4 ms·

> Back in my twenties, I started noticing that there really wasn't much on TV that I wanted to watch, and so never got around to subscribing to cable. To me, in

by LeonM 7y ago

> Back in my twenties, I started noticing that there really wasn't much on TV that I wanted to watch, and so never got around to subscribing to cable. To me, in the intervening years, TV has only become worse. My TV set spends most of its time as a large monitor. Same here. I grew up with television, but once I got my first own apartment I never bothered to get a cable subscription. I have a TV in my living room, but I consider it as a monitor for my game console and chromecast. The first thing people ask me when they hear I don't have a cable subscription is usually: how do you watch the news then? The answer is simple: Except for stuff that interests me (tech mostly) I do not read, watch or listen the generic news. Most news is depressing anyways, and you really don't miss out on anything imo.

bluGill 7y ago
What I miss the most is local news. If something happens in Italy (pick a random country that is far away from my US home) that matters to me I will hear about it. However if something happens on my block I am unlikely to hear about it because things that close to home matter even when they are well below insignificant on the scale of national (or even state level) news. Note that news shows cover a much larger area than my neighborhood and wouldn't give me that anyway. What I need most is a local newspaper with a small circulation.
- jermaustin1 7y ago
  This is why I pay for a couple of my local "papers". Thankfully I live in a section of New York (Halfway between Poughkeepsie and Peekskill) with loads of them. I'm sure a lot of mediumly populated places have at least one. Even my town of 600 has it's own paper - that I don't subscribe to because they distribute them to most of the shops in town. Even if they have a political slant (which (a lot|most|all) of them do), it's easy to ignore that coverage and focus on the truly local news. Also, tons of local gossip.
peckrob 7y ago
We cancelled our cable subscription after our daughter was born. We just weren't watching enough to justify a $240 a month cable bill. That bill went to $60 when we switched to Internet-only. In the meantime, I put an antenna in the attic and wired it to all the TVs in the house. Primarily this was to pick up local stations because I live in an area prone to severe weather, but we ended up getting something like 30 over the air channels. Some of them are low-power (primarily religious) stations that we never watch, but we get all the majors (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS, CW) and a bunch more on sub-channels. I was pretty surprised by how much could get for free with just an antenna. Between that and Netflix, Hulu, and (now) Disney Plus, we are never short of things to watch and still get the local news when we need that coverage.
ryanmercer 7y ago
>I do not read, watch or listen the generic news. Most news is depressing anyways, and you really don't miss out on anything imo. This. I stopped actively following news around the time the iPhone 3GS came out and within a month or two I was far happier in general. Around the time iPhone 6 came out I was using flipboard on an iPad nightly for a few weeks, found it pretty miserable and quit again. Now I will look at my Google news recommendations on my phone once or twice a day for the first few articles, rarely doing more than scanning the headlines. These articles are almost always of interest to me as I will tell it I don't want to see these kinds of articles when it puts garbage in there so it's mostly NASA and SpaceX news which I'll hear about on a few podcasts I listen to anyway. Aside from that my news is limited to a story or two on the Adam Carolla podcast each weekday, whatever I see on HN on weekdays and whatever gets sent to me via SMS. Right now I'm currently checking /r/China_flu every day because I work in international freight and we're already feeling the virus in our volume due to Chinese freight slowing but once the virus starts to decline I'll stop.
- jsmonkey 7y ago
  Similar experiences here. I was a news addict for most of my youth. The general knowledge I gained that way sure helped me to ace college exams, but that's about it as far as benefits go. All the negativity in news was definitely bad for my mental health. Constantly checking out news was also a giant waste of time - time that could have been spent on self-development, or something that makes me happy. Now I've blocked all news sites of my country on all my devices, and I definitely feel much better. Checking out bbc.com or whatever once a day is enough.

by LeonM 7y ago

bluGill 7y ago

What I miss the most is local news. If something happens in Italy (pick a random country that is far away from my US home) that matters to me I will hear about it. However if something happens on my block I am unlikely to hear about it because things that close to home matter even when they are well below insignificant on the scale of national (or even state level) news. Note that news shows cover a much larger area than my neighborhood and wouldn't give me that anyway. What I need most is a local newspaper with a small circulation.

jermaustin1 7y ago
This is why I pay for a couple of my local "papers". Thankfully I live in a section of New York (Halfway between Poughkeepsie and Peekskill) with loads of them. I'm sure a lot of mediumly populated places have at least one. Even my town of 600 has it's own paper - that I don't subscribe to because they distribute them to most of the shops in town. Even if they have a political slant (which (a lot|most|all) of them do), it's easy to ignore that coverage and focus on the truly local news. Also, tons of local gossip.

peckrob 7y ago

We cancelled our cable subscription after our daughter was born. We just weren't watching enough to justify a $240 a month cable bill. That bill went to $60 when we switched to Internet-only. In the meantime, I put an antenna in the attic and wired it to all the TVs in the house. Primarily this was to pick up local stations because I live in an area prone to severe weather, but we ended up getting something like 30 over the air channels. Some of them are low-power (primarily religious) stations that we never watch, but we get all the majors (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS, CW) and a bunch more on sub-channels. I was pretty surprised by how much could get for free with just an antenna. Between that and Netflix, Hulu, and (now) Disney Plus, we are never short of things to watch and still get the local news when we need that coverage.

ryanmercer 7y ago

>I do not read, watch or listen the generic news. Most news is depressing anyways, and you really don't miss out on anything imo. This. I stopped actively following news around the time the iPhone 3GS came out and within a month or two I was far happier in general. Around the time iPhone 6 came out I was using flipboard on an iPad nightly for a few weeks, found it pretty miserable and quit again. Now I will look at my Google news recommendations on my phone once or twice a day for the first few articles, rarely doing more than scanning the headlines. These articles are almost always of interest to me as I will tell it I don't want to see these kinds of articles when it puts garbage in there so it's mostly NASA and SpaceX news which I'll hear about on a few podcasts I listen to anyway. Aside from that my news is limited to a story or two on the Adam Carolla podcast each weekday, whatever I see on HN on weekdays and whatever gets sent to me via SMS. Right now I'm currently checking /r/China_flu every day because I work in international freight and we're already feeling the virus in our volume due to Chinese freight slowing but once the virus starts to decline I'll stop.

jsmonkey 7y ago
Similar experiences here. I was a news addict for most of my youth. The general knowledge I gained that way sure helped me to ace college exams, but that's about it as far as benefits go. All the negativity in news was definitely bad for my mental health. Constantly checking out news was also a giant waste of time - time that could have been spent on self-development, or something that makes me happy. Now I've blocked all news sites of my country on all my devices, and I definitely feel much better. Checking out bbc.com or whatever once a day is enough.