9 ms·

Too Much Internet

125 points by herbertl 4y ago

bumblebritches5 4y ago
Taniwha 4y ago
You know you don't have to look at all of it ...
Finnucane 4y ago
I am old and uncool and do not care at all if I miss popular things on the Internet. So what? Life is a sea of froth and knowing more than a tiny sliver of it is impossible.
lmm 4y ago
> To be clear, this is not just a case of me being old and uncool. Doubt.
- strken 4y ago
  On one level this is obviously true, e.g. most young and cool people in the US still have no idea what the Chinese internet is doing. On a national level, I supposed you'd have to go ask the local under 17s football team whether they've heard of Try Guys, because who really knows?
- coldtea 4y ago
  Well, young early 20s people also express the same sentiment all the time, so I don't doubt him...
smegsicle 4y ago
> I consider myself fairly “up” with popular trends. maybe that's your problem? try reading a book instead obviously i didn't read the "member only" article
jacknews 4y ago
"And yet they have existed in some sort of bubble outside of my frame of reference." Hmmm.
dmje 4y ago
I'm sort of more interested in the effect this has mentally on people. Not from a FOMO point of view but from a "what is my place in the world" point of view. If you're an artist or a musician or a developer or, well anything really, what does it mean to be able to go online and are hundreds, thousands, millions of people who are far better at a thing than you are? I'm 50 and sufficiently old / mature to be able to cope with this but even so, when I do a search for "linocut" (one of my hobbies) and see 82,000 results (just on Etsy) - and they're all really good and incredibly cheap... this dents something in me. As I say, I'm realistic enough to know I'm not the world's best artist and I'm not trying to make a living out of it - it's also great, and useful, to see other people's work...but it's also somehow galling as well, in a way that's quite hard to define. It's a bit like Douglas Adams' infinity - it isn't infinity but it feels sufficiently big to make one teeter a bit and wonder at one's place in the universe...
- nicbou 4y ago
  I have the same feeling as a traveler. There's always a Greater Badass who has been on the same adventures as you, but roughed it out the entire way. There's an 80 year old guy who did it in half the time, and another that did it on one foot. It's hard to look back at an identity-defining motorcycle trip, and realise that it's not that special. In a way though, it's liberating. One-upping the entire world is so out of reach that you can focus on your own experience. Just go there and have your fun. If my place in the universe is to be a mediocre artist and a passable rider, so be it.
  - CGamesPlay 4y ago
    I agree with your conclusion here. And a big thing to keep in mind is that you are that guy to a lot of the people you’ll meet. As an expat living in exotic places, I find that I consistently impress people with my story and meet people with more impressive stories than me, often on the same day.
    - ohwellhere 4y ago
      Sage advice. In comparing ourselves to others -- wealth, beauty, fitness, career, etc -- we tend to look up (and feel unsuccessful) rather than look down (and feel successful).
gilgoomesh 4y ago
> To be clear, this is not just a case of me being old and uncool Ha. The author’s journey is a standard realisation of growing up. You think you can keep up with everything popular when “popular” is judged based on the 200 people you know and the occasional others you meet in similar demographic groups. As you are exposed to more influences it becomes harder to keep up. You think it’s because times have changed. But people have been making this statement for hundreds of years across every mass media in existence. There was too much internet for any person to keep up in 1993 before most of the world was on the internet. Eventually you realise that there isn’t one definition of popular. There are literally hundreds. Maybe millions. For every billion viewed thing on Website X, where surely everyone “popular” has viewed this thing, you can eliminate duplicate viewings and find out that 99% of the world has never looked once. They’re doing something you never thought had mass appeal on a website or service you didn’t realise was huge. They’ve never heard of Website X and are astounded anything on it has a billion views. You don’t know about each other because even the ways you discover “popular” things are different. Because most people grow up in a relatively narrow niche. People think they’re trying everything the world has to offer but they’re not even close. And that’s not even counting the fact that people who don’t chase the popular thing probably outnumber those who do. But don’t feel bad that the concept of a single unifying “popular” doesn’t exist because the reality is better. You don’t need to keep up with anyone else’s definition of popular and you can just pursue what you enjoy and you get so much more out of hobbies if you specialise instead of trying to do everything.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  > There was too much internet for any person to keep up in 1993 before most of the world was on the internet. There were a couple of hundreds webpages in 1993. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_before_1995 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_bef... Guessing 90% were "Hello world personal pet fansites", you had to know about 60 pages to know them all.
  - tom_ 4y ago
    The internet then was, by and large, elsewhere. There was less of it, but still enough that you'd struggle to keep on top of all of it.
rambambram 4y ago
What worries me more - now that I think about it - is the fact that millions of people don't know about millions of other people on the internet, but that a handful of big tech companies do 'know' about it. They might not care and not act upon it, but they have that data in their db.
