My feeling is that the current state of the internet is just exposing how humans behave normally, the guardrails have just fallen away. Everyone is immune to shame, the threat of consequences etc. You see this in real life on the streets too.
I came to comment the exact opposite. People are good, caring, kind, helpful, thoughtful, funny, interesting. It’s visible every day in real life beyond the streets… in both small and big interactions.
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.
Well, the guardrails, by which I assume you mean legal and social accountability, were the norm for most of human history, which is why I don't consider the behaviour of anonymous and unaccountable humans on the internet to be "normal". Of course, humans are capable of great evil, but we are also pretty good at building social structures to prevent the worst of it. But those structures don't work so well on the anonymous internet.
> 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.)
I actually think the opposite, the hatred on the internet seems artificial to me.
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.
This is how humans behave under anonymity, towards an anonymous crowd of people. It is something you don't see on the streets with the exception of a few assholes, but you see it a bit more on the road, where being in a vehicle puts some distance.
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.
What ruined the internet is monetized social media, regardless ad driven or direct monetization. Monetization will basically ruin anything meant to be fun, even a simple board game with friends and family, if it stopped being about spending quality time and having fun and now there’s a competition of how much will each make at the end, it won’t be fun, you will see tribalism, manipulation, cheating, and other shenanigans.
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.
This so exaggerated. If you think some of the people you know are assholes, that's fine. If you think all of them are assholes, you are either choosing the wrong places to be, or (more likely) the problem is with you.
It's written in a hyperbolic way, but I don't think your characterization is right. The author isn't saying everyone is an asshole, he's saying the systemic forces are mostly aligned in a predatory direction, and that part is absolutely true. I have a good time on Instagram despite the ways the platform is structured.
Good point on the systemic forces. Yet I feel your second point falls broadly in with what I meant with "choosing the right places". E.g., I also use YouTube, but don't watch shorts, avoid clickbait, ragebait, etc, and filter ads. That makes the place OK for me. But as you say, it's then ok despite the structure of the platform.
"Online" is not one place. And what the author is complaining about is not happening in the places I spend 99% of my online time on.
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"
I don't think everyone is an asshole exactly but something is wrong with more and more people and you see it everything from how people drive to the degree to which so many things seem more adversarial or feel like part time jobs.
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.
I saw a video of a doctor answering a call and the caller started saying some strange hate/concensus-pushing message about Jews hating people who hate Jews in a very angry tone. Neither the doctor nor the commenters suggested it was AI, but it certainly sounded like it. I got a flash of a future where every telemarketer call is either an angry voice ready to convince you of something, or the gender you like trying to woo you.
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 as well, and a few able to live without being effected by the laser guided anger and manipulation
Well duh, was this not expected? The Internet userbase has transitioned dramatically over the past several decades.
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 it was created.
That’s why you’re seeing stratification reemerge imo. Paywalls are probably the most obvious feature of this, where information worth accessing these days tends to be paywalled. By contrast high volume, low quality slop supported by ads is generally free.
I don't doubt that there are very large communities of grifters, but to say that they are "the Internet" seems a bit much. If you see grifting as the central core of the Internet, maybe that's a problem with your filter bubble. You need to filter that stuff out.
> People increasingly behave like addicts because addiction is the business model.
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.
Pandemic really ramped it up. Also screen addiction has gone mainstream. In front of a screen 12+ hours a day 20 years ago? Total nerd. Now? Standard behavior.
I started to notice a shift in how the recommendation algorithms worked probably around 2018-2019 and then the pandemic just took it to nuclear levels against the entire population
It's so weird. I used to consider myself a fringe internet addict in the 2000s but now everyone is like me.
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.
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.
> I think the addiction began as soon as I started to work at a desk behind a computer which had internet access
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.
Do you ever wonder, if you were born in a different era, like 1901, and still had the base drives behind this addiction, how would it channel itself? Like what would you replace the internet with in those days
Internet addiction in the early millennium wasn't so destructive, because so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people. You could meet new people from forums and blogs, and they were a hub for discussion for real-life communities like music-band fandom or travel subcultures.
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.
>there is less connection to real-life socializing, because that has collapsed in so many countries.
I was walking around my old college town a while ago and overheard someone talking about this, covid + internet really did a number of how people socialize.
I think early "internet addiction" was really just knowledge addiction because at least in my circles there was so much actual good information out there. Now that it's all been high-fructose-corn-syrupified the crave for information is there with none of the substance. AI is like the apex of that.
This is a big part of it for me. The old Internet was full of individuals sharing deep passion--whether on a personal website or on a forum. There was a sense of connecting to another human being.
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.
The internet is still full of individuals sharing deep passion for all sorts of things, but only within the walls of invite-only communities you have to go out of your way to find (Discord servers, private forums) and/or make a financial commitment towards (Patreon).
