Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

Focus on you. What are you doing today? What do you need to reflect on from yesterday? What do you need to plan for tomorrow? Don't waste cycles on things that are out of your scope.

> It's meant to exhaust you.

* https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1886247034664964548

Ezra Klein:

> That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him. […]

> What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.

* https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

Most countries have rights to protest, organise, strike, for a reason. Most of these rights were gained after long fights in which single individual was meaningless but together they moved contains. You have to know when to pull back but you also have to know when to dive in

If it only was so simple. How to define such things? Case in point: the biggest "outrage factor" seems to be politics. Well - _can_ you control your country's government? Yes, you can - however not directly. And this means that "I don't care about politics" stance is bad.

edit: spelling

I'm not saying you shouldn't care about politics at all. But politics in a country you're not a citizen of are irrelevant. And politics in your own country only really matter when it's time to vote, right? So what's the value in "staying informed" outside of that narrow window?

> ... people have found that, actually, outrage can be useful. It actually can help you identify a problem and react to it. But it can also be harmful if you’re experiencing it all the time and become overwhelmed by it.

I'm reading that as meaning something more like identify a problem and act on it. Outrage itself is a reaction, just not a positive one. There's no shortage of people reacting to things.

(this is a response to the comment, not the article)

[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/10/texas-ut-lecturer-ar...

[2] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240425-more-than-100...

[3] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-us...

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index

Agreed. I personally believe that checking the news everyday is akin to something like a ‘news overdose’. There’s nothing wrong with spending just 15 minutes per week. At least for me, that’s a far healthier dose.

The news just made me sad, sad and angry most of the time, it's just a stream of 24/7 misery and if there's not enough misery going on locally the news will find misery from around the world to fill the run time.

Platforms have realized this long ago, that as info explodes people pay attention to the easiest things to pay attention too not the hardest, so they move resources to designing things like reels and shorts and tweets etc etc. Every earnings call they gloat about how shorter form content is exploding and how thrilled they are about it.

The long form stuff only holds attention of the majority if you keep throwing Novelty on the table every two sentences.

Platforms are basically running an animal domestication program, where people have been rewarded with high rep and status for extremely low cognitive work.

So that entire group that has benefited doesn't see any need for nuance and depth in anything. "Cause look how many likes, clicks, views and followers I have accumulated without it"

Over time though I picked up on these "outrage triggers" and that's helped me be much more objective about news I'm reading. I'll be reading an article and I can usually pick up the "tricks" writers use to generate outrage. I often find myself reading an article and go "oh look you want me to feel outraged right now".

Nowdays when I try to be informed about a story I will read an NYT report, a CNN report, a Fox News or other right leaning report, and then maybe one from DailyWire of Bannon's War Room. Skimming every article I often see spots where the outlet is trying to outrage their readers. NYT will report something that will outrage the left and as you "go right" on the reports you will start to see outrage directed to the right.

- you have a team that will brief you on it

- you will get the news that apply to you from the source

You won’t get either of these from a news website.

As a civilian, you can stay completely up to date with a quick weekly / monthly headline scan.

So it's not really that simple is it?

When you finally decide to pay attention, there is a chance that you will not be able to easily absorb everything that leads to the situation so you will lack any perspective of the past events.

We live in an extremely dense and complex times, staying informed is very difficult as it is even when you try to pay attention.

Reddit, instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, etc are all the equivalent of digital junk food and I’d argue that we’re all a lot more negatively affected by it than we think. There’s a reason ‘brain rot’ was word of the year.

It's not really the ads that bother me. It's the "recommended videos". Is there a way to customize my view of youtube to avoid the shit I don't need to see?

The thing about youtube is that it's very easy for propaganda/click-bait to creep in during moments of weakness.

Maybe it's time to go cold-turkey? Failing that, maybe it's worth it to try and take some control over the experience?

>es, you can - however not directly. And this means that "I don't care about politics" stance is bad.

Though you might not be aware of it, you're repeating propaganda that actually aids some nebulous group of people. It seeks to recruit me and my efforts to further their purposes, none of which overlap my own significantly. I can't exert significant indirect influence either. And if I were to pool my insignificant influence with others (such as you suggest) to influence government, it would almost certainly be towards ends I do not agree with. I can be used by others, so to speak, but no one's on my side.

I might get to watch one group I don't agree with go killdozer on another group I don't agree with, and it will be entertaining to watch supposing I can maintain enough distance from the carnage.

It also puts things into a bit of a global perspective, when you realize how much stuff is going on around the world all the time. Though this of course also means you'll learn things that are on the news everywhere in your country only after they've become relevant enough to register on a global level.

But I'm OK with the idea that change speed is somewhat inversely proportional to value at risk. Might be better if it was 1/log(value).

However, shitty newsfeeds like Google news are my bane. I can’t stop.

It fails to account for the majority of outrage-inducing news where the stupidity is at the source.

( - Stewart Lee's taxi driver, over a decade ago. )

Prior to social media, we all had incredibly conflicting views, just wasn't in our faces all the time to get outraged about! So the trick is to remember, by having these discussions/disagreements, we're actually making progress. We hear the loudest voices, but there's always smart and sincere people quietly reading and learning, which is a brilliant outcome!

If you find yourself getting outraged, be disciplined and switch activities (exercise, go for a walk, or turn off the source).

I definitely wouldn't leave social media though! Instead, harness them! Train those algos to give you science, book clubs, fascinating music niches, travel, culture - go deep, explore, and 'follow' liberally - you can very easily remove yourself from a group/page. I've found insanely interesting chemistry and physics pages, not to mention domains I never even knew existed, like color theory and a handful of others. Once you start clicking on politics, you'll only get more of it. Click on the good stuff!

