Anyone else burnt out from the outrage cycle in recent times?
I don’t know if it’s selfish but I just don’t have the energy anymore to care about what bad thing person X or company Y did this week.
My current philosophy is to treat news/Reddit/social media like email in the old days.
That is: log on to a desktop computer once a week and read the highlights. It is not accessible except through the desktop computer.
The funny thing is this approach is completely opposite the “stories” trend in social media. It makes you really aware of the FOMO-by-design pattern these days.
When nothing resulted of the "Panama papers", I admit I basically checked out of active politics and reading the news. On occasion, I'll read some long-form journalism, but I am done with daily "news".
Actually, this very common misunderstanding of the outcome is very illustrative of the journalism problem in America.
A number of high profile people were held accountable for their tax evasion. Multiple people were prosecuted, and many politicians, including heads of state were forced to resign.
But because the Panama Papers did not contain US citizens (Panama is not a useful refuge for US tax evaders because Panama cooperates with the IRS), the reporting of such consequences was not politically useful, and thus not reported.
In fact, it was more useful to propagate the lie that there were NO consequences to the leak - something you are perpetuating here.
My general philosophy is that if I’m not going to take action on a piece of news, it’s fairly pointless. Keeping somewhat up to date is important as a citizen, but staying on the news treadmill is only important in as much as it effects my decision making. If I’m not going to donate money/time to dealing with an issue, keeping up to the minute on it isn’t something that is worth my attention. Similarly with companies, with few exceptions it won’t make a difference if news that an establishment doesn’t deserve my money takes an extra week or month to reach my attention. And if that sort of news isn’t going to effect my purchasing habits, once again it doesn’t matter.
As such, yeah, checking in once a week seems fine to me on most topics.
I've really enjoyed https://www.slowboring.com/ for this reason. There are plenty of hot takes that shouldn't necessarily be taken at face value, but I appreciate how the site focuses on long term trends rather than the news treadmill.
I’m glad I’m not alone doing this! I’ve gone so far as setting up a content blocker on my phone and putting Reddit on a blocklist.
I just can’t handle all the front page content that elicits outrage and/or incredulity, and the comment threads can be just as outrageous as the content itself.
Still, I dig so many of the communities on there, so I browse by setting aside time and hopping on my desktop.
I don’t use my desktop much (maybe a couple times a week), so I find it creates a nice mental partition from my day-to-day life and let’s me engage with Reddit on my own terms. Frankly, Reddit is a blast in small doses, so I’m happy with the balance I’ve struck.
Reddit has turned into a clownish propoganda website. It is exponentially worse than any other social media website. It is a complete failure at every level.
Reddit is just too far gone now. If you pay attention to the front page, different celebrities will be plastered over it at different times, usually coinciding with some new release.
The politics subreddit is an absolute abomination of one sided debate and everything else is shut down.
World news is basically America bad everywhere else good (but especially Canada and Scandinavia).
Trump was hitler.
Some small subreddits are useful but it’s exceptionally hard not to be sucked in to the rest of it, by design.
I've found using old.reddit.com, unsubscribing from the default subs, and adblock still leave Reddit as one of the few enjoyable places on the internet for me. There is still legitimate, organic discovery and discourse that I find there.
The times I occasionally get pulled into the void are when following a user's content/comment that I found interesting, then finding all kinds of bile that they push to the main forums.
Reddit also has an underappreciated feature of being able to sort posts database style (e.g. Top Posts > All Time) to get a sense of what a particular community found transcendent or controversial. If the top posts are any kind of angry response to a current event that's one you can typically ignore.
I tappped out a couple of years ago. I don't have agency over most of the issues and if I did have agency I would probably already know about it from the community.
It's not willful ignorance, I have just acknowleded that I have limited time and resources and I should put those back into my local community. Being angry at stories on the internet helps no one.
I check in periodically, like once a month, to make sure I can still talk to people about stuff and am not too far out of the loop. But the daily scoop is not necessary.
>Anyone else burnt out from the outrage cycle in recent times?
Yes, and it's not surprising.
The solution to everything in society now is "let the individual provide the solution":
* Democracy = "if a politician is shit then just vote them out, you really should do your research before voting"
* Capitalism = "if they're using slave labour then just vote with your wallet til they go bankrupt - if you simply buy an object with decent specs without looking into the company's track record on labour rights, then you're complicit"
* Broken system = "call your local politician to demand reform, the problem is ultimately caused by your inaction"
* Bad news source = "spend your spare time doing research before believing random stuff on the internet then"
Society has no cap on its complexity, nor boundaries for individual responsibility in a utilitarian world. This ultimately means that the stability and moral rightness is directly limited by how much effort You The Individual are willing/able to apply at any given time.
Is it really that surprising that when people have a choice between being Atlas or living a good life, they'll choose the latter?
More to the point, this is precisely why companies specifically push for "individualism" and "freedom" from regulation - because they know people don't have time or energy to police every single organisation under the sun.
EDIT: apparently HN doesn't support markdown lists. It does have a feature for stripping single newlines (like what you'd use to format a list), though.
I've been largely acting the same way my whole life. I never really got into social media, it mostly felt creepy to me, though I admittedly have been using twitter more lately.
That being said, I've seen friends and family become radicalized from social media. I think there is a nuance that people miss, radicalized doesn't just mean storming the capital or antifa, it also means jumping down someone's throat when they don't want to engage in your favorite content. This isn't just about politics, there are the conspiracy people, the UFO people, the spirituality people, etc. It really just seems like everyone is so energized towards making you the other if you're not in their subgroup.
The really dark thing about this is that I find myself not caring about things that are pretty important because it's filled with extreme people yelling at each other. I actually deleted a recent example that I was going to put in this post because I don't want anyone to pick up a pitchfork.
My trading system works similar. It presents me a list of stocks ranked by that they had some coverage in social and traditional media + my preferences. This allows me to quickly check what is important and what not.
Minus a lot of the noise. Makes me a happy trader.
Thank you! Bloomberg browsing is quite a thing I agree. Now that I think about it, I haven't found Bloomberg to be all that good except for Matt's news letter.
When you're trading, you're also less likely to read newsletters, which are not a source of accurate information. In that respect, Bloomberg is pretty good since their information service on the Terminal is unmatched.
I don’t know if it’s selfish but I just don’t have the energy anymore to care about what bad thing person X or company Y did this week.
My current philosophy is to treat news/Reddit/social media like email in the old days.
That is: log on to a desktop computer once a week and read the highlights. It is not accessible except through the desktop computer.
The funny thing is this approach is completely opposite the “stories” trend in social media. It makes you really aware of the FOMO-by-design pattern these days.