Hnews is the only thing I read lately.
I had to remove reddit, CNN, nytimes, fnews, fb. And honestly I'm a lot happier.
I'm sad because I no longer an doing my civic duty to stay informed and have an educated opinion but part of gaining that opinion I would get materially angry at the otherside that they were "being so stupid, obviously you shouldn't think like that".
It got bad enough it was affecting me personally and how I interacted with my family.
I'll start up again eventually because it matters to me but for now I need to stay happier.
Everything is designed to invoke negative emotions because negative emotions are engaging and engagement is money. Be less informed on international affairs and more involved in your own communities.
Spoiler: it's all negative content on social media. That's why we all think we're doomed, even though, objectively, we're incredibly lucky to be alive when we are
Related: "I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom" by Jason Pargin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203578812-i-m-starting-t...
I just created a regex-based content blocker that literally blacks out text content on any webpage. Chrome extension.
2 modes - block only matches, or, block surrounding text (too).
Create as many rules as you like, it will block anything.
I entered it into Google Built-in AI hackathon the other day.
Uses local LLM to scan blocked content to determine if regex was too trigger happy, then lets user unblock.
Information is a virus. The cure is censorship. This may sound odd, but it's the truth.
When you read a negative word, even passingly, imagine all sorts of complex interactions that happen with the neurons inside your brain. Ban the words. Block everything. Keep your mouth shut. Create a chamber insulated from negativity.
Negativity is spam. Nobody asks for it and nobody wants it, yet people can't stop themselves from sharing it, forcing negative thoughts onto others' sight. This has to stop.
I don't go to the Internet to hear about the world's problems. The world doesn't have a right to waste my bandwidth to force me to see its propaganda. All I want is cat pictures. If it isn't a cat picture, I don't want to see it.
I don't care how many countries are at war right now. I'll learn about it at my pace, when I want to. Who gave war the right to invade the privacy of my feed? To appear there, unsolicited? To demand my attention, constantly, as if it were entitled to it?
It truly doesn't make any sense when you think about it.
I can't do anything about the world's problems. Go bother someone else.
I do agree that sometimes you have to consume less negative content or else you can become pretty doomy after reading about it.
But dont forget that sometimes you need to feel bad to understand that you are sick. If you were sick without feeling bad, you could die, because you did not take action!
Dont sugar coat the world! If you feel shitty, maybe there is a reason for it, a reason within or outside you!!
I notice a lot of tabloid news websites surface negative local content from across the globe. They make headlines out of "YOUNG/OLD PERSON ASSAULTED IN RISING TENSIONS" and it takes a few paragraphs for me to realise it's in a different country. Every societal imbalance is being trumpeted into every suburb, until it becomes a reality there.
Social media is dead for me already, if there is an ad, I leave. That is all, I am a simple man.
I blacklist all news sites, reddit, all social media sites etc. Completely blocked on my device.
I have switched away from using Google as a search engine entirely.
That still wasn't enough, so I ditched the smart phone for a brick phone. So on that I can only message/call and play Tetris.
That still wasn't enough so I also sold my TV.
That still wasn't enough so I also built an internet content blocker extension to further block mentions of certain words/phrases/patterns (think drugs/war/alcohol/gambling/porn/religion/politics etc).
I'm thinking of building an image blocker next, somehow without "AI".
All this + site blacklisting + ad-blockers + no social media + no TV + no news seems to do the trick!
Maybe with the vast amount of upcoming AI generated content people will finally be forced to realize a thing that was true all along but we seem to have forgotten over the past 25 years.
Nothing on the screen is real. It's just pixels on a screen.
I think I’ve finally cut out Reddit and Threads from my life. I actively ignore looking at anything from those sites unless I’m looking for a product review or something on Reddit.
Reddit constantly had me feeling like life was hopeless, and that I was never gonna be enough, and I could never get excited about anything because I was conditioned to see things through a cynical lens. Sometimes HN does that for me too though, just more intellectually, maybe eventually I’ll quit this place too but it’s a decent news source.
A tangent perhaps, but I've felt this with AI, albeit with nuanced differences. In a nutshell, there's this weird tension between being kind of dismissive of it due to failed personal expectations, but also a desire to be as objective about it as possible, a "fear of missing out" if you will. As such I consume news about AI and engage with the "community" online about it, but I struggle constantly between separating noise from signal, "truth" and bullshit. It's not so much that bad news gets me down so much as the fact that sensationalist hype and bullshit makes me irrationally upset.