This sounds so interesting to me - was it your responsibility? How did you detect if someone was addicted? And most importantly, how did you scale it?

Also, I am impacted by legal system, by lawlessness for some, by environment pollution, by Healthcare system ...

Sorry, but that last paragraph sounds like AI generated Meta PR.

I'm very aggressive with the "not interested" and "don't recommend this channel" buttons, and over time it does mostly get rid of the most obnoxious recs. Right now it's also not recommending much good stuff, either, so YMMV.

To put it another way, ditching a medium entirely is the incorrect strategy; akin to refusing to read books just because there's many bad ones - obviously, instead, we select the good ones and read those. Same goes for social media pages/groups/profiles

The net effect of my news/social media fast has been fairly dramatic. I suddenly have an attention span again. When a persons opinion differs from mine, I generally don't immediately assume they are part of the third reich (although if they keep talking a while I might get there lol).

To be clear I absolutely despise whats happening in the US right now. Enough information makes it to me through friends and family (and HN) that I feel a deep sense of despair. I am just not sure what minute by minute updates on the fuckery happening right now gets me.

Why should anyone have to care about the Treasury's Bureau of the Fiscal Service?

Are people aware of of how the Internet works? Are people aware of how water and sewage work? The electrical grid?

If someone who just graduated high school started flipping breakers at a substation would people think that's a good idea?

Or, even more difficult: Actually read the science paper, or the court ruling, or the executive order, or the proposed legislation, rather than the journalist's hot take. A lot of these journalists takes boil down to "tweets with more words."

But now, politics is getting involved because people are having government job offers rescinded and the entire federal government is in a free fall like a 3rd world banana republic.

She mentions that people are using "outrage" issues (abortion, gay rights, critical race theory) "as kind of wedge issues to convince people to vote in ways that might be against their own self-interest"...

GREAT! We need more tips on how to train yourself to recognize when that's happening and not get outraged. It boils down to emotional control. If politicians can't use outrage as a tool of control then they'll have to move on (to something better hopefully, but probably not ;).

Here's one tip. If Trump enrages you every time you see him, watch him in a way that allows you to appreciate something about him! He is a cool cucumber. He sheds attacks like water off an umbrella. (whatever, you come up something)... Remember, the goal here is to not let him control your emotions. This isn't about the facts or morality or how he "lies".

Depending on where you live, there’s 2-10 parties. You know who they are and what they want. If you want to affect the outcome you can get involved in your local politics; being glued to NYT.com all day isn’t changing one thing except wasting time.

As a general solution for us techies, you can have user defined style sheets that selectively override the site's CSS, either using a plugin like Stylus, or Firefox's built-in userContent.css. Inspect the website, find the id name (or class if it is unique enough) for the content you want to go away and put the following in your user CSS.

   #<id> {
      display: hidden;
   }

This 100%. If a piece of news is truly important, then it'll be important tomorrow or even a week from now. You'll even get clarifications and corrections along the way.

I like to use Pocket to build a list of long-form articles I want to read, then EpubPress (https://epub.press/) to compile that into a weekly EPUB that I can read in-full on a distraction-free e-book reader. It's a much less stressful way of consuming media than the whole neverending drug-frenzied quick-hits world of online news.

Looking at it on my phone, if I can see three entries and 2 are anxiety inducing, I close the app. (I'm 99% certain they get that telemetry too)

That said, I also had days where I doomscrolled instagram and thought 'it's been 20 minutes and I haven't seen anything entertaining yet.' And that's when I decided to drop it. (It was the only app I could chat with my kids with...we've since moved to other methods)

I haven't cut it out completely, but I'm not hyper aware of how I'm consuming it.

By contrast, the NYT often feels more subtle and therefore more effective at stoking that sense of constant agitation. They’re meticulously fact-based, but their editorial choices—what they highlight, the framing they use—can seem designed to provoke a reaction rather than just inform. It’s not only about the content of the stories; sometimes it’s also about how they present or prioritize them. If you haven’t encountered this firsthand, checking out “NYTimes pitch bot” on Bluesky can illustrate how their style can veer into outrage territory. It’s a satirical account, but it often points out the patterns in the Times’ headlines and story angles that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Shift your focus to things you can possibly control, e.g. the news that's happening in your local community where you have a say in how things are done.

My Facebook feed is all friends and family who don't discuss politics and ads for nerd shirts. I've purchased a few. It is also easy and effective to hit show me less of this.

I agree about LinkedIn and don't go there unless I'm actively job hunting, something I hope never to do again. I don't feel any bitterness when I see friends and family on FB go on expensive vacations, but I do feel an unhealthy and indefensible jealousy sometimes when I see former coworkers getting new jobs or promotions.

Reading "You should quit reddit" helped a little. The author tries to reframe your hidden beliefs about reddit like "finding useful information" or "it's filled with experts." Helped me to realize I was spending more time reading about my hobbies than actually doing them. Though I understand it's not that simple, doing requires more energy, etc.

I'm assuming you're more aligned politically with the left. If you're not, I apologize for the assumption. To someone who is more right-wing, the bias of e.g. NYT is just as blatant as Fox News is to you, and Fox may come off as "fair". This is because the propaganda is specifically intended to land with their own audience. It's tuned to your sensibilities.

It's very much a "fish in water" scenario. Trying to read articles from multiple sources can help, and questioning why you agree with one take over another. In the end, these are pretty sophisticated operations, and they know how to prey on their targets.

That's not how it works in the U.S. If an executive branch department was created by the legislature, it is up to the legislature whether or not it exists, not the executive. If the legislature has passed laws regarding how its resources are to be used, its employees treated, the executive is not free to disregard those laws.