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.
Even 25 years ago being “too online” - back then it was icq, livejournal, and forums - was already destructive as hell and always led to some pretty cringe outcomes. At least these days some people make a career out of it, back then it was purely negative
It wasn't purely negative for everyone. I still maintain ties with several people I hung out with on an IRC channel in the 2000s, and a couple of fellow heavy commenters on one blog in the same decade. Granted, this was aided by the fact that we were all in Europe and all traveled regularly, so we could do the IRL interaction that solidifies friendships.
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.
Yep... back then, the internet was a way people would discuss and organize their real world interests and activities, like clubs and usergroups would organize their next meeting... and then meet, off the internet.
Now, it's all just online drivel that never turns into anything else.
I use the Internet about how I used to 30 years ago.
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.
Sorry, but teenage me, growing up late 90s, wildly disagrees with this statement.
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.
> Internet addiction in the early millennium wasn't so destructive, because so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people. You could meet cool new people (even occasionally IRL friends) from forums and blogs
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.
Discord servers skew towards a very young demographic. One of the striking things about the early-millennium blog scene was how much quality long-form-text interaction it facilitated among relatively older people: the average age around a lot of blogs on topics like the arts or literature was like 40 or 50.
I think for people that age now, the internet is a much lonelier place.
Im with you!
The most times Im late for "some things on a project" at work is, because, I wasted time reading through dozens of feeds/news/comments on "too many" days so I got somehow a "delay" ;-)
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 :-)
> Like putting an alcoholic to work behind a bar and thinking he’d restrain himself.
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.
If you're interested in what helped me overcome the worst aspects of my internet addiction, I learned to reframe it.
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.
Forcing a short delay is such a powerful technique.
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.
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
reverse/compliment to this to start working for me is just aiming to work for 1-2 minutes when it feels hard to get started. i usually end up getting immersed, and find it hard to stop.
Not bad, but leaves out crucial steps?
"I chose to do this" puts the blame at your own feet without telling you how to deal with it constructively. That can lead to learned helplessness.
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.
Focusing on how other people designed it might be good to generate momentum for political activism purposes but it's not good for your own personal self improvement. And if you're getting mad about the world and not doing a significant amount of real world activism, you're getting the worst of both worlds, not helping yourself or anyone else.
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.
Thanks - useful to think about as I try and wean myself off the novel information highs. I’ve been consciously aware of the problematic aspect of my behavior since about the pandemic - but struggle to make much change.
The most dangerous part of this addiction is that it doesn't feel like addiction. Suppose we spend 4 hours in an afternoon consuming random content - starting somewhere on a Google search, landing on Wikipedia, end up reading dozens of articles on various topics in that 4 hours. Unlike alcohol or drugs, this is knowledge addiction - afterall, we learned about a bunch of things in those 4 hours, didn't we? We didn't spend any money (well, other than the laptop, electricity and internet bills), we didn't harass anyone (like alcoholics sometimes do) etc. Heck, we didn't even "waste" time like we think we do, when we play video games. So it feels somewhat better.
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.
Well, it depends. If it's not at the cost of relationship, sports and other important things, is it really an addiction? It can often be just a hobby like everything else.
It's all about balance. Learning about various stuff from well written articles and Wikipedia for one hour is good. Doing the same thing for the whole weekend isn't.
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.
Doing a bit of everything is what’s good? Why? Because that sounds like aimless distraction. If you had a goal in mind, doing a bit of everything isn’t even an option
I've recently spent a night or two with near insomnia going down a performance / security rabbit hole in open source .NET libraries.
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.
Piggybacking onto your post to sort of expand this. I feel like there are a few views of what those 4 hours can encompass on the internet. My view is that reels/shorts << rage gaming <<< background noise-tier youtube << social/healthy gaming <= information binging. My problem is most reddit or twitter-esque sites make it easy to fall on the side of rage consumption, without constant self enforcement.
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
It's not learning unless you put it into practice. 4 hours of woodworking videos is nothing for you unless you get to work.
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.
That’s a good point. Internet addiction didn’t have a name, or a stigma, in the way alcohol or other drugs did so in a sense I had no idea that the slide I was on was harmful. It also felt a lot like what I did a lot of at university - library research.
> The most dangerous part of this addiction is that it doesn't feel like addiction.
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.
For the purposes of apocalyptic fiction, I wonder what the overlap is between people who have an offline copy of Wikipedia and people who have only casual security or no password. I can imagine a survivor hunting around for it for a very long time.
Exactly. Whether hn is a social platform is a hot topic for some, but in terms of addictiveness it's on the same level as reddit. And there's no algorithm and sub categories.
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.