slyall 4y ago
I don't think this is entirely new. One thing that confuses people is that social media (ie twitter) is all shared, so if a scandal happens anywhere you see it. So 20+ years ago I wouldn't be getting bombarded by scandals surrounding "Lizzo and a flute" and "Liz and a mini-budget" at the same time. If I lived in the US I'd get one and in the UK another. The Try Guys would have a TV show that was very niche or a morning breakfast show in Chicago. The scandal would be all over the local media and barely covered elsewhere.
- CogitoCogito 4y ago
  > I don't think this is entirely new. One thing that confuses people is that social media (ie twitter) is all shared, so if a scandal happens anywhere you see it. I kind of think it's the exact opposite. We all have our own individual views of reality and are only able to see an extremely small subset of what's going on. Whereas before you were mainly reached by broadcast media that others would see as well, now you and the person next to you might have an entirely different feed of information coming in. To me it's not surprising at all that the author doesn't know "all the things going on". Really I think the author should consider the opposite: this is probably just an example of a million similar things that everyone should know about, but that he does not.
Owen69 4y ago
[flagged]
richardatlarge 4y ago
The “medium” is the message
shalmanese 4y ago
I used to be with "it", but then they changed what "it" was. Now what I'm with isn't "it" anymore and what's "it" seems weird and scary... It'll happen to yoooou!
jmfldn 4y ago
I realise that saying this makes me an old man, but virtually none of it is worth keeping up with. Celebrity social media gossip is information junk food. If you have to consume it, do so in small doses. Why does it matter what some influencer says about some shoes they're trying to sell?
- jonas-w 4y ago
  I don't understand it either, but the majority of people seem to understand it and buy it. I think the typical HackerNews person isn't one of those and probably many people on here think like you and me about it. But it is the same on instagram, the typical instagram User doesn't think like us and probably wouldn't understand your comment and how it doesn't matter to you. The difference is Instagram has a bigger platform than e.g. hackernews.
  - jmfldn 4y ago
    Sure, I can't argue with that. I just had to vent my frustration that all this stuff that people get hung up on is largely meaningless fluff and there are far better uses of time. If you must indulge, do so with moderation. It's only going to make you addicted / depressed / badly informed.
    - Bakary 4y ago
      The HN equivalent of info junk food is entrepreneurial or stoicism or byte-sized wisdom blog posts, Zettelkasten and other productivity methods, articles about specific parts of history that make more claims about these eras than needed, stuff about Feynman or Paul Graham or what X or Y STEM-related person did or did not do, and so on.
      - karaterobot 4y ago
        You're right that that's probably the equivalent, and I find all that stuff corny. But, it is still a lot better than celebrity gossip and feasting on people's personal failures.
athrowaway3z 4y ago
I'm sorry but wtf is this. This should have been a /r/showerthought post with: > omg 6billion people consume more information then I can scan in my lifetime Here is my showerthought. Twitter sells the illusion that their platform is the center of the world. They do this so well that a large part of their userbase internalized this belief.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Yup, exactly. ("despite being on Twitter 870 hours a week" !!) Furthermore, this is almost a caricature "clueless USAian that doesn't acknowledge (realize ??) that most of the Internet is not in English, and most of the English content isn't by USAians"...
  - ianai 4y ago
    Which is of course why humility shouldn’t be such a virtue and more a standard way to get through a day. Of course there’s a lot any individual person can’t possibly know and still more they don’t need to know or have an opinion regarding. Maybe this could be filed under “it’s ok to lurk”? Or something.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    It's weird to think that there's are entire Cyrillic, Chinese, and Spanish internets out there that are practically invisible to us in the anglosphere. I wonder what their versions of Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, and Hackernews are...
    - mgkimsal 4y ago
      vk.com was/is Russian Facebook similar service. I know there's more, but that's the only one that springs to mind. Oh... Orkut... that became big in Brazil, IIRC, but I don't think it was entirely non-english.
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      I'd also note that many "social" networks are barely on the Web any more (while still being on the Internet) - can you really say that you're on the Web if you don't let your website be crawled by search engines ? For instance, Discord isn't being crawled, Instagram and Twitter tend to be very annoying about having to create an account with them. Reddit (and HN) have a separate issue in that they fundamentally violate netiquette by locking threads and preventing necroposting even WHEN it's what should be done (also in case of Reddit, frequently (ab)using shadowbans).
worftl 4y ago
emptyfile 4y ago
Another post written by an American who thinks Twitter is the arbiter of what's popular and the centre of the internet. Newsflash: Twitter peaked in 2018 with 336m users, significantly less then other social networks. If there weren't so many news reporters on it, it would be rather obscure to non english speakers.
Synaesthesia 4y ago
That happened to me a LONG time ago when TV shows proliferated, I stopped watching movies etc, with pop music etc.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