The legislature is the source of laws in the U.S., not the executive. The irony is that the Republicans control the legislature as well. They could pass laws to achieve what Musk wants. It would be slow, but it would be legal.

A coup is seizing power outside the legal mechanism for doing so.

I'm out. I'm hiding away and hoping nothing affects me personally, and if it does I'm not going to think there's anything I could have done about it.

We're not in control anymore. Not unless there are any tech billionaires lurking on HN, and they don't give a shit about us.

This is a pointless truism. Everything relies on "does not directly impact your life", and there's no useful guidance on that point.

And of course everyone is convinced that they have the rational truth and it's the other guy who's the "low-information voter" being taken by the propaganda.

Feels like the causality might be the other way around.

Emotion is something you feel, not something you decide to allow yourself to feel.

Like, if I hear about someone being raped or murdered, how am I not going to have an emotional reaction of sadness or anger to that? And ultimately what use was that emotion? I cannot prevent the event happening, it has already happened, I am just a voyeur to someone else's tragedy.

Most of the news is like that. It's events that have already happened, that I can do nothing about but I'm vaguely meant to be up to date with because.... reasons? Some vague concept that everyone is meant to have an inch deep understanding of current events so they've got something to gossip about?

I truly don't see the point or the benefit.

I think it worked quite well, there's only about 10 headlines a day (out of 15k+) that get a significance rating higher than of 5.5 out of 10.

It also helps avoiding the overfocus on western issues and actually learn what's happening around the world.

https://www.newsminimalist.com/

Not at all, I think citizens have an obligation to vote, and an obligation to do their research when it's time to vote. But let's say that takes you a week. Why bother being focused on the outrage during the rest of the term? What value is there to you being mad at whatever politician on week 15 of their 208 week term? If anything, I'd say "staying informed" is a hinderance, because you'll always just be focused on the issue-of-the-day and build mental biases rather than being able to take a wider view of what the politician implemented, and how it played out over a period of time afterwards.

Whether you're influenced by facts or "propaganda" unfortunately depends entirely on your own research and critical thinking skills, and has little to do with timing.

I find myself reaching for something when I have YouTube/chilling at my desk at the end of the day, can't code anymore/make something just on till I sleep. Sometimes have the desire to play a video game (I have a gaming rig too funny how that works)

I've been trying to read HN or IEEE, TechCrunch stuff like that as my "lazy fun"

I will miss posting stuff like "what is this car" or being part of the car talk for a sporty car I drive but idk kind of want to just live too

It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something

Anyway my main goal in life right now is getting out of debt/staying fit and work on projects

That said, I recognize that I am speaking completely for myself in regards to my own interests. YMMV.

It's beyond me how so many of us think that continuously ignoring the will of the people is "OK". Either tell me my choice doesn't matter, or just shut up with the drama and enact safe and fair referendums on every single hot topic so we can all get to the right answer and then if we find we're in the minority, we'll shut up.

It should be clear as day to anyone that is unbiased that fixing the US/Mexican border was ridiculously easy (it's essentially been done in 2 weeks and they didn't even have to finish building their stupid wall). The only reason it didn't happen till now was precisely because the whole thing is broken and not really an expression of the peoples' will. It was rather an expression of an amalgamation of a giant mindless mass of bureaucrats, and you can't fix it unless you do what they are doing now. Not to single you out sorry, but opinions like yours ("we gotta do it the legal way and according to rules x, y, z, and 500 other rules") are precisely why nothing ever got done or fixed properly. And I say that as someone that is absolutely on board with following every rule to the T, with no exceptions.

Current top stories on the CNN frontpage are:

> Trump's effort to end birthright citizenship is blocked nationwide

> Trump’s Gaza plan is the most outlandish in region’s peacemaking history

> China is building a giant laser to generate the energy of the stars, satellite images appear to show

Is your child not a citizen? Are you child's vaccines related to Gaza, somehow? Will China's laser affect your wife's pregnancy?

Why do you feel the need to engage with this?

Yes. I still have to be at least aware of what is happening for work reasons, but removing social media was one of the better decisions for my sanity ( I stil comment on HN, but the quality of conversations was degrading as well, which in itself is a concern suggesting further digital landscape deterioration ).

I considered some more obvious solutions ( from buying subscription to WSJ/FT to personal news aggregator -- and objective/neutral observer rewrite using LLM and they all are not exactly ideal ).

Here is the good news. All this chaos is an opportunity to stand something useful up. And I mean something useful that cannot be so easily dismantled by powers that be ( and there are already heavy indications they are aware people may try going outside the defined paths ).

That's critical. My YouTube rule these days is to block any channel with a video name or thumbnail that says something like "This is why you fail at XYZ" or other statements designed to evoke an emotional response from me. And on top of that, I try to only click on videos where the title/thumbnail is properly informative, exposing the content rather than trying to hide it behind a vague hook. Hooks like "You won't believe this one trick!" and fluff like that, titles/thumbnails that should introduce the trick, not just allude to it.

Good luck out there.

This isn't really a matter of subjective opinion, though. Objective surveys have consistently shown that Fox News viewers are worse-informed than people who don't pay attention to any conventional news sources. NYT readers are a long way up from there.

I’ve never really understood doomscrolling on Twitter or Reddit. The only social media I find remotely useful out entertaining is actually TikTok. The comments are IME the least toxic and most entertaining. And I’ve gone down fascinating rabbit holes of things that have absolutely no relevance to my life like medical residency TikTok.

As far as social media goes, just don't follow accounts that are annoying. If some accounts are friends in real life but insufferable online, just mute them. Other than friends I follow accounts about food and pottery, I don't see any reason to get off social media, I love it.

