety, etc from the news so often, and just feel like I'm talking to someone complaining about sunburn and continuing to go out without sun protection

> I completely stopped all news watching/reading entirely. ... I seem to be better-informed.

How do these square? How is it that you become informed?

Better-informed implies useful knowledge. Stop with the news for a month and you'll realize that 98% of it doesn't provide you with any information that stays with you for more than a day or so. It doesn't matter that you read it. It only has negative effects on you.

This opens up a lot more time and effort to explore the 2% that does matter.

One way that I could imagine is having long-form discussions about it with friends rather than getting a journalist’s opinion and settling on it as fact.

But then you just had a discussion about your friends understanding of the issue, which is going to be another step removed from the journalist. And you're either relying on the friend to have done all the work for you, or you're just two people who haven't taken the time to look at the issue discussing it.

To me, it seems that was lies strong opinions and without context.

There’s the rub. Your friend is more likely to have a similar point of view as you on a given topic so they can relay the necessary details for you, if the topic is important enough. No matter the topic, there will always be multiple spins on it so getting your friend’s spin is no better or worse than a journalist’s — or worse, the mob’s.

I would argue the friends spin is probably more reliable, depending on the friend of course, as at least they would not be motivated by ratings or money and probably are not intentionally trying to cultivate any certain biased viewpoint in you.

Books

Well, I'm guessing this whole conversation them hinges on what we mean by "informed."

I'm doubting that a person could be well-informed by what's going on recently with the Trump adminstration, or BLM protests, or recent Covid news, from reading books alone.

I'm guessing that people who don't read the news might respond that the latest scandal from the government isn't important, and why they stopped reading the news.

At which point, "informed" might simply mean "the things I know about, because I think they're important."

The post reminds me of this: https://www.theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-d...

I don't agree in your main argument, which seems to be based on the idea that whatever makes you feel better is good. I, for one, prefer to read the news and watch the occasional clip online. It makes you better informed, which is essential for many things, including business and informed voting.

Trying to be happy all the time is overrated.

> Trying to be happy all the time is overrated.

Completely agree.

“[B]y restoring grief to soul work, we are freed from our one-dimensional obsession with emotional progress. This “psychological moralism” places enormous pressure on us to always be improving, feeling good, and rising above our problems.2 Happiness has become the new mecca, and anything short of that often leaves us feeling that we have done something wrong or failed to live up to the acknowledged standard. This forces sorrow, pain, fear, weakness, and vulnerability into the underworld, where they fester and mutate into contorted expressions of themselves, often coated in a mantle of shame. People in my practice routinely apologize for their tears or for feeling sad.

I am an advocate for a soul psychology that senses vitality in every emotion, whatever life offers to us in the moment. We will have times of being happy, which is cause for celebration. We will, however, also have times of sorrow and loneliness. Moods will come upon us and events will occur that evoke anger and outrage in us. In fact, archetypal psychologist James Hillman once noted that being outraged is a sure sign that our soul is awake. Each of these emotions and experiences has vitality in it, and that is our work: to be alive and to be a good host to whoever arrives at the door of our house. Happiness, then, becomes a reflection of our ability to hold complexity and contradiction, to stay fluid and accept whatever arises, even sorrow.”

—Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow

I loved that the Onion article, thanks for sharing it!

“Who decided that this was important to you, and why did you let them decide that?”

I love this, thanks.

However, it is possible to have a view contrarian to whatever is being published. For the life of me, I cannot seem to find any news source that I feel comfortable with or even trust.

Also - it's actually important that some people pay attention. The 'real news' is in the details, and it takes attention. Right now, there's a minor scandal in the Canadian government, but really it cuts very deep, to the point where the PM and the Minister of Finance are compromised, the later possibly in point blank illegal graft. These are the kinds of things that rot democratic institutions, and the manner in which they are conceived is usually quite subtle. The government sponsored news in Canada, is somewhat compromised by the fact that their source of funding comes from the source - and very unfortunately, some of the most detailed reporting is coming from the otherwise, low-grade daily tabloids. The only way to parse through the scandal is to read it all - and the only way for the electorate to solve the problem is to put enough political pressure, or, to vote them out. This is an unfortunate paradox, it does take quite a lot of attention on the part of the plebes to make sure things work well.

It's really surprising how vague sometimes corruption can be: if the oversight board doesn't raise a huge fuss, and neither do the mainstream press - then it's simply 'not corruption'. It's weirdly a matter of interpretation and spin, sadly. 'Friends doing business with friends' is normal, the line that gets crossed is sometimes very grey.

That said, it's 95% rubbish.

> “Who decided that this was important to you, and why did you let them decide that?”

Thank you for that comment... I'm now going to turn on my news blackhole hosts file, which I disabled long ago. I remember being far more content back then so I'm not sure why I reverted back.

I use the leechblock plugin and have it redirect any site like twitter/reddit/hn to my todo list instead. I also have it setup so I can only view hackernews on Fridays so I'm not constantly loading it.

I also subscribe to https://hackernewsletter.com/ which is a list of all the interesting articles from hacker news from that week. (it comes out on Friday, thus I unblock on the site on my computer on Fridays)

> to my todo list instead

Ha! That's awesome. That's an in-your-face "hey you, focus!"

I wholeheartedly 100% agree with this.

As soon as I entered the workforce @ 21 I cut out 2 things from my diet, sugar and news.

This habit has compounded so much, not saying its been 100% perfect because I still read reddit, twitter (very selective following and blocking all outlets that end up on my TL) and HN (this place is a total bubble of smart, high IQ people, I enjoy the comments here, I don't get to interact with such smart people on a day to day).

Any interesting developments will filter through my social circle, someone will bring it up.

I stopped watching TV altogether, I stream the occasional show though.

Can I ask _how_ you did this? I've done some things like block sites on various devices, etc. But I do find myself still - when I'm waiting for a build to complete or whatever - sliding over to whateveroutragesite.com almost compulsively.

Try finding something else interesting to do instead, I found it made breaking the habit much easier

This is somehow correlated with the idea of knowing 'about' a thing vs knowing a thing. News, in a large majority of cases, is something that you learn about. Its not something you experience directly. In most cases, the most useful knowledge pertains to those things that you do or likely would soon experience directly, so news is therefore a mostly useless pastime.

And if there's an upcoming election, you can always just read the candidate's stated policies and record of voting.

Don't worry, we've always been at war with Eurasia, and nothing's changed.

Oh--wait--MiniTruth is saying something about Eastasia...

(All seriousness aside, you do have a point.)

I'm a little confused. I agree with some of your sentiment, but are developments w/r/t COVID not important?

> Name anything that happened 5 years ago. If it’s significant, I remember it. If it isn’t, I never heard about it at all, and nobody else remembers it either.

OP has heard of COVID. It would be impossible not to. I follow a similar approach (avoiding news as much as possible) and I still am exposed to much more information about COVID than is useful.

So relying on informal networks to pass on the key information? That's actually a really sensible strategy. I retract my argument.

You outsource it. Like I’m not on FB but my wife is.

This is a bit unrelated to HN, but in the terms of "memeculture."

What you've discovered and described is called "NPC" by meme culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPC_(meme)

I find meme culture just as, if not worse than news in some ways.

It convinces people that something that has enough truthiness and is funny enough is true.

Can you elaborate on this?

