17 ms·

Agreed. Unfortunately now it's more like picking a sport team ("Team CNN" or "Team Fox"), or Apple vs/ Google vs/ Microsoft than actually finding, or learning a

Agreed. Unfortunately now it's more like picking a sport team ("Team CNN" or "Team Fox"), or Apple vs/ Google vs/ Microsoft than actually finding, or learning about, facts. Tribalism at it's finest. The only alternative I've found (I'm open to helpful suggestions) is to ignore that noise and read actual briefings and original sources. But, that defeats the point of news being an honest and straight forward source of a summary. And it takes a lot of time. And doesn't always end in rewarding information (lies/bias in original sources exist too - eg: watching hours upon hours of live impeachment hearings was full of lies/half-truths/obfuscation coming from all sides).

AndrewBissell 7y ago
I've found a well-curated Twitter feed of smart sources from various ideological and media camps helps to find interesting and informative info which would otherwise take a great deal of time to find. You do get misinfo and bad takes sometimes, but if you set it up right it's no worse than mainstream sources. Lists are useful as well to avoid Twitter's feed curation algos. Just specifically for COVID-19, this led me to: - Pay closer attention to the pandemic in China and request testing for my daughter when she had flu symptoms in late January while traveling (the CDC had no tests, of course) - Begin using masks and gloves while going to groceries and other stores long before it was in common use and the value of masks had been acknowledged - Mentally and materially prepare my family for an extended quarantine period long ahead of when the necessity was broadly acknowledged
- sroussey 7y ago
  Agreed. I’d also add selling stocks when they were hitting highs.
- alexilliamson 7y ago
  It sometimes feels like there is the perception that twitter is worthless and devoid of meaningful information, but like you I've been increasingly relying on it for news. I'm not sure where else you can collect so many different perspectives on any given piece of news. Overtime, you learn how many grains of salt to take with each person in your timeline, and you get a sense of their personal biases. And if you can brush off the trolls, it's instructive to read the arguments that happen in the replies. The way I use twitter, it serves the same purpose as hacker news, but with a much broader scope.
  - smsm42 7y ago
    > It sometimes feels like there is the perception that twitter is worthless and devoid of meaningful information My feeling has been there are nuggets of really good and really up-to-date information there, and there are some threads that are extremely informative, but signal-to-noise ratio is in general extremely close to zero and the hostility of the surrounding environment is unbelievably terrible.
  - throwaway294 7y ago
    A BIG advantage of Twitter is that get to hear from the persons themselves totally without filtering by the media. Maybe you do or don't like what some public figure who posts on Twitter says, but at least DO get just what THEY said.
    - Fjolsvith 7y ago
      This. The slanted editorializing and purposefully misconstrued out-of-context quoting by the media long ago turned me off.
      - throwaway294 7y ago
        My response some years ago was just to turn the mainstream media (MSM) off. On paper they can't compete with Charmin, and on the Internet they are useless for wrapping dead fish heads. Some of their material is worse than just misleading and down to manipulative, deceptive, dangerous, and even destructive. I don't want even to hear the MSM and, then, have to debunk them or risk being influenced. I hope the Internet enables some replacements, many more outlets but focused on smaller audiences.
- dewy 7y ago
  I've resisted Twitter for a long time, but this would be the only reason I could see myself becoming a user. In the past I've had a hard time finding people to follow with a high enough signal to noise ratio (or who don't flood my feed with a new tweet about their cat every 5 mins). Do you have any tips for picking sources? Or choosing when to fill them? And how do you stay on top of the flood of information?
  - raphlinus 7y ago
