17 ms·

I Hate the News (2006)

222 points by oskarth 12y ago

INTPenis 12y ago
I couldn't agree more with Aaron on that. A lot of people have started turning a blind eye to the TV, but very often they replace it with constant news coverage online. So they really have made no significant change in their lives. They're still spoonfed with something that has never had any impact on them, and most likely never will. Anything with a significant impact, and unfortunately many things without it, are relayed through friends, family and co-workers. If the bomb drops or christ returns then we have a warning system setup all over Sweden that wakes anyone up. I can only imagine bad things from watching the news. I can't prove anything but it can't be good to constantly be told about negative things happening halfway across the world.
- parennoob 12y ago
  > If the bomb drops or christ returns then we have a warning system setup all over Sweden that wakes anyone up. How does the warning system work for the return of christ? Church bells?
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  That's why I limited my news to Hacker News. Whenever there is an event that actually matters - like a war or a cataclysm - it will be here, upvoted and with comments made by people who know what they're talking about. I don't mind missing the 99% of the typical news sites content.
  - lordbusiness 12y ago
    I've been running an experiment for the past several months to outsource relevant news curation. It's super simple and super passive. Basically I only read news brought to my attention organically; social media, word on the street which I later look up, etc. Thus far I haven't missed anything of genuine humanity-shaking importance, my emotional state has improved, and I have much more time for reading, hacking, and all other aspects of my life. It resonates with the "millennials consume news differently" piece submitted elsewhere on HN actually.
    - Goronmon 12y ago
      Doesn't this experiment rely on a certain critical mass of people consuming information in a non-organic fashion?
      - lordbusiness 12y ago
        Not really, though I don't claim this has been a truly scientific study. :-) Generally, the principle relies on "if it's not important [1], people don't talk about it". In other words, anything someone directly or indirectly mentions to me may be of value, everything else is just soundtrack. [2] Further, I often find that news that does matter comes to me from the likes of a more considered periodical; I learnt a lot of fact-based detail regarding the Alberta oil sands from National Geographic, and I learn about peace process break downs from twitter users I follow far quicker and with less bias than from mainstream media outlets. Local news tends to be handled by random people I meet on the street. It's effective so far! [1] This is an overly burdened word in this context. Darfur is very important, but we rarely hear about it, for example. What I mean in this context is "relevant enough to daily life to stop me in my tracks and get my attention". It's worth highlighting here that a lot of very important news doesn't make it to us via mainstream media because mainstream media selects for sales and / or target audience bias / interests, ergo in that sense, I'm actually NOT hearing about important things by tuning in to traditional mainstream media. [2] People murdering each other due to orders from invisible people in the sky is going to be a soundtrack to my life thanks to the era I live in. I know this happens. It will continue to happen for my life at least. No, I don't need daily reminders of this universal constant. The way I conduct my life and my advocacy against such acts will not be altered because I don't get those daily reminders.
meric 12y ago
http://zerohedge.com http://zerohedge.com A news website that covers important issues rather than petty crimes.
- toephu2 12y ago
  and another one: https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com
twelfthnight 12y ago
Hmm. I think this article doesn't distinguish between news and bad news. Frankly, anyone reading this must be interested in news, it's in the title of the website. Why else be here? This site isn't perfect, but it's useful to know what's happening in the tech world. Knowing about the world's current events is similar. We shouldn't dwell on negative events, but they happen and they happen to real people. Just because they don't happen to us doesn't mean it's not affecting us in a broader human perspective. We are all in it together.
- jchrome 12y ago
  Hacker News isn't so much about "news" per se. "News", I believe, should be about something new or recent. We're now talking about an article (op-ed?) written by Aaron in 2006. This isn't news and much of Hacker News isn't either. It's more just curated information.
  - SilasX 12y ago
    A glance at the front page finds that it's mostly about new events or commentary; stuff like this is the exception.
Ciantic 12y ago
I wish news sites had a periodical system built-in. One could choose the period, e.g. 7 days to the past, and see all important news from that time-frame. It would of course require a human to tag the news as important within a period. Subscriber only feature would suffice.
- icebraining 12y ago
  I believe those are called "weekly newspapers" :)
  - Ciantic 12y ago
    It's not, 7 days to the past from current day is not last week. The period should be adjustable for example 14 days or arbitrary number.
- dublinben 12y ago
  That sounds exactly like a weekly news magazine. There are quite a few that are worth reading, if you want to follow the news. The slower publishing pace allows a greater perspective and context on most stories that is missing on 24/7 channels.
  - Max_Mustermann 12y ago
    Could you post some examples? Specifically ones that center on world news and not only the US / Europe.
    - gerty 12y ago
      The Economist. Albeit overtly liberal (in European sense), the content is well written, well discussed and subscription policy is great.
    - bcraven 12y ago
      The Week [1] is an excellent subscription magazine that comes every Friday to my door. It's UK-centric, but has international news as one of its many sub-sections. [1] http://www.theweek.co.uk/ http://www.theweek.co.uk/
austenallred 12y ago
I, strangely enough, agree with Most of what Aaron says. And I'm the founder of a news company. I worry about this attitude on a macro scale, but it's hard to argue with on a micro one. I spend most of my day following what's going on in the world, and it hasn't added much value to my life. But I worry about everyone not caring. Not because that would kill my company (I started it because I hate news in its current form too), but because there are times when public outrage changes things. It's like voting - my vote doesn't matter, but on aggregate it's everything. I'm convinced that the goal of a good news publication should be like Google - to get you in and out the "door" as quickly as possible understanding what you need to know. We're rebuilding everything around that. A publication one can consume in thirty seconds with the most important stuff, ruthlessly curated and fact-checked. No entertainment gossip or puff pieces or PR pitches. (To get it as an email sign up at https://grasswire.com https://grasswire.com) I'm looking forward to reading what others think on this subject.
- samastur 12y ago
  I guess I must be too dense, but I simply do not know how to use grasswire. I'm stuck with live feed on left which shows me exactly the kind of useless "breaking" stuff I want to avoid and popular feed on the right which I don't seem to be able to control beyond either providing fact-check or comment. What am I missing?
  - austenallred 12y ago
    What you're looking at is kind of like a backend - consider it the "talk" page for Wikipedia. It's a little bit chaotic this early in the morning, but our algorithm pulls in the "breaking" stuff on the left, and the most upvoted stuff flows to the top of the "popular" page. Grasswire users fact-check stuff for accuracy, and comment on whether or not/why it's important. The site is mostly for news junkies. It's a little bit hectic right now because a bunch of people from HN are just upvoting random stuff to screw everything up, and it will take the power users a minute to sort through it. The result is at the end of the day, the best stuff curated and fact-checked by a couple thousand people, and we send that out to the everyday person in an email they can digest in 30 seconds. We're adding a short, editable description to each news item to give some background, and allowing anyone to submit external stuff, so it's still a work in progress, but that's the gist of it.
lovelearning 12y ago
I've developed similar views of late, especially on political news and online comments. I feel all those thousands of comments, mini essays, online slugfests, number of likes or dislikes on politics are not going to change even a little how governments work or how decisions are made. I feel I've wasted too much time on such things. I still follow tech news though, simply because it's interesting to me. As for crimes and scandals, well, it's not called "crime porn" for nothing!
djoldman 12y ago
"They point out that newspapers are a key part of our democracy, that by exposing wrong-doing to the people, they force the wrong-doers to stop. This seems to be true, but the curious thing is that I’m never involved." The sad irony of this statement is profound.
- j2kun 12y ago
  Both parts: that he was involved, and that the wrong-doers didn't stop. They're still holding office, journals still charge an arm and a leg for publication access, and the last I heard the amendments to the laws that led to this are held up by lobbyists.
jheriko 12y ago
News does serve at least one basic function, even if many other things can do the same: It gives you something to talk about and ask opinions on.
- bsdpython 12y ago
  This is true of sports as well. I can't talk to the average person (and family members) about asynchronous job queues but I can talk about how much the Knicks suck.
  - jheriko 12y ago
    true. although they tack it on the end of the newspaper, or at the end of the news announcements as if its not very important, its still news. :)
detaro 12y ago
I know the feeling, but I worry about the consequences. There are news I think as many people as possible should process. How is democracy or any discussion as a society supposed to work if people don't know about the issues going on? It is a problem that seemingly all news channels use "wrong" selection criteria about what to report, including a lot of things that are not directly important, leading to fatigue and news that are only consumed, not processed. Of course, there probably is no "right" selection of issues, just differently flavored biases. Many issues that are sort of important I ignore because I can't see how I am supposed to get to an educated opinion about them. There is so much noise and bias going around that I don't have the time and abilities to aggregate them down myself, and no way to know which external aggregation to trust.
- Mikeb85 12y ago
  > How is democracy or any discussion as a society supposed to work if people don't know about the issues going on? It's not supposed to work. Democracy makes us fell like we have a say in politics, but we really don't. If we did, there wouldn't be mass surveillance, governments wouldn't be taking away our rights, and criminalizing entire segments of the population. But hey, at least we can vote once every few years, for one of two to four candidates who claim to be different (but really just work for the same interests anyway).
  - talmand 12y ago
    Well, true democracy is a serious problem for many people right from the start. Which is why true democracy in the world is very rare. But, once a government reaches the point of what you describe, that is no longer a government of the people and has become something else. Which, according to history, is almost certainly inevitable.
  - svdree 12y ago
    > If we did, there wouldn't be mass surveillance Are you sure? Outside of this little bubble we live in, there are lots of people willing to give up every last bit of privacy ("nothing to hide"), in exchange for the government giving them the feeling of "safety".
bkurtz13 12y ago
He uses voting as an example. Which begs the question: why vote? If you're living within a corrupt, self-serving political system (we are), then naturally the only people who run for office will be products of that system. If a candidate who genuinely wants to change the status quo somehow manages to slip in, they will be prevented from achieving anything meaningful once inside. No matter what, none of these people have my interests in mind. So I ask, what's the point?
