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Between the fight over AI, shifting geopolitics reigniting old conflicts, an overly-centralized technology industry, a lack of meaningful innovation from a cons

Between the fight over AI, shifting geopolitics reigniting old conflicts, an overly-centralized technology industry, a lack of meaningful innovation from a consumer perspective, and the immense precarity of modern work in general, it feels like we’re at the start of the end of a cycle. I’m noticing more people taking stock of what’s actually important to them and taking a stand on their values. This is good in the long run, but in the immediate it results in a lot of binary/black-and-white decision-making that results in dustups and conflicts between groups who would normally be allied behind common goals. All of this is to say that I expect we’ll see many, many, many more of these types of posts in the future, as everyone remembers they can choose to shape their engagement with technology, and that naturally includes the right to disconnect from it - not out of any sort of anti-technology position itself, necessarily, but simply from realizing that a specific thing isn’t something they need or are interested in, and that’s okay. Props to the author for being so clear about their engagement with social media, their background, and their thought process. If it encourages more folks to reassess their own relationship with social media (or any technology), I’m all for it.

bigbuppo 1y ago
I know a few people on the internet long enough to have IP assignments that were originally recorded in Jon Postel's notebook. They have always been on the forefront of everything new and exciting on the internet. Today, there's a fairly even split between bluesky, various mastodon instances, and going back and hanging out on IRC. Nobody that has been in the trenches for a few decades wants to touch an algorithmically-curated platform. If there's one thing twitter showed us it's that humanity isn't yet ready for the hive mind. As for me, I am on bluesky, but I limit who I follow to the point that I can mostly take in a whole week of posts in about five minutes. I'm at the age where a few hours of my time is a horrifyingly significant fraction of a percent of my remaining time on this planet. I have better things to do with that time than to squander it being miserable so the world's third richest person can get a little richer and buy another private island.
- atavistically 1y ago
  [dead]
stevenAthompson 1y ago
Similarly, I've been watching the rise of the "minimal phone", and "analog tech" with interest lately. People have lost agency to the degree that they're looking to the very tech that stole their agency for answers, and I view that a sign that perhaps the push-back is actually beginning in earnest.
- nradov 1y ago
  There's no push-back. Manifestos posted by a few members of the terminally online chattering class don't constitute any sort of real trend. I've yet to see anyone using a "minimal phone" (other than a few older people who might still have a working feature phone).
  - atavistically 1y ago
    [dead]
  - gamacodre 1y ago
    As an anecdatum, one of my gen Y embedded engineers is using a little stick phone that can barely text, and avoids all social media except Discord (assuming that counts). One of the other younger folk in a different department has something similar. And we've only got around 100 people in this building.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - burningChrome 1y ago
    I still have a smartphone, but I barely have any apps on it. I literally have a handful of email apps and two weather apps and that's it. So yeah, I have a smartphone, but I barely use it compared to how I used to use it even 5 years ago. By unplugging, I've found myself way more productive. I'm reading two or three books a month now. Its an amazing feeling knowing you can drive what you want to do instead of having social media driving your life, manipulating you into using it more and more and not feeling like you're in control. I've essentially logged off and I really don't miss it. I feel like I can't be the only one.
thinkingtoilet 1y ago
I think one thing to remember that is often forgotten is just how new all this is. Society is moving incredibly fast and that can be both good and bad. Even 10 years ago the way people interacted with technology would be unrecognizable today. 20 years ago is the distant pass. We sacrificed a generation of kids to figure this out and hopefully we will actually figure this all out, but we shouldn't be surprised that we've had seismic shifts in how technology is impacting our society and we didn't get it immediately right from the get go.
- throaway955 1y ago
  yes, us millennials should be called the "guinea pig generation"
- stego-tech 1y ago
