I'm partial to what I call the "doomer effect". If you feel sad or disenfranchised you're just much more likely to spend time online talking. A person with a fulfilling social life and a job they feel satisfied with is going to spend time socializing with friends and working on their job. They may read online feeds, they may write very occasionally, but that will be the extent of most interactions. On the other hand the folks that feel the most negative tend to spend inordinate amounts of time online posting about how sad and angry they are.
In a real life conversation when a depressed friend gets on their soapbox most folks give the friend a subtle clue that it's time to move on. If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative. Nothing like this happens offline. If you're in a bad place, as long as a forum will have your posts you can post to your heart's content. And oh boy is it finally the time to let your hair down and tell everyone how f-ed everything is on the inside. Constantly.
This makes a flywheel. People who want to avoid negativity start avoiding negative online spaces. People who are fine with it or feel similarly keep reading. Eventually negativity becomes the default.
"Misery loves company" is much older than the Internet. There's no doubt to me that the net makes it that much worse.
I dont disagree that depressive online spaces breed more depressive cycles, but good lord, what you seem to be implying is even worse. You can’t just brute force “hey cheer up” no matter the group structure.
like particularly this:
> If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative.
Is not ever helping a clinically depressed person. especially when offers of “help” are often quite victim blamey and threatening like the tone of your post here - stop bringing the vibe down, or we’ll make you feel even more isolated! good lord. Try bringing them a meal or giving them a compliment first? holy shit.
I could give you a detailed response but, given your tone, instead I'll say: assume the best and don't make everything about yourself. Several people I know have struggled with negative mental health effects of finding themselves in a caretaker role for a mentally ill friend or partner. In my experience offline groups (not individual relationships) have pretty good immune systems for this. They also often do band together to support or help a struggling friend.
In the same way that you expect a depressed person to receive charity, please offer it in your responses.
I live in the US and I’ve watched in real time every sad, terrible decision made by the current administration and every sad terrible decision by what’s supposed to be the opposition party. It all makes me want to scream.
And then I’m offline and my life carries on because none it has really affected my white privileged middle class tech worker butt.
It all feels wrong.
Agreed.
From TFA: "This disillusionment is infectious."
I would suggest it is in part being spread by articles like this one. If you look at the press surrounding earlier advances, it was largely neutral to positive. Nowadays, as you note, it's doom stew everywhere, and the beacons of solace are pieces like this one driving home to anyone who's missed it how demoralized their peers are.
I can see it as a foreign adversary psyop (they benefit from us being demoralized) or as a side effect of the attention economy (more clicks is all that matters) or even a hyper-partisanship epiphenomenon (whichever side is currently down wants people to think everything is awful).
But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-movie plot. How is that supposed to work? Are they secretly feeding creatures from the 4th dimension by harvesting misery or something?
Fear is the best driver of attention and clicks.
Someone can choose to pass on a light-hearted fun article. If they feel their life or the fate of the universe is in the balance, they will read it.
There isn't some evil mastermind behind it, just the banal economic incentives and evolutionary psychology.
Edit: by way of example, when every woman I know got pregnant, their social media instantly filled up with stories about dead babies. Nobody hard coded that, but the algorithm picked up on the fact that pregnant women will pay attention to stories of dead babies. After all, it is incredibly heartbreaking and the next Tick Tock might include the fact that will save their own baby.
It takes a lot of self-awareness to say "while I might learn information that saves my baby, that is incredibly unlikely so I will refuse to watch this 30 sec video or read this article"
There isn't some evil mastermind behind it--at least, in the click-case; in the psyops or vote-for-us! cases there might sort of be, but even there they aren't profiting from the misery per se.
For them it really is doom and gloom, and they spread it to the rest of society like a contagion by their writing much like the the banking crisis in 2008 poisoned the entire economy.
I'm not sure if it's true, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
If you want to maximize "Engagement", which these companies explicitly do, then you WILL maximize rage and doom and gloom. They drive engagement more than anything else.
“Night must fall, now! Darker! — darker!”
It feels to me like the change from:
- old: going downtown to the restaurants and shops of your small village to enjoy a relaxing evening.
- new: downtown is a crowded confusing mishmash of unregulated blaring music, over-the-top blinking flashing signs, intrusive people accosting you and dangerous thieves lurking everywhere. don't go.
there's no "regulated" that makes thing better for anyone, it just gets morphed into oppression of the vistors making them more vulnerable without fixing any problems.
