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More and more people are tuning the news out: 'Now I don't have that anxiety

deleted 1y ago
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j_bum 1y ago
I have cut out the vast majority of news and social media since the beginning of 2025. My mental health is noticeably better, and I would readily attribute this to not being tuned in to the ongoings of the globe that I have zero control over. Instead, I have been more focused on my local life and community. But I regularly feel guilty about not being keyed in to the flirtations with/forays into authoritarianism in my country.
- zeta0134 1y ago
  This is my strategy as well. There are some issues I care about enough to follow, mostly related to lgbtq+ topics and technical regulations affecting my industry. But for the larger political sphere and what I hesitantly refer to as "headlines that belong in tabloids" I actively do not care. It'll take me about a day or two (per candidate) to get back up to speed when elections come around, so I can do my civic duty and vote. Beyond that I don't let it consume my life. I've got stuff to do, and not very much time left to do it.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    That's kind of my attitude. I have a number of friends that are addicted to Outrage Pron (almost all media -mainstream or fringe- qualifies). They -literally- spend almost every waking hour, doomscrolling. One of them occasionally forwards videos to me, that are clearly edited for angst, but he takes as gospel. AI will make that kind of stuff much, much worse. I had a friend tell me "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention!" He thought it was a clever, brand new saying (Spoiler: It's not —I first heard it, in the 1970s). I've found that I can get a lot done, when I pay attention to the things over which I have direct control.
    - 0points 1y ago
      > "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention!" Yea.. that outrage won't lead to any change. On the contrary, being in this state of distress eventually makes you unable to cope, breaking you down.
      - ModernMech 1y ago
        Being complacent also won't lead to any change. People need to be outraged but they also have to do something about it. You have to pick a lane -- if you're going to not do anything about it, then commit to not doing anything and bury your head. If you're going to get outraged, you can't just go into work every day like everything is normal, the cognitive dissonance will get you. Outrage needs an outlet.
        quantummagic 1y ago
        > Outrage needs an outlet. You've really let yourself off the hook there; that's way too easy to say. What exactly do you suggest, that would make an actually useful contribution to improving the situation?
        JKCalhoun 1y ago
        You're right that optimism has a difficult job of looking for tangible, actionable things while nihilism can stretch out in a hammock and watch the world burn. Historical situations like our own might be a good place to start to look for solutions.
        quantummagic 1y ago
        > Historical situations like our own might be a good place to start to look for solutions. If you have a suggestion about something practical, that can actually help, please speak up. Offering more platitudes is just way too easy; it feels good, maybe, but it's really just an admission that we don't have a good outlet for our outrage. Which is why so many of us spend our days venting online, because apparently (judging from the lack of concrete ideas offered) it's about as effective as anything else we could do.
  - waltbosz 1y ago
    > I'll take me about a day or two (per candidate) ... I have so much trouble deciding on primary elections. There are often 5 primary candidates, and 10 seats to decide upon. And I've found no good tool to help evaluate their policy and record. I want some sort of score board website that tracks their political and public behaviors towards various policies.
    - Esophagus4 1y ago
      I’ve found sites like Balletopedia to be good starting points when I do my research. Then I generally go to the candidates individual websites or see what their main talking points are. You don’t always get a sense for everything, but you kind of figure out who they are in general. From an actual example of a candidate’s official Facebook page in my state, if you see them post something like “how come the MAINSTREAM media isn’t covering the BLACK on WHITE crime?!” you generally don’t need to do much research on them after that.
      - waltbosz 1y ago
        That's my standard process too, ballotpedia > candidate website. But campaign websites often feel like general bland taking points repeated by all the primary candidates.
- emchammer 1y ago
  Apple’s Screen Time has been pretty good by me. I set Safari to an hour and News/Stocks to 15 minutes per day, only allowed after noon, and blocked on the weekend. I still click Give Me Another 15 Minutes but it’s annoying enough that it reminds me why it’s there.
- ModernMech 1y ago
  > But I regularly feel guilty about not being keyed in to the flirtations with/forays into authoritarianism in my country. This really highlights that the threat of authoritarianism is really only a threat to certain people, which frankly is why authoritarianism happens. Because if authoritarianism were an issue for you, you'd be reading the news. If POTUS were threatening to send troops into your streets to arrest people who look like you, that'd be something you'd want to be aware of yes? If he had a policy to detain people who look like you, and if he doesn't like your tattoos he'll send you to a foreign torture prison, you'd probably be very keen on paying attention to that kind of thing. But since he's not threating you and yours specifically, you have the luxury of tuning out for your mental health while all that goes on. Until of course he comes for your ethnicity/religion/politics/profession. Although, I guess you won't know until that happens because you won't be reading the news. Yeah, you know what I think I would have better mental health too if I could just tune out the daily missives from the abyss, but I need to stay on top of what words I'm not allowed to say at my job or else the government will target us for research defunding. Words like "equity" and anything that starts with the prefix "trans".
  - delfinom 1y ago
    Consuming a 24/7 feed of doomerism media does nothing for fighting authoritarianism. It simply just gives ad revenue to oligarchs. If you want to do something, get involved in local politics and groups, stay off social media where Facebook like activism does nothing.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - techpineapple 1y ago
    Yes, some people benefit more from watching the news than others and therefore choose to.
    - AlecSchueler 1y ago
      Meanwhile some of aren't badly affected but care about the wellbeing of others so choose not to tune out to their detriment.
mschuster91 1y ago
Ignorance is bliss, eh? But don't come and pull off the "we didn't know anything" excuse that the Germans used in droves after 1945. And no, that's not exclusive to Trump and what ICE has been up to, vanishing people into deportation camps. Climate change, the increasing frequency of pandemics, PFAS/forever chemicals, the list of stuff being swept under the rug instead of being acted against grows longer by the day.
- delfinom 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - hnhg 1y ago
    Your reply really does not need the offensive opening line.
    - delfinom 1y ago
      The OP immediately opened up with describing everyone who refuses to consume doomer media as nazis. It is deserved.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
- giuliomagnifico 1y ago
  In my opinion, it's not ignorance but fear and anxiety. When you have too much information, even conflicting, the human brain rejects all. It's like when you watch an ad for an insect repellent: if they show you all those disgusting insects, the ad disgusts you so much that you avoid the product. It's a phenomenon known in psychology. Now the trend is the same with news and media.
- lazide 1y ago
  The issue is, what else do you expect people to do? They will destroy their own lives if all they worry about is the bigger stuff. There is no clear path from what an individual can practically do, to addressing those bigger things either. For example, politically - anyone trying to do the actual effective thing in this situation is going to be thrown in jail, often with praise and finger wagging by the nominal folks in charge of those who it would be benefitting. And since everyone would rather yell and scream back and forth at each other rather than actually do anything that matters, what else is going to happen? That goes for pretty much every one of these hot button topics. People can only control what they can actually control, and at some point, those things are in bad enough shape that they require 100% of a persons attention. Or more. This is 'California politics' by the way - and it's spread everywhere. Nothing is good, everything is bad, no one can do anything that actually benefits them, etc, etc.
hnhg 1y ago
I believe Hannah Arendt made the point that politicians lie not so much as to get away with the issue at hand but rather as a long term strategy to nullify any interest in politics overall in order to get away with absolute everything on their agenda. This might be the most recent iteration of this, aided by an often complicit media.
- toss1 1y ago
  ^^^ THIS! ^^^ The explicit goal of dezinformatsiya (coined by Stalin) is not to get people to believe the lies (an occasional bonus) —— the goal is to get people to GIVE UP on finding the truth. Once people give up on finding the truth, dictators and despots can get away with anything because people literally do not even have the knowledge prerequisite to any opposing action; the people become a mere mass of compliant NPCs in the despot's regime. OFC, if the news is genuinely crippling in a way that renders you incapable of any action, then by all means take care of that first. But especially in these times of serious real threats, anxiety in response to those real threats is the exact expected healthy response! More broadly, as a society in the US and EU, the threats have outpaced the speed of anxiety growth, a delay which allowed them to gain power. Anxiety overall is only now growing to the point where a backlash is forming that may restore small-d democratic norms and overtake a rapidly growing authoritarian regime. Remaining ignorant is personally easier in the short term, but definitely helps an authoritarian regime gain and cement its power, so is likely to be regretted in the long term. Many under Hitler's regime lived out their lives in shame they had not done more to stop him when they could have.
  - jimkleiber 1y ago
    And I imagine avoiding political issues can show up also as avoiding issues or conflicts at work or in any group of people to which we belong. I think so much of it is us feeling emotionally overwhelmed and running away. Anxiety can be really helpful if we engage with it, have the courage to address the fear. If we just always run, especially with social conflicts, the conflicts often don't go away, we just pretend they don't exist until they boil over.
  - rramadass 1y ago
alexjplant 1y ago
This is really rich coming from The Guardian, a publication that, while not nearly on the same level of degeneracy as the usual rags, is hardly a bastion of factual reporting [1] (and, to be clear, I'm talking about factuality, not political bias, but downvote anyhow I guess). The last story I read from them was linked from here on HN and riddled with bad facts in a naked attempt to support the author's narrative. News flash (pun intended): if something is dire enough to be newsworthy then it doesn't need editorial embellishment. It's the metaphorical equivalent of a reporter making airplane noises while zooming a spoon of food around their readership's head like they're a hungry baby. If you want hard hitting public interest pieces then ProPublica [2] and Democracy Now! [3] are both far better choices. I can't say that they'll make you feel better about the wacky world we live in but at least they treat you like an adult. [1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/ [2] https://www.propublica.org/ https://www.propublica.org/ [3] https://www.democracynow.org/ https://www.democracynow.org/
- cma 1y ago
  Mediabiasfactcheck is run by someone on the Council of Foreign Relations, The Guardian is typically left of their worldview FWIW Mediabiasfactcheck rates Foreign Affairs, a publication of the council on foreign relations, as the least biased, with no mention of their owner's connection.
  - alexjplant 1y ago
