4 ms·

Well said, especially: "...is shallow and wearing off your, now deprived from depth, mind." Modern social media seems to me a lot like fast food. You feel good

Well said, especially: "...is shallow and wearing off your, now deprived from depth, mind." Modern social media seems to me a lot like fast food. You feel good while eating it; it fires off a lot of pleasure-seeking receptors in your mind and body; and it's addicting. But then, like with fast food, you feel the crash. The problem with the internet is that the crash is mental, not obviously physical, like gaining weight would be. In the past two months I'm realizing that the constant, jittery nature of social media is genuinely affecting other aspects of my life. I used to love hanging out with my friends and family, watching movies, playing video games, and reading books. Lately I've been finding that I want to do none of that--all I want to do is lie down and scroll through YouTube. The irony, of course, is that while I'm doing that, I wish I was doing something else. It's a weird cycle I've found myself in that I'm trying desperately to break now. I want to consciously pay attention to other things, specifically my friends and family, my work, and "meaningful" leisure e.g. good films, not instagram pictures.

agumonkey 7y ago
this is my sentiment too I find it quite sad that internet "promise" became a shallow stream of ads disguised as content
- BoiledCabbage 7y ago
  It didn't "become" that. The internet was hyper-tuned to exact that exact addicting behavior. It was by design optimized for exactly that because that was the way to get the most eye balls on ads, and the most data to scrape and leverage for ads. This wasn't some passive process. The fact that nobody ever solved micropayments made the internet what it is today. It's really that simple. You can have any system this sized without funding, and people wont pay for subscriptions for text content, so it's either frictionless micropayments or datamining and ads. And we all know how that ended. I would pay $40 a month for my entire internet to be ad free and non data-mined. Facebook makes what 50c a month of people? Maybe $1? All this BS we have to deal with for a dollar a month??
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    Internet wasn't made for this, it was a resilient serious information distributed system. WWW added hypertext convenience on top of it. Only post web2.0 shifted toward business first approach
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    There is no one way to use the Internet that was "hyper-tuned". The most addictive way of using the Internet recreationally is naturally the one that most people fall into patterns of doing. If "a shallow stream of ads disguised as content" is the only Internet you're aware of, that's a commentary on you, not the Internet. There are a million other ways to use the Internet regularly in a healthy and valuable way, and millions of people do it. I probably spend a moderate amount of time using the Internet recreationally, and I can think of half a dozen ways to do this. As one example, paying for ad-free YouTube (included with a GMusic streaming subscription) and spending your passive Internet time on the huge wealth of educational videos available, covering the entire spectrum from low-content entertainment to relatively dry[1] pure education. Note that the tracking side of the Internet is more complex, and a lot less under an individual person's control. But that's a slight non sequitur from what we're talking about, which is the direct user experience and quality of content. [1] Dry in the context of recreational Internet time; ie, not stimulating for a brain that's trying to be somewhat passive

agumonkey 7y ago

this is my sentiment too I find it quite sad that internet "promise" became a shallow stream of ads disguised as content

BoiledCabbage 7y ago
It didn't "become" that. The internet was hyper-tuned to exact that exact addicting behavior. It was by design optimized for exactly that because that was the way to get the most eye balls on ads, and the most data to scrape and leverage for ads. This wasn't some passive process. The fact that nobody ever solved micropayments made the internet what it is today. It's really that simple. You can have any system this sized without funding, and people wont pay for subscriptions for text content, so it's either frictionless micropayments or datamining and ads. And we all know how that ended. I would pay $40 a month for my entire internet to be ad free and non data-mined. Facebook makes what 50c a month of people? Maybe $1? All this BS we have to deal with for a dollar a month??
- agumonkey 7y ago
  Internet wasn't made for this, it was a resilient serious information distributed system. WWW added hypertext convenience on top of it. Only post web2.0 shifted toward business first approach
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  There is no one way to use the Internet that was "hyper-tuned". The most addictive way of using the Internet recreationally is naturally the one that most people fall into patterns of doing. If "a shallow stream of ads disguised as content" is the only Internet you're aware of, that's a commentary on you, not the Internet. There are a million other ways to use the Internet regularly in a healthy and valuable way, and millions of people do it. I probably spend a moderate amount of time using the Internet recreationally, and I can think of half a dozen ways to do this. As one example, paying for ad-free YouTube (included with a GMusic streaming subscription) and spending your passive Internet time on the huge wealth of educational videos available, covering the entire spectrum from low-content entertainment to relatively dry[1] pure education. Note that the tracking side of the Internet is more complex, and a lot less under an individual person's control. But that's a slight non sequitur from what we're talking about, which is the direct user experience and quality of content. [1] Dry in the context of recreational Internet time; ie, not stimulating for a brain that's trying to be somewhat passive