Comment by TitaRusell

2 days ago

Breaking news. If a bomb goes off or a plane goes down people post it to X.

Personally I have zero interest. If it's a big enough deal, it'll get to me somehow. Knowing about it 15s after it happened and then seeing a flood of uninformed speculation would be stressful.

Others do value that, no judgment, but for me it's be a net negative.

  • Literally the next thing that happened after I posted this yesterday: my kid texted me that Dolly Parton had died. That’s how some news gets to me—- it’s important to someone I know. It turns out that that is both a good filter and fast enough propagation.

  • Yeah, I used to watch things like this, I stopped using Twitter the second it became called 'X' and actually find I don't miss it including the major event live-tweeting.

    Since then I've had a look on XCancel when there have been major events once or twice and yeah, most of the flurry of real time updates turn out to be misinformed or just plain wrong later anyway... I don't miss it.

  • Yeah browsing every stressful piece of news on X was unironically increasing my cortisol levels

> Breaking news.

Except you now need to create a Xitter account to view posts in chronological order (i.e. breaking news).

No thanks.

They post it other places also in my experience. Twitter doesn't have the monopoly on that it used to.

  • If nothing else news agencies publish articles that are nothing but copies of tweets. Sometimes just one sentence long, other times there's no text at all and just a link to the original post. It's basically the same experience, especially since the news media isn't always bothering to fact check or verify anything either in the rush to get views/ad serves.

I mean, if it is real it's on every wire service there is too, with slightly less hysteria.

I ventured onto Twitter for the first time in maybe a year to check on some breaking news around America/Canada tariffs and trade war.

The comment section was pretty awful; 90% people yelling about Canada's government being a tyranny and/or in bed with Communist China.

Bluesky Social is more useful for news. I can use custom clients such as https://sill.social/ which just aggregate the links and commentary from my feeds, and catch up on what news is important to the ppl I'm following.

Whenever I check X, it's always just misinformation, and it's impossible to see what people actually say because bluechecks are always the first to show up in the algorithmic ranking. On political commentary: they were dying hard for Graham Platner saying he was the only option, but then Troy Jackson who replaced him did better in the polls.