Switching from consuming Hacker News during the week to exclusively during the weekend has helped me a lot, I now spend substantially less time there and even when I do check it on the weekend, I still somehow keep it reasonably short and it doesn’t take too much time out of my day, plus the urge to check it very often has waned. Once a week seems to be a nice novelty hit and exploration time for consuming Hacker News, so I’ll keep to this restriction on it since it lets me use it better as a tool for finding new and interesting things without that tool causing negative impacts on my life.
I find that knowledge of historical enough significance will be pushed in my direction (e.g. the pandemic) without me seeking it out or reading the news or signing up for newsletter updates, and that’s good enough for me regarding staying informed unless I am specifically following some particular thing closely. But yes, I agree that push systems probably have a net negative impact on individuals and instead of being useful tools to get information from, aren’t. The only exception I think would be push notifications from messaging apps when dealing with time sensitive things e.g. meeting up with a friend and figuring out where to go, meeting a deliveryperson outside to sign for a package, emergency work meeting or issue, etc. On demand is a much better use of resources, because then you can be deliberate about using such tools that allow for accessing whatever resources you want to access. Taking deliberate action is better than not, usually.
Regarding your last paragraph, I think you may find Gwern’s Internet Search Tips helpful. I suspect search like you want is still a bit of a hard problem which is why (to choose one example in particular) Google makes so much money from advertising and search. Prediction markets for the efficacy of information provided by X sources could be interesting though.
Switching from consuming Hacker News during the week to exclusively during the weekend has helped me a lot, I now spend substantially less time there and even when I do check it on the weekend, I still somehow keep it reasonably short and it doesn’t take too much time out of my day, plus the urge to check it very often has waned. Once a week seems to be a nice novelty hit and exploration time for consuming Hacker News, so I’ll keep to this restriction on it since it lets me use it better as a tool for finding new and interesting things without that tool causing negative impacts on my life.
I find that knowledge of historical enough significance will be pushed in my direction (e.g. the pandemic) without me seeking it out or reading the news or signing up for newsletter updates, and that’s good enough for me regarding staying informed unless I am specifically following some particular thing closely. But yes, I agree that push systems probably have a net negative impact on individuals and instead of being useful tools to get information from, aren’t. The only exception I think would be push notifications from messaging apps when dealing with time sensitive things e.g. meeting up with a friend and figuring out where to go, meeting a deliveryperson outside to sign for a package, emergency work meeting or issue, etc. On demand is a much better use of resources, because then you can be deliberate about using such tools that allow for accessing whatever resources you want to access. Taking deliberate action is better than not, usually.
Regarding your last paragraph, I think you may find Gwern’s Internet Search Tips helpful. I suspect search like you want is still a bit of a hard problem which is why (to choose one example in particular) Google makes so much money from advertising and search. Prediction markets for the efficacy of information provided by X sources could be interesting though.