One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all.
It is really hard not to succumb to this. It requires active effort and sometimes even a willful ignorance. "turn a blind eye" is the idiom here. Monty Python's "Always look on the bright side of life" kind of thing.
Mr Rogers said it: look for the helpers. They may be few, but they are there. Find them and focus on them.
‘Fred Rogers often told this story about when he was a boy and would see scary things on the news: "My mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.' To this day, especially in times of 'disaster,' I remember my mother's words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers-so many caring people in this world."’
I think that's why historical education is so important (or just liking history as in my case), looked through the lens of history all of the current shit as bad as it is, is really nothing all that new either, the only constant is change after all.
As the aphorism goes: History may not repeat but it sure does rhyme.
If you're able to, find a random NPR broadcast from 20 to 30 years ago and marvel at how it could be replayed nearly verbatim today. "Inflation", "war in the Middle East", "Congress stalled on xyz." Even the "unprecedented" political correctness and racial reckonings in the US observed around 2020 were not uncommon in the 1970s and 1980s (see the Stanford Beethoven poster incident which also left students literally fainting and crying in hysterics).
You're absolutely correct that history helps you see that none of this is new. However, is it better to be the person who sees the waterfall their boat is inevitably going to go over, or the person completely ignorant of it until it happens?
On the contrary: we've fall off waterfalls every few decades or so. Humanity simply survives and moves on, taking maybe 2% more caution for the next waterfalll
> However, is it better to be the person who sees the waterfall their boat is inevitably going to go over, or the person completely ignorant of it until it happens?
Neither, it's better to be the person who realizes we're in for a bright future no matter what doomers think.
But this is. This sort of violent partisanship that self ensconces around identity versus issues is exactly what tears apart democracies and republics.
Message unclear. You're saying the USA is an old hand at civil wars now and could do another one any time, no problem? Or perhaps I shouldn't look for a message.
This isn't new either. The tools and technology are new. The strategies and psychologies aren't.
Even the identity part isn't new; even among Caucasian males only, see how many times society's woes will be blamed on whatever convinient immigrant there is in that period.
And I think history provides some prophylactic counterbalance to the cynical narrative. To hear some people talk, people are inherently evil, and the US has been a downhill project to oppress since the days of the founding.
History shows that things can and do improve when people try. The overall trajectory has been positive, even if bumpy.
I've heard it described as a growing but fluctuating graph (think something like a logarithmic graph, with some noise added in). Progress is positive overall, but there are times of radical progress and decline. And people will feel both aspects.
We're definitely in a decline as of now, where we arguably had progress from 80 to 50 years ago.
> One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all.
It's even sadder when one realizes the world was always that way. The author more-or-less says as much, though they seem to suggest it is amplified. I'm not entirely sure the part about it being more amplified today true. Most of the ills mentioned existed when I was a youth, it simply took different forms and (of course) was spread by means other than the Internet. There never was a chance to get ahead because the cards were always stacked against us.
> One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all.
> It is really hard not to succumb to this. It requires active effort and sometimes even a willful ignorance.
I feel this very strongly over the past couple of years. As always, hackernews is full of extremely smart, well read people so I'd really appreciate any good reading material on this so I can better understand it. Tips are appreciated as well (healthy diet and regular exercise, good extended blood labs (think like Function health), good consistent sleeep habits).
I'm not sure why we're talking about cynicism all of a sudden. I hope it's not because we're framing this blogger's recognition of existing cynicism, as constituting cynicism in and of itself. Because if so, I would have to disagree, just as I would disagree that talking about racism makes one racist for example.
People sometimes get mad at this, like it’s callous or privileged, but what’s the difference between focusing on problems you can’t help and slowing down to stare at a car wreck?
Thanks for commenting and acknowledging that it's challenging. My mates and myself have definitely fallen into this. Reminds me of that hackernews post about how doomerism is a siren's song for genZ, forget where it is.
The last thing my father said to me before he passed was to keep people looking forward to the future.
It's easy to romanticize the past and it can seem intellectually sophisticated to despair about the future, when in fact the overwhelming evidence is that things have gotten much much better for nearly everyone on just about any objective axis you can pick.
I think this growth in cynicism really depends on where people start from. A lot of people were taught and reinforced a inaccurate model of the world.
When confronted with reality, it can't stand up and the individuals become angry and disengage rather than working with the system as it is.
I know this is painting with a broad brush but I see it basically everywhere I look. One example would be the expectation of a benevolent Authority that manages political and social life. Reality is that it is just messy humans all the way down.
Some people assume that from the beginning and can work with it. Other people just break down with frustration and broken expectations.
I (self-servingly) don't think that cynicism is bad, nor that it would be a good idea to pathologize what is simply a healthy defense to a hostile reality.
It depends on how you wield it.
Cynicism shouldn't cloud your judgement. That's the actually correct point you wanted to make, I think.
I try not to think in black/white, good/evil kinds of terms. I think of forces and dynamic systems.
There appears to be some force that promotes one particular way of thinking, perhaps the inevitable consequence of accumulated experiences. In the case of cynicism, the balance tends to shift towards one side of a scale over time.
Without a countervailing force on the other side it can tip a normally balanced system out of stable equilibrium.
My point is explicitly: the world provides the force in one direction, and the individual must provide the force in the other.
I tend to agree. The quote "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society" embodies it well.
I don't think cynicism is the correct approach though. It's possible to accept that circumstances are unhealthy without internalizing general negativity. It's just hard. I suspect you and I, and OP, are all agreeing with each other on this point.
It doesn't help that the clinical meaning and the colloquial meaning of the word are different, with the latter being used by people to hit you over the head with, pretending that it would be the former.
There's Diogenes, the original cynic with a dog's lifestyle, and there's the Diogenes Club in Sherlock Holmes. In this classical context it's about being unconventional and challenging (challengingly silent, even). You can say "that's just skepticism" but it comes with a certain sulky refusenik flavor, and yet it's defensible as a form of individualism, and presumably positive, at least because it's one form of diversity and critical thought.
> People increasingly behave like addicts because addiction is the business model.
I sense my internet addiction got a lot worse in recent years. I don’t use social media, but I consume news, blogs and newsletters - and comment threads - voraciously.
I think the addiction began as soon as I started to work at a desk behind a computer which had internet access - 20+ years ago. Like putting an alcoholic to work behind a bar and thinking he’d restrain himself.
It seems to have worsened in recent years. I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.
If you're interested in what helped me overcome the worst aspects of my internet addiction, I learned to reframe it.
I wasn't overcome with addiction, but I was CHOOSING to take a break. There are good reasons to read the news, there are good reasons to take breaks. End the war against yourself and take more wholesome breaks, so your subconscious doesn't take over and force them. It may involve forcing yourself to be more realistic about what you can do in a given time period, but that's a good thing ultimately.
I know it sounds like a minor change but the whole game is putting your life back in your own control. When you find yourself binging, say "I am choosing to do this," even if you don't immediately log off. Just observe your own choices as a first step.
Another tip: when you're craving a hit of the internet, ask yourself "can I wait 5 minutes before checking my phone?" If you can't, no big deal. But if you do this enough time you build up the self discipline muscle.
Forcing a short delay is such a powerful technique.
I use this when I'm at risk of binging a show. If I'm tempted to let Netflix continue into the next episode, I say "ok maybe, but let's get up and do something else for a few minutes first and see if I still want to" and before I know it I'm building a robot instead.
This is something I've been working on a lot myself. It's so easy to wind up sliding into the familiar patterns and routines, and reaching for the phone. I'm finding that discipline is less about resisting it and more about redirecting it to something more productive
Not bad, but leaves out crucial steps?
"I chose to do this" puts the blame at your own feet without telling you how to deal with it constructively. That can lead to learned helplessness.
Contemplation has the goal of a reassessment of evaluation. The choice needs to be re-evaluated as inferior to better alternatives.
Those need to be explicitly identified. In order to do this, you need to know what led to your choice emotionally.
The other side of the coin is the intentional design of many internet sites to exploit human psychology. News for example are "infotainment", "fear-porn" and "rage-bait", etc. by design and override many "self-discipline" mechanisms.
The internet isolates people while feeding them a simulacra of social interaction without actual social functionality. Objective truth in particular isn't reliably established by "watching the news", that's merely top-down conditioning by whoever owns your "news". Finding objective truth is an active process, not a passive event.
Focusing on how other people designed it might be good to generate momentum for political activism purposes but it's not good for your own personal self improvement. And if you're getting mad about the world and not doing a significant amount of real world activism, you're getting the worst of both worlds, not helping yourself or anyone else.
I think the best attitude is "Yes, the world could be improved, but all I can do right now is improve myself." There's a raft of evidence (and not just my firsthand anecdotal experience) that shows taking ownership yields far better life outcomes.
The risk for learned helplessness is far greater if you don't even acknowledge the control you have over it. True, someone reading my comment might not go "all the way" in fixing their problems and get stuck blaming themselves, but there's only so much I can do with an internet comment. I recommend therapy too to save you from those sorts of blind alleys.
Thanks - useful to think about as I try and wean myself off the novel information highs. I’ve been consciously aware of the problematic aspect of my behavior since about the pandemic - but struggle to make much change.
The most dangerous part of this addiction is that it doesn't feel like addiction. Suppose we spend 4 hours in an afternoon consuming random content - starting somewhere on a Google search, landing on Wikipedia, end up reading dozens of articles on various topics in that 4 hours. Unlike alcohol or drugs, this is knowledge addiction - afterall, we learned about a bunch of things in those 4 hours, didn't we? We didn't spend any money (well, other than the laptop, electricity and internet bills), we didn't harass anyone (like alcoholics sometimes do) etc. Heck, we didn't even "waste" time like we think we do, when we play video games. So it feels somewhat better.
But, all that we learned in those 4 hours - is it really that useful? Some of it might be, lets say an hour of it. What about the other three? That could have been spent on something healthier - having fun with friends, play sports, or even just sleeping!
I understand the irony of typing this, but I too am in the same boat - consuming things voraciously, most of which is just useless knowledge, at the cost of relationships, health etc.
It's all about balance. Learning about various stuff from well written articles and Wikipedia for one hour is good. Doing the same thing for the whole weekend isn't.
Even reading books all the time to the detriment of other activities isn't good.
What's good is doing a bit of everything. Reading a book an hour before sleep, doing a hour of exercise two to three times a week. Reading a few blog articles, wikipedia, long and well researched magazine articles. Making time for in person social interactions. Playing games, video games, board games, card games from time to time. Engaging in a few online discussions every week. Etc
It's all about balance or at least that's the way I see it.
> The most dangerous part of this addiction is that it doesn't feel like addiction.
I've started framing addiction as something that we feel compelled to do even when we know it has a detrimental effect on more important aspects of our life. In that respect, yes, it does feel like an addiction.
> Unlike alcohol or drugs, this is knowledge addiction - afterall, we learned about a bunch of things in those 4 hours, didn't we?
Did we learn anything? If we aren't using that knowledge, even in casual conversation, chances are that retention is very low. I'm not even talking about useful learning here, since it is pleasurable to learn something for its own sake. I'm talking about the stickiness.
Another way to think of it is: are we even interested in learning? I have downloaded the entire Wikipedia to my computer, along with Project Gutenberg, as well as various technical documentation. (Kiwix is wonderful.) On top of that I have enough books (digital and physical) to last a lifetime. I have a multitude of resources that I can tap into without touching the Internet, and accessing it is all very low resistance (e.g. I don't have to get off my ass to go to the library). So why do I even have home Internet access? Communicating with people certainly doesn't require a high speed connection.
For the purposes of apocalyptic fiction, I wonder what the overlap is between people who have an offline copy of Wikipedia and people who have only casual security or no password. I can imagine a survivor hunting around for it for a very long time.
Piggybacking onto your post to sort of expand this. I feel like there are a few views of what those 4 hours can encompass on the internet. My view is that reels/shorts << rage gaming <<< background noise-tier youtube << social/healthy gaming <= information binging. My problem is most reddit or twitter-esque sites make it easy to fall on the side of rage consumption, without constant self enforcement.
Now I don't think that most knowledge is really that useful in general, maybe 1% of 4 hour binges have any real consequences. But occasionally it really does turn out to be very useful. I spent maybe 4-5 hours reading and watching videos about window air conditioners, having known basically nothing but the terrible shaky units from my childhood. After that period of research time, I bought two new replacements, saved $80 with National Grid rebates, and reduced my summer monthly kwh consumption by 200-250. It also led me to information about heat pump systems which I will consider in a future house purchase, and additionally more information which led me to avoid purchasing cheap peltier dehumidifiers for one with a compressor.
I guess my point is, it can definitely be worse. You can at least point to an Ortega hypothesis-like effect of learning a bunch of random stuff. But I agree that even just going on a walk and doing literally nothing feels way, way better than spending that time online. The balance is so heavily tilted towards internet addiction that I expect that having multiple "real" offline hobbies will increasingly be seen as green flags. In my experience, "bookworm" has not been a pejorative in a long time. stackbutterflow's comment about balance seems like the most sensible way to approach timespend in this sense, though. /rant
I've recently spent a night or two with near insomnia going down a performance / security rabbit hole in open source .NET libraries.
It feels useful, it feels important. But it's not, it's just addictive behaviour, because "you found a way to make <library> 5% faster / 5% fewer allocations" is a dopamine hit that feeds back into wanting to prod some more.
It feels like I'm learning an absolute ton about high performance .NET and the kinds of crazy things that maintainers need to consider when taking in untrusted input.
But it's the equivalent of empty calories. The maintainers don't really want to know, and I'm not really learning anything actually useful. It's not actually enlightening work, it's just keeping myself busy while helping feed maintainers a maintenance headache.
The security angle is also horrifying in a different way, it puts me off wanting to put anything near the internet. I used to think the concept of "net crash" and an internet abandoned to "rogue AIs" in cyberpunk was entertaining fiction.
While I don't think the network itself will host those rogue AIs, I do worry that there'll simply be a critical mass of bad actors armed with AI that will render the net effectively inoperable.
Well, it depends. If it's not at the cost of relationship, sports and other important things, is it really an addiction? It can often be just a hobby like everything else.
It's not learning unless you put it into practice. 4 hours of woodworking videos is nothing for you unless you get to work.
I've been watching framing videos for weeks feeling like I'm being less unproductive than if I were playing video games. But at a certain point it's just as bad. Not a single nail driven.
That’s a good point. Internet addiction didn’t have a name, or a stigma, in the way alcohol or other drugs did so in a sense I had no idea that the slide I was on was harmful. It also felt a lot like what I did a lot of at university - library research.
Internet addiction in the early millennium wasn't so destructive, because so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people. You could meet cool new people (even occasionally IRL friends) from forums and blogs, and they were a hub for discussion for real-life communities like music-band fandom or travel subcultures.
Besides the deleterious nature of engagement-maximizing social media today, I think another aspect of the problem is that there is less connection to real-life socializing simply because that has collapsed in so many countries.
This is a big part of it for me. The old Internet was full of individuals sharing deep passion--whether on a personal website or on a forum. There was a sense of connecting to another human being.
This is the only forum-style site I regularly interact with, and I must admit that I rarely try to remember another username here. The effect is that I interact with ideas, not people. And there is some deep connection between behaviors I might label as addiction and a felt sense of isolation.
The internet is still full of individuals sharing deep passion for all sorts of things, but only within the walls of invite-only communities you have to go out of your way to find (Discord servers, private forums) and/or make a financial commitment towards (Patreon).
Or at least it was, before LLM "enthusiasts" started leaking into these otherwise hermetic communities and overrunning formerly safe spaces with mass-produced low-effort content nobody wants to see, particularly when anyone else could prompt the exact same thing into existence.
For me the difference today is that most people sharing their passions are now doing for The Algorithm. It's a far cry from the scrappy days of the early web where people just posted stuff because they thought it was cool. I'm not saying their passion is any less, more just that is so much noise. People are now "creators" and are pressured to constantly create.
Why do you assume a hobby or interest still has a significant presence on the non-algorithmified open web?
For travel-related hobbies, for instance, there is no longer any kind of significant open-web scene where people just share stuff to help others or because it is cool. (Yes, you can set up your own blog, but pretty much none of your peers will ever see it.) The community might be using a variety of apps beyond your "like 5 websites", but all those apps are designed around phones and minimize text content, and so they are just as pathological as "sites with 'creators'".
Ha, yes I wanted to keep my comment short without trying to cover every base, but figured I might get this comment. Of course such sites still exist, but still a different phenomena when that was the entire internet. There are a lot of interesting people who run YouTube channels that be so cool to see a GeoCities-type site from, for example.
Even 25 years ago being “too online” - back then it was icq, livejournal, and forums - was already destructive as hell and always led to some pretty cringe outcomes. At least these days some people make a career out of it, back then it was purely negative
It wasn't purely negative for everyone. I still maintain ties with several people I hung out with on an IRC channel in the 2000s, and a couple of fellow heavy commenters on one blog in the same decade. Granted, this was aided by the fact that we were all in Europe and all traveled regularly, so we could do the IRL interaction that solidifies friendships.
Today, if one is heavily online, many platforms no longer offer a space where one can tell a fellow user, "I'll be in your town soon, let's meet up", or even if it does, the general culture has changed away from that.