You can mute subreddits and not see them anymore

Funny you have to purge the algo on things like YouTube if you click on a thubmnail with some hot chick, boom your feed is nothing but click bait of hot women

Maybe they have more empathy for the plight of others?

Also, it is often the case that the events of today which don't directly affect you, if not stopped, will affect you before you know it, at which point it is too late to do anything about.

HN also doesn’t seem to be as susceptible to rage-baiting / outrage-attention-seeking behavior. Not sure exactly what by this is the case but I’d venture a guess it has a lot to do with (1) “dang”s moderation, and (2) not having a personalized algorithm feed.

I’m increasingly of the view that personalized algorithm feeds generated to select the maximum attention grabbing content for each person is a truly dangerous idea.

Frankly, HN is not that engaging (by modern standards). In fact, probably 60-70% of the articles on the front page are boring to me on any given day. I view this as a feature and not a bug. Why should I expect that everything I look at must be maximally engaging?

I wish more sites were old skool like HN.

For example, this headline with a score > 5 is flatly incorrect.

“China launches innovative flying robot to explore Moon's south pole for water resources”

Every article listed in the summary says the launch is planned for 2026.

Simplest way is to read media from independent country. India is good, perhaps Arabic countries.

Next level are independent channels on Telegram and Youtube. 10 min daily summary on war situation goes very long way.

> but with the dial turned down a little.

Exactly for this reason. Yes, HN is a social network. And if it follows the same enshittification path as the others, I will be gone from here too. But until then, to me (YMMV) it still provides a bit of entertainment and news without rotting my brain.

Even the analogy works. Fast food is not that bad... in moderate quantities (/"with the dial turned down a little")

Fixing the border happened 8 months ago. Nothing meaningful has changed at the border since June 2024. The only reason it took so long is that Biden wanted Congress to do it rather than using probably-illegal executive fiat powers, and eventually Biden got tired of waiting and did it anyway after Trump told Congress to axe the bipartisan border deal that bascially everybody but the extremists on either side was on board with.

You can make an argument that Biden should have done it by executive fiat even earlier, and that's your prerogative. But the fact of the matter is that even once a legislative fix was ready, Trump and the Republicans threw it away for no good reason, so that he could continue campaigning on immigration. That, by the way, is exactly "not an expression of the peoples' will". That's refusing to fix a problem for the sole purpose of campaigning on that problem.

Much of Trump's governance is like an episode of reality TV or WWE. Loud, flashy and mostly fake. Creating his own problems to "solve" by changing nothing. Threaten Canada and Mexico with tariffs then cancel them and declare victory when they say they'll do something they were already doing, e.g. Mexico deployed 10,000 Mexican troops to their border years ago under an agreement with Biden. Columbia accepted hundreds of deportation flights under Biden, then Trump tries to use military aircraft to do it and they say no, he makes threats then he declares massive victory when the arrangement reverts to exactly what was happening before.

I've found that over time this chokes the recommendation system - makes it boring and it now finally refuses to show me any video recommendations on my youtube homepage - just a message asking me to turn history on. of course, you lose your watch history, but I just bookmark the videos I like anyway.

Videos related to the one you're watching may appear, but imo these tend to be based on your subscriptions / more focused / less rabbit-holey (and you can disable those with extensions and such as well).

You can just add subs that are of interest that lack the torrent of bad news and only ever visit that custom feed. It doesn't ever algorithmically add posts from subs you don't manually include, as far as I've seen.

I think there will always be some hallucinations until they're solved on a model level, but I'll also try to nudge AI now to be more precise with the headlines.

I'm thinking tweet-sized news stories, a few per day at most, no threads, no images, no links, nothing but 140 characters of pure text. You could even deliver them as texts or unclickable push notifications.

That format heavily discourages clickbait (because there are no clicks to be had) and forces journalists to only include the information that actually matters, with no fluff about how they were sipping hot cocoa in a nice indie restaurant in Montana when talking to the subject of the story, a 38-year-old man wearing a polo shirt.

You could run an operation like this on a shoestring budget, with one or two individuals regurgitating news stories from mainstream sources in a much denser format, minus the outrage. Many, including me, would probably be willing to subscribe.

Outside of reddit/discord/hn, I haven't had any social media since roughly 2010, and I don't use reddit or discord for anything remotely "social media"-ish.

While I still get the occasional look as if I'm wearing a tinfoil hat when I say "I don't have FB. No, no insta either. No... not snapchat either", I find it's a lot less common now, thankfully. When I first left social media in ~2010, it was rough. Not only dating scene wise, but I lost out on a few job opportunities (at least a few, probably more than I know) as well.

Now you're just considered kind of weird/fringe, instead of being borderline insane. Moving (slowly) in the right direction, I think.

It's interesting that you listed India first. The English-language news source that pops up most often via Google News is the Hindustan Times, which is hot garbage. Are there any Indian sources that are much, much better than that which you recommend?

But what you're asking sounds extremely close to what I made: https://www.newsminimalist.com/

If you want fewer stories (by default it shows about 25 a day), adjust the slider to a higher significance threshold.

I used to waste so much time posting about cars on Reddit. I'd open my computer at 11pm, reply a few times to a single post on Reddit, and before long, I'd see 1:45am on the clock.

Not posting anything has been a massive time saver.

A couple times a day? Who needs to check the news that often? I’ve not checked the news at all this year and it hasn’t negatively impacted me at all.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller

the goal of fascist political propaganda is to convince you that you can't do anything about the state of the world. clearly, it worked on you.

1 = (Not describing the content because that's not the point.)

