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Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

(www.scientificamerican.com)
757 points headalgorithm | 1 comments | 05 Feb 25 14:55 UTC | HN request time: 0.269s | source
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joshdavham ◴[05 Feb 25 15:50 UTC] No.42950233[source]▶
One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together. I’m technically gen z and I’ve been off of social media (aside from HN, WhatsApp and discord) for years and you wouldn’t believe how great it’s been for my overall state of mind.

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.

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sporkydistance ◴[05 Feb 25 17:43 UTC] No.42952227[source]▶
Why do you exclude HN from your list? It is literally social media, but with the dial turned down a little. Yet, you don't have to dig to deeply to see flamewars, outrage, and trolling. I mean, look at many of the garbage comments in this very thread that are on par with /.,xchan.
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1. n144q ◴[06 Feb 25 13:59 UTC] No.42962349[source]▶
I learned much from just scrolling HN. Technical articles help me know the latest updates in various areas, dive deep into a topic, or develop new skills. I applied quite a few things I learned in my job. Fundamentally, most links on HN are articles, many of which are quite long, which tend to be more focused and informative.

Completely non-technical ones are few, and you can always choose to ignore them.

The feed is also non-personalized. It's not going to show a few more article on politics just because you linked on one.

By comparison, reddit is much, much worse, almost the opposite of HN. Just a bit better than Twitter, maybe. Most of my reddit browsing/participation falls into tech/hobby, yet I always find that spend more time than I'd like on meaningless stuff, and reddit keeps pushing/promoting political content (even in the context of technology).

My solution? Don't browse reddit unless I really need to for some reason (or if I really don't have anything else to do at that time).