my reading of this is that the long tail and media distribution via internet means that there are now largely popular rich celebrities in a subculture of your culture that you do not know about, you don't even know the subculture exists. Let's take Science Fiction fandom, 40 years ago, people knew it existed but probably couldn't name most of the people. But a lot of people who were not in that subculture could probably still sort of identify the top lights of that subculture, er Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov might be identified as science fiction writers by people not particularly into science fiction. Isaac Asimov's autobiography the second part was full of anecdotes of him meeting famous people and having them somewhat be familiar with who he was which he thought was nice, not so much focused on his breast-grabbing routines though. This guy however is just a little bit future shocked that there exist niche celebrities by virtue of the internet that are wealthy and he does not know who they are at all or what their niche is. This might also have existed in the past, but I think probably most people knew a niche existed (rodeo rider, huh yeah I heard of that), so yeah I do believe the internet has made it that you cannot keep up in what in the 'old days' would be thought of as part of your culture. on edit: although to be clear knowing that Asimov is a Sci-Fi writer in the old days was akin to knowing that Addis Addaba was the capitol of Ethiopia, you knew basically enough to think you knew something but didn't really know anything useful.
angry_octet 4y ago
Just wait till he finds out there are languages other than English, and they have internet too.
jamesgreenleaf 4y ago
How rude it is for eight billion other souls to go on existing, and without even giving such basic consideration as to notify me of their doings. /s
rhn_mk1 4y ago
There is no Internet, apart from the technical meaning. Internet culture is just culture, Internet celebrities are just celebrities. The author sees the Internet as a place where you can walk in, hang around, and hear about most things that are happening. But replace "Internet" with "Philippines" or any other space which many people share, and it's clearly not possible. Internet may have started out as a space where people "go", where the culture was distinct, and so on. But as it became more integrated into people's lives, it stopped being a space, and became a mode of life, just like photography is a mode of art, or "homesteading" is a mode of living. You can't possibly hear about everything happening in a mode because once it becomes accessible, it escapes its delimited roots, it's available for anyone in any society, anywhere. The Internet stopped being a box a long time ago, and the author didn't notice.
- Bakary 4y ago
  Your point is striking, as it had never occurred to me to think of it like this. Perhaps to steelman the initial argument: there are things going on the Internet whose importance is greatly magnified or outright fabricated by it. There is such a thing as touching grass so to speak. The medium is the message. There are large swathes of internet activity you could just drop and nothing at all would happen.
j3th9n 4y ago
Tldr: Guy discovers he can't keep up with everything that is going on on this planet.
t43562 4y ago
You have already been living in the illusion that the cultural things that you consider important - artists, music, whatever - are paid much attention to in the rest of the world. Outside your own bubble you'll find that even if the most famous musicians in the world are known everywhere they often only have a small mindshare compared to more local artists and there's a lot of extremely popular stuff going on that you have never heard of. Perhaps that's just happening to the internet as more people get it.
swah 4y ago
There is only 1 mention of "Try guys" on HN last year. So we collectively also don't know about it and/or don't find it interesting to mention in a comment here to make a point... (We are all old)
rikroots 4y ago
I love the internet because every day it teaches me that there is a whole world of stuff out there, a planet-load of humanity struggling to overcome stuff and deal with stuff and celebrate stuff just like I/family/friends/neighbourhood do. Yesterday I learned about a terrible football stadium incident in Indonesia; I know more about regular expressions than I do about Indonesia (or football) but now I know a little more about both. I learned that Ukraine forces have retaken a city called Lyman, which has given the people of Ukraine some hope that the war forced on them may, possibly, be winnable. I remember the joy I experienced when I asked some work colleagues in Jaipur why they were having a holiday and got to learn all about Holi - including the part where they get to throw paint over each other! I am so grateful that the days of reading a "Fog in Channel - Continent Cut Off"[1] headline in the newspapers are dead and buried for good! [1] - https://www.quora.com/Is-the-famous-headline-Fog-in-Channel-Continent-Cut-Off-an-urban-myth https://www.quora.com/Is-the-famous-headline-Fog-in-Channel-...
shp0ngle 4y ago
At least Kardashians are still around. I think. Are they still around?
hbossy 4y ago
Somehow, despite being on Twitter 870 hours a week, people write stuff like this and then act surprised when their candidate is not elected president.
trey-jones 4y ago
