Overdosing on Celebrity Gossip, The News, and Low Quality Information | Hacker News Reader

Overdosing on Celebrity Gossip, The News, and Low Quality Information

jamesclear.com

63 pointssunasra19 comments

"The problem with most news, gossip, and link-bait titled articles online is that they are filled with surface level information. Your life isn’t better off for reading them and you’re rarely better informed because of them."

Strangely enough, that is how I feel after reading this blog post: The title promised more than the content delivered. I recognize the problem, but the article is thin on insight beyond the observation.

It doesn't provide insight. It ends with asking the reader what to do.

Thank you for sharing this article sunasra, accurately describes how I spend (too much of) my time. I am slowly getting better at controlling how much infosugar I intake, but it's still a pesky habit.

Most of the time I waste online is HN-related. I'll read articles that at best I only have a passing interest in. Whilst I enjoy knowing a little about a lot, I'd still prefer to be chipping away at larger projects, even if I only have a few minutes at a time to spend. Time for another HN detox...

Turn it off, put it down, go outside. Talk to people. Or make something with your hands.

This is exactly the same like junk food. The solution is the same.

Hi ZenoArrow, Most welcome, glad that you liked it

Everywhere you find addicted users, look at who is feeding them, and you'll find perverse incentives: whether they're page views, contextual ads, or in-app purchases. Aggregators compete amongst one another for users, so they trickle out all content. They claim that quality content is voted to the top, but it is ultimately thinly-masked groupthink. Comment sections are often intellectual wastelands rife with people needing to yell and/or 'win' Internet points for no reason at all.

The world needs innovative thought, not people reinforcing the 'right' opinions. I find social media is particularly bad at this: why is it normal to ingest everyone's opinions on a daily basis? Why don't we want that mental space for ourselves?

We're far too content with the cheap substitutes for things that truly satisfy us. Facebook uses this to great effect, and aggregators do too.

There is plenty of innovative thought out there. The problem is the lack of efficiency in requiring that every individual find and consume the best innovative thought on her own.

Also, I agree that modern manners insist on a a very peurile fear of conflict, which leads to strong segregation of viewpoints, groupthink, a lack of empathy, and even an ignorance of alternate viewpoints.

What we need, among other things, is a new set of manners that encourage conflicting opinions (or even debate) while providing ground rules for avoiding harm to feelings, reputations, and relationships. The fact is, if people become hurt, angry, or withdrawn when someone simply disagrees (let alone argues) with their viewpoint, there is not really any hope for breaking everyone out of their echo chambers. It's simply not worth it to antagonize people for the sake of calling Scientology bogus or homeopathy a waste of money.

And as long as that is the case, I don't see news aggregators (including all forms of journalism) promoting against-the-grain or otherwise uncomfortable information within their respective echo chambers.

And this is the true sadness: new media suffers from the exact same biases/critical flaws of old media. Except it's OK this time, because it's a different set of biases.

That popup at the end of the article totally broke my concentration about the subject at hand. I quickly fell from thought to disgust when the popup came up and covered 1/4 of the screen. Then I backed out of the site. Why do people insist on getting their users onboard a newsletter for a blog like this?

because it works. the site owner knows it's obnoxious, but the numbers justify the annoyance.

Does it really, though? Any hard numbers to back up the "it works"?

This is almost entirely this post from a week ago: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/07/how-big-is-your-ci...

This article reads like a call for better curation. There's too much information for everyone to be fully informed about everything. But (and here's where I differ) it's not acceptable to just remain ignorant about things I can't affect. If nothing else, I can (and should) react strategically to even the biggest and the most foregone trends.

Journalism is exactly the answer to a call for better curation. News networks, newspapers, blogs, documentary film-makers, and so on, should be providing the high-level view of what is important and nothing more in an age where attention is a scarce resource.

Unfortunately, there isn't (yet) a successful business model for journalism that rewards the content producer for being efficient. That is, newspapers don't get rewarded for not producing a paper on slow news days (or for being shorter in general). Likewise, TV channels cannot pride themselves on providing a twelve-minute newscast covering the same information as the competition.

On the contrary, all modern sources of information (news, facebook, and otherwise) get rewarded for attracting eyeballs as much as possible, so there is an incentive to do the exact opposite: there's no news today, so here's a kitty fashion show or some linkbait to get your blood boiling.

Er, Natural disasters, as caused by climate change, are increasingly within the sphere of human control. War is also very much a result of our own behavior. I have trouble with the argument that 'ignoring' these things has a positive outcome.

My spin on that was not that these things should be completely ignored, but that you should be informed and act on them; if you're not going to act on them, don't constantly consume the news about them.

I don't completely agree with that. I do read about those topics; I don't necessarily act upon it, e.g., engage in climate change research but I do use that information to inform my actions, e.g., what I purchase, how I vote, etc.

Or how about: So what if I can't do anything about big issues? There's usually something I can do because of those big issues.

If I'm aware of a war broiling in a certain country, I can avoid investing there. If I'm aware of market trends, I can plan my investments accordingly. If I believe immigration restrictions on educated workers will be loosened over the next fifty years, I can develop products that will be especially useful to people with green cards and white-collars.

Sure, you won't be able to do anything tomorrow, but that won't mean you ready yourself to seize opportunities that present themselves over the next decade or two.

I think the author was more talking about the difference between consuming information or consuming narrative even though he didn't quite phrase it that way. Learning about a new piece of regulation that just passed on immigration reform is information. Learning about what the sheriff of Arizona thinks about illegal immigration is narrative. Someone somewhere crafted that piece for you to consume and is spoon-feeding it to you. It's like the junk food of information.

We like narrative, because its fun and exciting and designed to appeal to us, but at the end of the day has very little information value.

Wikipedia is my modern and globalized version of CliffsNotes. I only deep dive into sources and research if I happen upon a subject incredibly interesting to me (my "fun" reading) or might help me get ahead with one of my projects (my "work" reading).

As for HN, this site provides more of the guilty pleasure of looking inside the tech bubble than actually being an incredible source of information. So to me it lies somewhere between the national news and Wikipedia.

I really identified with this article's message. It is nicely written. For my part: in an effort to cut through some of the noise of one of the most popular channels - Twitter - I recently created and launched this service:

http://qureet.com - Find Meaning on Twitter.

FYI, it is implemented 100% in golang, and runs on a Raspberry Pi.

Literally clicked away from this article to Facebook.

Maybe I have a problem. ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com