What makes me money is staying aware of changes in German bureaucracy, and other things that recent immigrants should know about.

My solution is information streams. I set up various stream that surface important information so that I don’t need to seek it. It saves me an absurd amount of time.

This includes people who write to me when specific things in their field change, a WhatsApp group of relocation consultants, and monitoring lots of German laws for changes with Wachete. I also follow the monthly changes gazette from the German government. This covers 90% of what I need to know.

I am now designing a tool to gather feedback from my readers about unobservable things such as the processing times at the immigration office. This would be insanely valuable to people who apply for a residence permit.

In summary, I automate the surfacing of important information, and make sure the updates come at a reasonable frequency, with as little noise as possible.

For everything else, I just don’t care. Knowing the latest and greatest in tech does not affect my income. I can build valuable things with old, boring tech.

I have a job that makes me money. I don't find that it requires me to try and chase current events and drama on all platforms.

There is too munch information being created every day to possibly keep up. Pick a couple sources you like and forget about the rest. If something is important enough, and you happen to miss it, someone will tell you about it.

Don't fish where there are no fish. Each spot has different kind of fish. If your goal isn't clear, you'll catch "something", but not necessarily what your looking for. If you're still hungry, then you need to find a spot that feeds you, rather than bouncing between a few.

HN has smart folk but it's particularly bad for web3, AI, and startups. Reddit is below average on everything, but better than HN on those topics. Lemmy tends to lean more towards web3 and FOSS. TikTok covers newer things. YouTube goes deepest, but you don't always need depth. The shorter the video, the more noise it needs.

Define what's important for you to know, or can make you money. Then select a few reliable sources that will deliver that info to you.

You could set up a Google Alert to have the news delivered to you in your inbox. There are probably other services like that as well.

Just make sure you select the right settings (language, sources etc).

Or select a few trustworthy newsletters on topics that matter to you. If you find that you are not reading them (not enough time), then unsubscribe.

It’s great - I dont! Most news, current events, forums are garbage that do not relate to, or help my life in any way!

Sorry, but I don’t care what’s happening in the USA, or the Middle East, or anywhere for that matter. I don’t care about the latest celebrity death. I don’t. Care. At. All. I don’t care about your politics unless it affects me, my family, or friends.

Media is manipulation.

I care about what I can see around me with my own eyes, and I care about programming and computer science. I care about my own small community I live in. I research what I care about.

I don’t need to stay upto date with anything else.

Neither do you, don’t be a sheep. Most people are sheep. Unplug yourself and live life undistracted.

Why do you need to stay up to date?

For money?

Why will keeping “up to date” bring you money? If you do the same as others do, you’re going down well-trodden paths. You’re not differentiating yourself or your mind from others if you consume the same media.

I’ve made money from software, I build software others consider impossible to monetise (extensions).

I did that by not “staying upto date” and by consuming and building different to the majority.

Forge your own path and don’t consume media. 99.9% of it is noise. Even hacker news is mostly noise.

I find that subscribing to newsletters that curates your interest is the easiest.

Pull over push (I choose when I want to see what's new, no email/notification driven stuff)

I feel like I'm in the same boat where I spend too much time reading news articles, twitter threads, reddit feeds, etc. A friend recently shared this chrome extension with me that helps me summarize the content on these pages using LLMs so now I use this all the time https://rockyai.me/. Instead of spending 2 mins reading an article I'll just read a summary in 10s and then decide if I want to dive in deeper.

Make a personal search engine, starting with one for hacker news… of course !!!

Honestly there’s tons of ways to make money. Noise is whatever distracts you from what you actually want to do. I struggle with this myself tbh but I feel this is somewhat relevant: https://justinjackson.ca/surfing

TLDR newsletter is my go to source.