I am unsure if you are saying not watching the news makes him an NPC, or if the people who just parrot the news are the NPCs.

I am leaning toward the latter, but based on your wording and the wording of the parent post, that's not what I initially expected.

The later, the parroting of facts and the inability to go into deep detail besides being told information tidbits and repeating them is what makes the NPC so chilling in todays world. Especially when a few people get that high level of norieity and trust.

It's kind of weird that this is attributed to 'memeculture', given that I can recall people referring to others (in a denigrating fashion) as NPCs back in the 90s, before 'meme' was part of our lexicon.

The article is Start-Class.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Internet...

>> "A very basic description of the topic. Can be well-written, but may also have significant content issues."

That means someone wrote it up on a whim and no one's come to address prior art in a way that suits the standards of Wikipedia.

I appreciate this. Watching the news cycle feels like being in an abusive relationship. You watch and wait for the next eruption, anticipating if it will be violent or joyful. It leaves you feeling depleted and helpless.

The problem is that it isn't really the "news". It is infotainment. I'm not talking about the fact that truth is subjective and every story has a lens.

The truth of the matter is that the story (and "updates") are all crafted specifically to be addictive, to be click bait. It isn't about sharing information or exposing the truth. All that matters is ad revenue. I do get it that we need to pay journalists. It has become clear we need a new system. I guess NPR kinda has a solution via patronage. If only we could now get more different viewpoints this way. God knows we have enough multi-billionares to fund it.

News is not news. It is entertainment. Pick your flavor and let them tell you how to feel.

It is designed to be addictive. Either by accident or deliberate is up for debate. I have my opinion on it but it is just that. They use your own feelings to manipulate you into watching/clicking for more. Facts matter little, feelings do in this segment of our world. Mr. Bernays should be proud of the monster he set loose upon us. Even the vaunted NPR does this. I noticed it years ago after a drive across the country and realizing they try to make it look like they were investigating things and not just reading something of one of the 4 or 5 news wires.

> Even the vaunted NPR does this.

I recently upped my monthly donation to my local NPR station, and I feel like if anything it's made me more critical of them. Probably most of it is that I lean politically Right, and they lean Left. But it feels like sometimes they just go out of their way to try to check all the boxes of "woke" culture, whatever the hell that is.

The example that sticks out in my mind is they did a piece on immigration detention centers a few weeks back (no qualms there). The person they chose to interview was a transgender Guatamalen.

It's basically the most on-brand thing the reporter could have done. Talking about immigration? Better throw in some LGBT issues as well.

It's too much I guess to expect a news organization to just report on the news.

When I get feeling really irritated about it, I calm myself down by rationalizing that I like the music they play in the evenings.

Without having listened to that piece, it occurs to me that one reason for specifically including the perspective of a transgender individual in the radio segment may have been that under the current administration there have been _major_ changes to our country's policies around asylum. "Fear of persecution for sexual orientation or transgender status" is one of the one of the more common reasons that people seek asylum in the US, after all. Just a thought...

I found the article [1]. Looks like they crossed Coronavirus off the bingo card too.

Like I said, it's perfectly on-brand for them.

My wife and I have a running joke (which I think I've seen pop up elsewhere too) about how Terry Gross picks her interview guests based on how many items the guest ticks on the "diversity checklist"

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/871625210/you-can-either-be-a...

You are clearly right on the topic of intentionally addictive click bait.

> that long-sought serenity

But i don't think changing your input is related to gaining that long-sought serenity - in a sense of being immune to those inputs if required.

I my opinion it boils down to being human and being to some degree a puppet of your brain chemistry, meaning we can search for said serenity but are propably doomed to never find it.

On a non-subjective basis, there are many bad things going on in the world, with implications for both ourselves and our families.

A genuine question: is it access to news or content of the news that messes with our sense of wellbeing? Does “the media” upset me, or knowledge, for example that climate models appear to be more conservative than reality, upset me?

In not reading the news, are we simply happy in the way ostriches are happy when they place their heads in the sand?

For me personally, it's the volume. If you concentrate on your local area, particularly if you live somewhere smaller than a city, there are crimes and tragedies, but even if some of them are horrible they're relatively few and far between, and can be processed mentally. If you take the entire world of 7+ billion people you could spend your entire waking hours reading about brutality, tragedy and horror from around the world and not run out. Many of us - particuiarly new addicts - have psychologies that are tuned to stories which provoke emotion, so we're drawn to those them. Until relatively recently, you wouldn't be able to get many of those stories outside of occsaional TV programmes and "World's Grisliest Murders" books. But now there's a firehose of horror that you can tap into and it's both fascinating and debilitating. I've found the only way is to do what Charles Simic's dad did, and not read it. I hope that there's some kind of a resurgence in online local journalism that's not driven by advertising, because that feels like the only thing I should read on a day-to-day basis, unless there's something of national importance going on (which, unfortunately, in these days does actually seem to be every day).

I live thousands of miles away from New York city. A few months ago I was reading about someone getting into an argument in central park. Why am I being show that? It was to provoke an emotional response out of me. They are using our emotions to manipulate us.

Or maybe the advent of easy to use and accessible recording devices is shining a light on the prejudice and abuse that people with certain characteristics have been suffering from for decades.

Those with political power in the US could conveniently turn a blind eye to the problem with plausible deniability with a he said she said excuse, but now they have to face the problem.

I think that’s an important development in the progress of my country.

You should be having an emotional response to the huge undercurrent of racism and classism pervading society.

Why? They were being quite racist towards each other. Should I get involved somehow? Other than 'be angry' what are my choices? I literally can not change what those two do to each other. I sure did not feel sympathy towards either of the two people. I see neither party doing much to help at all. I see one party who has promised to fix that exact issue and made it much worse with poor economic choices and making people think they are getting a good deal. The people of those cities have consistently voted for that. So it is what they wanted. Now they seem shocked that they have made it worse. They literally voted for it.

are you talking about the time when a white woman tried to weaponize the police on a black man?

> climate models appear to be more conservative than reality

I've read this sentence multiple times and still not sure what it means. Would you please expound?

“Conservative” here is being used to mean “marked by moderation or caution”, rather than the set of political positions called conservatism.

The poster is saying that global climate change is probably even worse than people think. Often, the reporting around climate change focuses on the best case, the average case, or what could be achieved with an immediate strong response. But the actual paths we are on seems to track some of the worse, more pessimistic cases.

It's not clear to me how anyone can make a judgement about whether models are more conservative than reality. We have no ability to independently measure climate change within our tiny data point of existence. Even a decade of observing it being hotter than it was in your younger years is not any sort of indicator of climate change.

Unless you're reading the entirety of academic research yourself and able to critically judge the validity of that research (by being a climate scientist yourself) it seems like you're always depending on someone else's biased interpretation.

To clarify: not disputing climate change. Only the ability for someone to make judgement calls on whether the reporting is accurate.

I wouldn't blame the reporting... the scientists are also very conservative, because they're afraid of being labeled doom-sayers by deniers.

If they are worried about being labeled doom-sayers by deniers then they aren't very good scientists.

Or they’re worried about losing their source of income with which they feed and house themselves and their families. Because the leaders of the US have explicitly threatened them.

