Ask HN: How do you stay up to date without over consuming?
I feel like so much current events and information is hidden in instagram, tik tok, reddit, HN, and other forums.
How do you stay up to date on what’s important aka what will make you money without spending way too much time consuming noise?
What makes me money is staying aware of changes in German bureaucracy, and other things that recent immigrants should know about.
My solution is information streams. I set up various stream that surface important information so that I don’t need to seek it. It saves me an absurd amount of time.
This includes people who write to me when specific things in their field change, a WhatsApp group of relocation consultants, and monitoring lots of German laws for changes with Wachete. I also follow the monthly changes gazette from the German government. This covers 90% of what I need to know.
I am now designing a tool to gather feedback from my readers about unobservable things such as the processing times at the immigration office. This would be insanely valuable to people who apply for a residence permit.
In summary, I automate the surfacing of important information, and make sure the updates come at a reasonable frequency, with as little noise as possible.
For everything else, I just don’t care. Knowing the latest and greatest in tech does not affect my income. I can build valuable things with old, boring tech.
Don't fish where there are no fish. Each spot has different kind of fish. If your goal isn't clear, you'll catch "something", but not necessarily what your looking for. If you're still hungry, then you need to find a spot that feeds you, rather than bouncing between a few.
HN has smart folk but it's particularly bad for web3, AI, and startups. Reddit is below average on everything, but better than HN on those topics. Lemmy tends to lean more towards web3 and FOSS. TikTok covers newer things. YouTube goes deepest, but you don't always need depth. The shorter the video, the more noise it needs.
I have a job that makes me money. I don't find that it requires me to try and chase current events and drama on all platforms.
There is too munch information being created every day to possibly keep up. Pick a couple sources you like and forget about the rest. If something is important enough, and you happen to miss it, someone will tell you about it.
I feel like I'm in the same boat where I spend too much time reading news articles, twitter threads, reddit feeds, etc. A friend recently shared this chrome extension with me that helps me summarize the content on these pages using LLMs so now I use this all the time https://rockyai.me/. Instead of spending 2 mins reading an article I'll just read a summary in 10s and then decide if I want to dive in deeper.
Pull over push (I choose when I want to see what's new, no email/notification driven stuff)
succinct description of my personal practice so,hey!,thanks for that! to which I would add that whatever gets pulled be evauluated for its benificial qualities as its just as easy to go all.OCD digging as it is easy to sit back and...well..."endure the show" its the built in danger of all binary choices in an analog universe if then or maybe rock scissors paper lizard spock plus the internet is quickly exploiting itself to the point of drudgery ie: "forced labour without a reward"
Make a personal search engine, starting with one for hacker news… of course !!!
Honestly there’s tons of ways to make money. Noise is whatever distracts you from what you actually want to do. I struggle with this myself tbh but I feel this is somewhat relevant: https://justinjackson.ca/surfing
TLDR newsletter is my go to source.