Ask Lemmy

Lol the hurricane is literally heading your direction.

Depends on the article.

If it's something I have a genuine interest in, then heck yeah, I read the article. I like me some long-form discussion, so if it's a high quality article then I need to read it in order to make a high quality comment.

If it's about politics it requires more nuance. I'm not going to stay quiet about things that do have the potential to affect me, the people I care about, and humans in general. I'm also not going to go out of my way to consume a ton of propaganda. That's when the pithy jokes come in, usually with a goal of calling out misinformation or general assholery.

By and large, the vast majority of headlines are bait. You're not going to get a clear picture of what's going on from a loaded title anyway, and it's alarming how often people make the opposite inference from the headline compared to the body of the article. I suppose it's human nature to look for easy answers, but if you only look at the summary then you're allowing other people to form your opinion for you. Those people always have an agenda.

In this political climate, the news is probably going to make the average reader angry. If it does that means it's working - either because they're consuming hateful propaganda or because they're being agitated against the evils of the establishment. This is by design: you can garner more clicks from angry, frightened people, and they're usually easier to control that way.

I agree that you can't take on the burdens of the world as an individual. But ignoring problems that have no will to resolve themselves only allows those issues to perpetuate themselves. Something about evil succeeding when good people do nothing.

I just read wikipedia's portal of current events for world news. The whole articles.

Newspapers I don't read, and i block news articles on social media.

If an article doesn't fit my mental model of the world I'll often skim through it and check out a related wikipedia

I'll read the article if it's not behind a paywall. I often don't finish them because most articles are poorly written.

Just the headline

Both

I don't click most links due to online tracking although fedi crowd is pretty good about cleaning up tracking links.

Either way, most media is owner class asset used to shill their interest. So reading that shit aint nothing but reading some rich old clowns opinion on the issue.

Comment section is where real discussion happens anyway.

I drop my 2 cents to see how it resonates and what counter points I can gather. Most of the time it is people screeching some owner sanctioned bullshit...

so much bootlicking or tankies...

Yes, usually, but I'm more frequently using the Read Aloud extension. It's the least effort that gets me there.