Discord servers skew towards a very young demographic. One of the striking things about the early-millennium blog scene was how much quality long-form-text interaction it facilitated among relatively older people: the average age around a lot of blogs on topics like the arts or literature was like 40 or 50.
I think for people that age now, the internet is a much lonelier place.
> Internet addiction in the early millennium wasn't so destructive, because so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people. You could meet cool new people (even occasionally IRL friends) from forums and blogs
My experience has been the opposite. The people I knew who got seriously addicted to the internet a couple decades ago were mostly not thriving online among cool other people. They were getting dragged down into swirling cesspools of the time.
4chan has been around for over 20 years. A lot of the gaming communities and forums were toxic and brutal back then. There were social news sites, content mills, and personality cults back then too.
I think there’s some glorification of the past that happens in these threads. The old internet was full of toxic and addictive things, too. It was just less common to be immerse in it because you had to go to a physical computer and, if you go back far enough, dial up and occupy the house phone line. There were natural limits to how exposed most people would get.
Sorry, but teenage me, growing up late 90s, wildly disagrees with this statement.
It's always been addictive and destructive. I was staying up past 3am to talk to my American friends, knowing I'd have to get up at 7am to get to school.
Painting the past with such a rose brush does not help anyone.
My first date was a guy with fake photos. Ten dates later I settled for a married guy cheating on his wife. He eventually divorced but then I left him.
Yep... back then, the internet was a way people would discuss and organize their real world interests and activities, like clubs and usergroups would organize their next meeting... and then meet, off the internet.
Now, it's all just online drivel that never turns into anything else.
I use the Internet about how I used to 30 years ago.
I chat with friends. Sometimes, I make a new friend or lose track of one. On rare occasion we get together to do whatever it is that we have a common interest in. That used to be IRC.
I learn new shit by interacting with people I don't know at all. Sometimes, that means hanging out in much more anonymous places (like HN) and sharing ideas. That used to be Usenet.
I learn other stuff by Googling things and otherwise conducting research. That used to be AltaVista; nowadays, it's often an LLM.
How do you make new IRL friends now in 2026? Where are you hanging out online where there is a culture of people not only revealing their location and age (which platforms and individual internet users have become more guarded about), but even meeting up with other users?
Not OP, and I will assume you ask about making irl friends online: niche multiplayer videogames always were the best way to make irl friends. I still have a few friends from a web game where you had to coordinate 5-10 people for ~1h a day (and enemies could counter if they chose to connect around the same time) that I played from 2004 to 2013 (with breaks in between). Later it has mostly Hoi4 and civ6 (which are now less niche, but the mp communities used to be extremely niche before ~2020) (civ6 still is). I have a friend who I've met through another because they played on a SWTOR roleplay server together. Also, now that I remember, a friend of mine turned 40 a year ago, and I was surprised of the younger friends (less than 30) he made. They told me they met through WoW classic, managed to find out they lived close from each other, and decided to hang out/play RPGs (pen and paper) together.
That's still not answering my question. Where do you make those "far away IRL friends"? Most commercial platforms today discourage (because it is bad for engagement) users from building close ties with individual other users even if said users are willing to let their guard down. The user base of open and easily findable non-commercial platforms has collapsed. Your posts are dangling some kind of 2026 Shangri-La before HN readers, and you can understand my skepticism.
You have seriously made contacts on Reddit or HN that have led to meeting people IRL when you visit their regions or they visit yours? Even way back when IRL meetups between users of internet forums were common, Reddit was already famous for having a culture where that wasn't at all likely due to the design of the site.
As for HN, there is no DM feature and only a minority of users give any contact info in their profiles. In over a decade here, I have never seen one user passing contact info to another user in public.
Of course I have. I've flown and driven many thousands of miles to hang out with some of these folks. We've even planned and executed public events together. We help eachother out. When the distance is great and we want to borrow, lend, or trade some small stuff, we spend a few dollars and send it in the mail.
It'd be pretty great if we all lived closer, but we do not. We've all got our reasons to live wherever we individually live.
I've also made other, more-temporary friendships online in recent years. When they're nearby it's actually pretty easy, upon recognizing that things click well-enough, to go out for drinks with other friends, or sushi, or whatever. It isn't necessary to commit to keeping a friend forever in order to make these minor moves and put a face with their words and just hang out for a bit.
For HN in particular, there are ways to initiate out-of-band comms. It's not exactly rocket surgery to just drop an email address (a throwaway one? a real one? sure!) here in a comment, or leave a clue in a bio, or even to do both things to validate who's who and connect.
It works for me, and I'm somewhat private about what I share here. Meanwhile, some users here are very public about who they are and don't hide behind a pseudonym at all. It's OK. Both types fit.
There's nothing that would motivate me to lie about this stuff. I do not stand to gain or to lose anything whether you believe me or not. :)
One of the things I liked about my Windows phone, was the relative lack of apps made it very hard to fall into addiction 'traps'.
On the flip side, my partner has fallen deep into the cesspit, either seeing her doom-scrolling through Facebook for hours, or the way she talks about all the things she saw on there despite not handling any of the things that she said she would get done that day (FWIW... My partner does not work at this time, she quit her job under the auspices of taking care of the house. Has not gone well. I guess at least she stopped playing cow-clicker games on her phone...)
If I will give my first 'real job' some credit for anything around their Blocking policies, they had extremely strict blocks around anything that could be 'personal use' and had very alarming warnings pop up if you happened to hit one of the blocks. (To the point where even doing legitimate work research I more than once freaked out and went right to my manager and the IT managers explaining my case and what I was doing.)
But it's also part of why the open office / panopticon layout has become more popular; It provides at least some vague threat to somewhat lower the risk folks get sucked into their phones out of view...
Pandemic really ramped it up. Also screen addiction has gone mainstream. In front of a screen 12+ hours a day 20 years ago? Total nerd. Now? Standard behavior.
It's so weird. I used to consider myself a fringe internet addict in the 2000s but now everyone is like me.
Like many of you, I deal with stuff like depression, anxiety, ADHD. Back in the 2000s it felt like I was the only weirdo out there. Now I cringe writing that out because it feels like everyone is like that now.
I think people under 25 probably don't even know how absolutely uncool it was to tell people you stayed at home in front of a computer on weekends or after school.
Absolute pariah behavior on the scale of coolness. But now ? Totally normal.
I started to notice a shift in how the recommendation algorithms worked probably around 2018-2019 and then the pandemic just took it to nuclear levels against the entire population
> I think the addiction began as soon as I started to work at a desk behind a computer which had internet access
Interestingly, my digital consumption for idle entertainment dropped when I started working full time. I didn’t want to be in front of a screen when work was done.
My screen exposure for fun is primarily this site (where I spend too much time), and games where my friends and I treat the time as a multi-way group call with long distance friends.
I do know a lot of people who followed the exact course you describe: They watch screens at work and had periods where it was okay to spend a lot of time on social media or social news sites (Hacker News, Reddit, Slashdot, Digg, depending on the era). Checking those sites all day long became a habit for them and filled all idle time. Whenever they felt uncomfortable or bored, visiting a site would fix it.
Some of them broke out of it when they switched to workplaces where it wasn’t acceptable to do non-work things during the day. This is almost inconceivable for a lot of tech workers who have had a lot of freedom to date, but it’s normal in some industries. As an example, I have friends who work in areas where security concerns are so high that they check their phones into lockers before entering their work areas. Others worked at companies who did over-reaching analysis of computer use. Many just moved to companies with packed open office spaces where it would be obvious to everyone around if you were on Reddit or looking at your phone instead of the computer for an excessive amount all day.
What is interesting is that this seems to induce a split: Some people get broken of their Internet use habits this way and continue not using those sites outside of work. Others seem to have a rebound where they leave work and start gorging on Reddit or TikTok or their other preferred sites.
> I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.
Since the industry stops for noone (and you kinda have to keep learning in software dev) and due to the state of the economy it feels like one big rat race to me, I don't foresee that sort of outcome for myself.
I can easily imagine how lazing in the sun in Italy or someplace like that (if the hot summers nowadays don't fuck that up), going swimming and eating healthy food with not a care in the world would surely help one get rid of the dopamine addiction, getting there being the hard part.
The fast paced modern lifestyle and being always online can feel a tad anxiety inducing and unnatural.
> and you kinda have to keep learning in software dev
It's less the constant need to keep learning that bothers me (my formal credentials involve a requirement to undertake a minimum of 30 hours of continuing education annually) than it is that the industry has focused on vendor-specific implementations of various concepts.
I've built a lot of control planes like Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry (and its accompanying BOSH) over my career as a system administrator, but hiring managers and staff engineers these days specifically want Kubernetes experience.
Likewise, I've built a lot of control planes like what backs AWS's EC2 (including multi-tenant accounting and quotas and MAC/RBAC!), but hiring managers and staff engineers specifically want production experience with EC2 (and, seemingly, the broader AWS ecosystem, which is nonetheless approachable for someone who has production distributed systems experience).
At my most tinfoil hat, I want to say that this is blatantly in the interest of setting up a consulting industry around these vendor solutions, and it creates something of a monopsony situation for someone with my skillset.
My formal credentials are as an actuary, so I can at least go back to pursuing claim severity modeling and pricing out when something has a hiccup as a primary responsibility, but this focus is almost certainly a deskilling move otherwise.
> Like putting an alcoholic to work behind a bar and thinking he’d restrain himself.
I've been thinking about this recently. The tools we use as desk workers are only ever one step away from endless streams of addictive content. And in many cases the software we use to do our jobs are adopting dark patterns similar to those which have been successful in consumer apps.
Often the advice is to opt out of the system. I make mobile apps, I can't simply drop out and use a dumb phone (unless I get a new career). My workplace is essentially inside the addictive environment. I have to keep my knowledge up to date and be on top of app/design trends to be successful in my job. This used to feel rewarding to me, but increasingly it doesn't.
I used to be able to go to Twitter and read+learn+be inspired a lot about web development for example, but now it's almost entirely short form video content. And I fall for it every time. And I actively tried to avoid this from happening, I barely use YouTube and I've never used TikTok.
My Dad was a carpenter and it's as if his day-to-day tools were cigarettes or something. It's hard/impossible to avoid this environment when we are increasingly working in it.
Im with you!
The most times Im late for "some things on a project" at work is, because, I wasted time reading through dozens of feeds/news/comments on "too many" days so I got somehow a "delay" ;-)
Esp. comments: Actually, I ready mostly those because usually they have more information or context etc.than the article itself. (BTW: thats the reason why Im here on HN :-)
Exactly. Whether hn is a social platform is a hot topic for some, but in terms of addictiveness it's on the same level as reddit. And there's no algorithm and sub categories.
But every day there's basically the same type of threads, with the same predictable discussions and you know just by the title and the amount of comments on a thread that you'll get you dose of dopamine whether you're pro or anti any topic that is regularly discussed.
> I don’t use social media, but I consume news, blogs and newsletters - and comment threads - voraciously.
> It seems to have worsened in recent years. I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.
That's just anxiety from worsening politics, don't you think? Getting out of that anxiety may just be a matter of recognizing that just because bad stuff's happening in certain places that may eventually have repercussions in your own individual life, it doesn't mean that it's going to affect you that bad. It's like someone jumping in the pool. The waves will dissipate by the time they reach you. You can ignore them and just pay attention to the water in your personal space.
Just focus on putting your phone in a draw for as long as you can, leave a stopwatch on it running so you can see how long you have left it - it will be short to start with but with practice you’ll regain the ability to live without consuming information.
>Just focus on putting your phone in a draw for as long as you can,
I've had a smartphone since the iPhone 4, I think. And while I find it useful, I honestly don't understand how anyone can be addicted to it. Mostly stays in my pocket. If I need navigation, it's out in the car while I find the address. I use it for instant messaging for my wife and kids (rarely the phone call anymore... don't know the last time I answered a call, it's all robot scammers and telemarketers).
The screen's not big enough to read anything, not large enough to watch anything. The sorts of games I enjoyed as a kid just aren't available. Sometimes I'll have an ebook on it, that's ok (it's nearly as big as a paperback used to be), but remembering to load one onto my phone before I got somewhere I'll be waiting doesn't always work out.
I can spend hours online, if I'm not careful. At home, in front of the big monitor. How does anyone get addicted on a tiny little phone screen, with dumbed down apps? I can't even look at pages on Firefox on the phone, without adblock it's just abysmal.
The web changed too, early 2000s was a balanced between real world, old media and web trying to exist, then it swallowed more, and many old things had to migrate or imitate. Now the world is all streamed, always on..
Huh mines been the opposite; I use the internet less and less the last few years.
Difference maybe is during covid I got rid if my TV and got into guitar. I also deleted Twitter and Facebook in the early 2010s. Never fostered a sense of ownership over an account.
Not having the "work laptop to TV" pattern created a need to fill time otherwise. Cooking skills have greatly improved. Home improvements are getting done much cheaper without labor costs.
Sign ups and paywalls everywhere when I do take a minute to surf the web help. Anything that wants me to sign up is ignored.
Further reinforcement during these windows of surfing comes from not being wrapped up in thought-less rush to join in. Just browsing makes the banal content stand out.
>I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.
Having income and even better, time, to take out of the current workforce cog would do wonders. Sadly, we're in an employer's market and non-internet activities are only getting more expensive.
Ideally, you'd have some getaway with family and/or friends to enjoy the beauty of the world we're in. That's the best antidote to such digital addiction. But I'm sadly been spending all my time trying to get back on the hamster wheel with the job search.
Do you ever wonder, if you were born in a different era, like 1901, and still had the base drives behind this addiction, how would it channel itself? Like what would you replace the internet with in those days
Nice article by Stephen Diehl - I really liked his latest on crypto.
I noticed that in certain sections there seems to be a heavy use of LLM-assisted writing, such as this one:
> The platforms did not invent fear, greed, loneliness, or status anxiety. They industrialised their extraction. Their recommendation systems are vast reinforcement-learning loops that continuously experiment on human weakness. Each objective is a moving composite of high-dimensional signals for attention, retention, and conversion, dispersed across models, metrics, tests, and feedback systems. The subject cannot see the experiment. The operator cannot fully explain it. The regulator can barely comprehend it. The loop knows only that one stimulus keeps a person scrolling while another lets them leave. Calm accuracy loses. Threat, transgression, humiliation, and impossible promises win. The resulting social damage appears nowhere in the objective function. It arrives as an externality.
Not sure what you think of it.
In my view, his ideas are nice and interesting, and I would rather read less verbose, less "perfect" blog posts, and reduce or remove the use of LLMs.
Same. Every time I see LLM has contributed to the work I feel it greatly dilutes it. I'll push through if the topic is important and there's good points. But e.g. on YT, a sloppy script that barely stands on its own becomes a hard no on the very first "it's not X, it's Y".
The thing is, the "old" internet is still out there. No one is stopping you from writing a futile blog (as I do.) Or using YouTube only for instruction for tasks around the house. Or learn about any topic imaginable. It's just that the bigger ecosystems have followed their incentives to their logical conclusion (hyper-addictive content to maximize earnings from ad sales.) Any new, "for the people" platform is going to face overwhelming pressure at some point to morph into the platforms we have today. It's just too profitable.
100% agree. Only thing is, as the last few years have shown, if you don't jump into the cesspit but a majority of your fellow humans do, it affects you anyway.
we also need time, energy. and care to make and tend to our own gardens. I see more and more people even with jobs try to go into various hustles just to make ends meet. Let alone those who aren't in work and pushed into NEET-dom.
This also seems to be spilling into the real world. Because of this internet addiction, it’s almost guaranteed that everyone has a relatively expensive computer in their pocket. This has turned into an increasing number of real-world scams, as well as supporting trafficking networks for stealing phones. The scams range from old school pickpocketers to sympathy schemes to full out phone-related accusations – anything to get you to take your phone out of your pocket, potentially unlock it, and have someone swipe it.
If it’s unlocked, they may do some further scams from what’s available on the device, but either way, within days, your phone is somewhere in Asia, disassembled, and sold for scrap and parts.
After reddit prevented browsing old.reddit.com without signing in, I got a lot more active on lemmy. There's some amount of old internet feeling there, you don't get exhausted by the amount of material and it's not overrun by corporations. So far it's been nice.
What killed Reddit wasn't just its corporate chase for profit. It was also the fact that the general public's default internet device shifted to the smartphone and its limited keyboard and screen, no longer the computer. That led to comments largely being reduced to 140-character quips, no longer substantial discussion.
I am skeptical any non-corporate replacement like Lemmy can bring the old internet feeling back, because even on those alternative platforms, you just won't get many people using computers again.
It also was because it became a target to influence and manipulate people both by every day scammers and marketers as well as nation state level actors.
Sure, but that didn't hit a lot of small hobby subreddits until recently. But the discussion culture there had already declined starting a decade ago, and it was ordinary subreddit denizens and their phones to blame, not bots or geopolitical intrigues.
Every platform with votes does that. Including HN. A community's feeling is largely determined by its sorting algorithm, and voting selects for engagement/ragebait. Chronological is more balanced, but you have to prevent spam because it also doesn't punish spam. You could make it difficult to get an account, but we're all used to moderators abusing the power now, so that leads to self censorship. You could retry the Something Awful way where you let people have unlimited accounts but they have to pay $10 each time, heh.
I follow reddit through RSS, at least that still works but probably that would be the final nail in the coffin for me. There are some really good subs out there and there is no replacements of those on the open internet. Maybe on Discord but I don't really like to use to that for anything else besides voice chat.