  That’s something that still blows my mind, and gives me serious pause when I consider the impacts. Sure, I’ve been involved in technology and the internet since the mid-90s as an elementary schooler, but I’m the exception to the rule. In thirty short years we’ve gone from bank tellers to bank apps, from dreary Government buildings with long waiting times to poorly-designed websites that crash frequently, and from only being reachable via post or landline to never being unavailable unless you’re somewhere isolated and remote - and then building technology to bring connectivity into those areas as well. In three decades computing went from a toy of the rich and tools of the biggest businesses to a “necessity” of the everyman, but without any formal training on usage, value, or feedback on boundaries. Thirty years to go from only nation states being able to effectively surveil people at scale, to any tech company with a magic pixel being able to gather far more and accurate data than anyone prior could hope to. This has been a gargantuan shift in civilization in an impossibly short amount of time, and we’re only really just now agreeing that there’s some growing pains that need sorting out. Maybe most businesses don’t need cloud-based services for everything, maybe most humans don’t actually need public social media, and maybe some of the stuff we take for granted as necessary today are actually quite worthless to most people/entities. Viewed through that lens, I also see the desperation of the AI movement to continue accelerating “advancement” forward, before more people start asking the same questions regarding necessity and importance of existing tools and technologies. Once people start questioning the utility of a purchase, they’re less likely to spend money on it - and there goes your business.
qmmmur 1y ago
People with their own name as the domain posting with a clearly technical background are hardly representative of the general populace. Most people are completely enthralled by social media and use it uncritically for most day-to-day interactions. I wouldn't hesitate to argue that they live their lives through something like tiktok or facebook messenger.
- rightbyte 1y ago
  I don't know about uncritically. It has been like 10 years since I heard anyone refer to social media in some positive sense. Maybe normal people underestimate the scale of corruption the companies do or something. Often some bogey man is blamed not the main culprits by pundits but dunno if people believe that or not.
- otodus 1y ago
  She's not a programmer. She's an author of a book on health issues explaining why social media failed her as a marketing tool. She's probably still not representative of the general population, but she gives an interesting window into a community that is expected to use social media a lot.
  - dmbche 1y ago
    Parent didn't mention she was a programmer
  - nradov 1y ago
    It's tough to be an author. Publishers and retailers will only put major marketing efforts behind new books from authors who are already popular. Before social media, less popular authors had to try to market their own books through interviews on radio and TV but most authors weren't good at that either. So I don't think that social media has necessarily made things any worse, just different.
- qzx_pierri 1y ago
  You nailed it. However, it is good to see more people waking up from the contrived nightmare that is social media.
emseetech 1y ago
I want a social media website that barely ever notifies me, has no algorithmic feed, no ads and limits the amount of connections I can have to about the size of a large wedding party. Something like that would be for actual friends and family and would be useless for influencers, trolls and bots. Bonus points if it doesn't have an app and is only a website.
- hackable_sand 1y ago
  Discord does all that
  - emseetech 1y ago
    As I said below, I’m not interested in a chat program in the least. Especially discord. I use it when I have to but it’s a much more demanding and ephemeral experience than I described. Is this a generational divide? There’s no way I’d ever convince my immediate family let alone my extended family to join a discord server.
- the_snooze 1y ago
  It's called a private group chat.
  - emseetech 1y ago
    Come again? I don't want to be in a discord or WhatsApp chat, I want 2010 era Facebook. Those are different experiences and products.
    - the_snooze 1y ago
      I don't know what 2010 era Facebook is, but I'm talking about small SMS, iMessage, Signal, or WhatsApp groups among people who know each other outside the platform. These groups are no more than maybe 10 people each, so you don't fall into the problem of context collapse [1]. You can have offshoot subgroups, and groups can also be ad-hoc for a particular event. The personal small-scale nature means they're governed entirely by shared social norms, not algorithms or formal moderation. If you want actual meaningful social interactions online, it needs to be small-scale and completely useless for advertisers. Group chats are that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse
andrewmutz 1y ago
I want an LLM that I control to sit between me and any social media feed. Let it filter the garbage and engagement-bait and boil it down to something that actually adds value to my life
- CharlesW 1y ago
  Achievable goal! Bluesky lets you create your own moderation tools using whatever technologies you like. https://deepwiki.com/bluesky-social/bsky-docs/2.5-moderation-apis https://deepwiki.com/bluesky-social/bsky-docs/2.5-moderation...