- talmand 12y ago
  "I have solved this political dilemma in a very direct way: I don't vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, 'If you don't vote, you have no right to complain,' but where's the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain. I, on the other hand, who did not vote -- who did not even leave the house on Election Day -- am in no way responsible for that these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created." -George Carlin
- Toenex 12y ago
  Because otherwise you leave the decision to those that do. Vote. Spoil your ballot paper if you must (these get counted, at least in the UK) but take part in the process. Otherwise you are indistinguishable from those that couldn't be bothered or didn't care.
  - VLM 12y ago
    If we know they don't care what we think, then why would it matter if they knew we didn't care? If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound? If 40% of the population votes, they don't worry about the 40% who are use voting as the opiate of the masses... the problem they see is the 60% who didn't fall for the scam. The arguments in the following essay are compelling. I haven't heard much of an argument against them, historically, other than pure sophistry (that domain sucks, etc) or tradition (you should vote because your ancestors voted) http://archive.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff224.html http://archive.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff224.html
thebigspacefuck 12y ago
The lunatics are in my hall The paper holds their folded faces to the floor And every day the paper boy brings more
detcader 12y ago
How would Lawrence Lessig feel about this article? Lessig obviously believes that the U.S. political parties' activities are consequential to everyone's lives. Aaron seems to reject the notion of the implicit involvement, in a democracy, of every citizen in the affairs of their government. We supposedly elect (a significant portion of) the government, we pay for its activities, so we should care about what it has done and continues to do in Iraq. Virtually every extremist who has attacked the U.S. and lived to be captured and give statements in trial has cited U.S. foreign policy as a chief motivation for their actions. This alone should have us caring about U.S. foreign policy. I agree that news covers too many topics to report on any of them consistently well (or guard against interested parties shaping the news into propaganda). I think there's a Poe's-Law-type meme about that.
- emerod 12y ago
  The notion of implicit involvement is a PR strategy for legitimizing a government. If a majority of the population do not feel implicitly involved, they will not care if the government is overthrown.
- DubiousPusher 12y ago
  I don't think Shwartz was advocating a position of ignorance regarding geopolitical affairs. Just read a book or an essay on important geopolitical topics instead. If you want to know what important legislation is being advanced go to town halls, visit .gov sites, make an activist friend. All those are better ways to find out what's going on than the news. I stopped following the news, other than this site, after years of dedicated reading/viewing. I'd become disgusted with the amount of time that's dedicated to manufactured scandal, fained outrage and disemination of non-facts. I'm happier now and actually feel better informed. Sure, if I want to know about something I'll hit a major news site from time to time but honestly the longer I go without digging through the daily news pile for information gold, the more it just looks like a midden concealing a few soggy turds.
  - detcader 12y ago
    I know what you mean; after all, I don't consume the mainstream news, besides occasionally Democracy Now, which I mostly value for the interviews.
karmacondon 12y ago
This misunderstands the point of news. People read it to have common subjects of conversation, filtered through the same perspective. It's actually important to human discourse within society. So that when two people are making small talk, one can say "Did you see what happened with Hilary Clinton/LeBron James/Kanye West?" It's pointless, but pointless communication has a role as a social lubricant. It lets people build up to weightier topics, or just politely pass the time together. And common knowledge of news subjects is a part of that system. Ultimately, news is a form of entertainment. Now more than ever. People don't watch Fox News or MSNBC to be more informed voters or to take personal action. Many of them want to hear what Personality X has to say about Event Y. Same with twitter or facebook or the opinion section of the local newspaper. And that's cool. If that's what someone finds interesting or entertaining, then so be it. In general, all of the arguments in this post could be applied to anything that people read, watch, play or listen to. From reality tv to Shakespeare. "It doesn't involve me and isn't useful in my daily life" and "I've lived without it for a long time and my life is no less rich" are generic statements that would be equally valid discussing pretty much any form of diversion. Part of maturity is realizing that the world is full of things that you don't like, and that belittling those things or questioning their value doesn't do any good. We all get to decide how to waste our time. Let people have their news.
VLM 12y ago
There is the obvious corporate analogy with news where most data and reports are distracting noise. If it can't have an impact or won't have an impact, stop spending the time and money to report the data as if it means something. This tends to be more a disease of large dilbertian corporations. (Insert Office Space TPS report analogy here)
bryanlarsen 12y ago
In my opinion, the best way to consume the news is weekly or even monthly. Give the journalists time to digest and process the news, figure out what's important, and time to write well thought out articles and summary. I like the Economist for that -- there's a 2 page "world news" digest section in every issue. Some weeks that's all I read. But when I have more time there are also in depth, well written, well edited and unabashedly opinionated articles in the rest of the issue. (I really hate the fake neutrality in most journalism) What would be really nice would be something similar for national and local news.
- lmm 12y ago
  I read Prospect here in the UK for that.
iagomr 12y ago
There's also an interesting article in The Atlantic regarding the "endless stream" of news. Alexis C. Madrigal makes a very interesting point regarding the stock (what stays) and the flow (what keeps you entertained rather than informed). http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/2013-the-year-the-stream-crested/282202/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/2013-t...
emodendroket 12y ago
The link to Twitter at the end seems a bit ironic since Twitter offers all the things he's criticizing, except without the promise of any substance.
- Dirlewanger 12y ago
  I don't think the way to interpret his post is to stop reading all news, but to do due diligence and learn how to filter out the shit and focus on the essentials. Not paying attention at all to what's going on in the world makes for an ignorant and useless citizen. Especially since getting everyone to go along with Aaron's suggestion of filling the time digesting news with a book will never happen.
  - emodendroket 12y ago
    I guess. Also, following the link to his Twitter it's full of -- get this -- links to news articles.
- spacab 12y ago
  I agree with this. But at least with Twitter, you're the one actively filtering and curating your news feed, as opposed to exclusively reading The New York Times every morning and having the content curated for you.
popeshoe 12y ago
I feel that this was and is a super myopic view to hold, while it's true that most of the worlds news probably doesn't affect you directly, it will almost certainly affect you indirectly, since you live in the world. It boils down to the same reason you should vote, sure you probably won't swing any elections, but in the same way your voting might influence politicians into listening to the things you care about, by being aware what is happening in and around your city/country/planet you make it harder for people doing shady shit who rely on general public apathy to get away with it.
- hueving 12y ago
  >while it's true that most of the worlds news probably doesn't affect you directly, it will almost certainly affect you indirectly, since you live in the world. That's a useless conclusion in itself. There is an unlimited amount of news if you just include the whole world since "you live in it". Do you follow individual county elections for Nebraska? Why or why not? How do you determine what news is important enough for you to follow? Now you are back to square one.
balabaster 12y ago
The most ironic thing I think about this piece is that he claims not to have followed the news since he was 13 and has drawn this conclusion... Having spent a large portion of my life keeping up with the news, other than a few minor quibbles about semantics, I'm inclined to draw the similar conclusions. Most of what is presented is not news, it's politically slanted propaganda relating to daily events that further the political position of the network that owns that media outlet - this goes the same for papers, TV and radio. They only bring in "experts" that corroborate their own viewpoint, and when opposing opinions stray too far from their party line and cannot be discredited, they're let go. It happens time and again, and eventually you have to wonder why you continue to allow your own perspectives to be influenced by their agenda. It's gotten to the point where I'm so tired of wading through all the bullshit to find facts or something remotely resembling truth that I frequently wonder why I bother... We all know at this point that what goes on behind the closed doors of Government doesn't even closely resemble "legal" or "constitutional" and when they get busted, they "welcome public debate" and change the law or reinterpret the constitution to allow their illegal or unethical behaviour to continue and discredit anyone against that as at best unpatriotic or at worst a traitor... you get to a point where you wonder which side is the side of truth and righteousness. Does any of it matter? Is it all just bullshit, distracting us from greater things...?
- mtbcoder 12y ago
  > "Most of what is presented is not news, it's politically slanted propaganda" This was starting to be discussed on HN the other day, but unfortunately didn't seem to get much traction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9202533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9202533
  - balabaster 12y ago
    Yeah, it's sad. I think that investigative journalism should be funded by the public, unfortunately, that's a conflict of interest for the government and sadly, most of the public doesn't really want to know the truth, they want just want to feel that their perspective on the status quo is validated, and that their life can carry on comfortably like it did yesterday... and the day before... and the day before that. And if it isn't carrying on that way, they want to know who to blame for the discomfort that causes so they can go over with their torches and pitchforks and get "justice", whatever the "news" tells them what form that justice should take.
indienkid 12y ago
Several things are currently wrong with the news. From the overuse of the word “BREAKING” (does that even mean anything anymore?) to the lack of verified information (the rush to get the scoop), the news industry is a bit of a mess right now. It’s overwhelming, and there’s no end to “Oh, you haven’t heard about this? You’re out of the loop!” I always think of this Friends segment where Joey buys a volume of an encyclopedia to try to impress everyone else (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3eD0imnhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3eD0imnhQ). I agree it’s hard to see how the effects of what goes on in the world propagate down to how each of us lives our life today -- but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t ever affected by them. I still think we have a basic responsibility to try to understand those things, and the primary goal of news outlets should be to make that information as accessible as possible (while still being accurate). Full disclosure: I work for a news app (http://www.getbriefme.com http://www.getbriefme.com).
oldpond 12y ago
