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There's an interesting set of conflicting forces where people are tempted through selfish interests to be lazy interacting with humans and prefer to stay home c

There's an interesting set of conflicting forces where people are tempted through selfish interests to be lazy interacting with humans and prefer to stay home connected while also craving intimate human interaction. I think this laziness is encouraging us to stay home while also causing all us to feel more isolated and lonely. Like you said, "social junk food", but it's also video games, TV, etc. We've invented more ways to avoid social interaction which causes a feedback-loop of sorts. We're becoming more anti-social but also more lonely. Having nothing to do is a great driver to force people out of their holes and interacting with other humans. We've made it too easy to stay home

AlexandrB 3y ago
> There's an interesting set of conflicting forces where people are tempted through selfish interests to be lazy interacting with humans and prefer to stay home connected while also craving intimate human interaction. Counterpoint: when genuine human interaction does start to happen online, there's often an incentive to monetize it. It's the monetization that turns it into junk food. Spam, clickbait, infinite algorithmic feeds - they're all symptoms of the need to make money. I wonder if a true public space will ever emerge online. See also this post that makes roughly the same point: https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other...
- xeromal 3y ago
  I don't believe virtual interaction covers the same basic needs that physical interaction does but this is completely my own opinion. I'm sure everyone is different. That said, the nice thing about physical interaction is that you can always find free spaces to join. Makes me wonder if the state should create an online equivalent of a public park.
- noduerme 3y ago
  Online spaces cost a lot of money and manpower to run. Half the people on this site could put one up in a day, but who would pay to scale it if it wasn't monetized? And as soon as it is, you have an opaque corporate hierarchy directly MITMiddling discourse. Wikipedia and Archive.org provide clues to other ways this could be addressed, through nonprofit donations, but then you have a somewhat opaque and unelected priesthood moderating things. HN gets around it by basically being niche enough to rely on one overworked person to moderate. Scaling up the HN model would mean many individual small sites acting independently as a patchwork of public commons. And all the other workarounds to this problem - and I agree it's a huge social problem and a drain on society - turn out to involve some technical hack to tie patchworks together, like Mastodon. One thing that hasn't really been tried (by a democracy), at least that I know of, is a social network for citizens run by elected committees. And this may be the worst idea of all, since it would become a natural competitor for power with all other branches of government, and would run the risk of directly corrupting national politics in any number of ways... Basically all this is to say that running any kind of mediation at scale between random members of society is dangerous, and not just because of the profit motive, but more basically because power corrupts.

AlexandrB 3y ago

> There's an interesting set of conflicting forces where people are tempted through selfish interests to be lazy interacting with humans and prefer to stay home connected while also craving intimate human interaction. Counterpoint: when genuine human interaction does start to happen online, there's often an incentive to monetize it. It's the monetization that turns it into junk food. Spam, clickbait, infinite algorithmic feeds - they're all symptoms of the need to make money. I wonder if a true public space will ever emerge online. See also this post that makes roughly the same point: https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other...

xeromal 3y ago
I don't believe virtual interaction covers the same basic needs that physical interaction does but this is completely my own opinion. I'm sure everyone is different. That said, the nice thing about physical interaction is that you can always find free spaces to join. Makes me wonder if the state should create an online equivalent of a public park.
noduerme 3y ago
Online spaces cost a lot of money and manpower to run. Half the people on this site could put one up in a day, but who would pay to scale it if it wasn't monetized? And as soon as it is, you have an opaque corporate hierarchy directly MITMiddling discourse. Wikipedia and Archive.org provide clues to other ways this could be addressed, through nonprofit donations, but then you have a somewhat opaque and unelected priesthood moderating things. HN gets around it by basically being niche enough to rely on one overworked person to moderate. Scaling up the HN model would mean many individual small sites acting independently as a patchwork of public commons. And all the other workarounds to this problem - and I agree it's a huge social problem and a drain on society - turn out to involve some technical hack to tie patchworks together, like Mastodon. One thing that hasn't really been tried (by a democracy), at least that I know of, is a social network for citizens run by elected committees. And this may be the worst idea of all, since it would become a natural competitor for power with all other branches of government, and would run the risk of directly corrupting national politics in any number of ways... Basically all this is to say that running any kind of mediation at scale between random members of society is dangerous, and not just because of the profit motive, but more basically because power corrupts.