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    I wrote a comment a bit ago on what this adversarial interoperability [1] could look like with local LLMs and accessibility APIs [2]. Big AT Proto and Bluesky fan, as it cannot be captured ("protocols, not platforms"), but it isn't enough to have this capability only with Bluesky; it must be able to support any social network or graph. It should be a robust content processor under the user's control for any firehose they wish to consume, whether that is a REST API endpoint, an RSS feed, a plain 'ol website that the agent will login as the user as, or a closed app that the agent will use accessibility APIs to operate the app as the user. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42879342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42879342
- goopypoop 1y ago
  If my roof leaks and my drip bucket is full, do I need a shinier bucket or a better roof?
- fullshark 1y ago
  I want to communicate with actual humans and enjoy meaningful conversation, 5-10 actual humans is enough really, I don't have a public-facing brand I need to maintain like the author. That's what social media is for and thus it's simply not for me.
- 1y ago
jackdoe 1y ago
Yes! I am using old nokia phone for 3 months now, I am not going back to my iphone. (means no whatsapp, banking, uber, reddit, hn, whatever) It took almost 1 week to get rid of the cravings "I am slightly bored, I *MUST* look at my phone" Now, I am just bored, I had forgotten how nice it is to be bored, I just stare at things, poke something with a stick, look for patterns, ask questions, have ideas.. etc; when I have a meeting and the other person doesn't show up on time, I just watch the world and wait. I also noticed I can watch movies properly, I have more patience, I dont look at my phone at the first "less exciting" moment. It is really nice especially for things like Star Trek where they have not algorithmically optimized every frame to keep you engaged because they were not competing with instagram for your attention. I even bought a walkman. When the song is not very good, I just wait it out. Very quickly I got my sense of time back, just after few days I can measure time in 'songs' or 'cassette sides'. I have also blocked all socials except hn on my local pihole. If you survive the first week of cravings after that it gets nicer every day! Some people say I am doing those things because of "nostalgia" but this is incorrect, I just want to be able to be bored.
- globnomulous 1y ago
  Canceling streaming, on-demand media subscriptions and replacing them with cable is my next step in this process. The practices cable TV cultivates and requires seem healthier and more civilized than those streaming services cultivate. I love the idea that media consumption is tied to a specific place, which the whole house shares, and that if I want to watch something, I may need to plan for it and know when it'll be available. Moreover, not always getting exactly what I want, when I want it, in the largest possible dose, seems the right way to consume media.
  - throaway955 1y ago
    Cable is a good downgrade but still insidious. I personally would recommend just a hard drive full of whatever media you want to store on it.
    - globnomulous 1y ago
energy123 1y ago
The problems with social media are partly network related. You may opt out, but those naked pictures or nasty comments about you are still up there, the division and polarization that social media causes is still there. Basically society is just as bad off as before you decided to opt out, and you can't opt out of society. This is one of those technologies that we shouldn't have invented (one of Bostrom's black balls), but once you invent it it's too late because the incentives make it too difficult to roll back.
Bluestein 1y ago
> If it encourages more folks to reassess their own relationship with social media (or any technology), I’m all for it. Great point, this.-
munificent 1y ago
> everyone remembers they can choose to shape their engagement with technology, and that naturally includes the right to disconnect from it The thing that scares me the most about the times we are living in right now is that while I can choose how I shape my engagement with technology, I am still stuck living in a planet/country/society/democracy filled with people who may be making radically different choices and I still have to deal with the consequences of that. It really doesn't matter that much if I figure out ways to avoid toxic disinformation when I'm outvoted by idiots who haven't. It doesn't matter that much if I spend less time staring at a screen so that I can spend more in-person time with people I care about when it's a grueling task getting anyone else to commit to hanging out because they are still enthralled by the glowing rectangle. I'm doing my best to navigate this chaotic stressful time, but ultimately I share a boat with many many other people and have only my own tiny little oar.
- andhuman 1y ago
  Well, isn’t this a ”build it and they will come” situation? Do what you feel is right and that will communicate to others around you that there’s an alternative.
  - munificent 1y ago
    In my more optimistic days, I believe that, yes. But on many other days, I remember that all the asshats are also doing their own "build it and they will come" and pimping their own brand of toxic nonsense. And, worse, the billionaires are all doing it too and they have many orders of magnitude more influence than I ever will.

