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- Hacker News
- Ok article, and has similar points to “You should quit Reddit” (which was a pretty good book).
About 2/3 in, the sentences got choppier and shorter, and you could tell some context rot was setting in.
by linster - 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 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.by tamimio
- 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.
- The thing is, the "old" internet is still out there. No one is stopping you from writing a futile blog (as I do.) Or using YouTube only for instruction for tasks around the house. Or learn about any topic imaginable. It's just that the bigger ecosystems have followed their incentives to their logical conclusion (hyper-addictive content to maximize earnings from ad sales.) Any new, "for the people" platform is going to face overwhelming pressure at some point to morph into the platforms we have today. It's just too profitable.
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.
- Nice article by Stephen Diehl - I really liked his latest on crypto.
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.
- > 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.
by Biologist123 - 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.