Of course, and I apologize that it was not more clearly stated. (1) climate models project changes in climate, (2) a body of evidence is emerging that climate volatility is greater in reality than predicted by those models, eg we are on track to hit 1.5 degrees of warming in 5 years time instead of 50, (3) therefore the models were too cautious or conservative in their projection of the rate of change.

Thank you. After reading a few explanations, I think the phrase was fine. I was just parsing it in a political context, as opposed to the original meaning of the word "conservative".

Where can you find up-to-date temperature readings (as up-to-date as possible)? Are there public datasets available?

There are a range of projections among climate models, and as we learn more it seems that on average the consensus models have been too optimistic.

I.e., things are even worse than we thought.

I agree with your description. The devil on my other shoulder tries to argue with me about being knowledgeable about the world so that I can do something about it. Support my causes by protesting, donating etc Instead I get into snark warfare on twitter :-(

> no longer reading the papers and watching television

This is what I do, in addition to no social media except for certain personal alerts.

I ask my partner to relay any significant news/events to me.

I do support my local media group The Colorado Sun with a membership and sometimes read through their articles, which don't have advertisements so they are not incentivised to produce click-bait headlines and sponsored/addictive/entertainment content.

> This is what I do, in addition to no social media except for certain personal alerts. I ask my partner to relay any significant news/events to me.

It sounds like you've partly outsourced the problem to your partner then. What does your partner do?

You don't consider HN to be social media?

I consider internet boards like HN a pre-cursor to all dark-pattern-laden "social" "media" today. So yes in a sense, we're all communicating and this is social media. Now, we wait while someone comes to dispute my personal interpretation of the words, but yeah my $0.02 have been deposited.

Don't you believe it has largely the same negatives as other social media like Twitter or Facebook? (At least in terms of the present topic that "news is addictive".) Why drop one but not the other?

Fair point, why not drop all and become an internet hermit relying solely on RSS feeds? But then again, aren't these feeds addictive? Don't they leave you asking for more? At what point in the discussion of internet content can we truly(as a userbase) call it non-addictive then? I'm the furthest thing from an expert on the matter so for me, a website that opens once a week at 17:00 EST for a duration of 2 hours might even do the job. Can't say it hasn't crossed my mind. This is a very tricky and subjective issue. What do you think?

I think HN is awfully addictive, though slightly less so than certain other sites due to a slightly bounded amount of content. Though I think it has helped my life in some ways, it's probably a net negative. My real problem is what should I replace it with? Trying to limit HN (and similar) time tends to make me increase my time on even-less-worthwhile activities like other sites. It's not that HN is good, it's just among the least-bad of the activities that tap this certain urge.

HN may not have teams dedicated to getting you addicted like Twitter or IG does, but it's still addictive.

Many people refresh HN multiple times per day and spend hours arguing about the same things over and over (seriously, I've seen the same arguments for 5+ years). I'm sure all of us have caught ourselves closing HN and then opening it again a few mins later.

This goes for all forums ever, so it's more of a personal change than anything 'wrong' with HN or others.

The big difference I see between HN, Reddit, and traditional message boards on one hand and Facebook/Twitter/Instagram style social media on the other is the relative prominence of personalities vs topics. HN/Reddit/boards are topic focused, whereas the other social media sites are personality focused, with the specific accounts that you follow determining your overall experience of the site and the topics that you are shown. In order to have an experience on those latter sites you must connect yourself into the graph.

Thanks, this hits close to the bone. There's definitely a connectedness in the tragedy of it all.

The only thing that works for me is what worked for his dad - don't read it. Make sure you read around at times when it's relevant - before you vote for example - but don't torture yourself with news that (a) isn't actionable and (b) isn't relevant to you. I've steadily weaned myself off social networks, and am now doing the same for news sites. I've started reading more books (I prefer physical books because I find even having an electronic device in my hand like an old Kindle triggers a desire to check email etc.), I'm calmer, and more focused on what's around me like nature and my family. It's not been easy, particularly given that I sit in front of a computer all day for work, but it's worth finding ways to resist the triggers, which can be as simple as taking a deep breath, closing a tab, then repeat until you have no tabs left...

A problem with factual books is the format. Sometimes a concept only needs 50 pages to explain, support, and explore implications, yet grows to 300 pages to fill the format.

This is true, but I regularly get recommended good non-fiction books by friends which don't suffer from that, so they are out there.

Great quote I feel that way too.

2 ways that I've found some refuge in the chaos that is the hyper-modern world:

1) More news. Flood your brain. Find all the news sources you can in your chosen language. Most big-time newspapers have an English-language resource. Look at those. Once, I put the online English version of the top 100 newspapers in the world (by circulation and if they had an English version) in my morning readings. I'd have to open them all at once and then go through each of the 100 tabs and skim them and close each one. You get really good skimming the world's news that way and really seeing what is important internationally: US politics, cyclones/hurricanes/weather, sports, etc.

2) Read a book. Books tend to draw you in much better than the news. At least the better-ish books. Though it's not as easy as chewing the candy that is Twitter, the 'classics' are a great jumping in point. Struggling to read and grok a few pages of Dante's Inferno does become preferable after a time. Lists of classic literature abound and nearly any of them are top-notch.

> Read a book.

Non-fiction books have driven my world opinions more than any other source (besides I suppose lived experience).

One sad thing about the past few months is I no longer find time to read. My wife does ebooks, but I just can't get into them.

On the plus side, I'm getting a lot of projects done around that house.

Good as it is, the first paragraph of Simic's short essay which you quote is preliminary.

Later, these two paragraphs capture Simic's mood more completely and that mood cuts into the "bliss" of being unencumbered by news:

> I mustn’t forget, either, that I was surrounded by political exiles in my youth, many of whom, after having lived either under Stalin or Hitler, or in some cases both, never lost their vigilance. Even after twenty or thirty years in the United States, they gave the impression of keeping a suitcase packed under their beds, ready to flee at a moment’s notice should hippies or some variety of American fascists come power.

> Lucky for them, they are all long dead, so they can’t read some opinion piece or hear a congressman or a senator today clamor for the very same police state measures they barely escaped from. Watching the government of the country they grew to love curtailing liberties, spying on its citizens, militarizing its police forces, imprisoning both foreigners and Americans indefinitely without having to prove their guilt, and coming to admire the mindset of authoritarian regimes it used to despise, would have been both terrifying and depressing. They could not help but note that some of their fellow Americans who cheer for the death penalty and for torture, and call the people demonstrating against Wall Street lice-infested misfits and degenerates, are no better than the ones they knew back home and are as eager to persecute, imprison, and even commit murder should they be called upon (I think people who clap for death, love war without end, and adore guns are perfectly capable of it). My mother, who never recalled anything but trouble, and was sure the worst was yet to come, would be saying, I told you so, all day long.

That was beautifully said. Thank you for sharing. Alas, gems like this is also why I'm addicted to HN.

Why allow yourself be tormented by something you have no control over?

My understanding is it’s the little thrill your brain gets from the possibility of finding something super interesting. That’s the addicting piece. The gambling piece of it.

I read (or more likely heard on a podcast) about an experiment with mice and a food dispensing button. In one case, the button reliably dispensed food every time it was pressed. In the other case, sometimes the button wouldn’t work. The mice with the reliable button didn’t do anything odd. Whenever they were hungry, they would hit the button for some food. The mice with the unreliable button however would repeatedly hit the button, and they ended up being overweight.