bigbuppo 1y ago

I know a few people on the internet long enough to have IP assignments that were originally recorded in Jon Postel's notebook. They have always been on the forefront of everything new and exciting on the internet. Today, there's a fairly even split between bluesky, various mastodon instances, and going back and hanging out on IRC. Nobody that has been in the trenches for a few decades wants to touch an algorithmically-curated platform. If there's one thing twitter showed us it's that humanity isn't yet ready for the hive mind. As for me, I am on bluesky, but I limit who I follow to the point that I can mostly take in a whole week of posts in about five minutes. I'm at the age where a few hours of my time is a horrifyingly significant fraction of a percent of my remaining time on this planet. I have better things to do with that time than to squander it being miserable so the world's third richest person can get a little richer and buy another private island.

atavistically 1y ago
[dead]

stevenAthompson 1y ago

Similarly, I've been watching the rise of the "minimal phone", and "analog tech" with interest lately. People have lost agency to the degree that they're looking to the very tech that stole their agency for answers, and I view that a sign that perhaps the push-back is actually beginning in earnest.

nradov 1y ago
There's no push-back. Manifestos posted by a few members of the terminally online chattering class don't constitute any sort of real trend. I've yet to see anyone using a "minimal phone" (other than a few older people who might still have a working feature phone).
- atavistically 1y ago
  [dead]
- gamacodre 1y ago
  As an anecdatum, one of my gen Y embedded engineers is using a little stick phone that can barely text, and avoids all social media except Discord (assuming that counts). One of the other younger folk in a different department has something similar. And we've only got around 100 people in this building.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- burningChrome 1y ago
  I still have a smartphone, but I barely have any apps on it. I literally have a handful of email apps and two weather apps and that's it. So yeah, I have a smartphone, but I barely use it compared to how I used to use it even 5 years ago. By unplugging, I've found myself way more productive. I'm reading two or three books a month now. Its an amazing feeling knowing you can drive what you want to do instead of having social media driving your life, manipulating you into using it more and more and not feeling like you're in control. I've essentially logged off and I really don't miss it. I feel like I can't be the only one.

thinkingtoilet 1y ago

I think one thing to remember that is often forgotten is just how new all this is. Society is moving incredibly fast and that can be both good and bad. Even 10 years ago the way people interacted with technology would be unrecognizable today. 20 years ago is the distant pass. We sacrificed a generation of kids to figure this out and hopefully we will actually figure this all out, but we shouldn't be surprised that we've had seismic shifts in how technology is impacting our society and we didn't get it immediately right from the get go.

throaway955 1y ago
yes, us millennials should be called the "guinea pig generation"
stego-tech 1y ago
That’s something that still blows my mind, and gives me serious pause when I consider the impacts. Sure, I’ve been involved in technology and the internet since the mid-90s as an elementary schooler, but I’m the exception to the rule. In thirty short years we’ve gone from bank tellers to bank apps, from dreary Government buildings with long waiting times to poorly-designed websites that crash frequently, and from only being reachable via post or landline to never being unavailable unless you’re somewhere isolated and remote - and then building technology to bring connectivity into those areas as well. In three decades computing went from a toy of the rich and tools of the biggest businesses to a “necessity” of the everyman, but without any formal training on usage, value, or feedback on boundaries. Thirty years to go from only nation states being able to effectively surveil people at scale, to any tech company with a magic pixel being able to gather far more and accurate data than anyone prior could hope to. This has been a gargantuan shift in civilization in an impossibly short amount of time, and we’re only really just now agreeing that there’s some growing pains that need sorting out. Maybe most businesses don’t need cloud-based services for everything, maybe most humans don’t actually need public social media, and maybe some of the stuff we take for granted as necessary today are actually quite worthless to most people/entities. Viewed through that lens, I also see the desperation of the AI movement to continue accelerating “advancement” forward, before more people start asking the same questions regarding necessity and importance of existing tools and technologies. Once people start questioning the utility of a purchase, they’re less likely to spend money on it - and there goes your business.