In a previous generation, people would detect those technological snake oil sellers , call them out , even chase them. Because they could tell scammers from non-scammers.
Now we have already 2-3 generations raised to consider scam practices to be the norm , and even to celebrate behavioral tricks and audience maximizing optimization at any cost (clickbait!).
I cannot be convinced this is a normal thing. Over time, things revert to normal, but often in an explosive way.
"There's a sucker born every minute" is a saying for a reason. It's a damn shame, but these things exist and happen because they work to a non-trivial degree. There are two forms of capitalism: in service to your fellow man (solving a problem/fulfilling a need) or in opposition (arbitraging naivety and ignorance). There are customers for both and always will be [1].
This so exaggerated. If you think some of the people you know are assholes, that's fine. If you think all of them are assholes, you are either choosing the wrong places to be, or (more likely) the problem is with you.
It's written in a hyperbolic way, but I don't think your characterization is right. The author isn't saying everyone is an asshole, he's saying the systemic forces are mostly aligned in a predatory direction, and that part is absolutely true. I have a good time on Instagram despite the ways the platform is structured.
Good point on the systemic forces. Yet I feel your second point falls broadly in with what I meant with "choosing the right places". E.g., I also use YouTube, but don't watch shorts, avoid clickbait, ragebait, etc, and filter ads. That makes the place OK for me. But as you say, it's then ok despite the structure of the platform.
"Online" is not one place. And what the author is complaining about is not happening in the places I spend 99% of my online time on.
That's just the saying as I know it. Regarding the post it would be along the lines of "if you think everyone is a predator/grifter/scammer, it may be a problem with you or the places you roam"
I don't think everyone is an asshole exactly but something is wrong with more and more people and you see it everything from how people drive to the degree to which so many things seem more adversarial or feel like part time jobs.
1. If everyone you know is an asshole about some particular thing, then you're probably the asshole. Think politics or design.
2. Everybody is an asshole some of the time for some reason. Because the internet connects and exposes us to so many people that even if someone only acts like an asshole very rarely said connectivity and algorithm boosting ensures you get exposed to it.
The internet is the people using it, if many of its users have come up with more effective ways to exploit the rest than the internet has become a worse place.
The internet is an ecosystem just like any other one on earth. Being it's a pretty new one the typical parasites and viruses that grow in every environment hadn't really developed to fill that ecosystem in the first decade or two of it. Now we are reaching the cambrian explosion of bullshit that the human animal isn't innoculated against.
So yea, the internet is a worse place, but really because the early internet wasn't realistically behaved for the amount of free energy it left around.
You know, we could just put those people in jail if we wanted to. At least when they're traceable - like everyone who uses a phone number or an IP address. They actually do this in Europe,.as a result there aren't many spam calls originating from European numbers.
Internet deserves some blame too, when you have 8 billion people, but only 4 billion addresses, you are naturally going to end up with a lot of centralized services to work around those limits.
You’re right but it’s a point I’ve tried to make for years to no avail.
The V4 limit is one thing that does this. The other is DNS, which is inherently hierarchical because it’s a tree. The whole structure of the net and the web promotes the emergence of aggregation points, which then amass insane amounts of largely unearned power and influence through sheer network effect.
“The medium is the message” is a much deeper statement than people think. The structure of the medium and the sympathetic structures it encourages to form around it are the message. IPv4 with NAT and DNS with its real estate model directly encourage the formation of aggregators and siloes and that’s where it starts.
People don’t get it. I’ve given up trying to explain. Systems thinking isn’t as titillating as conspiracism, doomerism, or misanthropic cynicism I guess.
Does not seem convincing to me so far and i like systems thinking. Do you have a link, where you wrote more?
I think a fundamental problem is that micropayments don’t work. Instead we pay with attention, i.e. by watching ads. That already worked before the internet, in tv and radio and newspapers.
People should know more about data fusion. How browser javascript fingerprints and unique personal id of the adtech works. Hint it traveres VPNs. The seven has an id of you
So I think there is an oversight in this essay, and it's that society becoming predatory is much bigger than the Internet: it is the story of the decay of America, reflected and exacerbated by the internet, as it becomes a anti-democratic huckster society dominated by grifters, theocrats, and snake-oil sellers.
Forget the internet, you can't get your home repaired, your car worked on, an appliance purchased, shop for food, or do anything else without wading through a corrupt morass of that mixes woo, subcultures, grift, and subscriptions. Maybe it's the hospital that wants to charge a $25 a day fee to make the hospital room TV grant access to basic cable channels instead of nothing. Maybe it's the elementary school district that mandates every physical interaction between students is called in to the police - like little Jenny shoved Johnny who skinned his knee because he teased her, call the cops, it's policy. Or the way that every customer service interaction is routed through endless AIs because it's cheaper than solving a problem. Or how it seems like nobody will do right by anyone else until lawyers get involved. Cut taxes year after year, while everything decays, we fail the younger generations, and everyone thinks you fake it till you make it because it's all zero sum... It's how America heads straight to banana republic, and it might be too late to turn.
The predatory cesspit has always been there. It just moves every few decades. That moving process always looks like what the author outlined here.
New technology emerges. It's first few years are innocent. Then, someone discovers how to con people at scale with it and gets stupidly rich. Then the copycats emerge. Then it gets enshittified until there's nothing left.
It happened with land, medicine, books, steam engines, looms, radio, and TV. It was only a matter of time before it came for the Internet and smartphones. It's happening at plaid speed with AI even.
(Medical grift in particular is an ancient business. Countless fortunes were made selling placebos (or worse!) that claimed to cure literally everything.)
My feeling is that the current state of the internet is just exposing how humans behave normally, the guardrails have just fallen away. Everyone is immune to shame, the threat of consequences etc. You see this in real life on the streets too.
I think the opposite. The vast majority of kind and gently people are suddenly observing a small but ultra loud obnoxious minority take the stage and burn resources like nothing else to get maximum attention. Attention wins and you don’t get it by being gentle, balanced, kind and most importantly, don’t care about maximum attention.
There is the saying "the empty vessel makes the loudest noise". This was part of the reason I eventually left Reddit, as I was getting sucked in to the habit of making empty meme-like responses to posts.
Some of the worst places for comments I've seen are on youtube - just the lowest effort ("who is listening to this in 2026?!") or the most obnoxious, or just misunderstood. Partly this is because of voting systems combined with large numbers of people. Partly because of bots I suppose.
I watched the announcement on the detection on gravitational waves on YT. The comments scrolling by were like from another world, I even made some screenshots, insane, obnoxious. Could be bots I suppose, I hear from political commentators here who advocate for thoughtful commentary "from the middle", that their social media posts are always very quickly flooded by the same kind of polarizing low-level comments that drown out any intellectual and thoughtful debate. It's probably partly bots, partly a small minority of people that get sucked into it by the bots. I have no problem believing this is Russia, or NK, undermining our democracy in a fully automated fashion.
Yes. I remember reading a piece on /r/SlateStarCodex subreddit many years that said something like, "Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people," and that had an impact on me. In fact, many articles by Scott Alexander had an impact on me, though I don't know what he's up to these days.
I'd say at least 1/3 of internet commenters clearly have GAD (generalized anxiety disorder). Most of them undiagnosed. Anxiety triggers ancient animalistic parts of the brain and the "need to do something NOW" which often then gets released into negative / angry / aggressive posts.
Depressed people are the opposite, they tend to lurk and not care that much
I remember back in the "old" internet pre-2010, there was basically zero anxious people posting.
Fear and anxiety sells best (even better than Sex). When you end up selecting procedures that ensures the maximum sales/clicks, you are actually optimizing for things that cause maximum fear and anxiety?
And the SlateStarCodex people are also, for the vast majority, batshit insane people behind a veil of "no but you see i'm a rationalist". That includes Scotty.
This is the right takeaway. Before the internet went mainstream, these ultra loud and obnoxious minorities were restricted to being obnoxious within their local communities, and their speech was restricted to what they were willing to say to others face-to-face.
Now, both of those restrictions have been lifted: they can now act obnoxious in front of a global audience that will be forced to listen to them, and they no longer have to worry about the potential consequences of being obnoxious in person.
Us kind souls are not forced to listen, however, something in our nature draws us to these extremes, and then, observing a lot of these extremes, our minds label them as “common”. It’s all quite unsurprising when put like this, imho.
The antidote is real interactions, and ignoring the online extremes.
Yeah, I just came back from traveling a couple of weeks, and I have had such wonderful experiences with people. There were times where I just wanted to hug a taxi cab driver (ie when a Grab driver was holding an umbrella over my vomiting daughter [car sickness] and me, with his car stopped by at the side of a highway... etc.)
I came to comment the exact opposite. People are good, caring, kind, helpful, thoughtful, funny, interesting. It’s visible every day in real life beyond the streets… in both small and big interactions.
When you choose to see beyond the surface, it becomes clear this is the cause of a system. A system that is nearly impossible to escape, and which will last for the rest of our lives. But still a system, and not the people participating.
The internet has a big "dogs barking at each other through the closed gate" dynamic. People are much more rude and aggressive to each other from a safe distance.
The safe distance is anonymity. A few of the bold ones that are all in on the grift or just genuine assholes will own their opinions and behaviour.
All the little followers have a different tune when confronted with a real social situation, at least one that isn't a mob providing safety in numbers.
It's similar to the bully dynamics at school. Get one of the hangers-on by themselves and they are civil with you. When they are with the bully peer-pressure stops them from thinking for themselves.
I think it's actually inverted, the sudden arrival of this new information layer is bringing out the worst in people as they try to suddenly adapt to this new social environment. Even worse, is that it works(ed) and now the behavior is influencing real life.
This is how humans behave under anonymity, towards an anonymous crowd of people. It is something you don't see on the streets with the exception of a few assholes, but you see it a bit more on the road, where being in a vehicle puts some distance.
It is not a lack of shame and the treat of consequences. Take soldiers for instance, instinctively, they don't want the enemy they face dead, it takes a lot of conditioning to have them kill without hesitation and it often results in mental health issues later. And solders are rewarded for killing the enemy, it means the shame and threat of consequences go the other way. Normal people just don't want to hurt others.
But the more detached we become from the actual person, the easier it is to be an asshole. This is what happens on the internet where people are just entries in a database, at best a name and an avatar.
Well, the guardrails, by which I assume you mean legal and social accountability, were the norm for most of human history, which is why I don't consider the behaviour of anonymous and unaccountable humans on the internet to be "normal". Of course, humans are capable of great evil, but we are also pretty good at building social structures to prevent the worst of it. But those structures don't work so well on the anonymous internet.
> You see this in real life on the streets too.
To nowhere near the same extent, in my experience. Most people in real life are still fairly polite, even to strangers. It's insane to me how rude people can be on social media. Some of the aggressive responses I've received on Reddit (to fairly innocuous comments) I would never in a million years get in real life. (And this is also true of the 90s internet.)
Sort of the paradox of humanity. I actually like the majority of people I meet in person. But ‘humanity’ in the aggregate is just fucking terrible and constantly finds new and interesting ways to lower my expectations further.
I actually think the opposite, the hatred on the internet seems artificial to me.
In the current day when AI is so prevalent, it always makes me wonder how many posts are made by agents instructed to maximize engagement by making people angry.
I think the fundamental issue is social communication without any social consequences. In real life if you continually insult and troll people, you will be a pariah. Online, you can find others who admire and support that behavior. And all you need is another anonymous/pseudonymous account to keep doing it if you get blocked.
And no, that does not mean that I am calling for identification. It just seems to be a natural consequence of having social interaction without real consequences.
Economic exploitation is just one way to take advantage of people who lack internal contentment. The other forms are cultural and social.
Modifying one element in this environment in favor of others won't make things better. You could even argue that less people are being financially scammed online than they are cognitively.
These problems are not endemic to the internet. But the internet does cast a broader net and provide a wider variety of ways for people to become afflicted by whatever it is I'm trying to describe.
What ruined the internet is monetized social media, regardless ad driven or direct monetization. Monetization will basically ruin anything meant to be fun, even a simple board game with friends and family, if it stopped being about spending quality time and having fun and now there’s a competition of how much will each make at the end, it won’t be fun, you will see tribalism, manipulation, cheating, and other shenanigans.
Note, however, that even with achieving this first step, we'll still have a platform full of profit-motivated actors, because our economies incentivize this behavior whether online or IRL.
Both problems need solving, but the first one is easier, and demonstrating its solution on a large scale could help convince everyone that it's an endeavor worth applying to all domains.
We're evolutionarily programmed to stop everything and focus on anything that elicits fear in our environment. Enormous amounts of money has been invested to design algorithms that capture our attention with fear because they need your attention to sell advertising. Everything's optimized to make you enraged and afraid because it works. They're really good at it too.
I know they got my number. I've had to delete every social media site I used to be engaged in (I suppose except this one) for the sake of my mental health.
When you ride a bus, you pay for the fuel with money.
When you go online, you pay both for the internet itself and with your personal information, whatever it may be.
Nah. It's still the output of multiple ppl merged into one. There's no governing force there. Just human nature, across the world, more captured, more visible than ever before.
the internet is home to plenty of predatory cesspits, but the real stuff is still there too. it's not as convenient or addicting as content that doubles as a funnel for the ad machines, but the real spaces and media that aren't dominated by the advertising industrial complex still exist- just like in other forms of media that preceded the internet.
I saw a video of a doctor answering a call and the caller started saying some strange hate/concensus-pushing message about Jews hating people who hate Jews in a very angry tone. Neither the doctor nor the commenters suggested it was AI, but it certainly sounded like it. I got a flash of a future where every telemarketer call is either an angry voice ready to convince you of something, or the gender you like trying to woo you.
How discouraging would it be (intentionally) if every time an AI had access to your attention, it was trying to make you angry. This would probably cause a lot of people to disengage, a lot to get angry, and a few able to live without being affected by the laser guided anger and manipulation
It's almost as if a group of CEO's got together and asked each other, "How can we monetize the time our employees spend off work?". The answer was, apparently, to reduce purchasing-power adjusted pay to the point where hobbies, like the internet, must generate income for people if they want to afford basic necessities. Hence, stagnant wages and the rise of side-hustle economy. Now everybody goes back to work after they get home.
If you buy this (wildly speculative and unsupported) theory, then the enshittification of the Internet is only natural. The best way to ruin a hobby is to turn it into a job. The internet was not perfect, but a better place back when people did it as a fun hobby with no expectation of income. Now, everything has to produce financial gain for somebody. Kids still make the same videos of themselves kicking each other in the nuts, but now they have to remind you to like and subscribe in order to fund future tomfoolery.
Perhaps what we have is not a problem born of a new technology (i.e. The internet) so much as a societal problem resulting from social regress. We're no longer dividing the pie up equitably enough, so people now feel squeezed and have become utterly obsessed with money. As it turns out, that makes them less fun.
The root cause underlying all of that is the simple fact that the average person just isn't intelligent enough. They fall for the grift, they fall for the advertising, for the manipulation, the propaganda, the echo chambers, the emotion, the hate, they fall for it all. They're either unable to see it or escape it or both.
With the internet connecting everyone together, giving you direct, immediate, access to billions of people from the comfort of your own home, of course there's going to be classes of people working to siphon money (or power) from the unintelligent into their own pockets, rather than doing the hard work of actually producing value for their civilization.
There's also no real solution to this.
Of course, educating people is a solution, somehow getting people to be more intelligent. But that's a slow, long, process, and the more I see, the more I realize just how commonly intelligent people still fall prey to the same things.
The only other solution I see is blocking access for the majority for either consuming information from or contributing information to the internet, which is a hard pill to swallow, and which has its own horrible, and mostly unsolvable issues.
This reads to as pure AI slop to me, and Pangram agrees (100% AI).
To use one of the idioms that give this impression, this is not just knee-jerk whining. It's material to what the article is about. If you're going to raise this topic, be a human and say something constructive. An AI generated ragebait whinge about ragebait is ragebait squared with a heaped serving of hypocrisy on top. This exemplifies everything it complains about.
But forget Pangram. This passage, from the conclusion, is 100% rock-solid proof that Claude was a key contributor.
> "The question is not whether the internet contains useful things. It does. The question is whether human existence should be organised around alien and inhuman objective functions no human chose and nobody can inspect or understand."
Also, I think that "grift" (repeated throughout the article) is very poorly defined. I also think that most cryptocurrencies are, in the general case, a bad example of a "grift."
But this guy's talking about drop-shippers, life coaches, cryptocurrency, online "influencing" in general, and other things. Very few of those fit your own definition, as there's nothing illicit involved.
In some cases, e.g. if you compare cryptocurrency to drop-shipping, there's not even much common ground, except "markets things through social media."
I started using the Internet because of the convenience it offered. Now that convenience is gone. Due to ads, surveillance, toxicity, misinformation, slop.. It just isn't worth being online anymore. So instead, now I read books, meet with people, attent talks, go to a museum. It's not complicated when you think about it...
The observations appear like disconnected pieces or isolated trends. They are not. You need to step back and look at the full picture. It's just one trend with multiple manifestations. It doesn't require lengthy essays if you look at it's core.
It's the business beast riding the tech monster. Its not people. People are simply driven by the beast.
