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.
Going for a walk can sometimes scratch that itch. Instead of checking the news of a national or global scale, which you can’t ultimately do a lot about anyway, you’re checking “the news” of your immediate environment with your own eyeballs. It usually doesn’t change a lot, but what else is new?
Everytime i go for a walk i see something new that i haven’t noticed before.
Doing what to casual observater seems like the same thing over and over again, can actually be the process of developing a deeper understanding of the subject area than before, (in this case your local neighbourhood).
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.
RSS reader. Curate your own news
Do you have any RSS feed apps you’d recommend?
Fresh RSS if you want a self hosted option
Newsblur. it’s open source but there’s a hosted instance of it, and it’s paid (but very cheap) so it’s a fair exchange. it’s run by one guy and has been for a long time; I’ve used it for over 10 years now.
Nunti works well. https://gitlab.com/ondrejfoltyn/nunti
‘Saved’
Thanks for reminding us and for letting us know, I will have to make time to set one up for myself!
Is there any chance you’d want to, at least in part, get away from the instant hit of info? It’s possible to train your brain out of that habit if you’d rather be doing something else. No judgment if you’d really rather find something Iike you described.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
Only very short summaries of what happened, linked to Wikipedia article for more reading.
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.
Hacker news is often interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/
I started looking at summarized hacker news articles in the last month also, I like the format of this:
https://hackernews.betacat.io/#
But sometimes I check Lemmy instead. It’s a lot easier to digest for the brain.
@yogthos@lemmy.ml, obviously.
lol I’m definitely in the news checking to pass the time boat :)
Huey Lewis
Hardware News: Louis Rossmann, GamersNexus
Other News: Lemmy (very heavily curated), Mastodon (rarely)
US Pol, Israel/Palestine, Ukraine/Russia: Blocked
Now that is someone who has thought about this question a lot
This looks like it deserves my time, I will give it a read.
I hope you mean “as well as the news”
Consider a site like arstechnica. Just tech news, less depressing crap.
I’m a junkie for YouTube maker videos and other forms of creative infotainment. I binge on This Old Tony and Farmcraft101 videos, but I also listen to several podcasts adjacent to my (rather technical) professional sector.
Ugh, and politics. Stresses me out too.
This old tony is the GOAT
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
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.
Eh. Sort of. It’s still a big echo chamber with lots of feel good statements that amount to not much