qmmmur 1y ago

People with their own name as the domain posting with a clearly technical background are hardly representative of the general populace. Most people are completely enthralled by social media and use it uncritically for most day-to-day interactions. I wouldn't hesitate to argue that they live their lives through something like tiktok or facebook messenger.

rightbyte 1y ago
I don't know about uncritically. It has been like 10 years since I heard anyone refer to social media in some positive sense. Maybe normal people underestimate the scale of corruption the companies do or something. Often some bogey man is blamed not the main culprits by pundits but dunno if people believe that or not.
otodus 1y ago
She's not a programmer. She's an author of a book on health issues explaining why social media failed her as a marketing tool. She's probably still not representative of the general population, but she gives an interesting window into a community that is expected to use social media a lot.
- dmbche 1y ago
  Parent didn't mention she was a programmer
- nradov 1y ago
  It's tough to be an author. Publishers and retailers will only put major marketing efforts behind new books from authors who are already popular. Before social media, less popular authors had to try to market their own books through interviews on radio and TV but most authors weren't good at that either. So I don't think that social media has necessarily made things any worse, just different.
qzx_pierri 1y ago
You nailed it. However, it is good to see more people waking up from the contrived nightmare that is social media.

emseetech 1y ago

I want a social media website that barely ever notifies me, has no algorithmic feed, no ads and limits the amount of connections I can have to about the size of a large wedding party. Something like that would be for actual friends and family and would be useless for influencers, trolls and bots. Bonus points if it doesn't have an app and is only a website.

hackable_sand 1y ago
Discord does all that
- emseetech 1y ago
  As I said below, I’m not interested in a chat program in the least. Especially discord. I use it when I have to but it’s a much more demanding and ephemeral experience than I described. Is this a generational divide? There’s no way I’d ever convince my immediate family let alone my extended family to join a discord server.
the_snooze 1y ago
It's called a private group chat.
- emseetech 1y ago
  Come again? I don't want to be in a discord or WhatsApp chat, I want 2010 era Facebook. Those are different experiences and products.
  - the_snooze 1y ago
    I don't know what 2010 era Facebook is, but I'm talking about small SMS, iMessage, Signal, or WhatsApp groups among people who know each other outside the platform. These groups are no more than maybe 10 people each, so you don't fall into the problem of context collapse [1]. You can have offshoot subgroups, and groups can also be ad-hoc for a particular event. The personal small-scale nature means they're governed entirely by shared social norms, not algorithms or formal moderation. If you want actual meaningful social interactions online, it needs to be small-scale and completely useless for advertisers. Group chats are that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse

andrewmutz 1y ago

I want an LLM that I control to sit between me and any social media feed. Let it filter the garbage and engagement-bait and boil it down to something that actually adds value to my life

CharlesW 1y ago
Achievable goal! Bluesky lets you create your own moderation tools using whatever technologies you like. https://deepwiki.com/bluesky-social/bsky-docs/2.5-moderation-apis https://deepwiki.com/bluesky-social/bsky-docs/2.5-moderation...
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  I wrote a comment a bit ago on what this adversarial interoperability [1] could look like with local LLMs and accessibility APIs [2]. Big AT Proto and Bluesky fan, as it cannot be captured ("protocols, not platforms"), but it isn't enough to have this capability only with Bluesky; it must be able to support any social network or graph. It should be a robust content processor under the user's control for any firehose they wish to consume, whether that is a REST API endpoint, an RSS feed, a plain 'ol website that the agent will login as the user as, or a closed app that the agent will use accessibility APIs to operate the app as the user. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42879342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42879342
goopypoop 1y ago
If my roof leaks and my drip bucket is full, do I need a shinier bucket or a better roof?
fullshark 1y ago
I want to communicate with actual humans and enjoy meaningful conversation, 5-10 actual humans is enough really, I don't have a public-facing brand I need to maintain like the author. That's what social media is for and thus it's simply not for me.
1y ago