I'd like to see something like that take off, because I'd be willing to give it a try. I also think the communities should be limited. Maybe have several sizes and see how it plays. Something that never grows beyond 250. Never past 1000. Something along those lines.
Relatedly, I'm just about on board with the idea of a modern day Compuserve or Prodigy. Pay to play, but in return you get no ads, no malware, no algorithms, no AI. A gated community for the Internet.
But most people will still opt to stay on the slop-filled web because it’s free and because they like being angry. And as long as they stay the societal problems that stem from the toxic internet will live on.
As far as the disillusionment sense, I think that’s an active selection bias. I think people (including me) like to feel angry and so we go out there looking for and finding people who will give us that. The key, for me, is to curate one’s feed. On HN, for instance, I usually block the majority of repetitive boring posters using a chrome extension. The majority of these people have very low context sensitivity which annoys me.
There are also abrasive people or generally sad people, both groups of which are safely blockable because they have a comment style where P(token|context) = P(token). There is no surfeit of humans on the Internet and no surfeit of interesting information. Almost all humans can be safely excluded from my feed and I can still get information.
By the way, I know you from your search engine. This might be an out there question but do you offer your search index as a downloadable structure? If so, how much does that cost?
Shoot me an email and we can discuss, but the index is somewhere in the ballpark of 20 TB, so there are some quite significant logistical obstacles.
Why take the web seriously? It’s more fun to be some ridiculous person. Of course, some people are genuine and this kind of behavior chews them up when they take it seriously.
I think you make a strong point here. I will add a note of hope.
In my opinion, besides the 'this too shall pass' nature of life meaning this outrage-focused moment, we on HN have hope here.
I've been a lurker for a while around here, IDK when this account was made and I don't care, I feel confident that I've been watching the great techies of our era and HN celebrities and dang and other mods presiding over it all for at least a decade.
It's probably my own media bubble bias, but I have noticed this trend where HN is discussing a given subject that the general public is not aware of, and it after years filters into the greater consciousness. I don't think HN is necessarily magically head of the curve, but I do think it concentrates where curious and possibly-open-minded people's thoughts are at, before internet-point-seeking/popularity echo chamber communities like Reddit/FB/Twitter or algorithm-driven hivemind homogenziers like YT/Reels/TikTok/Periscope all become aware of something.
HN saw the centralization of control with the SOPA/PIPA/encryption in public fight, that has been ongoing since the clipper chip and before, but in this modern form with end-users not needing PGP and friends and just getting to have e2ee with Signal, HN was talking about and using Signal for years before now our government figures and traditional + social media companies have talked about Signal.
Similarly, the broader privacy questions, turning off Google Location History was happening on HN (and XDA back when custom android ROMs were more popular) as soon as Google Reader was axed, people only now have learned to fear 'the internet' because of how many more egregious things have happened across all powerful web platforms.
And of course we can't ignore HN playing with cleverbot and that dall-e precursor who's name I forget, ML models and markov chains and tech beyond my ability to teach about, before OAI ever released a single product like ChatGPT.
HN still has heavyweights of each industry and titans of tech who pop by on occasion to grace us mere plebians, pushing back the Eternal September for just a few happy moments (looking at you BWK, Walter Bright, and other famous names I can't rattle off) to share with us what happened 'in the room'. Just the other day someone posted 'I was the guy who controlled the rollout for Apple MacOS X Snow Leopard, it was a bugfix only release no really' ... only on HN by the power of the internet do we get that, we don't get that on a TikTok. So HN has still got 'it' at least for now, and therefore I can make a broad observation.
If the HN being directionally appropriate even if getting particulars wrong is true, I'm seeing future trends that will lead us out of this populist/blackpill moment.
People will get emotionally overwhelmed/numbed to overwrought angry moments, they will want to move forward. Americans tend to be keen as a people, whatever the 'thing' is. 90s tech utopia optimism was a keen-thing. Support for or opposition to the Iraq War was a keen-thing, whatever we Americans do, we do with gusto.
So right now, we are all in on outraged doom/gloom/anxiety/this sux!! feelings.
I'm hopeful that perhaps we as a people go with a decision to move in what a figure from my current media bubble named Aaaron Renn says where there are New Constructivists, who are intellectuals on all sides of American political aisles looking to revitalize and create new institutions.
