A part of me is overloaded with tons of news (which turn out being a noise after all) and «Last hour Ipad deals!!!» garbage in RSS. Another part thinks all the worthy news are showing up on HN within a few hours anyway.
The question is, am I missing out on anything if I only visit HN?
Longer answer: Staying in any kind of echo chamber for too long is a bad idea. Like-minded people will reinforce ideas that they like, and it can be an isolating and potentially damaging experience to exclusively read from HN. The real crown jewel in HN's crown is crowdsourced link aggregation, and there are a lot of aggregators for a lot of different topics. Take some time to find quality sources, vet them for a short while and incorporate them into your daily reading. There's a lot of information out there these days, so it can seem appealing to hide from it. There are also really high-quality information sifting tools available though.
Yes. Consider paying a small amount to specific news agencies for news you trust, and graze the margins of other, including possibly contrary view sites to understand perspectives.
I pay for the guardian. I read nytimes, wapo and drudge to understand how others see it.
Which world events do you consider important and directly relevant to yourself? I find that things like election dates, covid restrictions etc still get to us some way (or we look them up when needed). Nearly all of it is irrelevant.
“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.” — Nassim Taleb
> Which world events do you consider important and directly relevant to yourself?
I find this kind of view depressingly common. Knowing about world events breaks us out of our various bubbles and makes us aware of what is going on with our fellow human beings. It is short-sighted to only focus on things relevant to you at this moment.
And irrelevant to what? Your career? Social standing? If so, then throw away movies, all fiction books, etc. those don’t result in anything really actionable either.
(This isn’t an argument for up-to-the minute news, though. I sort of agree there.)
For me it often is up-to-the minute news vs no news. I think the format kind of encourages reporting on everything, not on what's important. The best heuristic I found to decrease wasted time and being more happy is to not read any news and accept that I'll miss something.
I am interested in longer form issues like inequality, economic development, important regulation etc, but don't really consider them news. Reading information on those can also wait a few week or months, and then longer essays or books will have a better analysis.
The bubble-breaking effect of staying informed is valuable, but I don't know how to weigh it properly against spending time well every day. Personally, I found singular focus to be the most satisfying and am not ashamed of that.
Stuff that's actually useful to you/me/someone else is a rather subjective set. As an example, I'm interested (with explicit purpose) in travel restrictions around Europe, especially now in Covid times. Other people might be fortunate enough to not care about stuff like that
I guess it depends on how interested you are in what’s going on in the world, whether it’s relevant to you or not.
Even if I was just to look at the news that directly relevant to me, there’s plenty that (rightly) doesn’t make it to HN. For example, if there are an increasing number of terror attacks in a part of the world I’ve been to or plan to go to then I’d consider that news important but not HN-worthy.
This argument only works in the limiting case. If 1% of HN readers read outside HN and post the good stuff here, that would keep the front page well stocked.
Well stocked with what that 1% like and appreciate, so we'd need for that 1% to be representative of the whole, otherwise users will leave until it becomes representative enough. But hey, that's a wild guess
The experience of reading a newspaper every day really startled me. When I'm given a set of news items picked by a knowledgeable editor, I hear about things I just never would've sought out on my own.
Go and read "Stop reading the news" by Rolf Dobelli. No, you do not miss anything with any news source, but but you may want to take steps to avoid being in only this one echo chamber.
What is news? Consider reading a 10-20-50-100 year old news magazine, it is a lot easier to see through the biases and agendas in todays news after this. A lot of it is PR or fear-inducing to sell you status or prop up the weapons industry.
That said I do like long-form news / docs that focus on the ordinary man on the ground. Just remember there is never a truly objective lens.
If you just want a different view that includes politics consider Al Jazeera english and Russia Today english.
I agree, Al Jazeera and Russia Today definitely show another perspective (also biased) than the usual opinions you'll find in any American news network. To add to this comment, if you want to see a European view then I can highly encourage you to look at the French-German documentaries produced and broadcasted by Arte. They have tons of documentaries (most also translated to English), it is totally free to stream them and they will portray the rest of the world through a mainstream social-democratic European lense (also very biased).
