Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

I checked reddit recently for the first time in a while, and I was shocked by how radicalized its become. An echo chamber of hateful people and perhaps GPTs that are agitating the big subreddits. The contrast is stark with all the "no place for hate" in the rules and endless banning of microaggressions.

I saw dozens of death threats. Even an explicit death threat thread with over 40,000 upvotes before reddit stepped in and shut the whole subreddit down.

It reminded me of Ghostbusters 2 with all the aggressively angry people and the ooze pouring out of the sewers, all building upon itself.

> I will miss posting stuff like "what is this car" or being part of the car talk for a sporty car I drive but idk kind of want to just live too

I used to waste so much time posting about cars on Reddit. I'd open my computer at 11pm, reply a few times to a single post on Reddit, and before long, I'd see 1:45am on the clock.

Not posting anything has been a massive time saver.

One healthy way to consume Reddit that I recently learned about is creating a "custom feed" (see left margin of new UI).

You can just add subs that are of interest that lack the torrent of bad news and only ever visit that custom feed. It doesn't ever algorithmically add posts from subs you don't manually include, as far as I've seen.

My suggestion: music! Give the eyes a break.

> It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something

I actually feel really good when people expect me to be on social media and I tell them Im not.

Kind of similar to the feeling when I say that I quit cigarettes. Im still surprised by it and talking about it makes me feel very blessed to be free of it.

>It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one

Outside of reddit/discord/hn, I haven't had any social media since roughly 2010, and I don't use reddit or discord for anything remotely "social media"-ish.

While I still get the occasional look as if I'm wearing a tinfoil hat when I say "I don't have FB. No, no insta either. No... not snapchat either", I find it's a lot less common now, thankfully. When I first left social media in ~2010, it was rough. Not only dating scene wise, but I lost out on a few job opportunities (at least a few, probably more than I know) as well.

Now you're just considered kind of weird/fringe, instead of being borderline insane. Moving (slowly) in the right direction, I think.

One unfortunate aspect of this phenomena is that as reddit "evaporatively cools" (ala https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ... ) as the more level headed people leave reddit gets even more radical.

It's even possible the places that people then move to (such as HN) also get more radical if the leavers have higher levels of radicalism than the place they join.

> It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something

Probably worth Googling something like [men who don't have social media] to think what women think about this, it's more positive than you might think :)

> I was a director of the community team at deviantart (...) I used to have to actively check in on community members who we deemed addicted

This sounds so interesting to me - was it your responsibility? How did you detect if someone was addicted? And most importantly, how did you scale it?

> Sure enough, here we are, except it seems nobody is looking out for the best interests of their communities anymore. Thank god for dang.

Here's to dang! Even when you do things I might not agree with if I knew about them, this is a place where interesting things can be shared and found without all the blah-blah.

This is how I've dealt with Instagram. My IG account is literally nothing but cats. it's actually very refreshing to look at for five or ten minutes. But it takes work. IG wants to keep feeding me their BS reels. Sometimes I don't think it's worth it, they really make you put up a fight.

Indeed. I've unsubscribed from all subreddits that have become infested with political content, and I've "unfollowed" all of my acquaintances on Facebook and LinkedIn who post anything political. So much more enjoyable.

That didn’t work for me, at least with FB and Insta.

I unfollowed/unfriended anybody who kept posting political stuff. I did the same for anybody I didn’t interact with in real-life regularly.

That basically left my parents, and about 5 friends. None of whom post anything regularly.

So, now my feed is just random shitposts and memes from “influencers”.

So, I deactivated my Meta accounts. And I’m still alive. And probably saner.

I totally understand the desire to avoid politics on all these platforms but in some way I always expect the greater powers want to destroy these platforms and make us even more hopeless.

I can't imagine identifying myself on a forum...much less reddit.

