Consuming Security News
In hindsight, I realized that I read too much news. I started reading RSS feeds from as many security blogs as I could, until those feeds overwhelmed me. Then I tried Twitter and followed 1.5k people in the security community. Now, my timeline adds a tweet every 15 seconds. However, it didn't work well.
Now, more than ever, it's impossible to keep up with everything. Not to mention that clickbait is scattered across the news, making it even harder to stay up-to-date. There is an information overload.
Today, I keep it simple.
Instead of RSS, I keep one tab on Hacker News, another on Reddit, and one on Digg because it summarizes Twitter for me. I occasionally check my Twitter and LinkedIn timelines. My favorite links go to Pocket, and I tag them in case I need to find them again, which happens by the way.
But if I read the same news as everybody else, we will all end up knowing the same things. I'm assuming that everybody reads the news every day, which isn't true in the first place.
And since nobody can catch up with all the news anyway, perhaps the order in which you read doesn't matter either. When you talk to someone, you have something new to share, and so does the other person.
At the end of the day, we tend to read what we enjoy the most rather than what we should be reading. It means that people in the same industry follow different influencers.
However, the real problem is not reading the news, but reading too much news. It means that you're not doing other things. Reading the news gives you a comforting and immediate satisfaction. You only need to read and grasp the contents by scrolling down the page. In comparison to learning a new skill, reading the news is almost relaxing.
Reading too much news turns you into someone who can talk about many topics, but maybe at a shallow or intermediate level. If you focus on learning a skill, you'll have fewer topics to talk about, but you'll know them in greater detail.
Sometimes we have to focus on the news. Sometimes we have to focus on honing a new skill. And sometimes we need to do both every day. Everyone approaches these things differently, and that's precisely what makes people complement each other in a team.
Knowing the balance is the key.
Thank you!
