Mentioned that I have quit checking news recently (and in fact blocked the sites I used to check using a Firefox extension called Leechblock to remind me of this decision). But I still need “something” to check in on to keep a loose contact at least with the outside world. I’m not on social media anymore though, so that isn’t an option. Too toxic, too full of bullshit & algorithm chasing. So what have I filled the gap with?

Two things. First is my regular Fraidycat RSS headline feed. When I find interesting sites, I plug them in there to keep track of them over time. This used to be sort of an after-thought after checking the news. But now it is one of the main jams. Second is a site called ooh.directory and its recently updated page, which acts as a sort of aggregator of the latest posts by blogs which have submitted their URLs to the directory (there’s also a page for newly added blogs, and a page for a random set). It’s kind of like an old-school blog aggregator, and because included sites seem to be largely self-selected by contributors, its overall content quality is high, and also pretty random. Because of its format also, it seems to not have really any of the drama (that I can tell) which you might be inundated with on social media.

I do still occasionally look at random news articles that might come up incidentally as part of checking my regular RSS sources, but I no longer seek it out, and frankly don’t plan to go back to it any time soon. This new configuration seems a lot healthier.

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