Ask HN: Do we need daily news and social media? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do we need daily news and social media?

21 pointspalidanx18 comments

I recently came back from a holiday where Internet access was basically unusable for a week and realized I didn't miss much news wise at all. When thinking about it, I would rather read a weekly digest of the news from the major papers and even a weekly aggregate of friend's social media feeds once a week instead.

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I think daily news is probably a good thing, given how far back in time it goes. (Newspapers have had centuries.) Possibly even twice daily like certain eras of newspapers where you'd have a morning and evening gazette.

I question a lot more "24/7 news". At some point beyond "twice daily digests" it does seem like too much news. It certainly doesn't help that 24/7 news to keep "engagement numbers" such as viewer counts or retweet counts deeply blurs the lines between entertainment and unsubstantiated rumors with "news", but even if you could somehow crack down on "news-like entertainment" there's probably still way too much diminishing return on it all beyond once or twice a day.

I don't know how we solve that though and a lot of people would complain if you tried to ban cable news networks and news Twitter, but sometimes I do envy the people that lived in "at most twice a day" news cycles.

Of course not. 99.999% of the "daily news" or "social media" content is not so time sensitive that one needs a constant feed of it.

I don't do any social media. Well, okay...there is my occasional jaunt (like weeks or more between logins) into the fediverse via Mastodon. But it's not really "social" the way I use it.

And HN is about the only news I ever seek out. And even that is a low-priority task -- like right now I'm here for like 10-20mins because I have some time to kill before kicking off the release of a product update.

Do we need video games? Do we need Marvel movies? Do we need distractions from the ennui of daily life? What's stopping you from only reading AP news wires? What's the point of this post? Congrats, you've escaped the system and gleemed hidden knowledge, you're so smart.

In a democracy, the news is supposed to be the channel of information by which the populace is able to supervise the government.

Perhaps it is my advancing age that makes me wonder how such an important function can be thought of in parallel with social media.

It works well during Republican administrations. Twitter, Reddit etc are very good watchdogs of R malfeasance, and don’t let scandals disappear quickly.

The issues appear with Democrat admins - as you can see with the last week’s revelations from Bari Weiss.

> Twitter, Reddit etc are very good watchdogs of R malfeasance,

In theory, that's true, but in practice, I see them as the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

If you treat literally everything as the world's biggest scandal, you're going to be ignored or drowned out if you actually do find a dangerous scandal because there's literally zero shift in tone.

> you're going to be ignored or drowned out if you actually do find a dangerous scandal because there's literally zero shift in tone

And consequently political figures will respond to the muted effect of this stimulus by up-regulating their performative, attention-seeking discourse.

Per Bettridge's law of headlines, obviously not.

Aaron Swartz's blog post "I hate the news" ( http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews ) expanded on that pretty well. "... But if that’s true on a scale of minutes, why longer? Instead of watching hourly updates, why not read a daily paper? Instead of reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review? Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine? Instead of a monthly magazine, why not read an annual book?"

That question goes to what the value of news is. Is it to be an informed citizen? A weekly digest is more than enough then.

There are other purposes though. The news is often the center of important conversations. You’re going to be out of the loop a lot if you don’t at least see daily headlines.

Anything more than that? For the vast majority of news items it’s just not that important. For example, I got a push notification at 3:44 am that Kyrsten Sinema is leaving the Democratic Party. Did I need to know that in that moment? No. Did I need to know it at all? Questionable.

> The news is often the center of important conversations. You’re going to be out of the loop a lot if you don’t at least see daily headlines.

The same thing is true of social media in general, popular TV shows, and all that. I think something more is needed. I would say it's important to know about things like Simema doing independent (hearing about it through say a weekly digest rather than omg a push notification), but mostly to stay cognizant of the kind of world that we currently live in. Being unaware leads to too much trust in institutions, that sort of thing.

I always say: "the best news is at least a week old".

"This thing happened" is often not all that interesting or insightful.

Why and how "this thing" happened with all the appropriate context is much more interesting, but that kind of analysis often taken times, so ... the best news is at least a week old.

Of course, we don’t need these things. Would be nice, though, to have more people view their output as what they are: statements designed to entertain, to gather ratings, to offend, to incite, to preen, to troll…. With some possible relation to reality of which you can’t quite judge.

Lots of water under the bridge since Morrow.

Yes, we get cartoon news, painted in broad strokes, and not very often. There's a lot of meaningless gossip about celebrities and sports and there are stories of airline crashes and the like, but as for proper engagement with the real problems the world is facing... there's nothing, and somehow the solutions are always said to be in someone else's hands anyway.

(It's just so weird to see Climate Action Now! billboards outside cafes patronised entirely by those who drive petrol cars... does that irony get reported in the news?)

I mean isn't CAN mean to reach those people using gas? Sounds like uts advertising to the right people.

Yeah but the customers think they're real climate warriors (some of them...)

Nope. I quit news years ago. Consuming it can't do anything for you but rile you up, distracting you from your goals. If something serious happens in the world, you'll hear about it via social osmosis.

If you collapse both of these into saying internet-based information, then yes we do if we want advancements to continue to skyrocket like it has in the last 30 years.

nah

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