[plonk]

> The mental effect of 'its different from mainstream, thus better and look at me how clever I am for finding it out 5 minutes before most of group'.

It's not because of lag time, and it's not because it's different from mainstream, it's due to growing frustration with older media that I slowly developed before I even knew about Twitter and my experience following interesting people on there. It's gotten worse since Musk, some have moved to bsky or mastodon, but it's still the best source for me.

I understand your point of view but I don't find your assumption very charitable, there are real reasons for this that have been touched on.

[jajko]

Well, charitable for normal situations IMHO it isn't. Some sort of OCD-ish behavior re info feed. I see it on myself - the less I focus on all crap coming from news, regardless of form or source, and more I focus on my own wellbeing, my close family and friends, the happier I am.

There are truly very few news which are seriously relevant to my life, and I suspect its the same for rest of us. Just because there is a big crowd of similarly-impacted folks I ain't going to normalize such toxic behavior.

[plonk]

Longforms from papers like the Economist actually really interest me, and I look forward to opening them even when my life is pretty happy already. But you need to find non-extreme papers that match your interests and keep reading time under control.