Me too. I try not to listen to the radio, read the newspaper, or watch the news on TV. I figure the big stuff will find it's way to me, and the rest is marketing bullshit. News is a commodity, created to sell advertising. Only the big draw stories get air time. Just watch the CBC National; the world is ending every evening, don't miss it.
serve_yay 12y ago
In 2010, I was living in Washington DC and one day I heard the pettiest political squabble between two strangers. It prompted me to stop paying attention to politics, which up to then I followed rather closely, because I realized how bonkers it was making me. Everyone is just a bunch of angry assholes yelling at each other. It doesn't improve life, it makes you upset and unhappy. It wasn't too long until I felt similarly about the news, period. I'd say the biggest challenge in no longer paying attention to the news is the idea that it's a serious person's domain, or even duty. That you're "not a real grown up" if you stop paying attention to the news. Every now and again you'll be among some NPR listeners and you won't know what happened in Kuala Lumpur or whatever. You need to be OK with that.
- plug 12y ago
  I think this is the nail on the head for me. I came to the conclusion late last year that I was spending too much time reading social, news and commentary - getting really sucked in. It was a massive waste of time, a productivity killer, and often quite depressing. For instance, I live in a country where the police have no guns, and gun crime is almost non-existent. And yet, I felt like I was constantly reading about police shootings and brutality, (primarily from the U.S). And... it started to really upset me. This news has no context in my existence at all, and yet I know about it in great detail. Same goes for all the Twitter flaming, and all sorts of other stuff. I realised it was actually making me very unhappy. I decided to see if I could take a step back - I deleted my Facebook and Twitter, and tried to avoid comments and most extraneous news. I expected I'd go a bit mad, but the opposite happened - I'm actually surprised at just how happier I am now. Ignorance is bliss? That said, I do believe there is huge value in being informed - but it is hard to regulate and parse all the information out there into something meaningful. HN is my only vice now - I'm a lurker mostly, and it's work related so that's okay, right? ;)
fromtheoutside 12y ago
I kind of agree, I often feel like I'm addicted to online news. I dislike it's shallowness. I despair at it's ignorance to history and context. But then, following the news teaches me stuff about the world and how it works. It reminds me how complex the world is and how dangerous. It educates and it coins me. I've always wondered how Aaron found the courage to live his life and fight for his ideals like he did. Maybe ignoring the larger scope was one of the reasons.
- kleer001 12y ago
  >it coins me. Whoa, what? How can you use 'coin' as a verb in this context? The news turns you into a different word or phrase? You've just blown my mind. Or is that a typo?
wantab 12y ago
In many ways I agree that most news nowadays has no relevance directly to your every day life, as he complains about early in the article, but on a broader scale they do. Later, he agrees with that but says he's never involved. Well, it's cause he chose to not be involved. Then he says the news doesn't help with his voting choice and he can get everything he needs to know from a simple guide but nothing could be further from the truth. If you really want to get involved in that, you can gather much more information about candidates and their real thoughts and if they would vote how you want them to vote on issues. You won't get that from any simple guide or the TV news. For example, maybe a bad one, I knew the brother of one of the candidates running for governor a while back. He's an asshole. I worked next to a lady whose husband was in the state legislature and knew the candidate closely. When I mentioned that I met the candidate once before she said, "Good family!". From there I could have learned a lot if I pursued it. You won't learn any of that from a brochure or the TV news. The problem with TV and radio news is you can't pick and choose what you want to see or hear. Newspapers were good for that. You could flip pages quickly. Online news sources have that ability if online source is worthy and organized but those are few and far between. In the past, TV news at most stations was its own department, especially at the networks, and not under control of marketing or advertising. This is no longer true. Despite some great reporters still working in newspapers, marketing has taken that over, too, cause the idea is to sell newspapers, not news. The same is true for television. How often, now, do you see ads for upcoming entertainment shows during the "news"? How often does a new product come out and it finds itself on the "news"? Unfortunate but true, the real news, along with in-depth discussion and analysis, can be boring to most. PBS probably is the only daily national news worth watching if you really want to learn but you may find yourself nodding off if the subject isn't of interest. Again, advantage newspapers and properly structured online news sources that don't emulate TV (CNN). I worked in television news for about 10 years long ago with reporters who used to work in respected newspapers. I hate TV "news" today.
towelguy 12y ago
How do you even find what book to read without reading articles about them? If people told you about them, how did they find them?
pakled_engineer 12y ago
Delayed Gratification magazine suits my time sched http://www.slow-journalism.com/ http://www.slow-journalism.com/ Quarterly that covers the news of the last 3mos after all the misinformation peddled by 24/7 news cycle has run it's course. I also like Stallman's political notes as they are brief and he has an interesting perspective sometimes https://www.stallman.org/archives/2015-jan-apr.html https://www.stallman.org/archives/2015-jan-apr.html
gopher2 12y ago
I'm curious what sources others get their news from and how you "cut through the clutter" so to speak. Mine are: BostInno, Abnormal Returns (curates investing/VC/startup/economy links), selected webdev subreddits, hacker news. I imagine this is fairly typical for someone on HN, but maybe not. Also, does anyone know of a long time horizon news company that primarily provides 3-5 year updates on large macro topics? Actually maybe that's just called "a book"
n1ck 12y ago
I stopped watching the news about a year ago. I have only benefited. My mood is much better (due to not constantly hearing about horrible goings on), and I have more free time. I have not found that I am out of the loop on anything relevant to my life. I still follow blogs and news sites (and of course, Hacker News). And I still feel that I am aware of important world events such as what is going on in Brazil right now. Knowledge is power, but useless knowledge is a waste of mental capacity.
- emerod 12y ago
  I have found that reacting to news in "real time" (for example, as it is fed to me through TV or Facebook) leads to a loss of perspective. The purported urgency of the story overwhelms its broader significance. Discovering news items later or second-hand enables me to research multiple perspectives after some people have had time to digest the event. On the other hand, sometimes the first-hand accounts get edited to have sensational elements removed, and the sanitized versions are less informative.
neilk 12y ago
Let's say we never had "the news", and we all decided we needed to help society understand and react to novel events. Would we invent newspapers and cable channels? I don't think so. When modern institutions realize they have an information distribution problem, they don't get a bunch of ink-stained, dubiously sober arts graduates with no special qualifications, and tell them to write stories. They pay people to do regularly updated dashboards or reports with charts and graphs, establish information reporting networks and hierarchies, institutionalize whistleblowers, schedule mandatory periodical reviews of how certain projects are going, that sort of thing. The human element is necessary but journalistic "storytelling" is just a euphemism for titillation or reinforcement of certain narratives. With minor exceptions, I'm not sure it was ever any different.
- afarrell 12y ago
  Who is the "we" that is doing the inventing? The News God[1] with the power to correct perverse incentives and keep prisoners from defecting? Doesn't exist. The committee of Folks Who Care About Policy And Represent a Broad Cross-Section of Society but Don't Get into Stupid Arguments? Doesn't exist. Even if they did, an organization would discover that they could get more views and exert more power using titilatory stories. What you propose is not a stable Nash Equilibrium. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ EDIT: re-read and that seems to be kinda your point. Apologies if it is and I'm oddly argumentative. To continue, one reason why organizations use stories is that stories are one of the data structures more efficiently-implemented in our minds.
  - neilk 12y ago
    This is a great point, but we also know that institutional, internal information distribution systems, of the kind I mentioned, don't fall prey to that. (They may fall prey to other things -- agreeing with the boss, groupthink, etc.) Anyway the reason why is because they have different incentives. The question is how to make incentives like that work for society, hopefully while keeping the critical independence of the media. We can't imagine that now, but we have new funding forms like Kickstarter, and Wikipedia is an existence proof for achieving consensus about what claims are well-sourced. But I think we agree that it's not a great idea to run society on an information system that gets paid every time it stimulates our basest impulses for the lowest possible cost. The endgame of that is Buzzfeed.
grecy 12y ago
I agree wholeheartedly. The news is no longer interesting and relevant to me, it's merely all the bad things happening all over the world. i.e. the headline might be about a train crash on the other side of the world, rather than some good story that happened in my own country. I spent two weeks above the Arctic Circle in September hiking and camping, with no access to the world [1]. When coming back along the road, my car radio was continually searching for a station, and it eventually locked onto one randomly. The first words I heard from "the world" after two weeks were "ISIS Threat". It turned it off and didn't turn it back on for the rest of the 8 hour drive home. [1] If you're curious, it looks like this http://theroadchoseme.com/the-dempster-highway http://theroadchoseme.com/the-dempster-highway
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Beautiful! In Nov '04 I went through the Northern Rocky Mountains: http://pics.camarades.com/d/210055-1/dscf0537.jpg http://pics.camarades.com/d/210055-1/dscf0537.jpg And these Elk would like to say hi to you and they're happy they avoided your freezer ;) : http://pics.camarades.com/d/210067-1/dscf0541.jpg http://pics.camarades.com/d/210067-1/dscf0541.jpg
vuldin 12y ago
The top address that appears in the dropdown list when I type 'news' is this site. Other hits show up, but the vast majority are related to something 'new' instead. I used to be a serious news junky, keeping track of everything that happened related to politics or the latest war. I'd even research what was happening regarding local politics in the place I was traveling to just in case the topic came up while I was with some people from that area. I monitored RSS feeds from various news outlets and blogs from others who also watched the news, and over time it became impossible for me to keep up with it. After that point of realization (that it was impossible for me to keep up with all this information), I then realized that it really didn't matter anyway! The world did not end, my favored side didn't win any less and my most hated side didn't win any more... I just had more time to focus on things that really mattered to me. I probably now have a better state of well-being on top of it all.
rckrd 12y ago
Agreed. I especially agree that yellow journalism in particular is a useless distraction. That being said, there is a certain beauty to experiencing things in the moment.
nyxtom 12y ago
Wow "Its obsession with the criminal and the deviant makes us less trusting people. Its obsession with the hurry of the day-to-day makes us less reflective thinkers. Its obsession with surfaces makes us shallow."
xnull6guest 12y ago
