What do you all check instead of the news?
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.
Solved: Go use a pub as your living room, or live in a hostel. Then check who else is hanging around.
47 replies
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).
And if it’s nature that catches your interest, in addition to walking, you could follow a live stream of some animal you may or may not care about.
I got into watching an Osprey hatch her eggs on a stream. Didn’t even know about the birds until I started, but the hook set quickly.
Watched that feed for weeks, checking to see who’s been eating, who’s been pooping, & who’s still sleeping. Pretty satisfying by the time the chicks left the nest.
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.
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!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
Only very short summaries of what happened, linked to Wikipedia article for more reading.
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.
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.
Consider a site like arstechnica. Just tech news, less depressing crap.
Hardware News: Louis Rossmann, GamersNexus
Other News: Lemmy (very heavily curated), Mastodon (rarely)
US Pol, Israel/Palestine, Ukraine/Russia: Blocked
Huey Lewis
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'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
I hope you mean "as well as the news"
History wiki's. Not current, but shows that the news isn't new.
This may not be the type of answer you are looking for, but personally I check on my friends and family. It helps me somewhat avoid overly browsing Lemmy. I'll send them a text asking how they are or what's new.
I tell my brain that this is a local and personalized news source. 🙃
There's always the weather. I check that plus an app I have for the guages on our local rivers as I am a fly fisherman.
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.
I liked Devs. It had a dope concept. That show didn't get much buzz.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Altered Carbon S01
Expanse
this creator
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The mastodon feed I've painstakingly curated for myself
If you want a summary of science events, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_in_science.
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.
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
my Lemmy feed. Google Scholar sorted by most recent.
@[email protected], obviously.
Metafilter!
Inoreader for android. It's just a news links aggregator that you opt in various topics or networks and get fed a plethora of headlines and links to the articles. Sometimes they'll even grab a paragraph or two from the article. I started using that at the same time I hopped on Lemmy.
I get my "education" from Lemmy
Hobby communities
atrioc
How about deep diving? It's not easy and consistent with one app, but it's pretty satisfying to be the one figuring stuff out.
Or local city planning. Future plans on what to build and where. Doesn't update as frequently, but it's something to circle back to on occasion, or you might want to get involved and go to a meeting.
Some people like to listen to police scanners, or alternatively there is usually someone with a social media account who posts just the most important or funniest transmissions from the city/county/whatever
Or you could get an idle game app that you occasionally need to pop into to collect money and upgrade.
Start day trading?
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