Nehaveigur

In recent years, I’ve tried to limit my news consumption. I’d rather spend my time and attention on things where I can make a difference. I couldn’t put it any better than Dynomight does here:

One of my strongest beliefs is that way too many people allow politics to play way too large a role in their emotional lives. Of course, elections matter. The world could be better and most potential improvements intersect with politics somehow. But the way we spend our energy on politics is poorly optimized for improving the world and well-optimized for sucking up all our time and making us miserable.

I also don’t want to completely shut myself off and stop keeping up with current events. Ideally, I’d just like to be notified of the most important developments. The problem is that all available news apps and sites are designed to maximize engagement, and they will send you breaking news alerts even if nothing particularly noteworthy is happening.

Instead, I’d like an app that sends me alerts only for the most important events, at a frequency of every few days. If nothing particularly important happens for a few weeks, I’d be happy not to get any alerts. The major advantage would be that there’d be no need to check the news, since I know that I get an alert if something actually important happens.

Here are the events that I’d consider alert-worthy since October:

• October 1: The Israel Defense Forces invade southern Lebanon, expanding its conflict against Hezbollah. In response, Iran attacks Israel with ballistic missiles.
• October 1: The Japanese parliament elects Shigeru Ishiba as the new prime minister, with members from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) forming the majority.
• October 13: SpaceX achieves the first successful return and capture of a Super Heavy booster from Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever to fly
• October 27: 2024 Japanese general election: The governing LDP loses its parliamentary majority for the first time since 2009, but still wins the most seats. The CDP wins its best result in party history.
• November 5: The 2024 United States presidential election is held, with Donald Trump winning a second (non-consecutive) term.

This corresponds to roughly one alert per week. Going forward, there may be months that go by without anything newsworthy, and there may be days that result in multiple alerts.

Implementation

A mobile app is the obvious choice for implementation. Unusually, the explicit aim is to reduce engagement. As far as I can tell, there’s no app quite like it on the Android or Apple app store yet.

There will need to be curation to decide what is alert-worthy. I based the alerts above on Wikipedia’s entry on the year 2024, which has the advantage over other news sites that it isn’t designed to drive engagement. As a general source of news alerts it is however unsuitable, as the editorial decisions what is alert-worthy don’t always agree with what would be of interest.

Curation would involve some basic rules. Alert-worthiness would be based on interest to Americans. Election results in major democracies, U.S. election results, deaths of very prominent figures like current heads of state, natural disasters leading to an exceptional amount of destruction, events affecting major wars and major scientific or technological breakthroughs would qualify. I’m unclear on whether the outcomes of major sporting events should be included.

Even with rules, someone would need to decide what’s alert-worthy. They’d follow the guidelines and their job will if news events meet the threshold for an alert. They’d also be responsible for the wording of the alert. Phrasing would need to make sure that they report the event without giving unnecessary detail or including a value judgement. An AI may be suitable for this role.

Eventually, the app may become more complex by allowing users to adjust the threshold at which they receive alerts or to adjust alerts according to their interest or the region of the world they live in.

Since this is a simple app, it’d be cheap to build. There’d be no registration required and the only access privilege the app would need to the phone is the right to deliver alerts. Curation would be an ongoing expense but could be done by part-time volunteers or even an AI. To support these costs, voluntary donations by ap users would likely be sufficient.

I’d be curious what others think of the idea and welcome messages by email and on X.

Related: My idea for a resource that points to the best introductory videos, websites, blogs, tutorials and books on any topic.