jackdoe 1y ago

Yes! I am using old nokia phone for 3 months now, I am not going back to my iphone. (means no whatsapp, banking, uber, reddit, hn, whatever) It took almost 1 week to get rid of the cravings "I am slightly bored, I *MUST* look at my phone" Now, I am just bored, I had forgotten how nice it is to be bored, I just stare at things, poke something with a stick, look for patterns, ask questions, have ideas.. etc; when I have a meeting and the other person doesn't show up on time, I just watch the world and wait. I also noticed I can watch movies properly, I have more patience, I dont look at my phone at the first "less exciting" moment. It is really nice especially for things like Star Trek where they have not algorithmically optimized every frame to keep you engaged because they were not competing with instagram for your attention. I even bought a walkman. When the song is not very good, I just wait it out. Very quickly I got my sense of time back, just after few days I can measure time in 'songs' or 'cassette sides'. I have also blocked all socials except hn on my local pihole. If you survive the first week of cravings after that it gets nicer every day! Some people say I am doing those things because of "nostalgia" but this is incorrect, I just want to be able to be bored.

globnomulous 1y ago
Canceling streaming, on-demand media subscriptions and replacing them with cable is my next step in this process. The practices cable TV cultivates and requires seem healthier and more civilized than those streaming services cultivate. I love the idea that media consumption is tied to a specific place, which the whole house shares, and that if I want to watch something, I may need to plan for it and know when it'll be available. Moreover, not always getting exactly what I want, when I want it, in the largest possible dose, seems the right way to consume media.
- throaway955 1y ago
  Cable is a good downgrade but still insidious. I personally would recommend just a hard drive full of whatever media you want to store on it.
  - globnomulous 1y ago

energy123 1y ago

The problems with social media are partly network related. You may opt out, but those naked pictures or nasty comments about you are still up there, the division and polarization that social media causes is still there. Basically society is just as bad off as before you decided to opt out, and you can't opt out of society. This is one of those technologies that we shouldn't have invented (one of Bostrom's black balls), but once you invent it it's too late because the incentives make it too difficult to roll back.

Bluestein 1y ago

> If it encourages more folks to reassess their own relationship with social media (or any technology), I’m all for it. Great point, this.-

munificent 1y ago

> everyone remembers they can choose to shape their engagement with technology, and that naturally includes the right to disconnect from it The thing that scares me the most about the times we are living in right now is that while I can choose how I shape my engagement with technology, I am still stuck living in a planet/country/society/democracy filled with people who may be making radically different choices and I still have to deal with the consequences of that. It really doesn't matter that much if I figure out ways to avoid toxic disinformation when I'm outvoted by idiots who haven't. It doesn't matter that much if I spend less time staring at a screen so that I can spend more in-person time with people I care about when it's a grueling task getting anyone else to commit to hanging out because they are still enthralled by the glowing rectangle. I'm doing my best to navigate this chaotic stressful time, but ultimately I share a boat with many many other people and have only my own tiny little oar.

andhuman 1y ago
Well, isn’t this a ”build it and they will come” situation? Do what you feel is right and that will communicate to others around you that there’s an alternative.
- munificent 1y ago
  In my more optimistic days, I believe that, yes. But on many other days, I remember that all the asshats are also doing their own "build it and they will come" and pimping their own brand of toxic nonsense. And, worse, the billionaires are all doing it too and they have many orders of magnitude more influence than I ever will.