Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

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I've been trying an experiment for the last year or two. I have an app that collects commentary, tech and science stories from across the web. (Recently I added news, but that was a mistake)

I find I stay just as informed reading commentary, where I'm purposefully being manipulated, as I do reading news. In fact the news is better, as various authors advance various personal theories they've been working on for weeks or months, using the current events as fodder. Reading a couple of these from different viewpoints provides wonderful context -- and context is the one thing critically missing from most "breaking news" reporting. The only difference is about a 12-hour delay. Trust me, the world does not depend on whether I know something that quickly. Twitter peeps will annoy me if something truly incredible happens.

I'm also finding that branding, whether by news outlet, author, or social signaling, is a terrible indicator of quality. As I continue to flush out the app, my belief is that a better indicator is statistical clustering around personality types, but that's still a year or two away.

But one thing is for sure: I've been much happier since I gave up all forms of news consumption. News is based on emotional manipulation. It's always a crisis, there's always an argument, and there's always some terrible danger you've been unaware of. That stuff will rot your mind. It's always been bad; it's just gotten worse over the last few decades as the news cycle has shortened.

I think this is a great observation that has really only become possible from the internet: the ability to consume viewpoints from others outside of your small social circle has been increased massively. Sites like HN, reddit, dig, slashdot, etc have enabled that dialog on top of the usual one sided article.

Think back to when news was mostly distributed via TV or newspapers. Where could you get alternative views? Neighbors, churches? These folks won't likely come from as diverse backgrounds as folks you might find in an online forum. They will have grown up most likely in the same town you are in, raised in a similar fashion. These days, I might read twenty different viewpoints of NSA wiretapping, from twenty different countries perspectives. It definitely provides the reader with a much richer experience, making the original article less valuable (except as a catalyst for the discussion obviously).

Yeah but the internet has also made it easier to filter out news you don't like. Back in the day, your local newspaper had to appeal to a general audience, and contained editorials from people with many perspectives. Now a days, you can chose to only consume news you agree with. If you're a conservative, you can read Drudge Report and Fox News Online without ever having to encounter a liberal viewpoint (except as the target of mockery). Liberals can get all their news from Daily Koz and MSNBC.com in the same fashion.

I've got a fiver that says your "twenty different viewpoints" are just twenty differently phrased reiterations of how Godawful bad it is that the NSA should do what the NSA does. Nothing personal -- but I strongly doubt that the ability to obtain, consider, and benefit by perspectives other than one's own, correlates meaningfully with the frequency with which anyone actually does so.

I've been wanting to do something like this for a while. I'd quite like something that collects commentary about the state of countries around the word, but I'm lacking decent sources, especially for outside of the west. Have you found any particularly enlightening sources of such things you'd care to share?

Foreign commentary can be a hoot! If you thought the western media was bad, you should get out more :)

Here's a secret ninja media consumption tip: http://watchingamerica.com It takes commentary from around the world and translates it into English. Quite informative. I wish we had far more services like it.

What does 'rot your mind' mean in this context? I agree, and intuitively feel there's value in avoiding short term distractions, but what's going on there? Is it just opportunity cost, spending time watching TV instead of thinking and learning so you miss out on the mental benefits? Or do certain types/durations of distraction make you less able to do complex mental tasks when you go back to them?

I think what happens is that we start viewing the world in overly-simplified political narratives, say left versus right, that can fit inside a typical news story. So if there's a shooting, it's a gun control story, and we have the same old assholes on TV saying the same old things. We become conditioned to think of everything in the world in cartoonish terms. Media outlets are only too happy to fill the space with people arguing. And it's always the same arguing. Arguing has become a commodity for consumption.

This makes the reporting itself really bad, since the only context the reporter needs to fit the event into is some off-the-shelf political bullshit, and it makes the outlets try to drive up viewership by having presenters who more and more have these recurring populist rages. Every night on TV there's somebody getting mad about something. So the reporters dig up enough to fuel the machine -- usually fed by the political parties, PACs, or other interested groups -- and the pundits and reactionaries do the dance. The viewer is left constantly seesawing from topic to topic. Are HMOs out to kill people? Will a child molester living five miles take my kid? There's no context to any of this because nobody gets paid to provide context. They get paid to make viewers frightened and angry, which drives up ratings.

That's unsustainable, in my opinion.

In printed media, without the branding or signaling, authors are required to provide a thesis and support it with an argument. The reader can choose to engage or not. There's no "if it bleeds, it leads" nonsense. I can read great commentary that I disagree with -- and not feel angry or somehow moved to outrage. Or I can read commentary I agree with that's a piece of junk. I'm no longer taking sides. Instead, I can separate my consumption of events from my characterization of the reporting itself. That's the critical piece that's missing for most news consumers.

Just guesswork on my part, though.

You have piqued my curiosity, your app sounds really interesting! Can you share more details about it? What sources do you aggregate from, how do you filter your stories (manually / statistically)? Actually i've been wanting to build something similar too!

That's my experience too. It came naturally ages ago, when I started reading /.. The explosion of different viewpoints was fascinating.

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