The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now(stephendiehl.com) |
The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now(stephendiehl.com) |
Cast aside the syntax and semantics of religion for financially engineered beliefs; buy low, sell high or you'll be "left behind!"
Small step forward from "believe in my take on Christianity or your soul will be eternally damned!"
Mirror neurons fostering same flock building via corps people used to build via scripture.
Just more lazy people who want zero responsibility to themselves and everyone else to have responsibility for them.
I know they got my number. I've had to delete every social media site I used to be engaged in (I suppose except this one) for the sake of my mental health.
quite frankly iam14andthisisdeep material
It's the business beast riding the tech monster. Its not people. People are simply driven by the beast.
I have been to a village recently, hoping to find the foods and fruits I remember from my childhood. They are all gone. Seeds were GM modified, chemicals entered through soil and water, the entire soil layer has lost its nature and ecosystem. The livestock has changed as well. You don't get the same chicken and eggs anymore. Grains, spices, pulses, milk, water everything changed. Just like internet, the enshittification happened everywhere.
That's not an isolated trend.
How discouraging would it be (intentionally) if every time an AI had access to your attention, it was trying to make you angry. This would probably cause a lot of people to disengage, a lot to get angry, and a few able to live without being affected by the laser guided anger and manipulation
If you buy this (wildly speculative and unsupported) theory, then the enshittification of the Internet is only natural. The best way to ruin a hobby is to turn it into a job. The internet was not perfect, but a better place back when people did it as a fun hobby with no expectation of income. Now, everything has to produce financial gain for somebody. Kids still make the same videos of themselves kicking each other in the nuts, but now they have to remind you to like and subscribe in order to fund future tomfoolery.
Perhaps what we have is not a problem born of a new technology (i.e. The internet) so much as a societal problem resulting from social regress. We're no longer dividing the pie up equitably enough, so people now feel squeezed and have become utterly obsessed with money. As it turns out, that makes them less fun.
With the internet connecting everyone together, giving you direct, immediate, access to billions of people from the comfort of your own home, of course there's going to be classes of people working to siphon money (or power) from the unintelligent into their own pockets, rather than doing the hard work of actually producing value for their civilization.
There's also no real solution to this.
Of course, educating people is a solution, somehow getting people to be more intelligent. But that's a slow, long, process, and the more I see, the more I realize just how commonly intelligent people still fall prey to the same things.
The only other solution I see is blocking access for the majority for either consuming information from or contributing information to the internet, which is a hard pill to swallow, and which has its own horrible, and mostly unsolvable issues.
To use one of the idioms that give this impression, this is not just knee-jerk whining. It's material to what the article is about. If you're going to raise this topic, be a human and say something constructive. An AI generated ragebait whinge about ragebait is ragebait squared with a heaped serving of hypocrisy on top. This exemplifies everything it complains about.
> https://i.ibb.co/m5tPKPYS/Screenshot2026829-1.png
But forget Pangram. This passage, from the conclusion, is 100% rock-solid proof that Claude was a key contributor.
> "The question is not whether the internet contains useful things. It does. The question is whether human existence should be organised around alien and inhuman objective functions no human chose and nobody can inspect or understand."
Also, I think that "grift" (repeated throughout the article) is very poorly defined. I also think that most cryptocurrencies are, in the general case, a bad example of a "grift."
AI is replacing Crypto on the topic in some sense.
You need to be in some kind of camp, even for something so minor as skincare brand or fanfiction.
I think that it was fine until the internet started to influence the real life way too much. You used to be able to log out and gain distance to the bullshit on the web.
Now the bullshit has permeated into the mainstream and you need very drastic measures and personality to reject it.
You will lose some people for this but there are still some older folks that can talk about anything and will never get offended. Never conform but also don't become a contrarian for the sake of it.
The modern life is an art how to stay weird in a world that wants to squash you into some kind of label. How to stay genuine
It starts during simple social interactions in real life. You make a joke about alcohol, now you feel the pressure of the crowd to become 'the funny drunk'. Squash it as soon as possible now you are a teetotaler. Now tell them joke about drugs. Make it all too confusing at all so they lose any idea about what to make of you. Obfuscation. Now you are free in the purest sense. There is no template for you aside from the one you craft or discover for yourself.
I even went further and made myself genderless so that these norms cannot easily qualify me into anything really. There is 50% chance if someone calls me a woman or a man.
Sometimes I support the feminism. Sometimes I give myself to patriarchy and observe how that feels.
Maybe I made it all up and nothing I wrote is genuine.
We should strive to be stranger or at least do not treat it as something bad but as a virtue. Of course do not try hard but just explore the weird and see where it takes you.
The sheer irony of the word "grift" being used 13 times within it...
The worse setbacks/shortcommings are probably:
1) removing promotional signatures from comments. This made it not worth your professional time writing a comment. It should also be a mechanism for raising the bar for quality comments. If there is a product or service behind your sig and it is bullshit or overpriced you need to deliver high quality well researched content. In contrast if you are a full time FOSS communist (joking) you get to misbehave all you like.
2) failure to make RSS mainstream. There are some services but few really know how to use RSS: The user needs to start with tens of thousands of subs then delete everything they don't like (dozens of items in a single click) and do keyword filtering. Some LLM to combine similar topics. I quickly slap this together many years ago.
https://salamisushi.go-here.nl
It's a pretty dumb script. All it does is gather the RSS/Atom feed from all websites you visit. I imagined that would produce a pile of rubbish but it turns out the websites one visits are surprisingly interesting. It shouldn't be a surprise but it is very.
RSS should be a constantly moving inbox with new stuff arriving non stop.
3) torrents should be expanded. Applications should really talk with a central torrent client to download all kinds of interesting things. Lets make an offline internet with online characteristics.
4) what I call "force the pattern", at least some people know how to do a things from step A to Z. With software you don't need to know, just follow the steps. The thing here shouldn't be to exploit the user. People should be made to do useful things for themselves. They think they want endorphin but what they really want is to find a partner, a community, a school, a job, a house, a car and perhaps a country. To learn how to sail the seven seas and how to use all parts of the buffalo.