Yes, some of the docs by Arte are great! I actually watched one with my mother a few weeks back regarding proxy wars and oil and she was blown away by connecting the dots on so much news from when she was ~20-30. (She is 70+ today and has lived in northern Europe all her life.)
Other docs on Arte feel like emotional eco-drivel “back to nature” blah blah, very German IMHO, but it can be somewhat enlightening to hear that point of view too. I am very pro nature/environment, but do not want to dismantle capitalism and remove all forms of mass-production that some Arte stuff advocates.
Popular HN story topics are pretty narrow when it comes to seeing the bigger picture of what's going on in the world.
I don't check often but a quick way to see interesting topical news is seeing the trending tab on Twitter. It's not always meaningful but it does a good job exposing me to things that I wouldn't choose to look up.
HN lacks meaningful discussion on basically any works of art, like films and tv. Sports aren't brought up either. It's not just politics that gets left out. Book recommendations on HN are also mostly focused on productivity and tech. I appreciate that it creates an environment that's not emotionally taxing but I also realize that it is a bubble.
> It's a bubble with great breadth of topic vs insightful comments ratio.
For a narrow range of topics, yes.
But ironically not with anything that might be relevant to analyzing news in general, which is why such stories tend to be banned or flagged, or burst into flames.
I mean news not related to tech. World events, politics, philosophy, art, science (outside of CS), etc. A forum of programmers and developers where mainstream news isn't even on topic unless it presents evidence of some "new or interesting phenomenon" isn't going to post the most important news of the day to begin with (it would likely be flagged as off topic) nor be capable of in-depth conversation about such matters most of the time.
Hacker News just isn't the place to go to be informed about the world.
I wonder if there is a place on the internet with the format of HN and a not so dissimilar quality of comments but focused on World events, philosophy, art, science ( excluding politics because it's too prone to flamewars).
By the way (off topic), sometimes there are threads on HN, that superficially look interesting, but that feel kind of "primitive" if you are used to read philosophy. I notice them probably because on other forum I just expect the thread to be not interesting at all.
I don't have an example at hand, but in those occasions it made me think there must be some kind of corollary of the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect"[0] at play.
On lesswrong, from memeory and in my very humble opinion, the ratio insights to (pompous?) lengthy sentences is way too low. But I will take a look again.
>I wonder if there is a place on the internet with the format of HN and a not so dissimilar quality of comments but focused on World events, philosophy, art, science ( excluding politics because it's too prone to flamewars).
Probably Reddit TBH, but also probably not the main subreddit for any particular topic, so it might take some digging. I hear good things about the quality of /r/askhistorians for instance. Also r/anime_titties/ (seriously.) Occasionally someone will post a thread here about high quality subreddits.
Thanks for reminding me of /r/askhistorians. I had not registered it in my mind as
a source for general consumption. But what the heck is r/anime_titties/ about :) ?
The feed is interesting , but I can't make up my mind on what the main topic of interest is.
HN never has two sides on important topics such as vaccines and science. It also used to be extreamly unaware of Googles role in controlling and censoring the entire Internet but that has changed in the last few years and there is hope of awareness here.
I just find it quite narrow minded in the other topics and very much in the "don't question science" camp.
I personally would argue that the HN community does a good job at applying the scientific method and question unsupported conclusions.
I don't think it's about believing which side is right. Many subjective topics aren't popular on HN because there's no way to reach a census. I have also noticed that most comments don't engage with exaggerated and flame bait language. People are generally listened to and responded to respectfully. There's going to be exceptions, but I see less troll type comments on HN and that's why I respect it as a source.
The "nutjob wacko" opinions are respectfully heard and then respectfully torn apart.
I’ve yet to meet a single person that wasn’t into some weird pseudoscience or just full of hubris that likes to categorize a philosophy of “listen to the experts, look at the literature not isolated studies” as “don’t question science.”
I listen to experts, just the ones arguing that the vaccines are dangerous.
Since when were we not allowed to listen to the experts we think make sense to us? I feel like social media has polarized us so much we can't even talk to eachother anymore if we don't listen to the same experts.
