Reddit is a dumpster fire. At least the r/all or whatever the front page is now, plus some major subreddits where dissent from the correct opinion is buried deeper than Jimmy Hoffa.
For now, it's still highly useful for very specific and obscure things, such as many of the smaller passionate subreddits filled with skilled amateurs and professionals. For example, when Googling "Oregon vacation" you get 2 pages of ads, questionable travel sites, and a laundry list of other corporate sites.
Go to reddit, search for the same thing, find a thread with a lot of comments and you'll usually get a lot of good info, including the good, bad, and the ugly. Corporate site would have you believe there are no such things as bad and ugly, except perhaps in regard to their competitors.
Google sucks, Bing sucks, DuckCensorGo sucks, and we're living in the suck era of the internet. Gone are the days of the free, un-curated, uncensored wild west internet. The inventive, talented, & entrepreneurial should all start working together to prevent the rent seekers from destroying all the nice things, as they are doing to the internet. Please stop handing over your legacy to thugs!
The above partly contributed to my becoming perpetually skeptical of every single article of news I read. I still need to work on being more skeptical of "news" that fits my worldview, as I'm sure many of us do, but it very much feels like there is a mental cost involved in not letting your brain absorb new information without critically questioning the new information. Especially if you take the time to dig deeper. Who has that kind of time--especially if you have a full-time job and a family? So most of the time I read something, I end up putting it in one of the mental categories of "possibly true, but don't bet on it" or "possibly true, but probably missing valuable details/context." Or the increasingly popular category, "clickbaity headline, probably untrue." These are all subcategories belonging to the larger, "garbage news" category.
This has led me to increasingly avoid reading major news outlets. And since I don't really have much time to verify the credibility of new sources, I am ultimately getting less and less news.
Take this apparently horrific example, found on reddit's front page: Black man awaiting kidney transplant beaten by hospital security.
It's clickbaity even without the racial descriptor. So I am intrigued, appropriately horrified, and also skeptical because clickbait and race. I did only a little digging, and several of the other outlets are saying the same thing, most relying on this St. Louis Post-Dispatch article or this one from Newsweek.
The incident happened last year, but is in the news now because of newly released video. The video shows the kidney patient being tackled and not much else. It does not reflect well upon the hospital/security staff, however. But still, the whole context we are getting is from the kidney patient's family and a short video. This is partly because the hospital is reportedly not saying anything about it right now.
Suspiciously, there is more video, but it is not released. Said video includes an interrogation where security allegedly says and does horrible things, but not released. Shit like this makes me trust the news like I trust Joe Biden to keep inflation low.
If everything being reported and claimed in the lawsuit is 100% factual, and there is no important missing context, then yes, obviously the hospital should pay and the security staff involved be replaced and their replacements better trained.
But the world I have become more aware of in recent years rarely provides 100% factual information, and rarely provides all the important context. If you can't clear these hurdles convincingly, you are in the "garbage news" category.
The kidney patient story is but a drop in the ocean. It might even be mostly true, but I can't turn off the Always Skeptical switch in my brain. Even if I wanted to, I don't think it's a great idea. But it is taxing, and I find myself reading more and knowing less. I think I need to change some habits. Maybe something along the lines of less internet, more books. Devote some time to discovering a few new credible, nonpartisan, and respected-but-not-part-of-the-establishment journalists.
