An extended experiment with autonomous numerical based news.

by Stephen Zeiner on April 30, 2024

Before we go any further, if you're looking for the homemade Stronghold Digital Mining shareholder dashboard, it's here now: https://sdig.zeiner.com.

TL;DR: I think I want to try consuming more financial information in a way that's similar to the SDIG dashboard. No narratives, no distractions, just the numbers.

I'm attempting to solve my own problem, which is admittedly a problem that is unusual. I increasingly dislike visiting mainstream financial news sites. Maybe you can relate to this, but probably not.

Here's what's going on: I'm primarily interested in financial news information that largely revolves around numbers. If you've come to appreciate the SDIG dashboard, it's likely because it's overwhelmingly focused on autonomously publishing numbers approximately every 5 to 8 minutes that are extremely focused and relevant to the revenue inputs for Stronghold.

What makes the dashboard meaningful and interesting to me is that I can quickly and easily see numerical based news that's topically focused.

What if more financial news could be reduced to just numbers?

"Brah, that sounds boring." I hear ya. I get it, I do. That said...

I suppose I should confess something awkward and weird sounding: I suspect I might be a so-called "highly sensitive person." It's okay to burst into astonished "WTF?!" laughter, at some level this is kinda funny sounding and unusual.

What does this even mean?

It means that when I visit a mainstream financial news website in search of pricing information regarding a company's share price, earnings data, or something like commodity prices, I don't really want to be exposed to a smattering of distracting headlines and images depicting gruesome global war zones, random horror stories, celebrity illnesses and deaths, or other utterly negative and somewhat depressing news.

Hey, I get it. This is what most people evidently want to see when they visit a mainstream financial news site, because these mainstream financial news sites have massive audiences.

"Brah, don't you care about the latest instance of a cluster bomb being detonated over a group of unarmed civilians, or about the most recent mass casualty event in some random community?" I hear ya. I do care. That's the problem. My original intent was to gather some numerical financial market related information. But instead, I find myself ruminating about problems in the world that I have zero control or influence over. For me, it's mentally and emotionally distracting and draining to have to crawl over corpses just to get some numerical financial market data. I think it also contributes to a low-grade anxiety that's unhelpful.

Just give me the numbers.

"Brah, you're weird." Haha yeah, I hear ya.

This is a work in progress and I'm still attempting to truly define the scope of this project. And hey, I do sometimes want to dig deeper to try to understand more about what factors might be influencing some of the numbers. In that scenario, I'm making a conscious decision to dig deeper, and that's an option I want available to me.