There was a time that whenever I got in front of a computer and opened a web browser, my hands would start typing "slashdot.org" into the address bar and my eyes would watch for autocompletion so I could enter the address as soon as possible.
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.
HN is mostly just a place to learn about some new things that are going on in the world, or find healthy responses that help me 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 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 been pretty easy to shut down 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.)
> I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.
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.
> and you kinda have to keep learning in software dev
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.
One of the things I liked about my Windows phone, was the relative lack of apps made it very hard to fall into addiction 'traps'.
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...
The web changed too, early 2000s was a balanced between real world, old media and web trying to exist, then it swallowed more, and many old things had to migrate or imitate. Now the world is all streamed, always on..
> I don’t use social media, but I consume news, blogs and newsletters - and comment threads - voraciously.
> 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.
Just focus on putting your phone in a draw for as long as you can, leave a stopwatch on it running so you can see how long you have left it - it will be short to start with but with practice you’ll regain the ability to live without consuming information.
>Just focus on putting your phone in a draw for as long as you can,
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.
Huh mines been the opposite; I use the internet less and less the last few years.
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 post so the banal content stands out.
>I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.
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.
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.
Internet deserves some blame too, when you have 8 billion people, but only 4 billion addresses, you are naturally going to end up with a lot of centralized services to work around those limits.
You’re right but it’s a point I’ve tried to make for years to no avail.
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.
Does not seem convincing to me so far and i like systems thinking. Do you have a link, where you wrote more?
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.
> 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.
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.
The internet is the people using it, if many of its users have come up with more effective ways to exploit the rest than the internet has become a worse place.
The internet is an ecosystem just like any other one on earth. Being it's a pretty new one the typical parasites and viruses that grow in every environment hadn't really developed to fill that ecosystem in the first decade or two of it. Now we are reaching the cambrian explosion of bullshit that the human animal isn't innoculated against.
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.
You know, we could just put those people in jail if we wanted to. At least when they're traceable - like everyone who uses a phone number or an IP address. They actually do this in Europe,.as a result there aren't many spam calls originating from European numbers.
I have only one agenda - my own. People hate that I think nowadays.
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
One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all.
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.
Thanks for commenting and acknowledging that it's challenging. My mates and myself have definitely fallen into this. Reminds me of that hackernews post about how doomerism is a siren's song for genZ, forget where it is.
I think that's why historical education is so important (or just liking history as in my case), looked through the lens of history all of the current shit as bad as it is, is really nothing all that new either, the only constant is change after all.
As the aphorism goes: History may not repeat but it sure does rhyme.
You're absolutely correct that history helps you see that none of this is new. However, is it better to be the person who sees the waterfall their boat is inevitably going to go over, or the person completely ignorant of it until it happens?
> However, is it better to be the person who sees the waterfall their boat is inevitably going to go over, or the person completely ignorant of it until it happens?
Neither, it's better to be the person who realizes we're in for a bright future no matter what doomers think.
On the contrary: we've fall off waterfalls every few decades or so. Humanity simply survives and moves on, taking maybe 2% more caution for the next waterfalll
I dont want to go through ANY of that crazy shit. And I dont want my kids to go through it either. And based on hostory, violent, cruel, oppressive shit can take looong time a hit huge amounts of people.
If you're in the traditional West, you did get a choice. And many actively voted for violent, cruel, oppressive predator shit. And I don't just mean MAGA, that's equally true for AfD, FN, FdI, SSZ, Spartans, ReformUK, Likud, etc.
But this is. This sort of violent partisanship that self ensconces around identity versus issues is exactly what tears apart democracies and republics.
This isn't new either. The tools and technology are new. The strategies and psychologies aren't.
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.
Message unclear. You're saying the USA is an old hand at civil wars now and could do another one any time, no problem? Or perhaps I shouldn't look for a message.
And I think history provides some prophylactic counterbalance to the cynical narrative. To hear some people talk, people are inherently evil, and the US has been a downhill project to oppress since the days of the founding.
History shows that things can and do improve when people try. The overall trajectory has been positive, even if bumpy.
I've heard it described as a growing but fluctuating graph (think something like a logarithmic graph, with some noise added in). Progress is positive overall, but there are times of radical progress and decline. And people will feel both aspects.
We're definitely in a decline as of now, where we arguably had progress from 80 to 50 years ago.
Are you saying we’ve been in a decline for the last fifty years?
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.
In terms of US macroeconomics, yes. End of the gold standard and the Vietnam War put the US in a position 9f slumping it's post WW2 command of the world, and the 80's accelerated the breakdown of all the structures that gave the US prosperous times.
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.
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?