I completely disagree with Aaron, who here seems to jump rather quickly to the (merely asserted) conclusion that the news (i.e. the world) doesn't affect him. (Without this same news we would not have heard of Snowden OR, in an ironic twist, of Aaron himself). Furthermore, how ironic is it that we're discussing this itself on a self-purported news site? The news, even global news, absolutely affects all of us even if we live local, cloistered lives. Let us take the United States - which is overly represented on this site. The US economy is fueled by its finance and investment sectors, which are in turn fueled by neocolonialist enterprises overseas. The success of the US domestic economy is fundamentally tied to its navigating geostrategy and multilateral diplomacy, its overthrowing of governments, stabilizing and destabilizing nations with propaganda and embargos, fixing international law in favor of the leaders of its private sectors, and in its opening resources abroad to US companies is the primary and nearly exclusive driver of the finance sector. And in fact, domestic and international law now blur due to a similarly increased globalization. I find it odd that Aaron, known for his stance on free access to information and to being informed, would fall only to the knowledge of the academic - and not information and facts about the world in which we immediately live. Yes there are some truly irrelevant news items (take celebrities). One must filter and prioritize. It is a small price to pay. I would love to defend whichever notions have offended downvoters.
- vinhboy 12y ago
  So I browsed the comment thread, and you are the first "disagree" I found. I am going to join you here. I think one of the most wrong thing in the article is this statement. > Indeed, reading a voter’s guide is much better: there’s no recency bias (where you only remember the crimes reported in the past couple months), you get to hear both sides of the story after the investigation has died down, you can actually think about the issues instead of worrying about the politics. Yea, no... A big fat screaming no. A voter guide is a propaganda piece that has ZERO substance. Maybe for the propositions they give a little bit of pros and cons, but for the candidates, they give you nothing. The only way you can discern who is a lying asshole is by following the news. Maybe the conclusion will be they are all lying assholes, but at least you'll be informed of that. I also think that saying I don't follow the news because it does not personally affect me is short-sighted and self-fish. For example, those Christians minorities getting slaughtered by ISIS has nothing to do with me. But hearing their stories and learning about them through the news will certainly teach me a bit of compassion that I will need in some random tangential decisions I make later.
asgard1024 12y ago
Here are two ideas for non-traditional news, that would reduce the information overload, and make news more interesting and healthy: - Actionable news. Only news to which you can (or have to), as a citizen, take some action. Examples: Changes in law, cultural events that will take place in the future, openings of new institutions, planned political demonstrations or petitions. - Old news. Only give news about something after it is resolved, not when it is happening (avoid especially breaking news). Examples: Instead of speculation who will be appointed to some office, just tell me who was appointed. When disaster occurs, wait three days when the information is more complete about the aftermath. Reviews of products that have already been released.
- skrebbel 12y ago
  Wow the "old news" idea blows me away. I really, really want that.
  - sdeutsch 12y ago
    You would probably really enjoy Delayed Gratification. It's a quarterly publication that wraps up global news day by day from 6 to 3 months prior (e.g. the March issue covers Oct/Nov/Dec). They have a great mix of short and long form articles and I think a reasonable balance for world news. http://www.slow-journalism.com/ http://www.slow-journalism.com/
  - olalonde 12y ago
    I use http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/top/?sort=top&t=month http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/top/?sort=top&t=month for that. Most news are ~20 days old. I check it about once or twice a month.
- WaxProlix 12y ago
  Sooo... volunteers to make these? They sound like great ideas. Not sure how you monetize, as ads are sort of antithetical to the notion of clean, BS-free news feeds, and we're all trained to expect content to be free these days.
- westoncb 12y ago
ooopsnevermind 12y ago
I find it very ironic that of course I am learning about this thought-provoking post via one of my go-to news channels, HN. Doesn't the very fact that we are having an interesting online discussion about an idea we hadn't previously given as much attention to, because it came up on HN, serve as an example of exactly why reading the news has value in our lives?
digitalneal 12y ago
:sigh: RIP buddy.
wjohnson 12y ago
Ironically, I found out about Aaron Swartz from the news. I'm reminded of "Nietzsche says God is dead; God says Nietzsche is dead". Aaron Swartz says the news is irrelevant. The news says Aaron Swartz is relevant.
abstractConcept 12y ago
> There is voting, of course, but to become an informed voter all one needs to do is read a short guide about the candidates and issues before the election. I have often wondered how people can make uninformed decisions easily. Now I know. Only reading a short guide, is akin to reading a Wikipedia article for a monumentally important decision, and not bothering to check the edit history, let alone the references.
- jessriedel 12y ago
  Rather than make a snide remark, it's more useful to "steel man" this argument: Consider the X hours you spend over the course of a year reading the news, which for most people you would consider "informed American" is in the triple digits. (That's less than 20 minutes a day.) Now, rather than reading any news that year, imagine that before the election you sat down for X hours and read a some books and long-format essays about the candidates. While reading you are free to look up old news articles when pertinent. Who is the better informed voter? What if you spend only X/10 hours?
  - abstractConcept 12y ago
    I have not heard the term (to) "steel man" (rather than (to) "straw man") before, interesting. Admittedly, I was writing emotionally, as the sarcastic "Now I know" might suggest. However, I would argue that reading "a short guide" seems vastly different from what you suggest. --- My emotional reaction was in response to how "a short guide" seems to suggest a very biased source; for instance a pamphlet that might be given out by a political party/group. Perhaps this was a flaw in phrasing, but that does not seem likely to me from the text.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- niels_olson 12y ago
  That would be infinitely better than the paid infommercials most people current claim as their "research".
gitpusher 12y ago
RIP Aaron. You are missed
aaronem 12y ago
Who doesn’t?
PSeitz 12y ago
I don't follow the news for 3 years now and I can say its great. I will never go back.
PhoenixWright 12y ago
Since I was old enough to read I've been following the news. Politics, world, sports finance I am really well informed to the point that if someone mentions any recent headline I've read at least one source regarding the topic, usually two or more with updates as well. During my freshman year of college I stopped following the news. I was so focused on starting off well in school that I avoided most distractions. I found that those months were some of the most focused and productive I've ever had. Sadly I fell back into the habit of reading news articles and catching cable news at night. But I've been trying to stop, although my smartphone is making it very difficult. Like Aaron points out I can't point to one thing I've read or heard on the news that has turned into actionable information. I also agree that reading better developed thoughts on a specific subject would be more beneficial. Lastly I'd like to say I really miss Aaron. This post is an example of his brilliance. Depression is a horrible disease and the circumstances surrounding his suicide make it all the more tragic. RIP aaronsw.
Perspectiv 12y ago
news.ycombinator.com But of course, he doesn't mean junk clickbait tech articles!... Those are useful!
- cbd1984 12y ago
  News as in Usenet.
DubiousPusher 12y ago
"Read not the Times. Read the Eternities." Thoreau agrees.
- jeffsco 12y ago
  "I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. ...Instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party," Emerson lamented in his eulogy of Thoreau.
TheMagicHorsey 12y ago
You can't be much of a citizen if you don't know what is going on.
dragontamer 12y ago
I'm gonna be the guy, and risk the downvotes. Its been long enough, and if we're gonna be idolizing this guy we need to have a serious discussion about the naivete of him. Aaron Swartz claims that politics, news and all that doesn't affect his life. And then a few years later, when he makes the news, he commits suicide. In particular, it was clear that his morals were not lined up to what the powers that be are. Instead of working to better understand the risks in the "piracy" that he was undertaking, maybe he could have paid attention to the news and garnered a better understanding of people around him. This "I hate the News" article glorifies ignorance in the most terrible way possible. Especially since it was that ignorance that eventually gave way to Aaron Swartz's untimely demise. Aaron Swartz eventually did wish to become involved in politics. He took documents from a university and published them online, in the name of "opening up information". If he did so with the naive "I hate the news" attitude however, then he was flying blind. He had no idea how others perceived him, including the FBI and other police powers. That was his mistake. And it is a mistake I hope no one else makes. If you are going to put your neck on the line and perform a protest that toes the lines of the law... be sure you are ready and willing to receive the attention of the media that will fall down upon you. On the one hand, we have Martin Luther King Jr. who broke the law, and managed to turn those crimes into a strength. A victory that changed the country for the better. On the other, we have Aaron Swartz who (probably) broke the law, and instead turned those crimes into a tragic weakness. A weakness that ends in the most horrible way possible. Note: I supported Aaron Swartz's cause. I've donated money to his prosecution when it came up years ago. So my money and actions are where my heart's at. The irony in this article is rather strong however, especially when we take it into context.
samspot 12y ago
I feel the same way about the news, but I suspect we are both wrong to have this exact reaction. While the bullet points are correct, not wanting to know the news comes from a place of self-centeredness. This is betrayed in the statement that "it doesn't affect me." I ought to have my ears open for problems that I might be able to help solve, but instead I have buried myself deep in my own affairs. I hope this doesn't come off as an attack. It is not directed at the author or any individual. I just feel like this is an undercurrent in society that is easily overlooked.
sharp11 12y ago
Go watch the Selma (movie)? That incident (where news coverage sparked public opinion, leading to political action) provides a great counter-example to the idea that news/journalism is a waste of time.
pwenzel 12y ago
"Jeepers, another stupid newsreel! I hate the news!" -- Roger Rabbit
adescham 12y ago
Doesn't being more informed about the world and the stories happening around us lead to a richer more interesting life? For instance, I randomly met someone working in racial justice down south and, because I had recently heard about all the issues around how to commemorate lynchings, we had a really interesting conversation about his work and I gained a lot of insight into that story. Does no one else value the human component of news and opinions? I find it a fun part of being a human on this earth
jeffdavis 12y ago
People's appetite for news is so universal and intense that I have to wonder if it's serving some important purpose that the author is missing. I, too, have moved away from most kinds of news. I only read tech news, and I could make an argument that tech news is more actionable. But even that, I spend less time on fewer sites. I used to look forward to a chance to catch up on HN, now I read it mostly during moments when I'm waiting for something else. So, what am I (and the author) missing? Or what is society missing because we don't participate in the news cycle?