    This is not true. From their site [1]: > Dave Van Zandt is a registered Non-Affiliated voter who values evidence-based reporting. Though not a journalist, Dave has maintained a lifelong interest in politics and media bias. He originally pursued a Communications degree in college before ultimately earning a degree in Physiology. Since then, he has worked in the healthcare industry (Occupational Rehabilitation) while continuing to study media, language, and bias independently. The guy you're talking about (from Wikipedia): > Van Zandt was born in 1953 in Montgomery, New Jersey, and raised in New Jersey along with his three siblings. He graduated from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology. In 1981, he earned a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School, where he served as managing editor for the Yale Law Journal. He earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the London School of Economics. Unless Dave leads a double life as both a physical therapist and treasurer of the bar foundation these are two different people. [1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/about/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/about/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Van_Zandt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Van_Zandt
HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
I remember that for years following 9/11 I would compulsively refresh Drudge every 1/2 hr expecting some other horror to unfold, and eventually just deleted the bookmark to prevent myself from doing that. Nowadays I get my daily news from a quick scan of the headlines on Google news, as well as Drudge (from Google search history - no bookmark!), but of course it's mostly sensationalist and partisan garbage, and only minimally informative about actual events/developments of interest. I only click through a very small number of headlines.
dazc 1y ago
'People are doing/not doing a thing...' says 'The News'.
squidgyhead 1y ago
For those complaining about the news sites being sensationalist, why not just read Reuters? You will miss out on local news, but it's pretty reliable for international news.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
  OK, maybe a bit like BBC TV News used to be years ago (no idea what it is like today), but presumably it's still disaster-orientated (earthquakes, fires, wars, etc), even if it cuts out the news of what Trump tweeted last night, or what the Hollywood starlets are wearing (which frankly is one of the less psychologically damaging things to be reading/seeing on a daily basis!)
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  Reuters isn't sensationalist, but it still doesn't tell the full story either. Flattening your language also helps maintain the status quo.
everdrive 1y ago
My social circle has shrank to almost nothing, and I go to work and pursue my hobbies. It's not clear to me that knowing about world or political events has much impact. To the extent that I'm well informed, it mostly just allows me to have political conversations in my head, with no one, sometimes my wife, and very occasionally a fried or two. And there's no reason to think that those political conversations are doing anything positive for the relationships. (I don't lean into politics with people since it can be so divisive, but if people are so inclined, it can be fun intellectually. I don't generally feel like there's much in the news that either discusses anything I care about. Or, to the extent that issues I care about are discussed, they come at it from such a strange angle that the discourse is mostly frustrating, or disappointing. (quick example, I heard a piece on NPR about how people are turning to LLMs for therapy. The commentator's solution? We NEED robust LLMs that are trained in psychology datasets and have the right guardrails for psychology.) For the rest of the HN crowd, imagine any news story from a mainstream outlet about issues of privacy or security. The commentary is completely worthless, except perhaps for informing you about where some of the general public may be on the issue. In other words, for me personally, it's not sure that following politics has very much real utility value. I can just research a candidate when I go to vote. The only direct referendums I can vote on are town-level and have nothing to do with national matters. I donate to a few causes I like, and otherwise I have effectively zero say in how these things turn out. This means I'd be far better off reading a book, doing chores, or thinking about how I can improve the quality of my life than paying attention to the news whatsoever.
- fluidcruft 1y ago
  I agree that there's this intense reality of powerlessness that makes wasting time on anything that isn't personally interesting pointless. And that journalists are atrocious and pushing narratives and their own careers nowadays (not that I should have expected it to ever have been different) but it's a difficult thing to unsee--that the "news" is being driven by power and agendas and is entirely unreliable. And you're right voting is all the control we ultimately have but what even is that. I live in a state that is gerrymandered to hell to ensure supermajority, where even the partisan State Supreme court has repeatedly declared the maps the Legislature and Governor approves to be un(state)constitutional and... there's nothing that anyone can do about it. But even if that wasn't the case how can you research candidate positions without knowing the political context you want them to represent you within? And even then frankly they've all proved themselves to be spineless liars who say anything to get elected and onto the graft money train so who gives a shit. So then you're left just electing people based on character ethics optics. I really don't know what the answer is, but the nationalization of everything seems extremely disenfranchising. Every little thing becomes a referendum about some national topic and hyperpolarized purity test. Just Ugh. Throw everyone out.
znpy 1y ago
I cut down my “news intake” significantly as well… most stuff that’s happening is outside my control anyway. If there’s something major (eg: another pandemic) the news will reach me anyway.
habosa 1y ago
If you want to keep a light pulse on national news without the clickbait and doomscrolling, I recommend https://text.npr.org https://text.npr.org It’s text-only, no photos or videos. Updates only once or twice a day. No comments section or any other distractions. That’s been my main change to my news diet. Deleting the NYTimes app and replacing it with that site has made me much happier. I still read a lot of local news (San Francisco things that affect my life) but I just realize that national political news is not something I need to track 24/7
- falcor84 1y ago
  A bit ironic that their news for today offer another means of reducing anxiety - https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5529325 https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5529325
- andyjohnson0 1y ago
  Thanks. I'm not a USian but thats a nice summary to have. I might whip up a quick greasemonkey script to strip out the links so it's just a set of simple summaries. Ofc NPR may not be reliable, or even exist, soon due to Trump's retaliatory budget cuts. But meanwhile, nicw to have. Thanks again.
- petesergeant 1y ago
  I’ve been using The Economist’s “The World in Brief”, which sounds like much the same thing. I’m six weeks in to the news diet, and am much less angry all the time.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
    I used to read the UK Financial Times ("the pink 'un") as a source of world news rather than fincancial news - it was always a lot more sober and objective.
    - gumboshoes 1y ago
      I thought the "pink 'un" was a horse racing paper or odds sheet? I get the color of the paper is the same.
Havoc 1y ago
I'm much more interested in actively filtering it than cutting it. Think yahoo pipes except DIY and more sophisticated. That'll take time to build though. In the near term I've found that asking an LLM with search/deep research to summarize news helps. Obviously zero shielding from bias, but at least its concise & all in one place There is also kagi and newsminimalist for out of the box semi-filtered: https://www.newsminimalist.com/ https://www.newsminimalist.com/ https://kite.kagi.com/ https://kite.kagi.com/
- 0points 1y ago
  I also went the filtering route. Thanks to atom/rss, it's a evening job at most. I made a self-censor app that simply scrubs feeds from certain controversial content.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  I'd rather just drink from the hose directly, personally. I've been doing an "anti-pomodoro" timer, myself. Set 30 or 60 minutes, and just scroll around as I usually do. aggregators (including here on the rare occasion a post isn't flagged), various news feeds, etc. when the timer ends, I get out of the hypnosis and move on to whatever the day needs. I think being anxious in these times is important. But the anxiety has middling returns. I want to do more, but I know spending hours worrying over stuff I can't control is futile.
senko 1y ago
I have tuned the news out as much as possible, as soon as I've realized it's mostly show biz. The News, like any other media, is in the business of producing content and being watched/read/listened to, as much as possible. Not in the business of keeping me informed about what's going on in the world (that's relevant to me). I don't want to bury my head in the sand. I do read/watch/listen to some of it. Usually weeklies, like The Economist, and I have a daily digest newsletter that dedupes and sends me local news from the day before. Between that and what I hear on the grapevine / from my friends, I trust that I am informed enough.
richieb 1y ago
I switched mostly to using an RSS reader to see the headlines, and then read what is interesting. Plus I follow several writers that I trust (eg. Heather Cox Richardson). I don't want to get my news from social media.
- chneu 1y ago
  Everyone is acting like rss feeds aren't still a thing. Curate your news sources, people. I use a self hosted commafeed. Super easy to setup and I also follow blogs along with my news sources.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    Commafeed looks nice. Can it also auto download a full article and strip any kind of formatting and ads? That's kinda what I'm looking for. And then have an LLM filter on top of that to filter out all the stuff I don't care about.
- qcnguy 1y ago
  HCR is social media. She posts to Substack, which has a feed, likes, recommendations and commenting.
pch00 1y ago
Slightly ironically, I stopped reading the Guardian a few years ago for this very reason!
- wkat4242 1y ago
  It's also a bit too unserious for me these days. There's always this stupid bs stuff like "my partner and I stopped having sex for 3 months and it improved our lives". That kind of crap belongs in Cosmopolitan not in a decent paper. They still have insightful stories at times but it's hard to wade through all the crap. I stopped supporting them during the Brexit negotiations because I was sick of hearing those entitled conservatives complain that they couldn't get from us (EU) what they knew they could never have because it was just the rules. But I recently came back to it after seeing a link to it somewhere but it seems such a hollow shell of what it was now.
stego-tech 1y ago
I’ve reduced my news intake to broadly just AP News, with color commentary/opinion/perspectives coming from The Guardian and Al Jazeera as needed. For local news, it’s my NPR station (WBUR) and Universal Hub in RSS format. The good news is I spend significantly less time doomscrolling (down, on average I’d say, over 90%). My anxiety levels are largely gone, and when they do spool up I’m equipped with the tools to interrupt or stop them. The downside to this has been an increased reliance on my news intake by others who have abandoned it wholesale or only consume opinion pieces like the “nightly news”. It’s a markedly different kind of anxiety, because now I also have to be ready to teach these other people about things they really should be building habits for themselves - but if I bail out, they just rely on ChatGPT instead to explain complex topics while remaining bereft of nuance and historical contexts. The current landscape sucks, because everyone is chasing bullshit KPIs (engagement metrics, attention economy, advertising revenue, etc) instead of just delivering high-quality journalism at rates the common man can’t afford to pass up (i.e., affordable). I do not blame people from noping out, but I remain angry that everyone basically abandoned RSS feeds and digestible news in lieu of clickbait, algorithms, and walled gardens.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  > I remain angry that everyone basically abandoned RSS feeds and digestible news in lieu of clickbait, algorithms, and walled gardens. Well one of them had billions to advertise and make dark patterns to keep people on. And people still don't realize those tricks in at play. This is sadly why proper regulation is needed. We didn't cut down o Yellow Journalism in press last century by simply informing the populace better. In many ways, the honest people need enough power to punish the dishonest people. Shame that 2025 is not the year of honesty.
nytesky 1y ago
