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None. I set up shell twitter accounts for each issue I'm interested in, follow all the relevant people, take a month or so to adjust by deleting irritating fla

by nomilk 4y ago

None. I set up shell twitter accounts for each issue I'm interested in, follow all the relevant people, take a month or so to adjust by deleting irritating flame baiters and accumulate a few sharers of high quality information. Twitter's algorithm recommends a bunch of similar content, but because I only follow one issue per twitter account, it's all (or mostly) on topic, without distractions. Use web archive to get around paywalls, uBlock Origin to remove the irrelevant parts of the twitter web UI, and Video Speed Controller to quickly watch video content at 2, 3, or 4x speed. This gives a quick, easy, and extremely effective way to scan important info on a topic. Since many "news" sites get their material from social media anyway, you just get the "news" a little earlier than everyone else by going to source. It's more cumbersome than Zite (remember that?), but very effective. For this to work you must be ruthless about navigating around attention sinks (like worthless twitter squabbles).

bergenty 4y ago
Why would some random internet user have better news than literal companies dedicated to it? This sounds more like you’re creating a misinformation bubble rather than objective information.
- nomilk 4y ago
  50-100 good sources on a topic is arguably a lot more expertise than most newsrooms have available, especially if they’re approximately single topic tweeters, and considering they probably aren’t only tweeting their own original thoughts but also providing other ideas (e.g. articles, videos etc) by others. Presuming the minds you follow have the same concern (to take on uncomfortable, ambiguous, and challenging ideas), then the approach is already far ahead of virtually all publications I’m aware of, including the most upvoted ones on this thread (economist, for example), since they all have problems too: revenue incentives for one, which shapes what they can and cannot report on, a need to produce content to fill pages (e.g. manufacturing drama), bias towards sensational but unimportant topics etc. Also, Twitter is somewhat self regulating, at least, more so than “news” sites. Since an author of a news article may face little backlash for biased or wrong information, whereas on Twitter it takes only a few seconds to get a whiff that something’s not right (scan replies for compelling counter arguments, look who endorses via retweet/like etc).

by nomilk 4y ago

bergenty 4y ago

Why would some random internet user have better news than literal companies dedicated to it? This sounds more like you’re creating a misinformation bubble rather than objective information.

nomilk 4y ago
50-100 good sources on a topic is arguably a lot more expertise than most newsrooms have available, especially if they’re approximately single topic tweeters, and considering they probably aren’t only tweeting their own original thoughts but also providing other ideas (e.g. articles, videos etc) by others. Presuming the minds you follow have the same concern (to take on uncomfortable, ambiguous, and challenging ideas), then the approach is already far ahead of virtually all publications I’m aware of, including the most upvoted ones on this thread (economist, for example), since they all have problems too: revenue incentives for one, which shapes what they can and cannot report on, a need to produce content to fill pages (e.g. manufacturing drama), bias towards sensational but unimportant topics etc. Also, Twitter is somewhat self regulating, at least, more so than “news” sites. Since an author of a news article may face little backlash for biased or wrong information, whereas on Twitter it takes only a few seconds to get a whiff that something’s not right (scan replies for compelling counter arguments, look who endorses via retweet/like etc).