Personally, I, as a programmer, read the news in the same way as my grandad who was a farmer. I read a printed weekly publication (in my case The Economist) on Sunday morning. Outside of Sunday morning I don't read the news at all.
I prefer printed news to media-supported news, because I think the imagery (I acknowledge The Economist still has images) and presentation of news, especially on TV detracts from the message it's trying to convey a lot of the time. After reading some of Neil Postman's books (notably Amusing Ourselves to Death), I find it strange to watch televised news whereby one minute I'm watching footage of a disaster, then the next minute I'm seeing sports news updates or an advert. Just like normal learning, I think news demands longer form content for proper understanding.
Reading the news on a low frequency basis also gives time for news stories to properly develop. Breaking news can be filled with speculation and incorrect details, which even if you keep up with, you can miss later corrections or crucial details. Not to mention the stress involved in it. Chances are if some real breaking news happens, like a natural disaster or war, I'll hear somebody else tell me.
The basic idea is you get one article at a time fed to you (no headline scrolling like Reddit or HN), and doesn’t let you proceed to the next article until you’ve scrolled through at least x% of the current article or spent a minimum time threshold reading it. Maybe allow a limited number of “skips” per day if the content really isn’t for you. Basically the idea is to force you to slow down and actually engage with the content by removing mechanisms that promote mindless scrolling and dopamine rush.
I just began reading amusing ourselves to death.
I read The Economist, which doesn't cover sports at all.
It's mostly 1-2 page long articles for each story, blocked into categories (UK, Europe, US, The Americas, Asia, China, Business, Finance, Tech, Culture at the end).
It's not exclusively (or mostly) U.S.A. residents who complain about contemporary politics topics getting flagged. We see plenty of complaints from Europe and elsewhere.
We've long accepted that there is a large overlap between politics and technology. The Snowden leaks in 2013 were huge on HN, as were several other Wikileaks releases well before that.
HN has never been a politics-free zone. It’s just subject to the same standard as everything else on HN: there has to be some “significant new information” to the story.
Right now I see two posts about Rust (don't program in it, don't care), Kyber is hiring (retired, not interested in a job), etc. That's fine though, I just don't visit those links/comments.
I think it's a fair issue for people trying to avoid triggering news topics. Sometimes the headlines can be really inflammatory. Avoiding them might be feasible for you and me but may be tougher for others. For example, the top post right now is titled, "ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants", which is tricky because it is tech related and straddles the line of politics and tech. But I can see how someone might get triggered by reading that. Telling someone, "Just don't click on it", may be akin to telling an alcoholic, "Just don't drink that poured beer" in this case.
It would be nice if you could unsubscribe from certain tags like you can on Tildes. That way, you would have slight control over what you see while allowing others to keep what they want to see.
I haven't really noticed politics of other countries get flagged that much, does it? Other than stuff that looks like propaganda from one country against another, that seems to get quickly flagged.
Finally I don't know what makes you think that HN is an unrelated to American politics forum, given that the guidelines of what the forum is for is quite lax.
Currently on the front page I see three stories that are not tech related, if I expand the definition of tech to include anything math or science related, there is really only one story, ironically this one that you posted in.
Often however I can find as many as 6 stories on the front page that are not tech and not any politics, as HN also handles art, history, and writing quite well.
But for some reason you seem to think it's a place for tech, and American politics should be kept out, which I find somewhat funny.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panorama_(British_TV_programme
There are other platforms for discussing Trump and his shenanigans. Reddit for example.
Surely the answer is, when you see news related keywords in an article title, to simply not click through. Same as when there’s so bit of technology or corporation that doesn’t interest you.
They explicitly stated they knew where to read / hear about US politics and did not see the need to have that news domain echoed across every forum.
It would seem that in your view, we should be discussing all things at all times due to this "oppressor" mindset.
This simply cannot be true.
I fully agree that it all seems fucked and there is no point in following anything other than specific tech stuff I'm interested in. Anything else actually important someone else in my life will probably mention it to me. Or the explosion will vaporise me and knowing it's coming won't have helped much.
However, looking at the current political climate in my own country, I too have lost faith in them solving local and global issues. When the people I can vote for don't actually solve pressing societal problems, then what's the point? Now factor in the influence of people in large countries that are in power that I can't even vote for...
There is a glimmer of hope that the EU now seems to have finally found some balls somewhere though, with their response to the Greenland situation. Maybe they've finally learned that a strategy of appeasement does not work for strongmen in power (hey, that sounds familiar...)
This is a completely human response to the horrible things happening the world both domestic and abroad.
It’s also history repeating itself: doing nothing when bad things are happening in our communities is what allows them to happen.
Think what the villages around the concentration camps must have known and yet did nothing.
Sure you could just focus on tech. You alone can’t stop Donald Trump or Stephen Miller from their racist move toward autocracy usurping norms and the world order … but you can join in with others who are trying to make a difference.
Apathy is a human emotion to such dire things. But we are better than that.
Sounds familiar. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (Attribution appears to be a matter of debate.)
Maybe the villages around concentration camps did nothing because they were consuming nazi propaganda.