I have two questions: 1) I thought most people got their “news” from social media (x, BlueSky, TikTok). TikTok esp does not really give link backs as well. 2) was this part of the “flood the zone” strategy, to get people to just be overwhelmed and not pay attention?
mherkender 1y ago
Somewhere in the 2010s, social media turned news into spam. I guess it was a long time coming, I remember news commercials in the 90s fear-baiting constantly, demanding you tune in at 11pm to find out more. I recommend Wikipedia frontpage, maybe Wikinews. It has to come from a nonprofit at this point.
aaomidi 1y ago
As an American, British, German, etc citizen our taxes are funding a genocide. But we are here giving self help guides on how to tune out the sounds of dying kids instead of demanding consequences from our government.
ferociouskite56 1y ago
When I was false imprisoned in the psych ward, I had anxiety for not being able to read RSS news.
- kelsey98765431 1y ago
  how much money did they get out of your insurance? paradoxically people who have less coverage are safer in that circumstance (they let you put in 72 hours vs 72 days)
  - ferociouskite56 1y ago
    Around $1,500/day, totaling $550,000. I reported to Medicaid CMS that it's discriminatory False Claims Act fraud because I never hallucinated, self harmed, nor was violent. I never signed anything saying I would pay.
djoldman 1y ago
News is entertainment. The vast majority of news consumption is for feeling amusement, outrage, tribal-solidarity, etc. It almost never leads to a change in action by the consumer. Non-entertainment news: articles that change future actions, e.g. trade publications related to one's career/job. Need information to vote? Wait 4 weeks before the election and then go to one of the many websites that track candidates' quotes to determine as best one can what their positions are on the issues you care about. For example: https://www.ontheissues.org/ https://www.ontheissues.org/ Entertainment is fine and dandy! But don't make the mistake of thinking it's productive or better/nobler than alternatives just because "journalism."
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >Wait 4 weeks before the election and then go to one of the many websites that track candidates' quotes So just hear carefully curated words and not see the actions they did? Yeah, that's pretty much how my country got into this situation. There's plenty of fluff, but lets not pretend that there isn't actual reporting out there for stuff that does or will affect your daily life. 1000x so with local policy where it is so excruciatingly difficult to find any real information on. Just 1) be honest about when you want either the dryest, direct report, or you want a show to go with it. I'm definitely in the middle myself, slightly skewed towards dry. 2) Understand the balance of relevance, impact, importance, and fun to your life. We can be honest and admit there some important news out there that simply isn't a fight you want to participate nor follow closely. Likewise, we're on a tech forum right now and I'm sure while many of us would read about a distributed GPU runtime that we also all know it's not necessarily the most important thing in life right now (unless that is indeed your career right now). Awareness can do a lot to drive behavior by itself. We just first need to be honest about it.
  - djoldman 1y ago
    > So just hear carefully curated words and not see the actions they did? Fair enough. Take a look at candidate actions as well.
the_snooze 1y ago
I like to take a tiered approach, placing way more importance on news 1s of miles away from me than 100s or 1000s of miles away from me. If there's a water main break or police activity or interesting new construction happening near me, that's the news that matters. What happens on the opposite end of the country has little bearing on my day-to-day life, so why give it a disproportionate amount of attention? It's trivia for all intents and purposes.
andyjohnson0 1y ago
This is me over the last year or two. Anxiety and creeping horror, interrupted sleep and low mood. Ukraine, Gaza, Trump, authoritarianism everywhere... I try to avoid online news sources, because there's an infinite amount to doomscroll. I use leechblock [1] in firefox to introduce just enough friction to visiting a news site, without hard-blocking them. Because sometimes I still need to know what's going on. I check the ten minute news summary on BBC Radio 4 as I'm driving to work. Its time-bounded, and pretty reliable imo - although I lean towards a Guardian perspective. Sometimes I hang around for the big interview afterwards, other times I go back to music on a usb stick. Or just drive. [1] https://github.com/proginosko/LeechBlock https://github.com/proginosko/LeechBlock Also available for chrome and edge
bigstrat2003 1y ago
I used to read the newspaper every morning over breakfast as a teenager. At one point I noticed that it just made me angry at the stuff going on in the world, but without me actually being able to do anything about it. So I stopped consuming the news. It's been 25 years now and I have zero regrets about this. On occasion I miss something I would like to know about, but in general I will find out about any truly important news out from other people. And that was before the current age of yellow journalism. The news is 10x worse now than it was then; I strongly recommend that everyone unplugs from it for the sake of their own mental health.
- tootie 1y ago
  Do you vote and do you consider yourself and informed voter? Do you not even consume local news? I understand the desire to protect yourself from anxiety but surely you have to acknowledge there's a downside to being willfully ignorant and detached from civic life.
  - hulitu 1y ago
    > but surely you have to acknowledge there's a downside to being willfully ignorant and detached from civic life. There is none. Cortuption goes on as ussual either you vote or you don't.
    - tootie 1y ago
      Such an absolutely facile take and certainly a favored one by people who want to pretend there is nothing they can do so they have an excuse to do nothing. Societies problems are as much your responsibility as any other individual.
      - ponector 1y ago
        They could be absolutely right, there is no sense to participate in election theater in some countries. Maybe they are from russia, who knows.
wkat4242 1y ago
I've been thinking of running all the news headlines through a (local) AI to filter out stuff that is actually important, aiming for about 1% of headines or so.
cjcenizal 1y ago
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Fix the News yet (https://fixthenews.com/ https://fixthenews.com/). If you want a weekly boost of amazing news from around the world, sign up for this newsletter! For example, did you know that in July 2025, 99.7% of new power capacity added in the US was from clean power (led by Texas)? The EU, US, and UK have committed to a $125 billion global fund to protect the Amazon? The US prison population is the lowest it's been since 1992? A new therapy has successfully cleared 100% of metastatic cancers in trial patients? 1 in 8 kids in Botswana were born with HIV in 2001, but that number has dropped to 1 in 100? These headlines rarely make the mainstream, but they're the ones that bring me the most hope and joy. If you're looking for positive news, you will love Fix the News.
- hulitu 1y ago
  > If you want a weekly boost of amazing news from around the world, sign up for this newsletter! I'm surprised you just don't get it. People are sick of "amazing news".
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    What do people want, in that case.
    - joquarky 1y ago
      To live in less interesting times?
      - johnnyanmac 1y ago
        I can definitely agree with that. Can't wait for the day where the biggest drama isn't yet another constitutional crisis.
- buu700 1y ago
  That's pretty neat. It sounds like a better version of Mark's idea from Peep Show: Nancy: Bad news, bad news, bad news. Jesus, Jeremy, one bus crash. What about all the buses that made it safely to their destinations, huh? Jeremy: Yeah! Yeah, this is such bullshit. Mark: Yes, I suppose the news should just be a dispassionate list of all the events that have occurred the world over during the day. That would be good. Except of course, it would take forever!
androng 1y ago
I used to watch "China Insights" on YouTube and "ClearValue Tax" on YouTube for updates on the Fed and realized that I was only just clicking and watching all the negative headlines with individual stories that I could do absolutely nothing about so now I made a website https://toolong.link https://toolong.link to convert those to articles and spend time watching comedy videos instead.
jmkni 1y ago
In the eternal words of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, 'Throw Away Your Television' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2f6JmTssLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2f6JmTssLQ
hagbard_c 1y ago
People are not so much tuning out the news as they are tuning out the narrative pushed by the likes of the Guardian et al. The old Soviet riff about there not being any truth (правда or 'Pravda' , the newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in the News (известия or 'Izvestia', the newspaper of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union) nor was there any news in the Truth holds true for most of the legacy news outlets out there. The clear bias shown by the Guardian and similar outlets has made them close to useless as a source of news. There are plenty of alternatives now which are not under control of the legacy publishers. Most of these are just as biased as legacy publications so following 'alternative news sources' is not a panacea for getting closer to the truth. You need to follow a number of outlets with different - and often opposing - biases to get a wider picture. RSS feed readers do wonders here but it still can take quite a bit of time and effort to separate 'news' from 'narrative' no matter the source.
kstrauser 1y ago
I use an RSS-alike app (Tapestry) to subscribe to a select few news sources I actually want to hear about, with NPR and 404 Media and ProPublica and Wired (which has gotten shockingly good in the last couple of years), and a couple of comics I like (my daily Calvin & Hobbes), a select few Mastodon feeds, and a couple of Reddit groups for specific interests (like Meshtastic radios). It’s not that I don’t ever look at the “full” news anymore, but that I severely limit how much time I spend doing that. It’s been great for my mental health.
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qgin 1y ago
If you can turn off whatever news you’re consuming and not ever notice any effect in your life or in the life of anyone you know that would make you think “wow, something must have happened”, then you’re just consuming that news as entertainment.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  Don't we all do that? 99% of the news has no impact on my life.. Especially American services try to make things sensational "BREAKING NEWS!!!" but really 99% is a nothingburger.
mettamage 1y ago
I just use Hacker News, unironically
- LexiMax 1y ago
  Hacker News's "tuning out" is a mirage. It hides a seedy underbelly of unaccountable user-based moderation and vote manipulation that is very plain to see if you use the "active" front page instead of the standard one, and turn on showdead. I feel like the experiment of moderation decisions via mob rule is largely a failure, and I much prefer the style of old webforums where moderation was left only to the people who ran the site/server and the people hand-picked by them. Tildes does this, as does Discord. Personally, my news diet is Kagi with a well-curated blocklist and Tildes with a few targeted topic tag filters.
karakot 1y ago
trying to follow http://aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews it helps
Anonyneko 1y ago
I had to tune out because most of the news in my region for the past several years are about the ongoing war. Even when you've made sure you're nowhere near it physically (provided that it doesn't expand into other countries), the constant reporting about it still does a number on your mental health...
bubudrc 1y ago
I use an app called Newsreadeck (https://newsreadeck.com/ https://newsreadeck.com/) to follow several local and international news sources at the same time together with other from my native country. You can add mute keywords or mute no desired sources to keep your news feed clean of not desired articles
rcarmo 1y ago
Yep. I’m now on my second 4-year period of news avoidance (sorry US folk), and all I do is skim headlines every other day—-everything I need to know seems to surface in social media (which I only check once a day or when waiting for something with my phone), and that has taken a lot of the pessimism off.
xtiansimon 1y ago
I’ve ignored the news for long periods of my life and regretted it. News is just another part of “adulting”. Finding the right mix and flow is difficult, because algo’s are not human editors. NPR is my daily dose.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

