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I gave up on Twitter, as even after massive ongoing curation the signal/noise is far too low. There's no way to filter tweets from sources I'm following, and it
by jonathansizz 9y ago
I gave up on Twitter, as even after massive ongoing curation the signal/noise is far too low. There's no way to filter tweets from sources I'm following, and it's a constant source of anxiety leading to compulsive reloading of the feed. Other social networks are worse. Life's too short for this.
I've also cut down on the web sources I follow, as information overload is a real thing, and we rapidly run into diminishing returns.
For news, I now just peruse the FT, Guardian and Atlantic (+HN via http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ using the 'top 50%' setting) a couple of times a day, and Politico Magazine once per week. This covers a decent section of the political spectrum and if there's anything important going on I'll find it amongst those sources. I probably read half a dozen full articles each day.
For non-immediate information, I browse A&L Daily, and I have print subscriptions to the following:
The Atlantic, Harper's, Sky & Telescope, American Scientist, Foreign Affairs, Philosophy Now, and The Philosophers' Magazine.
Additionally, I listen to a selection of podcasts when I'm in the car. These cover international relations and news analysis, history, philosophy and comedy.
That just about covers it; since I hit 40 and had a son my priorities changed, as did my outlook on life. Other than my family, I'm spending much more of my time on real hobbies and interests (in my case a bit of astronomy and photography, occasional writing, some cooking, and a lot of cycling and serious reading (books)), and less on time-wasting activities (social networks, web forums, television and video games).
It's amazing how much extra time you can find if you cut useless things out of your life.
- psing 9y agoAppreciate the thoughts.
- kthejoker2 9y agoWhat international affairs podcasts do you listen to? It's an area I would like more analytical insights into.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jonathansizz 9y agoCFR (the publishers of Foreign Affairs) have The World Next Week and The President's Inbox (and other more specialized ones) Carnegie Endowment does The Carnegie Podcast FT has World Weekly BBC (e.g. Global News, Newshour, The Inquiry), NPR and PRI (e.g. America Abroad) all have a few to try out, and CSIS also have a good one. Universities like Oxford and Harvard have their own podcasts as well. Try them all and pick your favourites. I just listen to CFR and Carnegie these days.
- mathperson 9y agoI also recommend war college by reuters http://www.reuters.com/podcasts/war-college http://www.reuters.com/podcasts/war-college
- alexpetralia 9y agoThanks a ton for hckr news. Great resource.
- alexpetralia 9y agoThanks a ton for hckr news. Great resource.
- aphextron 9y agoI would add nautil.us to that list. But yeah, that's essentially the entirety of what's worth reading online in terms of traditional "news".
- dabockster 9y ago> even after massive ongoing curation the signal/noise is far too low Agreed. Even with programs like TweetDeck that can apply some basic filtering, you're still left with a bunch of junk content. (And the UX of TweetDeck is terrible in my opinion, but that's best left for another post.)
- chasely 9y agoIf you have a lot of people you follow on Twitter, Nuzzel [1] can be useful. Basically, if people you follow are sharing the same article, it will get highlighted by the app. [1] http://nuzzel.com/ http://nuzzel.com/
- chillee 9y ago+1 for hckrnews. Even if I miss a day, I can easily go back through the last couple days and see what's interesting. If my backlog is getting too much for me to want to deal with, I simply reduce the number of articles to top 10 or top 20, and go from there.
- smithsmith 9y agohckrnews is awesome. Before i found hckrnews i had no idea at what point to stop scrolling for more news if i missed looking hacker news a day later. The problem was since the feed is not linear with time and the newer articles can go beyond the articles you have already visited, there was no right way at what point to stop. hckrnews has addressed this issue very cleverly with the 20% , 50 % vote. Amazing.