Bird bath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BJ0L750B9A
The Wind in the Willows live action movie (2006): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZAq_4ZO_3U
its late, go to sleep…: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0bATLAjEkI (this whole channel is a ..vibe)
Samorost 3: https://store.steampowered.com/app/421120/Samorost_3/
Wingspan: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1054490/Wingspan/
Tiny Bang Story: https://store.steampowered.com/app/96000/The_Tiny_Bang_Story...
There's good shit out there and everywhere, if you but let yourself take a break
I have no words.
I’m neither aroused nor enraged. Good job.
In some cases, e.g. if you compare cryptocurrency to drop-shipping, there's not even much common ground, except "markets things through social media."
The ratio of grifters to non-grifters could have halved or risen tenfold in the last few decades. How would we know?
What percentage of the population "now appears willing to devote every waking hour to fleecing their fellow man as a career choice?"
How "many online grifters are themselves marks"?
(Heck of a karakoe number if you can pull it off.)
New technology emerges. It's first few years are innocent. Then, someone discovers how to con people at scale with it and gets stupidly rich. Then the copycats emerge. Then it gets enshittified until there's nothing left.
It happened with land, medicine, books, steam engines, looms, radio, and TV. It was only a matter of time before it came for the Internet and smartphones. It's happening at plaid speed with AI even.
(Medical grift in particular is an ancient business. Countless fortunes were made selling placebos (or worse!) that claimed to cure literally everything.)
Most people were dicks even back then
including me :)
(It's strange to see people accuse others of grifting but then continue to engage with the arguments made in that "grift" as though the other party sincerely believed the claims. In my experience, the claims usually probably are made sincerely, and the "grifting" terminology is used because the accuser can't accept that the other worldview exists, or else just as a generic boo word.)
I get a lot of value from the internet. I fell for some traps (instagram, facebook with very little value but lots of wasted energy) that I mostly got rid of.
But I have many products I am very happy about, that I got to know through other people on the internet.
It moved from an outpost for computer nerds in the early 1990s, to a middle-class product in the 2000s, then everybody got access in the 2010s with the spread of the smartphone.
The demographics of the internet look nothing like they did when it was created.
This particular essay starts with
> I’m a kid of the 90s, and I still remember the early internet.
... and then contains a lot of predictable stuff about how and why avalon became: tarnished, effete, weak, tawdry, despoiled, no-fun, toxic, predatory, rapacious etc. You can take your pick, it doesn't matter. It's the same argument no matter which adjective you choose.
It finally gets to
> The question is not whether the internet contains useful things. It does.
That's a truism of no value.
Take the whole essay, replace "internet" with a country's name and amend some of the details. You've seen it before? You read it every damned day in every form of media. It's used to justify just about anything; the good and the bad. In the end it's a boring, repetitive argument.
At the edge, it reduces to: my country used to be great and now it's crap because it's not how it used to be - so, we need to roll everything back despite the number of years that have passed between then and now, and despite any of the positive things that may have come during that time.
I’m sorry but I’m sick to death of all this rose tinted glasses crap about the history of the Internet
I got on the Internet in 1993 and it is always been a cesspit of bullshit. You could easily find child pornography online in the 90s and there were all kinds of scams constantly being tried
> I was very wrong. The grift economy is massive. More disturbing still, it is participatory. A large and growing share of the population now appears willing to devote every waking hour to fleecing their fellow man as a career choice.
I find myself worrying about this a lot. For what it's worth though, the non-grifters, the people interested in building a community, are still out there. To find them, you need to look for groups that add no financial value – join an art club, volunteer locally. When I spend time with those groups, I'm reminded that not everyone's a grifter in real life.
Also, this explorable by Nicky Case is evergreen: https://ncase.me/trust/
You mean you love Claude's writing.
By Little Tech Bros i mean developers with lots of technical skills, but who haven't been lucky enough to be in the right spot at the right time with an IPO. They keep evangelizing hoping megabucks lightning will hit them the next time. It won't. More likely, a layoff notice. Because Big Tech Bro figured out how to grab all the money from their excess productivity.
Is
For porn
A long time ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I set up my first webserver. In those halcyon days you had to email CERN to get your website added to the list of websites in the world; a list people downloaded as the sum total of what the web was and where they could visit.
Things have come a long way since then, but maybe not always for the better. The ad-companies have wormed their way into just about everything on the web, and the tech billionaires have funded it because they can make even more money at the general public's expense.
I recently got very fed up with Reddit's anti-user policies, and decided 'screw it, there's not that much special here'. As a result, Blewit[1] came into existence: it's an experiment - can an old-style just-for-the-good-of-the-community-it-represents website still function in today's modern world? We'll see...
Blewit takes no user information other than a username/password. We're forced to accept cloudflare's country-code so we can be compliant with the Online Safety Act, but we deliberately don't even ask for an email address.
We don't track. We don't have ads that are other ways to track. We don't have algorithms that force engagement along the most-outrageous pathway. We don't have analytics to sell you stuff. We don't put tracking pixels in our site, and when you upload an image, we strip it of all the EXIF/Location data so it can't be used to track you by proxy.
More bluntly, all the dark patterns are missing. By design. It hearkens back to a simpler time, where people did things simply because they thought it was cool, and others might like it too.
So it'll be interesting to see if something like Reddit (I think it's better, but I'm biased) can survive in the far-more-predatory world that we live in, than when I first started using the web. The site is deliberately lean-and-mean, and I think I can give it the on-ramp it needs to become successful if it gets the engagement of sufficient people. Again, I guess we'll see :)
Enjoy.
I remember the 1990s and this guy's "description" is massively biased.
I remember oldschool browser games in the 1990s - AM Mari (Archmage, from a korean company), or even Java Applets such as Dragonquest or whatever was the name. Or Joe Cartoon - may be a bit after 1990s too. Either way, many such things were not a problem here. I never used a dial-modem, for instance, even in the 1990s had fast flat-rate cable connections that was surprisingly cheap. Still kind of is cheap, for the net-value I get from the world wide web, though I agree it has gone down in quality, for many reasons. One reason is ... Google. And other mega-corporations. These try to destroy the internet. Or rather they want to control more of it.
> The scammer once had to find a victim. The platform now finds one, profiles the weakness, optimises the pitch, processes the payment, and recommends the next scam. What was once an aberration has become the norm.