I have cut out the vast majority of news and social media since the beginning of 2025. My mental health is noticeably better, and I would readily attribute this to not being tuned in to the ongoings of the globe that I have zero control over. Instead, I have been more focused on my local life and community. But I regularly feel guilty about not being keyed in to the flirtations with/forays into authoritarianism in my country.

zeta0134 1y ago
This is my strategy as well. There are some issues I care about enough to follow, mostly related to lgbtq+ topics and technical regulations affecting my industry. But for the larger political sphere and what I hesitantly refer to as "headlines that belong in tabloids" I actively do not care. It'll take me about a day or two (per candidate) to get back up to speed when elections come around, so I can do my civic duty and vote. Beyond that I don't let it consume my life. I've got stuff to do, and not very much time left to do it.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  That's kind of my attitude. I have a number of friends that are addicted to Outrage Pron (almost all media -mainstream or fringe- qualifies). They -literally- spend almost every waking hour, doomscrolling. One of them occasionally forwards videos to me, that are clearly edited for angst, but he takes as gospel. AI will make that kind of stuff much, much worse. I had a friend tell me "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention!" He thought it was a clever, brand new saying (Spoiler: It's not —I first heard it, in the 1970s). I've found that I can get a lot done, when I pay attention to the things over which I have direct control.
  - 0points 1y ago
    > "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention!" Yea.. that outrage won't lead to any change. On the contrary, being in this state of distress eventually makes you unable to cope, breaking you down.
    - ModernMech 1y ago
      Being complacent also won't lead to any change. People need to be outraged but they also have to do something about it. You have to pick a lane -- if you're going to not do anything about it, then commit to not doing anything and bury your head. If you're going to get outraged, you can't just go into work every day like everything is normal, the cognitive dissonance will get you. Outrage needs an outlet.
      - quantummagic 1y ago
        > Outrage needs an outlet. You've really let yourself off the hook there; that's way too easy to say. What exactly do you suggest, that would make an actually useful contribution to improving the situation?
        JKCalhoun 1y ago
        You're right that optimism has a difficult job of looking for tangible, actionable things while nihilism can stretch out in a hammock and watch the world burn. Historical situations like our own might be a good place to start to look for solutions.
        quantummagic 1y ago
        > Historical situations like our own might be a good place to start to look for solutions. If you have a suggestion about something practical, that can actually help, please speak up. Offering more platitudes is just way too easy; it feels good, maybe, but it's really just an admission that we don't have a good outlet for our outrage. Which is why so many of us spend our days venting online, because apparently (judging from the lack of concrete ideas offered) it's about as effective as anything else we could do.
- waltbosz 1y ago
  > I'll take me about a day or two (per candidate) ... I have so much trouble deciding on primary elections. There are often 5 primary candidates, and 10 seats to decide upon. And I've found no good tool to help evaluate their policy and record. I want some sort of score board website that tracks their political and public behaviors towards various policies.
  - Esophagus4 1y ago
    I’ve found sites like Balletopedia to be good starting points when I do my research. Then I generally go to the candidates individual websites or see what their main talking points are. You don’t always get a sense for everything, but you kind of figure out who they are in general. From an actual example of a candidate’s official Facebook page in my state, if you see them post something like “how come the MAINSTREAM media isn’t covering the BLACK on WHITE crime?!” you generally don’t need to do much research on them after that.
    - waltbosz 1y ago
      That's my standard process too, ballotpedia > candidate website. But campaign websites often feel like general bland taking points repeated by all the primary candidates.
emchammer 1y ago
Apple’s Screen Time has been pretty good by me. I set Safari to an hour and News/Stocks to 15 minutes per day, only allowed after noon, and blocked on the weekend. I still click Give Me Another 15 Minutes but it’s annoying enough that it reminds me why it’s there.
ModernMech 1y ago
> But I regularly feel guilty about not being keyed in to the flirtations with/forays into authoritarianism in my country. This really highlights that the threat of authoritarianism is really only a threat to certain people, which frankly is why authoritarianism happens. Because if authoritarianism were an issue for you, you'd be reading the news. If POTUS were threatening to send troops into your streets to arrest people who look like you, that'd be something you'd want to be aware of yes? If he had a policy to detain people who look like you, and if he doesn't like your tattoos he'll send you to a foreign torture prison, you'd probably be very keen on paying attention to that kind of thing. But since he's not threating you and yours specifically, you have the luxury of tuning out for your mental health while all that goes on. Until of course he comes for your ethnicity/religion/politics/profession. Although, I guess you won't know until that happens because you won't be reading the news. Yeah, you know what I think I would have better mental health too if I could just tune out the daily missives from the abyss, but I need to stay on top of what words I'm not allowed to say at my job or else the government will target us for research defunding. Words like "equity" and anything that starts with the prefix "trans".
- delfinom 1y ago
  Consuming a 24/7 feed of doomerism media does nothing for fighting authoritarianism. It simply just gives ad revenue to oligarchs. If you want to do something, get involved in local politics and groups, stay off social media where Facebook like activism does nothing.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- techpineapple 1y ago
  Yes, some people benefit more from watching the news than others and therefore choose to.
  - AlecSchueler 1y ago
    Meanwhile some of aren't badly affected but care about the wellbeing of others so choose not to tune out to their detriment.