I have been to a village recently, hoping to find the foods and fruits I remember from my childhood. They are all gone. Seeds were GM modified, chemicals entered through soil and water, the entire soil layer has lost its nature and ecosystem. The livestock has changed as well. You don't get the same chicken and eggs anymore. Grains, spices, pulses, milk, water everything changed. Just like internet, the enshittification happened everywhere.
It's interesting to me how complaints about widespread Internet political propaganda and "grifting" so consistently reveal the author's own political biases. It's really hard to write about it in a detached way.
(It's strange to see people accuse others of grifting but then continue to engage with the arguments made in that "grift" as though the other party sincerely believed the claims. In my experience, the claims usually probably are made sincerely, and the "grifting" terminology is used because the accuser can't accept that the other worldview exists, or else just as a generic boo word.)
Part 1: Everything was turned into social User Generated Content to reduce editorial costs. Part 2: Predatory third parties ranging from nation states to SEO agencies started mass filling UGC with anxiety inducing brain rot. Part 3: the brainrot generation is automated by AI and it silences any real people or voices. Part 4: People go outside to touch grass and Part 5: That leaves opportunities for platforms for real people with good culture
tl;dr: The internet is the thing that needs the most attention when educating your kids.
I get a lot of value from the internet. I fell for some traps (instagram, facebook with very little value but lots of wasted energy) that I mostly got rid of.
But I have many products I am very happy about, that I got to know through other people on the internet.
Well duh, was this not expected? The Internet userbase has transitioned dramatically over the past several decades.
It moved from an outpost for computer nerds in the early 1990s, to a middle-class product in the 2000s, then everybody got access in the 2010s with the spread of the smartphone.
The demographics of the internet look nothing like they did when it was created.
That’s why you’re seeing stratification reemerge imo. Paywalls are probably the most obvious feature of this, where information worth accessing these days tends to be paywalled. By contrast high volume, low quality slop supported by ads is generally free.
I've seen this same discussion in a million guises.
This particular essay starts with
> I’m a kid of the 90s, and I still remember the early internet.
... and then contains a lot of predictable stuff about how and why avalon became: tarnished, effete, weak, tawdry, despoiled, no-fun, toxic, predatory, rapacious etc. You can take your pick, it doesn't matter. It's the same argument no matter which adjective you choose.
It finally gets to
> The question is not whether the internet contains useful things. It does.
That's a truism of no value.
Take the whole essay, replace "internet" with a country's name and amend some of the details. You've seen it before? You read it every damned day in every form of media. It's used to justify just about anything; the good and the bad. In the end it's a boring, repetitive argument.
At the edge, it reduces to: my country used to be great and now it's crap because it's not how it used to be - so, we need to roll everything back despite the number of years that have passed between then and now, and despite any of the positive things that may have come during that time.
I love Stephen's writing, and this is so well written.
> I was very wrong. The grift economy is massive. More disturbing still, it is participatory. A large and growing share of the population now appears willing to devote every waking hour to fleecing their fellow man as a career choice.
I find myself worrying about this a lot. For what it's worth though, the non-grifters, the people interested in building a community, are still out there. To find them, you need to look for groups that add no financial value – join an art club, volunteer locally. When I spend time with those groups, I'm reminded that not everyone's a grifter in real life.
Sadly, one of the contributors to this are the "Little" Tech Bros. They have drunk the kool aid at work. A bit libertarian or right wing in nature, they salivate at the latest Full Self Driving (supervised) lie, or AI hype, or crypto when it first came out. Some intricate new feature or language puts them into paroxysms of joy. In their view, any attempt to regulate or draw boundaries around "tech" equates to communism, marxism, and attempts to curtail so called freedom of speech. Don't use it if you don't like it, they say.
By Little Tech Bros i mean developers with lots of technical skills, but who haven't been lucky enough to be in the right spot at the right time with an IPO. They keep evangelizing hoping megabucks lightning will hit them the next time. It won't. More likely, a layoff notice. Because Big Tech Bro figured out how to grab all the money from their excess productivity.
The internet has made available a wide array of facts. And combined with needing to double-check the frequently incorrect hallucinations of AI, this set of facts has a devastating, world-altering effect on the white collar professional class.
And cognitive dissonance is the only retreat; the tyranny of reality is too much to bear.
I think part of it is due to corrupt government regulating internet as if only Facebooks and Reddits were on the market. It destroyed niche forums and made the place less democratised. Today you cannot just rent a server and start a forum without massive financial backing and therapist on speed dial.
Did you know that if you just run a forum you don't go to jail for that? First the police have to notice you in a negative light for any reason, and second they have to bother to do something about it, and thirdly their first interaction with you is more likely to be "oi! stop doing that!" than anything else. What killed them isn't the law, it was firstly centralisation pressure, and secondly our own paranoia about the law.
And if the government wants to arbitrarily get you, it can do that with or without you running a forum.
I don't doubt that there are very large communities of grifters, but to say that they are "the Internet" seems a bit much. If you see grifting as the central core of the Internet, maybe that's a problem with your filter bubble. You need to filter that stuff out.
you forgot to add "slow" to predatory cesspit, or with 4 pages open and 880meg
doing who knows what while everything bogs down, the though of closeing the browser and clearing the cache becomes the simpler more pragmatic option, though this dependent on the OS still responding
This is a little premature - I'm about a month away from a really good launch date, but the sentiment here is too good a match to miss...
A long time ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I set up my first webserver. In those halcyon days you had to email CERN to get your website added to the list of websites in the world; a list people downloaded as the sum total of what the web was and where they could visit.
Things have come a long way since then, but maybe not always for the better. The ad-companies have wormed their way into just about everything on the web, and the tech billionaires have funded it because they can make even more money at the general public's expense.
I recently got very fed up with Reddit's anti-user policies, and decided 'screw it, there's not that much special here'. As a result, Blewit[1] came into existence: it's an experiment - can an old-style just-for-the-good-of-the-community-it-represents website still function in today's modern world? We'll see...
Blewit takes no user information other than a username/password. We're forced to accept cloudflare's country-code so we can be compliant with the Online Safety Act, but we deliberately don't even ask for an email address.
We don't track. We don't have ads that are other ways to track. We don't have algorithms that force engagement along the most-outrageous pathway. We don't have analytics to sell you stuff. We don't put tracking pixels in our site, and when you upload an image, we strip it of all the EXIF/Location data so it can't be used to track you by proxy.
More bluntly, all the dark patterns are missing. By design. It hearkens back to a simpler time, where people did things simply because they thought it was cool, and others might like it too.
So it'll be interesting to see if something like Reddit (I think it's better, but I'm biased) can survive in the far-more-predatory world that we live in, than when I first started using the web. The site is deliberately lean-and-mean, and I think I can give it the on-ramp it needs to become successful if it gets the engagement of sufficient people. Again, I guess we'll see :)
You call it a "Reddit alternative" but that's not really how the world works. People don't go out looking for Reddit-like sites, stumble across Reddit and sign up. People are just going about their business, find Reddit, and eventually feel pressured to sign up so they can post, comment or vote. The funnel starts with people stumbling across engagement-worthy content on your site, which only exists and is findable if it exists and is findable.
The “prime directive” of the site is “do not track”. Historically that’s been irrelevant to the internet at large, but I think there is a growing feeling of disquiet over just how spied-on, measured, packaged, and sold we all are. If that undercurrent grows, the world might be a different place in a year or two.
Reddit itself populated its site with bot content scraped from other sites, and presented in a way users liked more, long before it had enough UGC. That's why comments didn't exist for the first year or so of its existence - the lack of comments would have betrayed how many users there weren't.
I’m sorry but I’m sick to death of all this rose tinted glasses crap about the history of the Internet
I got on the Internet in 1993 and it is always been a cesspit of bullshit. You could easily find child pornography online in the 90s and there were all kinds of scams constantly being tried
> I still remember the early internet. It was slow, ugly, unreliable, and full of cranks, a strange world of wheezing dial-up modems, Usenet flamewars, <marquee> tags, and dancing babies.
I remember the 1990s and this guy's "description" is massively biased.
I remember oldschool browser games in the 1990s - AM Mari (Archmage, from a korean company), or even Java Applets such as Dragonquest or whatever was the name. Or Joe Cartoon - may be a bit after 1990s too. Either way, many such things were not a problem here. I never used a dial-modem, for instance, even in the 1990s had fast flat-rate cable connections that was surprisingly cheap. Still kind of is cheap, for the net-value I get from the world wide web, though I agree it has gone down in quality, for many reasons. One reason is ... Google. And other mega-corporations. These try to destroy the internet. Or rather they want to control more of it.
> The scammer once had to find a victim. The platform now finds one, profiles the weakness, optimises the pitch, processes the payment, and recommends the next scam. What was once an aberration has become the norm.
Not incorrect indeed. The private companies here abuse the people. The problem is: what to do about that? Google de-facto controls the internet via its evil adChrome empire. All the ad-money revenue goes through this. It's kind of like a giant mafia system established here. Didn't the free market philosophy once claim that monopolies should be avoided? Why did the USA establish these monopolies?
> Each feeling arrives with something to buy.
Not sure what the guy means. Ublock origin blocks almost all ads. I don't buy anything advertised; I don't even notice it because it does not show up.
Not everyone uses the internet in the same way.
> People doomscroll until they acquire the anxiety that the next influencer will monetise.
Doomscrolling is indeed addictive; I do that on youtube shorts. The shorts are progressively getting worse though and also AI slop spams fake in, which invalidates any time I spend on these too. I usually close the tab after 10 downwards scrolls or so. I am accessing the internet on the desktop though; on smartphones this is probably a more default-y behaviour to swipe.
> The system is dopaminergic in the most banal and mechanical sense. It runs on anticipation, uncertainty, and variable reward.
Ok, I stopped reading there. The guy thinks that humans are simple systems based on biochemistry. I fail to see how I would fit into that scheme at all. And I understand biochemistry. I'd wish he would have spoken more about who ruined the internet, not what the thing today called the internet is about. We need to isolate and counter those who ruined the internet. Google is a huge factor here but not the only one.
I have only one agenda - my own. People hate that I think nowadays.
You need to be in some kind of camp, even for something so minor as skincare brand or fanfiction.
I think that it was fine until the internet started to influence the real life way too much. You used to be able to log out and gain distance to the bullshit on the web.
Now the bullshit has permeated into the mainstream and you need very drastic measures and personality to reject it.
You will lose some people for this but there are still some older folks that can talk about anything and will never get offended. Never conform but also don't become a contrarian for the sake of it.
The modern life is an art how to stay weird in a world that wants to squash you into some kind of label. How to stay genuine
It starts during simple social interactions in real life. You make a joke about alcohol, now you feel the pressure of the crowd to become 'the funny drunk'. Squash it as soon as possible now you are a teetotaler. Now tell them joke about drugs. Make it all too confusing at all so they lose any idea about what to make of you. Obfuscation. Now you are free in the purest sense. There is no template for you aside from the one you craft or discover for yourself.
I even went further and made myself genderless so that these norms cannot easily qualify me into anything really. There is 50% chance if someone calls me a woman or a man.
Sometimes I support the feminism. Sometimes I give myself to patriarchy and observe how that feels.
Maybe I made it all up and nothing I wrote is genuine.
We should strive to be stranger or at least do not treat it as something bad but as a virtue. Of course do not try hard but just explore the weird and see where it takes you.
One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all.
It is really hard not to succumb to this. It requires active effort and sometimes even a willful ignorance. "turn a blind eye" is the idiom here. Monty Python's "Always look on the bright side of life" kind of thing.
Mr Rogers said it: look for the helpers. They may be few, but they are there. Find them and focus on them.
Source for Mr Rogers quote:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100125201022/https://www.pbs.o...
‘Fred Rogers often told this story about when he was a boy and would see scary things on the news: "My mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.' To this day, especially in times of 'disaster,' I remember my mother's words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers-so many caring people in this world."’
I think that's why historical education is so important (or just liking history as in my case), looked through the lens of history all of the current shit as bad as it is, is really nothing all that new either, the only constant is change after all.
As the aphorism goes: History may not repeat but it sure does rhyme.
If you're able to, find a random NPR broadcast from 20 to 30 years ago and marvel at how it could be replayed nearly verbatim today. "Inflation", "war in the Middle East", "Congress stalled on xyz." Even the "unprecedented" political correctness and racial reckonings in the US observed around 2020 were not uncommon in the 1970s and 1980s (see the Stanford Beethoven poster incident which also left students literally fainting and crying in hysterics).
You're absolutely correct that history helps you see that none of this is new. However, is it better to be the person who sees the waterfall their boat is inevitably going to go over, or the person completely ignorant of it until it happens?
If we look at history, humanity has been through some pretty crazy shit and we haven't gone over the waterfall yet.
On the contrary: we've fall off waterfalls every few decades or so. Humanity simply survives and moves on, taking maybe 2% more caution for the next waterfalll
It's more like, is it better to be the person who:
- sees a waterfall in every river, even when one is not there?
- sees the waterfall, and is resigned about their fate?
- sees the waterfall, then struggles for survival no matter how hopeless the situation seems to be?
- is completely ignorant of the waterfall?
> However, is it better to be the person who sees the waterfall their boat is inevitably going to go over, or the person completely ignorant of it until it happens?
Neither, it's better to be the person who realizes we're in for a bright future no matter what doomers think.
> see that none of this is new
But this is. This sort of violent partisanship that self ensconces around identity versus issues is exactly what tears apart democracies and republics.
"B-b-but this really is new!" The USA did have a Civil War. It was so violent that it killed more Americans than all other wars combined.
Message unclear. You're saying the USA is an old hand at civil wars now and could do another one any time, no problem? Or perhaps I shouldn't look for a message.
This isn't new either. The tools and technology are new. The strategies and psychologies aren't.
Even the identity part isn't new; even among Caucasian males only, see how many times society's woes will be blamed on whatever convinient immigrant there is in that period.
The knowledge that 1932 was kinda similar is not comforting at all. Or whatever run up to historical horrible events we talk about.
I genuinely dont like what history sais follows after times like this.
And I think history provides some prophylactic counterbalance to the cynical narrative. To hear some people talk, people are inherently evil, and the US has been a downhill project to oppress since the days of the founding.
History shows that things can and do improve when people try. The overall trajectory has been positive, even if bumpy.
I've heard it described as a growing but fluctuating graph (think something like a logarithmic graph, with some noise added in). Progress is positive overall, but there are times of radical progress and decline. And people will feel both aspects.
We're definitely in a decline as of now, where we arguably had progress from 80 to 50 years ago.
I would kinda be with you, except, climate change. And like, we didn't have nukes when the last world war started. This time we will.
> One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all.
It's even sadder when one realizes the world was always that way. The author more-or-less says as much, though they seem to suggest it is amplified. I'm not entirely sure the part about it being more amplified today true. Most of the ills mentioned existed when I was a youth, it simply took different forms and (of course) was spread by means other than the Internet. There never was a chance to get ahead because the cards were always stacked against us.
Apologies for the cynicism.
> One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all. > It is really hard not to succumb to this. It requires active effort and sometimes even a willful ignorance.
I feel this very strongly over the past couple of years. As always, hackernews is full of extremely smart, well read people so I'd really appreciate any good reading material on this so I can better understand it. Tips are appreciated as well (healthy diet and regular exercise, good extended blood labs (think like Function health), good consistent sleeep habits).
I'm not sure why we're talking about cynicism all of a sudden. I hope it's not because we're framing this blogger's recognition of existing cynicism, as constituting cynicism in and of itself. Because if so, I would have to disagree, just as I would disagree that talking about racism makes one racist for example.
If you can’t help, it’s okay to look away.
People sometimes get mad at this, like it’s callous or privileged, but what’s the difference between focusing on problems you can’t help and slowing down to stare at a car wreck?
If you don’t slow down are you being insensitive?
Obviously if you can help it’s different.
I can't look away. It's everywhere.
Thanks for commenting and acknowledging that it's challenging. My mates and myself have definitely fallen into this. Reminds me of that hackernews post about how doomerism is a siren's song for genZ, forget where it is.
The last thing my father said to me before he passed was to keep people looking forward to the future.
It's easy to romanticize the past and it can seem intellectually sophisticated to despair about the future, when in fact the overwhelming evidence is that things have gotten much much better for nearly everyone on just about any objective axis you can pick.
Except they haven't.
Good one. Refute an unsubstantiated claim with an unsubstantiated rebuttal. I'm sure we can all learn from that. /s
You made the claim, you substantiate it.
I think this growth in cynicism really depends on where people start from. A lot of people were taught and reinforced a inaccurate model of the world.
When confronted with reality, it can't stand up and the individuals become angry and disengage rather than working with the system as it is.
I know this is painting with a broad brush but I see it basically everywhere I look. One example would be the expectation of a benevolent Authority that manages political and social life. Reality is that it is just messy humans all the way down.
Some people assume that from the beginning and can work with it. Other people just break down with frustration and broken expectations.
I (self-servingly) don't think that cynicism is bad, nor that it would be a good idea to pathologize what is simply a healthy defense to a hostile reality.
It depends on how you wield it.
Cynicism shouldn't cloud your judgement. That's the actually correct point you wanted to make, I think.
I try not to think in black/white, good/evil kinds of terms. I think of forces and dynamic systems.
There appears to be some force that promotes one particular way of thinking, perhaps the inevitable consequence of accumulated experiences. In the case of cynicism, the balance tends to shift towards one side of a scale over time.