Not incorrect indeed. The private companies here abuse the people. The problem is: what to do about that? Google de-facto controls the internet via its evil adChrome empire. All the ad-money revenue goes through this. It's kind of like a giant mafia system established here. Didn't the free market philosophy once claim that monopolies should be avoided? Why did the USA establish these monopolies?
> Each feeling arrives with something to buy.
Not sure what the guy means. Ublock origin blocks almost all ads. I don't buy anything advertised; I don't even notice it because it does not show up.
Not everyone uses the internet in the same way.
> People doomscroll until they acquire the anxiety that the next influencer will monetise.
Doomscrolling is indeed addictive; I do that on youtube shorts. The shorts are progressively getting worse though and also AI slop spams fake in, which invalidates any time I spend on these too. I usually close the tab after 10 downwards scrolls or so. I am accessing the internet on the desktop though; on smartphones this is probably a more default-y behaviour to swipe.
> The system is dopaminergic in the most banal and mechanical sense. It runs on anticipation, uncertainty, and variable reward.
Ok, I stopped reading there. The guy thinks that humans are simple systems based on biochemistry. I fail to see how I would fit into that scheme at all. And I understand biochemistry. I'd wish he would have spoken more about who ruined the internet, not what the thing today called the internet is about. We need to isolate and counter those who ruined the internet. Google is a huge factor here but not the only one.
Can't blame Internet. People which were scammed "offline" are now scammed online.
So yea, the internet is a worse place, but really because the early internet wasn't realistically behaved for the amount of free energy it left around.
The V4 limit is one thing that does this. The other is DNS, which is inherently hierarchical because it’s a tree. The whole structure of the net and the web promotes the emergence of aggregation points, which then amass insane amounts of largely unearned power and influence through sheer network effect.
“The medium is the message” is a much deeper statement than people think. The structure of the medium and the sympathetic structures it encourages to form around it are the message. IPv4 with NAT and DNS with its real estate model directly encourage the formation of aggregators and siloes and that’s where it starts.
People don’t get it. I’ve given up trying to explain. Systems thinking isn’t as titillating as conspiracism, doomerism, or misanthropic cynicism I guess.
The “prime directive” of the site is “do not track”. Historically that’s been irrelevant to the internet at large, but I think there is a growing feeling of disquiet over just how spied-on, measured, packaged, and sold we all are. If that undercurrent grows, the world might be a different place in a year or two.
Cheers
https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/piranesi/
> Piranesi is the opposite: everything stripped to the bone, every sentence load-bearing.
Yikes.
I think a fundamental problem is that micropayments don’t work. Instead we pay with attention, i.e. by watching ads. That already worked before the internet, in tv and radio and newspapers.
OK, you've explained it, and I think I buy that explanation. But now what do we do about it? At least the conspiracism gives us an enemy to be angry at and maybe try to fight.
It is really hard not to succumb to this. It requires active effort and sometimes even a willful ignorance. "turn a blind eye" is the idiom here. Monty Python's "Always look on the bright side of life" kind of thing.
Mr Rogers said it: look for the helpers. They may be few, but they are there. Find them and focus on them.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100125201022/https://www.pbs.o...
‘Fred Rogers often told this story about when he was a boy and would see scary things on the news: "My mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.' To this day, especially in times of 'disaster,' I remember my mother's words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers-so many caring people in this world."’
As the aphorism goes: History may not repeat but it sure does rhyme.
History shows that things can and do improve when people try. The overall trajectory has been positive, even if bumpy.
I genuinely dont like what history sais follows after times like this.
The pace of learning for our spieces is devastatingly slow. We rather regress faster than learn.
We are closer to idiocracy, due to knowledge and skills atrophy (not only due to AI).
When confronted with reality, it can't stand up and the individuals become angry and disengage rather than working with the system as it is.
I know this is painting with a broad brush but I see it basically everywhere I look. One example would be the expectation of a benevolent Authority that manages political and social life. Reality is that it is just messy humans all the way down.
Some people assume that from the beginning and can work with it. Other people just break down with frustration and broken expectations.
People sometimes get mad at this, like it’s callous or privileged, but what’s the difference between focusing on problems you can’t help and slowing down to stare at a car wreck?
If you don’t slow down are you being insensitive?
Obviously if you can help it’s different.
It's even sadder when one realizes the world was always that way. The author more-or-less says as much, though they seem to suggest it is amplified. I'm not entirely sure the part about it being more amplified today true. Most of the ills mentioned existed when I was a youth, it simply took different forms and (of course) was spread by means other than the Internet. There never was a chance to get ahead because the cards were always stacked against us.
Apologies for the cynicism.
I feel this very strongly over the past couple of years. As always, hackernews is full of extremely smart, well read people so I'd really appreciate any good reading material on this so I can better understand it. Tips are appreciated as well (healthy diet and regular exercise, good extended blood labs (think like Function health), good consistent sleeep habits).
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/trust-games/202111/t...
Or search HN for "cynical genius"
It's easy to romanticize the past and it can seem intellectually sophisticated to despair about the future, when in fact the overwhelming evidence is that things have gotten much much better for nearly everyone on just about any objective axis you can pick.
It depends on how you wield it.
Cynicism shouldn't cloud your judgement. That's the actually correct point you wanted to make, I think.
There appears to be some force that promotes one particular way of thinking, perhaps the inevitable consequence of accumulated experiences. In the case of cynicism, the balance tends to shift towards one side of a scale over time.
Without a countervailing force on the other side it can tip a normally balanced system out of stable equilibrium.
My point is explicitly: the world provides the force in one direction, and the individual must provide the force in the other.
Maybe this is the same thing you intended by saying it shouldn't Cloud your judgment.
I don't think cynicism is the correct approach though. It's possible to accept that circumstances are unhealthy without internalizing general negativity. It's just hard. I suspect you and I, and OP, are all agreeing with each other on this point.
(You might think the last point is the most naive one, but in my experience the economic growth was the only thing that actually worked)
Hopelessness has it's own self-fulfillment. In order to change a thing you have to wish for something, and if you can't imagine a better future, then you can't get one
I sense my internet addiction got a lot worse in recent years. I don’t use social media, but I consume news, blogs and newsletters - and comment threads - voraciously.
I think the addiction began as soon as I started to work at a desk behind a computer which had internet access - 20+ years ago. Like putting an alcoholic to work behind a bar and thinking he’d restrain himself.
