Hacker News

I get what the author is trying to do, but the food vs. info metaphor is awful. It simply doesn't work well, feeding more noise into the matter than info.

What he's calling "junk info" is actually multiple things, that may or may not be dangerous depending on the person. Some examples:

• fluff - "here's a cat pic".
• trivia - "a year in Pluto is 90k Earth days."
• "propaganda" (for the lack of a better word) - or, text showing huge usage of rhetorical devices for basically no info. I think that rage bait could go into this cat, dunno.
• misinformation - or, sharing beliefs that are either not true or not justified.
• etc.

Some of those things are actually good for you. Like fluff; if we must use the food metaphor fluff is like dietary fibre, you won't digest it but it's still necessary to keep you healthy. Trivia is also mostly harmless.

The harm comes from what I called "propaganda", and misinformation. Specially both combined.