I admit to being a pessimist; now let me think of some of the consequences of Too Much Internet, with the preamble that I'm not claiming it's a bad thing, however I would like to get rid of all the algorithmically generated trash cluttering everything up in an attempt to appeal to absolutely everyone and succeeding on hardly anyone. 1. We find it more difficult to engage with people who are around us, because our favorite parts of the internet share our exact interests. Very few in our immediate locality can match it. 2. We find it difficult to disengage from our greatest interests because there is a nearly limitless stream of new information flowing from our chosen corners of the internet. Some mundane but necessary tasks get neglected. 3. The internet in all its vastness can contain something that seems like our ideal version of the world. Coming back to the reality of most of our lives can bring on depression. I'm not out to change the way we interact with the internet, but perhaps if we can remain cognizant of how it's affecting us we'll be able to continue treating each other like human beings. It's easy to forget...
- Bakary 4y ago
  To counteract this, I've come to realize that actual real-life experiences feel far more fulfilling than any browsing. Now this is of course blindingly obvious, but the not so obvious part is actively modifying your life and trying new things to make these real-life experiences more common. Just talking to a person I'm attracted to makes all of the Internet seem completely uninteresting in that moment.
rufius 4y ago
I had this observation the other day with the HN post about Mr. Beast. Never heard of that guy before that article. That said, if the internet is at least in part a reflection of humanity’s interests, this isn’t surprising. I’m confident there’s a huge swath of things I look at or read that have never occurred to my parents. Probably less true with my wife by far, but she’s the exception not the rule. Then there’s the other 60%+ of the internet that is SEO spam.
swayvil 4y ago
The biggest part of the internet is the hiveminds. There are dozens of them. Each is a magnet for a certain personality type. Each is an echo chamber, and an amplifier for its particular way of thinking. Hiveminds usually ignore each other. Any mutual acknowledgement is generally antagonistic. A hivemind is a kind of demon. It whispers seductive arguments to its membership. It speaks with the voice of hundreds. (Literally a 3-part harmony of the damned, which is an interesting bit of art becoming life) Coming into contact with these demons is kinda not cool.
Bakary 4y ago
A couple of ideas: - There's increased interest in more personalized or niche experiences and media i.e. small (in a relative sense or not) streamers, videographers, discord servers. The idea of a generational movie is gone. Seems like the last time that happened was with the Matrix, ironically. - Much of what the internet serves you is useless. Instead of thinking how you should have heard of the Try Guys because you do X and Y, ask yourself why you need to hear about them and why your train of thought and lifestyle should be altered by the news you were served. Why do the Try Guys need to occupy your mental space? They do so because an algorithm and/or a "journalistic" sphere based on clicks served them to you. - The world is always bigger than you think, even if you already think it's impossibly big. You can never grasp its size.
- bombcar 4y ago
  > The world is always bigger than you think, even if you already think it's impossibly big. You can never grasp its size. I know someone who is working on walking down every street in his city. Even a smaller city, this is a major undertaking that takes years. Paris has over 6,000 for example.
shadowgovt 4y ago
This almost crosses over into "Old Man Yells At Cloud" territory, except the author is self-aware of how easy it is to become a simple complainer without peeling back the surface to understand how we got here. Credit to Ed Zitron for taking the extra step. There was an excellent interview with LeVar Burton once (I can't remember where, it might have been on NPR's Fresh Air) where he talked about the significance of the TV miniseries Roots, in which he starred. One key thing he mentioned is that Roots was one of the last shows that one could credibly assume "everyone with a television saw at least some of it." Because it came out right on the cusp of the explosion of cable television into the mainstream market and HDTV after it. For a specific generation of Americans, Roots is a common touchstone exploration of the grim history of slavery in the US. Recreating something like Roots today (something with both the wide reach and willingness to shine light on ugliness of the story) would be almost impossible. When there were a half-dozen stations to tune in, a message on them was seen by "everybody" (because even if it made you feel uncomfortable, what were you going to do if you had rabbit years? Tune in the wiggly-lines nightly news? Turn the TV off?) But with dozens and then hundreds of stations, that is no longer true. For all the complaint about consolidation of social networking, the Internet has had a massively-disintermediating effect on media (entertainment media in particular, but also news and technical; most people may get their basic facts from Wikipedia, but all other online sources of basic facts are exactly the same distance away from the consumer). It has become drastically harder, far more expensive, to get a message to everyone now. The "filter bubble" is the other side of the coin to the broadcaster's modern dilemma: if something actually is important, how do we get it in front of people?
kodah 4y ago
It's wild to me that there are people who are so intoxicated with a "wife positive brand" that they'd form into a mob demanding cancelling over something like cheating. The moral crusades of the past are now online sideshows featuring the interpersonal problems of real people. I can't help but to analog this kind of thing to the journals that routinely print rumors or juicy controversies about celebrities solely to make a dollar.
kristintynski 4y ago
I'd guess the author isnt on TikTok. Pretty impossible to avoid the TryGuy saga there...
greenhearth 4y ago
This is what the internet has ALWAYS been at least since the early 1990s.

