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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

I would advise the way to beat the anxiety about doom scrolling is to RTFA

Headline: The world is spiraling out of control

Body: X is happening that will impact Y in these specific ways. Z people are working against X and trying tactics A & B...

The Headline is calibrated to maximize your anxiety. The Body is often calibrated to the right level of anxiety and context. I find instead of trying to mentally suppress Headline that freaks me out, and thus subconsciously imagining the worst possible thing, RTFA helps to soften and calibrate the anxiety more appropriately.

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The problem with that is we are bombarded with at least 10 times as many headlines as articles can possibly be read. Even within an article, there will be links to other headlines. Look at a news front page and there are enough headlines immediately in view that would take an hour or five to read through. There’s no way to “get ahead” by RTFA, and shaming people for only having seen a misleading headline is attacking the victim, not the perpetrator. (You’re not doing that here, but I often see it done online.)

We MUST start shaming media organizations that publish bullcrap headlines. This is almost entirely the editors’ fault, BTW. The reporters don’t have control over the headline.

If news media is for profit, news media will naturally use the most engaging headline to beat out competition. There is no solution to this problem unless news is regulated or not for profit. You won't 'shame' an entire industry into changing something they've been doing for centuries.

Beats shaming humans for doing something they’ve been doing since the invention of writing: reading titles before reading books or articlesz

The problem with this approach is that it continues to drives traffic to exaggerated headlines, which merely encourages this same kind of headline in the future.

Does anyone know if there are news sources out there that don't have exaggerated, doom- and anger-filled headlines? If they're there, I'd love to drive traffic to them.

We should write a plugin which normalises headlines, essentially a de-click-bater. By training a NN on neutral headlines vs doom/anxiety-inducing/clickbait headlines we can essentially provide the inverse as well.

I actually wrote a half baked version of this to replace the headline with a machine learning generated summary of the article. Headlines wound up being sort of long and clunky but I did like them a lot more than the sort of headlines being discussed here (the reason I wrote it in the first place). Maybe I should finish that.

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