My feeling is that if EVERYTHING on something like HN was super interesting, we’d only be here when we were up for some interesting reads. But the fact is, not everything is. But the possibility that something EXTRA interesting might pop up keeps us coming back in an addictive type of way.

I think doomscrolling is quite related to this - Obsessively reading social media posts about how utterly fucked we are.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=doomscrollin...

There was a post about this a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893690

Slot machines essentially reproduce that mice experiment on humans, as does pull-to-refresh.

It's the same mechanism that social and other addicting apps use, specifically a variable reward system.

The unknown of what's behind that notification drives our brains crazy and makes us need to check.

Although I think I get the underlying feeling you're trying to define, I'm not sure about the analogy of the experiment on mice. That feels more like it's about being in the presence of an unreliable food source, where it makes sense to stock up while food is available to get you through the lean times. There's obviously an overcompensation there, but evolutionarily-derived mechanisms aren't particularly precise. The food source in this experiment is "reliably unreliable", which probably doesn't mimic real-life food sources very well.

You are of course free to model the underlying causality as you see fit, but the fact remains that this is one of the most robust and well-understood findings in all of psychology (see e.g. the Rescorla-Wagner model). The effect does not depend on the type of reward and exists in practically all intelligent animals, including humans. As noted, video game compulsion loops and gambling machines are carefully tuned to take maximal advantage of this "variable reward ratio".

I like to model this in terms of multi-armed bandits. Given a set of levers giving out unknown rewards, what is the optimal policy to maximize your rewards over time? A bad way would be to try all the levers until one gives you a reward, and then just keep pulling that one lever in hopes of more. This doesn't work because the other levers might have given you even better rewards.

Instead, you should try to learn to predict how much reward each lever is going to give you. A fast way to do this is to focus on pulling levers that "surprise" you, i.e. where your predictions of reward deviate from the actual reward you got. This works as long as the reward from the environment is at least in principle predictable, as it mostly is in nature. But with truly random rewards, you tend to end up with addictive behaviour. In nature this isn't a big problem, because truly random rewards are generally one-off events. So we're basically exploiting a bug in our own reward mechanisms, and evolution hasn't had time to adapt.

Incidentally, all of this can be viewed as a mathematically and psychologically precise way of saying that the reason you get addicted to news is because you are curious.

I'm not arguing with the research, I'm just saying it doesn't feel like a satisfactory match to the psychological phenomenon that OP describes. (I spent six years studying psychology, including a masters in neuroscience, so it's not coming from a place of ignorance).

It's also the method they use to train military working dogs. Find dogs with a huge ball chasing instinct but only reward occasionally and randomly. The dog will work so damn hard to get that ball toss.

Poker machines are built the same, as are the recently banned loot boxes in video games.

Yes. I like this. Now, how to resolve it?

I stopped reading news, including tech news, in 2012, while working at a large news site. Seeing how the sausage is made, helped a lot realizing of just how little value reading news to a normal person is. (Note that that this is very different from saying journalism has no value or nobody should be reporting on current events)

I resolved, my news addiction, by redirecting the time I would have scanned ~12 different news sites multiple times a day, into reading more substantial content. Be that more long form (investigative) journalism, books written on a topic, studies, etc. Content, that let you actually understand the why of things, not just the what that is happening.

How to filter on which things to focus on, or tame the fear of missing out came naturally with the realization, that if something is important enough for me to care about (be that politcal or a new javascript framework), it will reach me eventually one way or another.

Also for big sudden events, like for example a terrorist attack, no matter how reputable and connected the news paper, in the beginning nobody has any solid information, which doesn't stop anyone from reporting and wildly speculating. It might be tough to just ignore that, especially since people will think you don't care, but beyond some basic facts, you won't be able to get any useful information for at least a couple of weeks.

What part of seeing the sausage Being made turned You off from eating it?

Maybe sausage is the wrong analogy, since I love them and I find nothing wrong with the ingredients.

I'd say it is closer to a fast food meal. Yes they can be very tasty and satiating for a moment but the nutritional value is extremely low. If consumed too much it is pretty bad for you

Working in a office complex where about a dozen different news papers and sites were made, just made me realize that the "news" section is pretty much purely about relatively cheap traffic generation, nothing else. They license a bunch of wire agencies like Reuters, AP, etc. pick out and often blow up the stories that the target audience will likely click on. The site that is regularly the fastest in publishing something, will gain visitors.

So its not that there is per se something nefarious happening within any particular story, but the news feed is there to make you consume more and boost the numbers advertisement pricing is based on, not to inform you.

Related Article from The Guardian "News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier" https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...

>Related Article from The Guardian "News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier"

The author, Rolf Dobelli may be worth checking out, though I don't 100% agree with the article.

A good approach may be to do some independent analysis with the widest variety of sources, then use that going forward.

Eg anti Russian and China bias is coming more and more to the fore these days (not saying their leaders are good, far from it) but once its characteristics are recognised it's easier to ignore and not be influenced by it.

Hard, unwavering discipline. Resolve to stop reading it, either entirely or outside of rigid conditions (eg, no more than N minutes at X in the morning and Y at night). Then do so.

Some people have good luck modifying their network configs to enforce this when their willpower or habits are weak.

Fortunately there isn't a physical component to the addiction so it is safe to go cold turkey. Usually after a few days or weeks it gets easier but if you slip up it is very easy to fall back into old habits.

> eg, no more than N minutes at X in the morning and Y at night

Since this community is all about using IT tools to achieve goals:

- There are some browser extensions that can do this, e.g. lock you out of Facebook, Reddit or $newswebsite after X minutes of usage.

- HN itself has the "noprocrast" setting in the user profile which I hear works similarly.

In the words of Morrissey: Stop reading the news.

In the words of Morrissey: there is a light that never goes out

Why would you quote him of all people. The guy is a racist at worst and a bigot at best.

I am just one of those people who can listen to Wagner without invading Poland ...

That's a straw man statement. Listening to something is not the same as sharing a quote from a horrible person.

The full quote is as follows:

  Stop watching the news
  Because the news contrives to frighten you
  To make you feel small and alone
  To make you feel that your mind isn't your own

And is from the song "Spent the Day in Bed".

It is relevant here as the mice in the experiment loose control over their "mind" and start behaving in a self defeating manner.

He is pretty horrible. An example of the Everyone Who Likes Music I Do Must Be A Good Person fallacy I held to when I was younger.

I still seek this hit, but I do it in abstract knowledge like learning more about audio engineering (discovering the harmonic series for the first time or building an intuition for how FFT works is pretty neat). Then I get the hit, I learn neat stuff that may or may not be immediately useful, and I shut out the day-to-day noise.

Ditto, really, for how I engage with the industry. I'm looking at long-term principles like the fundamentals of distributed systems and not getting hung up on chasing certifications for Bob's New Cloud Platform. The details change slightly over time, but the principles remain the same.

Fear of something great showing up and then falling off the front page before you get a chance to see it

You've articulated why I come here perfectly. I've learned so much coming here and on twitter etc but I had to wade through reams of shit to find it.

This is a super interesting take. Are there studies / clinical definitions of this or something similar?

For a basic introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

Sounds like the gambler's fallacy

The premise is wrong. It’s less about news than your phone.