You listen to only one side of the expert argument, that’s an issue. Let’s switch the topic to climate change, would anyone on HN give weight to the 1% of ‘experts’ that deny climate change? No of course not because the consensus of reasonable experts is that climate change is here. Consensus of scientific thought is how we filter for what is true to the best of our knowledge.
>would anyone on HN give weight to the 1% of ‘experts’ that deny climate change?
Yes. Name any consensus opinion and at least one contrarian will show up to denounce it. Just look at COVID - every single thread about it is packed with anti-vaxxers and skeptics.
HN is still a decent news aggregator as long as you turn on "showdead" and browse through new submissions a bit. Upvoted stories and comments are more often one-sided, but there is lots of diversity in what gets submitted, and even discussed at the margins, including some crazy stuff but also some interesting stuff you definitely would not find discussed in mainstream news.
Right now US trending topics that show up for me are football, mets baseball, a celebrity birthday, #caturday, YouTube TV losing disney, Bleach anime, a popular basketball player who was vocally anti-vax entering covid protocol and is barred from playing, Taylor Swift, and an Esports team playing Halo Infinite. I can see worldwide trends but not directly on Twitter.
It's not all important news, but it's really different from what I see on HN and what I would choose to read about.
The news category on twitter for me shows #hodl, a shooting in japan, #womenwhocode, Theranos trial, Amazon warehouse working conditions, Maxwell trial, Omicron news from South Africa, California wildfire, among other things.
> HN lacks meaningful discussion on basically any works of art, like films and tv. Sports aren't brought up either. It's not just politics that gets left out. Book recommendations on HN are also mostly focused on productivity and tech.
And i think that's exactly the reason why so many tech enthusiasts are here.
I don't really care about celebrity news, tv, sports.
Even then, that news can be very local. Not everyone is interested in the saga of Verstappen ( from my country) vs. Hamilton in F1 sports.
I think most people don't care about art here either. But are curious about art generated by ML.
HN is mostly a tech culture blog aggregator. You’ll miss most of hard tech blogposts if you’re here. You’ll also miss almost all startup news. M
If you care about current affairs you’ll miss that too.
Ultimately, there’s no substitute for doing your own aggregation. But a good start is to find someone you like and expand from their Twitter/Substack. For me that’s John Carmack and Gwern.
I believe yes, because it's unavoidable that any mature forum settles on an overton window, accepted ideology, however you want to put it.
I deal with the overload by being a "slow" thinker. I figure that nearly anything worth knowing, will still be worth knowing in a week. The noise will be gone.
It helps to be Old. For instance I have good statistics on the percentage of cases, where I've looked back and regretted supporting a particular party or candidate in an election. This gives me a good handle on whether I need to rethink my political views urgently, or if I can wait until after the next election cycle.
In some parts of the US you can get some local events on patch [1] but coverage is very limited in some states, especially in the midwest. I don't know of any sites that have full unredacted news and as far as I can tell most investigative journalists are either gone or have their own little websites that are excluded from search engines. As far as I know all the corporate news sites are owned by the same handful of parent companies and very restricted on what topics they cover and how they are permitted to spin the events. All of that said I still occasionally find interesting stories on the corporate media sites and just accept that I am only seeing a tiny fraction of what is going on through the lens of a corporation.
I highly recommend The Syllabus (https://www.the-syllabus.com/). It’s paid (not outrageous) and they curate various high quality media (books, articles, academic studies, podcasts, videos, etc.) across a number of topics. When you sign up you choose which areas you’re more interested in and it’s personalized (ever so slightly) based on that.
I don't really think that reading news improves my life. In some cases it directly contradicts my lived experience and understanding (loosely it could be described as propaganda, but often it's just nonsense for clicks). In other cases, it's just fluff.
I do it anyway, but only really because it's accessible. If it weren't a few clicks away, I don't think I'd bother.
Particularly over the past year or so, my life has been improved by simply ignoring what the news is saying because it's been so conflicting and nonsensical.
So, yeah. I'd say that it's only worth doing something if it improves your life. If it does, crack on. If not, well, there's a big world out there and a lot to do.
>The question is, am I missing out on anything if I only visit HN?