Without a countervailing force on the other side it can tip a normally balanced system out of stable equilibrium.
My point is explicitly: the world provides the force in one direction, and the individual must provide the force in the other.
I think we shouldn't be quick to label criticism of such current systems as cynicism
I tend to agree. The quote "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society" embodies it well.
I don't think cynicism is the correct approach though. It's possible to accept that circumstances are unhealthy without internalizing general negativity. It's just hard. I suspect you and I, and OP, are all agreeing with each other on this point.
Cynicism is a negatively biased view of the world. People should strive for accuracy. Sometimes accurate is also harsh, but that is different.
Maybe this is the same thing you intended by saying it shouldn't Cloud your judgment.
Yeah, probably.
It doesn't help that the clinical meaning and the colloquial meaning of the word are different, with the latter being used by people to hit you over the head with, pretending that it would be the former.
What are the two?
> Cynicism is a negatively biased view of the world
Is what you said. The clinical thing.
> You're just being cynical
Is cognitive dissonance forcing its way out of the mouths of people to shoot the messenger.
Maybe I'm being slow, but I still dont get the difference. Isn't the 2nd the same as the first?
Isn't the first a product of generator of cognative dissonance? Doubling down on beliefs that pay rent, even when it doesn't fit?
Yeah tbh my sea lion warning light turned on on the first reply.
Right now it is flashing, so I will pull over and call AAA
Too bad, I was genuinely curious about how you viewed cynicism, and thought I was being clear and polite in my questions. Self-deprecating even.
I think your reaction is rather ironic given the context. An example of how people can't even talk to each other anymore.
There's Diogenes, the original cynic with a dog's lifestyle, and there's the Diogenes Club in Sherlock Holmes. In this classical context it's about being unconventional and challenging (challengingly silent, even). You can say "that's just skepticism" but it comes with a certain sulky refusenik flavor, and yet it's defensible as a form of individualism, and presumably positive, at least because it's one form of diversity and critical thought.
That is really interesting! I will have to look it up and read more.
Yes, yes. Truly a shame.
Any other interesting thoughts worth sharing from your side?
Good luck nurturing a garden, when every day someone tears down a tree inside or robs you of the fruits.
Or the summers get so hot it all burns down
> People increasingly behave like addicts because addiction is the business model.
I sense my internet addiction got a lot worse in recent years. I don’t use social media, but I consume news, blogs and newsletters - and comment threads - voraciously.
I think the addiction began as soon as I started to work at a desk behind a computer which had internet access - 20+ years ago. Like putting an alcoholic to work behind a bar and thinking he’d restrain himself.
It seems to have worsened in recent years. I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.
If you're interested in what helped me overcome the worst aspects of my internet addiction, I learned to reframe it.
I wasn't overcome with addiction, but I was CHOOSING to take a break. There are good reasons to read the news, there are good reasons to take breaks. End the war against yourself and take more wholesome breaks, so your subconscious doesn't take over and force them. It may involve forcing yourself to be more realistic about what you can do in a given time period, but that's a good thing ultimately.
I know it sounds like a minor change but the whole game is putting your life back in your own control. When you find yourself binging, say "I am choosing to do this," even if you don't immediately log off. Just observe your own choices as a first step.
Another tip: when you're craving a hit of the internet, ask yourself "can I wait 5 minutes before checking my phone?" If you can't, no big deal. But if you do this enough time you build up the self discipline muscle.
Forcing a short delay is such a powerful technique.
I use this when I'm at risk of binging a show. If I'm tempted to let Netflix continue into the next episode, I say "ok maybe, but let's get up and do something else for a few minutes first and see if I still want to" and before I know it I'm building a robot instead.
I'll vouch for this too
This is something I've been working on a lot myself. It's so easy to wind up sliding into the familiar patterns and routines, and reaching for the phone. I'm finding that discipline is less about resisting it and more about redirecting it to something more productive
Not bad, but leaves out crucial steps? "I chose to do this" puts the blame at your own feet without telling you how to deal with it constructively. That can lead to learned helplessness.
Contemplation has the goal of a reassessment of evaluation. The choice needs to be re-evaluated as inferior to better alternatives.
Those need to be explicitly identified. In order to do this, you need to know what led to your choice emotionally.
The other side of the coin is the intentional design of many internet sites to exploit human psychology. News for example are "infotainment", "fear-porn" and "rage-bait", etc. by design and override many "self-discipline" mechanisms.
The internet isolates people while feeding them a simulacra of social interaction without actual social functionality. Objective truth in particular isn't reliably established by "watching the news", that's merely top-down conditioning by whoever owns your "news". Finding objective truth is an active process, not a passive event.
Focusing on how other people designed it might be good to generate momentum for political activism purposes but it's not good for your own personal self improvement. And if you're getting mad about the world and not doing a significant amount of real world activism, you're getting the worst of both worlds, not helping yourself or anyone else.
I think the best attitude is "Yes, the world could be improved, but all I can do right now is improve myself." There's a raft of evidence (and not just my firsthand anecdotal experience) that shows taking ownership yields far better life outcomes.
The risk for learned helplessness is far greater if you don't even acknowledge the control you have over it. True, someone reading my comment might not go "all the way" in fixing their problems and get stuck blaming themselves, but there's only so much I can do with an internet comment. I recommend therapy too to save you from those sorts of blind alleys.
Thanks - useful to think about as I try and wean myself off the novel information highs. I’ve been consciously aware of the problematic aspect of my behavior since about the pandemic - but struggle to make much change.
Super hard agree with this
The most dangerous part of this addiction is that it doesn't feel like addiction. Suppose we spend 4 hours in an afternoon consuming random content - starting somewhere on a Google search, landing on Wikipedia, end up reading dozens of articles on various topics in that 4 hours. Unlike alcohol or drugs, this is knowledge addiction - afterall, we learned about a bunch of things in those 4 hours, didn't we? We didn't spend any money (well, other than the laptop, electricity and internet bills), we didn't harass anyone (like alcoholics sometimes do) etc. Heck, we didn't even "waste" time like we think we do, when we play video games. So it feels somewhat better.
But, all that we learned in those 4 hours - is it really that useful? Some of it might be, lets say an hour of it. What about the other three? That could have been spent on something healthier - having fun with friends, play sports, or even just sleeping!
I understand the irony of typing this, but I too am in the same boat - consuming things voraciously, most of which is just useless knowledge, at the cost of relationships, health etc.
It's all about balance. Learning about various stuff from well written articles and Wikipedia for one hour is good. Doing the same thing for the whole weekend isn't.
Even reading books all the time to the detriment of other activities isn't good.
What's good is doing a bit of everything. Reading a book an hour before sleep, doing a hour of exercise two to three times a week. Reading a few blog articles, wikipedia, long and well researched magazine articles. Making time for in person social interactions. Playing games, video games, board games, card games from time to time. Engaging in a few online discussions every week. Etc
It's all about balance or at least that's the way I see it.
> The most dangerous part of this addiction is that it doesn't feel like addiction.
I've started framing addiction as something that we feel compelled to do even when we know it has a detrimental effect on more important aspects of our life. In that respect, yes, it does feel like an addiction.
> Unlike alcohol or drugs, this is knowledge addiction - afterall, we learned about a bunch of things in those 4 hours, didn't we?
Did we learn anything? If we aren't using that knowledge, even in casual conversation, chances are that retention is very low. I'm not even talking about useful learning here, since it is pleasurable to learn something for its own sake. I'm talking about the stickiness.
Another way to think of it is: are we even interested in learning? I have downloaded the entire Wikipedia to my computer, along with Project Gutenberg, as well as various technical documentation. (Kiwix is wonderful.) On top of that I have enough books (digital and physical) to last a lifetime. I have a multitude of resources that I can tap into without touching the Internet, and accessing it is all very low resistance (e.g. I don't have to get off my ass to go to the library). So why do I even have home Internet access? Communicating with people certainly doesn't require a high speed connection.
For the purposes of apocalyptic fiction, I wonder what the overlap is between people who have an offline copy of Wikipedia and people who have only casual security or no password. I can imagine a survivor hunting around for it for a very long time.
Piggybacking onto your post to sort of expand this. I feel like there are a few views of what those 4 hours can encompass on the internet. My view is that reels/shorts << rage gaming <<< background noise-tier youtube << social/healthy gaming <= information binging. My problem is most reddit or twitter-esque sites make it easy to fall on the side of rage consumption, without constant self enforcement.
Now I don't think that most knowledge is really that useful in general, maybe 1% of 4 hour binges have any real consequences. But occasionally it really does turn out to be very useful. I spent maybe 4-5 hours reading and watching videos about window air conditioners, having known basically nothing but the terrible shaky units from my childhood. After that period of research time, I bought two new replacements, saved $80 with National Grid rebates, and reduced my summer monthly kwh consumption by 200-250. It also led me to information about heat pump systems which I will consider in a future house purchase, and additionally more information which led me to avoid purchasing cheap peltier dehumidifiers for one with a compressor.
I guess my point is, it can definitely be worse. You can at least point to an Ortega hypothesis-like effect of learning a bunch of random stuff. But I agree that even just going on a walk and doing literally nothing feels way, way better than spending that time online. The balance is so heavily tilted towards internet addiction that I expect that having multiple "real" offline hobbies will increasingly be seen as green flags. In my experience, "bookworm" has not been a pejorative in a long time. stackbutterflow's comment about balance seems like the most sensible way to approach timespend in this sense, though. /rant
I've recently spent a night or two with near insomnia going down a performance / security rabbit hole in open source .NET libraries.
It feels useful, it feels important. But it's not, it's just addictive behaviour, because "you found a way to make <library> 5% faster / 5% fewer allocations" is a dopamine hit that feeds back into wanting to prod some more.
It feels like I'm learning an absolute ton about high performance .NET and the kinds of crazy things that maintainers need to consider when taking in untrusted input.
But it's the equivalent of empty calories. The maintainers don't really want to know, and I'm not really learning anything actually useful. It's not actually enlightening work, it's just keeping myself busy while helping feed maintainers a maintenance headache.
The security angle is also horrifying in a different way, it puts me off wanting to put anything near the internet. I used to think the concept of "net crash" and an internet abandoned to "rogue AIs" in cyberpunk was entertaining fiction.
While I don't think the network itself will host those rogue AIs, I do worry that there'll simply be a critical mass of bad actors armed with AI that will render the net effectively inoperable.
Well, it depends. If it's not at the cost of relationship, sports and other important things, is it really an addiction? It can often be just a hobby like everything else.
It's not learning unless you put it into practice. 4 hours of woodworking videos is nothing for you unless you get to work.
I've been watching framing videos for weeks feeling like I'm being less unproductive than if I were playing video games. But at a certain point it's just as bad. Not a single nail driven.
That’s a good point. Internet addiction didn’t have a name, or a stigma, in the way alcohol or other drugs did so in a sense I had no idea that the slide I was on was harmful. It also felt a lot like what I did a lot of at university - library research.
What if you consume those things but still have time for relationships and health etc?
Internet addiction in the early millennium wasn't so destructive, because so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people. You could meet cool new people (even occasionally IRL friends) from forums and blogs, and they were a hub for discussion for real-life communities like music-band fandom or travel subcultures.
Besides the deleterious nature of engagement-maximizing social media today, I think another aspect of the problem is that there is less connection to real-life socializing simply because that has collapsed in so many countries.
This is a big part of it for me. The old Internet was full of individuals sharing deep passion--whether on a personal website or on a forum. There was a sense of connecting to another human being.
This is the only forum-style site I regularly interact with, and I must admit that I rarely try to remember another username here. The effect is that I interact with ideas, not people. And there is some deep connection between behaviors I might label as addiction and a felt sense of isolation.
The internet is still full of individuals sharing deep passion for all sorts of things, but only within the walls of invite-only communities you have to go out of your way to find (Discord servers, private forums) and/or make a financial commitment towards (Patreon).
Or at least it was, before LLM "enthusiasts" started leaking into these otherwise hermetic communities and overrunning formerly safe spaces with mass-produced low-effort content nobody wants to see, particularly when anyone else could prompt the exact same thing into existence.
For me the difference today is that most people sharing their passions are now doing for The Algorithm. It's a far cry from the scrappy days of the early web where people just posted stuff because they thought it was cool. I'm not saying their passion is any less, more just that is so much noise. People are now "creators" and are pressured to constantly create.
Don't go on sites with "creators" then. When people say this they're talking about like 5 websites. They're not "the Internet" at all.
Why do you assume a hobby or interest still has a significant presence on the non-algorithmified open web?
For travel-related hobbies, for instance, there is no longer any kind of significant open-web scene where people just share stuff to help others or because it is cool. (Yes, you can set up your own blog, but pretty much none of your peers will ever see it.) The community might be using a variety of apps beyond your "like 5 websites", but all those apps are designed around phones and minimize text content, and so they are just as pathological as "sites with 'creators'".
Ha, yes I wanted to keep my comment short without trying to cover every base, but figured I might get this comment. Of course such sites still exist, but still a different phenomena when that was the entire internet. There are a lot of interesting people who run YouTube channels that be so cool to see a GeoCities-type site from, for example.
Even 25 years ago being “too online” - back then it was icq, livejournal, and forums - was already destructive as hell and always led to some pretty cringe outcomes. At least these days some people make a career out of it, back then it was purely negative
It wasn't purely negative for everyone. I still maintain ties with several people I hung out with on an IRC channel in the 2000s, and a couple of fellow heavy commenters on one blog in the same decade. Granted, this was aided by the fact that we were all in Europe and all traveled regularly, so we could do the IRL interaction that solidifies friendships.
Today, if one is heavily online, many platforms no longer offer a space where one can tell a fellow user, "I'll be in your town soon, let's meet up", or even if it does, the general culture has changed away from that.
> so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people
That still exists. Except now it's not in IRC or BBSes but in Discord "servers" instead.
Discord servers skew towards a very young demographic. One of the striking things about the early-millennium blog scene was how much quality long-form-text interaction it facilitated among relatively older people: the average age around a lot of blogs on topics like the arts or literature was like 40 or 50.
I think for people that age now, the internet is a much lonelier place.
> Internet addiction in the early millennium wasn't so destructive, because so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people. You could meet cool new people (even occasionally IRL friends) from forums and blogs
My experience has been the opposite. The people I knew who got seriously addicted to the internet a couple decades ago were mostly not thriving online among cool other people. They were getting dragged down into swirling cesspools of the time.
4chan has been around for over 20 years. A lot of the gaming communities and forums were toxic and brutal back then. There were social news sites, content mills, and personality cults back then too.
I think there’s some glorification of the past that happens in these threads. The old internet was full of toxic and addictive things, too. It was just less common to be immerse in it because you had to go to a physical computer and, if you go back far enough, dial up and occupy the house phone line. There were natural limits to how exposed most people would get.
Sorry, but teenage me, growing up late 90s, wildly disagrees with this statement.
It's always been addictive and destructive. I was staying up past 3am to talk to my American friends, knowing I'd have to get up at 7am to get to school.
Painting the past with such a rose brush does not help anyone.
I was staying up till 3 am listening to my iPod and reading books without internet then going to school at 7
I do think the internet was less bad back then (but still bad) and i also think sometimes teenagers just be teenagers
You kids and your iPods. ;-)
> You could meet cool new people
My first date was a guy with fake photos. Ten dates later I settled for a married guy cheating on his wife. He eventually divorced but then I left him.
Username checks out. /s
Yep... back then, the internet was a way people would discuss and organize their real world interests and activities, like clubs and usergroups would organize their next meeting... and then meet, off the internet.
Now, it's all just online drivel that never turns into anything else.
I use the Internet about how I used to 30 years ago.
I chat with friends. Sometimes, I make a new friend or lose track of one. On rare occasion we get together to do whatever it is that we have a common interest in. That used to be IRC.
I learn new shit by interacting with people I don't know at all. Sometimes, that means hanging out in much more anonymous places (like HN) and sharing ideas. That used to be Usenet.
I learn other stuff by Googling things and otherwise conducting research. That used to be AltaVista; nowadays, it's often an LLM.
I order pizzas. (I just ordered pizzas, in fact.)
How do you make new IRL friends now in 2026? Where are you hanging out online where there is a culture of people not only revealing their location and age (which platforms and individual internet users have become more guarded about), but even meeting up with other users?
Not OP, and I will assume you ask about making irl friends online: niche multiplayer videogames always were the best way to make irl friends. I still have a few friends from a web game where you had to coordinate 5-10 people for ~1h a day (and enemies could counter if they chose to connect around the same time) that I played from 2004 to 2013 (with breaks in between). Later it has mostly Hoi4 and civ6 (which are now less niche, but the mp communities used to be extremely niche before ~2020) (civ6 still is). I have a friend who I've met through another because they played on a SWTOR roleplay server together. Also, now that I remember, a friend of mine turned 40 a year ago, and I was surprised of the younger friends (less than 30) he made. They told me they met through WoW classic, managed to find out they lived close from each other, and decided to hang out/play RPGs (pen and paper) together.
How I do it:
My local IRL friends are some folks I met during my days as a BBS sysop ~35 years ago.
My far away IRL friends are folks online where we felt motivated to treat eachother as friends instead of dangerous randos.
(Risky? Perhaps. We're all simply too old to give a shit.)
