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Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

(www.scientificamerican.com)
757 points headalgorithm | 4 comments | 05 Feb 25 14:55 UTC | HN request time: 1.142s | source
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miki123211 ◴[05 Feb 25 18:06 UTC] No.42952631[source]▶
I wish there was a modern "news wire" service to help with this problem.

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.

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teamonkey ◴[05 Feb 25 19:06 UTC] No.42953477[source]▶
I subscribed to International Intrigue, which sends a digestible summary by email every day.

https://www.internationalintrigue.io/

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1. zcar ◴[06 Feb 25 18:16 UTC] No.42964962[source]▶
This is the second reference to this site. I like the style and lack of propaganda pitch. I wish there were more writings like this. You know of any other apolitical or with more authentic writing style?
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2. teamonkey ◴[07 Feb 25 10:48 UTC] No.42971271[source]▶
It's it's political by nature, and biased because it's written by humans, but I think the brevity of the format helps keep things to the point.

Really, you have to do the pre-social-media trick of comparing multiple sources, adjusting for known biases, and synthesising a world view.

I've always rated the Financial Times for world news. It has a high-capital bias of course, but because its goal is to help investors make investment decisions it is incentivised to report things accurately rather than spin.

Also old media international news reporting is usually leagues better than domestic reporting. The BBC's reporting of UK politics is pretty weak, but it's international reporting is very high-quality. I wouldn't trust Al Jazeera to report on things the Qatari royal family have a stake in, but their remit is (or was) to inform said royal family accurately about world affairs.

On that note, I've seen plenty of adverts for Ground News, which supposedly lets you compare the bias of various sources for the same story. I've not tried it.

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3. zcar ◴[07 Feb 25 12:22 UTC] No.42971780[source]▶
It is hard to be apolitical, but most news are constantly repeating propaganda. Financial journals are great informing people. Right now business insider has an article on Wallstreet embracing opensource. The problem is that their pitch is always: How can we squeeze more from the working class and into our pockets?

I am looking for more authentic/humane writing style. There is a lot of info to keep informed, so the way in which things are expressed is important to me. Even outside the news it's hard to find good writing.

I think sites like ground.news just make things worst. The issue is not if something is left or right. It should be whether it is correct and in which setting. They are exploiting peoples' biases to make money.

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4. teamonkey ◴[07 Feb 25 15:13 UTC] No.42973545{3}[source]▶
I agree, but I don’t know of anything better. And with regards to Ground News specifically, it reinforces the fallacy that “the truth is somewhere in the middle,” while the position of the “middle” is being manipulated by bad actors at the extremes.