Before, news was timeboxed. You might have a daily paper habit, or listened to the radio in the car on a commute, or a nightly broadcast, and a handful of longer term magazines, but that was it. It may capture your attention for a bit but there wasn’t any more of it to obsess compulsively.

24/7 cable broke this contract, but let’s be honest, that’s really not something normal people stare at all day.

What’s really new is the constantly updating infinite feed, be it HN or Facebook. (Refreshing the front page of NYT or the BBC doesn’t have enough churn to creative this effect.) Oh, and we took that and we put it in your pocket.

So that’s not great, and it definitely doesn’t need to be in your pocket.

I’m still experimenting with this, but the best change has been to unfollow every news site on social media (the algorithm is a terrible editor) and sign up for a few email newsletters instead. They’re finite, and the good ones are curated by real people.

What newsletters do you get? I'm definitely interested in this.

not the OP, but I find BIG by Matt Stoller and Notes on the Crises by Nathan Tankus a nice break from the mainstream press.

Insightful, well considered and non-dramatized writing on important subjects: https://nathantankus.substack.com/ https://mattstoller.substack.com/

These days I'm really liking NPR's daily newsletter, which is a straightforward, no nonsense "here's what we think is important" report. And I'm a huge fan of NextDraft.

But at this point any writer or publication you like to read probably has one.

It's a pure dice-rolling addiction.

Let me share a personal story:

For the last 3.5 years, every night before bed, I would browse https://www.gitlogs.com, a site that had it's own algorithm for ranking top-trending Github repos for the day (it is much better than Github Trends, don't ask how).

It was my nightly ritual, and my favorite part of the day. Sometimes I would find 3-5 REALLY fucking awesome projects, or one that was so useful it changed my life as a developer, in one night.

I never missed a night.

For the last month or two it's been flaky (the API has been hosted as a free Glitch project this whole time LOL) and finally, the backend died. So it's gone forever. RIP friend, I have a void in my soul now.

But while it was alive, it was a daily dice roll that was incredibly exhilarating. And that's the addiction, and why I sink so much time into HN too.

This is the exact same excuse I make for myself whenever I get a thought that I might be spending too much time on HN: all the interesting and actually useful stuff I've found here makes the time spend worth it. Right?

Off-topic, but I wish GitHub had more functionality with starring repos. That and search seem such neglected parts of their platform.

I often use http://www.yasiv.com/github/ a tool to find related repos using information about shared number of stars to calculate similarity index between two projects.

Github: https://github.com/anvaka/gazer

It may be the case that we just crave variety.

If I am scrolling hacker news, and someone opened a portal to the Australian outback, I’d probably put down HN (sorry, folks) and crawl through the portal to hang out for a bit.

I lived on a beach for years and in a big city for several, and in each place I craved the other.

> If I am scrolling hacker news, and someone opened a portal to the Australian outback, I’d probably put down HN (sorry, folks) and crawl through the portal to hang out for a bit.

Which will, of course, be a fun VR diversion when the fully immersive video capture is accessible enough.

I lived among a group of Mayan Indians for six months once. It was the most boring experience of my life. The next time I was in a similar situation, I packed several very dense non-fiction books to satisfy my intellectual hunger. (This was long before the Internet, even before the Arpanet.)

I should add that it wasn't the Indians' fault, they were very nice neighbors. But there's only so much I can say or hear about corn farming.

Part of it is surely fear of missing out, in this case fear that everyone else will know something you don't. Exactly what we fear of missing out on probably varies a lot from person to person. I don't care all all about the football results, but many people do, as it's a staple of their conversation in their social sphere.

For the HN crowd, we survive and thrive on what we know. We're in an industry that moves rapidly, and we perceive that successful people thrive on knowing more, or knowing first. Of course that's only partly true. Successful people know just enough, and then actually get the job done. Knowing where to draw the line between reading about what others have done and doing stuff ourselves is really hard. It's always easier to read about what others have done, and it feels productive, but past a certain point it really isn't.

I remember many years ago I read an article on studies about addiction, and turns out Pornography and Drugs totally lost out to News, being the number one worldwide addiction without being widely known.

Unfortunately my Google Fu hasn't turn up anything. I will Edit the post if I find the link.

My personal opinion is that

1. All Human has an urge to want to know more, Curiosity. It doesn't necessarily means knowledge, as information without "thinking" is pretty much meaningless. One reason why the world we are in right now are a complete mess, because thanks to the Internet we all thought we "know".

2. All Human has an urge to want something better, Innovation. Why hasn't something been done? Why hasn't this problem be solved? Is this not a problem for enough people to recognise changes? Has Science improved? Medical improved? Technology Improved? Food Safety or Nutrition Improved? etc.

Seems like a good time to revisit this blog post by the late-Aaron Schwartz about removing news from your information diet: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

Removing news is a solution that screams privilege though, isn't it?

If I'm a DREAMer, or a woman who works for a private company, or a person recently laid off due to COVID, I kind of need to follow along to help me understand how I'm going to make it the next 30 days.

Yeah I've definitely thought about this and share the concern. I think there is a distinction between news that addresses immediate issues, like the ones you mentioned, vs unfocused news consumption, which amounts to a distracting form of entertainment that masquerades as productivity or civic responsibility.

The former is largely necessary, but probably far less frequent than we think on average. The latter is what we ought to reconsider; it's the addictive version of news that we should probably swap for slower/deeper versions of information.

I know Schwartz argues for a hardline "no news" position. I think that any amount of reflection and discipline to minimize mindless news consumption under the guise of "staying informed" and replacing that with deeper thought is a net benefit, and one that people from any walk of life are capable of.

I guess the question of how to filter out the noise and only pay attention to salient issues is the real challenge. When I've experimented with this, I've often still heard about issues important to my various identity/interest groups through group chats with friends, in-person conversations, even just passing by newstands and seeing headlines. This doesn't seem like a satisfyingly reliable solution, but like Schwartz mentions, it's kinda surprising how much current info we absorb even when not explicitly reading the news.

You really think those people wouldn’t hear about it any other way?

> But everybody seems to agree: it’s a citizen’s responsibility to keep up with the news. Everybody except me.

This rings true. I've been ridiculed for not knowing about the latest news a few times before, and its why I started reading it more.

Perhaps we need to view 'news' through the lens of 'is this information' before reading and therefore allowing it to impact how we feel about our lives. News being an event that may or may not impact your life, vs. information that can be assimilated to improve your life. Or perhaps, did you seek out the information because you need to learn something, or, are you reading what is being presented to you unprompted by a service that profits from you viewing it?

There is some news that matters, in terms of how you or those that matter to you can be impacted. For example, the state of the economy as pertains to your employment can help you forecast interruptions in work. Or in other economic cases, enable you to forecast where good investments will be. Or someone you admire passing away.

In political terms, changes in direction of leadership can forecast changes in lifestyle. Many nations could be given as an example, Iran, Syria, Turkey.

What does not matter, ever, as far as I can tell, is the type of 'rare incident' such as a shark attack killing a surfer, or a wildfire in another country that killed some unfortunate people, or locust swarms in Asia when you've never left South America. It matters to people directly affected, of course, but if you're half a world away, every day some bad event is going to transpire somewhere that could literally never affect your life. Does it benefit you to be aware of this?