mschuster91 1y ago

Ignorance is bliss, eh? But don't come and pull off the "we didn't know anything" excuse that the Germans used in droves after 1945. And no, that's not exclusive to Trump and what ICE has been up to, vanishing people into deportation camps. Climate change, the increasing frequency of pandemics, PFAS/forever chemicals, the list of stuff being swept under the rug instead of being acted against grows longer by the day.

delfinom 1y ago
[flagged]
- hnhg 1y ago
  Your reply really does not need the offensive opening line.
  - delfinom 1y ago
    The OP immediately opened up with describing everyone who refuses to consume doomer media as nazis. It is deserved.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
giuliomagnifico 1y ago
In my opinion, it's not ignorance but fear and anxiety. When you have too much information, even conflicting, the human brain rejects all. It's like when you watch an ad for an insect repellent: if they show you all those disgusting insects, the ad disgusts you so much that you avoid the product. It's a phenomenon known in psychology. Now the trend is the same with news and media.
lazide 1y ago
The issue is, what else do you expect people to do? They will destroy their own lives if all they worry about is the bigger stuff. There is no clear path from what an individual can practically do, to addressing those bigger things either. For example, politically - anyone trying to do the actual effective thing in this situation is going to be thrown in jail, often with praise and finger wagging by the nominal folks in charge of those who it would be benefitting. And since everyone would rather yell and scream back and forth at each other rather than actually do anything that matters, what else is going to happen? That goes for pretty much every one of these hot button topics. People can only control what they can actually control, and at some point, those things are in bad enough shape that they require 100% of a persons attention. Or more. This is 'California politics' by the way - and it's spread everywhere. Nothing is good, everything is bad, no one can do anything that actually benefits them, etc, etc.

hnhg 1y ago

I believe Hannah Arendt made the point that politicians lie not so much as to get away with the issue at hand but rather as a long term strategy to nullify any interest in politics overall in order to get away with absolute everything on their agenda. This might be the most recent iteration of this, aided by an often complicit media.