Yes, HN is an echo chamber like any other community. The more time you spend here you can see that. Especially if you follow the site with RSS where dead and flagged submissions are also archived, comments there usually paint a better picture about the whole site (ie see the echo chamber part)
My favorite is the minimum 20 point submissions feed. Those usually have enough traction already. Now I don't open every single link but if you find any dead/removed and/or flagged submissions from those then that's where the people usually goes against the hivemind/content guideline of the site. YET it already gained enough points so should be an interesting one https://hnrss.org/newest?points=20
The principal problem (alongside @knaik94) is correlation / orthogonality of news and, to a lesser extent, sources and world-view.
You want a diverse news feed. If you subscribe to, say, the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Reuters they will, almost certainly, cover pretty much the same stories in much the same, safe way. You get correlation of story, worldview and topic. You didn't need to subscribe to all of them. Just one would have covered 99 percent of what you were looking for. I used to read the FT out of that bunch for one gem of orthogonality -- Lucy Kellaway. Sadly, she is long gone.
HN solves part of this problem by crowd-curating a diverse range of sources but there will still be a high correlation of topics (and likely bias / worldview, too).
Long story short, news filtering is a dimensionality reduction and optimisation problem across tensors of different "characteristics; Maybe you really like an echo chamber. Perhaps you really like to get all sides of the story. Maybe you want just news on sports from journalists who hate your team.
That's a tough problem.
But the easiest path is to realise that, by default, almost all news sources are correlated -- so just pick the one you like best and ditch all the others. I promise you won't notice. After that, work on realising, as Taleb has pointed out, that "to be cured of reading news, spend a month reading only news from one year ago". You'll learn pretty quick that outside of reporting facts, opinion is usually junk. Treat it as entertainment.
Speaking of Taleb: how about a "barbell" news strategy? Get 95% of your info from boring mainstream outlets, and the other 5% on unhinged extremist sites?
HN is definitely manipulated as well. But you aren't necessarily missing out on anything if you only visit this site for news at the same time.
If you're genuinely overloaded, I'd say you're probably okay. It might be worthwhile to consider the value of being able to see different perspectives, even if often times the content is rehashed (e.g. What is being said differently? What is omitted in one and not the other?). I think everyone, if they have the time, should take a historiography course because these are the kinds of things you learn about.
It's especially important now, given the technology accelerated world we live in today of effectively instantaneous global mass-communication.
Try finding a state-owned news outlet for a country you don't live in, and filter to their coverage of your country specifically. The layers of removal mean it's already filtered by stuff so important that people in another country noticed. And an outside view is usually going to be less biased, except on a handful of issues that'll be extremely obvious.
I strongly disagree with this. Foreign journalists tend to concentrate in small areas, usually major cities, and talk mostly with other journalists and power elites. They usually aren't doing man-on-the-street interviews or tough investigative journalism. You may just be getting a distorted echo of how certain factions within your country wants to be seen to the outside world.
I have seen American and Latin American coverage of UK events and it's like Gell-Mann amnesia on crack.
Ideally you'd be reading fluently in a bunch of languages so you can go over to news.google.XX and skim some headlines too see what's on people's minds all over the world. Turns out not a lot of people care very much about the latest SCOTUS shenanigans
You’re not missing much, but you may be curious to know:
Joe Biden is president. Inflation is rampant. There is a new variant (Omicrom) that can get through two doses but might be less severe. Kentucky is recovering from severe weather. US left Afghanistan this year.
News those days is nothing more than "socially acceptable entetainment for grownups". There’s a reason why lot of industry call the whole package "infotainment".
What’s worth reading? What has an impact on your life. What will change some of your decisions. In that regard, Proust told it a long time ago: what’s important is in the books (probably already around you). News is just a distraction except for your very professional niche (and even in that case, if an information is important for you, the world will manage to pass the memo).
So : is it even worth reading news? No, for most people. (in fact, the world would probably be better if less people were reading the news).
If news in entertainment, then the answer is clear: read what is fun for you
> News those days is nothing more than "socially acceptable entetainment for grownups". There’s a reason why lot of industry call the whole package "infotainment".