I think an important point is that news outlets have learned how to sell news as tabloid entertainment. ...and when you engineer the narrative into a story that people find compelling, then if become emotionally addictive.

...and entirely destructive to political discourse.

So thank you for your many thoughtful responses to the post. My battery is about to die which means I am over and out (until I drive somewhere tomorrow and re-juice the phone). But to be honest, you've all done a pretty good job of answering why HN sits high in the list of nervous tics. I genuinely look forward to returning to read everything posted in the interim. In the meantime here's a picture of the sky from where I'm sat ~ https://ibb.co/cwDD7GG

How does one decide what information to consume? If I shun news altogether, then how will I come to know of some events that might have a direct effect on my life?

Even with what we consider useful knowledge, how much of it is really useful? Yes, it is fun learning new stuff, making connections between seemingly disjointed topics etc, but how much of it has direct influence on our daily lives? I've learned a lot from HN, but I often wonder if I should have spent all that time elsewhere, carefully picking up only those knowledge and skills that benefit me in my life and that I can use to help others.

This isn't an answer to your question, because I don't know the answer. I've the same question as you. My one guess is that everything that is made today is made with the explicit intention of getting users hooked - from fast food to social media, including news.

Coincidentally neuroscientist Andrew D. Huberman was on the JRE podcast yesterday and among the many topics/studies he discussed was one where electrodes were hooked up to brains and the subjects were given complete control over the areas they stimulated.

Contrary to what one might think (or at least the scientists) that the subjects would stimulate areas of sexual response or pleasure, it turns out they elected to stimulate areas of anger and frustration.

Without knowing exactly what "news" you found yourself reading, I think its a fair guess the majority of news now-a-days (or maybe always) triggers this area of the brain and so you are probably just elected to trigger anger and frustration over stimulating your brain with the natural beauty of the world around you (so don't feel bad apparently this is the norm).

I recommend book "Stop reading the news" by Rolf Dobelli.

To put it short, daily news are bad for you. Especially and including your understanding of the world. (Yes, I am still addicted, but trying to work myself out.)

+1 for Rolf Dobelli’s book. Read it last year and while I can’t say it changed my life, it definitely improved it.

As somebody who likes nature, please don't make fire on a cliff. It leads to the rock cracking and degrading faster. The next one coming along wants to enjoy the place as much as you do.

Thanks for the tip, honestly didn't know that. It's actually a sandstone cliff, my fire is about 15m from the edge (nearer my tent than the drop) and I'm using my own firepit. It's generally pretty hard to light fires (legally) in this part of the world without some serious precautions!

I think news gives the illusion that you are doing something important when you really aren't, and that has appeal.

Sometimes I feel like I am endlessly scrolling for a "solution" or bit of news that I "like". Then I have to take a step back and do something else, because nothing good really comes of that.

A therapist or coach recommended this book called the Power of Habit. https://www.amazon.com/Power-Habit-What-Life-Business/dp/081....

The central theme of that book is that people attribute dumb behaviors to things like chemical dependence, when in fact it's a behavioral habit. The classic example from the book is people trying to quit smoking. You kick the physical dependency in a few days - the headaches and irritability go away, but smokers still relapse months or years afterwards. Why? It's because the smoking formed a habit to their brain, and their brain associated good feelings with smoking.

Read the book. But if you don't: Your brain has trained you to feel good when you read the news. You break this habit by replacing the good feeling of reading the news with a good feeling from some other, positive, healthy activity. Example: every time you get a desire to pull out your phone, do 10 pushups instead. You get a little physical exercise, and your brain starts associating positive feelings with positive activities.

Also, why the hell do you have notifications turned on if you're worried about the phone or the news being addictive? It's like asking to have cravings amplified. Turn off badges, notifications, etc. Check it on your own time and terms.

This article enabled me to see and take care of my news addiction:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...

They're designed to be. The more emotional outrage they provoke in you, the more you spend engaging with them by reading more news, writing online comments, or even if the outrage happens once you've already closed the given webpage, giving you a need to read even more of them.

That's how they get views, ad revenue, and user-generated comments - out of an army of addicted people.

Matt Taibbi has a pretty good take on it I think. (https://www.amazon.com/Hate-Inc-Todays-Despise-Another/dp/19...)

I just built an app to control my own addiction (addictionlocker.com) and have thought a lot about this recently.

My two cents: the media has gotten good at giving us what we want, and what we want is conflict. If bad news and fighting weren't what we wanted they wouldn't publish it. By engaging with it, we tell it what we want, and they just deliver more of it. Extrapolated ad absurdum; YouTube and Facebook's algorithms serve you what you're interested in, otherwise you'd get bored and go somewhere else. The rest of the media just got good at doing this too...

Your brain gives you dopamine reward hits when you find a new article or topic, then you form a habit of looking for those dopamine hits. This habit is physically manifest in neural circuitry which your brain uses like a function to simplify its decision making, it uses that process to fill time and release dopamine.

So, you have to retrain your brain not to even start the process, you must be mindful and interrupt the process as it starts. Also, make the barrier to entry into the process very high, make it annoying and inconvenient to do the bad habit.

One of the best things I've done in my life is to start actively avoiding news. That doesn't mean I try to stay ignorant of what happens outside my home's walls. News is not information. Information you can find on your own, news is somebody deciding for you what you should know and how you should feel about it.

I've had nothing but an improvement in quality of life since starting this, and think people should try it at least once in their life, just to see how unhealthy news can be

Attention hijacking, turns into subtle micro-habits, then turns into routines, backed by the most powerful computers in the world and most likely AI.

Internet + Smartphones + Apps

Mentioned this a while ago but I try to skip all the CNNs and just subscribe to a couple of newsletters for Zeitgeistish stuff. the hustle, briefingday.com, etc.

It has always been. That’s why it’s called “News” not “Olds”. Getting access to the most up to date information about the world has always been compelling. Whether it’s where the best hunting or foraging grounds were, who is in a relationship to who, or which person/people are attacking our tribe. It’s all the same now.

Aggregators like people who are gossips, newspapers and now social media are all attention based. Even the structure of writing of news stories to give you the main story in the headline, then start with the conclusion and fill in the details has been making this type of information bite sized from the dawn of time.

And now of course our “news” is global, often the stories about people are not people actually in our lives (Royals? Celebrities, who cares?), and politics have cranked us vs them to 11. No wonder it’s addictive.

Add in complicated feelings that we want to avoid (how bout that pandemic?) and looking at new information also serves as a distraction from the things we can or cannot change in our lives.

Be well weary news consumer. Get off your phone and enjoy nature.

A distraction for sure. Luckily my battery is on 4% so I'll be forced off very soon.

Almost all news and social media site structure is derived from research using the Skinner box[1, scroll down to A Man, a Plan, and a Rat in a Box]. Researching operant conditioning, they found that introducing randomness to some sort of dopamine release would cause habitual behavior of the action that caused dopamine release. This reaction to novelty was then successfully transferred to humans. This is most obvious on Reddit IMO, with "gems" interspersed between vapid, uninteresting posts.

I'm actually making an alternative to Facebook that shows posts chronologically in the feed instead of using machine learning algorithms to make them addictive. I also plan to not include a share button on posts. I think these two changes would make it far less addictive and better for users.

[1] https://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/conditioned-social-m...

It may be a feedback loop that makes people read news.