toss1 1y ago
^^^ THIS! ^^^ The explicit goal of dezinformatsiya (coined by Stalin) is not to get people to believe the lies (an occasional bonus) —— the goal is to get people to GIVE UP on finding the truth. Once people give up on finding the truth, dictators and despots can get away with anything because people literally do not even have the knowledge prerequisite to any opposing action; the people become a mere mass of compliant NPCs in the despot's regime. OFC, if the news is genuinely crippling in a way that renders you incapable of any action, then by all means take care of that first. But especially in these times of serious real threats, anxiety in response to those real threats is the exact expected healthy response! More broadly, as a society in the US and EU, the threats have outpaced the speed of anxiety growth, a delay which allowed them to gain power. Anxiety overall is only now growing to the point where a backlash is forming that may restore small-d democratic norms and overtake a rapidly growing authoritarian regime. Remaining ignorant is personally easier in the short term, but definitely helps an authoritarian regime gain and cement its power, so is likely to be regretted in the long term. Many under Hitler's regime lived out their lives in shame they had not done more to stop him when they could have.
- jimkleiber 1y ago
  And I imagine avoiding political issues can show up also as avoiding issues or conflicts at work or in any group of people to which we belong. I think so much of it is us feeling emotionally overwhelmed and running away. Anxiety can be really helpful if we engage with it, have the courage to address the fear. If we just always run, especially with social conflicts, the conflicts often don't go away, we just pretend they don't exist until they boil over.
- rramadass 1y ago

alexjplant 1y ago

This is really rich coming from The Guardian, a publication that, while not nearly on the same level of degeneracy as the usual rags, is hardly a bastion of factual reporting [1] (and, to be clear, I'm talking about factuality, not political bias, but downvote anyhow I guess). The last story I read from them was linked from here on HN and riddled with bad facts in a naked attempt to support the author's narrative. News flash (pun intended): if something is dire enough to be newsworthy then it doesn't need editorial embellishment. It's the metaphorical equivalent of a reporter making airplane noises while zooming a spoon of food around their readership's head like they're a hungry baby. If you want hard hitting public interest pieces then ProPublica [2] and Democracy Now! [3] are both far better choices. I can't say that they'll make you feel better about the wacky world we live in but at least they treat you like an adult. [1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/ [2] https://www.propublica.org/ https://www.propublica.org/ [3] https://www.democracynow.org/ https://www.democracynow.org/

cma 1y ago
Mediabiasfactcheck is run by someone on the Council of Foreign Relations, The Guardian is typically left of their worldview FWIW Mediabiasfactcheck rates Foreign Affairs, a publication of the council on foreign relations, as the least biased, with no mention of their owner's connection.
- alexjplant 1y ago
  This is not true. From their site [1]: > Dave Van Zandt is a registered Non-Affiliated voter who values evidence-based reporting. Though not a journalist, Dave has maintained a lifelong interest in politics and media bias. He originally pursued a Communications degree in college before ultimately earning a degree in Physiology. Since then, he has worked in the healthcare industry (Occupational Rehabilitation) while continuing to study media, language, and bias independently. The guy you're talking about (from Wikipedia): > Van Zandt was born in 1953 in Montgomery, New Jersey, and raised in New Jersey along with his three siblings. He graduated from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology. In 1981, he earned a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School, where he served as managing editor for the Yale Law Journal. He earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the London School of Economics. Unless Dave leads a double life as both a physical therapist and treasurer of the bar foundation these are two different people. [1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/about/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/about/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Van_Zandt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Van_Zandt

HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago

I remember that for years following 9/11 I would compulsively refresh Drudge every 1/2 hr expecting some other horror to unfold, and eventually just deleted the bookmark to prevent myself from doing that. Nowadays I get my daily news from a quick scan of the headlines on Google news, as well as Drudge (from Google search history - no bookmark!), but of course it's mostly sensationalist and partisan garbage, and only minimally informative about actual events/developments of interest. I only click through a very small number of headlines.

dazc 1y ago

'People are doing/not doing a thing...' says 'The News'.

squidgyhead 1y ago

For those complaining about the news sites being sensationalist, why not just read Reuters? You will miss out on local news, but it's pretty reliable for international news.

HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
OK, maybe a bit like BBC TV News used to be years ago (no idea what it is like today), but presumably it's still disaster-orientated (earthquakes, fires, wars, etc), even if it cuts out the news of what Trump tweeted last night, or what the Hollywood starlets are wearing (which frankly is one of the less psychologically damaging things to be reading/seeing on a daily basis!)
johnnyanmac 1y ago
Reuters isn't sensationalist, but it still doesn't tell the full story either. Flattening your language also helps maintain the status quo.

everdrive 1y ago

My social circle has shrank to almost nothing, and I go to work and pursue my hobbies. It's not clear to me that knowing about world or political events has much impact. To the extent that I'm well informed, it mostly just allows me to have political conversations in my head, with no one, sometimes my wife, and very occasionally a fried or two. And there's no reason to think that those political conversations are doing anything positive for the relationships. (I don't lean into politics with people since it can be so divisive, but if people are so inclined, it can be fun intellectually. I don't generally feel like there's much in the news that either discusses anything I care about. Or, to the extent that issues I care about are discussed, they come at it from such a strange angle that the discourse is mostly frustrating, or disappointing. (quick example, I heard a piece on NPR about how people are turning to LLMs for therapy. The commentator's solution? We NEED robust LLMs that are trained in psychology datasets and have the right guardrails for psychology.) For the rest of the HN crowd, imagine any news story from a mainstream outlet about issues of privacy or security. The commentary is completely worthless, except perhaps for informing you about where some of the general public may be on the issue. In other words, for me personally, it's not sure that following politics has very much real utility value. I can just research a candidate when I go to vote. The only direct referendums I can vote on are town-level and have nothing to do with national matters. I donate to a few causes I like, and otherwise I have effectively zero say in how these things turn out. This means I'd be far better off reading a book, doing chores, or thinking about how I can improve the quality of my life than paying attention to the news whatsoever.

fluidcruft 1y ago
I agree that there's this intense reality of powerlessness that makes wasting time on anything that isn't personally interesting pointless. And that journalists are atrocious and pushing narratives and their own careers nowadays (not that I should have expected it to ever have been different) but it's a difficult thing to unsee--that the "news" is being driven by power and agendas and is entirely unreliable. And you're right voting is all the control we ultimately have but what even is that. I live in a state that is gerrymandered to hell to ensure supermajority, where even the partisan State Supreme court has repeatedly declared the maps the Legislature and Governor approves to be un(state)constitutional and... there's nothing that anyone can do about it. But even if that wasn't the case how can you research candidate positions without knowing the political context you want them to represent you within? And even then frankly they've all proved themselves to be spineless liars who say anything to get elected and onto the graft money train so who gives a shit. So then you're left just electing people based on character ethics optics. I really don't know what the answer is, but the nationalization of everything seems extremely disenfranchising. Every little thing becomes a referendum about some national topic and hyperpolarized purity test. Just Ugh. Throw everyone out.

znpy 1y ago

I cut down my “news intake” significantly as well… most stuff that’s happening is outside my control anyway. If there’s something major (eg: another pandemic) the news will reach me anyway.

habosa 1y ago

If you want to keep a light pulse on national news without the clickbait and doomscrolling, I recommend https://text.npr.org https://text.npr.org It’s text-only, no photos or videos. Updates only once or twice a day. No comments section or any other distractions. That’s been my main change to my news diet. Deleting the NYTimes app and replacing it with that site has made me much happier. I still read a lot of local news (San Francisco things that affect my life) but I just realize that national political news is not something I need to track 24/7

falcor84 1y ago
A bit ironic that their news for today offer another means of reducing anxiety - https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5529325 https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5529325
andyjohnson0 1y ago
Thanks. I'm not a USian but thats a nice summary to have. I might whip up a quick greasemonkey script to strip out the links so it's just a set of simple summaries. Ofc NPR may not be reliable, or even exist, soon due to Trump's retaliatory budget cuts. But meanwhile, nicw to have. Thanks again.
petesergeant 1y ago
I’ve been using The Economist’s “The World in Brief”, which sounds like much the same thing. I’m six weeks in to the news diet, and am much less angry all the time.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
  I used to read the UK Financial Times ("the pink 'un") as a source of world news rather than fincancial news - it was always a lot more sober and objective.
  - gumboshoes 1y ago
    I thought the "pink 'un" was a horse racing paper or odds sheet? I get the color of the paper is the same.