It seems to have worsened in recent years. I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.
I noticed that in certain sections there seems to be a heavy use of LLM-assisted writing, such as this one:
> The platforms did not invent fear, greed, loneliness, or status anxiety. They industrialised their extraction. Their recommendation systems are vast reinforcement-learning loops that continuously experiment on human weakness. Each objective is a moving composite of high-dimensional signals for attention, retention, and conversion, dispersed across models, metrics, tests, and feedback systems. The subject cannot see the experiment. The operator cannot fully explain it. The regulator can barely comprehend it. The loop knows only that one stimulus keeps a person scrolling while another lets them leave. Calm accuracy loses. Threat, transgression, humiliation, and impossible promises win. The resulting social damage appears nowhere in the objective function. It arrives as an externality.
Not sure what you think of it.
In my view, his ideas are nice and interesting, and I would rather read less verbose, less "perfect" blog posts, and reduce or remove the use of LLMs.
I'd like to give the author the benefit of the doubt, but since we've set all ourselves on being cynical....
The only way out is: don't to go to the casino in the first place. We need to tend our own [Voltarian](https://www.openculture.com/2020/09/what-voltaire-meant-when...) gardens.
If it’s unlocked, they may do some further scams from what’s available on the device, but either way, within days, your phone is somewhere in Asia, disassembled, and sold for scrap and parts.
Agreed, and the first step ought to be a push for demonetized / citizen-owned platforms:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
Note, however, that even with achieving this first step, we'll still have a platform full of profit-motivated actors, because our economies incentivize this behavior whether online or IRL.
Both problems need solving, but the first one is easier, and demonstrating its solution on a large scale could help convince everyone that it's an endeavor worth applying to all domains.
I am skeptical any non-corporate replacement like Lemmy can bring the old internet feeling back, because even on those alternative platforms, you just won't get many people using computers again.
About 2/3 in, the sentences got choppier and shorter, and you could tell some context rot was setting in.
> The platforms did not invent fear, greed, loneliness, or status anxiety. They industrialised their extraction.
Now we have already 2-3 generations raised to consider scam practices to be the norm , and even to celebrate behavioral tricks and audience maximizing optimization at any cost (clickbait!).
I cannot be convinced this is a normal thing. Over time, things revert to normal, but often in an explosive way.
Today you can recognize snake oil scams, most people can't. Nothing has changed.
Millions of people still fall victims to pyramid schemes and that's not due to the internet.
There is probably a catalog of dark-patterns for the titles somewhere, but you can usually tell.
If you (try to) read the news you can get good at it very fast. It's amazing how they twist and bend words together to leave an effect on you even if you are just scrolling.
No, it's just what's happening online.
>If you think some of the people you know are assholes, that's fine. If you think all of them are assholes,
Wrong thread? Doesn't seem to correspond to anything in the article.
That's just the saying as I know it. Regarding the post it would be along the lines of "if you think everyone is a predator/grifter/scammer, it may be a problem with you or the places you roam"
Forget the internet, you can't get your home repaired, your car worked on, an appliance purchased, shop for food, or do anything else without wading through a corrupt morass of that mixes woo, subcultures, grift, and subscriptions. Maybe it's the hospital that wants to charge a $25 a day fee to make the hospital room TV grant access to basic cable channels instead of nothing. Maybe it's the elementary school district that mandates every physical interaction between students is called in to the police - like little Jenny shoved Johnny who skinned his knee because he teased her, call the cops, it's policy. Or the way that every customer service interaction is routed through endless AIs because it's cheaper than solving a problem. Or how it seems like nobody will do right by anyone else until lawyers get involved. Cut taxes year after year, while everything decays, we fail the younger generations, and everyone thinks you fake it till you make it because it's all zero sum... It's how America heads straight to banana republic, and it might be too late to turn.
Check your id https://amiunique.org/
>China executes 11 members of Myanmar scam mafia https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2gdrvy9gjo
>Myanmar approves death sentence for cyberscam offences https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260728-myanmar-appro...
> Cambodian authorities rescued and deported 58,266 foreign nationals... 3,477 criminal suspects placed in pretrial detention https://apnews.com/article/cambodia-online-scam-compounds-cy...
No one forces anyone to use the internet, and certainly one can avoid being snared by the sirens.
A little self control goes a long way.
Modifying one element in this environment in favor of others won't make things better. You could even argue that less people are being financially scammed online than they are cognitively.
These problems are not endemic to the internet. But the internet does cast a broader net and provide a wider variety of ways for people to become afflicted by whatever it is I'm trying to describe.
And no, that does not mean that I am calling for identification. It just seems to be a natural consequence of having social interaction without real consequences.
The worst people in this set are public personalities. Everyone knows who they are. If anything that forces them to double down.
One cause is Congress not doing its job for 30 years. The other is the advertising funding model - website users are not the customers. Therefore, websites - especially news sites - aren’t delivering useful information to their users because that doesn’t make more money.
Therefore author is right. Reinforcement learning with this ecosystem is dangerous.
The internet has made available a wide array of facts. And combined with needing to double-check the frequently incorrect hallucinations of AI, this set of facts has a devastating, world-altering effect on the white collar professional class.
And cognitive dissonance is the only retreat; the tyranny of reality is too much to bear.
And if the government wants to arbitrarily get you, it can do that with or without you running a forum.
with no empirical reference, truth becomes a matter of popularity or the loudest argument.
with no space, everybody lives next door to a thousand assholes.
But, all that we learned in those 4 hours - is it really that useful? Some of it might be, lets say an hour of it. What about the other three? That could have been spent on something healthier - having fun with friends, play sports, or even just sleeping!
I understand the irony of typing this, but I too am in the same boat - consuming things voraciously, most of which is just useless knowledge, at the cost of relationships, health etc.
Even reading books all the time to the detriment of other activities isn't good.
What's good is doing a bit of everything. Reading a book an hour before sleep, doing a hour of exercise two to three times a week. Reading a few blog articles, wikipedia, long and well researched magazine articles. Making time for in person social interactions. Playing games, video games, board games, card games from time to time. Engaging in a few online discussions every week. Etc
It's all about balance or at least that's the way I see it.
It feels useful, it feels important. But it's not, it's just addictive behaviour, because "you found a way to make <library> 5% faster / 5% fewer allocations" is a dopamine hit that feeds back into wanting to prod some more.