When I was a kid or teenager I used to live in some mountains where even newspapers were rare. Being disconnected for months or years had no negative impact. Working in IT, being disconnected for a couple of years can catastrophic for you because changes are often, not of substance but there are legion of minor things that add up and catching up is possible, but difficult. Therefore I read IT news to keep up and ignore regular news, I don't watch TV and just read the titles of online news for something that I really need to know (like a virus lockdown in my city or country).

In a way I am concerned about the many "show HN: I did <some minor or irrelevant stuff> that I am proud of <and it's so similar with another billion existing solutions for the same problem>"; it gives the impression important things happen, when they don't. This feeds the loop to continue reading for some stuff for the fear of missing something important or useful.

I'm in the same boat. News is addicting. I've done a lot to rid myself of various addictions but news has been the last and hardest one to crack. It seems like it would be beneficial to know what's going on, and sometimes it is. Socially you look like a weirdo if you don't know the latest scare.

But that's not why I check it. I am addicted, and people a hundred years back recognized this as well.

Why I don't spend the time reading Tolstoy or Neitzsche or something more substantial I don't know. What I do know is that I burn more time than is healthy consuming it and it doesn't give back nearly as much as I give in. I have no suggestions, but maybe this will be what I try to expunge for the rest of this quarantine phase. I think at the end of it, the only thing in control of any addiction is one's self, site blockers and timers help, but what I really need are bulletproof arguments against consuming it, and from there I believe the motivation will follow.

It's difficult that in this covid pandemic you'll come off as esoteric or uninformed because you don't stay immediately up to date with the hyperbolized and polarizing news.

For example, just tonight, I wasn't sure exactly the status of bars: whether they are allowed to be open (legally), which ones might choose to be open (socially), which ones have favorable conditions (physically; outdoor seating, mask regulation, that sort of thing). When I asked my friends about the general status, they were somewhat incredulous.

Regardless, I had a nice time socializing, until my girlfriend and I went back to the car, and she immediately started a very uncomfortable diatribe on which of our friends she suspected were Republican based on innocuous comments of recent events.

I guess my point is that even if you try to abstain from the toxicity of current events and of the news, your friends and families can drag you back down, and I don't know how to improve the situation.

> Study finds information acquisition shares the same dopamine producing reward system pathway as food, financial rewards and drugs.

https://neurosciencenews.com/information-addiction-brain-142...

Raptitude has a good article about why you should read less news: https://www.raptitude.com/2016/12/five-things-you-notice-whe...

Reading news is procrastination. It's easier to rationalize than other forms, however. Not as obviously useless as watching TV. It's addictive because you don't have to go do work or something novel, but don't feel like you are wasting time.

A lot of things going on. My amateur take on _just one_ of the factors is that we are evolutionarily inclined to be aware of events, especially negative events.

Bad news is so addictive because knowing about the bad things in our tribe’s region helps us survive.

I was a huge news junkie in college. And at one point, I don't know where maybe at a doctor's office, I saw the cover of Newsweek magazine with a shocking statement of impending doom. I grabbed it and read the article and was worried. Then I saw the cover date was about a year old.

That moment was hugely influential to me. I still follow the news but at an arm's length. I learned that in news, as in everything, there are a few overarching stories and a lot of minutiae. A little signal, lots of noise. The signal takes a long time to build, it's not daily news. But when it comes, all the daily news changes to reflect it.

Novelty is rewarding in itself, all kinds of novelty (Why did you ride out to the outback? because you wanted novelty of visual and other sensory stimulus as well as novelty in perception of place). Same way why simply driving somewhere new is rewarding. "News" is constant information novelty , it's not like the "olds". Rewarding things have the potential to be addictive. If they are easily obtainable they tend to become so.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24911320/

You reminded me of this quote “Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.” -- Stranger in Strange Land.

That sounds awesome!

If you're going to spend time on the Internet, you could make it a better place by telling us more about what sounds like an awesome trip so we have something to read that's not the stupid news.

When I have the time!

I think it’s related to a human bias towards novel stimuli. Evolutionarily, it’s unsafe to disregard new and unfamiliar signals. That sound could be nothing, or it could be predator outside the cave.

I would guess it's the same mechanism as used in gambling , gaming and social media to addict the user: variable reward.

For some reason if you are given a reward with unpredictable interval in some specific context, this will create a dopamin kick in your brain.

So I would say you are not addicted to the news as such, you are addicted to the dopamine kick that picking up an occasional interesting news-article from the endless queue creates.

Slot machines, games with surprise reward loot-boxes, doom-scrolling social media - they all utilize this simple neurological hack.

I am in the same boat, floating the same ocean full of news.

New stuff, head lines, news flashes, breaking news, current events, notifications etc. all trigger some dopamine release and make me feel satisfied.

The media tries to induce fear and rage so they get the maximum number of eyeballs to see their ads. Couple that with high access to information and low transformative power on the part of the individual and you're set: almost everyone seems to be expecting some kind of "happening" to turn the tide towards their own ideology, since they cannot participate themselves. The media abides, but only gives them some breadcrumbs here and there to keep them glued to the screens.

One of the reason is because we like “new” things. Human tend to be attracted towards new vs old. I notice myself often less wanting to click on a news in HN that is not new.

News is mostly gossip. It tells you about unusual and sensational things. Not about how to understand the world.

To understand the world, spend that daily time reading books instead.

It is designed to be. If it wasn't addictive they'd change it to make it so. Otherwise you'd be thinking about the other 10^12 things in the world.

If you're on the autism spectrum.. your brain is hardwired to be 'obsessed' w/ certain topics it seems (just learning I'm on spectrum at 40).

you hate to talk, but get you going on a subject you read about yesterday and nobody can shut you up...

For those of us lower on the spectrum we're not super focused on one area but multiples, for me that's tech/programming/politics/science and lately viruses for obvious reasons.

I've gone so far as to forceably reduce the temptation of other websites by reducing my feed to a static set of links which is updated once a day.

Live website: www.danielwasserlaufquicklinks.com

github if you want to manage your own: https://github.com/twosdai/contentGrabber

I don't come to hackernews that often so just open an issue on git if you have a question.

You ask that on site that is as minimalistic as possible and still has buildin 'noprocrast' option. Clearly people can't stop checking the news.

I think it might be the "new" in "news". I think our brain has an impulsivity towards novelty.

Perhaps it's hitting the reward centers of our brain that is designed to validate productive behaviour. Although as we know there's a fine line when it comes to consumption of so-called news as to wheter it is actually productive.

I guess like any addictive "substance" it can be difficult to regulate and control.

Personally I've tuned out all news minus local news. All other is sensationalized garbage filled with fueling hate (stereotypes), outrage, and fear.

not sure if this resonates with anyone else, but from my own experience (especially back when I had really bad anxiety) I think a major draw of news is the perceived feeling of safety from being "in the know". I believed that the more I knew about what was going on in the world, the safer I would be without necessarily taking action based on the information. I think it was as if not reading the news was like being in a dark room where my mind was free to conjure up a multitude of awful things/situation lurking in the dark, but by reading what was gong on and grounding those fears in something "real", it gave me the sense that the world was not so scary or I could at least better react/protect myself by "knowing"/"illuminating" the darkness.