222 points by oskarth 12y ago

I couldn't agree more with Aaron on that. A lot of people have started turning a blind eye to the TV, but very often they replace it with constant news coverage online. So they really have made no significant change in their lives. They're still spoonfed with something that has never had any impact on them, and most likely never will. Anything with a significant impact, and unfortunately many things without it, are relayed through friends, family and co-workers. If the bomb drops or christ returns then we have a warning system setup all over Sweden that wakes anyone up. I can only imagine bad things from watching the news. I can't prove anything but it can't be good to constantly be told about negative things happening halfway across the world.

parennoob 12y ago
> If the bomb drops or christ returns then we have a warning system setup all over Sweden that wakes anyone up. How does the warning system work for the return of christ? Church bells?
TeMPOraL 12y ago
That's why I limited my news to Hacker News. Whenever there is an event that actually matters - like a war or a cataclysm - it will be here, upvoted and with comments made by people who know what they're talking about. I don't mind missing the 99% of the typical news sites content.
- lordbusiness 12y ago
  I've been running an experiment for the past several months to outsource relevant news curation. It's super simple and super passive. Basically I only read news brought to my attention organically; social media, word on the street which I later look up, etc. Thus far I haven't missed anything of genuine humanity-shaking importance, my emotional state has improved, and I have much more time for reading, hacking, and all other aspects of my life. It resonates with the "millennials consume news differently" piece submitted elsewhere on HN actually.
  - Goronmon 12y ago
    Doesn't this experiment rely on a certain critical mass of people consuming information in a non-organic fashion?
    - lordbusiness 12y ago
      Not really, though I don't claim this has been a truly scientific study. :-) Generally, the principle relies on "if it's not important [1], people don't talk about it". In other words, anything someone directly or indirectly mentions to me may be of value, everything else is just soundtrack. [2] Further, I often find that news that does matter comes to me from the likes of a more considered periodical; I learnt a lot of fact-based detail regarding the Alberta oil sands from National Geographic, and I learn about peace process break downs from twitter users I follow far quicker and with less bias than from mainstream media outlets. Local news tends to be handled by random people I meet on the street. It's effective so far! [1] This is an overly burdened word in this context. Darfur is very important, but we rarely hear about it, for example. What I mean in this context is "relevant enough to daily life to stop me in my tracks and get my attention". It's worth highlighting here that a lot of very important news doesn't make it to us via mainstream media because mainstream media selects for sales and / or target audience bias / interests, ergo in that sense, I'm actually NOT hearing about important things by tuning in to traditional mainstream media. [2] People murdering each other due to orders from invisible people in the sky is going to be a soundtrack to my life thanks to the era I live in. I know this happens. It will continue to happen for my life at least. No, I don't need daily reminders of this universal constant. The way I conduct my life and my advocacy against such acts will not be altered because I don't get those daily reminders.

meric 12y ago

http://zerohedge.com http://zerohedge.com A news website that covers important issues rather than petty crimes.

toephu2 12y ago
and another one: https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com

twelfthnight 12y ago

Hmm. I think this article doesn't distinguish between news and bad news. Frankly, anyone reading this must be interested in news, it's in the title of the website. Why else be here? This site isn't perfect, but it's useful to know what's happening in the tech world. Knowing about the world's current events is similar. We shouldn't dwell on negative events, but they happen and they happen to real people. Just because they don't happen to us doesn't mean it's not affecting us in a broader human perspective. We are all in it together.

jchrome 12y ago
Hacker News isn't so much about "news" per se. "News", I believe, should be about something new or recent. We're now talking about an article (op-ed?) written by Aaron in 2006. This isn't news and much of Hacker News isn't either. It's more just curated information.
- SilasX 12y ago
  A glance at the front page finds that it's mostly about new events or commentary; stuff like this is the exception.

Ciantic 12y ago

I wish news sites had a periodical system built-in. One could choose the period, e.g. 7 days to the past, and see all important news from that time-frame. It would of course require a human to tag the news as important within a period. Subscriber only feature would suffice.

icebraining 12y ago
I believe those are called "weekly newspapers" :)
- Ciantic 12y ago
  It's not, 7 days to the past from current day is not last week. The period should be adjustable for example 14 days or arbitrary number.
dublinben 12y ago
That sounds exactly like a weekly news magazine. There are quite a few that are worth reading, if you want to follow the news. The slower publishing pace allows a greater perspective and context on most stories that is missing on 24/7 channels.
- Max_Mustermann 12y ago
  Could you post some examples? Specifically ones that center on world news and not only the US / Europe.
  - gerty 12y ago
    The Economist. Albeit overtly liberal (in European sense), the content is well written, well discussed and subscription policy is great.
  - bcraven 12y ago
    The Week [1] is an excellent subscription magazine that comes every Friday to my door. It's UK-centric, but has international news as one of its many sub-sections. [1] http://www.theweek.co.uk/ http://www.theweek.co.uk/

austenallred 12y ago

I, strangely enough, agree with Most of what Aaron says. And I'm the founder of a news company. I worry about this attitude on a macro scale, but it's hard to argue with on a micro one. I spend most of my day following what's going on in the world, and it hasn't added much value to my life. But I worry about everyone not caring. Not because that would kill my company (I started it because I hate news in its current form too), but because there are times when public outrage changes things. It's like voting - my vote doesn't matter, but on aggregate it's everything. I'm convinced that the goal of a good news publication should be like Google - to get you in and out the "door" as quickly as possible understanding what you need to know. We're rebuilding everything around that. A publication one can consume in thirty seconds with the most important stuff, ruthlessly curated and fact-checked. No entertainment gossip or puff pieces or PR pitches. (To get it as an email sign up at https://grasswire.com https://grasswire.com) I'm looking forward to reading what others think on this subject.

samastur 12y ago
I guess I must be too dense, but I simply do not know how to use grasswire. I'm stuck with live feed on left which shows me exactly the kind of useless "breaking" stuff I want to avoid and popular feed on the right which I don't seem to be able to control beyond either providing fact-check or comment. What am I missing?
- austenallred 12y ago
  What you're looking at is kind of like a backend - consider it the "talk" page for Wikipedia. It's a little bit chaotic this early in the morning, but our algorithm pulls in the "breaking" stuff on the left, and the most upvoted stuff flows to the top of the "popular" page. Grasswire users fact-check stuff for accuracy, and comment on whether or not/why it's important. The site is mostly for news junkies. It's a little bit hectic right now because a bunch of people from HN are just upvoting random stuff to screw everything up, and it will take the power users a minute to sort through it. The result is at the end of the day, the best stuff curated and fact-checked by a couple thousand people, and we send that out to the everyday person in an email they can digest in 30 seconds. We're adding a short, editable description to each news item to give some background, and allowing anyone to submit external stuff, so it's still a work in progress, but that's the gist of it.

lovelearning 12y ago

I've developed similar views of late, especially on political news and online comments. I feel all those thousands of comments, mini essays, online slugfests, number of likes or dislikes on politics are not going to change even a little how governments work or how decisions are made. I feel I've wasted too much time on such things. I still follow tech news though, simply because it's interesting to me. As for crimes and scandals, well, it's not called "crime porn" for nothing!

djoldman 12y ago

"They point out that newspapers are a key part of our democracy, that by exposing wrong-doing to the people, they force the wrong-doers to stop. This seems to be true, but the curious thing is that I’m never involved." The sad irony of this statement is profound.

j2kun 12y ago
Both parts: that he was involved, and that the wrong-doers didn't stop. They're still holding office, journals still charge an arm and a leg for publication access, and the last I heard the amendments to the laws that led to this are held up by lobbyists.

jheriko 12y ago

News does serve at least one basic function, even if many other things can do the same: It gives you something to talk about and ask opinions on.

bsdpython 12y ago
This is true of sports as well. I can't talk to the average person (and family members) about asynchronous job queues but I can talk about how much the Knicks suck.
- jheriko 12y ago
  true. although they tack it on the end of the newspaper, or at the end of the news announcements as if its not very important, its still news. :)

detaro 12y ago

I know the feeling, but I worry about the consequences. There are news I think as many people as possible should process. How is democracy or any discussion as a society supposed to work if people don't know about the issues going on? It is a problem that seemingly all news channels use "wrong" selection criteria about what to report, including a lot of things that are not directly important, leading to fatigue and news that are only consumed, not processed. Of course, there probably is no "right" selection of issues, just differently flavored biases. Many issues that are sort of important I ignore because I can't see how I am supposed to get to an educated opinion about them. There is so much noise and bias going around that I don't have the time and abilities to aggregate them down myself, and no way to know which external aggregation to trust.