There’s plenty of right-of-centre magazines and websites aimed at educated right-wingers: e.g. First Things, Commentary, The American Conservative, the Spectator

Hindustan times seems like a rag, like British Sun.

I guess I would recommend to take some event that happened 2 years ago, find how some papers wrote about it back then, and if you like it, follow them.

My point is there is no reason to stay in toxic relationship. There is no reason to read news if you do not get any rewards. Even monthly AI summaries will be better, and you will stay "informed".

For example all the Trump shit today, he wants legal precedents from constitutional court, 90% of this shit is irrelevant.

I agree that our system of government makes it extremely difficult to enact large changes. That is by design, however well considered that design might be. Nevertheless, those are the rules. Which means the president can't legally do whatever he wishes to anything "under his purview" upon gaining power.

Or rather, that was the case until the SCOTUS decided there are no laws the president need respect. What they have not pronounced upon is whether the law binds anyone acting under the direction of the president. Does their invention merely protect the president from prosecution or does it abrogate all laws he finds inconvenient? I find it hard to believe they'll take the second step, but we'll probably find out pretty soon. Is Musk a monarch or merely our president?

One can still do everything in their power to prepare for, and mitigate things outside their control, while still keeping in mind what is in your control and isn't so you don't become emotionally dependent on outcomes outside your control, which is ruinous for mental health.

Having empathy, and caring about doing the right thing actually work better when you stop obsessing over and wasting all of your energy on things you cannot control.

I finally saw the futility when there were 10,000 articles about Trump tweeting "covfefe".

1. Turn off all notifications, especially for replies, likes, and content suggestions.

2. Train yourself not to look for feedback on the things you do post as a matter of habit. Intentionally check on the important discussions IFF you _remember_ to do so.

3. If possible, hide or remove any karma-like indications. Your life is better if the internet points aren't visible.

So that you stay in formation with everyone else, of course!

> Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

> But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

     - From "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"

From the "greed" point of view - because your chosen leaders can have dramatic and immediate impact on your net wealth.

Even if hedonistic, "I have no assets", your chosen leaders will choose how comfortable your life is.

What are you doing about it?

What is needed is a sustainable business model for quality journalism, set up in a way that is resistant to income inequality.

At the same time, I’m definitely less informed. Though I’m quite surprised how much still permeates despite me not “going looking”.

Generally, I think it’s more healthy to focus on what you can control and what you have agency over. You can choose what to be outraged over national/global events (and do nothing) or you can instead focus that energy on Doing Something closer to home that’s important to you. Which is the better trade?

I’m somewhat conflicted on being less informed esp with big changes happening. And even more conflicted about what kind of world we’d have if everyone chose this strategy. But, it’s not unprincipled. The principle is Focus on What You Can Control/Do and put all your energy into that.

Also Scientific American:

Science journal editor resigns after calling Gen X fascists over Trump win

Laura Helmuth leaves Scientific American following controversial social media posts in which she lashed out at ‘bigoted’ voters

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2024/11/15/laura-helmuth...

One of the reasons I love reading history is realizing the agency individual humans have when we get together. Individuals can't change much alone, but we don't have to do things alone.

You can choose not to use your agency, but that is still a choice to support the status quo.

"Someone who cares about you on the internet"

instead of

"Something that prevents you from posting hate/snuff/nude on the internet"

Obviously lots of problems, tons of them, and 1984 vibes, but still, the basic idea. A bit more like humans were meant to interact?

Seriously, do you know who does repairs on the sewer lines where you live? No. Does that mean you’re so oblivious that you wouldn’t be concerned by seeing half a dozen young men without any safety gear or official logos digging a six foot trench across the road outside your house?

If the fox news comments in any way represent true opinions of trump supporters, then our country is truly screwed.

Perhaps another strategy could be to maintain an awareness of the motivations and tactics of publishers/content creators, and that could be enough as an inoculation.

I imagine a clown on the street trying to enrage me, and I being aware of what it's trying to do, instead just laugh at it.

Today I walked into a restaurant with a cable TV news channel blaring on about the "invasion of men" into women's college sports. They offered no proof, just a continuous barrage of commentary. As I waited for my sandwich I watched one after another, with just continuous outrage. No proof, no on-site reporters, no B tape, nothing at all to support the claims being made. It was like watching bad science fiction of an alternate universe. I chuckled nervously as I looked around and wondered if the others there actually believed it. None of them were laughing.

https://www.internationalintrigue.io/

Must be nice for the current American administration to have 4 years of no democratic oversight to do whatever they want.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What’s that saying… “you aren’t stuck in traffic; you are the traffic.”

I saw dozens of death threats. Even an explicit death threat thread with over 40,000 upvotes before reddit stepped in and shut the whole subreddit down.

It reminded me of Ghostbusters 2 with all the aggressively angry people and the ooze pouring out of the sewers, all building upon itself.

I suspect they will have good reasons to pay more attention next time, if there is a next time.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211007051559/https://www.scien...

Then there’s “Diversity”, another section that has only been on the record as active since 2021:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220623091738/https://www.scien...

Here’s “Inequality”:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210926013845/https://www.scien...

We’re only one letter away from completing our “Forbidden Non-State 3-Letter Agency” bingo card.

Here’s a topic directory from 2014:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140531173853/http://www.scient...

Where would you file this story in 2014?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/from-civil-rights...

Today it’s under “Behavior”, which for a time was referred to as “Behavior and Society”, a section that appears to often be used as a place to put more overt political pieces, along with the Opinion section:

https://archive.is/QpKLI

Scientific American also had a report (what looks like a page that collects articles under a same theme of special interest) on The Black Lives Matter Movement.

