Ask HN: Is it even worth reading news outside of HN? A part of me is overloaded with tons of news (which turn out being a noise after all) and «Last hour Ipad deals!!!» garbage in RSS. Another part thinks all the worthy news are showing up on HN within a few hours anyway. The question is, am I missing out on anything if I only visit HN? |
If you care about current affairs you’ll miss that too.
Ultimately, there’s no substitute for doing your own aggregation. But a good start is to find someone you like and expand from their Twitter/Substack. For me that’s John Carmack and Gwern.
The danger is consuming without intention. It’s useful to ask yourself why you’re reading the news. Is it what you really want to be doing? Or is it a mindless habit of filling time?
What I do instead is I have a curated RSS feed of things I’m interested in. Not only websites by the way, I try to RSS anything. Subreddits, GitHub repos, mailing lists, blogs, podcasts.
The experience of reading a newspaper every day really startled me. When I'm given a set of news items picked by a knowledgeable editor, I hear about things I just never would've sought out on my own.
Together, it's enough and frankly more time than I have for news anyway.
Longer answer: Staying in any kind of echo chamber for too long is a bad idea. Like-minded people will reinforce ideas that they like, and it can be an isolating and potentially damaging experience to exclusively read from HN. The real crown jewel in HN's crown is crowdsourced link aggregation, and there are a lot of aggregators for a lot of different topics. Take some time to find quality sources, vet them for a short while and incorporate them into your daily reading. There's a lot of information out there these days, so it can seem appealing to hide from it. There are also really high-quality information sifting tools available though.
Great way to get a birds eye view of the news. https://ground.news/
Why do you want to read the news? What is your goal?
(Answers like "So I can be informed" simply beg the question).
Joe Biden is president. Inflation is rampant. There is a new variant (Omicrom) that can get through two doses but might be less severe. Kentucky is recovering from severe weather. US left Afghanistan this year.
There's some major news where I live about floods, which was predicted by climate change experts. There's a short term effect - helping flood victims, and long term - deciding how to deal with climate change in our backyard. Mainstream media is blaming drainage, but Twitter has actual experts with data and modeling, who point out that no amount of drainage is going to stop certain cities from being underwater in 30 years.
On top of that, HN shows mostly news today and you'll miss on more important news of the week, month, quarter, and so on.
I've been stalking certain people on HN and only then did I notice news that were actually relevant to me. Such as certain deaths that I really care about, the opioid epidemic, Omicron, these things that are actually personal or actionable.
You can also do what I do and find a good friend who talks about these things. People are great news aggregators too, and they want someone to gossip to.
Some examples for US people:
- BBC - https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/cx1m7zg01xyt/united-states
- Al Jazeera - https://www.aljazeera.com/where/united-states
- TeleSUR - https://www.telesurtv.net/SubSecciones/en/country/us/
I have seen American and Latin American coverage of UK events and it's like Gell-Mann amnesia on crack.
I do it anyway, but only really because it's accessible. If it weren't a few clicks away, I don't think I'd bother.
Particularly over the past year or so, my life has been improved by simply ignoring what the news is saying because it's been so conflicting and nonsensical.
So, yeah. I'd say that it's only worth doing something if it improves your life. If it does, crack on. If not, well, there's a big world out there and a lot to do.
I don't check often but a quick way to see interesting topical news is seeing the trending tab on Twitter. It's not always meaningful but it does a good job exposing me to things that I wouldn't choose to look up.
HN lacks meaningful discussion on basically any works of art, like films and tv. Sports aren't brought up either. It's not just politics that gets left out. Book recommendations on HN are also mostly focused on productivity and tech. I appreciate that it creates an environment that's not emotionally taxing but I also realize that it is a bubble.
Yes, HN is an echo chamber like any other community. The more time you spend here you can see that. Especially if you follow the site with RSS where dead and flagged submissions are also archived, comments there usually paint a better picture about the whole site (ie see the echo chamber part)
My favorite is the minimum 20 point submissions feed. Those usually have enough traction already. Now I don't open every single link but if you find any dead/removed and/or flagged submissions from those then that's where the people usually goes against the hivemind/content guideline of the site. YET it already gained enough points so should be an interesting one https://hnrss.org/newest?points=20
corrected the title for you.
News those days is nothing more than "socially acceptable entetainment for grownups". There’s a reason why lot of industry call the whole package "infotainment".
What’s worth reading? What has an impact on your life. What will change some of your decisions. In that regard, Proust told it a long time ago: what’s important is in the books (probably already around you). News is just a distraction except for your very professional niche (and even in that case, if an information is important for you, the world will manage to pass the memo).
So : is it even worth reading news? No, for most people. (in fact, the world would probably be better if less people were reading the news).
If news in entertainment, then the answer is clear: read what is fun for you
Stop watching cable news and read a newspaper.
You're overexposed to the firehose of noise and want to get away from that but still be reasonably informed. This is a good idea.
If you can pick one or two high quality publications (one local, one national/global) to check once per day (many have really good newsletters), you'll probably be pretty happy with that balance.
HN is not the right tool for this because it is a tech forum that sometimes discusses news.
You want a diverse news feed. If you subscribe to, say, the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Reuters they will, almost certainly, cover pretty much the same stories in much the same, safe way. You get correlation of story, worldview and topic. You didn't need to subscribe to all of them. Just one would have covered 99 percent of what you were looking for. I used to read the FT out of that bunch for one gem of orthogonality -- Lucy Kellaway. Sadly, she is long gone.
HN solves part of this problem by crowd-curating a diverse range of sources but there will still be a high correlation of topics (and likely bias / worldview, too).
Long story short, news filtering is a dimensionality reduction and optimisation problem across tensors of different "characteristics; Maybe you really like an echo chamber. Perhaps you really like to get all sides of the story. Maybe you want just news on sports from journalists who hate your team.
