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.
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.
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.
I get my “education” from Lemmy
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!
I hope you mean “as well as the news”
@yogthos@lemmy.ml, obviously.
lol I’m definitely in the news checking to pass the time boat :)
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 like watching well-done cinematic synopses of characters or storylines. Watched only AFTER having seen the series.
Here’s one for Altered Carbon S01. Very BladeRunner, very neo-noir, 80s meets 20s. Here’s one for the Expanse, story focused, 2 movements, so compassion-inducing
Both are by this creator.
Two of my top ten shows right now. I think I’m going to go finish DEVS right now.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I liked Devs. It had a dope concept. That show didn’t get much buzz.
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.
If you want a summary of science events, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_in_science.
Hardware News: Louis Rossmann, GamersNexus
Other News: Lemmy (very heavily curated), Mastodon (rarely)
US Pol, Israel/Palestine, Ukraine/Russia: Blocked
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
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.