Can you point to any article published by them in the last 70 years as absurd as this?

https://archive.is/H8hJw

Or this?

https://archive.is/fa88J

I don’t think that the implicit distinction between “getting into politics” (implying the outlet is adopting a noticeable ideological stance) and “addressing political issues” (that can arguably be described as scientific topics with political implications, as opposed to vice versa) warrants the color of your responses.

Maybe you’re just floating in the same tide as them.

I'm trying hard to do #1, mainly because #2 is confirmation bias (and reinforces it).

What other options are there?

I do think, though, that for at least some platforms it's possible to use them in a limited way where you confine yourself to relatively small communities that are focused on some common interest that genuinely brings together people who enjoy sharing it. You mentioned Discord for instance and that's one, if you can find the right servers. I think it's possible to do that on Reddit too. You just have to never visit the "front page" and stick only to subreddits that you actually get value out of. It's harder approaching impossible with ones like Facebook that are more doggedly algorithm-driven and don't put moderation in the control of users in the same way.

Of course, the lurking issue is that putting moderation in the control of users is building the platform on free labor and those good subcommunities are at risk of imploding when cracks emerge in the dike separating them from the wider platform userbase. And that's likely to happen because even those "safely usable" platforms are ultimately beholden to VC money that's going to demand enshittification eventually.

Cohost was by far the best attempt I've seen for many years, but sadly couldn't make a go of it in the toxic ecosystem we've got.

It's disheartening when the one-track politics infects every square inch. It's a good point about bots because 1) they can be sold or rented to advertisers, 2) they are more valuable with higher karma, and 3) the easiest way to get a bot to harvest karma is by agreeing with the hive. So they're amplifying "the message" without even intending to.

In general, the goal should be improvement of humans, not avoidance of negative stimuli. Something has to exist where humans are rewarded for aligning to truth and reality, rather than emotion.

I more or less agree. Thus the humans who created and enshittified such platforms should be correspondingly punished for their disalignment to truth and reality. It's not just about rewarding "consumers" of stimuli; the creators and promulgators of stumili also need to be incentivized (and disincentivized) in just the manner you mention.

the legislative branch can form administrative departments and prescribe their function however the president has already defined powers to impound funds and remove senior administrative officers and appoint/remove low-level staff. how these things intersect will be sorted be the courts.

executive actions (by-passing what should be legislation) have been increasing the last few decades. the various media companies plainly do make choices to portray some actions as nothingburger or crisis depending on their political alignment with the party in power.

the issue with the left-media and Trump is they outrage clickbait a bunch of events that are insignificant in terms of outcomes. Should they alarm about Jan6 yes. should they alarm over minor personnel at treasury or some dumb unserious thing Trump said at a press conference, no. This is how the media loses all trust in themselves broadly.

Then you might find that some sources are filled with lies and others contain a lot more facts.

Then you'd naturally weight facts from the more trustworthy source higher.

The next step is a "web of trust" where a new source will be more trustworthy if it's linked to by other trustworthy sources.

So in the end you'd rank information from Russia Today (one of Russia's main propaganda channels) as very low, a comment from a random redditor low, and a comment on physics by a renowned physicist as very high trustworthiness.

But these days half of it is outrage bait, ranging from "WOKE LIBTARD GETS DESTROYED" to "TRUMP LOSES HIS MIND", or malicious clickbait like "you won't believe what the cast if $tv_show looks like now" with some AI generated thing of one cast member being horribly maimed. Even on stuff that has nothing to do with any of that, like some music video.

And whether "Trump loses his mind" is something you agree or disagree with doesn't even matter – I'm just here to listen to some music, maybe watch a funny video or two. To take a break from all of that. It's become so pervasive that it's just exhausting.

So normal people like you or me just withdraw. And the only people who don't are the hyper-politicised who never grow tired of talking of $favourite_issue, which tend to be rather less reasonable or open to nuance. And this feedback loop just makes things worse and worse.

This, in a nutshell, is why you need moderation. People talk about "enshittification" of platforms, but IMO the bigger problem is more the "cuntification" of platforms, where a small number of extremely unpleasant and vitriolic people chase off many people who don't want to deal with that. X.com is a well-known example, but also online games where you're matched with random people (where you very quickly learn a great deal about your mother's sex life).

I agree (I've done this), but it's much easier said than done. Requires a lot of mental work/training.

More importantly, it requires a sort of mental "enlightenment" to the true state of things.. That everything you read for free on the internet is being paid for by someone, with their own motivation and intents, and that these forces don't have your best interest in mind. The saying "If you're watching it, then it was intended for you" comes to mind. Once this breakthrough occurs and you begin to see the world this way, everything else usually follows.

As you begin to realize that most of your facts and opinions are those planted there by other powerful ($$$) forces, you start to recognize that what you think is largely what they want you to think. But the scariest part of the awakening is that you begin to realize how little you truly know about the world outside your direct experience. You feel much less certain about the world and your place in it.

Most of the people I know recognize this, and I can have sane conversation with them. You can tell those that are caught up in the propaganda because they largely sound like parrots, and it's impossible to talk to them reasonably. A few friends of mine are in this category, and the one common denominator between them is that they are deeply unhappy, riddled with anxiety, and glued to their devices. The true human casualties of the new technological information age we've birthed. It appears that this is by design, as those that control the flow for information know exactly the power they have and what they intend to do with it.

For those that are stuck, I wish I knew how to open their eyes up and look around them. It's not too bad when you look at the world outside of the internet. I've tried to listen empathetically to people that are stuck, but it mostly doesn't help. Their minds are hamsters spinning on wheels, unable to stop or hear any thing else from the outside. One or two have woken up only after the anxiety it produces begins to interfere with their real lives and relationships, It's a form of addiction, and unfortunately many people are stubborn and will double down on their addiction time after time until they hit rock bottom.