Yes, but it’s the old skool version of social media and the conversations here are generally higher quality and more genuine. I strongly disagree that it’s “on par with /.,xchan”

HN also doesn’t seem to be as susceptible to rage-baiting / outrage-attention-seeking behavior. Not sure exactly what by this is the case but I’d venture a guess it has a lot to do with (1) “dang”s moderation, and (2) not having a personalized algorithm feed.

I’m increasingly of the view that personalized algorithm feeds generated to select the maximum attention grabbing content for each person is a truly dangerous idea.

Frankly, HN is not that engaging (by modern standards). In fact, probably 60-70% of the articles on the front page are boring to me on any given day. I view this as a feature and not a bug. Why should I expect that everything I look at must be maximally engaging?

I wish more sites were old skool like HN.

I learned much from just scrolling HN. Technical articles help me know the latest updates in various areas, dive deep into a topic, or develop new skills. I applied quite a few things I learned in my job. Fundamentally, most links on HN are articles, many of which are quite long, which tend to be more focused and informative.

Completely non-technical ones are few, and you can always choose to ignore them.

The feed is also non-personalized. It's not going to show a few more article on politics just because you linked on one.

By comparison, reddit is much, much worse, almost the opposite of HN. Just a bit better than Twitter, maybe. Most of my reddit browsing/participation falls into tech/hobby, yet I always find that spend more time than I'd like on meaningless stuff, and reddit keeps pushing/promoting political content (even in the context of technology).

My solution? Don't browse reddit unless I really need to for some reason (or if I really don't have anything else to do at that time).

I'm here to talk about technology and it's usage. I'm not here to socialize, I don't know your name, don't care, and haven't even looked at your username. You're just a sentence to me. It's more impersonal than the old newsgroups. How is it social?

I disagree with the often stated claim that HN is social media!

To me, HN is more like an online forum.

IMHO for a service to be defined as Social Media it needs to at least have a 'social graph' of some kind.

HN has never suggested an account to follow, or tried to suggest trending posts or topics to me.

Yes, HN does have a voting system. But that to me doesn't make it social media. HN posts are not measured and promoted based on engagement.

> Why do you exclude HN from your list? It is literally social media

I didn't exlude it from my list. See here:

> I’ve been off of social media (aside from HN, WhatsApp and discord) for years

I did, however, leave it out of this list

> Reddit, instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, etc are all the equivalent of digital junk food

because I don't consider HN to be digital junk food.

If HN is social media, then old online forums from the time before "social media" are also social media.

Not GP, but feel similarly. I'll offer my 2 cents:

> but with the dial turned down a little.

Exactly for this reason. Yes, HN is a social network. And if it follows the same enshittification path as the others, I will be gone from here too. But until then, to me (YMMV) it still provides a bit of entertainment and news without rotting my brain.

Even the analogy works. Fast food is not that bad... in moderate quantities (/"with the dial turned down a little")

This has been my exact issue with giving up reddit. It's really hard to replace very niche topics without it, since many online forums are dead. I also append so many searches on google with "reddit" because the top results are generally SEO spam.

Reading "You should quit reddit" helped a little. The author tries to reframe your hidden beliefs about reddit like "finding useful information" or "it's filled with experts." Helped me to realize I was spending more time reading about my hobbies than actually doing them. Though I understand it's not that simple, doing requires more energy, etc.

I have found this to be completely untrue. Yes, maybe not at the same scale that Reddit is, but if you dig, there's a community for everything. You can find what you're looking for.

That said, I recognize that I am speaking completely for myself in regards to my own interests. YMMV.

You can potentially rely on friends or family members to source such information (e.g., only one member of the household really needs to be checking the local group, etc...)

I think too that one thing that's important is to decide beforehand -- what can I do? What would I be willing to do?

That is to say, some people really are willing to be activists. They will organize protests and boycotts and things like that.

Other people are in marginalized communities and are trying to get a feel for whether they should move to a different region or even a different country.