Too Much Internet

125 points by herbertl 4y ago

bumblebritches5 4y ago

Taniwha 4y ago

You know you don't have to look at all of it ...

Finnucane 4y ago

I am old and uncool and do not care at all if I miss popular things on the Internet. So what? Life is a sea of froth and knowing more than a tiny sliver of it is impossible.

lmm 4y ago

> To be clear, this is not just a case of me being old and uncool. Doubt.

strken 4y ago
On one level this is obviously true, e.g. most young and cool people in the US still have no idea what the Chinese internet is doing. On a national level, I supposed you'd have to go ask the local under 17s football team whether they've heard of Try Guys, because who really knows?
coldtea 4y ago
Well, young early 20s people also express the same sentiment all the time, so I don't doubt him...

smegsicle 4y ago

> I consider myself fairly “up” with popular trends. maybe that's your problem? try reading a book instead obviously i didn't read the "member only" article

jacknews 4y ago

"And yet they have existed in some sort of bubble outside of my frame of reference." Hmmm.

dmje 4y ago

I'm sort of more interested in the effect this has mentally on people. Not from a FOMO point of view but from a "what is my place in the world" point of view. If you're an artist or a musician or a developer or, well anything really, what does it mean to be able to go online and are hundreds, thousands, millions of people who are far better at a thing than you are? I'm 50 and sufficiently old / mature to be able to cope with this but even so, when I do a search for "linocut" (one of my hobbies) and see 82,000 results (just on Etsy) - and they're all really good and incredibly cheap... this dents something in me. As I say, I'm realistic enough to know I'm not the world's best artist and I'm not trying to make a living out of it - it's also great, and useful, to see other people's work...but it's also somehow galling as well, in a way that's quite hard to define. It's a bit like Douglas Adams' infinity - it isn't infinity but it feels sufficiently big to make one teeter a bit and wonder at one's place in the universe...

nicbou 4y ago
I have the same feeling as a traveler. There's always a Greater Badass who has been on the same adventures as you, but roughed it out the entire way. There's an 80 year old guy who did it in half the time, and another that did it on one foot. It's hard to look back at an identity-defining motorcycle trip, and realise that it's not that special. In a way though, it's liberating. One-upping the entire world is so out of reach that you can focus on your own experience. Just go there and have your fun. If my place in the universe is to be a mediocre artist and a passable rider, so be it.
- CGamesPlay 4y ago
  I agree with your conclusion here. And a big thing to keep in mind is that you are that guy to a lot of the people you’ll meet. As an expat living in exotic places, I find that I consistently impress people with my story and meet people with more impressive stories than me, often on the same day.
  - ohwellhere 4y ago
    Sage advice. In comparing ourselves to others -- wealth, beauty, fitness, career, etc -- we tend to look up (and feel unsuccessful) rather than look down (and feel successful).

gilgoomesh 4y ago

> To be clear, this is not just a case of me being old and uncool Ha. The author’s journey is a standard realisation of growing up. You think you can keep up with everything popular when “popular” is judged based on the 200 people you know and the occasional others you meet in similar demographic groups. As you are exposed to more influences it becomes harder to keep up. You think it’s because times have changed. But people have been making this statement for hundreds of years across every mass media in existence. There was too much internet for any person to keep up in 1993 before most of the world was on the internet. Eventually you realise that there isn’t one definition of popular. There are literally hundreds. Maybe millions. For every billion viewed thing on Website X, where surely everyone “popular” has viewed this thing, you can eliminate duplicate viewings and find out that 99% of the world has never looked once. They’re doing something you never thought had mass appeal on a website or service you didn’t realise was huge. They’ve never heard of Website X and are astounded anything on it has a billion views. You don’t know about each other because even the ways you discover “popular” things are different. Because most people grow up in a relatively narrow niche. People think they’re trying everything the world has to offer but they’re not even close. And that’s not even counting the fact that people who don’t chase the popular thing probably outnumber those who do. But don’t feel bad that the concept of a single unifying “popular” doesn’t exist because the reality is better. You don’t need to keep up with anyone else’s definition of popular and you can just pursue what you enjoy and you get so much more out of hobbies if you specialise instead of trying to do everything.

rightbyte 4y ago
> There was too much internet for any person to keep up in 1993 before most of the world was on the internet. There were a couple of hundreds webpages in 1993. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_before_1995 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_bef... Guessing 90% were "Hello world personal pet fansites", you had to know about 60 pages to know them all.
- tom_ 4y ago
  The internet then was, by and large, elsewhere. There was less of it, but still enough that you'd struggle to keep on top of all of it.

rambambram 4y ago

What worries me more - now that I think about it - is the fact that millions of people don't know about millions of other people on the internet, but that a handful of big tech companies do 'know' about it. They might not care and not act upon it, but they have that data in their db.

slyall 4y ago

I don't think this is entirely new. One thing that confuses people is that social media (ie twitter) is all shared, so if a scandal happens anywhere you see it. So 20+ years ago I wouldn't be getting bombarded by scandals surrounding "Lizzo and a flute" and "Liz and a mini-budget" at the same time. If I lived in the US I'd get one and in the UK another. The Try Guys would have a TV show that was very niche or a morning breakfast show in Chicago. The scandal would be all over the local media and barely covered elsewhere.

