Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

Living in Poland ruled by trumpists for 8 years I have these experiences:

- Get subscription of high value newspaper or magazine. Professionals work there, so you will get real facts, worthy opinions and less emotions.

- It is better to not use social media. You never know if you are discussing with normal person, a political party troll, or Russian troll.

- It is not worth discussing with „switched-on” people. They are getting high doses of emotional content, they are made to feel like victims, facts does not matter at all. Political beliefs are intermingled with religious beliefs.

- emotional content is being treated with higher priority by brain, so it is better to stay away from it, or it will ruin your evening.

- people are getting addicted to emotions and victimization, so after public broadcaster has been freed from it, around 5% people switched to private tv station to get their daily doses.

- social media feels like a new kind of virus, we all need to get sick and develop some immunity to it.

- in the end, there are more reasonable people, but democracies needs to develop better constitutional/law systems, with very short feedback loop. It is very important to have fast reaction on breaking the law by ruling regime.

> - It is better to not use social media. You never know if you are discussing with normal person, a political party troll, or Russian troll.

Completely valid, but there is a middleground of very deliberately curating your social media:

- Avoid using services that are engineered for outrage and views

- be ruthless with who you follow and block (someone trying to drum up some unimportant javascript outrage? get them off your feed)

- for twitter-likes, mute phrases from your timeline like crazy (included in my muted words is plainly trump, kamala, elon, gop, democrats, doge, dei, covid, etc)

- always be skeptical that everyone else online is some PSYOP effort, even those that share views you politically align with

It is possible to use social media, but you must have agency over it and not allow it to just happen to you. That's why I'm much more enthusastic about decentralised/open and non-commercial social networks because they currently give users much more control.

Don't disagree with you, but I'll counter with 2 big issues:

1. the services themselves continually change, and are incentivized to get much more manipulative, and much, much worse. I used to use LinkedIn as an employment network, and now it's a full-on social media hub (though weirdly positive in a very phony way...) even HN has changed for the worse (despite the efforts of dang)

2. won't someone think of the kids? in seriousness though, they're struggling to build agency over themselves; how can they be expected to control social media, and to pile on, it's the only world they've ever known?