Of course all this mostly just fed into my fears and just exacerbated my anxiety-induced hyper vigilance and paranoia, but I really think that there was a part of me that saw benefit in being aware of the state of the world through news (both mainstream and alternative).

I think the whole package has been made in a such a way that it's addictive .. It's just another product being sold in the market ..

News is stimulus. All you're describing is a habit you've formed, and a stimulus you respond to.

When we're 'addicted' to anything, it's just us abusing our individual coping mechanisms.

The answer, like in all other aspects of life, is to take steps to form the habits you want, and steps to discard the habits you don't want.

I am an online media junkie but recently I've found so much of the news boring. Not because of what's going on, but because how it is reported is all the same. Hyperbole, listicles (never more than 10 items), predictions about the future that are simply opinions, etc.

Maybe there is hope that too much news just exhausts everyone.

I stopped reading news for a while as an experiment. It made me start to dwell on my personal life. Money issues, my love life, loneliness, my future in general, etc. This can either be a happy thing or not. I imagine the more bleak one's personal life is, the more we are drawn to news.

From a fellow Aussie: I'm in Melbourne atm in the midst of the latest C19 outbreak and I wish I was there

Sorry to hear! Hard to enjoy a Melbourne winter without the culture (and a pandemic). Tho not sure how much you'd be able to relax up here ... Have been getting some major earbashings about Victorians on the lam.

I think when it comes to news it just ends up being another skinner box for me. Reload the page/pull the lever whatever you want to call it. You almost always will find another story that's interesting. But, almost always it will just be another fluff-filled piece about some topic.

While reading the news you do not have to deal with yourself. Quite a relieve for most people I reckon.

On top of that, bad "news" sources are designed in such a way that you do get addicted (e.g. endless scrolling, getting notifications on new article while still reading one, clickbait and so on).

Here's one theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPYiif7znZw&feature=youtu.be... (Scott Adams @ Commonwealth Club of California).

My solution whenever focusing on goals / deadlines: edit hosts file (as root/admin, when necessary)

127.0.0.1 reddit.com www.reddit.com

127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com

127.0.0.1 twitter.com

127.0.0.1 other social / news domains...

The little bit of friction required to undo this is enough to remind me to get back to being productive.

Also, Pomodoros for pacing.

https://readup.com/comments/the-guardian/-news-is-bad-for-yo...

One of the best things that I did for myself related to this addiction process is to use android focus/well-being to limit my interaction with social networks/news with a time budget. It allowed me to focus my efforts in doing other things.

I think it is an easy, highly rewarding version of learning. Learning new things from a physics book and a news paper is probably not that enormously different on a chemical level.

News papers give you dozens of new things to learn every time you refresh the page.

1. Because organizations which don't make their news rewarding to read will not be able to make a profit.

2. Because we humans evolved as storytelling creatures. We live and die by our ability to maintain a connection to our kinship group by telling stories.

Our species has survived through millions of years of evolution by being social, and depending on others for resources. It's baked into our DNA by now. News is the ultimate form of social information, ergo, it's hard to resist.

Yeah the social thing is real. But the relentless need for currency? It feels more like a disease than an evolution.

Reminds me of this thread from last year.

"Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20241456

The twenty-four hour news cycle has had time to refine itself to be addicting. They must always produce news to be on continually, and news that keeps eyes on the screen, and therefore advertisers happy.

This is just evolution in action. The quiet progressive evolution of A/B testing culminating in our current symbiotic relationship between our dopamine receptors and the news headline generators. :)

Evolution. Information == survival. There’s a good scientific overview of how our hunter-gatherer brains evolved to put a huge value on novel bits of information in the book, “The Distracted Mind”.

News is like heroin, also earns billions. Also addictive as porn, coffee, cigarettes etc.

One of the easiest way to leave that way - force yourself to create something, not consume everything.

"News" is about manipulating your emotions to keep you watching, which sells advertising revenue. As long as you are upset about something, the profiteering ensures.

It's all about gaining social status, about knowing more than that other bloke and potentially gaining some economic advantage so as to attract an attractive female etc.

Reposting a comment from another thread as it seems relevant, I was talking about Twitter but the same applies to news sites I think...

I definitely found myself wasting more time recently scrolling through Twitter e.g. in the evening or when compiling code. I actually quite like the site but I find there's more and more irrelevant stuff on my feed so I don't really like feel like I get as much value from it, yet the addictive nature of the feed still makes you refresh it.

I was aware I was doing this but didn't do anything about it until I was prompted by this article, which I think was posted on here recently: https://craigmod.com/essays/how_i_got_my_attention_back/. For me it really hit the nail on the head about wanting to reclaim your attention a bit, but that these companies have thousands of people working on systems to try and claim your attention for themselves, so it's no wonder it's hard.

I made a few small changes as a result of this:

- I used Screen Time on my iPhone to block all apps except essential ones (clock, calendar, notes, Philips Hue) for the first hour of my day

- I logged out of Twitter on my Firefox and instead logged into it in a container tab, which takes a few extra clicks to open

- I logged out of Twitter on my iPhone, so I have to log in to access it

- I didn't install Twitter on my new iPad

I've found these changes have made a big difference - I think particularly blocking apps in the morning. It feels like if you can "control" your attention a bit more in the first part of your day, that continues somewhat throughout the day, then adding in the slight hurdles to access the site throughout the day causes you to stop and think "do I really want to do this?" when your reflex to just open a new tab and type "tw<enter>" or to scroll while you're stood in a queue or whatever kicks in.

I still do browse Twitter and other time wasting sites a little bit, which I'm fine with, but I feel like I'm doing it more conciously - sometimes after a long day I'll think "I just fancy sitting on the sofa and reading the news and looking on Twitter" and I'm fine with that, as it's something I've chosen to do.

It's only been a few weeks so I don't want to speak too soon, but I'm feeling really happy with this approach so far, without having to go atomic and delete Twitter entirely as I do get some value from it.

New. We are triggered by new information. Probably a really useful trait if you wandering around a savanna. Bit of a burden now to be honest.

Saltwater crocodile: eating humans and their phones since prehistorical times...

My biggest issue with 'not reading the news/social media', as so many have suggested, is that:

1) It feels irresponsible as a US Citizen. Especially with Trump as president. The corruption committed by the FCC chairman alone, that he nominated, feels like I should keep ahead of as a citizen. I got into politics after Microsoft tried to lobby the California government to ban copyleft software licenses like the GNU GPL.

2) There is good information valuable to me as a person or to my profession. It is easy to ignore CNN-a lot of it is click bait. Phoronix and Slashdot is another story. This post on 'Hacker News' is another good example. Yet it triggers the same dopamine release that gambling does-a random chance of getting something that may benefit you. But you are spending your time, instead of money, and instead of getting a lot of money, you get information you need to spend more time to act on in the future.

I stopped reading Apple News and Google News. Life is much better now.

News is habit forming.

I think it's because you like to learn new things.

I'd like to think it's as simple as that. And similarly to explain why I enjoy a drink most evenings.

I prefer Not to follow COVID related news.

Marketing. And it's not just news or why fizzy water and clothing and everything else that's sold to make you feel special. It's why we like pickup trucks now. And why we think everyone should have a gun. And why drugs seem so dangerous. And even why our notions of "left wing" in American seem awfully far to the right if we step back out of our typical context. All the result of marketing.

cause you are drawn away from the hard reality of yourr shity life

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