There’s so much so-called “news”, but most of it is just noise. In this situation, it seems easiest to either A) get consumed by it, trying to follow everything and reading every “he said what?”-piece posted or B) become more or less apathetic and avoid news altogether.
To be able to make proper choices and help move things in the right direction, B) is not an option, as you need to understand current events to at least a minimal level, but A) leaves you just as clueless, overflowing with useless information, with a heavily worn-down ability to be source critical, not remembering where you read any given “fact”.
So how do you keep up to date with current events? Have you found a good way? Am I mistaken in my above assessment?
what a great way to Segway to our sponsor grind news
I find I like to follow what analysts like Ben Norton report to get some context around the news. I evaluate whom I pay attention to based on their track record, and how well their predictions align with the way things actually developed.
I generally try to use RSS feeds, but I’ve come to realize this doesn’t really work too well with current-/world news, because it becomes a firehose that drowns my entire feed. So these days, I just have my other interests in RSS feeds and use the BBC and The Guardian front pages to quickly get a summary of current events. I also visit my local newspaper site for headlines (they put their stuff behind paywall though, so it’s just headlines).
I’ve culled my social media to Lemmy and Mastodon and I use pretty aggressive word filtering on Mastodon to get rid of topics I’m not very interested in.
It’s not perfect by no means, but I haven’t really found anything else that works. I wish I had some better way to follow European and African news and commentary, but everything (apart from manually visiting sites) seems to always result in a firehose of news that drowns all other sources.
I wonder if this could be a good use-case for an LLM: feed it that fire-hose of an RSS-feed and have it group and spit out a short and sweet summary per group with the original links. It’s something I would want from actual journalists, but while they are busy writing about Trump’s latest tweet, this might be a usable substitute?
I enjoy Democracy Now, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Zeteo, Dropsite News, and some others.
best thing to do is spend all day and all night on the internet tapped into the latest news and arguing with people about it
Hm, what letter comes before A?
I use an RSS app called Feeder, and Lemmy. I find I go back to The Conversation a lot as I find it covers topics in a calm tone of voice and with a level of academic rigor that I appreciate.
I use Feeder, but even with filters to try and remove as much stuff as I’m not interested in, there’s still too much for me to keep up with. I imported all my feeds to Nunti to filter things down more. Nunti allows you to either upvote or downvote articles, and that information is used by the app with a transparent, relatively simple algorithm to try to predict what type of things you want to see vs don’t want to see. It doesn’t give much priority to breaking news, and it doesn’t have the article snippets or built in reader mode like Feeder does, so i still use Feeder.
Filters; opt-out of negativity. I switched to Voyager from Boost because it supports filters and I can just blacklist topics that cause me stress. Anywhere I can just stop a topic from ever entering my perception, the better. A single bad headline may ruin my mood for hours from just a glance, better to never get the chance.
Subscriptions; opt-in to the topics and news you care about. Find a good source that offers curated feeds instead of a firehouse of everything. You can only care so much, so use that attention sparingly on things that deserve it.
Avoid algorithms. They are designed to keep your attention on them and outage is good at that. Save your health, find it yourself.
Community. Find people, groups, or organizations that have a similar mindset and share good content with them. If they share good content in kind, you all can improve your state of mind.
I have a Lemmy account specifically for news. I check it when I think I can handle it. Also, MSNBC app as it’s the most centrist I trust in the U.S.
I just don’t check news sources personally. My thinking is if something big happens then I’ll hear about it anyway through family and friends so I’ll just wait for them to fill me in.