Some folks don't really have a plan but they want to stay informed. If at some point a magical line is crossed, they might suddenly say, "That's IT! I can't take it anymore! I have to DO SOMETHNG!" and that's when they'll become activists.

But some folks are realistically never going to lift a finger to help themselves or anybody else. They'll just bitch online and/or be stressed.

What I'm working on is figuring out in what ways I might, in the right situation, be moved to contribute. If things get really bad (and they will), what will I realistically be doing? I'm disabled, so I can't be out in the streets. If things get even worse, I might write about the niche public health / politics topics I've accidentally become an expert in. And if something happens where medicare and medicaid are shut off, well then all hospitals everywhere will basically be non-functional. This will be a crisis for all but most immediately for the chronically ill -- any of us at that point who are able to will be leaving the country ASAP.

In other words, I need to know enough to keep writing (which I would do anyways) and I need to know when things are hopeless enough that a person with a messed up spine should travel out of the country anyways. That is currently all I need to know because it's all that is actionable for me.

There is a massive temptation to doomscroll into infinity, but that merely serves the enemies of sanity. I know what happens next because I've read Sarah Kendzior and Hannah Arendt. It's not good. But I also know that one of the first things that happened during the anti-semitic purges in Nazi Germany was that a ton of Jews got appendicitis from stress. Sometimes the body wants to align with power so badly, it aligns even with evil power and against its own interests. We have to be very careful not to poison ourselves and make evil's job easier.

> I stil comment on HN, but the quality of conversations was degrading as well

Yeah I agree that many HN comments are unfortunately pretty bad, but I think this should only motivate people like you and me to try harder to make HN a better place with constructive, useful comments :)

Just use the webapp too, when possible. Remove all native apps on your phones. Don’t read emails.

4. If you do scroll social media and you see a bad post then "punish" the platform by leaving.

Much of the German population in the 1930s and 1940s was not aware of concentration camps, and learned of them once the Allies arrived.

> I've earmarked 3% of my income every month for a list of selected charities that currently includes the ACLU, the HRC, and a short list of smaller ones.

I don't think that's a good investment, considering how badly those organizations failed in order to bring us to today.

Edit: decided I don't want to engage on this issue.

[flagged]

Last week I realized that this is bringing up the same feelings of anxiety as early 2020 where I'm living through something that I have little ability to change and don't know how bad it actually is going to get.

This is great advice, thanks for this! Whenever I've been in a stressful work situation using this approach has always led to better outcomes.

That’s also an alarm bell right there. If the answer to the question “Does this article/headline want me to feel anything?” is Yes, than it’s emotional bait. If its “boring” than it’s probably more neutral.

Emotional reactivity is the psychological name I believe. High reactivity means more anxiety, stress and sometimes sign of a disorder.

I’ve been sticking to the weekly edition of The Economist for years to stay informed while escaping the news cycle. The US coverage is remarkably good. The weekly cadence mean I’m often a week behind the news, but to me that’s a feature. The editorial pieces (those expressing “the opinion of the newspaper”) are kept separate as “Leaders” and I read them last, if it all; I usually read each issue back-to-front following a tip from HN years ago.

For US-interested people, I’d also like to recommend Checks and Balance, a podcast by some of The Economist’s US reporters.

Focus on investigative journalism. Places that do their own research. You'll likely get less big picture stuff but the tradeoff is worth it

ProPublica is a good example: https://www.propublica.org/

Focus on outlets that prioritize reporting. You can't find a "neutral" outlet -- all human beings have biases, and that gets magnified once we're talking about collective human endeavors such as newspapers, magazines, etc. But we can at least avoid solipsism ("the view that the self is the only reality") by grounding ourselves in outside, shared reality. That's what reporting is -- actually being at a place in real life, talking to actual people involved. Sure, the transmission of those observations will inevitably be shaped by the human reporter's own biases, but you're still getting access to shared reality. Even if the opinions aren't ones you share, you can at least see what they're based on and so have some ability to make your own evaluation on if the implicit conclusions the reporter is drawing match up with the base facts they are sharing.