CogitoCogito 4y ago
> I don't think this is entirely new. One thing that confuses people is that social media (ie twitter) is all shared, so if a scandal happens anywhere you see it. I kind of think it's the exact opposite. We all have our own individual views of reality and are only able to see an extremely small subset of what's going on. Whereas before you were mainly reached by broadcast media that others would see as well, now you and the person next to you might have an entirely different feed of information coming in. To me it's not surprising at all that the author doesn't know "all the things going on". Really I think the author should consider the opposite: this is probably just an example of a million similar things that everyone should know about, but that he does not.

Owen69 4y ago

[flagged]

richardatlarge 4y ago

The “medium” is the message

shalmanese 4y ago

I used to be with "it", but then they changed what "it" was. Now what I'm with isn't "it" anymore and what's "it" seems weird and scary... It'll happen to yoooou!

jmfldn 4y ago

I realise that saying this makes me an old man, but virtually none of it is worth keeping up with. Celebrity social media gossip is information junk food. If you have to consume it, do so in small doses. Why does it matter what some influencer says about some shoes they're trying to sell?

jonas-w 4y ago
I don't understand it either, but the majority of people seem to understand it and buy it. I think the typical HackerNews person isn't one of those and probably many people on here think like you and me about it. But it is the same on instagram, the typical instagram User doesn't think like us and probably wouldn't understand your comment and how it doesn't matter to you. The difference is Instagram has a bigger platform than e.g. hackernews.
- jmfldn 4y ago
  Sure, I can't argue with that. I just had to vent my frustration that all this stuff that people get hung up on is largely meaningless fluff and there are far better uses of time. If you must indulge, do so with moderation. It's only going to make you addicted / depressed / badly informed.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    The HN equivalent of info junk food is entrepreneurial or stoicism or byte-sized wisdom blog posts, Zettelkasten and other productivity methods, articles about specific parts of history that make more claims about these eras than needed, stuff about Feynman or Paul Graham or what X or Y STEM-related person did or did not do, and so on.
    - karaterobot 4y ago
      You're right that that's probably the equivalent, and I find all that stuff corny. But, it is still a lot better than celebrity gossip and feasting on people's personal failures.

athrowaway3z 4y ago

I'm sorry but wtf is this. This should have been a /r/showerthought post with: > omg 6billion people consume more information then I can scan in my lifetime Here is my showerthought. Twitter sells the illusion that their platform is the center of the world. They do this so well that a large part of their userbase internalized this belief.

BlueTemplar 4y ago
Yup, exactly. ("despite being on Twitter 870 hours a week" !!) Furthermore, this is almost a caricature "clueless USAian that doesn't acknowledge (realize ??) that most of the Internet is not in English, and most of the English content isn't by USAians"...
- ianai 4y ago
  Which is of course why humility shouldn’t be such a virtue and more a standard way to get through a day. Of course there’s a lot any individual person can’t possibly know and still more they don’t need to know or have an opinion regarding. Maybe this could be filed under “it’s ok to lurk”? Or something.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  It's weird to think that there's are entire Cyrillic, Chinese, and Spanish internets out there that are practically invisible to us in the anglosphere. I wonder what their versions of Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, and Hackernews are...
  - mgkimsal 4y ago
    vk.com was/is Russian Facebook similar service. I know there's more, but that's the only one that springs to mind. Oh... Orkut... that became big in Brazil, IIRC, but I don't think it was entirely non-english.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    I'd also note that many "social" networks are barely on the Web any more (while still being on the Internet) - can you really say that you're on the Web if you don't let your website be crawled by search engines ? For instance, Discord isn't being crawled, Instagram and Twitter tend to be very annoying about having to create an account with them. Reddit (and HN) have a separate issue in that they fundamentally violate netiquette by locking threads and preventing necroposting even WHEN it's what should be done (also in case of Reddit, frequently (ab)using shadowbans).

worftl 4y ago

emptyfile 4y ago

Another post written by an American who thinks Twitter is the arbiter of what's popular and the centre of the internet. Newsflash: Twitter peaked in 2018 with 336m users, significantly less then other social networks. If there weren't so many news reporters on it, it would be rather obscure to non english speakers.