We're in the middle of a massive mental health crisis. I hate knowing that a not-insignificant portion of our fellow citizens are rapidly heading towards some sort of mental/emotional rock bottom caused by technology... I feel powerless to do anything about it as I've watched it slowly unfold over the last decade or so -- it's nearly impossible to reach the friends and family members that you're actually close to. I don't know what can be done other than sit back and wait for them to crash, and help them pick up the pieces when that time comes.

Anyone got any good advice?

Umm no, I've not felt any outrage.

Not because I'm particularly satisfied with any recent political events, but because I've stopped consuming daily news from outlets where generating outrage has become a financial incentive.

I'm not on FB, my only use of social media is to help co-ordinate my kids' lives. I never watch TV, I've no idea what today's mainstream media clickbait stories are, I'm just not that interested.

I'm going to offer my two accounts as examples

https://mastodon.social/@UP8

https://bsky.app/profile/up-8.bsky.social

both of these are 'cyborg' accounts in that I have my RSS reader, classifier and autoposter. I am looking to build a lot more automation.

My Mastodon feed took a large set of rules to block out #uspol and certain communities of miserable people. My feed has stayed outrage-free since last month.

My measurements showed that Bluesky's 'Discover' feed blocked about 75% of emotionally negative material before Jan 20, since then people are inflamed but looking closely at my feed it seems they are deliberately trying to help certain people who felt stuck on X to migrate, that is, giving huge amounts of visibility to journalists, journalism professors, activists, and such so that they can run up 200k+ follower counts.

I understand. (I've been brainstorming ideas about "how to get people off X" with a friend and tonight I'm going to tell him that Bluesky has it) I've used "less like this", "unfollow" [1], "mute", "block" and such and my discover feed is getting good again.

I have two classifiers in the development pipeline, one to detect "screenshots of text" and "image memes", also a text classifier that is better at sentiment than my current one (I think ModernBERT + LSTM should be possible to train reliably, unlike fine-tuned BERTs.) I'm not so much interested in classifying posts as I am in classifying people; some of them are easy, there are 40,000 people who have a certain image meme pinned that I know I never want to follow. Just recently I figured out how to make training sets for these things without having to look too closely at a lot of toxic content.

I'm also eliminating the dependencies that are keeping this from being open sourced or commercialized so I may I have something to share this summer.

[1] one strike for an outrage post

I don't know what I'm doing differently than you, but I don't see ANY of that. The worst, most clickbaity Youtube content I see is poorly done rip-offs of Primitive Technology.

It's even possible the places that people then move to (such as HN) also get more radical if the leavers have higher levels of radicalism than the place they join.

> Lewis: So I think part of it is the fact that it’s more engaging. It, you know, activates your emotions, and so people are more primed to respond to that.

This is why upvote-style forums, like Hacker News, need to be treated with heavy scrutiny. They are hard-wired to bubble out of control when an opinion is the right combination of popular and passionate.

One way we can improve this situation, as contributors, is to try to stick to more logical, dispassionate responses. This is difficult to do because we all feel like what we are writing is the most important thing in the world and everyone else needs to read it.

I still use old.reddit and this is the only way I've ever used Reddit. My homepage only shows me posts from Reddits I follow and nothing else. I don't see all the craziness people here are talking about.

If I understand correctly, they are mostly busy taking over the country at the moment. No time for HN..

"The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth." -Garry Kasparov.

And

"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore." This latter quote is, rather ironically, a false quote! (falsely attributed to Hannah Arendt). But I still think it contains truth.

This isn't even close to true. Facts are facts, and stories are propaganda. What we call "news" is largely just "stories" (opinion/editorials) about facts -- the story is the propaganda - the story weaves the facts together in a narrative, the narrative tells us how to feel and think. Stories cost $$$, and those promoting them are absolutely promoting some stories over others. They have a message to send -- that message is propaganda.

You mention a comment from a "random redditor" is low value -- I'm suggesting that nearly every "major" narrative spun on Reddit has been largely placed there by forces with deep pockets and axes to grind, and the true believers and other useful idiots that follow blindly. It's all astroturfing, and Reddit is an absolute garbage dump of discussion. Anyone that goes there thinking they're getting an accurate picture of the world around them is seriously deluded. I'm convinced those that run Reddit do this by design. We know who runs Twitter, and Facebook. No one talks about who is running Reddit.

A "comment on physics by a renowned physicist" is still just a comment -- there are facts in physics, and theories. Even renowned physicists can be wrong when it comes to the theories they back. And honestly [coming back to the point of the article] that's not what's causing people to feel outrage -- they're not doom scrolling physics forums outraged about dark matter or a theory of everything -- they're doom scrolling an endless stream of political/cultural propaganda designed to outrage them and keep them addicted.

The world isn't nearly as black and white as the internet would have you believe it is.

Point me to a source of political/cultural news that you believe is full of fact and not just another site full of opinions pieces and editorializing around the facts.

More than that though. You can protest and organize however much you like. There’s no cap on that.

And that is how insidious “news” is. The news broadcasts the hegemonic mindset. The same mindset that says that citizens’ only role is to vote every few years. Other than that they are supposed to stay home. Certainly not make a ruckus or anything.

And that’s what many conclude. That they are only supposed to be political in a direct, consequential sense by voting. Then it is clearly absurd, from a cost-benefit analysis standpoint, to stay ever-constantly informed on politics all the time.

It’s really entitled (by whom? who knows) to say that people have control over their inner lives as a response to the News being misery-inducing (according to them). Yeah. So turn it off. You don’t own the outside world your attention.