That's still not answering my question. Where do you make those "far away IRL friends"? Most commercial platforms today discourage (because it is bad for engagement) users from building close ties with individual other users even if said users are willing to let their guard down. The user base of open and easily findable non-commercial platforms has collapsed. Your posts are dangling some kind of 2026 Shangri-La before HN readers, and you can understand my skepticism.
Reddit. Discord. HN. (Definitely not Facebook. That whole thing is resolutely toxic.)
I do not care what the platform encourages or discourages. If others do care and this precludes friendship, then: So it is.
You have seriously made contacts on Reddit or HN that have led to meeting people IRL when you visit their regions or they visit yours? Even way back when IRL meetups between users of internet forums were common, Reddit was already famous for having a culture where that wasn't at all likely due to the design of the site.
As for HN, there is no DM feature and only a minority of users give any contact info in their profiles. In over a decade here, I have never seen one user passing contact info to another user in public.
Of course I have. I've flown and driven many thousands of miles to hang out with some of these folks. We've even planned and executed public events together. We help eachother out. When the distance is great and we want to borrow, lend, or trade some small stuff, we spend a few dollars and send it in the mail.
It'd be pretty great if we all lived closer, but we do not. We've all got our reasons to live wherever we individually live.
I've also made other, more-temporary friendships online in recent years. When they're nearby it's actually pretty easy, upon recognizing that things click well-enough, to go out for drinks with other friends, or sushi, or whatever. It isn't necessary to commit to keeping a friend forever in order to make these minor moves and put a face with their words and just hang out for a bit.
For HN in particular, there are ways to initiate out-of-band comms. It's not exactly rocket surgery to just drop an email address (a throwaway one? a real one? sure!) here in a comment, or leave a clue in a bio, or even to do both things to validate who's who and connect.
It works for me, and I'm somewhat private about what I share here. Meanwhile, some users here are very public about who they are and don't hide behind a pseudonym at all. It's OK. Both types fit.
There's nothing that would motivate me to lie about this stuff. I do not stand to gain or to lose anything whether you believe me or not. :)
One of the things I liked about my Windows phone, was the relative lack of apps made it very hard to fall into addiction 'traps'.
On the flip side, my partner has fallen deep into the cesspit, either seeing her doom-scrolling through Facebook for hours, or the way she talks about all the things she saw on there despite not handling any of the things that she said she would get done that day (FWIW... My partner does not work at this time, she quit her job under the auspices of taking care of the house. Has not gone well. I guess at least she stopped playing cow-clicker games on her phone...)
If I will give my first 'real job' some credit for anything around their Blocking policies, they had extremely strict blocks around anything that could be 'personal use' and had very alarming warnings pop up if you happened to hit one of the blocks. (To the point where even doing legitimate work research I more than once freaked out and went right to my manager and the IT managers explaining my case and what I was doing.)
But it's also part of why the open office / panopticon layout has become more popular; It provides at least some vague threat to somewhat lower the risk folks get sucked into their phones out of view...
Pandemic really ramped it up. Also screen addiction has gone mainstream. In front of a screen 12+ hours a day 20 years ago? Total nerd. Now? Standard behavior.
It's so weird. I used to consider myself a fringe internet addict in the 2000s but now everyone is like me.
Like many of you, I deal with stuff like depression, anxiety, ADHD. Back in the 2000s it felt like I was the only weirdo out there. Now I cringe writing that out because it feels like everyone is like that now.
Everybody isn't like that. "The algorithm" might have made you think everybody is like that though.
Meet a lot of Gen Zers. Far too many of them are.
Huh, maybe that’s why I’m more empathetic towards them compared to my fellow millennials?
I made the same observation recently.
I think people under 25 probably don't even know how absolutely uncool it was to tell people you stayed at home in front of a computer on weekends or after school.
Absolute pariah behavior on the scale of coolness. But now ? Totally normal.
I started to notice a shift in how the recommendation algorithms worked probably around 2018-2019 and then the pandemic just took it to nuclear levels against the entire population
Okay but what should people be doing instead?
The complaint that everyone is on their phone (or in front of screens) is less informative then the interlocutors ideas of what should be instead.
> I think the addiction began as soon as I started to work at a desk behind a computer which had internet access
Interestingly, my digital consumption for idle entertainment dropped when I started working full time. I didn’t want to be in front of a screen when work was done.
My screen exposure for fun is primarily this site (where I spend too much time), and games where my friends and I treat the time as a multi-way group call with long distance friends.
I do know a lot of people who followed the exact course you describe: They watch screens at work and had periods where it was okay to spend a lot of time on social media or social news sites (Hacker News, Reddit, Slashdot, Digg, depending on the era). Checking those sites all day long became a habit for them and filled all idle time. Whenever they felt uncomfortable or bored, visiting a site would fix it.
Some of them broke out of it when they switched to workplaces where it wasn’t acceptable to do non-work things during the day. This is almost inconceivable for a lot of tech workers who have had a lot of freedom to date, but it’s normal in some industries. As an example, I have friends who work in areas where security concerns are so high that they check their phones into lockers before entering their work areas. Others worked at companies who did over-reaching analysis of computer use. Many just moved to companies with packed open office spaces where it would be obvious to everyone around if you were on Reddit or looking at your phone instead of the computer for an excessive amount all day.
What is interesting is that this seems to induce a split: Some people get broken of their Internet use habits this way and continue not using those sites outside of work. Others seem to have a rebound where they leave work and start gorging on Reddit or TikTok or their other preferred sites.
> I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.
Since the industry stops for noone (and you kinda have to keep learning in software dev) and due to the state of the economy it feels like one big rat race to me, I don't foresee that sort of outcome for myself.
I can easily imagine how lazing in the sun in Italy or someplace like that (if the hot summers nowadays don't fuck that up), going swimming and eating healthy food with not a care in the world would surely help one get rid of the dopamine addiction, getting there being the hard part.
The fast paced modern lifestyle and being always online can feel a tad anxiety inducing and unnatural.
> and you kinda have to keep learning in software dev
It's less the constant need to keep learning that bothers me (my formal credentials involve a requirement to undertake a minimum of 30 hours of continuing education annually) than it is that the industry has focused on vendor-specific implementations of various concepts.
I've built a lot of control planes like Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry (and its accompanying BOSH) over my career as a system administrator, but hiring managers and staff engineers these days specifically want Kubernetes experience.
Likewise, I've built a lot of control planes like what backs AWS's EC2 (including multi-tenant accounting and quotas and MAC/RBAC!), but hiring managers and staff engineers specifically want production experience with EC2 (and, seemingly, the broader AWS ecosystem, which is nonetheless approachable for someone who has production distributed systems experience).
At my most tinfoil hat, I want to say that this is blatantly in the interest of setting up a consulting industry around these vendor solutions, and it creates something of a monopsony situation for someone with my skillset.
My formal credentials are as an actuary, so I can at least go back to pursuing claim severity modeling and pricing out when something has a hiccup as a primary responsibility, but this focus is almost certainly a deskilling move otherwise.
> Like putting an alcoholic to work behind a bar and thinking he’d restrain himself.
I've been thinking about this recently. The tools we use as desk workers are only ever one step away from endless streams of addictive content. And in many cases the software we use to do our jobs are adopting dark patterns similar to those which have been successful in consumer apps.
Often the advice is to opt out of the system. I make mobile apps, I can't simply drop out and use a dumb phone (unless I get a new career). My workplace is essentially inside the addictive environment. I have to keep my knowledge up to date and be on top of app/design trends to be successful in my job. This used to feel rewarding to me, but increasingly it doesn't.
I used to be able to go to Twitter and read+learn+be inspired a lot about web development for example, but now it's almost entirely short form video content. And I fall for it every time. And I actively tried to avoid this from happening, I barely use YouTube and I've never used TikTok.
My Dad was a carpenter and it's as if his day-to-day tools were cigarettes or something. It's hard/impossible to avoid this environment when we are increasingly working in it.
Im with you! The most times Im late for "some things on a project" at work is, because, I wasted time reading through dozens of feeds/news/comments on "too many" days so I got somehow a "delay" ;-)
Esp. comments: Actually, I ready mostly those because usually they have more information or context etc.than the article itself. (BTW: thats the reason why Im here on HN :-)
> I don’t use social media
You are using social media right now.
And it's exactly as addictive as Twitter.
Exactly. Whether hn is a social platform is a hot topic for some, but in terms of addictiveness it's on the same level as reddit. And there's no algorithm and sub categories.
But every day there's basically the same type of threads, with the same predictable discussions and you know just by the title and the amount of comments on a thread that you'll get you dose of dopamine whether you're pro or anti any topic that is regularly discussed.
Fair enough.
> I don’t use social media, but I consume news, blogs and newsletters - and comment threads - voraciously.
> It seems to have worsened in recent years. I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.
That's just anxiety from worsening politics, don't you think? Getting out of that anxiety may just be a matter of recognizing that just because bad stuff's happening in certain places that may eventually have repercussions in your own individual life, it doesn't mean that it's going to affect you that bad. It's like someone jumping in the pool. The waves will dissipate by the time they reach you. You can ignore them and just pay attention to the water in your personal space.
I don’t think I’m necessarily caught in a doom loop news cycle. My reading habits are around philosophy, sociology, anthropology, technology.
That’s not to say I’m immune to clickbait!
And even worse, if you're addicted to soda, it is cheaper than bottled water, what if you don't have tap water?
Just focus on putting your phone in a draw for as long as you can, leave a stopwatch on it running so you can see how long you have left it - it will be short to start with but with practice you’ll regain the ability to live without consuming information.
>Just focus on putting your phone in a draw for as long as you can,
I've had a smartphone since the iPhone 4, I think. And while I find it useful, I honestly don't understand how anyone can be addicted to it. Mostly stays in my pocket. If I need navigation, it's out in the car while I find the address. I use it for instant messaging for my wife and kids (rarely the phone call anymore... don't know the last time I answered a call, it's all robot scammers and telemarketers).
The screen's not big enough to read anything, not large enough to watch anything. The sorts of games I enjoyed as a kid just aren't available. Sometimes I'll have an ebook on it, that's ok (it's nearly as big as a paperback used to be), but remembering to load one onto my phone before I got somewhere I'll be waiting doesn't always work out.
I can spend hours online, if I'm not careful. At home, in front of the big monitor. How does anyone get addicted on a tiny little phone screen, with dumbed down apps? I can't even look at pages on Firefox on the phone, without adblock it's just abysmal.
The web changed too, early 2000s was a balanced between real world, old media and web trying to exist, then it swallowed more, and many old things had to migrate or imitate. Now the world is all streamed, always on..
Huh mines been the opposite; I use the internet less and less the last few years.
Difference maybe is during covid I got rid if my TV and got into guitar. I also deleted Twitter and Facebook in the early 2010s. Never fostered a sense of ownership over an account.
Not having the "work laptop to TV" pattern created a need to fill time otherwise. Cooking skills have greatly improved. Home improvements are getting done much cheaper without labor costs.
Sign ups and paywalls everywhere when I do take a minute to surf the web help. Anything that wants me to sign up is ignored.
Further reinforcement during these windows of surfing comes from not being wrapped up in thought-less rush to join in. Just browsing makes the banal content stand out.
This is an amazing read. Hunter S. Thompson would be proud.
What type of work was it? Customer service/tech support? Software development?
Corporate law.
The dealer is in your pocket.
>I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.
Having income and even better, time, to take out of the current workforce cog would do wonders. Sadly, we're in an employer's market and non-internet activities are only getting more expensive.
Ideally, you'd have some getaway with family and/or friends to enjoy the beauty of the world we're in. That's the best antidote to such digital addiction. But I'm sadly been spending all my time trying to get back on the hamster wheel with the job search.
SelfControl app with restrictive whitelist
Done
Do you ever wonder, if you were born in a different era, like 1901, and still had the base drives behind this addiction, how would it channel itself? Like what would you replace the internet with in those days
If my history reading is any indication the answer is ‘getting drunk at the pub’
Opium
Nice article by Stephen Diehl - I really liked his latest on crypto.
I noticed that in certain sections there seems to be a heavy use of LLM-assisted writing, such as this one:
> The platforms did not invent fear, greed, loneliness, or status anxiety. They industrialised their extraction. Their recommendation systems are vast reinforcement-learning loops that continuously experiment on human weakness. Each objective is a moving composite of high-dimensional signals for attention, retention, and conversion, dispersed across models, metrics, tests, and feedback systems. The subject cannot see the experiment. The operator cannot fully explain it. The regulator can barely comprehend it. The loop knows only that one stimulus keeps a person scrolling while another lets them leave. Calm accuracy loses. Threat, transgression, humiliation, and impossible promises win. The resulting social damage appears nowhere in the objective function. It arrives as an externality.
Not sure what you think of it.
In my view, his ideas are nice and interesting, and I would rather read less verbose, less "perfect" blog posts, and reduce or remove the use of LLMs.
That does indeed seem like LLM text to me, which makes a depressing article even morning depressing. Inauthentic and hypocritical.
I'd like to give the author the benefit of the doubt, but since we've set all ourselves on being cynical....
That paragraph jumped out to me, as well. Thats also when the writing got very long winded and seemed to be repeating itself.
Same. Every time I see LLM has contributed to the work I feel it greatly dilutes it. I'll push through if the topic is important and there's good points. But e.g. on YT, a sloppy script that barely stands on its own becomes a hard no on the very first "it's not X, it's Y".
The thing is, the "old" internet is still out there. No one is stopping you from writing a futile blog (as I do.) Or using YouTube only for instruction for tasks around the house. Or learn about any topic imaginable. It's just that the bigger ecosystems have followed their incentives to their logical conclusion (hyper-addictive content to maximize earnings from ad sales.) Any new, "for the people" platform is going to face overwhelming pressure at some point to morph into the platforms we have today. It's just too profitable.
The only way out is: don't to go to the casino in the first place. We need to tend our own [Voltarian](https://www.openculture.com/2020/09/what-voltaire-meant-when...) gardens.
100% agree. Only thing is, as the last few years have shown, if you don't jump into the cesspit but a majority of your fellow humans do, it affects you anyway.
we also need time, energy. and care to make and tend to our own gardens. I see more and more people even with jobs try to go into various hustles just to make ends meet. Let alone those who aren't in work and pushed into NEET-dom.
This also seems to be spilling into the real world. Because of this internet addiction, it’s almost guaranteed that everyone has a relatively expensive computer in their pocket. This has turned into an increasing number of real-world scams, as well as supporting trafficking networks for stealing phones. The scams range from old school pickpocketers to sympathy schemes to full out phone-related accusations – anything to get you to take your phone out of your pocket, potentially unlock it, and have someone swipe it.
If it’s unlocked, they may do some further scams from what’s available on the device, but either way, within days, your phone is somewhere in Asia, disassembled, and sold for scrap and parts.
After reddit prevented browsing old.reddit.com without signing in, I got a lot more active on lemmy. There's some amount of old internet feeling there, you don't get exhausted by the amount of material and it's not overrun by corporations. So far it's been nice.
What killed Reddit wasn't just its corporate chase for profit. It was also the fact that the general public's default internet device shifted to the smartphone and its limited keyboard and screen, no longer the computer. That led to comments largely being reduced to 140-character quips, no longer substantial discussion.
I am skeptical any non-corporate replacement like Lemmy can bring the old internet feeling back, because even on those alternative platforms, you just won't get many people using computers again.
It also was because it became a target to influence and manipulate people both by every day scammers and marketers as well as nation state level actors.
Sure, but that didn't hit a lot of small hobby subreddits until recently. But the discussion culture there had already declined starting a decade ago, and it was ordinary subreddit denizens and their phones to blame, not bots or geopolitical intrigues.
Reddit ended up gamifying for engagement/rage-bait instead of natural, authentic discussion.
Every platform with votes does that. Including HN. A community's feeling is largely determined by its sorting algorithm, and voting selects for engagement/ragebait. Chronological is more balanced, but you have to prevent spam because it also doesn't punish spam. You could make it difficult to get an account, but we're all used to moderators abusing the power now, so that leads to self censorship. You could retry the Something Awful way where you let people have unlimited accounts but they have to pay $10 each time, heh.
The other main way would be manual curation. That basically makes a non-interactive website.
Just a hunch, but I think Aaron Swartz would be disappointed.
(Then you bring up Aaron Swartz and Obama's DOJ on reddit and it's massive downvotes calling you a MAGA nazi blah blah blah.)
I follow reddit through RSS, at least that still works but probably that would be the final nail in the coffin for me. There are some really good subs out there and there is no replacements of those on the open internet. Maybe on Discord but I don't really like to use to that for anything else besides voice chat.
Which subs?
Ok article, and has similar points to “You should quit Reddit” (which was a pretty good book).
About 2/3 in, the sentences got choppier and shorter, and you could tell some context rot was setting in.
I did not pick up on this being ai generated. I guess this was the first time I am realizing I can no longer tell, and it doesn't feel good.
This below example of "it's not x, it's y" often seems to be a giveaway of LLM:
> The platforms did not invent fear, greed, loneliness, or status anxiety. They industrialised their extraction.
pangram says 100% the first paragraph is ai
What did you like about that book or what points stuck out to you?
In a previous generation, people would detect those technological snake oil sellers , call them out , even chase them. Because they could tell scammers from non-scammers.
Now we have already 2-3 generations raised to consider scam practices to be the norm , and even to celebrate behavioral tricks and audience maximizing optimization at any cost (clickbait!).