It feels like I'm learning an absolute ton about high performance .NET and the kinds of crazy things that maintainers need to consider when taking in untrusted input.
But it's the equivalent of empty calories. The maintainers don't really want to know, and I'm not really learning anything actually useful. It's not actually enlightening work, it's just keeping myself busy while helping feed maintainers a maintenance headache.
The security angle is also horrifying in a different way, it puts me off wanting to put anything near the internet. I used to think the concept of "net crash" and an internet abandoned to "rogue AIs" in cyberpunk was entertaining fiction.
While I don't think the network itself will host those rogue AIs, I do worry that there'll simply be a critical mass of bad actors armed with AI that will render the net effectively inoperable.
I've started framing addiction as something that we feel compelled to do even when we know it has a detrimental effect on more important aspects of our life. In that respect, yes, it does feel like an addiction.
> Unlike alcohol or drugs, this is knowledge addiction - afterall, we learned about a bunch of things in those 4 hours, didn't we?
Did we learn anything? If we aren't using that knowledge, even in casual conversation, chances are that retention is very low. I'm not even talking about useful learning here, since it is pleasurable to learn something for its own sake. I'm talking about the stickiness.
Another way to think of it is: are we even interested in learning? I have downloaded the entire Wikipedia to my computer, along with Project Gutenberg, as well as various technical documentation. (Kiwix is wonderful.) On top of that I have enough books (digital and physical) to last a lifetime. I have a multitude of resources that I can tap into without touching the Internet, and accessing it is all very low resistance (e.g. I don't have to get off my ass to go to the library). So why do I even have home Internet access? Communicating with people certainly doesn't require a high speed connection.
Now I don't think that most knowledge is really that useful in general, maybe 1% of 4 hour binges have any real consequences. But occasionally it really does turn out to be very useful. I spent maybe 4-5 hours reading and watching videos about window air conditioners, having known basically nothing but the terrible shaky units from my childhood. After that period of research time, I bought two new replacements, saved $80 with National Grid rebates, and reduced my summer monthly kwh consumption by 200-250. It also led me to information about heat pump systems which I will consider in a future house purchase, and additionally more information which led me to avoid purchasing cheap peltier dehumidifiers for one with a compressor.
I guess my point is, it can definitely be worse. You can at least point to an Ortega hypothesis-like effect of learning a bunch of random stuff. But I agree that even just going on a walk and doing literally nothing feels way, way better than spending that time online. The balance is so heavily tilted towards internet addiction that I expect that having multiple "real" offline hobbies will increasingly be seen as green flags. In my experience, "bookworm" has not been a pejorative in a long time. stackbutterflow's comment about balance seems like the most sensible way to approach timespend in this sense, though. /rant
I've been watching framing videos for weeks feeling like I'm being less unproductive than if I were playing video games. But at a certain point it's just as bad. Not a single nail driven.
I wasn't overcome with addiction, but I was CHOOSING to take a break. There are good reasons to read the news, there are good reasons to take breaks. End the war against yourself and take more wholesome breaks, so your subconscious doesn't take over and force them. It may involve forcing yourself to be more realistic about what you can do in a given time period, but that's a good thing ultimately.
I know it sounds like a minor change but the whole game is putting your life back in your own control. When you find yourself binging, say "I am choosing to do this," even if you don't immediately log off. Just observe your own choices as a first step.
Another tip: when you're craving a hit of the internet, ask yourself "can I wait 5 minutes before checking my phone?" If you can't, no big deal. But if you do this enough time you build up the self discipline muscle.
I use this when I'm at risk of binging a show. If I'm tempted to let Netflix continue into the next episode, I say "ok maybe, but let's get up and do something else for a few minutes first and see if I still want to" and before I know it I'm building a robot instead.
Contemplation has the goal of a reassessment of evaluation. The choice needs to be re-evaluated as inferior to better alternatives.
Those need to be explicitly identified. In order to do this, you need to know what led to your choice emotionally.
The other side of the coin is the intentional design of many internet sites to exploit human psychology. News for example are "infotainment", "fear-porn" and "rage-bait", etc. by design and override many "self-discipline" mechanisms.
The internet isolates people while feeding them a simulacra of social interaction without actual social functionality. Objective truth in particular isn't reliably established by "watching the news", that's merely top-down conditioning by whoever owns your "news". Finding objective truth is an active process, not a passive event.
Besides the deleterious nature of engagement-maximizing social media today, I think another aspect of the problem is that there is less connection to real-life socializing simply because that has collapsed in so many countries.
This is the only forum-style site I regularly interact with, and I must admit that I rarely try to remember another username here. The effect is that I interact with ideas, not people. And there is some deep connection between behaviors I might label as addiction and a felt sense of isolation.
My experience has been the opposite. The people I knew who got seriously addicted to the internet a couple decades ago were mostly not thriving online among cool other people. They were getting dragged down into swirling cesspools of the time.
4chan has been around for over 20 years. A lot of the gaming communities and forums were toxic and brutal back then. There were social news sites, content mills, and personality cults back then too.
I think there’s some glorification of the past that happens in these threads. The old internet was full of toxic and addictive things, too. It was just less common to be immerse in it because you had to go to a physical computer and, if you go back far enough, dial up and occupy the house phone line. There were natural limits to how exposed most people would get.
My first date was a guy with fake photos. Ten dates later I settled for a married guy cheating on his wife. He eventually divorced but then I left him.
It's always been addictive and destructive. I was staying up past 3am to talk to my American friends, knowing I'd have to get up at 7am to get to school.
Painting the past with such a rose brush does not help anyone.
That still exists. Except now it's not in IRC or BBSes but in Discord "servers" instead.
Now, it's all just online drivel that never turns into anything else.
On the flip side, my partner has fallen deep into the cesspit, either seeing her doom-scrolling through Facebook for hours, or the way she talks about all the things she saw on there despite not handling any of the things that she said she would get done that day (FWIW... My partner does not work at this time, she quit her job under the auspices of taking care of the house. Has not gone well. I guess at least she stopped playing cow-clicker games on her phone...)
