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All the sad young terminally online men
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoI love how Derek centers on (and summarizes) Jay Van Bavel's characteristics of online discourse, and the four "Dark Laws" he comes out with: > 1) Negativity bias increases clicks. 2) Extreme opinions increase sharing. 3) Out-group animosity increases engagement. 4) Moral-emotional language goes viral. These read as all to familiar, strikes me as having all the ingredients to spiral us down into the nightmare of Sagan's Demon Haunted World. Which has been a lovely dark thread going on today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45404373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45404373 It feels like we're deep in the whirlpool of such a radically non-empathetic zero-sum dis-reality based thinking.
- drchopchop 1y ago" This group tended to agree with dark pronouncements, such as “I need chaos around me” and “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’ ” Petersen and his colleagues came up with an unforgettable term to describe this group’s psychology: “The need for chaos.”" My take is that a lack of opportunity / class stratification / societal mobility plays into this. It's essentially the same reason people play the lottery. When you're stuck in a seemingly intractable situation, you need the world to suddenly change around you. Maybe you win Powerball, or maybe you decide to just burn everything down out of desperation. Social media just amplifies those thoughts.
- positron26 1y ago> non-zero-sum Don't you mean zero-sum? Cynicism often defaults to transactionalism and implying that people are motivated by nothing else and deconstructing any evidence to the contrary as if dopamine is never mutually released. Transactionalism is frequently and illogically zero-sum play that takes place within infinite games.
- pyuser583 1y agoPartisan people have higher rates of political participation. This has been the case for a long time.
- mindwok 1y agoI often wonder what the internet would look like if we just banned paid advertising. Facebook, instagram, X, TikTok, they’d all have to start charging users to stay alive and I don’t think anyone would choose to pay for the brainrot. I’d like to see us remove the incentives these companies have for just gluing us to our phones.
- AuthAuth 1y agoI'd like to think parents would be more involved if they had to buy their kids internet things but they'd probably end up swiping their creditcard on the same stupid stuff.
- socalgal2 1y agoI don't think it would change at all. Look at creators on Youtube. The majority are clickbait and other crap, people trying to get money and/or influence. It doesn't require advertising by the platform. All it requires is the internet itself and nearly everyone on it. Ads might have accelerated things but the basic incentives are "more viewers = more money / influence", with or without ads. And those incentives eventually lead to where we are.
- mingus88 1y agoCreators on YouTube do it for monetization. There are now multiple generations of youths for which “influencer” is their desired career. If you make it, you make it big. They might pull in more money with sponsorships but they only got there because the algorithm put them at the top where the money is. Don’t believe me? Look up the woman who shot up google HQ when they demonetized her channel.
- Poomba 1y agoI know someone who got addicted to the influencer money in Tiktok and dropped out of a med school program because making 5 figures a month, taking videos of you wearing fancy clothes was way better than slogging thru med school
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- zinodaur 1y ago[flagged]
- kaonwarb 1y agoMany good writers used the em dash long before LLMs. (Where, after all, did LLMs get the idea from?)
- codpiece 1y agoEm dashes —once the sign of a sophisticated writer— were prominent in The New York Times.
- yodon 1y agoMicrosoft word would add them for you long before AI
- sli 1y agoEntering two dashes on the iOS keyboard inserts an emdash, I would use them frequently when I had an iPhone.
- anigbrowl 1y agos/sophisticated writer/Mac user. It was a pain to type them on Windows so most people just used the regular dash - accessible on any keyboard.
- codpiece 1y agoI had no idea! I was a typesetter, we would have to manually create them using keyboard shortcuts on both systems.
- zinodaur 1y agoYeah, but when an article is already giving off slop vibes, it's more evidence that the article is slop. AI code is great - but it has compilers and linters and tests. I'm sure someone will figure out a writing workflow that doesn't produce slop, but I ain't seen it yet
- haunter 1y ago>I don’t know how to stop political violence in America. "sad young terminally online men" is not an American thing it's a global phenomenon yet America has something that most other countries don't. Simple as that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_gun_laws_by_nation#Maps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_gun_laws_by_nation... Not even mention this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_carry_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_carry_in_the_United_State...
- ViscountPenguin 1y ago[flagged]
- stavros 1y agoParticularly the victim had decided this. I don't know if he thought he'd be a victim of gun violence, or if it was an instance of "gun violence for thee, but not for me", but democracy is all about the tyranny of the majority.
- bigyabai 1y ago> I don't know if he thought he'd be a victim of gun violence This is exactly the problem with advocating for gun rights. If you can't think past the first-order consequences, you're not taking it seriously.
- stavros 1y agoThis is the problem with making any tradeoff. If you think only the benefits will apply to you, and the downsides to other people, you're being delusional.
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- shoobiedoo 1y agoI can agree with the original intent of the second amendment. But deliberately ignoring the most critical point of it is just insane: "well-regulated militia". People who are trained, share common values and understand the gravity of firing a weapon is kind of important. I don't think the founding fathers would see "You were born in America and are old enough? here ya go!" as what they intended.
- billy99k 1y ago[flagged]
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- recallingmemory 1y agoSocial media companies have managed to figure out what can keep a person glued to a screen for hours on end. The result is a clearly fucked up generation that took in endless staged content as reality and their brains have been shaped accordingly. Young men do not have a working model of the world that is based in reality. Congratulations to the social media companies and their infinite ad revenue, and so sorry to the rest of us who have to live in a Tiktok society.
- setterle 1y ago[flagged]
- rogerrogerr 1y agoYeeep. I don’t consider myself terminally online, but am a mid-20s male who doesn’t see the path forward. I make software money and can’t buy a house locally without it feeling really irresponsible. I have no idea where women who think the way I do would be. Everyone I meet in my age bracket is unbelievably immature, or married. AI might take my job in the next single digit years, so taking on liabilities seems foolish anyway. The stuff about being told I’m evil for skin color or whatever doesn’t resonate much with me. Sure, I’ve heard it from fringe people, and I guess I could see how someone could get wrapped up in it, but it doesn’t really stick with me.
- mullingitover 1y ago> If you've been told your whole life that you're inherently evil for your gender I'm sorry, I'm nowhere near an expert on gender theory but even I know this is BS: nobody is telling young men they're "evil for their gender." What they are told is the fact that they live in a patriarchy. Nobody is held personally responsible for being born into the patriarchy, and the patriarchy is just as toxic to young men as it is to women. The main people who get held responsible are the ones who enthusiastically perpetuate the system and plug their ears when they hear evidence that it might not be super great for everyone.
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- whynotminot 1y ago> I'm sorry, I'm nowhere near an expert on gender theory but even I know this is BS: nobody is telling young men they're "evil for their gender." What they are told is the fact that they live in a patriarchy. Well sure, this is the actual text book answer for people who understand it. Today's young people are not responsible for the systems they were born into. This includes young men born into a patriarchal system. But it doesn't take a genius to see why a young man might get the message "you're the problem" when he constantly hears that The Patriarchy is enemy number one. It actually does require a little bit of sophistication to understand the distinction between a system and the people in it. And I also don't think young men are the only ones misunderstanding the message! Young women too often don't understand the difference between patriarchy as a system and the young men in their lives who had nothing to do with building it. A lot of them also go on to internalize a message of "man is the problem." The gender divide for young people in this country is stunningly large. I can't help but think this patriarchy messaging plays a role here.
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- incomingpain 1y agoI dislike that they cut this off at 2003. On those graphs it was clearly already an upward trend. Afterall, the actual issue derives more from the 1990s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone Your thesis that the social issues are caused by the internet would become very weak; seeing as this started during the dial up era; pre smart phones, pre social media.