The whole OpenAI strawberry thing is kind of a great example. There was vague hype and speculation about it months before it was actually released, and in the end we got a model that is objectively impressive when it comes to benchmarks and is objectively better at certain tasks, but otherwise in my mind fell way short of the expectations being set by more "enthusiastic" commentators.
Now, normally if someone is prone to hype and sensationalism on the internet one would typically learn to ignore them and preserve your mental health, problem is that sometimes OpenAI employees (and other employees of frontier labs) can't resist making sensationalist claims themselves, i.e. claiming that we're a couple of years away from AGI or whatever.
On the one hand, it's a smart and reasonable thing to bet on expert advice, on the other hand, the experts are making very bold claims that I just struggle to see coming to fruition. The idea that you could simply scale an LLM until we achieved AGI always felt a little suspect to me.
Curious to see how others have felt about this.
Now that LLMs are so readily available it would be interesting to see if there were any browser extensions that could rewrite news articles in a more positive light
Being able to read your normal news website but have the topic being discussed written in a more positive light
Or generate the articles with a balanced view instead of negatively one sided
Best thing I ever did was to quit twitter, even before all the changes. Because everybody, good or bad, was concerned by things and they posted or shared them. A million voices talking is a million problems voiced
The real secret to life is...
You really don't need to know.
Researchers have developed a web plug-in to help make better/informed online decisions
On the flip side I’m often horrified by what people think “positive” content is.
Digital Diet tool sounds promising, but I wonder how effective it will be in the wild. Will people actively choose to use it, or will the tendency to seek negative content override the desire for help?
Maybe watching extremely negative content like gory cartel videos from South America could help with desensitization?
Ignorance is bliss. My therapist hated it when I said it that way, but it's undeniably true.
Study: Studying obvious things wastes time and money
Here is another recent one: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-housing-shortages-cause...
And what about all those murder movies, the horror movies, the gun shooting movies, the extortion murder rape kidnapping etc, crime in general, intrigue, blackmail, scheming? We have a subscription to a package that has a lot of US content. HBO, Fox aka Star Channels. 80s & 90s movies were better, happier. The mood is mostly dark and dire nowadays.
And then there's "news", if you can even call it that anymore. Mostly political propaganda, hate mongering and FUD. I'm in a good mood, then I read "the news". I had a time where I completely ignored them, that was after 9/11 and my mental health was superb. But nowadays the planet is on fire and everyone in power is just starting more fires. But "the news" are also pushing a certain mindset, at least in Germany, although there isn't much difference between the outlets. They all just more or less copy paste the same sources. Paranoid schizophrenic mindset mixed with some Russian hate and foreign hate and radical right normalization.
this is like the study about water making you hydrated. quite possibly the most obvious outcome of all time.
sounds obvious, yes?
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So impressive the way MIT adds to the depth and breadth of human knowledge.
Gotta learn to filter the news on various ways. Climate change? You gonna make the earth temp decrease? Then stop worrying. Microplastics? Just drink more from glass and less junk which come from plastic containers. Lots of violence on the news? It’s been like that ever since man has evolved from cells. Stop worrying
Idk what the point of research like is. I mean like, duh? I would be surprised if they claimed negative news DIDNT affect mental health struggles.
Instead the far more interesting questions seems to be: in a world where negative news is becoming more common and prevalent, how do we face the reality of the world without destroying our own mental health in the process.
The naive takeaway from this article would be "just stay away from negative news" which is even reinforced by this little plugin they made. But this simply accelerates the fragmentation we have seen in society, for how can you ever have empathy with others if you refuse to appreciate the suffering of anybody but yourself and what immediately affects you?
Maybe instead of sticking our heads in the sand, we should be taking this as a wakeup call that us trying to solve these problems will help not just our planet, but our own mental health and will be necessary to have a healthy populace going into the future.
I have found myself worrying about global politics, climate change, microplastics and whole lot of other things. Things that I have no control over. Don’t get me wrong it’s good to be informed about these things but constant influx of such information is not helping anyone. It’s critical to regulate what we consume on web because our brains have a tendency to think about what we consume. Our thoughts get influenced by what information we are consuming. Seriously ditch the feed that someone else is curating for you!
RSS is all you need https://rohanrd.xyz/posts/why-rss/
P.S. I haven't been able to ditch hacker news like I wanted to.