Synaesthesia 4y ago

That happened to me a LONG time ago when TV shows proliferated, I stopped watching movies etc, with pop music etc.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

my reading of this is that the long tail and media distribution via internet means that there are now largely popular rich celebrities in a subculture of your culture that you do not know about, you don't even know the subculture exists. Let's take Science Fiction fandom, 40 years ago, people knew it existed but probably couldn't name most of the people. But a lot of people who were not in that subculture could probably still sort of identify the top lights of that subculture, er Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov might be identified as science fiction writers by people not particularly into science fiction. Isaac Asimov's autobiography the second part was full of anecdotes of him meeting famous people and having them somewhat be familiar with who he was which he thought was nice, not so much focused on his breast-grabbing routines though. This guy however is just a little bit future shocked that there exist niche celebrities by virtue of the internet that are wealthy and he does not know who they are at all or what their niche is. This might also have existed in the past, but I think probably most people knew a niche existed (rodeo rider, huh yeah I heard of that), so yeah I do believe the internet has made it that you cannot keep up in what in the 'old days' would be thought of as part of your culture. on edit: although to be clear knowing that Asimov is a Sci-Fi writer in the old days was akin to knowing that Addis Addaba was the capitol of Ethiopia, you knew basically enough to think you knew something but didn't really know anything useful.

angry_octet 4y ago

Just wait till he finds out there are languages other than English, and they have internet too.

jamesgreenleaf 4y ago

How rude it is for eight billion other souls to go on existing, and without even giving such basic consideration as to notify me of their doings. /s

rhn_mk1 4y ago

There is no Internet, apart from the technical meaning. Internet culture is just culture, Internet celebrities are just celebrities. The author sees the Internet as a place where you can walk in, hang around, and hear about most things that are happening. But replace "Internet" with "Philippines" or any other space which many people share, and it's clearly not possible. Internet may have started out as a space where people "go", where the culture was distinct, and so on. But as it became more integrated into people's lives, it stopped being a space, and became a mode of life, just like photography is a mode of art, or "homesteading" is a mode of living. You can't possibly hear about everything happening in a mode because once it becomes accessible, it escapes its delimited roots, it's available for anyone in any society, anywhere. The Internet stopped being a box a long time ago, and the author didn't notice.

Bakary 4y ago
Your point is striking, as it had never occurred to me to think of it like this. Perhaps to steelman the initial argument: there are things going on the Internet whose importance is greatly magnified or outright fabricated by it. There is such a thing as touching grass so to speak. The medium is the message. There are large swathes of internet activity you could just drop and nothing at all would happen.

j3th9n 4y ago

Tldr: Guy discovers he can't keep up with everything that is going on on this planet.

t43562 4y ago

You have already been living in the illusion that the cultural things that you consider important - artists, music, whatever - are paid much attention to in the rest of the world. Outside your own bubble you'll find that even if the most famous musicians in the world are known everywhere they often only have a small mindshare compared to more local artists and there's a lot of extremely popular stuff going on that you have never heard of. Perhaps that's just happening to the internet as more people get it.

swah 4y ago

There is only 1 mention of "Try guys" on HN last year. So we collectively also don't know about it and/or don't find it interesting to mention in a comment here to make a point... (We are all old)

rikroots 4y ago

I love the internet because every day it teaches me that there is a whole world of stuff out there, a planet-load of humanity struggling to overcome stuff and deal with stuff and celebrate stuff just like I/family/friends/neighbourhood do. Yesterday I learned about a terrible football stadium incident in Indonesia; I know more about regular expressions than I do about Indonesia (or football) but now I know a little more about both. I learned that Ukraine forces have retaken a city called Lyman, which has given the people of Ukraine some hope that the war forced on them may, possibly, be winnable. I remember the joy I experienced when I asked some work colleagues in Jaipur why they were having a holiday and got to learn all about Holi - including the part where they get to throw paint over each other! I am so grateful that the days of reading a "Fog in Channel - Continent Cut Off"[1] headline in the newspapers are dead and buried for good! [1] - https://www.quora.com/Is-the-famous-headline-Fog-in-Channel-Continent-Cut-Off-an-urban-myth https://www.quora.com/Is-the-famous-headline-Fog-in-Channel-...

shp0ngle 4y ago

At least Kardashians are still around. I think. Are they still around?

hbossy 4y ago

Somehow, despite being on Twitter 870 hours a week, people write stuff like this and then act surprised when their candidate is not elected president.

trey-jones 4y ago

I admit to being a pessimist; now let me think of some of the consequences of Too Much Internet, with the preamble that I'm not claiming it's a bad thing, however I would like to get rid of all the algorithmically generated trash cluttering everything up in an attempt to appeal to absolutely everyone and succeeding on hardly anyone. 1. We find it more difficult to engage with people who are around us, because our favorite parts of the internet share our exact interests. Very few in our immediate locality can match it. 2. We find it difficult to disengage from our greatest interests because there is a nearly limitless stream of new information flowing from our chosen corners of the internet. Some mundane but necessary tasks get neglected. 3. The internet in all its vastness can contain something that seems like our ideal version of the world. Coming back to the reality of most of our lives can bring on depression. I'm not out to change the way we interact with the internet, but perhaps if we can remain cognizant of how it's affecting us we'll be able to continue treating each other like human beings. It's easy to forget...

