I found a #NewsDiet accountability buddy, and am recommitting to my diet through the new year, at which point I'll re-evaluate in light of changing circumstances.

My plan is specific and highly detailed, includes technological assistance, and I think it's quite likely to succeed.

Some features:

* hard mode 2 days a week (days I'm likely to meditate with others)
* no news & minimal social media on hard mode days and before 4pm in normal mode
* no news aggregators
* aggressively curated FB feed

I need a #NewsDiet accountability buddy.

Getting my friends on board to be accountability buddies (via text, or social media or whatever) is like pulling teeth. In fact, the only person that's ever stepped up is an acquaintance from 20 years ago who wanted to be mutual accountability buddies for a daily meditation habit.

This is a bit problematic when juxtaposed with the fact that I often simply cannot make myself do ANYTHING without a social accountability component.

#ADHDlife

@mayel it's funny, I've been thinking about the news issue in very similar terms and even discussing it on here in the past few days. I'm altering my news consumption as a New Year's resolution, but long term, I realized that only auto-curation (or human curation which I can't afford to pay for) is going to do what I need.

I've been on a #newsdiet for a year or two at least, but I cheat and go to WaPo and it's a take-out box with a healthy entree and seven side dishes of poisoned tripe.

Poverty I think is going to make it so I can't start my #NewYear2018 resolution to return to pescetarianism until I am back at home, so I'm contemplating a further tightening of my #newsdiet instead.

I already "cheat" on my diet by visiting the NYT, Washington Post, and Politico; I'm trying to come up with a realistic resolution here. Plus debating whether or not to cut my few diet-approved current events sources down further.

Then of course there are editorial concerns. What constitutes toxic #news? Which upsetting stories are important enough to include in the feed? What about differing user preferences for amount of unpleasantness in their news feed? And how to deliver such tailored feeds - RSS/Atom by topic and unpleasantness tier??? I'd be happy to offer this myself if I had the spoons to deal with the endless tide of existential horror in the news, but I don't. #newsdiet #mentalhealth

I would love to have a set of #newsfeeds organized by topic & curated such that toxic news was minimized. Not eliminated, mind you - I don't want to read about e.g. ongoing ethnic cleansing or #metoo in daily minute detail, but I do want to at least be aware. But this requires outsourcing labor, both what we typically consider as labor, & emotional labor. There are people who would be fine with doing the emotional labor to make this work, but they'd need to be paid. #newsdiet #news #mentalhealth

Long ago I started a #newsdiet for my #mentalhealth. It's been helpful. I do it by carefully choosing my sources and reading my news in an RSS / feed reader.

Unfortunately, curating on a source level isn't granular enough. I still get too much toxic news, and too little of some topics I want to see.

The missing topics - e.g. politics - tend to cluster with toxic news, so I don't subscribe. But then I cheat, checking in on the sites themselves, and get exposed to toxic news anyway.

Debating a much more severe #newsdiet. But like... how would I even implement that. Like even if I stuck only to tech and science news, how to implement.