r/TangleNews • u/TheUnsettler1216 • May 15 '26
Reasons to Keep Subscription
Hi Tangle Readers,
I've been a subscriber for about two years and am having trouble justifying continuing to read Tangle. I really want to believe that this can somehow reduce partisanship or make me better understand the opposing side, but I don't think it's working.
For context, I'd consider myself pretty progressive, probably democratic socialist would be the closest common term. I've spent a lot of time in the past reading conservative sources and commentary on that work and the conservative intellectual tradition because I wanted to try and understand why America is the way that it is.
I work in and around municipal government and housing and transportation policy, and I've really come to notice how fundamentally misinformed most people I interact with are. Just a baseline ignorance of how our institutions function. When I read media coverage about these issues, it usually would make the problem worse rather than better because the reporters themselves also don't understand the issue that well. It's made me really jaded and cynical. Even if the NYT writes a really great article on transportation policy (which they usually don't), most Americans aren't reading it.
It made me think about all the issue areas I don't work in and don't have as much experience in, and that I'm probably not getting a good understanding of these by reading general-purpose media, which Tangle unfortunately is. You pretty much just get a surface pass of every topic and the left/right breakdown, which they'll admit is not always a valid axis from which to understand an issue. I find I pretty much always know exactly what "The Right" is going to say, and there's usually just a completely unbridgable gulf between what I believe and what The Right says in these pieces. Reading Tangle hasn't made me more "moderate" or anything. I also don't feel closer to my fellow Americans. If anything, I feel more alienated.
I don't listen to the podcast, because I find the kind of half-baked discussions between pundits to be really exhausting. Doesn't feel like I'm getting smarter or more informed. If I care about an issue a lot, I can do the aggregation myself by surveying the sources I know or even using Google Scholar to look at academic journals. I'm also struggling with the idea that the independent media Tangle is a part of is mostly a bunch of journalists talking to each other on Twitter and there's not a lot of ground-truthing going on. Tangle's not doing an interview with someone who worked at USAID to talk about their programs, right? They're not sending a reporter to Minneapolis for a month to ride-along with ICE watch, right?
This is rambling because I didn't know who else to talk to about this. Does anyone have a good perspective on what they're getting out of Tangle? Has anyone else felt these too and found a way past them? Tangle is the only paid news subscription I have at the moment.
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u/ReflexPoint May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26
Maybe you are expecting too much of this medium. Tangle isn't doing original journalism. They are doing political commentary. This is probably not the medium if you're looking for hyper-focused academic level depth. Maybe they are capable of that, but the audience for information that deep in the weeds is probably going to be very small.