I’ve realized that I check the news several times a day but not because I’m curious about what’s happening on the grand scheme of things, but because my brain wants to check something that keeps changing with new, evolving information. It fills a slightly different niche than social media, and I don’t watch sports so I don’t have that to check. Can anyone think of something else that could fill this need? I could read blogs but they just don’t feel current. And the news is making be stress about information I didn’t need to know.
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The news communities on lemmy. It’s still the news, but sometimes i appreciate the comments.
Comments is where the real work gets done. That’s how reddit used to work before it turned into bot networks spinning narratives for interested parties etc
Eh. Sort of. It’s still a big echo chamber with lots of feel good statements that amount to not much
I think a lot of the meme content here is bots as well.
But since most users don’t post anything, it’s better than the alternative.
We do have bots are they are labeled and I haven’t seen bot nets driving narrative… Yet.
Also engagement quality is way better. Even when disagree with comments, they feel like real people with their own opinions.
atrioc
This looks like it deserves my time, I will give it a read.
Now that is someone who has thought about this question a lot
History wiki’s. Not current, but shows that the news isn’t new.
@yogthos@lemmy.ml, obviously.
lol I’m definitely in the news checking to pass the time boat :)
Consider a site like arstechnica. Just tech news, less depressing crap.
tiktok. you get war news faster than any news outlet does, you get unvarnished war and protest news as it’s happening before it’s been filtered by the spin room. I found out about Chiquita banana being held liable for multiple banana farm related murders in Columbia on tiktok well before it popped up on any other news source, stuff like that.
oh you meant instead of getting the news lol. I watch stuff on Plex and scroll Lemmy on the bottom in split screen
Huey Lewis
There’s always the weather. I check that plus an app I have for the guages on our local rivers as I am a fly fisherman.
I’m definitely a news junkie and I used to spend many hours per day on that other Platform because it made for such an effective news-media aggregator. It sounds like your seeking out a replacement for that dopamine hit you used to get from checking the news all of the time. There are plenty of bad alternatives out there as others have already mentioned. Regardless of what you choose to do, I hope you periodically take stock of your own mental health. Personally speaking, this habit has sent me into major depression more than once in my life.
Hardware News: Louis Rossmann, GamersNexus
Other News: Lemmy (very heavily curated), Mastodon (rarely)
US Pol, Israel/Palestine, Ukraine/Russia: Blocked
Metafilter!
Lemmy, All, Top 6 Hours
I need to start doing this more… “Active” starts to get pretty stale.
Yeah, Top 6 Hours stays pretty fresh. And if I feel like it’s getting stale it means I’ve been on too long in a row and need a break anyway.
Then I just block any communities or instances I don’t want to see in my feed.
Don’t bother with the 24 rolling news updates. It is much better to watch a video news summary a few days later. A really really good YouTube channel called TLDR news (they have a number of subchannels) that I would highly recommend.
The other thing is to use RSS…never news websites. RSS presents news chronologically. Websites curate to put absolute shit on their front-page so avoid that. If you use an RSS app like Pluma, then it lets you set a blacklist (like I’ve excluded news about Biden, Trump, Covid, vaccines, Israel, Ukraine, Superbowl, football, etc)… It really let’s you exclude what you don’t want to see and improve what shows up in your list.