Havoc 1y ago

I'm much more interested in actively filtering it than cutting it. Think yahoo pipes except DIY and more sophisticated. That'll take time to build though. In the near term I've found that asking an LLM with search/deep research to summarize news helps. Obviously zero shielding from bias, but at least its concise & all in one place There is also kagi and newsminimalist for out of the box semi-filtered: https://www.newsminimalist.com/ https://www.newsminimalist.com/ https://kite.kagi.com/ https://kite.kagi.com/

0points 1y ago
I also went the filtering route. Thanks to atom/rss, it's a evening job at most. I made a self-censor app that simply scrubs feeds from certain controversial content.
johnnyanmac 1y ago
I'd rather just drink from the hose directly, personally. I've been doing an "anti-pomodoro" timer, myself. Set 30 or 60 minutes, and just scroll around as I usually do. aggregators (including here on the rare occasion a post isn't flagged), various news feeds, etc. when the timer ends, I get out of the hypnosis and move on to whatever the day needs. I think being anxious in these times is important. But the anxiety has middling returns. I want to do more, but I know spending hours worrying over stuff I can't control is futile.

senko 1y ago

I have tuned the news out as much as possible, as soon as I've realized it's mostly show biz. The News, like any other media, is in the business of producing content and being watched/read/listened to, as much as possible. Not in the business of keeping me informed about what's going on in the world (that's relevant to me). I don't want to bury my head in the sand. I do read/watch/listen to some of it. Usually weeklies, like The Economist, and I have a daily digest newsletter that dedupes and sends me local news from the day before. Between that and what I hear on the grapevine / from my friends, I trust that I am informed enough.

richieb 1y ago

I switched mostly to using an RSS reader to see the headlines, and then read what is interesting. Plus I follow several writers that I trust (eg. Heather Cox Richardson). I don't want to get my news from social media.

chneu 1y ago
Everyone is acting like rss feeds aren't still a thing. Curate your news sources, people. I use a self hosted commafeed. Super easy to setup and I also follow blogs along with my news sources.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  Commafeed looks nice. Can it also auto download a full article and strip any kind of formatting and ads? That's kinda what I'm looking for. And then have an LLM filter on top of that to filter out all the stuff I don't care about.
qcnguy 1y ago
HCR is social media. She posts to Substack, which has a feed, likes, recommendations and commenting.

pch00 1y ago

Slightly ironically, I stopped reading the Guardian a few years ago for this very reason!

wkat4242 1y ago
It's also a bit too unserious for me these days. There's always this stupid bs stuff like "my partner and I stopped having sex for 3 months and it improved our lives". That kind of crap belongs in Cosmopolitan not in a decent paper. They still have insightful stories at times but it's hard to wade through all the crap. I stopped supporting them during the Brexit negotiations because I was sick of hearing those entitled conservatives complain that they couldn't get from us (EU) what they knew they could never have because it was just the rules. But I recently came back to it after seeing a link to it somewhere but it seems such a hollow shell of what it was now.

stego-tech 1y ago

I’ve reduced my news intake to broadly just AP News, with color commentary/opinion/perspectives coming from The Guardian and Al Jazeera as needed. For local news, it’s my NPR station (WBUR) and Universal Hub in RSS format. The good news is I spend significantly less time doomscrolling (down, on average I’d say, over 90%). My anxiety levels are largely gone, and when they do spool up I’m equipped with the tools to interrupt or stop them. The downside to this has been an increased reliance on my news intake by others who have abandoned it wholesale or only consume opinion pieces like the “nightly news”. It’s a markedly different kind of anxiety, because now I also have to be ready to teach these other people about things they really should be building habits for themselves - but if I bail out, they just rely on ChatGPT instead to explain complex topics while remaining bereft of nuance and historical contexts. The current landscape sucks, because everyone is chasing bullshit KPIs (engagement metrics, attention economy, advertising revenue, etc) instead of just delivering high-quality journalism at rates the common man can’t afford to pass up (i.e., affordable). I do not blame people from noping out, but I remain angry that everyone basically abandoned RSS feeds and digestible news in lieu of clickbait, algorithms, and walled gardens.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
> I remain angry that everyone basically abandoned RSS feeds and digestible news in lieu of clickbait, algorithms, and walled gardens. Well one of them had billions to advertise and make dark patterns to keep people on. And people still don't realize those tricks in at play. This is sadly why proper regulation is needed. We didn't cut down o Yellow Journalism in press last century by simply informing the populace better. In many ways, the honest people need enough power to punish the dishonest people. Shame that 2025 is not the year of honesty.

nytesky 1y ago

I have two questions: 1) I thought most people got their “news” from social media (x, BlueSky, TikTok). TikTok esp does not really give link backs as well. 2) was this part of the “flood the zone” strategy, to get people to just be overwhelmed and not pay attention?

mherkender 1y ago

Somewhere in the 2010s, social media turned news into spam. I guess it was a long time coming, I remember news commercials in the 90s fear-baiting constantly, demanding you tune in at 11pm to find out more. I recommend Wikipedia frontpage, maybe Wikinews. It has to come from a nonprofit at this point.

aaomidi 1y ago

As an American, British, German, etc citizen our taxes are funding a genocide. But we are here giving self help guides on how to tune out the sounds of dying kids instead of demanding consequences from our government.

ferociouskite56 1y ago

When I was false imprisoned in the psych ward, I had anxiety for not being able to read RSS news.

kelsey98765431 1y ago
how much money did they get out of your insurance? paradoxically people who have less coverage are safer in that circumstance (they let you put in 72 hours vs 72 days)
- ferociouskite56 1y ago
  Around $1,500/day, totaling $550,000. I reported to Medicaid CMS that it's discriminatory False Claims Act fraud because I never hallucinated, self harmed, nor was violent. I never signed anything saying I would pay.

djoldman 1y ago

News is entertainment. The vast majority of news consumption is for feeling amusement, outrage, tribal-solidarity, etc. It almost never leads to a change in action by the consumer. Non-entertainment news: articles that change future actions, e.g. trade publications related to one's career/job. Need information to vote? Wait 4 weeks before the election and then go to one of the many websites that track candidates' quotes to determine as best one can what their positions are on the issues you care about. For example: https://www.ontheissues.org/ https://www.ontheissues.org/ Entertainment is fine and dandy! But don't make the mistake of thinking it's productive or better/nobler than alternatives just because "journalism."

johnnyanmac 1y ago
>Wait 4 weeks before the election and then go to one of the many websites that track candidates' quotes So just hear carefully curated words and not see the actions they did? Yeah, that's pretty much how my country got into this situation. There's plenty of fluff, but lets not pretend that there isn't actual reporting out there for stuff that does or will affect your daily life. 1000x so with local policy where it is so excruciatingly difficult to find any real information on. Just 1) be honest about when you want either the dryest, direct report, or you want a show to go with it. I'm definitely in the middle myself, slightly skewed towards dry. 2) Understand the balance of relevance, impact, importance, and fun to your life. We can be honest and admit there some important news out there that simply isn't a fight you want to participate nor follow closely. Likewise, we're on a tech forum right now and I'm sure while many of us would read about a distributed GPU runtime that we also all know it's not necessarily the most important thing in life right now (unless that is indeed your career right now). Awareness can do a lot to drive behavior by itself. We just first need to be honest about it.
- djoldman 1y ago
  > So just hear carefully curated words and not see the actions they did? Fair enough. Take a look at candidate actions as well.