Mikeb85 12y ago
> How is democracy or any discussion as a society supposed to work if people don't know about the issues going on? It's not supposed to work. Democracy makes us fell like we have a say in politics, but we really don't. If we did, there wouldn't be mass surveillance, governments wouldn't be taking away our rights, and criminalizing entire segments of the population. But hey, at least we can vote once every few years, for one of two to four candidates who claim to be different (but really just work for the same interests anyway).
- talmand 12y ago
  Well, true democracy is a serious problem for many people right from the start. Which is why true democracy in the world is very rare. But, once a government reaches the point of what you describe, that is no longer a government of the people and has become something else. Which, according to history, is almost certainly inevitable.
- svdree 12y ago
  > If we did, there wouldn't be mass surveillance Are you sure? Outside of this little bubble we live in, there are lots of people willing to give up every last bit of privacy ("nothing to hide"), in exchange for the government giving them the feeling of "safety".

bkurtz13 12y ago

He uses voting as an example. Which begs the question: why vote? If you're living within a corrupt, self-serving political system (we are), then naturally the only people who run for office will be products of that system. If a candidate who genuinely wants to change the status quo somehow manages to slip in, they will be prevented from achieving anything meaningful once inside. No matter what, none of these people have my interests in mind. So I ask, what's the point?

talmand 12y ago
"I have solved this political dilemma in a very direct way: I don't vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, 'If you don't vote, you have no right to complain,' but where's the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain. I, on the other hand, who did not vote -- who did not even leave the house on Election Day -- am in no way responsible for that these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created." -George Carlin
Toenex 12y ago
Because otherwise you leave the decision to those that do. Vote. Spoil your ballot paper if you must (these get counted, at least in the UK) but take part in the process. Otherwise you are indistinguishable from those that couldn't be bothered or didn't care.
- VLM 12y ago
  If we know they don't care what we think, then why would it matter if they knew we didn't care? If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound? If 40% of the population votes, they don't worry about the 40% who are use voting as the opiate of the masses... the problem they see is the 60% who didn't fall for the scam. The arguments in the following essay are compelling. I haven't heard much of an argument against them, historically, other than pure sophistry (that domain sucks, etc) or tradition (you should vote because your ancestors voted) http://archive.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff224.html http://archive.lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff224.html

thebigspacefuck 12y ago

The lunatics are in my hall The paper holds their folded faces to the floor And every day the paper boy brings more

detcader 12y ago

How would Lawrence Lessig feel about this article? Lessig obviously believes that the U.S. political parties' activities are consequential to everyone's lives. Aaron seems to reject the notion of the implicit involvement, in a democracy, of every citizen in the affairs of their government. We supposedly elect (a significant portion of) the government, we pay for its activities, so we should care about what it has done and continues to do in Iraq. Virtually every extremist who has attacked the U.S. and lived to be captured and give statements in trial has cited U.S. foreign policy as a chief motivation for their actions. This alone should have us caring about U.S. foreign policy. I agree that news covers too many topics to report on any of them consistently well (or guard against interested parties shaping the news into propaganda). I think there's a Poe's-Law-type meme about that.

emerod 12y ago
The notion of implicit involvement is a PR strategy for legitimizing a government. If a majority of the population do not feel implicitly involved, they will not care if the government is overthrown.
DubiousPusher 12y ago
I don't think Shwartz was advocating a position of ignorance regarding geopolitical affairs. Just read a book or an essay on important geopolitical topics instead. If you want to know what important legislation is being advanced go to town halls, visit .gov sites, make an activist friend. All those are better ways to find out what's going on than the news. I stopped following the news, other than this site, after years of dedicated reading/viewing. I'd become disgusted with the amount of time that's dedicated to manufactured scandal, fained outrage and disemination of non-facts. I'm happier now and actually feel better informed. Sure, if I want to know about something I'll hit a major news site from time to time but honestly the longer I go without digging through the daily news pile for information gold, the more it just looks like a midden concealing a few soggy turds.
- detcader 12y ago
  I know what you mean; after all, I don't consume the mainstream news, besides occasionally Democracy Now, which I mostly value for the interviews.

karmacondon 12y ago

This misunderstands the point of news. People read it to have common subjects of conversation, filtered through the same perspective. It's actually important to human discourse within society. So that when two people are making small talk, one can say "Did you see what happened with Hilary Clinton/LeBron James/Kanye West?" It's pointless, but pointless communication has a role as a social lubricant. It lets people build up to weightier topics, or just politely pass the time together. And common knowledge of news subjects is a part of that system. Ultimately, news is a form of entertainment. Now more than ever. People don't watch Fox News or MSNBC to be more informed voters or to take personal action. Many of them want to hear what Personality X has to say about Event Y. Same with twitter or facebook or the opinion section of the local newspaper. And that's cool. If that's what someone finds interesting or entertaining, then so be it. In general, all of the arguments in this post could be applied to anything that people read, watch, play or listen to. From reality tv to Shakespeare. "It doesn't involve me and isn't useful in my daily life" and "I've lived without it for a long time and my life is no less rich" are generic statements that would be equally valid discussing pretty much any form of diversion. Part of maturity is realizing that the world is full of things that you don't like, and that belittling those things or questioning their value doesn't do any good. We all get to decide how to waste our time. Let people have their news.

VLM 12y ago

There is the obvious corporate analogy with news where most data and reports are distracting noise. If it can't have an impact or won't have an impact, stop spending the time and money to report the data as if it means something. This tends to be more a disease of large dilbertian corporations. (Insert Office Space TPS report analogy here)

bryanlarsen 12y ago

In my opinion, the best way to consume the news is weekly or even monthly. Give the journalists time to digest and process the news, figure out what's important, and time to write well thought out articles and summary. I like the Economist for that -- there's a 2 page "world news" digest section in every issue. Some weeks that's all I read. But when I have more time there are also in depth, well written, well edited and unabashedly opinionated articles in the rest of the issue. (I really hate the fake neutrality in most journalism) What would be really nice would be something similar for national and local news.

lmm 12y ago
I read Prospect here in the UK for that.

iagomr 12y ago

There's also an interesting article in The Atlantic regarding the "endless stream" of news. Alexis C. Madrigal makes a very interesting point regarding the stock (what stays) and the flow (what keeps you entertained rather than informed). http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/2013-the-year-the-stream-crested/282202/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/2013-t...

emodendroket 12y ago

The link to Twitter at the end seems a bit ironic since Twitter offers all the things he's criticizing, except without the promise of any substance.

Dirlewanger 12y ago
I don't think the way to interpret his post is to stop reading all news, but to do due diligence and learn how to filter out the shit and focus on the essentials. Not paying attention at all to what's going on in the world makes for an ignorant and useless citizen. Especially since getting everyone to go along with Aaron's suggestion of filling the time digesting news with a book will never happen.
- emodendroket 12y ago
  I guess. Also, following the link to his Twitter it's full of -- get this -- links to news articles.
spacab 12y ago
I agree with this. But at least with Twitter, you're the one actively filtering and curating your news feed, as opposed to exclusively reading The New York Times every morning and having the content curated for you.

popeshoe 12y ago

I feel that this was and is a super myopic view to hold, while it's true that most of the worlds news probably doesn't affect you directly, it will almost certainly affect you indirectly, since you live in the world. It boils down to the same reason you should vote, sure you probably won't swing any elections, but in the same way your voting might influence politicians into listening to the things you care about, by being aware what is happening in and around your city/country/planet you make it harder for people doing shady shit who rely on general public apathy to get away with it.

hueving 12y ago
>while it's true that most of the worlds news probably doesn't affect you directly, it will almost certainly affect you indirectly, since you live in the world. That's a useless conclusion in itself. There is an unlimited amount of news if you just include the whole world since "you live in it". Do you follow individual county elections for Nebraska? Why or why not? How do you determine what news is important enough for you to follow? Now you are back to square one.

balabaster 12y ago

The most ironic thing I think about this piece is that he claims not to have followed the news since he was 13 and has drawn this conclusion... Having spent a large portion of my life keeping up with the news, other than a few minor quibbles about semantics, I'm inclined to draw the similar conclusions. Most of what is presented is not news, it's politically slanted propaganda relating to daily events that further the political position of the network that owns that media outlet - this goes the same for papers, TV and radio. They only bring in "experts" that corroborate their own viewpoint, and when opposing opinions stray too far from their party line and cannot be discredited, they're let go. It happens time and again, and eventually you have to wonder why you continue to allow your own perspectives to be influenced by their agenda. It's gotten to the point where I'm so tired of wading through all the bullshit to find facts or something remotely resembling truth that I frequently wonder why I bother... We all know at this point that what goes on behind the closed doors of Government doesn't even closely resemble "legal" or "constitutional" and when they get busted, they "welcome public debate" and change the law or reinterpret the constitution to allow their illegal or unethical behaviour to continue and discredit anyone against that as at best unpatriotic or at worst a traitor... you get to a point where you wonder which side is the side of truth and righteousness. Does any of it matter? Is it all just bullshit, distracting us from greater things...?

mtbcoder 12y ago
> "Most of what is presented is not news, it's politically slanted propaganda" This was starting to be discussed on HN the other day, but unfortunately didn't seem to get much traction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9202533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9202533
- balabaster 12y ago
  Yeah, it's sad. I think that investigative journalism should be funded by the public, unfortunately, that's a conflict of interest for the government and sadly, most of the public doesn't really want to know the truth, they want just want to feel that their perspective on the status quo is validated, and that their life can carry on comfortably like it did yesterday... and the day before... and the day before that. And if it isn't carrying on that way, they want to know who to blame for the discomfort that causes so they can go over with their torches and pitchforks and get "justice", whatever the "news" tells them what form that justice should take.

indienkid 12y ago

Several things are currently wrong with the news. From the overuse of the word “BREAKING” (does that even mean anything anymore?) to the lack of verified information (the rush to get the scoop), the news industry is a bit of a mess right now. It’s overwhelming, and there’s no end to “Oh, you haven’t heard about this? You’re out of the loop!” I always think of this Friends segment where Joey buys a volume of an encyclopedia to try to impress everyone else (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3eD0imnhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3eD0imnhQ). I agree it’s hard to see how the effects of what goes on in the world propagate down to how each of us lives our life today -- but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t ever affected by them. I still think we have a basic responsibility to try to understand those things, and the primary goal of news outlets should be to make that information as accessible as possible (while still being accurate). Full disclosure: I work for a news app (http://www.getbriefme.com http://www.getbriefme.com).

oldpond 12y ago

Me too. I try not to listen to the radio, read the newspaper, or watch the news on TV. I figure the big stuff will find it's way to me, and the rest is marketing bullshit. News is a commodity, created to sell advertising. Only the big draw stories get air time. Just watch the CBC National; the world is ending every evening, don't miss it.