I'm fearful that we will have to fall down hard to learn our lessons first and/or learn the wrong lessons where we decide the fix to ennui is to blame 'those' people over there (whoever that happens to be). The fix to the fear and ennui won't come from us fighting with our families, community members, internet strangers, or political opponents, it will come from us choosing to change our media diets away from garbage in/garbage out (I Know, I know, you who read this and disagree with everything I say and my media diet sources want me to change my media diet, that may very well be true) that is focused on emotional inflammation (didn't we used to ban people from our forums for flaming?) instead of genuine debate and encouragement and online civility.
It's boring and its lame, but circling all the way back to the parent comment: the web used to be a homogenous unified place made up of professionals and nerds and group think. We need more diverse opinions than that, but what has happened is that the internet (and its mobile app/web/private chat mediums) has become a borderless place where people who never encounter each other have diametrically opposed views constantly, and so retreat into echochambers and don't get the media literacy experience needed to peacefully coexist with the rest of the online anglosphere without constant acrimony. Grifters feed the flames for likes/subscribes/patreon subs/etc.
No. And this shallow dismissal builds the mood you complained about.
For the first couple weeks it seemed like a mild to moderate improvement. Especially not having Elon’s tweets and the Twitter memes of the day in my head 24 hours a day.
But after a month my baseline pretty much reset with the same levels of anxiety, just with different sources/triggers to attribute those feelings to.
And after a few more months, I started to feel to absurdly detached from the real world that it started to become a problem in casual conversations and stuff just being so out of touch with everyone else’s collective experiences.
My boss referenced some big natural disaster or something that everyone knew about from the news and looked at me like I was crazy when I had no idea what he was talking about. Little awkward moments like that kept popping up, never a big deal but started to feel uncomfortable as they added up.
The tipping point was when Biden dropped out and I didn’t know about it for like three days and had to nod along when a friend mentioned it obliquely while I was internally like “uh wtf” until I had a second to Google it to get caught up.
All in all the net change in negativity/anxiety was pretty much a wash, the mind finds different ways to justify how it feels even after losing the ‘20s go-to of “doom scrolling” as the universal source of all life’s problems.
But feeling like an alien interloper posing as a resident of “America, Earth” tipped the scales into hurting more than it helped.
For better or worse we live in a highly interconnected world of immediate information delivery, there’s no quick fix to make that all go away by pretending it doesn’t exist.
I still miss a lot of the people I got to know on Twitter, and with hindsight that was probably more emotionally valuable than the negativity and addiction that came with the package (I know many/most of them have left by now too, so can’t teleport back to that point in time either). But that’s just life, it is what it is.
Rather than giving up on news entirely, in the long-run, I’ve just dropped political podcasts and opinion pieces. I think these products exist to give us the feeling of being informed, but mostly it is just speculation.
Politics matters a lot, but for most of us are just going to vote or donate. I don’t need to hear somebody’s opinion for that, and I especially don’t need to hear speculations about political events that’ll happen in the next couple days (the speculation possibilities will collapse before I do either).
> Rather than giving up on news entirely, in the long-run, I’ve just dropped political podcasts and opinion pieces. I think these products exist to give us the feeling of being informed, but mostly it is just speculation.
The idea was this would teach something. And another idea was All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom. What could someone do for months or years? Cycle outrage porn and detox. Or avoid all news. But you saw news differed and you could control your news.
I think you are right that there’s some middle ground between 0 and doomscrolling that is preferable, though.
Cutting off corporate media is good, but you don't have to cut off all sources of media. I'm a fan of alternative media myself, so I listen/read things like Citations Needed, Zeteo, American Prospect, Dropsite News, or specific journalists like Edward Ongweso Jr. One thing to remember that it's still just consuming news, consuming things are very little part of the human experience. You need to actually socialize and discuss things with other humans, it's a real need; but you can still find high quality people to follow the news, maybe this is up your speed:
https://www.slow-journalism.com/
Creating is a human urge that you need to fulfill, as is socializing; with socializing it comes in many forms, but a core component needs to in some form of mutual aid. You need to have solidarity with your fellow man for we all share the same struggles together.