the_snooze 1y ago

I like to take a tiered approach, placing way more importance on news 1s of miles away from me than 100s or 1000s of miles away from me. If there's a water main break or police activity or interesting new construction happening near me, that's the news that matters. What happens on the opposite end of the country has little bearing on my day-to-day life, so why give it a disproportionate amount of attention? It's trivia for all intents and purposes.

andyjohnson0 1y ago

This is me over the last year or two. Anxiety and creeping horror, interrupted sleep and low mood. Ukraine, Gaza, Trump, authoritarianism everywhere... I try to avoid online news sources, because there's an infinite amount to doomscroll. I use leechblock [1] in firefox to introduce just enough friction to visiting a news site, without hard-blocking them. Because sometimes I still need to know what's going on. I check the ten minute news summary on BBC Radio 4 as I'm driving to work. Its time-bounded, and pretty reliable imo - although I lean towards a Guardian perspective. Sometimes I hang around for the big interview afterwards, other times I go back to music on a usb stick. Or just drive. [1] https://github.com/proginosko/LeechBlock https://github.com/proginosko/LeechBlock Also available for chrome and edge

bigstrat2003 1y ago

I used to read the newspaper every morning over breakfast as a teenager. At one point I noticed that it just made me angry at the stuff going on in the world, but without me actually being able to do anything about it. So I stopped consuming the news. It's been 25 years now and I have zero regrets about this. On occasion I miss something I would like to know about, but in general I will find out about any truly important news out from other people. And that was before the current age of yellow journalism. The news is 10x worse now than it was then; I strongly recommend that everyone unplugs from it for the sake of their own mental health.

tootie 1y ago
Do you vote and do you consider yourself and informed voter? Do you not even consume local news? I understand the desire to protect yourself from anxiety but surely you have to acknowledge there's a downside to being willfully ignorant and detached from civic life.
- hulitu 1y ago
  > but surely you have to acknowledge there's a downside to being willfully ignorant and detached from civic life. There is none. Cortuption goes on as ussual either you vote or you don't.
  - tootie 1y ago
    Such an absolutely facile take and certainly a favored one by people who want to pretend there is nothing they can do so they have an excuse to do nothing. Societies problems are as much your responsibility as any other individual.
    - ponector 1y ago
      They could be absolutely right, there is no sense to participate in election theater in some countries. Maybe they are from russia, who knows.

wkat4242 1y ago

I've been thinking of running all the news headlines through a (local) AI to filter out stuff that is actually important, aiming for about 1% of headines or so.

cjcenizal 1y ago

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Fix the News yet (https://fixthenews.com/ https://fixthenews.com/). If you want a weekly boost of amazing news from around the world, sign up for this newsletter! For example, did you know that in July 2025, 99.7% of new power capacity added in the US was from clean power (led by Texas)? The EU, US, and UK have committed to a $125 billion global fund to protect the Amazon? The US prison population is the lowest it's been since 1992? A new therapy has successfully cleared 100% of metastatic cancers in trial patients? 1 in 8 kids in Botswana were born with HIV in 2001, but that number has dropped to 1 in 100? These headlines rarely make the mainstream, but they're the ones that bring me the most hope and joy. If you're looking for positive news, you will love Fix the News.

hulitu 1y ago
> If you want a weekly boost of amazing news from around the world, sign up for this newsletter! I'm surprised you just don't get it. People are sick of "amazing news".
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  What do people want, in that case.
  - joquarky 1y ago
    To live in less interesting times?
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      I can definitely agree with that. Can't wait for the day where the biggest drama isn't yet another constitutional crisis.
buu700 1y ago
That's pretty neat. It sounds like a better version of Mark's idea from Peep Show: Nancy: Bad news, bad news, bad news. Jesus, Jeremy, one bus crash. What about all the buses that made it safely to their destinations, huh? Jeremy: Yeah! Yeah, this is such bullshit. Mark: Yes, I suppose the news should just be a dispassionate list of all the events that have occurred the world over during the day. That would be good. Except of course, it would take forever!

androng 1y ago

I used to watch "China Insights" on YouTube and "ClearValue Tax" on YouTube for updates on the Fed and realized that I was only just clicking and watching all the negative headlines with individual stories that I could do absolutely nothing about so now I made a website https://toolong.link https://toolong.link to convert those to articles and spend time watching comedy videos instead.

jmkni 1y ago

In the eternal words of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, 'Throw Away Your Television' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2f6JmTssLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2f6JmTssLQ

hagbard_c 1y ago

People are not so much tuning out the news as they are tuning out the narrative pushed by the likes of the Guardian et al. The old Soviet riff about there not being any truth (правда or 'Pravda' , the newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in the News (известия or 'Izvestia', the newspaper of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union) nor was there any news in the Truth holds true for most of the legacy news outlets out there. The clear bias shown by the Guardian and similar outlets has made them close to useless as a source of news. There are plenty of alternatives now which are not under control of the legacy publishers. Most of these are just as biased as legacy publications so following 'alternative news sources' is not a panacea for getting closer to the truth. You need to follow a number of outlets with different - and often opposing - biases to get a wider picture. RSS feed readers do wonders here but it still can take quite a bit of time and effort to separate 'news' from 'narrative' no matter the source.

kstrauser 1y ago

I use an RSS-alike app (Tapestry) to subscribe to a select few news sources I actually want to hear about, with NPR and 404 Media and ProPublica and Wired (which has gotten shockingly good in the last couple of years), and a couple of comics I like (my daily Calvin & Hobbes), a select few Mastodon feeds, and a couple of Reddit groups for specific interests (like Meshtastic radios). It’s not that I don’t ever look at the “full” news anymore, but that I severely limit how much time I spend doing that. It’s been great for my mental health.

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qgin 1y ago

If you can turn off whatever news you’re consuming and not ever notice any effect in your life or in the life of anyone you know that would make you think “wow, something must have happened”, then you’re just consuming that news as entertainment.

wkat4242 1y ago
Don't we all do that? 99% of the news has no impact on my life.. Especially American services try to make things sensational "BREAKING NEWS!!!" but really 99% is a nothingburger.

mettamage 1y ago

I just use Hacker News, unironically

LexiMax 1y ago
Hacker News's "tuning out" is a mirage. It hides a seedy underbelly of unaccountable user-based moderation and vote manipulation that is very plain to see if you use the "active" front page instead of the standard one, and turn on showdead. I feel like the experiment of moderation decisions via mob rule is largely a failure, and I much prefer the style of old webforums where moderation was left only to the people who ran the site/server and the people hand-picked by them. Tildes does this, as does Discord. Personally, my news diet is Kagi with a well-curated blocklist and Tildes with a few targeted topic tag filters.

karakot 1y ago

trying to follow http://aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews http://aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews it helps

Anonyneko 1y ago

I had to tune out because most of the news in my region for the past several years are about the ongoing war. Even when you've made sure you're nowhere near it physically (provided that it doesn't expand into other countries), the constant reporting about it still does a number on your mental health...

bubudrc 1y ago

I use an app called Newsreadeck (https://newsreadeck.com/ https://newsreadeck.com/) to follow several local and international news sources at the same time together with other from my native country. You can add mute keywords or mute no desired sources to keep your news feed clean of not desired articles

rcarmo 1y ago

Yep. I’m now on my second 4-year period of news avoidance (sorry US folk), and all I do is skim headlines every other day—-everything I need to know seems to surface in social media (which I only check once a day or when waiting for something with my phone), and that has taken a lot of the pessimism off.

xtiansimon 1y ago

I’ve ignored the news for long periods of my life and regretted it. News is just another part of “adulting”. Finding the right mix and flow is difficult, because algo’s are not human editors. NPR is my daily dose.