> So what are people reading?

I've been liking AllSides. They aggregate news from all parts of the spectrum, so you get stuff ranging from Jacobin / Daily Beast all the way to Fox News / Breitbart (I'm not commenting on the truthfulness of or recommending any of these sources, just using them as an example of how wide ranging the sources being pulled from are)

For each headline, they pick a left, center, and right source and show that headline. They also show various headlines either side misses along with which side of the media is covering it. And other stuff, but mostly I just care about the news.

It helps with avoiding echochambers. One side's doomerism usually ends up being what another side's cheering. Given the current political climate that's been especially helpful to my stress levels.

Don't have a specific advise, but generally I don't consume nor trust news articles about given country, from given country. So I read about my central European homeland from neighboring news, or BBC/Guardian for example.

Its more difficult with US since every fart affects rest of the world, sometimes massively, but some sort of averaging in my mind does it for me. Or at least I think it does, what is truly objective is a goal worthy of maybe academic discussions, I don't think individual can easily even get to it and realize 'this is it'.

There is no such thing as an unbiased new source. Rpoerting only articles with pure fact there is still selection bias in what topics are covered and what facts are presented. Giving equal coverage across articles and within results in both sides reporting which can seriously tilt the article.

Choose reputable sources and read with an understanding of the corespondent's perspective as well as the publication's. Diversify your choices to not isolate yourself.

Almost every story has sides. Multiple at a time. Depending on people and their cultural background involved or observing. Ask one people about a story, and might say completely different things than another. This is just the nature of humanity, nothing novelty was said here.

Choose something where they at least try.

My long time favorite is The Economist. They have writers there committed to a certain kind of message, true, like everywhere, putting on a glass supporting their preconceptions, yet the overall tone is somewhat analytical, at least trying to look behind and around, trying to use multiple viewpoints. If they miss some, you might add yours pretty easily (on your own or from other sources), and so you will be empowered by better vintage point at the matter than without their help. That's much more than nothing, at least compared to the vast majority (I believe).

I am sure there are even better alternatives where the being emotional first and professionally outraged all the time is frowned upon too. Definitely avoid bbc.co.uk despite their facade of being in depth and balanced. They actually say nothing more than repetition of the events mixed with lots of emotions nowadays, even their selection of topics are outrage oriented.

So many once great media outlets were bought by billionaires and now all have the same editorial slant. It's extremely frustrating. In there modern world where would Woodward and Bernstein work? Propublica? Even where there is a will to do that kind of work the funding is even harder to secure. The reporters have to pick and choose their stories.

They've lost majority in the 2023 elections.

The current president (serving his second term) is a big fan of Trump though.

If that could somehow be automated that would be cool

I swore off all television news except PBS Newshour. It's way less stressful than having cable/local news on in the background all the time.

I wish there were more news sources that enabled this. There is so much focus being first to cover a story, and dripping out information. My local newspaper had a website redesign a couple years ago, and completely eliminated the chronological story view. I literally have no idea how to browse stories older than what is currently on their main page for the day. There are some great national weekly papers but they all assume you've already heard the daily news and instead focus on supplementing it with deep dives on selected issues, and don't provide any summary that can be used as a primary news source.

Indeed, 40 years ago, if we weren't getting our news from the TV, we quite often got it via weekly news magazines and Sunday newspapers.

Am I on the wrong page or were there only 4 articles on North America for all of January?

Another bonus is that you get accurate into that way. I've lost count of how many times the tweet/article gets it completely wrong.

I must agree, but I think the global public's awareness has been shocked into growth. I find the biggest problem with social media is actually user error. Unfortunately social media apps have become so complex that many have given up on curating their feeds. This is critical. If you can tune your social media to show you _interesting_ things, you can stay informed, possibly get good context, and not lose your mind.

Is your comment propaganda?

