App Will Help You Follow Election Results Without Triggering Your Anxiety | Hacker News Reader

App Will Help You Follow Election Results Without Triggering Your Anxiety

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Or you could, ya know, just wait until tomorrow. The outcome is going to be the same whether you find it out right this minute or next week.

Nothing at all is meaningful until at least the polls close on the west coast, and probably not until long after. Go to bed and find out when you wake up. I promise that nothing is going to happen overnight that requires your action.

Usually after an election I just wait until someone tells me what happened. When Trump first won back in the day, some dude in the gym just came up and told me with a forlorn look on his face.

My son told me at breakfast — it was the first election he could vote in. But like you I figured the results would be the same regardless so I had read a book and gone to bed.

That is, unfortunately, not a possible scenario now due to COVID.

My gym is open, so it's still possible

FWIW, a gym is about the last kind of place that should be open right now, based on what we know about how this particular plague spreads. No judgement from me either way, but take care of yourself out there.

As a robot with no feelings or worries, I do not see how you people just refuse to wait until ((friendlyDate.tomorrow))

Yeah, snarky but whatevs. The assurance of control helps, even if it’s just checking your phone is still working while expecting a call.

I believe that in a lot of people, that quest for assurance causes more anxiety. Even when the news is good, the effect is fleeting, while any bad news lasts longer. You prime yourself to keep seeking little hits of reward, like a hamster at a feeder bar.

You do what you gotta do, but I think you should consider the idea that it'll be more reassuring to do something that takes your mind off of it -- especially sleep, which takes your mind off of everything. Internalize the fact that the stream of updates do not matter, and you might find it easier to sleep. It will be hard to turn it off if you've been feeding it all day.

I say this not because I have no feelings or worries, but exactly the opposite. I am quite anxious. I'm trying to deal with the anxiety by refusing to engage with it, and focusing on what I know about the timeline.

I've almost managed to completely abandon the 24-hour news cycle. You hit the nail on the head with the anxiety thing. I live in Victoria, Australia and people looked at me like an alien when I didn't know what the daily COVID case numbers were.

Ironically it's 4am here and I recently woke up with my mind racing. Nowt to do with COVID or the elections though!

I'm assuming it's for a similar reason that people like to watch sports rather than just read the outcome in the news the next day.

Indeed, and I think that treating this like sports is part of the problem. Victory for your team dominates any actual effect of policy on human beings. And it's constant -- the game is going on at literally every instant, with a SuperHyperDuperMegaBowl every four years.

Our choices of elections teams are only slightly less arbitrary than our choices of sports teams. Once chosen we get a continual barrage of cheerleading for us and against our arch-rivals. It's not just the ordinary mental failings of refusing to consider things from others' point of view (while telling ourselves that we have carefully considered and rejected it). It's the continual thrill of the match, with both points for and points against creating mental rewards to cheer harder and not look away for a moment.

We'll all be healthier if we stopped looking at it like a sports match. And the first step, I believe, is to turn it off, so that we can engage with it at a greater distance, without the dopamine hits and troughs that make it so addicting.

Why does it have to be an app? I don't want to install your garbage spyware on my phone. Just make an extremely simple webpage without any ads or other garbage.

I was surprised how many different permissions they wanted for a news app.

Also, does Apple list permissions? I couldn't find it on their website (easily). I did find Google play store permissions easily.

Apple's App store doesn't list permissions, but permissions are not given until the user is asked for each individually. I think it's against the app store guidelines to require permissions that aren't actually necessary (eg. requiring microphone permission before displaying a news article to the user).

You realize the app recommended is the Guardian’s and uses updating notifications to present in a predictable manner and context? This seems like an improvement in user experience over keeping this in a tab along all the other tabs and having to meander past your regular distractions, many of which might present results in a less restrained manner than what is being advocated for here. It seems like you saw the word app, made a throwaway, and ranted about the word app.

I agree. It's thoughtfully done and easier than refreshing a web page. Not worthy of the shade thrown, IMO. If you don't like it, don't use it.

http://www.justtellmewhowon.com

Even this site seems to use WordPress and some other frameworks. So unnecessary...just need a simple static page.

Oh and no HTTPS.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

No joke. The website pulls down about 1MB of content, takes 1s to load and shows "NO ONE YET. KEEP CHECKING BACK" + one image (which is 72KB).

No wonder most non-webdevs think the web is bloated.

It's really your phone manufacturer's fault for giving apps a higher status than web-pages.

Most of the large newspapers and media sites will have this.

A live updating page with the results as they come in, and often with their predictions once they are able to call the results.

Just pick whichever media site you like best.