Bakary 4y ago
To counteract this, I've come to realize that actual real-life experiences feel far more fulfilling than any browsing. Now this is of course blindingly obvious, but the not so obvious part is actively modifying your life and trying new things to make these real-life experiences more common. Just talking to a person I'm attracted to makes all of the Internet seem completely uninteresting in that moment.

rufius 4y ago

I had this observation the other day with the HN post about Mr. Beast. Never heard of that guy before that article. That said, if the internet is at least in part a reflection of humanity’s interests, this isn’t surprising. I’m confident there’s a huge swath of things I look at or read that have never occurred to my parents. Probably less true with my wife by far, but she’s the exception not the rule. Then there’s the other 60%+ of the internet that is SEO spam.

swayvil 4y ago

The biggest part of the internet is the hiveminds. There are dozens of them. Each is a magnet for a certain personality type. Each is an echo chamber, and an amplifier for its particular way of thinking. Hiveminds usually ignore each other. Any mutual acknowledgement is generally antagonistic. A hivemind is a kind of demon. It whispers seductive arguments to its membership. It speaks with the voice of hundreds. (Literally a 3-part harmony of the damned, which is an interesting bit of art becoming life) Coming into contact with these demons is kinda not cool.

Bakary 4y ago

A couple of ideas: - There's increased interest in more personalized or niche experiences and media i.e. small (in a relative sense or not) streamers, videographers, discord servers. The idea of a generational movie is gone. Seems like the last time that happened was with the Matrix, ironically. - Much of what the internet serves you is useless. Instead of thinking how you should have heard of the Try Guys because you do X and Y, ask yourself why you need to hear about them and why your train of thought and lifestyle should be altered by the news you were served. Why do the Try Guys need to occupy your mental space? They do so because an algorithm and/or a "journalistic" sphere based on clicks served them to you. - The world is always bigger than you think, even if you already think it's impossibly big. You can never grasp its size.

bombcar 4y ago
> The world is always bigger than you think, even if you already think it's impossibly big. You can never grasp its size. I know someone who is working on walking down every street in his city. Even a smaller city, this is a major undertaking that takes years. Paris has over 6,000 for example.

shadowgovt 4y ago

This almost crosses over into "Old Man Yells At Cloud" territory, except the author is self-aware of how easy it is to become a simple complainer without peeling back the surface to understand how we got here. Credit to Ed Zitron for taking the extra step. There was an excellent interview with LeVar Burton once (I can't remember where, it might have been on NPR's Fresh Air) where he talked about the significance of the TV miniseries Roots, in which he starred. One key thing he mentioned is that Roots was one of the last shows that one could credibly assume "everyone with a television saw at least some of it." Because it came out right on the cusp of the explosion of cable television into the mainstream market and HDTV after it. For a specific generation of Americans, Roots is a common touchstone exploration of the grim history of slavery in the US. Recreating something like Roots today (something with both the wide reach and willingness to shine light on ugliness of the story) would be almost impossible. When there were a half-dozen stations to tune in, a message on them was seen by "everybody" (because even if it made you feel uncomfortable, what were you going to do if you had rabbit years? Tune in the wiggly-lines nightly news? Turn the TV off?) But with dozens and then hundreds of stations, that is no longer true. For all the complaint about consolidation of social networking, the Internet has had a massively-disintermediating effect on media (entertainment media in particular, but also news and technical; most people may get their basic facts from Wikipedia, but all other online sources of basic facts are exactly the same distance away from the consumer). It has become drastically harder, far more expensive, to get a message to everyone now. The "filter bubble" is the other side of the coin to the broadcaster's modern dilemma: if something actually is important, how do we get it in front of people?

kodah 4y ago

It's wild to me that there are people who are so intoxicated with a "wife positive brand" that they'd form into a mob demanding cancelling over something like cheating. The moral crusades of the past are now online sideshows featuring the interpersonal problems of real people. I can't help but to analog this kind of thing to the journals that routinely print rumors or juicy controversies about celebrities solely to make a dollar.

kristintynski 4y ago

I'd guess the author isnt on TikTok. Pretty impossible to avoid the TryGuy saga there...

greenhearth 4y ago

This is what the internet has ALWAYS been at least since the early 1990s.