If I will give my first 'real job' some credit for anything around their Blocking policies, they had extremely strict blocks around anything that could be 'personal use' and had very alarming warnings pop up if you happened to hit one of the blocks. (To the point where even doing legitimate work research I more than once freaked out and went right to my manager and the IT managers explaining my case and what I was doing.)
But it's also part of why the open office / panopticon layout has become more popular; It provides at least some vague threat to somewhat lower the risk folks get sucked into their phones out of view...
Like many of you, I deal with stuff like depression, anxiety, ADHD. Back in the 2000s it felt like I was the only weirdo out there. Now I cringe writing that out because it feels like everyone is like that now.
The complaint that everyone is on their phone (or in front of screens) is less informative then the interlocutors ideas of what should be instead.
I think people under 25 probably don't even know how absolutely uncool it was to tell people you stayed at home in front of a computer on weekends or after school.
Absolute pariah behavior on the scale of coolness. But now ? Totally normal.
Interestingly, my digital consumption for idle entertainment dropped when I started working full time. I didn’t want to be in front of a screen when work was done.
My screen exposure for fun is primarily this site (where I spend too much time), and games where my friends and I treat the time as a multi-way group call with long distance friends.
I do know a lot of people who followed the exact course you describe: They watch screens at work and had periods where it was okay to spend a lot of time on social media or social news sites (Hacker News, Reddit, Slashdot, Digg, depending on the era). Checking those sites all day long became a habit for them and filled all idle time. Whenever they felt uncomfortable or bored, visiting a site would fix it.
Some of them broke out of it when they switched to workplaces where it wasn’t acceptable to do non-work things during the day. This is almost inconceivable for a lot of tech workers who have had a lot of freedom to date, but it’s normal in some industries. As an example, I have friends who work in areas where security concerns are so high that they check their phones into lockers before entering their work areas. Others worked at companies who did over-reaching analysis of computer use. Many just moved to companies with packed open office spaces where it would be obvious to everyone around if you were on Reddit or looking at your phone instead of the computer for an excessive amount all day.
What is interesting is that this seems to induce a split: Some people get broken of their Internet use habits this way and continue not using those sites outside of work. Others seem to have a rebound where they leave work and start gorging on Reddit or TikTok or their other preferred sites.
I've been thinking about this recently. The tools we use as desk workers are only ever one step away from endless streams of addictive content. And in many cases the software we use to do our jobs are adopting dark patterns similar to those which have been successful in consumer apps.
Often the advice is to opt out of the system. I make mobile apps, I can't simply drop out and use a dumb phone (unless I get a new career). My workplace is essentially inside the addictive environment. I have to keep my knowledge up to date and be on top of app/design trends to be successful in my job. This used to feel rewarding to me, but increasingly it doesn't.
I used to be able to go to Twitter and read+learn+be inspired a lot about web development for example, but now it's almost entirely short form video content. And I fall for it every time. And I actively tried to avoid this from happening, I barely use YouTube and I've never used TikTok.
My Dad was a carpenter and it's as if his day-to-day tools were cigarettes or something. It's hard/impossible to avoid this environment when we are increasingly working in it.
Since the industry stops for noone (and you kinda have to keep learning in software dev) and due to the state of the economy it feels like one big rat race to me, I don't foresee that sort of outcome for myself.
I can easily imagine how lazing in the sun in Italy or someplace like that (if the hot summers nowadays don't fuck that up), going swimming and eating healthy food with not a care in the world would surely help one get rid of the dopamine addiction, getting there being the hard part.
The fast paced modern lifestyle and being always online can feel a tad anxiety inducing and unnatural.
It's less the constant need to keep learning that bothers me (my formal credentials involve a requirement to undertake a minimum of 30 hours of continuing education annually) than it is that the industry has focused on vendor-specific implementations of various concepts.
I've built a lot of control planes like Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry (and its accompanying BOSH) over my career as a system administrator, but hiring managers and staff engineers these days specifically want Kubernetes experience.
Likewise, I've built a lot of control planes like what backs AWS's EC2 (including multi-tenant accounting and quotas and MAC/RBAC!), but hiring managers and staff engineers specifically want production experience with EC2 (and, seemingly, the broader AWS ecosystem, which is nonetheless approachable for someone who has production distributed systems experience).
At my most tinfoil hat, I want to say that this is blatantly in the interest of setting up a consulting industry around these vendor solutions, and it creates something of a monopsony situation for someone with my skillset.
My formal credentials are as an actuary, so I can at least go back to pursuing claim severity modeling and pricing out when something has a hiccup as a primary responsibility, but this focus is almost certainly a deskilling move otherwise.
Esp. comments: Actually, I ready mostly those because usually they have more information or context etc.than the article itself. (BTW: thats the reason why Im here on HN :-)
You are using social media right now.
> It seems to have worsened in recent years. I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.
That's just anxiety from worsening politics, don't you think? Getting out of that anxiety may just be a matter of recognizing that just because bad stuff's happening in certain places that may eventually have repercussions in your own individual life, it doesn't mean that it's going to affect you that bad. It's like someone jumping in the pool. The waves will dissipate by the time they reach you. You can ignore them and just pay attention to the water in your personal space.
That’s not to say I’m immune to clickbait!
Having income and even better, time, to take out of the current workforce cog would do wonders. Sadly, we're in an employer's market and non-internet activities are only getting more expensive.
Ideally, you'd have some getaway with family and/or friends to enjoy the beauty of the world we're in. That's the best antidote to such digital addiction. But I'm sadly been spending all my time trying to get back on the hamster wheel with the job search.
I've had a smartphone since the iPhone 4, I think. And while I find it useful, I honestly don't understand how anyone can be addicted to it. Mostly stays in my pocket. If I need navigation, it's out in the car while I find the address. I use it for instant messaging for my wife and kids (rarely the phone call anymore... don't know the last time I answered a call, it's all robot scammers and telemarketers).
The screen's not big enough to read anything, not large enough to watch anything. The sorts of games I enjoyed as a kid just aren't available. Sometimes I'll have an ebook on it, that's ok (it's nearly as big as a paperback used to be), but remembering to load one onto my phone before I got somewhere I'll be waiting doesn't always work out.
I can spend hours online, if I'm not careful. At home, in front of the big monitor. How does anyone get addicted on a tiny little phone screen, with dumbed down apps? I can't even look at pages on Firefox on the phone, without adblock it's just abysmal.