This site, while great, is incredibly US centric so most of what is posted barely makes sense to me. I find myself hitting that "hide" button often enough that I started thinking about writing a Firefox extension that would hide anything that has China in the title and everything from a popular US newspaper. The amount of manufactured concent that ends up being posted here is just overwhelming. No wonder I find myself baffled reading the usual takes on matters outside tech
I really like Drudge Report because the layout is so basic and similar to websites from the early days of the web. I figure it's also worth noting that despite the conservative lean, I do find it is a good source for lots of various world news.
I think you have the problem right but the answer wrong.
You're overexposed to the firehose of noise and want to get away from that but still be reasonably informed. This is a good idea.
If you can pick one or two high quality publications (one local, one national/global) to check once per day (many have really good newsletters), you'll probably be pretty happy with that balance.
HN is not the right tool for this because it is a tech forum that sometimes discusses news.
Most news (geopolitics, economic indicators, natural disasters, etc.), no. Read it only if you enjoy it.
However, I think one type of news is essential: that about what your government is doing. Are legislators being led by lobbyists? Are regulators captured by big business? Are politicians breaking promises without good reasons?
Following this, and voting accordingly, is necessary for democracy to function.
What you miss out on is anything to do with your geographic community. Try looking for sources of local journalism like alt weeklies and zines based in your area. These tend to be published less often and curate for long-running issues rather than attention-grabbing headlines
I follow soylentnews.org for "nutritious" tech news. It's an old slashdot fork, from back when /. changed ownership (IIRC), so it must be going for almost a decade already. Their determination to provide only high quality submissions is admirable and yet I never see it mentioned anywhere.
I make a point to read local news and the comments (and occasionally facebook). I think only reading HN tricks you into thinking people will a) read the whole article b) understand the article c) have read further on the topic d) will contribute respectfully to the conversation and e) cite sources and question things said.
I don’t habitually read or watch the traditional news media for a long time. I don’t feel any negative effect.
What I do instead is I have a curated RSS feed of things I’m interested in. Not only websites by the way, I try to RSS anything. Subreddits, GitHub repos, mailing lists, blogs, podcasts.
Yes, there's a strong echo chamber effect. Also the community is heavily leaning towards SF/USA.
There's some major news where I live about floods, which was predicted by climate change experts. There's a short term effect - helping flood victims, and long term - deciding how to deal with climate change in our backyard. Mainstream media is blaming drainage, but Twitter has actual experts with data and modeling, who point out that no amount of drainage is going to stop certain cities from being underwater in 30 years.
On top of that, HN shows mostly news today and you'll miss on more important news of the week, month, quarter, and so on.
I've been stalking certain people on HN and only then did I notice news that were actually relevant to me. Such as certain deaths that I really care about, the opioid epidemic, Omicron, these things that are actually personal or actionable.
You can also do what I do and find a good friend who talks about these things. People are great news aggregators too, and they want someone to gossip to.
I have a membership on the Science [1]. I read the Science once a week. The Science contains difficult articles, which are often worth reading as they are explaining something new without making any compromises or trying to simplify the results. Besides HN and Science that I try all other news. I think you're better off without news. [2]
there is worthy news that doesn't make it to hn, but also lots of worthy news that doesn't make it to CNN and plenty that doesn't make it to CNN but is in fact newsworthy. So if the question is whether you should read what the old media passes off as news, don't bother.
You’re always going to miss out on something. That’s life. You can’t know everything, focus on everything, and be everywhere.
The danger is consuming without intention. It’s useful to ask yourself why you’re reading the news. Is it what you really want to be doing? Or is it a mindless habit of filling time?
As much as I love HN, it is an echo chamber on some topics. Also sometimes people are too afraid to post a contrary opinion for fear of getting voted down to oblivion, as such some threads just become full of 'me-too' type comments.
My wish is for more text centric HN-alike forums, which cover the topics that HN doesn't, but is populated by the same type of people that HN has - i.e. mostly polite and knowledgeable, with a desire to contribute to the discussion.
Reddit is not it, nor are any of the other forums I've found so far.
The question is, am I missing out on anything if I only visit HN?