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1. Muninn 🍃 (muninn@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 18-Dec-2017 14:27:55 EST Muninn 🍃

   Long ago I started a #newsdiet for my #mentalhealth. It's been helpful. I do it by carefully choosing my sources and reading my news in an RSS / feed reader.

   Unfortunately, curating on a source level isn't granular enough. I still get too much toxic news, and too little of some topics I want to see.

   The missing topics - e.g. politics - tend to cluster with toxic news, so I don't subscribe. But then I cheat, checking in on the sites themselves, and get exposed to toxic news anyway.

   1. Muninn 🍃 (muninn@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 18-Dec-2017 14:31:42 EST Muninn 🍃

      in reply to

      I would love to have a set of #newsfeeds organized by topic & curated such that toxic news was minimized. Not eliminated, mind you - I don't want to read about e.g. ongoing ethnic cleansing or #metoo in daily minute detail, but I do want to at least be aware. But this requires outsourcing labor, both what we typically consider as labor, & emotional labor. There are people who would be fine with doing the emotional labor to make this work, but they'd need to be paid. #newsdiet #news #mentalhealth

      1. Muninn 🍃 (muninn@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 18-Dec-2017 14:36:54 EST Muninn 🍃

         in reply to

         Then of course there are editorial concerns. What constitutes toxic #news? Which upsetting stories are important enough to include in the feed? What about differing user preferences for amount of unpleasantness in their news feed? And how to deliver such tailored feeds - RSS/Atom by topic and unpleasantness tier??? I'd be happy to offer this myself if I had the spoons to deal with the endless tide of existential horror in the news, but I don't. #newsdiet #mentalhealth