Done
This is the result of a simple equation:
The more time you spend on an online website/app the more ads they can show you. And with that, the more info they make from you, the more relevant the ads become, and the more money they make.
Keeping you glued to their website or app is the goal of "free to use" social media apps.
If i had no ethics, and corporations as naturally amoral entities don't, i'd hire PhDs in psychology in order to try to employ tactics to keep you engaged and spending as much time in the app as possible. This, btw, is exactly what they have been doing.
Tiktok became super big in western world around the time of covid, and that one was the first app i immediately noticed how stupidly addictive and "brain rotting" it was. Soon after Instagram introduced Reels, Youtube Shorts, and Facebook their own shorts.
Difference maybe is during covid I got rid if my TV and got into guitar. I also deleted Twitter and Facebook in the early 2010s. Never fostered a sense of ownership over an account.
Not having the "work laptop to TV" pattern created a need to fill time otherwise. Cooking skills have greatly improved. Home improvements are getting done much cheaper without labor costs.
Sign ups and paywalls everywhere when I do take a minute to surf the web help. Anything that wants me to sign up is ignored.
Further reinforcement during these windows of surfing comes from not being wrapped up in thought-less rush to join in. Just browsing makes the banal content stand out.
1. If everyone you know is an asshole about some particular thing, then you're probably the asshole. Think politics or design.
2. Everybody is an asshole some of the time for some reason. Because the internet connects and exposes us to so many people that even if someone only acts like an asshole very rarely said connectivity and algorithm boosting ensures you get exposed to it.
Some of the worst places for comments I've seen are on youtube - just the lowest effort ("who is listening to this in 2026?!") or the most obnoxious, or just misunderstood. Partly this is because of voting systems combined with large numbers of people. Partly because of bots I suppose.
Now, both of those restrictions have been lifted: they can now act obnoxious in front of a global audience that will be forced to listen to them, and they no longer have to worry about the potential consequences of being obnoxious in person.
Okay, found it -- https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
Edit: It was written in October 2018 -- 8 years ago. Feels centuries ago, to be frank. We're moving at absolute breakneck speed in tech.
When you choose to see beyond the surface, it becomes clear this is the cause of a system. A system that is nearly impossible to escape, and which will last for the rest of our lives. But still a system, and not the people participating.
All the little followers have a different tune when confronted with a real social situation, at least one that isn't a mob providing safety in numbers.
It's similar to the bully dynamics at school. Get one of the hangers-on by themselves and they are civil with you. When they are with the bully peer-pressure stops them from thinking for themselves.
It is not a lack of shame and the treat of consequences. Take soldiers for instance, instinctively, they don't want the enemy they face dead, it takes a lot of conditioning to have them kill without hesitation and it often results in mental health issues later. And solders are rewarded for killing the enemy, it means the shame and threat of consequences go the other way. Normal people just don't want to hurt others.
But the more detached we become from the actual person, the easier it is to be an asshole. This is what happens on the internet where people are just entries in a database, at best a name and an avatar.
> You see this in real life on the streets too.
To nowhere near the same extent, in my experience. Most people in real life are still fairly polite, even to strangers. It's insane to me how rude people can be on social media. Some of the aggressive responses I've received on Reddit (to fairly innocuous comments) I would never in a million years get in real life. (And this is also true of the 90s internet.)
In the current day when AI is so prevalent, it always makes me wonder how many posts are made by agents instructed to maximize engagement by making people angry.
Also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49493820
I totally missed this just a few days ago lol
We're definitely in a decline as of now, where we arguably had progress from 80 to 50 years ago.
If so, I would agree, but for fairly narrow definitions of “we”.
Globally, the median human is wildly better off than 50 years ago.
Even in the US, I see your point for straight white men (of which I’m one), but would the median woman be better off fifty years ago? What about if you’re gay, disabled, black, etc? That’s not even getting into things like medical conditions, life expectancy, violent crime rates, etc. Infant mortality was more than 3x higher fifty years ago than it is now.
Socially speaking, it's been a much better curve, albeit not without its own share of slumps. Especially recent updates on Roe v.Wade. There's certainly a conversation for that as well, but economics makes sure those marginalized classes remain marginalized.
This is something I've been working on a lot myself. It's so easy to wind up sliding into the familiar patterns and routines, and reaching for the phone. I'm finding that discipline is less about resisting it and more about redirecting it to something more productive
Today, if one is heavily online, many platforms no longer offer a space where one can tell a fellow user, "I'll be in your town soon, let's meet up", or even if it does, the general culture has changed away from that.
I think the best attitude is "Yes, the world could be improved, but all I can do right now is improve myself." There's a raft of evidence (and not just my firsthand anecdotal experience) that shows taking ownership yields far better life outcomes.
The risk for learned helplessness is far greater if you don't even acknowledge the control you have over it. True, someone reading my comment might not go "all the way" in fixing their problems and get stuck blaming themselves, but there's only so much I can do with an internet comment. I recommend therapy too to save you from those sorts of blind alleys.
I think for people that age now, the internet is a much lonelier place.
The antidote is real interactions, and ignoring the online extremes.
(Then you bring up Aaron Swartz and Obama's DOJ on reddit and it's massive downvotes calling you a MAGA nazi blah blah blah.)
I don’t know enough about macroeconomics in the global sense to say about the first one though. My sense is that we’ve gotten much richer, more innovative, more technologically advanced, etc as a nation over the last half century. More so than basically anyone else. And no one is really catching up to us in those areas, with the possible exception of China. Is that wrong?
I agree that we seem to have destroyed a lot of institutions and safeguards that might precipitate our decline, but those things seem very subjective and qualitative. If we look at it quantitatively and holistically, we see pockets of decline all over, but the overall picture of the metrics doesn’t look like decline, does it? But I suppose that depends on how you weigh the pockets of decline against the pockets of advancement.
I guess maybe a better way to frame the question would be: what would you expect to see from the US economically over the last 50 years if we had not been in the decline you’re claiming?
I do think the internet was less bad back then (but still bad) and i also think sometimes teenagers just be teenagers
But every day there's basically the same type of threads, with the same predictable discussions and you know just by the title and the amount of comments on a thread that you'll get you dose of dopamine whether you're pro or anti any topic that is regularly discussed.