I will be explicit in that I am not condoning doxxing Reddit mods. I just don’t think we’d be fine with this in normal day to day life.

Never mind of course there is an inherent bias in choosing what to publish and what not to publish.

So it's not forcing journalists to "only include the information that actually matters", it's forcing journalists to exclude tons of information that really does matter. In fact, it's worse than pointless: it's actively harmful to mislead people with these "unbiased facts", because they're not.

Choose a different path

That’s not really a gotcha statement.

What I struggle with isn't fatigue at outrage, it's knowing what to do about it.

I think violence is going to become more common, but I don't particularly think it will be effective.

So less so than outrage, it's the feeling that we're trapped in a real life doom loop with no clear off ramp that I struggle with.

I would like to do something... But what?

Maybe a better demonstration of their point might be comparing NYT/WaPo to the WSJ

It's all just driveby anger and reposts. Maybe some smaller subs with good communities here and there, but that often requires a mod team putting in substantial hours and remaining under the radar from All/Popular in any shape.

Forgot to mention, Reddit also started paying these accounts for posting. So a literal financial incentive to ragebait. It' called the "Contributor Program".

What kind and why?

I clear it about once every 2 weeks or month depending on how many of the same topics I see.

It works really well in that if you ignore the content you saw before it forces the algorithm to find unique content because it thinks you don't like the stuff you've seen.

That and cleaning your subscription list. Easily the best platform I have as of now because of that.

That said, I think the why is more complicated. At least in the US I think there's a general sense that the world is backsliding, and that people feel like any bump on the road of life risks turning into a complete derailment. But this doesn't lead to any one particular ideology or course of action, so much as externalization of angst, whether against individuals, systems, or the "nobody pays attention to our angst let's burn it all down" attitude that's somewhat widespread.

Glad I'm not alone, but knowing that doesn't change the situation. Still unable to wake from the nightmare... :(

We're all nearly powerless but our choices do matter.

Advertisers currently

7th recommended is " "YOU WILL BE INDICTED AND JAILED! " Jim Jordan SILENCE Overconfident Hillary Clinton" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbqHVba3Ohs)

I'm not logged in. I don't save cookies.

Unfortunately my regular internet has an outage and I need to rely on a mobile hotspot which YouTube seems to throttle with 20 second delays on everything, so looking for more examples is a bit painful at the moment. But having 1 to 3 of this kind of thing is common.

On more than one occasion the direct feedback of why I didn't move further in the hiring process was a lack of internet presence.

But, again, keep in mind this was early 2010s. Social media hadn't had as much time to show the world how poisonous it is.

It's an interesting relevant short story. Won the 2024 Hugo Award. It was posted a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263876

There’s a clear difference of kind between modern social media and the forums/usenet of old.

What I did was unfollow everyone and everything, and block all suggested content. The front page is literally empty. Nothing on those websites captures my attention unless I specifically look for it.

This was very effective. These websites have effectively become write-only media for me. They're still here if I need them, but I end up browsing just one page of /r/curatedtumblr and then doing something else.

I encourage you to do the same!

Most articles I come across have a very fiery headline, then you dig in to the article and the facts are different, and/or the sources are dubious, and/or there's historical precedent for the thing that makes it not seem so strange this time, and/or the article doesn't dive deeply enough in to the details, etc.

Political biases and current events aside, it all sucks! It's so annoying that I have to do the legwork of reading through the article carefully and following through in factchecking outside of the article to get the meat of it out, and after all that, it feels like no one else does the same.

1. This is literally a worse outcome than the alternative you prefer. You should care enough to try to fight it politically, especially if you are well positioned to do so.

2. This case (and 99% of cases of political outrage I see on the news) is trivial in the context of what is “normal” for human political history, even the political history that many people alive today were around for.

Will this even register as a trivia question in 100 years? Is a framing I ask myself when I’m mad about something in the world.

I think a lot of people walked from a world where they had no idea what the normal tumult of human political society is like, even normal American political messiness, and into the world of 24/7 current political news without any context what came before. It’s like, the sausage has always been made this way, you’re just now finding out.

I say these things and it always pisses people off. But I don’t recommend not caring, the world moves forward one micrometer at a time by caring, it’s just not worth the existential angst I see so often.

After this past election cycle I don't see how people can make that comment with a straight face.

Media in general is very right leaning. Some like CNN and NYT are maybe slightly more left than far right fox news, but there aren't many "left leaning" mass market news sources that are essentially felating one party for millions of people.

NYT and CNN, etc are all very critical of democrats when there is a controversy. This is stark contrast to fox news which essentially is willful ignorance of anything bad republicans / trump has done.

The "normalization" of Trump's corruption by media in general should be enough to see which way they lean.

Its just that if anybody is slightly less than full blown fox news conservative they get labeled as left leaning by everyone in the media so there is some idea of "balance" but conservative media (fox news, conservative podcasts, etc) are overwhelmingly mass market and the majority.

Simple, no ads, and with just the headlines it's enough.

It doesn't help to stare at rage/anxiety inducing things - it doesn't mean you're actually informed all the time.

Plus I'd argue that most things you'll see end up being hogwash and the important stuff will rise to the top and you're generally hear about it anyway.

The genocide in Gaza has been going intensely for more than a year, dead and mutilated children streamed out pretty much every day. Now it has moved to the West Bank.

Similarly a genocidal process has been ongoing in Sudan, perpetrated by a proxy of the UAE, close partner to the US.

Do usians not see these images and only just now with the new administration's inauguration entered a mood of distress?

There are neighbourhood groups and other really useful forums on Facebook. There are tech discussions on BlueSky.

But it's annoyingly hard to run the gauntlet of politics and outrage bait to get to the stuff I actually want.