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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 yo
by 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 agoI 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 agoSure, 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 agoThe 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 agoYou'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.
- Bakary 4y agoWell it depends on the individual. A person might waste their entire life because all those blog posts convinced them that they should work on their "legacy" or some app. Or they might spend years stressing about their productivity while applying that effort on the wrong things, all because the material they read looks serious and fruitful because it's not gossipy. Granted, it will generally be better than gossip because there is some meat to these topics, but the true cost has to be seen per person.
- jmfldn 4y agoI suppose it depends on how people use sites like this, but I discover such a wealth of fascinating information here, the most interesting of which is often nothing to do with tech. I really do think that spending time on HN vs TikTok looking at amusing videos, for example, is time better spent on the whole.