There was just as much "large pain" being inflicted on people in the previous 4 years, it just didn't affect you personally.

my advice to you that cant breathe it in is leave your fantasy where propaganda is pollution and join reality where it does not impact you. also if you live in reality instead of the fantasy, you will just be less outraged in general.

How about you read actual news, not already half-digested propaganda vomit? You do not have to live in polluted wasteland of western media propaganda! Big media failed 1000x since war on terror, and Bush lies, yet you still consume their shit!

Simplest way is to read media from independent country. India is good, perhaps Arabic countries.

Next level are independent channels on Telegram and Youtube. 10 min daily summary on war situation goes very long way.

> constant lying

Selective truth is far more effective, and more common, propaganda. Not in omitting important context from a story, but by omitting or burying (or simply never seeking out) entirely stories you don't want heard, and emphasizing stories you do want heard. In essence, holding up a funhouse mirror to society.

This is the propaganda you get when all your reporters think they are being honest and uncensored, but they all deeply care about the same set of issues, and are deeply ambivalent about another set.

This, plus the A/B testing of headlines to maximize clicks has lead inexorably to the current information environment.

Our intuitions, outrage, and knee-jerk reactions are being weaponized to gain clicks, votes, donations, and "action".

Many a dictatorship has fallen in the wake of social media revolutions. I wonder how long democracy can last?

In a would-be-funny-if-it-weren't-tragic ironic twist both of the two main US parties see themselves as the last guardians of democracy and frame their opponents as Evil, against which "any means necessary" is the only reasonable course of action.

(Yes, the party you disagree with is way worse and it's all their fault, this whataboutism indeed has to end, absolutely)

And here we all are.

You cannot logic someone out of something they didn't logic themselves into. 90% of what we feel is primal in-group survival.

For youtube, you can put the video in theater mode, which makes the video the full width of your window, and pushes recommendations down below it. With this I only ever see recommendations at the end of the video.

As a general solution for us techies, you can have user defined style sheets that selectively override the site's CSS, either using a plugin like Stylus, or Firefox's built-in userContent.css. Inspect the website, find the id name (or class if it is unique enough) for the content you want to go away and put the following in your user CSS.

   #<id> {
      display: hidden;
   }

I go to extremes compared to most others, but I log into YT with a browser profile where history is not kept and don't log in. The front page is basically empty. I have a local web page with links to creators whose content I enjoy. I check out one of my favorite creators and see what new videos they have to offer. The benefit of this is that the first few rounds of recommendations are actually mildly useful since the algorithm knows nothing about you and you haven't showed it much for it to use since I'm usually logging in through a vpn.

It's crazy that the best experience (for me, anyway) is achieved by giving it the least amount of information possible.

There's a browser addon, Enhancer for Youtube, that lets you hide recommended videos, among other things

there's actually a great "hidden" way to disable the youtube homepage and shorts across platforms - turn off youtube's watch history feature (myactivity.google.com > youtube history)

I've found that over time this chokes the recommendation system - makes it boring and it now finally refuses to show me any video recommendations on my youtube homepage - just a message asking me to turn history on. of course, you lose your watch history, but I just bookmark the videos I like anyway.

Videos related to the one you're watching may appear, but imo these tend to be based on your subscriptions / more focused / less rabbit-holey (and you can disable those with extensions and such as well).

Clear your history often. My youtube is actually incredible, massive variety and useful topics.

I clear it about once every 2 weeks or month depending on how many of the same topics I see.

It works really well in that if you ignore the content you saw before it forces the algorithm to find unique content because it thinks you don't like the stuff you've seen.

That and cleaning your subscription list. Easily the best platform I have as of now because of that.

Slide the right side of the window off the screen, maybe? Dirty tricks are allowed.

I'm very aggressive with the "not interested" and "don't recommend this channel" buttons, and over time it does mostly get rid of the most obnoxious recs. Right now it's also not recommending much good stuff, either, so YMMV.