    For covid-19 I've curated this list: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1239639611694911489 https://twitter.com/i/lists/1239639611694911489 All the people on it are serious experts. I've also left out some people who are worth listening to, but have a political bias or express a lot of emotion (it's hard not to be angry). I spend way too much time getting up to speed, but (a) there's a lot of stuff I find interesting (I studied molecular and cell bio a bit during my Masters), and (b) would rather err on the side of over-learning than being misinformed. If you want secondary sources rather than primary, try STAT news. They've been excellent. The quality of discussion in other fora (including HN) has been quite disappointing.
    - travisporter 7y ago
      Thank you so much for this! I recently got into Twitter and following local news in an effort to stay informed but boy do the comments enrage/scare me. It’s just crazy how tribal things have gotten. Is there any end of this sort of division in sight? Every year I think it will get better but it doesn’t.
- jliptzin 7y ago
  Would you mind sharing the twitter handles you recommend following?
hhs 7y ago
> Unfortunately now it's more like picking a sport team Indeed, what’s being provided is infotainment / soft news. [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infotainment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infotainment
mrfusion 7y ago
I’ve been sorting reddit comments by controversial. There’s a lot of junk sure, but it’s you also get away from people parroting the standard lines and sometimes get some unique insight.
- aexl 7y ago
  That's an interesting idea. I need to try this too!
  - squiggleblaz 7y ago
    Oh I didn't know you could do that! In the old days when I used to visit another site, I gave bonus points to Flamebait and read at +4. As other p said, a lot of crap, but also a lot of insight. (I also took a point off "Insightful", since +4 Insightful was usually more like "a good but well known perspective which you have probably encountered before". The genuine insightful stuff was always +5.) I kinda miss the ability to make my own comment thread. My social media was much more efficient back then.
gred 7y ago
My approach is to include one or two news sources from the "other team" in my daily news diet. It adds a nice grain of salt for when I read "my team's" news.
xenyal 7y ago
Out of curiosity, and because I'm a Canadian out of the loop with respect to American news networks, how can there be news being at ends with each other? That's something I have difficulty putting into perspective (referring to the Team CNN vs Team Fox comparison)
- eric-hu 7y ago
  This is just my hypothesis: news networks discovered that they can cater to 30% of the population with an extreme message and get more viewership than they would have catering to 50% or 100%. A side effect is that the permissible extremity increases over time as radical becomes the new norm. Both sides can play off each other's increasingly radical messages.
- lucretian 7y ago
  two comments: 1) the american TV news industry has slowly blurred, then obliterated, the line between straight news and editorial opinion. they're now often intermixed, with slanted analysis weaved throughout reporting. things like those news panel shows are particularly bad about this. many people don't like to admit it because it challenges their centrist pretensions, but in the modern era, fox news started it and the remaining TV news outlets followed suit over the years. 2) but more fundamentally, there is probably no such thing as truly unbiased straight news reporting. the choosing of which facts to present is itself still an editorial process subject to human prejudice.
  - Zenbit_UX 7y ago
    You're forgetting the most important point. There's no law requiring a "news" agency to report the facts. In fact there's no laws requiring them to not lie about everything they say. It seems crazy to admit, because news is suppose to be useful and factual information surrounding current events, but in America it doesn't have to be and it stopped being that way when they realize that sensational and entertaining stories got better ratings.
- visiblink 7y ago
  If you read the Globe and Mail (Liberal) and National Post (Conservative), you'll see a similar -- though not quite as extreme -- phenomenon.

