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I don’t think the idea is clickbait at all. I deeply regret wasting my youth on my small portion of building out the Internet. What it became went well beyond
by phil21 2y ago
I don’t think the idea is clickbait at all. I deeply regret wasting my youth on my small portion of building out the Internet. What it became went well beyond the benefits you describe and might be the downfall of society as we know it in the end.
I won’t go into more detail other than that. The dream of 13 year old midwestern me playing chess with some random person in South Africa in the early 90’s died long ago for me. It was truly awe inspiring while the naivety lasted though!
I now operate on a harm reduction principle. I truly feel the internet as we know it causes more harm than good these days.
- eesmith 2y agoI'm fully in your camp. People are surprised when they find out I get depressed about the internet. When I tell them I've been on the internet for 35 years (technically ARPANET then), on the web for 30 years, and I'm tired of it, they begin to realize what might be in their future.
- JohnFen 2y agoI agree entirely. I've been actively using the internet for roughly as long as you, and I find a great deal of it highly discouraging, depressing, and frightening. There's always been a dark side, even in the ARPANET days, but the percentage of it that's horrible has been growing steadily over the years. It's become so bad that I've severely limited my use of the internet anymore. Too much of it actively makes my life worse. Avoiding it has improved things quite a lot. Lately, I've been thinking that I may even need to stop hanging out here on HN, which is the only "social media" I use anymore.