For example, he mentions reading about genocide and not doing anything about it. In a democratic state the thing you do about it - aside from giving money to NGOs and other groups who are actually helping on the ground, protesting, sending letters to politicians and editors, boycotting businesses that align themselves with it - is to vote against the people who enable it. If you do nothing about genocide, you don't care about genocide. You always have levers to pull. Our role in a democracy is not to be a passive consumer; we have to use our votes, our voices, and apply pressure about the things we care about.
The idea that the news doesn't tell you about the historical context of a particular event is also an important tell. That's a pretty good indication that you're reading the wrong news, not that news as a whole is bad. There is plenty of really good, smart, long-form, deeply reported, contextually revealing journalism out there. I agree that there's a lot of news that doesn't fit that description. But it's out there.
But most importantly, this is a barometer of how people are actually feeling. The news industry is doing a terrible job of meeting people where they're actually at.
Part of the problem is that we are genuinely in a tough spot in history: rising authoritarianism, climate change, oligarchy, and many other factors are joining together to squeeze the most vulnerable communities. I don't know that looking away is the right thing to do, but the fire alarm analogy is almost good: it's true that if you're subjected to continuous peril you'll stop paying attention, but the peril is real and not akin to a broken alarm.
Perhaps what we need is a newsroom that only takes a step back and reports on the underlying trends, removing a dependence on the individual stories of today. For example, we should be worrying a lot more about the integrity of midterm elections here in the US, but the individual stories get lost in the mix.
I love it when this shows up from time to time. Everyone should own their own content! And the indieweb community and its underlying philosophy are worth celebrating.
If you haven't, you should try to get to a Homebrew Website Club. Go talk to people about making your own, weird spot on the web that truly represents you. It'll make you feel great about technology again, I promise.
I must say, it's delightful to see this on the front page of HN.
A lot of people have been following indieweb POSSE principles for almost 15 years: publishing on their own site and syndicating elsewhere. I built my own platform for it that I used for 11 years, but you can use just about anything.
What's superb about the indieweb principles is that they're as simple as the web itself. It's worth digging into microformats, webmention, micropub, and the other lightweight standards the community has nurtured. It's all really good work that will become even more useful as more people turn away from centralized social media and AI-saturated services towards human websites. The indieweb is a slow burn but a really vibrant, growing, human community.
ProPublica | Director of Product Engineering | Remote (US only) or NYC | Full-time
ProPublica is a non-profit newsroom that investigates abuses of trust in the public interest. Journalism we published last year shed light on the impact of DOGE and ICE, investigated right-wing militias, told stories about the US medical system, and more. Here were our most-read stories in 2025: https://www.propublica.org/article/propublica-most-read-stor...
I'm the Senior Director of Technology. I'm hiring a pragmatic, mission-driven Director of Product Engineering, who will report to me, in order to provide more support for our product engineers who work on our publishing and data products. (This is not a reporting position.) You'll directly lead and manage a small team of engineers and help us to create and maintain great engineering processes.
More about the role here, including a direct route to apply:
Or get in touch with me at ben.werdmuller [at] propublica.org if you'd like to have a conversation about it.
The expected salary range for this position is $170,000 to $180,000. We cannot sponsor visas and must hire in the US. The role is almost fully remote: we have two in-person week-long summits a year.
I agree that it's tech leadership 101, but I think you'd be surprised how many teams don't do this! (And how many ICs aren't aligned with the principles.)
I lead tech at https://propublica.org/
Previously: The 19th*, ForUsAll, Unlock, Matter Ventures, Medium, Known, Latakoo, Elgg.
Personal homepage: https://werd.io
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/benwerd; my proof: https://keybase.io/benwerd/sigs/YK-QOCNnsiG6ADHQHU5pAARzJFek-ajUnq2wvcDCRk0 ]