serve_yay 12y ago

In 2010, I was living in Washington DC and one day I heard the pettiest political squabble between two strangers. It prompted me to stop paying attention to politics, which up to then I followed rather closely, because I realized how bonkers it was making me. Everyone is just a bunch of angry assholes yelling at each other. It doesn't improve life, it makes you upset and unhappy. It wasn't too long until I felt similarly about the news, period. I'd say the biggest challenge in no longer paying attention to the news is the idea that it's a serious person's domain, or even duty. That you're "not a real grown up" if you stop paying attention to the news. Every now and again you'll be among some NPR listeners and you won't know what happened in Kuala Lumpur or whatever. You need to be OK with that.

plug 12y ago
I think this is the nail on the head for me. I came to the conclusion late last year that I was spending too much time reading social, news and commentary - getting really sucked in. It was a massive waste of time, a productivity killer, and often quite depressing. For instance, I live in a country where the police have no guns, and gun crime is almost non-existent. And yet, I felt like I was constantly reading about police shootings and brutality, (primarily from the U.S). And... it started to really upset me. This news has no context in my existence at all, and yet I know about it in great detail. Same goes for all the Twitter flaming, and all sorts of other stuff. I realised it was actually making me very unhappy. I decided to see if I could take a step back - I deleted my Facebook and Twitter, and tried to avoid comments and most extraneous news. I expected I'd go a bit mad, but the opposite happened - I'm actually surprised at just how happier I am now. Ignorance is bliss? That said, I do believe there is huge value in being informed - but it is hard to regulate and parse all the information out there into something meaningful. HN is my only vice now - I'm a lurker mostly, and it's work related so that's okay, right? ;)

fromtheoutside 12y ago

I kind of agree, I often feel like I'm addicted to online news. I dislike it's shallowness. I despair at it's ignorance to history and context. But then, following the news teaches me stuff about the world and how it works. It reminds me how complex the world is and how dangerous. It educates and it coins me. I've always wondered how Aaron found the courage to live his life and fight for his ideals like he did. Maybe ignoring the larger scope was one of the reasons.

kleer001 12y ago
>it coins me. Whoa, what? How can you use 'coin' as a verb in this context? The news turns you into a different word or phrase? You've just blown my mind. Or is that a typo?

wantab 12y ago

In many ways I agree that most news nowadays has no relevance directly to your every day life, as he complains about early in the article, but on a broader scale they do. Later, he agrees with that but says he's never involved. Well, it's cause he chose to not be involved. Then he says the news doesn't help with his voting choice and he can get everything he needs to know from a simple guide but nothing could be further from the truth. If you really want to get involved in that, you can gather much more information about candidates and their real thoughts and if they would vote how you want them to vote on issues. You won't get that from any simple guide or the TV news. For example, maybe a bad one, I knew the brother of one of the candidates running for governor a while back. He's an asshole. I worked next to a lady whose husband was in the state legislature and knew the candidate closely. When I mentioned that I met the candidate once before she said, "Good family!". From there I could have learned a lot if I pursued it. You won't learn any of that from a brochure or the TV news. The problem with TV and radio news is you can't pick and choose what you want to see or hear. Newspapers were good for that. You could flip pages quickly. Online news sources have that ability if online source is worthy and organized but those are few and far between. In the past, TV news at most stations was its own department, especially at the networks, and not under control of marketing or advertising. This is no longer true. Despite some great reporters still working in newspapers, marketing has taken that over, too, cause the idea is to sell newspapers, not news. The same is true for television. How often, now, do you see ads for upcoming entertainment shows during the "news"? How often does a new product come out and it finds itself on the "news"? Unfortunate but true, the real news, along with in-depth discussion and analysis, can be boring to most. PBS probably is the only daily national news worth watching if you really want to learn but you may find yourself nodding off if the subject isn't of interest. Again, advantage newspapers and properly structured online news sources that don't emulate TV (CNN). I worked in television news for about 10 years long ago with reporters who used to work in respected newspapers. I hate TV "news" today.

towelguy 12y ago

How do you even find what book to read without reading articles about them? If people told you about them, how did they find them?

pakled_engineer 12y ago

Delayed Gratification magazine suits my time sched http://www.slow-journalism.com/ http://www.slow-journalism.com/ Quarterly that covers the news of the last 3mos after all the misinformation peddled by 24/7 news cycle has run it's course. I also like Stallman's political notes as they are brief and he has an interesting perspective sometimes https://www.stallman.org/archives/2015-jan-apr.html https://www.stallman.org/archives/2015-jan-apr.html

gopher2 12y ago

I'm curious what sources others get their news from and how you "cut through the clutter" so to speak. Mine are: BostInno, Abnormal Returns (curates investing/VC/startup/economy links), selected webdev subreddits, hacker news. I imagine this is fairly typical for someone on HN, but maybe not. Also, does anyone know of a long time horizon news company that primarily provides 3-5 year updates on large macro topics? Actually maybe that's just called "a book"

n1ck 12y ago

I stopped watching the news about a year ago. I have only benefited. My mood is much better (due to not constantly hearing about horrible goings on), and I have more free time. I have not found that I am out of the loop on anything relevant to my life. I still follow blogs and news sites (and of course, Hacker News). And I still feel that I am aware of important world events such as what is going on in Brazil right now. Knowledge is power, but useless knowledge is a waste of mental capacity.

emerod 12y ago
I have found that reacting to news in "real time" (for example, as it is fed to me through TV or Facebook) leads to a loss of perspective. The purported urgency of the story overwhelms its broader significance. Discovering news items later or second-hand enables me to research multiple perspectives after some people have had time to digest the event. On the other hand, sometimes the first-hand accounts get edited to have sensational elements removed, and the sanitized versions are less informative.

neilk 12y ago

Let's say we never had "the news", and we all decided we needed to help society understand and react to novel events. Would we invent newspapers and cable channels? I don't think so. When modern institutions realize they have an information distribution problem, they don't get a bunch of ink-stained, dubiously sober arts graduates with no special qualifications, and tell them to write stories. They pay people to do regularly updated dashboards or reports with charts and graphs, establish information reporting networks and hierarchies, institutionalize whistleblowers, schedule mandatory periodical reviews of how certain projects are going, that sort of thing. The human element is necessary but journalistic "storytelling" is just a euphemism for titillation or reinforcement of certain narratives. With minor exceptions, I'm not sure it was ever any different.

afarrell 12y ago
Who is the "we" that is doing the inventing? The News God[1] with the power to correct perverse incentives and keep prisoners from defecting? Doesn't exist. The committee of Folks Who Care About Policy And Represent a Broad Cross-Section of Society but Don't Get into Stupid Arguments? Doesn't exist. Even if they did, an organization would discover that they could get more views and exert more power using titilatory stories. What you propose is not a stable Nash Equilibrium. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ EDIT: re-read and that seems to be kinda your point. Apologies if it is and I'm oddly argumentative. To continue, one reason why organizations use stories is that stories are one of the data structures more efficiently-implemented in our minds.
- neilk 12y ago
  This is a great point, but we also know that institutional, internal information distribution systems, of the kind I mentioned, don't fall prey to that. (They may fall prey to other things -- agreeing with the boss, groupthink, etc.) Anyway the reason why is because they have different incentives. The question is how to make incentives like that work for society, hopefully while keeping the critical independence of the media. We can't imagine that now, but we have new funding forms like Kickstarter, and Wikipedia is an existence proof for achieving consensus about what claims are well-sourced. But I think we agree that it's not a great idea to run society on an information system that gets paid every time it stimulates our basest impulses for the lowest possible cost. The endgame of that is Buzzfeed.

grecy 12y ago

I agree wholeheartedly. The news is no longer interesting and relevant to me, it's merely all the bad things happening all over the world. i.e. the headline might be about a train crash on the other side of the world, rather than some good story that happened in my own country. I spent two weeks above the Arctic Circle in September hiking and camping, with no access to the world [1]. When coming back along the road, my car radio was continually searching for a station, and it eventually locked onto one randomly. The first words I heard from "the world" after two weeks were "ISIS Threat". It turned it off and didn't turn it back on for the rest of the 8 hour drive home. [1] If you're curious, it looks like this http://theroadchoseme.com/the-dempster-highway http://theroadchoseme.com/the-dempster-highway

jacquesm 12y ago
Beautiful! In Nov '04 I went through the Northern Rocky Mountains: http://pics.camarades.com/d/210055-1/dscf0537.jpg http://pics.camarades.com/d/210055-1/dscf0537.jpg And these Elk would like to say hi to you and they're happy they avoided your freezer ;) : http://pics.camarades.com/d/210067-1/dscf0541.jpg http://pics.camarades.com/d/210067-1/dscf0541.jpg

vuldin 12y ago

The top address that appears in the dropdown list when I type 'news' is this site. Other hits show up, but the vast majority are related to something 'new' instead. I used to be a serious news junky, keeping track of everything that happened related to politics or the latest war. I'd even research what was happening regarding local politics in the place I was traveling to just in case the topic came up while I was with some people from that area. I monitored RSS feeds from various news outlets and blogs from others who also watched the news, and over time it became impossible for me to keep up with it. After that point of realization (that it was impossible for me to keep up with all this information), I then realized that it really didn't matter anyway! The world did not end, my favored side didn't win any less and my most hated side didn't win any more... I just had more time to focus on things that really mattered to me. I probably now have a better state of well-being on top of it all.

rckrd 12y ago

Agreed. I especially agree that yellow journalism in particular is a useless distraction. That being said, there is a certain beauty to experiencing things in the moment.

nyxtom 12y ago

Wow "Its obsession with the criminal and the deviant makes us less trusting people. Its obsession with the hurry of the day-to-day makes us less reflective thinkers. Its obsession with surfaces makes us shallow."