The urge to create for others is a human trait founds for 100s of thousands of years before industrial usage (people created + shared art with one another before things like replicated tool usage). Don't deny your urge to create and share with others. For some it's baking, for others it's raising children; you just need to create tangible things and share them with others. You can do this digitally but it's very hard, and IMO after 10ish years of doing so, also not really rewarding compared to writing music for friends or baking deserts for family. Got way more fulfillment out of helping children set up a bake sale than any amount of open source I've done in my entire life.
Just my experience, but I know I'm not along in thinking so because I ask people about this all the time. Seems to be the simple way to live a meaningful life for very little cost.
Please find your tribe, it is out there and it may give you more meaning in your life than any form of digital consumption/creation.
> A fresh U.S. residential IP address (especially one behind carrier-grade NAT and harder to block individually) is “gold.” Customers pay up to $95 to lease a single U.S. residential IP address for 2 weeks (versus $0.30 for an Eastern European IP).
That's bananas. The place I found a link to that story was jwz's blog, a site that is actively getting hammered by one of the many Rube-Goldberg machines behind these scrapers.
I take your point wrt, say, recommendation engines. But this is a bizarre and fascinating period we're living through right now. I don't plan to stop reading blogs and news any time soon.
1: https://www.nokia.com/blog/one-year-later-the-residential-pr...
If I'm wrong give me another case that isn't a crypto scam and I'll read up on it.
The assumption I had not was false.
If you want to make the world a better place, you have to retain a headspace that actually lets you do that, and right now, the easiest fix for that is to just unplug, and then work with what you can change, which typically involves things and people around you.
I don't think you realize how ridiculous and out of touch it sounds to tell me to "disconnect" from politics to be less angry. I am extremely angry, and I will continue to let that anger fuel my choices until the vile bullshit that has infected this nation is gone.
Enlightening my ass. Tell that to the trodden upon and the dead. Reality sucks and sometimes you have to do something about it or else you're the problem. Tough shit if you don't like it.
narrator: actually, it's you who is the problem.
"I'm only happy when I'm in my misery" - Offspring
But ARE you doing anything about it? Because unless you're actually taking action it's basically just self flagellation to the benefit of no one. Like if you have some measure of power (community action, organized resistance, political lobbying) and are taking action that's great, reading articles that make you sad and angry and then going to bed isn't doing anything.
> what I was also doing - relentlessly recording and documenting their behavior and addition to protesting.
You can be 99% sure that the people currently saying that wasn't such a big deal are also saying you should not pay attention to the media because it is just about making you angry.
They say this as they've been consuming Conservative AM radio for decades, which was entirely about making up stories to make people angry.
Meanwhile the local legal immigrant community is terrified, many people have been literally kidnapped and are missing, and this idea that they would somehow be fine if they just didn't pay attention is absurd.
It's insane. These conservatives are acting like it's no big deal real harms are happening, like this is just some sort of game. My brother visited and talked about his complaints about what is happening as if it was a milquetoast yelp review of a local burger joint. Asshole doesn't care that his voting choices has literally killed hundreds for no reason.
Predictably, he's the kind of person that talks about sports teams as if he is a member. "We did so well" in reference to the bruins winning a game for example.
You can pretty safely ignore a lot of irrelevant rage bait, but by remaining ignorant to what's going on around you you also risk losing a lot of useful, actionable, information and being blindsided by things that could have been avoided.
I know that if I were corporation hurting and exploiting people for profit or a corrupt politician screwing over the public I'd be very happy to encourage people to "unplug" and stop stressing about things.
Yes.
You can't always expect to be able to fix everything yourself, but you often can take steps to help or at least protect yourself. It just depends on what's in the news. Very recently, I've started avoiding produce from Taylor Farms. Good thing I was paying attention to the news when that mess started. It was only by reading the news that I became aware of a change in how postmarks were being added by the USPS and that saved me some potential headaches.
Being informed can result in things like patching vulnerable software, withdrawing supporting a political candidate, reaching out to your representatives about issues that concern you, asking your doctor about treatments/medications/vaccines, exploring new media, changing or delaying travel plans, changing your spending habits, making adjustments to investments, etc.
What does ignorance get you?
This is very obviously not the type of situation and behavior marginalia_nu and then I were commenting about.
marginalia_nu said all news.
The coalition-of-Molochs appears to be finding it much more profitable to make everyone want to kill themselves. (Not sure if that's a great long-term strategy, but they seem to have thought this through.)