
Ask HN: What is your information diet? - rollinDyno
An information diet is becoming more and more important to maintain a healthy mind and a stable relationship with society.<p>Consuming too much junk news can turn us into dopamine addicts and, generally speaking, focusing on journals or classics can render us out of touch with the contemporary world.<p>My question to you is, have you put any thought into the ways you consume information? If so, what have you come up with?
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blastbeat
No TV consumption, no social media like Reddit, Twitter or Facebook. I don't
buy newspapers and seldom magazines. My smartphone is only for traveling and
snapshots, I leave it at home most of the time (it has no SIM card). For phone
calls I use an internet-less dumbphone instead, which is annoying to use, to
use it as little as possible. In addition, I try to outsource as much
communication as possible to email, to slow it down. I have the luxury to get
away with reading work mail only at work. My private emails are filtered and
freed from annoying subscriptions and newsletters. I have only a handful of
websites I visit on a regular basis, which is still time consuming enough. If
I need specific information, I web-search for it. Apart from this, I actively
try to scrutinize information to avoid bias, but that's almost hopeless.

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strikelaserclaw
i try to get in an hour a day of reading material that requires alot of
thinking, for me it's technical articles or "hard" books. I'll read for an
hour but i probably spend another hour or two thinking about it. I try to do
this everyday. Other than that, i put my phone in silent mode and turn the
screen's face down during work hours. I visit hacker news everyday, and try to
limit my reddit viewing. I find that reddit in low doses actually provides a
decent cross section of what's happening in the world.

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HNLurker2
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ice6GTtO3w8](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ice6GTtO3w8)

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muzani
Books have been great, the more difficult the more nutritious. But the more
nutritious they are, the harder they are to digest, so I don't recommend
trying to read too many at a time.

Books themselves are also a great resource to find other great resources.
Generally things that attract your attraction are the ones which give the best
ROI. Books are a great place to find this, as you can trace a source and
really consume it. Books like Tools of Titans are better off as a directory
for discovery rather than read end to end.

Classics are worth reading when you find yourself pacing over an idea a few
times. Discussing a lot of capitalism? Pick up The Wealth of Nations
sometimes. Need help getting into the flow? Read the original book on Flow, by
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

I do want something that highlights good new tools and trends. Product Hunt
feels a little too sponsored. HN is great, with good critical feedback, but
it's biased towards the older crowd.

Facebook has been the source for 80% of my discoveries, but it's got a
terrible signal-noise ratio. Only about 5% of FB is actually useful. But it
gives a lot of anecdotal information about the rest of the world around me.
I'd love to quit FB if possible though. A big part of my frustration with it
is that dangerous misinformation is so abundant and spreads more easily than
actual information. I don't see myself using FB actively in the next 5 years.

Reddit is fun, but I picked up nothing useful from my time there.

Browsing foreign job ads is a good way to see what's going on in the rest of
world, and where the trends are flowing. There's a tendency for people to
cargo cult tech that's just popular in their area, but this is a good way of
seeing patterns.

