I don’t want to be totally uninformed about what’s going on, but I also don’t want to fall into doomscrolling.
I know that I could very easily just avoid any news sites and only find out about these things secondhand from people I talk to whether in real life or online. I also know that it’s not good to bury your head in the sand quite that far.
I could also very easily doomscroll different news sites and actively seek out more depressing news when I’m done scrolling one site. I’ve been doing more of this option lately, and as a reaction to that I’ve started doing total avoidance, which I know isn’t good.
So how and where did you strike a healthy balance between reading enough news to stay informed, but not enough to be in a constant state of anxiety about the world?
I’m looking for genuine advice here. I don’t want to be mean but I’m not too sure else how to say the following: I don’t want to come back to a lot of replies about “I didn’t find a balance lol I just doomscroll/stick my head in the sand” and “I feel this, same.” Not really sure if that’s going against the spirit of the chatting community, but seeing a lot of “same problem” and zero advice tends to make me feel more in despair. I already know this is a common problem, so what would usually be the correct social move of saying you relate in order to empathize and let the other know they’re not alone isn’t helpful for me in this particular instance.
My three main sources to follow the news (from France) :
- Leftist twitch streamers (reacts and press reviews)
- a website that handpicks funny tweets about the news of the day
- my wife
That keeps me informed on most of the important facts while adding a light touch with humor. I also like to read and watch other people getting angry for me, it’s cathartic.
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For me it feels important to maintain faith that, deep inside, people are good, or at least are born innocent, and that it’s mainly our institutions, philosophies, and cultural norms that turn us against each other and harm our souls with toxic stuff. And that through seeking local community and connection we can reconnect with the natural tendency towards compassion that exists within us all even as so many of our leaders fail to show those qualities.
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Learning more about socialism gave me hope for the future.
I sort of feel the opposite. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s only possible to fully achieve through violence and power, and I can’t morally support that happening, there are good people on both sides.
You can get a mix of socialism that helps band-aid the problems caused by capitalism, but the root of the problem is still there.
I don’t consider something like a general strike to be violent. It could definitely result in violence by the ruling class against the working class, especially when they bring cops into the mix, but then the working class will look even better in the public eye.
I like the MLK Jr. idiology.
Disclaimer: living in USA. I used to doom scroll a lot a few years ago… What helped me was initially leaving the feeds (head in the sand as you say), but this was not a good permanent solution. Since then, I have done a few things that have helped (your mileage may vary depending on what you’re trying to stay informed about). The first and easiest was to switch how I was getting my news. Now, I will get international news from different country’s sources (ie:https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/world-int.html or https://www.channelnewsasia.com/world). I’ll swap up which one I go to each day normally. It’s interesting seeing world news from different perspectives. If I find a story that is particularly interesting, I’ll look more into it. Secondly, I believe it is often more important to be aware of your local news than anything. To that end, I follow quite a few local sources of news. Most are hinted with my interests (urbanist improvements, community meetings, local discord servers), but some are more general. Also, I listen to a few podcasts not aimed at news, but as a queer person consuming queer media I occasionally hear things I didn’t know. Promptly, I might look into it more. My motto is if something sounds really crazy, it’s probably being misconstrued. You’re never going to be informed on everything, but if you want to get less biased news, there are ways. Hope some of this helps in any way
Similarly to this, I mostly don’t read or engage with news feeds on social media and keep up to date by reading a local news site that’s curated by hand and the international version of the guardian website for the big stuff … although the Guardian is generally doom and gloom there are upbeat stories listed too and it’s not a never-ending list of depression like Facebook/reddit/some communities on Lemmy.
Ya, feed trolling is often the source of a lot of stress and outrage. It’s designed that way
I, too, find striking the balance between staying informed and protecting myself from negativity to be daunting, disheartening, and frequently unrealistic.
What helped me was my coincidental transition to services that have little or no “algorithmic” influence, such as switching to Lemmy/Mastodon. It requires me to be more intentional with my willing exposure to content, at the cost of being less convenient to find new content.
Like, I don’t get as many new songs in my playlists since I jumped out of Spotify. It means I need to get creative in order to try new artists, but I’m not hitting the skip button as much, either.
I’m perfectly happy with it being harder to find new content. Finding new content online usually just results in more scrolling and more consumption from me. If I try something new/expand my horizons into something that isn’t just trying a new game or watching a new video, if I do something new to me that isn’t just consumption, it’s usually as a result of talking with people in the real world. For me, finding new content online tends to give me zero benefits and more wasted time. I assume you are not the same and new content is actually useful for you?
