As the title says, I can’t trust anything online anymore. Every blog post, “news” article, and hot take has a serious slant on the underlying facts.
This has been on my mind for a loooooooooong time, and I wish I could fix the situation, but I can’t. I’m looking at it through the eyes of a developer.
I’m setting up stricter lenses to keep other people’s thinking from creeping into mine. To do that, I’m throwing out secondary (and tertiary) sources. If I’m evaluating a library, a framework, or some “X just killed Y” announcement, I’m going straight to the source: the repo, the changelog, the commit history, the issue tracker, the spec. Tech news is mostly there to grab your attention and steal your focus.
I remember reading something (I wish I could remember where) about the cost of information. The highest-quality sources are the ones that are expensive to produce, or that you pay for. Code works like that. Code has to compile, pass tests, and survive contact with production. If it’s wrong, things break, builds fail, and pagers go off. There’s a real cost to being factually incorrect, and the compiler doesn’t care about your narrative.
A random blog post or tweet thread has no such cost. The author can write whatever they want for the price of an afternoon. It doesn’t have to be correct, only clickable. Nobody’s build breaks when a “Top 10 Frameworks You Must Learn in 2027” listicle is wrong.
Going forward, I won’t be reading hot takes, hype cycles, or “ecosystem analysis” pieces. If something blows up on Hacker News or X, I’ll go back to the source material: the release notes, the docs, the actual diff. If it’s just general chatter and I hear something in passing, I’m going to assume the following:
- It isn’t nearly as bad (or as revolutionary) as it’s being reported.
- The opposing camp probably has some merit.
- If I can’t verify it through the source, I’ll assume something happened and leave it at that.
I’m moving to a verify-first model of thinking. Everything else goes into the “something happened” bucket, with the understanding that how it’s being reported probably isn’t close to accurate.
I’m taking my attention and focus back.
Leave a Comment