Technology

Sometimes there's good discussion though, and it's good to hear different takes.

Having comments also gives less power to the writer, like could you imagine if we all took Fox News or CNN headlines at face value and didn't discuss them?

So much news is just reading the headline and seeing a photo now.

Mexico's new president: 3-year-old Alfredo Pequeño Lobo becomes nation's youngest elected and first canine leader. But can he be rough on the cartels?

I'm guilty of doing this (just reading the headlines) as well. I usually do it for these reasons:

• I don't care enough to want to read more. For example, news about US politics. I don't live in the US. I feel that reading the headlines is enough to keep me informed about what's happening, but I really don't care any more than that.

• The details aren't valuable to me. For example, the Apple anti-trust lawsuit... Is it important? Yes. I'm already well aware of the horrible anticonsumer practices of Apple. But do I need to know all the particular details about the lawsuit? Not really. In fact, the only thing that matters is the final verdict, which hasn't happened yet.

• I care, but I already know enough details.

• I don't feel like the article would bring a lot of value, especially if the title is click-baity. I've encountered too many articles that are void of content, just the title repeated in 10x more words.

I don't like visiting news sites because, in addition to all of them being obnoxious and ad riddled, I feel like I'm wasting a lot of time reading long articles that could be rewritten as 3 bullet points. On platforms like lemmy, users will highlight the important bits in the comments which saves a lot of time.

That’s what places like Lemmy are for though.

You can find out the event from the news, but then get the facts from industry experts. It's much better these days.

I think the bigger issue is how bad news sites have gotten. I'm sure part of the reason for that is people getting news online from alternative sources, but mainstream sources are significantly worse than they once were which just pushes things further in that direction.

That said, I don't know which caused more group-think. Was it having a few mainstream sources and that's it or having many worse quality but more diverse sources? People relate to the new version more probably, which encourages them to follow along and not think for themselves, but I don't know if that's better or worse than not really having any dissenting opinion available at all.

That's how I get my news. I visit the Finnish equivalence of BBC once or twice a day and that's my news diet. If they don't report on it, I don't need to know. Something like what a VOX journalist thinks about Twitter I couldn't care less so I don't even bother reading it. I'm proudly unaware of most of the things that non-serious news organizations report on.

I use 1440, which sums up daily news in a fact-based way and leaves out all opinion. It's magical. It takes 10 minutes to read and I'm not bombarded by why "libtards are destroying america" or why "this ties back to trump destroying democracy" somehow.

Highly recommend it for daily news.

I get my news from a paper and it is a decent blend of good and bad news. Quality journalism. I gift articles often just to kinda fight back against the whole title-and-picture-only news.

I'd read more articles if they weren't paywalled.

A few months back, i subscribed to the news aggregator Ground News. Although there are more expensive options, i pay about $6/year and I love it. You get news stories from lots of different sites and gives you a good idea of biases. I highly recommend it!

I'd argue it was a good place for FAST news. For a lot of major events you can find posts and videos from users before the media releases anything, which is kind of a first for humanity at least in terms of accessibility.

Now, if you're looking for ACCURATE news...

It's no longer a good place for news, discussion, or even real opinions. It's just an echo chamber of hate and closed-mindedness, and increasingly just bots talking to each other.

You could follow journalists you like or outlets though

Exactly, I was the same. This is the News that Twitter was good for, the live events.

I'd always check Twitter for the initial on the scene explanation of what was happening from local people. In my case it was a massive warehouse fire that I could see the smoke in the distance. Obviously there was nothing about it on the traditional news sites, but loads of stuff from local people on Twitter immediately.

Then afterwards you'd just read the proper News outlets for the full official details after the fact.

I thought you said news. This just looks like spam?

I just read this headline first and your comment second. Yikes. Guilty.

Any android alternatives?

I remember when Reddit was consistently two to three days ahead of the news cycle. Same for Fark

Thanks Aaron Swartz! Reddit might not be working out but RSS has the staying power.