There is now too much information for a person to take in and process in full. Apparently, at some point we took a wrong turn. We started producing more content than we manage to digest.
Where we get information from
Judge for yourself how many of these sources you go through every day.
- Channels
- Public pages
- Release notes
- Digests
- Blogs
- News
- Podcasts
- Chats
- Video
- Books
If we talk about extremes, there are two options. Ignore all news and content, but then you can't stay current. Or follow everything and spend the whole day just figuring out what happened yesterday. Neither suits me. I want to focus on what matters and not spend much time on it.
What hurts
Quantity devalues quality. It has become too hard to find useful sources you can actually trust. The AI boom has made it all worse. There are lots of retellings of primary sources in different words, and lots of generated content. Channels forward things that were already written about before, the same information goes around in circles. There is no time to read all of it, and no reason to.
You have to tell generated content apart from what the author actually wants to say, or from what really deserves attention. The unread badges on channels with posts from public pages have started to annoy me. The feed shows spam, ads or recommendations I don't want to read. It clutters the brain and kills time. At some point I got fed up and realized that information has to be handled differently.
What I want
Since AI has made a breakthrough into the future, information should also be handled differently, deliberately. I want to unsubscribe from most public pages, channels and other sources. To drink coffee in the morning, read only what matters to me in 10 minutes, and go on about my business. Not to get stuck in feeds, not to try to read every channel. Just to understand the main changes across different areas that I need to react to, and to let everything else go and live in peace.
That's how I started this project.