It doesn't. You can just use the Google widget for it - https://www.google.com/search?&q=us+election+results

I think the poster was concerned about privacy.

Are webpages allowed to edit the contents of already-sent notifications?

Using a notification system at all for this sort of thing runs counter to the premise of low anxiety design.

I think a single persistent notification is lower anxiety than a constant stream of them

Lower still is no notifications, or a single notification when the result is final.

If you really have anxiety about this I recommend not engaging with any new software at all and just wake up tomorrow and see who won.

Tomorrow? More like December, if we're lucky.

And that's the source of anxiety, at least for me.

Wish it were that cut and dried, but — depends on the earliest callable swing states.

It's pretty unlikely there'll be a definitive result by morning.

Over/under on at least one state simply ordering the count halted and all uncounted ballots destroyed?

No.

Unless they already have a "must be counted by" time that's tonight/early tomorrow morning, I'd say that won't happen.

What's going to happen if someone does just that, though, rules be damned?

Three years of litigation and someone barely involved getting a misdemeanor plea bargain?

Hopefully criminal charges would be filed against the responsible parties (destroying ballots is a felony, as I understand it). If none are charged, consider the US a defunct superpower. We don't possess a huge population (relative to the globe) and if the rule of law has failed so dramatically we will lose whatever remains of our political standing within the world.

But I still think it's unlikely that this will happen. At least on a statewide level. I could see some voting precincts doing something completely moronic like this.

This did happen recently in Florida; see Brenda Snipes.

Reading her Wikipedia page is interesting. Broward County is not the place to live if you want your vote reliably counted.

Then the matter will very likely go to the Supreme Court.

This is a distracting and unhelpful comment. The rules (despite attempts to persuade us otherwise) are well-established and not nearly so easy to deviate from, even in this tumultuous time.

Well, the lawsuit has been announced: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/524404-trump-says-hell...

The rules are what the supreme court says they are, which is why the appointment of Barrett was rushed.

Only if PA really is the state that decides the election and the vote is too close to be obvious there. Any permutation where it isn’t that close and we’ll probably know tomorrow.

Possibly better to link to the Guardian's page directly: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/oct/29/live-us-electi...

This, whoever decided to pin a video in the middle of the article on mobile is an idiot.

Strangely, that page doesn't seem to have a link to the app stores (unless I missed it)

You could have easily titled this as "Download The Guardian App"

Tao te ching has helped me eliminate Political Anxiety.

Who in their right mind would intentionally let The Guardian be their sole source of news on this topic?

In my experience, The Guardian has often been the fastest at updating with accurate count data.

If I did want to find out what's going on, which I don't because I'm a Brit and several time zones away from the action, I would simply open Twitter.

How is Twitter a source of information rather than gossip, opinion, and outright information warfare conducted by both sides?

> How is Twitter a source of information rather than gossip, opinion, and outright information warfare conducted by both sides?

Your Twitter experience will be wildly different depending on who you follow. If you do this with some care, and also don't take everything at 100% face value, you too can have a low-misinformation Twitter experience.

I quit Twitter in 2015 when my supposedly level-headed friends (most of whom are fellow software engineers) lost their minds and switched to posting only about politics. Twitter immediately lost all utility. To me, politics has little to do with good governance, and is thus a kind of misinformation or spam. I opted right out of all that. I’ve been much happier ever since.

I think you're smart for cutting that toxicity out of your life. I quit Facebook a couple years ago I've never regretted it.

Luckily Twitter wasn't a "friends" platform for me, and so far I'm doing okay using Lists and being generous with blocking.

I didn't quit FB, but I stopped looking at it. I maintained it strictly to organize group events which it was very useful for. The feed, however, has become garbage (as demonstrated again when I perused it this morning for grins).

This, 100%. Choose your follows very carefully and you will be rewarded with a goldmine.

I often see news I am interested on Twitter hours before it makes the actual news. And some content that I want to know that never makes the news.

I'm sorry to tell you that the traditional media isn't any better for gossip, opinion and information warfare. You gotta be able to analyse your sources in any case.

I prefer not to follow news at all. 99.999% of it never has anything to do with me. If I can’t hear it from the front porch of my house, I don’t care to know about it.

I don't understand political anxiety. In the United States, elections even of the president, do not ultimately matter a whole lot. There are several layers of government and several governmental co-equal bodies such that the election of any one person is not super important. And that's the way it should be:

https://reason.com/2020/11/02/make-elections-not-matter-so-m...

While usually there's some truth in this sort of sentiment, this simply isn't about the election of one individual this go round. It's about perpetuating and legitimizing the overreach of one particular political party that seeks to keep itself in power despite the conventions and rules that should allow it to be removed — see: autocracy.

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