General Discussion

I decided it doesn't. All it does is depress me and make me anxious -- first of all because this breaking news is often a garbled mess excitedly reported by people who don't know shit, and second because more than 99% of the time I can't do anything about it. It's not like I'm an Emergency Medical Technician completing my paperwork at the fire station when the alarm goes off.

I've done logistics for emergency transfers of blood and organs. My wife has delivered babies, stabilized victims of accidents or violence for transport to trauma centers, etc.. She was in the front lines facing the COVID-19 pandemic. She's been doing that kind of work for decades and loves it. When she's on-call and something requiring her immediate response happens her work phone rings, often in the middle of the night.

The site formerly known as twitter is mostly unactionable noise. Fuck that. I'll have all my unactionable news in the morning with a cup of coffee, thank you, all neatly sorted by people I trust. If something happens that requires my immediate attention I'll be on-site already or someone will call me. I also have numbers I can call if I find myself caught up in a "late breaking news" situation. I'm not going to be a looky-loo standing on the sidelines with my "smart" phone posting crap on the internet.

DU is my only social media. Other sites are just too damned noisy. I actively blacklist them. I don't want their shit and I don't want them taking metrics on me. DU would be intolerably noisy too if not for my trash by keyword list, my ignore list, and the excellent moderation here.