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- Hacker News
- I'm having a real existential crisis over the internet and technology. On the one hand, LLMs are allowing me to build and explore and learn more than I have ever been able to do before. I'm a kid in a candy store.
On the other hand, I really hate what social media has become. I'm addicted to Reddit and I hate it. I hate the toxicity of the community. I hate the rage algorithms. I hate the brain rot content. The rest of the internet is no better. Websites have become marketing funnels. Dark patterns designed to squeeze every second of attention and every cent out of users.
Ultimately I feel I have all the tools required to just walk away from the "bad" parts of the internet, but I can't. I liken this to people who cannot lose weight. It's simple to just eat less, but it's not easy. I can't help but feel that we've structured society around encouraging us (in extremely well-researched and optimised ways) to be as unhealthy as possible in every way. Physically, mentally, spiritually, socially, economically.
I have become at least somewhat sympathetic towards paternalistic governing structures around the world like China. I am painfully aware of all of the atrocious human rights abuses and lack of freedoms, but when they saw children becoming addicted to social media and committing suicide at much higher rates, they acted and either banned kids, or severely limited access. When they saw TikTok turn children's brains into mush, they mandated that the content be educational and aspirational.
I guess what I'm saying is: I don't think human psyches have evolved to deal with this level of psychological manipulation. Professional testing shows my IQ to be well above average, and I'm failing. The average person doesn't stand a chance. I think we need much tougher regulations on this stuff, but I don't trust any of our politicians to do it competently or with our best interests in mind.
by Gareth321 - I am old enough to remember the world before the web rather clearly. There are tradeoffs, but on balance, I do believe the world is better now than it was.
There has been a massive disintermediation of information, it's cheaper and easier to start and run a business, it's cheaper and easier to do accounting and taxes, it's cheaper and easier to find the exact products for which one is searching, and communication is cheaper and easier.
In general, more people have more ability, greater abundance, and a higher quality of life. Are there downsides, absolutely. There are tradeoffs for every advancement. Housing is unaffordable for many, but it is also no longer laden with lead, asbestos, or radium. For the internet, while it has been used to create addictive usage patterns, surveillance, and radicalization, it has also fostered the creation of communities, life saving interventions, cost reductions that have meaningful impacts on daily human lives, and far better optimized supply chains.
by BirAdam - Alas, in my country WhatsApp is obligatory. Everyone uses it, businesses and banks included, and no one, at all, uses SMS. Most don't even know what SMS is for, all they know is they get random spam by their ISP, and sometimes 2FA bubbles, on an app called "Messages", but that's it.
Now, technically it's possible to go without it, but life becomes so much harder it just isn't worth the hassle.
by alexgieg - The global internet is - effectively - over. It will eventually also officially be declared as such, but it might be a while until we see that.
Mark and his kind killed it, but, to be fair, it wasn't exactly hard to kill something that consisted exclusively of hopes, dreams, optimism and duct tape.
It was a nice historical anomaly, and I am glad to have been gifted the privilege of growing up in that period; even though it was already the tail end of that.
by hypfer - You don't hate The Internet, you hate The Web.
The Web can be forked and I don't know why people aren't working on this.
An ad free, zuck-less ungoogle Web is possible.
I don't like the current web either. I like The Internet though. I can get free satellite imagery of the world and tons of other cool stuff. This doesn't need to use The Web, except for some relatively simple and replaceable metadata channels.
- Every time people use costs I really wonder what’s going on. My wife still uses an iPhone 13 and life for her is not particularly different from my iPhone 16. You don’t have to do any of this stuff:
> I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable
No one is going to connect you to a network from wherever you are for free. Sure that’s true. You have to go to a library or public service if you want that.
But also all these things are entirely optional. One of my bank accounts was locked out of online use because of something or the other and I just used it as my debit card and went in to the branch to withdraw money. I much preferred my other accounts where I could also use online stuff and when I finally got around to solving it it was only 30 min with one of those branch managers.
But I learned that it’s not really that bad to be cut off from online services. It pretty gracefully degrades to just being a banking service like the 2000s.
I haven’t lived in the UK for a decade so it would be a pain for me from here in the US to do so with my HSBC account but all local banking is fine and I could probably continue to use my debit card.
This entire genre of rant is popular on social media like HN these days and I really don’t get it. Everything is awesome. The Internet is blazing fast and has 1000x the content it used to and it’s all incredibly well indexed and available via LLMs and search. This feels very rose-tinted about the past.
by arjie - > The internet was about connection, but the way I see it, it’s become a great way for bad actors to...
There seems to be a profound confusion somewhere in here that people come with an evil bit and we're going to toggle technology so that those people can't use it and everyone else can.
Y'know, racists use cars to drive to their racist conventions or whatever. On publicly funded roads. Possibly with time freed up by a strong welfare system. Just because people someone doesn't like use or made something has little relevance to the value of the thing. Horrible people make wonderful things in horrible ways all the time, history is rife with it [0].
Getting off most social media does seem like a win though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber is a great example, this man is arguably greatly responsible for billions of people being alive today. Which is absolutely stunning in context of the rest of his Wikipedia page.
by roenxi - I've been trying to come to terms with the modern internet just not being for me. It's honestly taken a bit of emotional processing, growing up a very lonely teen in the late 90s the internet was a haven and a lifeline. It's where I met a number of my current friends. It was my community.
The modern internet and especially social media is just... bizarre.
I open Facebook and it's all videos of body horror bullshit because I linger on them because my brain can't help but stare. I open X and it's all engagement bait from major creators I don't give a damn about. I can switch to the Following tab and it's a lot of political opinions I'd just rather not hear about.
Bluesky was a decent little community for a minute. I was having old internet fun. And then it just died, I don't know. All the energy left the room.
Hacker News and my very curated Reddit are about all I even use the internet for these days, and Reddit is on some absolute mission to make the experience miserable.
There was a very popular thread on here the other day basically talking about how these modern algorithms are the product, and how they're actually great and everyone loves them despite denying it... I'm just like is my brain so alien? I actively want and desire these services to be interesting or fun to use and they're just... not. They're boring.
There's nothing I want to see, so I don't use them anymore. It's not a leave Meta/X/etc in a huff like some of my more reactionary friends. It's just I don't even think to open them anymore because there's nothing worth my time.
by donatj