There's a Firefox add-on called Distraction free YouTube I used in the past. Maybe try that one

If everything I read online [that I don't pay for] is a form of propaganda, then the only choice I have is to either: 1) weight all information equally 2) bias information based on [personal beliefs XYZ]

I'm trying hard to do #1, mainly because #2 is confirmation bias (and reinforces it).

What other options are there?

I agree. Came on here to say that doing your own research is one way to reduce outrage stress. After reading a top political story in NYT, I hardly ever learn a valid point made by “the other side”. Researching with ChatGPT, or reading conservative media, I can usually find some. This makes the other side a little more rational in my imagination and reduces the stress.

Steelman your opponent’s arguments! It’s not just good for thinking, it’s relaxing!

You're absolutely correct, but you're missing an important detail.

I'm assuming you're more aligned politically with the left. If you're not, I apologize for the assumption. To someone who is more right-wing, the bias of e.g. NYT is just as blatant as Fox News is to you, and Fox may come off as "fair". This is because the propaganda is specifically intended to land with their own audience. It's tuned to your sensibilities.

It's very much a "fish in water" scenario. Trying to read articles from multiple sources can help, and questioning why you agree with one take over another. In the end, these are pretty sophisticated operations, and they know how to prey on their targets.

In the last week what headline and story do you think was overblown by the NYT?

>meticulously fact-based

Interesting...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_York_Times_con...

I'm not picking on them specifically. If you'd said this about any news outlet, I wouldn't believe you.

For anyone wanting to skip the outrage but still get news and analysis, I can't recommend the PBS News Hour highly enough.

Today's episode, for example: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/february-5-2025-pbs-news-h...

> news exists for the sole purpose of creating outrage in order to generate ad impressions

I like the idea of distinguishing news from journalism. If we say they're distinct, then yeh I think I can agree that news is–via weird unintentional evolution of incentives–an outrage machine, but true journalism is a wondrous and professional exercise of human scrutiny on centres of otherwise unchecked power. We need that.

in some handwavy simplification:

[start] data --(meaning/interpretation)--> information --(interpretation/understanding)-> knowledge ----> ...

probably more levels. At any step one can take action.. faster if more to the start but also less thoughtfull/"correct". primal instincts are at the start

the whole point of news-machine is to never get to beyond information.. same as <2sec video-frame switching..

See i even go further, i disagree that consuming _more_ propaganda is somehow an antidote to other propaganda you consumed. My strong belief on this is that the more media you consume the less accurate your worldview becomes

How often do you actually act on something you saw in the news, within, say, a month?

I avoid news qua news as much as possible and try to read up on things after a month or so, when the heat has gone out and more sober analysis has taken place. E.g. I'm vaguely aware there was a plane crash recently and look forward to reading a proper writeup of that at some point, but I doubt there's anything to be learnt from diving into detailed coverage right now.

That's a false equivalence which is at the heart of the issue. You seem to be be assuming that "being informed" makes you better placed and/or more willing to take right action, but I'm not convinced that's the case

>So what's your alternative? Living in ignorance until it's too late?

Too late for what? you are _already_ a slave to the system from birth to grave. If there is anything you can do, do it regardless of the news which is a distraction/propaganda.

Thanks! Good point.

I think there will always be some hallucinations until they're solved on a model level, but I'll also try to nudge AI now to be more precise with the headlines.

Can't share the full prompt, but I share methodology on the about page: https://www.newsminimalist.com/about

If you ever read an article about something you are knowledgeable about you might find that the content is just as misleading or downright wrong as the headline.

At least the toggles even for free users let you immediately disable market stuff, right alongside changing theme.

I don't have a subscription so far, I just use it in its default setting. I'm not sure there is a filter like that even with a subscription, though.

There usually are links to the news articles and the corresponding Wikipedia articles. (Though sometimes it's redirected me to some nirvana-page that just shows '[object Object]', not sure what that's about.)