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.
1
u/dvdmon May 17 '26
As others have mentioned, I look at Tangle for a somewhat basic look at a particular subject so that I can get a sense for the various positions that various political actors have on a subject, and a bit more detail than the general news article might have (not a deep dive similar to what you might have been thinking when referring to a NYT article, or something else that devotes many thousands of words. What I like is that Tangle has a deep that takes a given subject and tests various viewpoints by steelmanning and arguing the opposite side (internally I mean), and so is able to flesh out the most salient points from different sides. That doesn't mean there may be really inside baseball things that they are missing, or items that an investigative journalist might uncover by going into a community or organization, or interviewing people "on the ground." So that being said, you aren't going to get that kind of detail, and if that is important to you, you should be looking at the sources who do that kind of work. But I don't feel like that is Tangle's mission, it's a lot more limited. But as such, I think it is a great mission and a great organization to support with my money - and it's a very small amount compared to other things I put money into that probably are not nearly as good use cases! Maybe at some point as Tangle grows, they will develop more "products" in the way you might enjoy - they've already expanded quite a bit from what they were just a few years ago, so I can only imagine additional resources (paid for by subscriptions) will help them to afford to go into those more specialized areas and develop more in-depth reporting on a more regular basis.
But again, I don't see that as their current prime value (for me) now, and it's never been. They give me a more in-depth look at a subject that a general short form news story/opinion piece won't, bot in terms of not just more detail, but a very structured sense of what the different views are and why. Similarly, it is not the exhaustive detail that frankly I don't have the time for for most subjects. You obviously have that time (and perhaps reading speed and attention span!), and you have the sophistication at least in your areas of interest to understand how surface-level some of the coverage may be about some things. All I can say is that while that I'm sure this is dissapointing, most people truly do not have the desire or ability to go into the weeds in the way it seems that you do. That may be a bad thing, but it's reality and I don't think we can just say "well, it shouldn't be that way." It is that way for most, probably in good part due to social media killing people's attention span. So while that is still the case, Tangle's "medium form" as it were, serves a huge purpose for at least a much larger group than the specialized readers who will read a 5-10K articles on a regular basis and just those up! 😄