If the article sounds interesting, I'll read it, although I usually skim articles these days.

I do but that is because I use RSS feeds and heavily curate what I get (think new scientific papers, animation news, and DIY stuff) those articals are almost always interesting enough to get me to read them in entirety. Politics on the other hand... I check in maybe once a month to see what is going on. If something huge happens I'm sure I will find out from my coworkers quick enough.

Sometimes I try, but I about as soon as the paywall pops up.

Both

I'll read the article if it's not behind a paywall. I often don't finish them because most articles are poorly written.

Do y'all actually read articles or just the headline?

Both. I first read the headline (while taking it with an immense grain of salt due to, by my experience, the commonplace usage of clickbait/misleading headlines) to see if the article may interest me, then, if so, I read the article to either effectively fact-check the article's own headline, or to actually get more detail on what the headline summarized ­— though, it certainly feels like it is more often than not the former. Sometimes, however, the headline, on it's own, is enough, but that seems rare — logically, it is in a news company's best interest to get people to read the article (if it is assumed that they get income from people reading the article's content) so they would be incentivized to make the headline as provoking or nebulous as possible to maximize the probability that one will click on it.

Its just crazy cabinet nominees every time. Wars happening. Nothing I can control.

Personally, I believe that it's, at the very least, important to be peripherally aware of what's happening in the world, but one must be careful to recognize what they can and can't control — what is worth fretting over and what isn't. Inundating oneself with the knowledge of any number of horrible things that may have happened somewhere in the world in a given day is generally of no help to anyone and only serves to degrade one's own mental state.

Y’all actually read all this shit? How does anyone have the energy?

The most tiring thing, personally, is fact checking. It is tiring to feel like the majority of my interactions with news articles that are shared are that of dealing with misleading claims and misdirected or misinformed reactions. It certainly feels like the majority offloads the scrutiny of data onto the minority.

I don't click most links due to online tracking although fedi crowd is pretty good about cleaning up tracking links.

Either way, most media is owner class asset used to shill their interest. So reading that shit aint nothing but reading some rich old clowns opinion on the issue.

Comment section is where real discussion happens anyway.

I drop my 2 cents to see how it resonates and what counter points I can gather. Most of the time it is people screeching some owner sanctioned bullshit...

so much bootlicking or tankies...

What's 'articles' hobbitses?

Yes, usually, but I'm more frequently using the Read Aloud extension. It's the least effort that gets me there.

Just the headline

If an article doesn't fit my mental model of the world I'll often skim through it and check out a related wikipedia