I cannot be convinced this is a normal thing. Over time, things revert to normal, but often in an explosive way.
Really. I think snake oil sellers were so popular because people believed them. It's no different today.
Today you can recognize snake oil scams, most people can't. Nothing has changed.
Millions of people still fall victims to pyramid schemes and that's not due to the internet.
"There's a sucker born every minute" is a saying for a reason. It's a damn shame, but these things exist and happen because they work to a non-trivial degree. There are two forms of capitalism: in service to your fellow man (solving a problem/fulfilling a need) or in opposition (arbitraging naivety and ignorance). There are customers for both and always will be [1].
[1] https://youtu.be/WiUsWg5l04E?t=70&is=M_OmEcG4_d1HM6pR
This so exaggerated. If you think some of the people you know are assholes, that's fine. If you think all of them are assholes, you are either choosing the wrong places to be, or (more likely) the problem is with you.
It's written in a hyperbolic way, but I don't think your characterization is right. The author isn't saying everyone is an asshole, he's saying the systemic forces are mostly aligned in a predatory direction, and that part is absolutely true. I have a good time on Instagram despite the ways the platform is structured.
Good point on the systemic forces. Yet I feel your second point falls broadly in with what I meant with "choosing the right places". E.g., I also use YouTube, but don't watch shorts, avoid clickbait, ragebait, etc, and filter ads. That makes the place OK for me. But as you say, it's then ok despite the structure of the platform.
>This so exaggerated
No, it's just what's happening online.
>If you think some of the people you know are assholes, that's fine. If you think all of them are assholes,
Wrong thread? Doesn't seem to correspond to anything in the article.
"Online" is not one place. And what the author is complaining about is not happening in the places I spend 99% of my online time on.
That's just the saying as I know it. Regarding the post it would be along the lines of "if you think everyone is a predator/grifter/scammer, it may be a problem with you or the places you roam"
I don't think everyone is an asshole exactly but something is wrong with more and more people and you see it everything from how people drive to the degree to which so many things seem more adversarial or feel like part time jobs.
Hm, maybe. Though I thought that's a combination of what Corona did to the society, late-stage capitalism and me getting older and more sceptical.
There are two competing ways of looking at this.
1. If everyone you know is an asshole about some particular thing, then you're probably the asshole. Think politics or design.
2. Everybody is an asshole some of the time for some reason. Because the internet connects and exposes us to so many people that even if someone only acts like an asshole very rarely said connectivity and algorithm boosting ensures you get exposed to it.
I wish I knew more assholes. It's the imbeciles that I keep running into.
A good quote: "Sell people a worldview, and they will advertise it for free because criticism of the product now feels like criticism of the self"
Internet didn't change, it's population did. It's 8 billion potential victims and all bit more sophisticated thieves under one roof.
Can't blame Internet. People which were scammed "offline" are now scammed online.
The internet is the people using it, if many of its users have come up with more effective ways to exploit the rest than the internet has become a worse place.
The internet is an ecosystem just like any other one on earth. Being it's a pretty new one the typical parasites and viruses that grow in every environment hadn't really developed to fill that ecosystem in the first decade or two of it. Now we are reaching the cambrian explosion of bullshit that the human animal isn't innoculated against.
So yea, the internet is a worse place, but really because the early internet wasn't realistically behaved for the amount of free energy it left around.
You know, we could just put those people in jail if we wanted to. At least when they're traceable - like everyone who uses a phone number or an IP address. They actually do this in Europe,.as a result there aren't many spam calls originating from European numbers.
Internet deserves some blame too, when you have 8 billion people, but only 4 billion addresses, you are naturally going to end up with a lot of centralized services to work around those limits.
You’re right but it’s a point I’ve tried to make for years to no avail.
The V4 limit is one thing that does this. The other is DNS, which is inherently hierarchical because it’s a tree. The whole structure of the net and the web promotes the emergence of aggregation points, which then amass insane amounts of largely unearned power and influence through sheer network effect.
“The medium is the message” is a much deeper statement than people think. The structure of the medium and the sympathetic structures it encourages to form around it are the message. IPv4 with NAT and DNS with its real estate model directly encourage the formation of aggregators and siloes and that’s where it starts.
People don’t get it. I’ve given up trying to explain. Systems thinking isn’t as titillating as conspiracism, doomerism, or misanthropic cynicism I guess.
Does not seem convincing to me so far and i like systems thinking. Do you have a link, where you wrote more?
I think a fundamental problem is that micropayments don’t work. Instead we pay with attention, i.e. by watching ads. That already worked before the internet, in tv and radio and newspapers.
We desperately need to replace ICANN.
People should know more about data fusion. How browser javascript fingerprints and unique personal id of the adtech works. Hint it traveres VPNs. The seven has an id of you
Check your id https://amiunique.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_fusion
I'm using an addon that just changes my unique fingerprint every ten minutes. Not sure if that helps or not.
So I think there is an oversight in this essay, and it's that society becoming predatory is much bigger than the Internet: it is the story of the decay of America, reflected and exacerbated by the internet, as it becomes a anti-democratic huckster society dominated by grifters, theocrats, and snake-oil sellers.
Forget the internet, you can't get your home repaired, your car worked on, an appliance purchased, shop for food, or do anything else without wading through a corrupt morass of that mixes woo, subcultures, grift, and subscriptions. Maybe it's the hospital that wants to charge a $25 a day fee to make the hospital room TV grant access to basic cable channels instead of nothing. Maybe it's the elementary school district that mandates every physical interaction between students is called in to the police - like little Jenny shoved Johnny who skinned his knee because he teased her, call the cops, it's policy. Or the way that every customer service interaction is routed through endless AIs because it's cheaper than solving a problem. Or how it seems like nobody will do right by anyone else until lawyers get involved. Cut taxes year after year, while everything decays, we fail the younger generations, and everyone thinks you fake it till you make it because it's all zero sum... It's how America heads straight to banana republic, and it might be too late to turn.
If you spend your time online, and the online time is spent on the major sirens, then yeah, it's a predatory cesspit.
No one forces anyone to use the internet, and certainly one can avoid being snared by the sirens.
A little self control goes a long way.
The predatory cesspit has always been there. It just moves every few decades. That moving process always looks like what the author outlined here.
New technology emerges. It's first few years are innocent. Then, someone discovers how to con people at scale with it and gets stupidly rich. Then the copycats emerge. Then it gets enshittified until there's nothing left.
It happened with land, medicine, books, steam engines, looms, radio, and TV. It was only a matter of time before it came for the Internet and smartphones. It's happening at plaid speed with AI even.
(Medical grift in particular is an ancient business. Countless fortunes were made selling placebos (or worse!) that claimed to cure literally everything.)
My feeling is that the current state of the internet is just exposing how humans behave normally, the guardrails have just fallen away. Everyone is immune to shame, the threat of consequences etc. You see this in real life on the streets too.
I think the opposite. The vast majority of kind and gently people are suddenly observing a small but ultra loud obnoxious minority take the stage and burn resources like nothing else to get maximum attention. Attention wins and you don’t get it by being gentle, balanced, kind and most importantly, don’t care about maximum attention.
There is the saying "the empty vessel makes the loudest noise". This was part of the reason I eventually left Reddit, as I was getting sucked in to the habit of making empty meme-like responses to posts.
Some of the worst places for comments I've seen are on youtube - just the lowest effort ("who is listening to this in 2026?!") or the most obnoxious, or just misunderstood. Partly this is because of voting systems combined with large numbers of people. Partly because of bots I suppose.
I watched the announcement on the detection on gravitational waves on YT. The comments scrolling by were like from another world, I even made some screenshots, insane, obnoxious. Could be bots I suppose, I hear from political commentators here who advocate for thoughtful commentary "from the middle", that their social media posts are always very quickly flooded by the same kind of polarizing low-level comments that drown out any intellectual and thoughtful debate. It's probably partly bots, partly a small minority of people that get sucked into it by the bots. I have no problem believing this is Russia, or NK, undermining our democracy in a fully automated fashion.
I hope you are right
Yes. I remember reading a piece on /r/SlateStarCodex subreddit many years that said something like, "Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people," and that had an impact on me. In fact, many articles by Scott Alexander had an impact on me, though I don't know what he's up to these days.
Okay, found it -- https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
Edit: It was written in October 2018 -- 8 years ago. Feels centuries ago, to be frank. We're moving at absolute breakneck speed in tech.
I'd say at least 1/3 of internet commenters clearly have GAD (generalized anxiety disorder). Most of them undiagnosed. Anxiety triggers ancient animalistic parts of the brain and the "need to do something NOW" which often then gets released into negative / angry / aggressive posts.
Depressed people are the opposite, they tend to lurk and not care that much
I remember back in the "old" internet pre-2010, there was basically zero anxious people posting.
I blame A/B testing.
Fear and anxiety sells best (even better than Sex). When you end up selecting procedures that ensures the maximum sales/clicks, you are actually optimizing for things that cause maximum fear and anxiety?
And the SlateStarCodex people are also, for the vast majority, batshit insane people behind a veil of "no but you see i'm a rationalist". That includes Scotty.
This is the right takeaway. Before the internet went mainstream, these ultra loud and obnoxious minorities were restricted to being obnoxious within their local communities, and their speech was restricted to what they were willing to say to others face-to-face.
Now, both of those restrictions have been lifted: they can now act obnoxious in front of a global audience that will be forced to listen to them, and they no longer have to worry about the potential consequences of being obnoxious in person.
Us kind souls are not forced to listen, however, something in our nature draws us to these extremes, and then, observing a lot of these extremes, our minds label them as “common”. It’s all quite unsurprising when put like this, imho.
The antidote is real interactions, and ignoring the online extremes.
Thank you
Yeah, I just came back from traveling a couple of weeks, and I have had such wonderful experiences with people. There were times where I just wanted to hug a taxi cab driver (ie when a Grab driver was holding an umbrella over my vomiting daughter [car sickness] and me, with his car stopped by at the side of a highway... etc.)
I came to comment the exact opposite. People are good, caring, kind, helpful, thoughtful, funny, interesting. It’s visible every day in real life beyond the streets… in both small and big interactions.
When you choose to see beyond the surface, it becomes clear this is the cause of a system. A system that is nearly impossible to escape, and which will last for the rest of our lives. But still a system, and not the people participating.
The internet has a big "dogs barking at each other through the closed gate" dynamic. People are much more rude and aggressive to each other from a safe distance.
The safe distance is anonymity. A few of the bold ones that are all in on the grift or just genuine assholes will own their opinions and behaviour.
All the little followers have a different tune when confronted with a real social situation, at least one that isn't a mob providing safety in numbers.
It's similar to the bully dynamics at school. Get one of the hangers-on by themselves and they are civil with you. When they are with the bully peer-pressure stops them from thinking for themselves.
I think it's actually inverted, the sudden arrival of this new information layer is bringing out the worst in people as they try to suddenly adapt to this new social environment. Even worse, is that it works(ed) and now the behavior is influencing real life.
This is how humans behave under anonymity, towards an anonymous crowd of people. It is something you don't see on the streets with the exception of a few assholes, but you see it a bit more on the road, where being in a vehicle puts some distance.
It is not a lack of shame and the treat of consequences. Take soldiers for instance, instinctively, they don't want the enemy they face dead, it takes a lot of conditioning to have them kill without hesitation and it often results in mental health issues later. And solders are rewarded for killing the enemy, it means the shame and threat of consequences go the other way. Normal people just don't want to hurt others.
But the more detached we become from the actual person, the easier it is to be an asshole. This is what happens on the internet where people are just entries in a database, at best a name and an avatar.
Well, the guardrails, by which I assume you mean legal and social accountability, were the norm for most of human history, which is why I don't consider the behaviour of anonymous and unaccountable humans on the internet to be "normal". Of course, humans are capable of great evil, but we are also pretty good at building social structures to prevent the worst of it. But those structures don't work so well on the anonymous internet.
> You see this in real life on the streets too.
To nowhere near the same extent, in my experience. Most people in real life are still fairly polite, even to strangers. It's insane to me how rude people can be on social media. Some of the aggressive responses I've received on Reddit (to fairly innocuous comments) I would never in a million years get in real life. (And this is also true of the 90s internet.)
Sort of the paradox of humanity. I actually like the majority of people I meet in person. But ‘humanity’ in the aggregate is just fucking terrible and constantly finds new and interesting ways to lower my expectations further.
I actually think the opposite, the hatred on the internet seems artificial to me.
In the current day when AI is so prevalent, it always makes me wonder how many posts are made by agents instructed to maximize engagement by making people angry.
so normal human behavior is immune to shame and consequences?
I think the fundamental issue is social communication without any social consequences. In real life if you continually insult and troll people, you will be a pariah. Online, you can find others who admire and support that behavior. And all you need is another anonymous/pseudonymous account to keep doing it if you get blocked.
And no, that does not mean that I am calling for identification. It just seems to be a natural consequence of having social interaction without real consequences.
> that does not mean that I am calling for identification
The worst people in this set are public personalities. Everyone knows who they are. If anything that forces them to double down.
Economic exploitation is just one way to take advantage of people who lack internal contentment. The other forms are cultural and social.
Modifying one element in this environment in favor of others won't make things better. You could even argue that less people are being financially scammed online than they are cognitively.
These problems are not endemic to the internet. But the internet does cast a broader net and provide a wider variety of ways for people to become afflicted by whatever it is I'm trying to describe.
What ruined the internet is monetized social media, regardless ad driven or direct monetization. Monetization will basically ruin anything meant to be fun, even a simple board game with friends and family, if it stopped being about spending quality time and having fun and now there’s a competition of how much will each make at the end, it won’t be fun, you will see tribalism, manipulation, cheating, and other shenanigans.
> What ruined the internet is monetized social media, regardless ad driven or direct monetization
Agreed, and the first step ought to be a push for demonetized / citizen-owned platforms:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
Note, however, that even with achieving this first step, we'll still have a platform full of profit-motivated actors, because our economies incentivize this behavior whether online or IRL.
Both problems need solving, but the first one is easier, and demonstrating its solution on a large scale could help convince everyone that it's an endeavor worth applying to all domains.
There’s also a bad side.
We're evolutionarily programmed to stop everything and focus on anything that elicits fear in our environment. Enormous amounts of money has been invested to design algorithms that capture our attention with fear because they need your attention to sell advertising. Everything's optimized to make you enraged and afraid because it works. They're really good at it too.
I know they got my number. I've had to delete every social media site I used to be engaged in (I suppose except this one) for the sake of my mental health.
When you ride a bus, you pay for the fuel with money. When you go online, you pay both for the internet itself and with your personal information, whatever it may be.
Nah. It's still the output of multiple ppl merged into one. There's no governing force there. Just human nature, across the world, more captured, more visible than ever before.
Hell is other people.
the internet is home to plenty of predatory cesspits, but the real stuff is still there too. it's not as convenient or addicting as content that doubles as a funnel for the ad machines, but the real spaces and media that aren't dominated by the advertising industrial complex still exist- just like in other forms of media that preceded the internet.
Where is the directory of real stuff?
I saw a video of a doctor answering a call and the caller started saying some strange hate/concensus-pushing message about Jews hating people who hate Jews in a very angry tone. Neither the doctor nor the commenters suggested it was AI, but it certainly sounded like it. I got a flash of a future where every telemarketer call is either an angry voice ready to convince you of something, or the gender you like trying to woo you.
How discouraging would it be (intentionally) if every time an AI had access to your attention, it was trying to make you angry. This would probably cause a lot of people to disengage, a lot to get angry, and a few able to live without being affected by the laser guided anger and manipulation
It's almost as if a group of CEO's got together and asked each other, "How can we monetize the time our employees spend off work?". The answer was, apparently, to reduce purchasing-power adjusted pay to the point where hobbies, like the internet, must generate income for people if they want to afford basic necessities. Hence, stagnant wages and the rise of side-hustle economy. Now everybody goes back to work after they get home.
If you buy this (wildly speculative and unsupported) theory, then the enshittification of the Internet is only natural. The best way to ruin a hobby is to turn it into a job. The internet was not perfect, but a better place back when people did it as a fun hobby with no expectation of income. Now, everything has to produce financial gain for somebody. Kids still make the same videos of themselves kicking each other in the nuts, but now they have to remind you to like and subscribe in order to fund future tomfoolery.
Perhaps what we have is not a problem born of a new technology (i.e. The internet) so much as a societal problem resulting from social regress. We're no longer dividing the pie up equitably enough, so people now feel squeezed and have become utterly obsessed with money. As it turns out, that makes them less fun.
Half the comments here, for instance.
The root cause underlying all of that is the simple fact that the average person just isn't intelligent enough. They fall for the grift, they fall for the advertising, for the manipulation, the propaganda, the echo chambers, the emotion, the hate, they fall for it all. They're either unable to see it or escape it or both.
With the internet connecting everyone together, giving you direct, immediate, access to billions of people from the comfort of your own home, of course there's going to be classes of people working to siphon money (or power) from the unintelligent into their own pockets, rather than doing the hard work of actually producing value for their civilization.
There's also no real solution to this.
Of course, educating people is a solution, somehow getting people to be more intelligent. But that's a slow, long, process, and the more I see, the more I realize just how commonly intelligent people still fall prey to the same things.
The only other solution I see is blocking access for the majority for either consuming information from or contributing information to the internet, which is a hard pill to swallow, and which has its own horrible, and mostly unsolvable issues.
