Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | 7222aafdcf68cfe's comments login

It might be both ?

I like to believe the internet is a great enabler when it comes to finding or accessing information, unfortunately discovery has become progressively worse for a long time now.

The internet is also a massive distraction as Sturgeon's Law applies fully, and certain participants optimize for capturing attention with low value content. It definitely holds us back, and leads to multiple adverse outcomes.

imo, engaging with the current day Internet must be done carefully as it's not all good, some days that works better than others.


In this context, I often refer to the essay by Rolf Dobelli, titled Avoid News: Towards a Healthy News Diet.

It can be found on the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20130117104220/http://dobelli.co...


Actually Dobelli was the one who got me thinking about this. I tend to agree with him, although eschewing all news is a bit too extreme to my taste. I tried scaling back my intake by switching from a daily paper to a weekly paper, but one has to have tremendous discipline to avoid the news of the day on the internet. Especially if the internet is your job, like it is for me.


I 100% concur, it's not easy.

I block / filter most of the news sites I might wander to mindlessly with uBlock, and even filter out DOM elements that have certain keywords.

I also found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events to be a good alternative for daily news without the nonsense.


Chiming in as someone who's been doing this. Haven't watched a TV news program since 2020.

The only thing in 4 years that I "missed" (which it turns out actually means "was delayed in finding out about to a degree that other people actively comment on it") was the recent escalations in the middle-east.

And even that I was only about 24 hours behind.

You really miss nothing, particularly with the amount of passive news we ingest via social media. (I also have a fairly minimal social media diet.)


Can you provide a link to the weekly paper please


Focus.

Another well-known example: https://bellard.org/


The quality and depth of Fabrice's output is insane.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: