16 ms·

> A futuristic dystopia. A place where the real world sucks. Where people consider talking to someone a chore. Connection, closeness, ambition are replaced by d

by pkdpic 5y ago

> A futuristic dystopia. A place where the real world sucks. Where people consider talking to someone a chore. Connection, closeness, ambition are replaced by detachment and dogmatic slumber. Society is satisfied with shallow thoughts and the pursuit of artificially created stimuli in an imaginary world. Beautifully written top-notch orwellian poetry. Seriously inspiring. Also as someone who has only ever used social media as a low-level content creator (we used to be called deadbeat artists) I feel like this starts an important conversation about the new problems that develop when you stop consuming and start doing. In my experience over the last decade there are fewer and fewer ways to find a community and any success as a creator of any kind without getting corralled into social media and furthermore getting corralled into being a daily active user / consumer as to not get shadow banned by any given app. Doing rather than consuming feels much healthier than doom scrolling, but theres a larger dialogue that has to happen about the problems with creating in the 21st century imho.

aw9f70gae 5y ago
Social media reinforces the idea that artistic success is a single, worldwide, objective hierarchy. It's harder than ever to return to the idea that art should be a pursuit that is social and subjective — one validated by the people that the artist directly cares about.
civilized 5y ago
I feel like the challenge for creators is less the "social media Orwellian dystopian hellscape etc" and more that virtually everything you can contribute has been done better by someone else before you.
- fullshark 5y ago
  And you can learn that fact with just a few clicks of some buttons on your magical view screen.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ehnto 5y ago
  Which is an example of the "best or why bother" attitude of exceptionalism the internet can breed, which can affect people in some surprising areas. Even something like grass roots motorsport. Everyone's too busy in their garages trying to build the absolute peak performance car, before even doing a single lap, because they think they can't have fun until their car is as good as all the others on Instagram. There is so much fun to be had in the space between 0% and 100%, and some don't even get started until they're confident they're already at 95% in the comfort of their own home.
  - civilized 5y ago
    Yes. We're going to have to figure out how to manage this side-effect, because the delight of having the best always at our fingertips isn't going to go away.
- handrous 5y ago
  Vonnegut wrote about this a few times. It seems to have been something that bugged him. The short version of his complaint is that mass media, generally, have wiped out the social value of all kinds of moderate artistic talent—for example, fewer people may learn to plink out some holiday tunes on the family upright for everyone to sing along with, because you can just put on the radio, or Spotify. Live storytelling, or being good at dramatically reading from books (yes, people used to sit around and do that for entertainment)? Small, local theater? All replaced by radio plays and TV. And so on. Basically, recording and mass broadcast means moderate talents lose nearly everything (as far as social, or even monetary, value of their skills) and discourage people from developing those talents in the first place, because those technologies place them in competition with people who are at the top edge of human achievement in those areas—including dead ones. It's broadened how many people get to experience those top-tier talents, and how often, but practically obliterated a formerly-major component of how people related to one another, socially. The Internet has changed this a bit. Some folks have responded to the problem by digging hard into a niche and taking their act online, because you can succeed in an really tiny niche while being only pretty-good at something, since there are so many people that a niche with nearly-zero audience can still reach a lot of people, considered over the entire globe—think filk, or steampunk-themed music, or doing furry art on commission, or something like that. But in person value among their actual social circle, and among family, remains low, because Spotify and TV and Netflix et c. exist.
  - chartpath 5y ago
    This resonates with me a lot as someone who gave up music and university for programming in my early 20s. And yet, mediocre content abounds in the media. How should that be explained?
    - alehlopeh 5y ago
      I think it’s because content by definition is mediocre, otherwise it would be called art.
      - nobody9999 5y ago
jaynetics 5y ago
> Beautifully written top-notch orwellian poetry. Seriously inspiring. yeah, that paragraph was probably the best one. all in all i find this text really painful to read. main issues: - a lot of sentences feel superfluous, like time-wasting boilerplate - poor grammar, punctuation and paragraph structure disrupt the reading flow - there is little logical structure or flow of arguments - there is far too much repetition
- RankingMember 5y ago
  I agree. Good message, but could've used a proofreader/editor to refine it and make corrections.
ehnto 5y ago
I once asked here about how you would start an online business without interacting with Google, and I think that somewhat echoes the problem you've mentioned. While totally possible to do these things without social media, there is a challenge posed by the fact that the big platforms have captured the audiences you might have engaged with if they weren't already occupied. If it weren't for those big platforms, many people would be happy to check out videos on your own website. But when YouTube is as easy as it is to consume, they're over there doing that instead. Same with photography, why would anyone go look at a photographers website when they've got endless photography to see on Instagram. For me, I feel like the answer to running a software company without online advertising is to go local, grass roots, focus on niche problems for a handful of real world in-the-flesh clients, rather than trying to be everything to thousands of people I'll never meet. For content creators I think the same might be applicable, say for a musician to focus on their local music scene, or an artist to find local projects to contribute to or pieces of work they can do for their community. It has the upside of building your life in the real world as well, which is hopefully more tangible and fulfilling than building up your life in an ephemeral platform that may not be here tomorrow.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  We desperately need new companies emerging and taking over FAANGs. It’s been too long. I think about big tech same as what we thought of HP, Oracle and IBM 20 years ago. Time to conquer them and make them obsolete. If we don't, we're guaranteeing absolute stagnation of the society in many insiduous ways. Always watching, always controlling Big Tech dystopia.
  - handrous 5y ago
    We don't need new companies, we need open protocols to become A Thing again. For open protocols to develop and succeed, we need to modify the business environment so capturing users isn't the #1 goal of online megacorps. That probably means passing really, really strong privacy laws, and the death of mass individually-targeted advertising. I don't think we'll do that, but it's what it would take. Replacing the companies won't help, except maybe very briefly.
jl6 5y ago
> the pursuit of artificially created stimuli in an imaginary world A description which could apply to all of art, ever?
toto444 5y ago
> furthermore getting corralled into being a daily active user / consumer as to not get shadow banned by any given app. I call it the paradox of discussions on the internet. When it comes to some topic (eg language learning) everything has already been said somewhere by someone very clever. So in the grand scheme of life the value of my contribution to a conversation is 0. Now, if instead of wasting my (and everyone's) time in a pointless discussion I write an in depth blog post or make some creation of some sort that expresses my thought in a deep way and share it then I become a spammer. Whereas a one liner written by a newb or a comment that is posted everyday with a slightly different wording is a 'contribution'.
rpastuszak 5y ago
>In my experience over the last decade there are fewer and fewer ways to find a community and any success as a creator of any kind without getting corralled into social media and furthermore getting corralled into being a daily active user / consumer as to not get shadow banned by any given app. Haha, my first thought after reading this comment was that I could've written it myself. I miss internet forums. Also, I'm much more creative when I own the content I make. Doomscrolling is one thing, feeling like you're wasting your life by getting sucked into the dopamine/reward loop, another. Reaching people is hard, because social is the main channel, but I'm experimenting with: 1) helping people (everyone) to reach me directly: https://sonnet.io/posts/hi/ https://sonnet.io/posts/hi/ So far, I've met so, so many fascinating people this way and the depth of conversations I've (or just feedback) doesn't even compare to anything I could ever do on, say, Twitter. 2) content syndication This one's a bit harder as there's a certain amount of bureaucracy involved (https://mxb.dev/blog/syndicating-content-to-twitter-with-netlify-functions/ https://mxb.dev/blog/syndicating-content-to-twitter-with-net...) I found a perfect solution to Twitter blocking my account for whatever reason the might have: 1. go to https://www.potato.horse/shhh https://www.potato.horse/shhh 2. scroll to the bottom of the page 3. roll over the Twitter button If you're on mobile, here's the video: https://twitter.com/rafalpast/status/1457702588787433473?s=20 https://twitter.com/rafalpast/status/1457702588787433473?s=2...
ipdashc 5y ago
> Where people consider talking to someone a chore. This bit in particular really hit me. I've noticed a rising trend around the Internet (or maybe I was just blind to it before), mostly on Reddit, of people who really do seem to consider any sort of real-life social interaction a chore and an attack. I forget the exact context, I think the conversation that stood out to me was about someone in a gas station or something, trying to make friendly conversation with another shopper next to them, along the lines of "oh that's a cool hat". And the consensus of the thread was "yeah that's awful, why would you do that, why are you subjecting them to the labor of talking to you" or such. Guys... we're humans. It isn't a crime to make small talk. It's not a chore to open your mouth. Most of us consider (or used to consider; and I'm not even old) that enjoyable. What happened?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  I think it's because reddits user base has significantly decreased in age. I have been using it since late 2012, which even then I felt like a late adopter. The content on Reddit back then was like a more ”normie" version of HN and slashdot. It had good articles consistently with maybe 1 or 2 default meme subreddits. Then Reddit started cutting down content it didn't like and now it's just a leftwing cesspool of antisocial, antiwork rhetoric. It's not even worth posting or commenting because if your comment veers slightly off course, instant downvotes. Not to mention the monetizing of posts with stickers. It's just turned into out of touch people who glorify mental illness imo.
  - GingerMidas 5y ago
    Have you considered the target age hasn't changed, but you're just a decade older now?
    - throwawaygh 5y ago
      Kids these days are such radicals ;-)
5faulker 5y ago
Maybe we're all living in our dreams...
kodah 5y ago
> In my experience over the last decade there are fewer and fewer ways to find a community and any success as a creator of any kind without getting corralled into social media and furthermore getting corralled into being a daily active user / consumer as to not get shadow banned by any given app. I spent a good chunk of my career in platform engineering. I generally worked on internal hosting platforms, but there's enough correlation between those and large online platforms. These platforms must knock out competition, this delivers some benefits to the end user but as an intended byproduct it eliminates choice. If you are anything but someone who wants a boilerplate to build on, say you want to do something custom or special, that will always be out of the question -- because deviation introduces risk of various types. It's a tradeoff, and for now it's a sufficiently good tradeoff for the public until they become aware of what they bought.
supernovae 5y ago
I sort of raged on twitter the other day that what we call "community" (while online) is sick. I'll take my example of Astrophotography - the "online community" is soul sucking, competitive and not nice at all - sort of hundreds of assholes all competing to be the biggest asshole... Yet, the astronomy clubs that meet in person that are shrinking in numbers and dwindling over the years (the comet just a little while ago was a saving grace here for sure - hope we get more!) are the nicest, most sincere people but they have other drawbacks.. The in human ones tend to socialize around being social in permanence - always meetup at every start party, volunteer, join the board - help it survive - it's hard to do with our terrible work life balance we have today - stay up all night to look at stars and go to work and volunteer? ouch... But the online communities? All it is is bragging rights - nothing is ever good enough, fun enough unless you dedicate yourself to being "That asshole" - and it boggles my mind that astrophotography has that concept at all... Those assholes are often depressed jerks with more money to burn than anyone else can burn and the "community" loves it up. It ends up being all about the insta... all about the reddit points... all about the discord infamy 10 years ago, it was all about "how to buy this web cam and modify it for astrophotography to get fun shots"... today its "dump 50 grand to buy this or your spending money on meme gear lol gtfo you dumbass" how did we get here? The irony of raging on twitter is hardly anyone replied because twitter is all about playing to the algo and it feels like everyone on twitter who has a following just uses it to complain about burnout, depression, ADHD and other illnesses that to me - seem to be a symptom of the "twitter community" - which isn't as bad as Facebook, but is still largely biased to suffering
- notacoward 5y ago
  > being social in permanence That's a really important point. Joining an online community has become much lower effort than joining an in-person one. Just finding a time and place for everyone to meet is more of a chore than even running a small site online. Depending on the type of community you might also need to deal with recruiting speakers, storing/maintaining shared equipment, etc. My family belongs to a ski club, and it's a commitment in both time and money. It's not a full time job or anything, but it's on the same level as a typical four-credit college course. If not for the fact that the underlying shared interest is physical in nature, the online alternative would seem very compelling. The downside of online is that the conflicts and competition for "internet points" often colors the conversation or even drowns it out. People start to show up who actually don't care as much about the shared interest as they do about having another arena in which to fight. Without the real-world mechanisms that tend to curb the most outrageous behavior, and often with substitutes that encourage it, the need for explicit moderation becomes greater ... but brings its own share of problems. In my thirty years or so of online experience, moderation and moderators have exacerbated conflict and degradation more often than they've helped. Just read the news and you'll see it happening today on all of the big sites. The solution, IMO, is to pay attention to the actual science of how people coexist, and apply its lessons. What are the empirical effects of upvotes and downvotes and other reactions? Of showing or not showing view counts? Of hierarchical vs. flat conversations? Of content restrictions or moderator behaviors? Unfortunately, that kind of examination will never happen where "soft" sciences are disrespected, which is every place where these decisions actually need to be made. Everyone just flies by the seat of their pants, and most of them fly into mountainsides.

by pkdpic 5y ago

aw9f70gae 5y ago

Social media reinforces the idea that artistic success is a single, worldwide, objective hierarchy. It's harder than ever to return to the idea that art should be a pursuit that is social and subjective — one validated by the people that the artist directly cares about.

civilized 5y ago

I feel like the challenge for creators is less the "social media Orwellian dystopian hellscape etc" and more that virtually everything you can contribute has been done better by someone else before you.

fullshark 5y ago
And you can learn that fact with just a few clicks of some buttons on your magical view screen.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ehnto 5y ago
Which is an example of the "best or why bother" attitude of exceptionalism the internet can breed, which can affect people in some surprising areas. Even something like grass roots motorsport. Everyone's too busy in their garages trying to build the absolute peak performance car, before even doing a single lap, because they think they can't have fun until their car is as good as all the others on Instagram. There is so much fun to be had in the space between 0% and 100%, and some don't even get started until they're confident they're already at 95% in the comfort of their own home.
- civilized 5y ago
  Yes. We're going to have to figure out how to manage this side-effect, because the delight of having the best always at our fingertips isn't going to go away.
handrous 5y ago
Vonnegut wrote about this a few times. It seems to have been something that bugged him. The short version of his complaint is that mass media, generally, have wiped out the social value of all kinds of moderate artistic talent—for example, fewer people may learn to plink out some holiday tunes on the family upright for everyone to sing along with, because you can just put on the radio, or Spotify. Live storytelling, or being good at dramatically reading from books (yes, people used to sit around and do that for entertainment)? Small, local theater? All replaced by radio plays and TV. And so on. Basically, recording and mass broadcast means moderate talents lose nearly everything (as far as social, or even monetary, value of their skills) and discourage people from developing those talents in the first place, because those technologies place them in competition with people who are at the top edge of human achievement in those areas—including dead ones. It's broadened how many people get to experience those top-tier talents, and how often, but practically obliterated a formerly-major component of how people related to one another, socially. The Internet has changed this a bit. Some folks have responded to the problem by digging hard into a niche and taking their act online, because you can succeed in an really tiny niche while being only pretty-good at something, since there are so many people that a niche with nearly-zero audience can still reach a lot of people, considered over the entire globe—think filk, or steampunk-themed music, or doing furry art on commission, or something like that. But in person value among their actual social circle, and among family, remains low, because Spotify and TV and Netflix et c. exist.
- chartpath 5y ago
  This resonates with me a lot as someone who gave up music and university for programming in my early 20s. And yet, mediocre content abounds in the media. How should that be explained?
  - alehlopeh 5y ago
    I think it’s because content by definition is mediocre, otherwise it would be called art.
    - nobody9999 5y ago

jaynetics 5y ago

> Beautifully written top-notch orwellian poetry. Seriously inspiring. yeah, that paragraph was probably the best one. all in all i find this text really painful to read. main issues: - a lot of sentences feel superfluous, like time-wasting boilerplate - poor grammar, punctuation and paragraph structure disrupt the reading flow - there is little logical structure or flow of arguments - there is far too much repetition

RankingMember 5y ago
I agree. Good message, but could've used a proofreader/editor to refine it and make corrections.

ehnto 5y ago

I once asked here about how you would start an online business without interacting with Google, and I think that somewhat echoes the problem you've mentioned. While totally possible to do these things without social media, there is a challenge posed by the fact that the big platforms have captured the audiences you might have engaged with if they weren't already occupied. If it weren't for those big platforms, many people would be happy to check out videos on your own website. But when YouTube is as easy as it is to consume, they're over there doing that instead. Same with photography, why would anyone go look at a photographers website when they've got endless photography to see on Instagram. For me, I feel like the answer to running a software company without online advertising is to go local, grass roots, focus on niche problems for a handful of real world in-the-flesh clients, rather than trying to be everything to thousands of people I'll never meet. For content creators I think the same might be applicable, say for a musician to focus on their local music scene, or an artist to find local projects to contribute to or pieces of work they can do for their community. It has the upside of building your life in the real world as well, which is hopefully more tangible and fulfilling than building up your life in an ephemeral platform that may not be here tomorrow.

systemvoltage 5y ago
We desperately need new companies emerging and taking over FAANGs. It’s been too long. I think about big tech same as what we thought of HP, Oracle and IBM 20 years ago. Time to conquer them and make them obsolete. If we don't, we're guaranteeing absolute stagnation of the society in many insiduous ways. Always watching, always controlling Big Tech dystopia.
- handrous 5y ago
  We don't need new companies, we need open protocols to become A Thing again. For open protocols to develop and succeed, we need to modify the business environment so capturing users isn't the #1 goal of online megacorps. That probably means passing really, really strong privacy laws, and the death of mass individually-targeted advertising. I don't think we'll do that, but it's what it would take. Replacing the companies won't help, except maybe very briefly.

jl6 5y ago

> the pursuit of artificially created stimuli in an imaginary world A description which could apply to all of art, ever?

toto444 5y ago

> furthermore getting corralled into being a daily active user / consumer as to not get shadow banned by any given app. I call it the paradox of discussions on the internet. When it comes to some topic (eg language learning) everything has already been said somewhere by someone very clever. So in the grand scheme of life the value of my contribution to a conversation is 0. Now, if instead of wasting my (and everyone's) time in a pointless discussion I write an in depth blog post or make some creation of some sort that expresses my thought in a deep way and share it then I become a spammer. Whereas a one liner written by a newb or a comment that is posted everyday with a slightly different wording is a 'contribution'.

rpastuszak 5y ago

>In my experience over the last decade there are fewer and fewer ways to find a community and any success as a creator of any kind without getting corralled into social media and furthermore getting corralled into being a daily active user / consumer as to not get shadow banned by any given app. Haha, my first thought after reading this comment was that I could've written it myself. I miss internet forums. Also, I'm much more creative when I own the content I make. Doomscrolling is one thing, feeling like you're wasting your life by getting sucked into the dopamine/reward loop, another. Reaching people is hard, because social is the main channel, but I'm experimenting with: 1) helping people (everyone) to reach me directly: https://sonnet.io/posts/hi/ https://sonnet.io/posts/hi/ So far, I've met so, so many fascinating people this way and the depth of conversations I've (or just feedback) doesn't even compare to anything I could ever do on, say, Twitter. 2) content syndication This one's a bit harder as there's a certain amount of bureaucracy involved (https://mxb.dev/blog/syndicating-content-to-twitter-with-netlify-functions/ https://mxb.dev/blog/syndicating-content-to-twitter-with-net...) I found a perfect solution to Twitter blocking my account for whatever reason the might have: 1. go to https://www.potato.horse/shhh https://www.potato.horse/shhh 2. scroll to the bottom of the page 3. roll over the Twitter button If you're on mobile, here's the video: https://twitter.com/rafalpast/status/1457702588787433473?s=20 https://twitter.com/rafalpast/status/1457702588787433473?s=2...