This reads to as pure AI slop to me, and Pangram agrees (100% AI).
To use one of the idioms that give this impression, this is not just knee-jerk whining. It's material to what the article is about. If you're going to raise this topic, be a human and say something constructive. An AI generated ragebait whinge about ragebait is ragebait squared with a heaped serving of hypocrisy on top. This exemplifies everything it complains about.
Yes. "High confidence." I confirmed it myself:
> https://i.ibb.co/m5tPKPYS/Screenshot2026829-1.png
But forget Pangram. This passage, from the conclusion, is 100% rock-solid proof that Claude was a key contributor.
> "The question is not whether the internet contains useful things. It does. The question is whether human existence should be organised around alien and inhuman objective functions no human chose and nobody can inspect or understand."
Also, I think that "grift" (repeated throughout the article) is very poorly defined. I also think that most cryptocurrencies are, in the general case, a bad example of a "grift."
Grift poorly defined? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grift
But this guy's talking about drop-shippers, life coaches, cryptocurrency, online "influencing" in general, and other things. Very few of those fit your own definition, as there's nothing illicit involved.
In some cases, e.g. if you compare cryptocurrency to drop-shipping, there's not even much common ground, except "markets things through social media."
Sadly, I can't find anything to disagree with, here...:(
I started using the Internet because of the convenience it offered. Now that convenience is gone. Due to ads, surveillance, toxicity, misinformation, slop.. It just isn't worth being online anymore. So instead, now I read books, meet with people, attent talks, go to a museum. It's not complicated when you think about it...
> Crypto has become the subject of my verbal ire so often because it is the apotheosis of the grift economy.
AI is replacing Crypto on the topic in some sense.
Good writing includes some examples or statistics.
The ratio of grifters to non-grifters could have halved or risen tenfold in the last few decades. How would we know?
What percentage of the population "now appears willing to devote every waking hour to fleecing their fellow man as a career choice?"
How "many online grifters are themselves marks"?
The observations appear like disconnected pieces or isolated trends. They are not. You need to step back and look at the full picture. It's just one trend with multiple manifestations. It doesn't require lengthy essays if you look at it's core.
It's the business beast riding the tech monster. Its not people. People are simply driven by the beast.
I have been to a village recently, hoping to find the foods and fruits I remember from my childhood. They are all gone. Seeds were GM modified, chemicals entered through soil and water, the entire soil layer has lost its nature and ecosystem. The livestock has changed as well. You don't get the same chicken and eggs anymore. Grains, spices, pulses, milk, water everything changed. Just like internet, the enshittification happened everywhere.
That's not an isolated trend.
If you don't know the song Welcome to the Internet by Bo Burnham, allow me to introduce you to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
(Heck of a karakoe number if you can pull it off.)
You could replace nearly every instance of "the Internet" in this article with "capitalism" and it would make perfect sense.
Yea, It seems that the author is just waking up to the reality, and mistakenly thinks it's all the fault of some new fangled thing...
quite frankly iam14andthisisdeep material
It's interesting to me how complaints about widespread Internet political propaganda and "grifting" so consistently reveal the author's own political biases. It's really hard to write about it in a detached way.
(It's strange to see people accuse others of grifting but then continue to engage with the arguments made in that "grift" as though the other party sincerely believed the claims. In my experience, the claims usually probably are made sincerely, and the "grifting" terminology is used because the accuser can't accept that the other worldview exists, or else just as a generic boo word.)
"Kind of" feels like the understatement of the century
Part 1: Everything was turned into social User Generated Content to reduce editorial costs. Part 2: Predatory third parties ranging from nation states to SEO agencies started mass filling UGC with anxiety inducing brain rot. Part 3: the brainrot generation is automated by AI and it silences any real people or voices. Part 4: People go outside to touch grass and Part 5: That leaves opportunities for platforms for real people with good culture
Heh “predatory cesspit”. Ironically, the internet is kind of returning to its roots in this respect.
A billion hungry discorporate souls, roaming a vast non-space, looking to feed their hunger, looking to eat each other. Some call that hell.
tl;dr: The internet is the thing that needs the most attention when educating your kids.
I get a lot of value from the internet. I fell for some traps (instagram, facebook with very little value but lots of wasted energy) that I mostly got rid of.
But I have many products I am very happy about, that I got to know through other people on the internet.
"Usenet is a cesspool, a dung heap" -- Patrick A. Townson -- published in May 1994 in The UNIX-Hater's Handbook.
Well duh, was this not expected? The Internet userbase has transitioned dramatically over the past several decades.
It moved from an outpost for computer nerds in the early 1990s, to a middle-class product in the 2000s, then everybody got access in the 2010s with the spread of the smartphone.
The demographics of the internet look nothing like they did when it was created.
The tools, business models have changed just as much as the demographics if not more.
That’s why you’re seeing stratification reemerge imo. Paywalls are probably the most obvious feature of this, where information worth accessing these days tends to be paywalled. By contrast high volume, low quality slop supported by ads is generally free.
I've seen this same discussion in a million guises.
This particular essay starts with
> I’m a kid of the 90s, and I still remember the early internet.
... and then contains a lot of predictable stuff about how and why avalon became: tarnished, effete, weak, tawdry, despoiled, no-fun, toxic, predatory, rapacious etc. You can take your pick, it doesn't matter. It's the same argument no matter which adjective you choose.
It finally gets to
> The question is not whether the internet contains useful things. It does.
That's a truism of no value.
Take the whole essay, replace "internet" with a country's name and amend some of the details. You've seen it before? You read it every damned day in every form of media. It's used to justify just about anything; the good and the bad. In the end it's a boring, repetitive argument.
At the edge, it reduces to: my country used to be great and now it's crap because it's not how it used to be - so, we need to roll everything back despite the number of years that have passed between then and now, and despite any of the positive things that may have come during that time.
I love Stephen's writing, and this is so well written.
> I was very wrong. The grift economy is massive. More disturbing still, it is participatory. A large and growing share of the population now appears willing to devote every waking hour to fleecing their fellow man as a career choice.
I find myself worrying about this a lot. For what it's worth though, the non-grifters, the people interested in building a community, are still out there. To find them, you need to look for groups that add no financial value – join an art club, volunteer locally. When I spend time with those groups, I'm reminded that not everyone's a grifter in real life.
Also, this explorable by Nicky Case is evergreen: https://ncase.me/trust/
> I love Stephen's writing
You mean you love Claude's writing.
I've followed Stephen for a while now, and I don't think this is Claude.
Well, I'm sorry to say, but you've been reading AI slop for a while now.
https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/piranesi/
> Piranesi is the opposite: everything stripped to the bone, every sentence load-bearing.
Yikes.
you've got to be kidding me
Sadly, one of the contributors to this are the "Little" Tech Bros. They have drunk the kool aid at work. A bit libertarian or right wing in nature, they salivate at the latest Full Self Driving (supervised) lie, or AI hype, or crypto when it first came out. Some intricate new feature or language puts them into paroxysms of joy. In their view, any attempt to regulate or draw boundaries around "tech" equates to communism, marxism, and attempts to curtail so called freedom of speech. Don't use it if you don't like it, they say.
By Little Tech Bros i mean developers with lots of technical skills, but who haven't been lucky enough to be in the right spot at the right time with an IPO. They keep evangelizing hoping megabucks lightning will hit them the next time. It won't. More likely, a layoff notice. Because Big Tech Bro figured out how to grab all the money from their excess productivity.
I will provide a contrary opinion.
The internet has made available a wide array of facts. And combined with needing to double-check the frequently incorrect hallucinations of AI, this set of facts has a devastating, world-altering effect on the white collar professional class.
And cognitive dissonance is the only retreat; the tyranny of reality is too much to bear.
I have IRC logs from 1998
Most people were dicks even back then
including me :)
I think part of it is due to corrupt government regulating internet as if only Facebooks and Reddits were on the market. It destroyed niche forums and made the place less democratised. Today you cannot just rent a server and start a forum without massive financial backing and therapist on speed dial.
Did you know that if you just run a forum you don't go to jail for that? First the police have to notice you in a negative light for any reason, and second they have to bother to do something about it, and thirdly their first interaction with you is more likely to be "oi! stop doing that!" than anything else. What killed them isn't the law, it was firstly centralisation pressure, and secondly our own paranoia about the law.
And if the government wants to arbitrarily get you, it can do that with or without you running a forum.
The internet
Is
For porn
Not if Texas has anything to say about it
Everything is kind of a predatory cesspit now
maybe the physical world is the moderator of the dream world (internet). In the absence of the physical world the dream world runs rampant.
with no empirical reference, truth becomes a matter of popularity or the loudest argument.
with no space, everybody lives next door to a thousand assholes.
If you go to doomer places on the internet (this thread included), you will see the internet as doomed
Where to go to see the internet is blessed with a future of truth, fraternity and general goodness?
VC fund meetings, maybe?
AI slop (like the article) makes it a worse place.
I ran this article through through Pangram and it says the text is AI written
Fully AI generated article complaining about the state of the internet.
The sheer irony of the word "grift" being used 13 times within it...
Blows my mind that several trillions in I still see so much LLM text with no stylistic awareness.
I don't doubt that there are very large communities of grifters, but to say that they are "the Internet" seems a bit much. If you see grifting as the central core of the Internet, maybe that's a problem with your filter bubble. You need to filter that stuff out.
Can you name three popular websites that aren't grifts or platforms mainly for grifts?
you forgot to add "slow" to predatory cesspit, or with 4 pages open and 880meg doing who knows what while everything bogs down, the though of closeing the browser and clearing the cache becomes the simpler more pragmatic option, though this dependent on the OS still responding
This is a little premature - I'm about a month away from a really good launch date, but the sentiment here is too good a match to miss...
A long time ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I set up my first webserver. In those halcyon days you had to email CERN to get your website added to the list of websites in the world; a list people downloaded as the sum total of what the web was and where they could visit.
Things have come a long way since then, but maybe not always for the better. The ad-companies have wormed their way into just about everything on the web, and the tech billionaires have funded it because they can make even more money at the general public's expense.
I recently got very fed up with Reddit's anti-user policies, and decided 'screw it, there's not that much special here'. As a result, Blewit[1] came into existence: it's an experiment - can an old-style just-for-the-good-of-the-community-it-represents website still function in today's modern world? We'll see...
Blewit takes no user information other than a username/password. We're forced to accept cloudflare's country-code so we can be compliant with the Online Safety Act, but we deliberately don't even ask for an email address.
We don't track. We don't have ads that are other ways to track. We don't have algorithms that force engagement along the most-outrageous pathway. We don't have analytics to sell you stuff. We don't put tracking pixels in our site, and when you upload an image, we strip it of all the EXIF/Location data so it can't be used to track you by proxy.
More bluntly, all the dark patterns are missing. By design. It hearkens back to a simpler time, where people did things simply because they thought it was cool, and others might like it too.
So it'll be interesting to see if something like Reddit (I think it's better, but I'm biased) can survive in the far-more-predatory world that we live in, than when I first started using the web. The site is deliberately lean-and-mean, and I think I can give it the on-ramp it needs to become successful if it gets the engagement of sufficient people. Again, I guess we'll see :)
Enjoy.
1: https://blewit.uk/
You call it a "Reddit alternative" but that's not really how the world works. People don't go out looking for Reddit-like sites, stumble across Reddit and sign up. People are just going about their business, find Reddit, and eventually feel pressured to sign up so they can post, comment or vote. The funnel starts with people stumbling across engagement-worthy content on your site, which only exists and is findable if it exists and is findable.
Hey, everyone starts somewhere :)
The “prime directive” of the site is “do not track”. Historically that’s been irrelevant to the internet at large, but I think there is a growing feeling of disquiet over just how spied-on, measured, packaged, and sold we all are. If that undercurrent grows, the world might be a different place in a year or two.
Cheers
Reddit itself populated its site with bot content scraped from other sites, and presented in a way users liked more, long before it had enough UGC. That's why comments didn't exist for the first year or so of its existence - the lack of comments would have betrayed how many users there weren't.
AI slop.
Now, for the last 20 years.
Everything on the Internet is designed to enrage or sexually arouse you as quickly as possible, including this article.
You can have both very quickly at the same time if you start playing League of Legends
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP-KvpO804M
lol never seen that before
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAQSicsoEu0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random you may get lucky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint%27s_triad
I have no words.
These look like words to me
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komarodin
I’m neither aroused nor enraged. Good job.
Nah dawg, here's some chill pills:
Bird bath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BJ0L750B9A
The Wind in the Willows live action movie (2006): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZAq_4ZO_3U
its late, go to sleep…: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0bATLAjEkI (this whole channel is a ..vibe)
Samorost 3: https://store.steampowered.com/app/421120/Samorost_3/
Wingspan: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1054490/Wingspan/
Tiny Bang Story: https://store.steampowered.com/app/96000/The_Tiny_Bang_Story...
There's good shit out there and everywhere, if you but let yourself take a break
Literally 100% AI generated slop, disappointing
Now?
I’m sorry but I’m sick to death of all this rose tinted glasses crap about the history of the Internet
I got on the Internet in 1993 and it is always been a cesspit of bullshit. You could easily find child pornography online in the 90s and there were all kinds of scams constantly being tried
Both those things are still true today
So it’s the same then like my point is
> I still remember the early internet. It was slow, ugly, unreliable, and full of cranks, a strange world of wheezing dial-up modems, Usenet flamewars, <marquee> tags, and dancing babies.
I remember the 1990s and this guy's "description" is massively biased.
I remember oldschool browser games in the 1990s - AM Mari (Archmage, from a korean company), or even Java Applets such as Dragonquest or whatever was the name. Or Joe Cartoon - may be a bit after 1990s too. Either way, many such things were not a problem here. I never used a dial-modem, for instance, even in the 1990s had fast flat-rate cable connections that was surprisingly cheap. Still kind of is cheap, for the net-value I get from the world wide web, though I agree it has gone down in quality, for many reasons. One reason is ... Google. And other mega-corporations. These try to destroy the internet. Or rather they want to control more of it.
> The scammer once had to find a victim. The platform now finds one, profiles the weakness, optimises the pitch, processes the payment, and recommends the next scam. What was once an aberration has become the norm.
Not incorrect indeed. The private companies here abuse the people. The problem is: what to do about that? Google de-facto controls the internet via its evil adChrome empire. All the ad-money revenue goes through this. It's kind of like a giant mafia system established here. Didn't the free market philosophy once claim that monopolies should be avoided? Why did the USA establish these monopolies?
> Each feeling arrives with something to buy.
Not sure what the guy means. Ublock origin blocks almost all ads. I don't buy anything advertised; I don't even notice it because it does not show up.
Not everyone uses the internet in the same way.
> People doomscroll until they acquire the anxiety that the next influencer will monetise.
Doomscrolling is indeed addictive; I do that on youtube shorts. The shorts are progressively getting worse though and also AI slop spams fake in, which invalidates any time I spend on these too. I usually close the tab after 10 downwards scrolls or so. I am accessing the internet on the desktop though; on smartphones this is probably a more default-y behaviour to swipe.
> The system is dopaminergic in the most banal and mechanical sense. It runs on anticipation, uncertainty, and variable reward.
Ok, I stopped reading there. The guy thinks that humans are simple systems based on biochemistry. I fail to see how I would fit into that scheme at all. And I understand biochemistry. I'd wish he would have spoken more about who ruined the internet, not what the thing today called the internet is about. We need to isolate and counter those who ruined the internet. Google is a huge factor here but not the only one.
I noticed a drastic drop in the quality of YouTube shorts when they removed the dislike button.
This post is one long strawman argument.
I have only one agenda - my own. People hate that I think nowadays.
You need to be in some kind of camp, even for something so minor as skincare brand or fanfiction.
I think that it was fine until the internet started to influence the real life way too much. You used to be able to log out and gain distance to the bullshit on the web.
Now the bullshit has permeated into the mainstream and you need very drastic measures and personality to reject it.
You will lose some people for this but there are still some older folks that can talk about anything and will never get offended. Never conform but also don't become a contrarian for the sake of it.
The modern life is an art how to stay weird in a world that wants to squash you into some kind of label. How to stay genuine
It starts during simple social interactions in real life. You make a joke about alcohol, now you feel the pressure of the crowd to become 'the funny drunk'. Squash it as soon as possible now you are a teetotaler. Now tell them joke about drugs. Make it all too confusing at all so they lose any idea about what to make of you. Obfuscation. Now you are free in the purest sense. There is no template for you aside from the one you craft or discover for yourself.
I even went further and made myself genderless so that these norms cannot easily qualify me into anything really. There is 50% chance if someone calls me a woman or a man.
Sometimes I support the feminism. Sometimes I give myself to patriarchy and observe how that feels.
Maybe I made it all up and nothing I wrote is genuine.
We should strive to be stranger or at least do not treat it as something bad but as a virtue. Of course do not try hard but just explore the weird and see where it takes you.
So ...it's the same social dumpster fire humanity has always been?
Cast aside the syntax and semantics of religion for financially engineered beliefs; buy low, sell high or you'll be "left behind!"
Small step forward from "believe in my take on Christianity or your soul will be eternally damned!"
Mirror neurons fostering same flock building via corps people used to build via scripture.
Just more lazy people who want zero responsibility to themselves and everyone else to have responsibility for them.