If you're able to, find a random NPR broadcast from 20 to 30 years ago and marvel at how it could be replayed nearly verbatim today. "Inflation", "war in the Middle East", "Congress stalled on xyz." Even the "unprecedented" political correctness and racial reckonings in the US observed around 2020 were not uncommon in the 1970s and 1980s (see the Stanford Beethoven poster incident which also left students literally fainting and crying in hysterics).
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?
I (self-servingly) don't think that cynicism is bad, nor that it would be a good idea to pathologize what is simply a healthy defense to a hostile reality.
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.
I think this growth in cynicism really depends on where people start from. A lot of people were taught and reinforced a inaccurate model of the world.
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.
The last thing my father said to me before he passed was to keep people looking forward to the future.
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.
The fundamentals behind the tech might have gotten better but the implementations of it have also gotten worse in many significant ways for normal users.
The thing is you have to imagine a better garden in order to build one. Maybe you have to imagine bigger fence, or a guard, or moving house to a better part of town, or even a social change that would provide food for the hungry so they wouldn't feel the need to steal
(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
> One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all.
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.
I'm not sure why we're talking about cynicism all of a sudden. I hope it's not because we're framing this blogger's recognition of existing cynicism, as constituting cynicism in and of itself. Because if so, I would have to disagree, just as I would disagree that talking about racism makes one racist for example.
> One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all.
> It is really hard not to succumb to this. It requires active effort and sometimes even a willful ignorance.
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).
‘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."’
We're evolutionarily programmed to stop everything and focus on anything that elicits fear in our environment. Enormous amounts of money has been invested to design algorithms that capture our attention with fear because they need your attention to sell advertising. Everything's optimized to make you enraged and afraid because it works. They're really good at it too.
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.
This also seems to be spilling into the real world. Because of this internet addiction, it’s almost guaranteed that everyone has a relatively expensive computer in their pocket. This has turned into an increasing number of real-world scams, as well as supporting trafficking networks for stealing phones. The scams range from old school pickpocketers to sympathy schemes to full out phone-related accusations – anything to get you to take your phone out of your pocket, potentially unlock it, and have someone swipe it.
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.
After reddit prevented browsing old.reddit.com without signing in, I got a lot more active on lemmy. There's some amount of old internet feeling there, you don't get exhausted by the amount of material and it's not overrun by corporations. So far it's been nice.
What killed Reddit wasn't just its corporate chase for profit. It was also the fact that the general public's default internet device shifted to the smartphone and its limited keyboard and screen, no longer the computer. That led to comments largely being reduced to 140-character quips, no longer substantial discussion.
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.
Every platform with votes does that. Including HN. A community's feeling is largely determined by its sorting algorithm, and voting selects for engagement/ragebait.
I follow reddit through RSS, at least that still works but probably that would be the final nail in the coffin for me. There are some really good subs out there and there is no replacements of those on the open internet. Maybe on Discord but I don't really like to use to that for anything else besides voice chat.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 9.2 ms ] threadWhen 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.
If humans behaved like that normally, then the internet wouldn't expose anything unusual. We'd see the behavior ... normally.
> 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.
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.
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.
quite frankly iam14andthisisdeep material
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"
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.
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 as well, and a few able to live without being effected by the laser guided anger and manipulation
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 it was created.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was walking around my old college town a while ago and overheard someone talking about this, covid + internet really did a number of how people socialize.
I think early "internet addiction" was really just knowledge addiction because at least in my circles there was so much actual good information out there. Now that it's all been high-fructose-corn-syrupified the crave for information is there with none of the substance. AI is like the apex of that.
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.
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.
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.
Now, it's all just online drivel that never turns into anything else.
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.)
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.
I do think the internet was less bad back then (but still bad) and i also think sometimes teenagers just be teenagers
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.
That still exists. Except now it's not in IRC or BBSes but in Discord "servers" instead.
I think for people that age now, the internet is a much lonelier place.
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 :-)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
You are using social media right now.
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.
HN is mostly just a place to learn about some new things that are going on in the world, or find healthy responses that help me 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 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 been pretty easy to shut down 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.)
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.
Done
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...
> 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!
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.
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 post so the banal content stands out.
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.
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.
Can't blame Internet. People which were scammed "offline" are now scammed online.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
As the aphorism goes: History may not repeat but it sure does rhyme.
I genuinely dont like what history sais follows after times like this.
Neither, it's better to be the person who realizes we're in for a bright future no matter what doomers think.
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.
- 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.
History shows that things can and do improve when people try. The overall trajectory has been positive, even if bumpy.
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.
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?
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).
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 depends on how you wield it.
Cynicism shouldn't cloud your judgement. That's the actually correct point you wanted to make, I think.
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.
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.
(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
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"
Also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49493820
I totally missed this just a few days ago lol
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."’
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.
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.
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.
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.