The point being made by the author is that "following the news" nowadays has nothing to do with being informed. Instead, it became about being constantly bombarded by a barrage of noise and nonsense to constantly grab your attention.
So instead, by finding a monthly publication giving him an overview of the local, European and world news, the author is looking for a filter removing all the unnecessary noise. And the month granularity should be more than enough to allow him to be informed about important changes.
People who consume a lot of news tend to have very shallow understanding of a broad range of current events. Worse they tend to be passive receivers of news instead of active seekers of information with intent to understand the world.
As a result, they are very susceptible to manipulation through selection of what makes the news they tend to consume. They become passive pawns in political power struggles.
No evidence supports your sentiment. Find an example of democracy that arose from citizens "being informed about what's happening." The Athenians limited democratic participation to a small educated elite. The American Founders had the same instinct, excluding more people than they included.
Demoracy dies in front of our eyes right now, in the USA, the most media-saturated culture in history. You might blame that on an ignorant and uncritical population. You might call them uninformed, or misinformed. As Jefferson understood the problem doesn't come from people not reading the news, but rather people not educated enough to understand, think critically, or even care.
For the rest of the news, I am considering subscribing to a magazine that covers important events in Germany, the EU, or the world every few months. This kind of format filters out short-term noise and fear-driven stories.
As we said in the UK in my childhood, "Today’s news is tomorrow’s chip* paper".
Personally I think once a week magazines / reviews are a good compromise. I’m not sure how useful reading 3 month old news will be.
Even this is privilege. Try "one's identity".
Last year, legal immigrants were fine. Today, their kids are kidnapped and used as bait to take them to Alcatraz. And that's not even the identity I'm mostly referring to.
Very cool stance OOP, thank you for identifying yourself as the type of centrist heaven will reject at the gate and angels will never get tired of the reaction to the shrug.
The web has destroyed that business model, because the news industry now controls far less advertising space, so there is no longer enough advertising revenue to support quality journalism. The broadsheets are in real financial trouble, and most have turned to tabloid-style articles (albeit ones that promote more sophisticated worldviews) in order to pull in those social-media clicks.
I find myself increasingly interested in publications like The Economist and The Financial Times, simply because their readerships have financial interest in actually knowing what's going on in the world, and so they can charge a subscription price that supports quality journalism.
1) Financial news, specifically the Financial Times - middle, Bloomberg - slightly left leaning, and the Economist, slightly right leaning. I've found that they have incentives to keep their news as close to just presenting the pure information as possible, as their readers are often making investment decisions based on the quality of the information, resulting in wanting zero "spin". This isn't the case for the NYT or WSJ, which have an incentive misalignment.
2) Anything that shows up on Hacker News. I trust that if something is important enough to get posted here (and make the front page), then I should probably be aware of it. The comments are for the most part measured, analytical, and thought-provoking.
https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...
Eg. no law in Poland regulates legal gender change process. But there is a series of directves for courts on how this should be addressed issued by whoever is in the govt at the moment. One govt issued a directive that those are low prority, other that spouse and children should have a power to veto, another that actually those are high priority and then govt-appointed judges in the supreme court decided to veto the veto and implement new procedure altogether. And none of this is in the law - just directives for judges from pliticans and higher judges.
Perhaps we could pay people to follow important topics, politicians, important lobbyists and see what they're doing and claiming they want to do. They could send us summaries to save us time.
We could call those people journalists.
Neither were out bishops speaking about rainbow disease and calling us all ideology, not people.
You are privileged if you can afford to only rely on official sources.
In the USA today (and many other places, but I'm in the US), anyone of any kind of minority is the target of beatings, kidnappings and possibly public executions by the government right now. Not exactly something you can ignore.
If you go on reddit, unless you've curated your subreddits and never touch /all or /popular, it's very heavy with 'news'. The Google app, a left-swipe by default on your Android phone is all 'news'. Twxtter/Bluesky/etc. are full of news. Avoiding news entirely is almost impossible on today's internet.
I have had success with this approach too, but key to all this is being careful about where you go online to minimise exposure. These days I don't use any 'social media' platforms, but I do visit HN and BBC news (both of which are of higher quality than most places, and crucially only have a few stories on a typical day - the rate of new content is low). This way I stay informed without falling down rabbit holes about every twist and turn of every (mostly awful/depressing) thing happening in the World.
Same when it comes to staying on top of tech news -- almost everything is a flash in the pan. I used to bookmark cool new products, never revisit them, and then a year later realise half of the links are now dead.
One thing I realised though is I still need to mindlessly browse an endless feed every once in a while for some downtime. One way or another I'll want to fill that time with something, so it's a question of being mindful what goes in it. So my drugs of choice are Hacker News, and carefully curated YouTube subscriptions.
More than a decade ago, I stopped following general news and learn about things asynchronously. However, I had picked up a few topics that I like to follow and do follow them. Since the Pandemic, I had settled on just a few niche areas of Tech and Science to follow — which, of course, quite a few of them land on Hacker News when I submit them.
Around the end of 2025, I picked up the actual printed Physical Newspaper again. A lot of the news seems like yesterday’s Jam to me. I’m going to continue reading the newspaper, Slow and Smooth, picking the ones I want to read and ignoring everything else.