xnull6guest 12y ago

I completely disagree with Aaron, who here seems to jump rather quickly to the (merely asserted) conclusion that the news (i.e. the world) doesn't affect him. (Without this same news we would not have heard of Snowden OR, in an ironic twist, of Aaron himself). Furthermore, how ironic is it that we're discussing this itself on a self-purported news site? The news, even global news, absolutely affects all of us even if we live local, cloistered lives. Let us take the United States - which is overly represented on this site. The US economy is fueled by its finance and investment sectors, which are in turn fueled by neocolonialist enterprises overseas. The success of the US domestic economy is fundamentally tied to its navigating geostrategy and multilateral diplomacy, its overthrowing of governments, stabilizing and destabilizing nations with propaganda and embargos, fixing international law in favor of the leaders of its private sectors, and in its opening resources abroad to US companies is the primary and nearly exclusive driver of the finance sector. And in fact, domestic and international law now blur due to a similarly increased globalization. I find it odd that Aaron, known for his stance on free access to information and to being informed, would fall only to the knowledge of the academic - and not information and facts about the world in which we immediately live. Yes there are some truly irrelevant news items (take celebrities). One must filter and prioritize. It is a small price to pay. I would love to defend whichever notions have offended downvoters.

vinhboy 12y ago
So I browsed the comment thread, and you are the first "disagree" I found. I am going to join you here. I think one of the most wrong thing in the article is this statement. > Indeed, reading a voter’s guide is much better: there’s no recency bias (where you only remember the crimes reported in the past couple months), you get to hear both sides of the story after the investigation has died down, you can actually think about the issues instead of worrying about the politics. Yea, no... A big fat screaming no. A voter guide is a propaganda piece that has ZERO substance. Maybe for the propositions they give a little bit of pros and cons, but for the candidates, they give you nothing. The only way you can discern who is a lying asshole is by following the news. Maybe the conclusion will be they are all lying assholes, but at least you'll be informed of that. I also think that saying I don't follow the news because it does not personally affect me is short-sighted and self-fish. For example, those Christians minorities getting slaughtered by ISIS has nothing to do with me. But hearing their stories and learning about them through the news will certainly teach me a bit of compassion that I will need in some random tangential decisions I make later.

asgard1024 12y ago

Here are two ideas for non-traditional news, that would reduce the information overload, and make news more interesting and healthy: - Actionable news. Only news to which you can (or have to), as a citizen, take some action. Examples: Changes in law, cultural events that will take place in the future, openings of new institutions, planned political demonstrations or petitions. - Old news. Only give news about something after it is resolved, not when it is happening (avoid especially breaking news). Examples: Instead of speculation who will be appointed to some office, just tell me who was appointed. When disaster occurs, wait three days when the information is more complete about the aftermath. Reviews of products that have already been released.

skrebbel 12y ago
Wow the "old news" idea blows me away. I really, really want that.
- sdeutsch 12y ago
  You would probably really enjoy Delayed Gratification. It's a quarterly publication that wraps up global news day by day from 6 to 3 months prior (e.g. the March issue covers Oct/Nov/Dec). They have a great mix of short and long form articles and I think a reasonable balance for world news. http://www.slow-journalism.com/ http://www.slow-journalism.com/
- olalonde 12y ago
  I use http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/top/?sort=top&t=month http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/top/?sort=top&t=month for that. Most news are ~20 days old. I check it about once or twice a month.
WaxProlix 12y ago
Sooo... volunteers to make these? They sound like great ideas. Not sure how you monetize, as ads are sort of antithetical to the notion of clean, BS-free news feeds, and we're all trained to expect content to be free these days.
westoncb 12y ago

ooopsnevermind 12y ago

I find it very ironic that of course I am learning about this thought-provoking post via one of my go-to news channels, HN. Doesn't the very fact that we are having an interesting online discussion about an idea we hadn't previously given as much attention to, because it came up on HN, serve as an example of exactly why reading the news has value in our lives?

digitalneal 12y ago

:sigh: RIP buddy.

wjohnson 12y ago

Ironically, I found out about Aaron Swartz from the news. I'm reminded of "Nietzsche says God is dead; God says Nietzsche is dead". Aaron Swartz says the news is irrelevant. The news says Aaron Swartz is relevant.

abstractConcept 12y ago

> There is voting, of course, but to become an informed voter all one needs to do is read a short guide about the candidates and issues before the election. I have often wondered how people can make uninformed decisions easily. Now I know. Only reading a short guide, is akin to reading a Wikipedia article for a monumentally important decision, and not bothering to check the edit history, let alone the references.

jessriedel 12y ago
Rather than make a snide remark, it's more useful to "steel man" this argument: Consider the X hours you spend over the course of a year reading the news, which for most people you would consider "informed American" is in the triple digits. (That's less than 20 minutes a day.) Now, rather than reading any news that year, imagine that before the election you sat down for X hours and read a some books and long-format essays about the candidates. While reading you are free to look up old news articles when pertinent. Who is the better informed voter? What if you spend only X/10 hours?
- abstractConcept 12y ago
  I have not heard the term (to) "steel man" (rather than (to) "straw man") before, interesting. Admittedly, I was writing emotionally, as the sarcastic "Now I know" might suggest. However, I would argue that reading "a short guide" seems vastly different from what you suggest. --- My emotional reaction was in response to how "a short guide" seems to suggest a very biased source; for instance a pamphlet that might be given out by a political party/group. Perhaps this was a flaw in phrasing, but that does not seem likely to me from the text.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
niels_olson 12y ago
That would be infinitely better than the paid infommercials most people current claim as their "research".

gitpusher 12y ago

RIP Aaron. You are missed

aaronem 12y ago

Who doesn’t?

PSeitz 12y ago

I don't follow the news for 3 years now and I can say its great. I will never go back.

PhoenixWright 12y ago

Since I was old enough to read I've been following the news. Politics, world, sports finance I am really well informed to the point that if someone mentions any recent headline I've read at least one source regarding the topic, usually two or more with updates as well. During my freshman year of college I stopped following the news. I was so focused on starting off well in school that I avoided most distractions. I found that those months were some of the most focused and productive I've ever had. Sadly I fell back into the habit of reading news articles and catching cable news at night. But I've been trying to stop, although my smartphone is making it very difficult. Like Aaron points out I can't point to one thing I've read or heard on the news that has turned into actionable information. I also agree that reading better developed thoughts on a specific subject would be more beneficial. Lastly I'd like to say I really miss Aaron. This post is an example of his brilliance. Depression is a horrible disease and the circumstances surrounding his suicide make it all the more tragic. RIP aaronsw.

Perspectiv 12y ago

news.ycombinator.com But of course, he doesn't mean junk clickbait tech articles!... Those are useful!

cbd1984 12y ago
News as in Usenet.

DubiousPusher 12y ago

"Read not the Times. Read the Eternities." Thoreau agrees.

jeffsco 12y ago
"I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. ...Instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party," Emerson lamented in his eulogy of Thoreau.

TheMagicHorsey 12y ago

You can't be much of a citizen if you don't know what is going on.

dragontamer 12y ago

I'm gonna be the guy, and risk the downvotes. Its been long enough, and if we're gonna be idolizing this guy we need to have a serious discussion about the naivete of him. Aaron Swartz claims that politics, news and all that doesn't affect his life. And then a few years later, when he makes the news, he commits suicide. In particular, it was clear that his morals were not lined up to what the powers that be are. Instead of working to better understand the risks in the "piracy" that he was undertaking, maybe he could have paid attention to the news and garnered a better understanding of people around him. This "I hate the News" article glorifies ignorance in the most terrible way possible. Especially since it was that ignorance that eventually gave way to Aaron Swartz's untimely demise. Aaron Swartz eventually did wish to become involved in politics. He took documents from a university and published them online, in the name of "opening up information". If he did so with the naive "I hate the news" attitude however, then he was flying blind. He had no idea how others perceived him, including the FBI and other police powers. That was his mistake. And it is a mistake I hope no one else makes. If you are going to put your neck on the line and perform a protest that toes the lines of the law... be sure you are ready and willing to receive the attention of the media that will fall down upon you. On the one hand, we have Martin Luther King Jr. who broke the law, and managed to turn those crimes into a strength. A victory that changed the country for the better. On the other, we have Aaron Swartz who (probably) broke the law, and instead turned those crimes into a tragic weakness. A weakness that ends in the most horrible way possible. Note: I supported Aaron Swartz's cause. I've donated money to his prosecution when it came up years ago. So my money and actions are where my heart's at. The irony in this article is rather strong however, especially when we take it into context.

samspot 12y ago

I feel the same way about the news, but I suspect we are both wrong to have this exact reaction. While the bullet points are correct, not wanting to know the news comes from a place of self-centeredness. This is betrayed in the statement that "it doesn't affect me." I ought to have my ears open for problems that I might be able to help solve, but instead I have buried myself deep in my own affairs. I hope this doesn't come off as an attack. It is not directed at the author or any individual. I just feel like this is an undercurrent in society that is easily overlooked.

sharp11 12y ago

Go watch the Selma (movie)? That incident (where news coverage sparked public opinion, leading to political action) provides a great counter-example to the idea that news/journalism is a waste of time.

pwenzel 12y ago

"Jeepers, another stupid newsreel! I hate the news!" -- Roger Rabbit

adescham 12y ago

Doesn't being more informed about the world and the stories happening around us lead to a richer more interesting life? For instance, I randomly met someone working in racial justice down south and, because I had recently heard about all the issues around how to commemorate lynchings, we had a really interesting conversation about his work and I gained a lot of insight into that story. Does no one else value the human component of news and opinions? I find it a fun part of being a human on this earth

jeffdavis 12y ago

People's appetite for news is so universal and intense that I have to wonder if it's serving some important purpose that the author is missing. I, too, have moved away from most kinds of news. I only read tech news, and I could make an argument that tech news is more actionable. But even that, I spend less time on fewer sites. I used to look forward to a chance to catch up on HN, now I read it mostly during moments when I'm waiting for something else. So, what am I (and the author) missing? Or what is society missing because we don't participate in the news cycle?