I am not a big social media user, to be honest it is too stressful. Minimal social interaction is fine for me, and I'm happy with the boundaries IRL social encounters create where you can walk away (politely at the end of course) and it's over.

News and politics was a big waste of time for me too. Before 2015 I just kept up to date with big issues, but Brexit and then Covid really got me addicted to news and politics.

I ditched Reddit (with the API thing) and news websites about a year ago. It really is nice not knowing about every tiny event. It's not even necessary for being politically aware as so much of the "news" is hearsay and random Tweets turned into content by the media.

I have started looking at the BBC News business section every now and then. This really shows what a content factory other news media sites are. The BBC business page adds new articles maybe twice a day. There is no point checking more often than that (unless you go down a comments rabbit hole).

Sites like The Guardian have new articles hourly and sometimes multiple "live blogs" going on at once. That sort of output can happen in just the "business/economy" section, never mind the rest of the site.

Like social media there is just no way that amount of content can be useful, in fact it's most likely the opposite.