It was so automatic that when I was working on a new, not-at-all-internet-connected long-distance wireless IP network with the (quite apt) customer looking over my shoulder, well before the days of cheap or free phone hotspots and always-on pocket supercomputers, he laughed when he saw my hands start to type out slashdot and said: "Yeah, good luck with that."
After Slashdot, it was Reddit.
Now, it's mostly HN.
I've mostly avoided traps like MySpace, FB, and whatever LinkedIn has become. But it's all social media, and all of it always has been.
But HN is a little bit softer, I think. Whether it's design elements like the deliberately-quiet cooldown periods on serial comment replies, or the very apt and cordial moderation by dang and company, or some combination of that and everything else else: My compulsion to smash news.ycombinator.com into the address bar is not quite as intense as it was for Slashdot during its prime, or Reddit.
For me, HN is mostly just a place to learn about some new things that are going on in the world (with a focus on tech) and find healthy responses that help me to do better in my little version of that world. Sometimes, I get to teach some things, and I also occasionally vent about some things.
But sometimes, I get still find myself mired in responses from people who I feel are deliberately anti-helpful. This promotes involuntary responses in my brain chemistry that make me want to fight back as soon as I possibly can. I wish I could do better, and I wish that they would also do better.
But! So far, that's usually been pretty easy to shut down or redirect here on HN when it occurs, before it all gets Godwin'd all to hell and back.
(And before Slashdot, I used tin and an an ISP-provided news server. And before that, networked BBS systems; the whole of the 1990s were also rife with social media in my world. :) I even tried [and failed] once to implement an nntpcache box for a local ISP, to help them save on bandwidth and local storage.
Before all of that, it was the 1980s and I was a little kid.)
Depressed people are the opposite, they tend to lurk and not care that much
I remember back in the "old" internet pre-2010, there was basically zero anxious people posting.
Fear and anxiety sells best (even better than Sex). When you end up selecting procedures that ensures the maximum sales/clicks, you are actually optimizing for things that cause maximum fear and anxiety?
It doesn't help that the clinical meaning and the colloquial meaning of the word are different, with the latter being used by people to hit you over the head with, pretending that it would be the former.
Is what you said. The clinical thing.
> You're just being cynical
Is cognitive dissonance forcing its way out of the mouths of people to shoot the messenger.
Or at least it was, before LLM "enthusiasts" started leaking into these otherwise hermetic communities and overrunning formerly safe spaces with mass-produced low-effort content nobody wants to see, particularly when anyone else could prompt the exact same thing into existence.
I chat with friends. Sometimes, I make a new friend or lose track of one. On rare occasion we get together to do whatever it is that we have a common interest in. That used to be IRC.
I learn new shit by interacting with people I don't know at all. Sometimes, that means hanging out in much more anonymous places (like HN) and sharing ideas. That used to be Usenet.
I learn other stuff by Googling things and otherwise conducting research. That used to be AltaVista; nowadays, it's often an LLM.
I order pizzas. (I just ordered pizzas, in fact.)
My local IRL friends are some folks I met during my days as a BBS sysop ~35 years ago.
My far away IRL friends are folks online where we felt motivated to treat eachother as friends instead of dangerous randos.
(Risky? Perhaps. We're all simply too old to give a shit.)
But this is. This sort of violent partisanship that self ensconces around identity versus issues is exactly what tears apart democracies and republics.
Even the identity part isn't new; even among Caucasian males only, see how many times society's woes will be blamed on whatever convinient immigrant there is in that period.
Neither, it's better to be the person who realizes we're in for a bright future no matter what doomers think.
- sees a waterfall in every river, even when one is not there?
- sees the waterfall, and is resigned about their fate?
- sees the waterfall, then struggles for survival no matter how hopeless the situation seems to be?
- is completely ignorant of the waterfall?
You could consider that a variant of the voter's dilemma.
For travel-related hobbies, for instance, there is no longer any kind of significant open-web scene where people just share stuff to help others or because it is cool. (Yes, you can set up your own blog, but pretty much none of your peers will ever see it.) The community might be using a variety of apps beyond your "like 5 websites", but all those apps are designed around phones and minimize text content, and so they are just as pathological as "sites with 'creators'".
Today, no one you will see the content that you posted to help other people out. Google began deprioritizing personal blogs a decade ago already, and now a whole generation has come up that doesn't know the open web is a thing. When people look for tips in this hobby, it is overwhelmingly on phone apps like Komoot or PolarSteps, on the general image-based social media like YouTube or Instagram, or (already for an older-skewing crowd that still uses browsers) on the big for-profit website Bikepacking.com that grew by using its SEO-fu to wipe out the non-profit-driven scene.
There is a community around this hobby, one with a lot of IRL interaction, and people do enjoy that feeling of community. But claiming that people "aren't really your peer" if they don't use the old open web that we knew, is just cutting yourself off from that.
Isn't the first a product of generator of cognative dissonance? Doubling down on beliefs that pay rent, even when it doesn't fit?
Right now it is flashing, so I will pull over and call AAA
I think your reaction is rather ironic given the context. An example of how people can't even talk to each other anymore.
I do not care what the platform encourages or discourages. If others do care and this precludes friendship, then: So it is.
As for HN, there is no DM feature and only a minority of users give any contact info in their profiles. In over a decade here, I have never seen one user passing contact info to another user in public.
It'd be pretty great if we all lived closer, but we do not. We've all got our reasons to live wherever we individually live.
I've also made other, more-temporary friendships online in recent years. When they're nearby it's actually pretty easy, upon recognizing that things click well-enough, to go out for drinks with other friends, or sushi, or whatever. It isn't necessary to commit to keeping a friend forever in order to make these minor moves and put a face with their words and just hang out for a bit.
For HN in particular, there are ways to initiate out-of-band comms. It's not exactly rocket surgery to just drop an email address (a throwaway one? a real one? sure!) here in a comment, or leave a clue in a bio, or even to do both things to validate who's who and connect.
It works for me, and I'm somewhat private about what I share here. Meanwhile, some users here are very public about who they are and don't hide behind a pseudonym at all. It's OK. Both types fit.
There's nothing that would motivate me to lie about this stuff. I do not stand to gain or to lose anything whether you believe me or not. :)
Any other interesting thoughts worth sharing from your side?