ipdashc 5y ago

> Where people consider talking to someone a chore. This bit in particular really hit me. I've noticed a rising trend around the Internet (or maybe I was just blind to it before), mostly on Reddit, of people who really do seem to consider any sort of real-life social interaction a chore and an attack. I forget the exact context, I think the conversation that stood out to me was about someone in a gas station or something, trying to make friendly conversation with another shopper next to them, along the lines of "oh that's a cool hat". And the consensus of the thread was "yeah that's awful, why would you do that, why are you subjecting them to the labor of talking to you" or such. Guys... we're humans. It isn't a crime to make small talk. It's not a chore to open your mouth. Most of us consider (or used to consider; and I'm not even old) that enjoyable. What happened?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
I think it's because reddits user base has significantly decreased in age. I have been using it since late 2012, which even then I felt like a late adopter. The content on Reddit back then was like a more ”normie" version of HN and slashdot. It had good articles consistently with maybe 1 or 2 default meme subreddits. Then Reddit started cutting down content it didn't like and now it's just a leftwing cesspool of antisocial, antiwork rhetoric. It's not even worth posting or commenting because if your comment veers slightly off course, instant downvotes. Not to mention the monetizing of posts with stickers. It's just turned into out of touch people who glorify mental illness imo.
- GingerMidas 5y ago
  Have you considered the target age hasn't changed, but you're just a decade older now?
  - throwawaygh 5y ago
    Kids these days are such radicals ;-)

5faulker 5y ago

Maybe we're all living in our dreams...

kodah 5y ago

supernovae 5y ago

I sort of raged on twitter the other day that what we call "community" (while online) is sick. I'll take my example of Astrophotography - the "online community" is soul sucking, competitive and not nice at all - sort of hundreds of assholes all competing to be the biggest asshole... Yet, the astronomy clubs that meet in person that are shrinking in numbers and dwindling over the years (the comet just a little while ago was a saving grace here for sure - hope we get more!) are the nicest, most sincere people but they have other drawbacks.. The in human ones tend to socialize around being social in permanence - always meetup at every start party, volunteer, join the board - help it survive - it's hard to do with our terrible work life balance we have today - stay up all night to look at stars and go to work and volunteer? ouch... But the online communities? All it is is bragging rights - nothing is ever good enough, fun enough unless you dedicate yourself to being "That asshole" - and it boggles my mind that astrophotography has that concept at all... Those assholes are often depressed jerks with more money to burn than anyone else can burn and the "community" loves it up. It ends up being all about the insta... all about the reddit points... all about the discord infamy 10 years ago, it was all about "how to buy this web cam and modify it for astrophotography to get fun shots"... today its "dump 50 grand to buy this or your spending money on meme gear lol gtfo you dumbass" how did we get here? The irony of raging on twitter is hardly anyone replied because twitter is all about playing to the algo and it feels like everyone on twitter who has a following just uses it to complain about burnout, depression, ADHD and other illnesses that to me - seem to be a symptom of the "twitter community" - which isn't as bad as Facebook, but is still largely biased to suffering

notacoward 5y ago
> being social in permanence That's a really important point. Joining an online community has become much lower effort than joining an in-person one. Just finding a time and place for everyone to meet is more of a chore than even running a small site online. Depending on the type of community you might also need to deal with recruiting speakers, storing/maintaining shared equipment, etc. My family belongs to a ski club, and it's a commitment in both time and money. It's not a full time job or anything, but it's on the same level as a typical four-credit college course. If not for the fact that the underlying shared interest is physical in nature, the online alternative would seem very compelling. The downside of online is that the conflicts and competition for "internet points" often colors the conversation or even drowns it out. People start to show up who actually don't care as much about the shared interest as they do about having another arena in which to fight. Without the real-world mechanisms that tend to curb the most outrageous behavior, and often with substitutes that encourage it, the need for explicit moderation becomes greater ... but brings its own share of problems. In my thirty years or so of online experience, moderation and moderators have exacerbated conflict and degradation more often than they've helped. Just read the news and you'll see it happening today on all of the big sites. The solution, IMO, is to pay attention to the actual science of how people coexist, and apply its lessons. What are the empirical effects of upvotes and downvotes and other reactions? Of showing or not showing view counts? Of hierarchical vs. flat conversations? Of content restrictions or moderator behaviors? Unfortunately, that kind of examination will never happen where "soft" sciences are disrespected, which is every place where these decisions actually need to be made. Everyone just flies by the seat of their pants, and most of them fly into mountainsides.