AndrewBissell 7y ago

I've found a well-curated Twitter feed of smart sources from various ideological and media camps helps to find interesting and informative info which would otherwise take a great deal of time to find. You do get misinfo and bad takes sometimes, but if you set it up right it's no worse than mainstream sources. Lists are useful as well to avoid Twitter's feed curation algos. Just specifically for COVID-19, this led me to: - Pay closer attention to the pandemic in China and request testing for my daughter when she had flu symptoms in late January while traveling (the CDC had no tests, of course) - Begin using masks and gloves while going to groceries and other stores long before it was in common use and the value of masks had been acknowledged - Mentally and materially prepare my family for an extended quarantine period long ahead of when the necessity was broadly acknowledged

sroussey 7y ago
Agreed. I’d also add selling stocks when they were hitting highs.
alexilliamson 7y ago
It sometimes feels like there is the perception that twitter is worthless and devoid of meaningful information, but like you I've been increasingly relying on it for news. I'm not sure where else you can collect so many different perspectives on any given piece of news. Overtime, you learn how many grains of salt to take with each person in your timeline, and you get a sense of their personal biases. And if you can brush off the trolls, it's instructive to read the arguments that happen in the replies. The way I use twitter, it serves the same purpose as hacker news, but with a much broader scope.
- smsm42 7y ago
  > It sometimes feels like there is the perception that twitter is worthless and devoid of meaningful information My feeling has been there are nuggets of really good and really up-to-date information there, and there are some threads that are extremely informative, but signal-to-noise ratio is in general extremely close to zero and the hostility of the surrounding environment is unbelievably terrible.
- throwaway294 7y ago
  A BIG advantage of Twitter is that get to hear from the persons themselves totally without filtering by the media. Maybe you do or don't like what some public figure who posts on Twitter says, but at least DO get just what THEY said.
  - Fjolsvith 7y ago
    This. The slanted editorializing and purposefully misconstrued out-of-context quoting by the media long ago turned me off.
    - throwaway294 7y ago
      My response some years ago was just to turn the mainstream media (MSM) off. On paper they can't compete with Charmin, and on the Internet they are useless for wrapping dead fish heads. Some of their material is worse than just misleading and down to manipulative, deceptive, dangerous, and even destructive. I don't want even to hear the MSM and, then, have to debunk them or risk being influenced. I hope the Internet enables some replacements, many more outlets but focused on smaller audiences.
dewy 7y ago
I've resisted Twitter for a long time, but this would be the only reason I could see myself becoming a user. In the past I've had a hard time finding people to follow with a high enough signal to noise ratio (or who don't flood my feed with a new tweet about their cat every 5 mins). Do you have any tips for picking sources? Or choosing when to fill them? And how do you stay on top of the flood of information?
- raphlinus 7y ago
  For covid-19 I've curated this list: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1239639611694911489 https://twitter.com/i/lists/1239639611694911489 All the people on it are serious experts. I've also left out some people who are worth listening to, but have a political bias or express a lot of emotion (it's hard not to be angry). I spend way too much time getting up to speed, but (a) there's a lot of stuff I find interesting (I studied molecular and cell bio a bit during my Masters), and (b) would rather err on the side of over-learning than being misinformed. If you want secondary sources rather than primary, try STAT news. They've been excellent. The quality of discussion in other fora (including HN) has been quite disappointing.
  - travisporter 7y ago
    Thank you so much for this! I recently got into Twitter and following local news in an effort to stay informed but boy do the comments enrage/scare me. It’s just crazy how tribal things have gotten. Is there any end of this sort of division in sight? Every year I think it will get better but it doesn’t.
jliptzin 7y ago
Would you mind sharing the twitter handles you recommend following?

hhs 7y ago

> Unfortunately now it's more like picking a sport team Indeed, what’s being provided is infotainment / soft news. [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infotainment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infotainment

mrfusion 7y ago

I’ve been sorting reddit comments by controversial. There’s a lot of junk sure, but it’s you also get away from people parroting the standard lines and sometimes get some unique insight.

aexl 7y ago
That's an interesting idea. I need to try this too!
- squiggleblaz 7y ago
  Oh I didn't know you could do that! In the old days when I used to visit another site, I gave bonus points to Flamebait and read at +4. As other p said, a lot of crap, but also a lot of insight. (I also took a point off "Insightful", since +4 Insightful was usually more like "a good but well known perspective which you have probably encountered before". The genuine insightful stuff was always +5.) I kinda miss the ability to make my own comment thread. My social media was much more efficient back then.

gred 7y ago

My approach is to include one or two news sources from the "other team" in my daily news diet. It adds a nice grain of salt for when I read "my team's" news.

xenyal 7y ago

Out of curiosity, and because I'm a Canadian out of the loop with respect to American news networks, how can there be news being at ends with each other? That's something I have difficulty putting into perspective (referring to the Team CNN vs Team Fox comparison)

eric-hu 7y ago
This is just my hypothesis: news networks discovered that they can cater to 30% of the population with an extreme message and get more viewership than they would have catering to 50% or 100%. A side effect is that the permissible extremity increases over time as radical becomes the new norm. Both sides can play off each other's increasingly radical messages.
lucretian 7y ago
two comments: 1) the american TV news industry has slowly blurred, then obliterated, the line between straight news and editorial opinion. they're now often intermixed, with slanted analysis weaved throughout reporting. things like those news panel shows are particularly bad about this. many people don't like to admit it because it challenges their centrist pretensions, but in the modern era, fox news started it and the remaining TV news outlets followed suit over the years. 2) but more fundamentally, there is probably no such thing as truly unbiased straight news reporting. the choosing of which facts to present is itself still an editorial process subject to human prejudice.
- Zenbit_UX 7y ago
  You're forgetting the most important point. There's no law requiring a "news" agency to report the facts. In fact there's no laws requiring them to not lie about everything they say. It seems crazy to admit, because news is suppose to be useful and factual information surrounding current events, but in America it doesn't have to be and it stopped being that way when they realize that sensational and entertaining stories got better ratings.
visiblink 7y ago
If you read the Globe and Mail (Liberal) and National Post (Conservative), you'll see a similar -- though not quite as extreme -- phenomenon.