I really dislike the notion that events outside of your country are somehow not important.
Sure, do what you want, ignore news if that makes you feel better, but do realise for many, they are not afforded this kind of luxury.
If you want to do more, you can find some protests to participate in. Or do something other than protest like clean a local park or feed hungry people.
If I spend 3 hours on a random Tuesday consuming the news, that doesn't help anyone. It does the opposite; it makes me less able to focus, and makes me have less personal power and discipline to affect change in the world.
They used to show news channels.
He said clients would come in all stressed out. So they changed to a home improvement channel.
"Home & Garden Television". Lots of shows about flipping houses, etc.
It used to be far more instructional (Julia Child-esque) before it and Food Network got swept up in the reality TV craze. It still has the "bones" of its former self though.
That said, you do notice it when the currency crashes.
I find I will hear about the relevant things from people and events around me, whether or not I follow the news. The news doesn't have any actual bearing on my life but the news does have a few stories that do have bearing.
So theres no downside of not following the news. I will hear what I need to and want to hear about from people around me or other sources.
Some think that in not consuming what they think I should consume, that this is a morally wrong thing to do. They will be personally offended, how can they ignore my story? There is a case that if we all stopped following the news then how can the other sources inform us, so there would still be a benefit to reporting...
Consider two anthropologists examining a culture. One only has remote access to every news source the culture produces for itself, the other can only talk face to face with people. Which one will understand the people more?
This is by a bash script in a cron job that reads RSS feeds and grabs the headlines and links to articles, so I can get a flurry of tech news and general news headlines without having to go into detail on each topic (which in news terms is typically slanted with some sort of bias).
So I can stay up to date on general happenings, speedily. It is fairly simple to set up - a LLM will write a suitable bash script to parse RSS XML and grab links and headlines in moments.
So we shouldn't do the same with things we read on the internet and our brain.
But today I read them differently. I read news site, with some curation (e.g., settings for threshold for articles that comes up in various fields) together with a few favorite sites (e.g., HN)
I've posted the same message so many time I could get banned but if you live in the UK then Private Eye is what you want here. It's every fortnight, very funny and a bastion of genuine journalism (see the Paul Foot Award they give out each year)
In particular LLM summaries are great for this. Introduces risk of hallucinations which is not awesome, but it does tend to neutralise the rage bait tone and tricks that are pervasive these days. Tradeoff but one that has been working for me
Smart guy.
I note that the complaint "I can't do anything about it" throws doubt on "it doesn't affect me". But both of those seem to me to miss the point, which is to get new ideas.
I realised that if I exclusively read business news I can avoid a good amount of the fluff and sensationalism. I made a browser extension which pushes the headlines from Bloomberg, Financial times Euronews Business and a few others on to my new tab from their RSS, and it's more than enough to give me a nugget of what's going on in the world without being overloaded. 1 item per new tab.
End result is: I don't read the news, but I still know what's going on without the need for Social Media's hot take.
Can't say it's the best extension in the world, but it scratches my own itch and I'm happy with it. Sometimes that's good enough.
It's been discussed several times on HN[2]. I had periods I go through without news. It's been harder to do that lately.
And these days, you're misinformed with a good dose of dramatic Hans-Zimmer-like soundtrack and visuals designed to evoke fear and outrage.
1) a large number of people are dissatisfied with the current product
2) but aren’t willing to pay for an alternative which solves the problem in the ideal way (for them)
There have been dozens of attempts at weekly news summary newsletters, minimal news sites, etc. over the years. None ever seem to go anywhere because no one wants to pay for something they are deliberately deciding has little value.
It makes me think of budget airlines: constantly critiqued for being uncomfortable and using dark patterns to get every last dollar - yet people consistently just book the cheapest flight possible.
And to think Americans used to take pride in being nation of freedom.
You may not follow the news right until they start knocking on your door, or just obliterate your house in a rocket strike.
Even more tiring is to see how useful idiots [1] happily take the propaganda pushed by the media and trumpet it as if it were pure gospel, often with dire consequences. Should I just quit following the legacy media and the more recent anti-dotes and try to live here in quiet and solitude on the farm? Well, no, I don't think I should. I will be confronted with te results of the media poisoning the minds of their victims the next time I go to a city and find the roads blocked by a crowd of people shouting inane slogans. Where did they get those from, what are they blathering about, why does this crowd of screechy weasels hollering about some supposed misdeed performed by some government somewhere far from here occupy the station? Almost invariably it comes down to the propaganda pushed by the media - nowadays usually some on-line version which is amplified up by the legacy dinosaurs and trumpeted by the other titles which are more often than not owned by the same conglomerate - which the useful idiots uncritically pick up and use as their guide star. I read this stuff because I want to know what ideas the media is trying to amplify and which they are attempting to suppress. I read it because I sometimes have to quench whatever fuse has been lit by them in the heads of my children. So, tiring as it is I'll keep the feeds running and try to follow my way through the mire of deceptions, half-truths, outright lies and other propaganda which is what goes for 'news'.