That's a tough problem.
But the easiest path is to realise that, by default, almost all news sources are correlated -- so just pick the one you like best and ditch all the others. I promise you won't notice. After that, work on realising, as Taleb has pointed out, that "to be cured of reading news, spend a month reading only news from one year ago". You'll learn pretty quick that outside of reporting facts, opinion is usually junk. Treat it as entertainment.
I pay for the guardian. I read nytimes, wapo and drudge to understand how others see it.
If you're genuinely overloaded, I'd say you're probably okay. It might be worthwhile to consider the value of being able to see different perspectives, even if often times the content is rehashed (e.g. What is being said differently? What is omitted in one and not the other?). I think everyone, if they have the time, should take a historiography course because these are the kinds of things you learn about.
It's especially important now, given the technology accelerated world we live in today of effectively instantaneous global mass-communication.
I deal with the overload by being a "slow" thinker. I figure that nearly anything worth knowing, will still be worth knowing in a week. The noise will be gone.
It helps to be Old. For instance I have good statistics on the percentage of cases, where I've looked back and regretted supporting a particular party or candidate in an election. This gives me a good handle on whether I need to rethink my political views urgently, or if I can wait until after the next election cycle.
However, I think one type of news is essential: that about what your government is doing. Are legislators being led by lobbyists? Are regulators captured by big business? Are politicians breaking promises without good reasons?
Following this, and voting accordingly, is necessary for democracy to function.
[1] - https://patch.com/
“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.” — Nassim Taleb
I find this kind of view depressingly common. Knowing about world events breaks us out of our various bubbles and makes us aware of what is going on with our fellow human beings. It is short-sighted to only focus on things relevant to you at this moment.
And irrelevant to what? Your career? Social standing? If so, then throw away movies, all fiction books, etc. those don’t result in anything really actionable either.
(This isn’t an argument for up-to-the minute news, though. I sort of agree there.)
Even if I was just to look at the news that directly relevant to me, there’s plenty that (rightly) doesn’t make it to HN. For example, if there are an increasing number of terror attacks in a part of the world I’ve been to or plan to go to then I’d consider that news important but not HN-worthy.
My wish is for more text centric HN-alike forums, which cover the topics that HN doesn't, but is populated by the same type of people that HN has - i.e. mostly polite and knowledgeable, with a desire to contribute to the discussion.
Reddit is not it, nor are any of the other forums I've found so far.
[1] - https://www.science.org/
- TheInformation
- WSJ
- Economist
- London Review of Books (if you were to call this "news")
That said I do like long-form news / docs that focus on the ordinary man on the ground. Just remember there is never a truly objective lens.
If you just want a different view that includes politics consider Al Jazeera english and Russia Today english.
Other docs on Arte feel like emotional eco-drivel “back to nature” blah blah, very German IMHO, but it can be somewhat enlightening to hear that point of view too. I am very pro nature/environment, but do not want to dismantle capitalism and remove all forms of mass-production that some Arte stuff advocates.
And i think that's exactly the reason why so many tech enthusiasts are here.
I don't really care about celebrity news, tv, sports.
Even then, that news can be very local. Not everyone is interested in the saga of Verstappen ( from my country) vs. Hamilton in F1 sports.
I think most people don't care about art here either. But are curious about art generated by ML.
The trending tab on Twitter is awful. It's the kind of news stories that are viral, not important.
For a narrow range of topics, yes.
But ironically not with anything that might be relevant to analyzing news in general, which is why such stories tend to be banned or flagged, or burst into flames.
It's not all important news, but it's really different from what I see on HN and what I would choose to read about.
The news category on twitter for me shows #hodl, a shooting in japan, #womenwhocode, Theranos trial, Amazon warehouse working conditions, Maxwell trial, Omicron news from South Africa, California wildfire, among other things.
I just find it quite narrow minded in the other topics and very much in the "don't question science" camp.
Of course both sides believe they're the rational one, and the other side is the nutjob wacko one.. and both believe they're right.
I am interested in longer form issues like inequality, economic development, important regulation etc, but don't really consider them news. Reading information on those can also wait a few week or months, and then longer essays or books will have a better analysis.
The bubble-breaking effect of staying informed is valuable, but I don't know how to weigh it properly against spending time well every day. Personally, I found singular focus to be the most satisfying and am not ashamed of that.
I don't think it's about believing which side is right. Many subjective topics aren't popular on HN because there's no way to reach a census. I have also noticed that most comments don't engage with exaggerated and flame bait language. People are generally listened to and responded to respectfully. There's going to be exceptions, but I see less troll type comments on HN and that's why I respect it as a source.
The "nutjob wacko" opinions are respectfully heard and then respectfully torn apart.
Since when were we not allowed to listen to the experts we think make sense to us? I feel like social media has polarized us so much we can't even talk to eachother anymore if we don't listen to the same experts.
Yes. Name any consensus opinion and at least one contrarian will show up to denounce it. Just look at COVID - every single thread about it is packed with anti-vaxxers and skeptics.
I am curious to know what you mean by that ?
Hacker News just isn't the place to go to be informed about the world.
By the way (off topic), sometimes there are threads on HN, that superficially look interesting, but that feel kind of "primitive" if you are used to read philosophy. I notice them probably because on other forum I just expect the thread to be not interesting at all.
I don't have an example at hand, but in those occasions it made me think there must be some kind of corollary of the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect"[0] at play.
Probably Reddit TBH, but also probably not the main subreddit for any particular topic, so it might take some digging. I hear good things about the quality of /r/askhistorians for instance. Also r/anime_titties/ (seriously.) Occasionally someone will post a thread here about high quality subreddits.