I will say that Lemmy and the like aren’t the most useful unless you curate it, although this may vary per instance. I had to go out of my way to block Politics and similar communities here on Beehaw, and am about to go block the Technology community too. I usually spend more time rabbitholing into doom than I should as a result of what I see on Technology.
A lot of the news going on in the world doesn’t affect your life every day. That’s my reasoning. But it’s good to know what’s going on and file it away.
This is probably not what you’re looking for, but at the height of Covid I made myself a prototype browser extension that would scan the front page of the two newspapers I read and replace all headlines containing certain keywords with a random dog picture. Everything was hardcoded and it only worked for the two news websites I used the most at the time, but it was fantastic.
Maybe there’s something similar, but production-ready and publicly available?
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I haven’t been doomsrolling for at least 15 years. Even on Reddit, I had my frontpage curated to block most of the “doom” stuff… but leaving Reddit behind and switching to Lemmy, has definitely cut on that even more.
I DO NOT directly visit news sites, AT ALL. Only whatever I get through news aggregators.
Currently, my sources are:
- Beehaw Local
- LemmyWorld Local
- LemmyWorld Subscribed (only cool/funny stuff)
- Google News recommends (curated down to mostly science, tech and space)
- YouTube (similarly curated)
- TV (mostly the looping 24h news broadcast, mostly the beginning with the headline blurbs, turning it off when I start getting fed up)
- Fedilab (mastodon, following some people, artists, etc.)
- Porn (check on 𝕏, quick search on your favorite website, y’know the drill)
- A couple Facebook groups (FB’s ads interrupt the scrolling and make me close the whole thing)
I try to switch from one source to another in a more or less regular pattern, never staying too long on a single feed, and engaging by writing comments or looking up related stuff.
You could say I’m somewhat “underinformed”, but actually get a decent cross-section of news about local, country, world, general science and tech, and some niche interests.
As for a constant state of anxiety… well, on one hand I’m in more of a resigned state of despair about the world… and I take anti-anxiety meds… so… yeah, not sure how much is owed to information hygiene, and how much to just giving up/not giving a crap.
As an asexual who’s only visited a porn site once to see what all the fuss was about before I knew I was asexual…
Porn sites have NEWS!?
I’m using it in a broad sense of “looking for updates”. Porn sites have updates about new content, some people and artists post NSFW stuff on Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr, etc. There is a whole lemmynsfw instance… and several more.
Not sure how your case works, I’ve mentioned it because I have known people who were IMHO excessively sexual, who’d follow multiple sites, know actors by name, follow them, look for updates over and over, and so on.
I feel you.
I collected competing websites that measure bias, reliability, and fact checking. Then I used them to narrow down my sources to the most reliable and centerline. My collection of sites and info (check the menu for more related resources) https://www.mediabiasmap.com
If you wanted to read about my approach and findings read the about:
https://www.mediabiasmap.com/about
Short and sweet summary?
- Read one of the news wires for general world and national knowledge (AFP, Reuters, AP, UPI, etc).
- Read investigative local news for local stuff.
- Read the news 3 times per week (kinda like a scheduled workout). This can help limit the doom scrolling.
Personally I like AP for general awareness, RollCall for US congressional stuff, and my city’s paper for local news.
It’s something I struggle with a lot, too. I stay away from feeds and aggregates for the most part because they tend to have the most attention grabbing (ragebaut, despairbait, what have you) and just browse a handful of news sites when I want to get an idea of what’s happening at home and around the world.
To keep from doomscrolling/binge reading despair, I limit my browsing to just an hour or two in the morning (or on lunch break, downtime at work) ever couple of days or so, unless there’s a specific event that I want to follow (like Eurovision, Ukraine war update, my local election results, wildfire update etc).
I use Ground.news to see sources’ factuality/credibility and biases, and scope out topics and sources of interest.
Grist.org focuses on environmental news and are pretty consistent about having some kind of meaningful, forward -facing conclusion in their articles. Usually in the form of ways everyday folks like you or me can contribute/participate, steps toward long term solutions, that kind of thing. Personally find these additions to be helpful in lessening the aftertaste of despair I’m usually left with whenevet I read the news…
I guess my advice is 1. moderation and 2. quality sources. Easier said than done, I know, but… Good luck 🐝
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I’ve got an app called SmartNews that pulls news from lots of different sources and aggregates them. My feed is set up to pull news only from the front pages of AP and Reuters - which seem to be mostly unbiased sources that both sides get info from for their articles and they use unbiased titles. I skim to the end of my feed (which isn’t very long, maybe 20-30 articles) read a half dozen of them, and that’s my news for the day. Every other media source has news and politics 100% filtered out.
I feel like it’s enough info for informed decisions and topical conversations with my coworkers, but not so much that I dwell on news in my off time.
