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What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

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Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#861

Post by zahlman »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #54

Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going…

> a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become.... Like what [person in my ideological group] did [allegedly, with no explanation or description] with [thing that happened online]... [this comment made online]

I see.

You complain of astroturfing, but you seem unaware of things that you have come to believe because of it.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#862

Post by zahlman »

hellohello2 wrote: post #467
marginalia_nu wrote: post #54

Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going…

Yeah I'm not sure what happened but Reddit in particular is beyond saving, and I'm not saying it was ever great. I think we simply don't know how to create online communities that make any sense yet. I'd rather have second hand smoke than any more algorithmic "engagement" maximization at this point.

> I think we simply don't know how to create online communities that make any sense yet.

We do, and we knew decades ago.

The problem is, they can't become large or useful. That limitation is inherent, and due to human social behaviour.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#863

Post by onraglanroad »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #449
MarkusQ wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's making money off our misery exactly? I can see it as a foreign adversary psyop (they benefit from us being demoralized) or as a side effect of the attention economy (more clicks is all that matters) or even a hyper-partisanship epiphenomenon (whichever side is currently down wants people to think everything is awful). But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-mo…

Advertisers make money on clicks, and content creators get a cut. This is the backbone that the entire internet operates on. Fear is the best driver of attention and clicks. Someone can choose to pass on a light-hearted fun article. If they feel their life or the fate of the universe is in the balance, they will read it. There isn't some evil mastermind behind it, just the banal economic incentives and evolutionary p…

> by way of example, when every woman I know got pregnant

Impressive work, but surely there were suspicions?

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#864

Post by tokioyoyo »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #483
marginalia_nu wrote: post #54

Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going…

Many folks have talked about optimizing for engagement and while I do think this is a factor, I don't think this is the cause. HN has a pretty simple set of algorithms and yet it's largely followed the same trend of negativity and despair. I'm partial to what I call the "doomer effect". If you feel sad or disenfranchised you're just much more likely to spend time online talking. A person with a fulfilling social life…

> If you're in a bad place, as long as a forum will have your posts you can post to your heart's content.

I agree with you, but would also add that, ~99% of people do not post anything. They mostly consume. When your consumption habits are constantly doomerism, and "all the bad stuff that will happen in the next 5 years", your mind also starts thinking that way. And spirals down that way. There's a lack of healthy dose of reality in online circles. So everything just becomes outrage/doomer hell.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#865

Post by zahlman »

rootusrootus wrote: post #470
hellohello2 wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm not sure what happened but Reddit in particular is beyond saving, and I'm not saying it was ever great. I think we simply don't know how to create online communities that make any sense yet. I'd rather have second hand smoke than any more algorithmic "engagement" maximization at this point.

I feel like we're probably going to have to give up something, most probably anonymity, to get back to anything like sanity. We'll see communities that are militantly anti-AI where it's hard to get in and easy to get kicked out, and it will probably cost money and require you to divulge who you really are. It could still be semi-anonymous at the user level but not at the administrative level. I'd like to see somethin…

Giving up anonymity would be giving up on the entire idea wholesale.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#866

Post by zahlman »

purplemoonx wrote: post #587
marginalia_nu wrote: post #54

Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going…

The fact you say "on mastodon" proves it's effectively centralized, just pointing that out

As much as I'd like to endorse the decentralization model of Mastodon, it's annoying that I'm constantly shown Mastodon messages from new, often very suspicious looking domains that then want me to enable JavaScript yet again in order to run the same damn Mastodon app.

This problem is not inherent to the task. Nitter instances can do almost everything without JS.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#867

Post by Obscurity4340 »

paganel wrote: post #662

> “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid. Uncle Ted is being proved correct in his assessment day after day after day. Too bad that the normies in the article wont' ever look at the world through Uncle Ted's nor through Ellul's eyes, they're too intellectually limited (to not use the word "stupid") for that. Too bad, had they known they could have turned their lives for the better earli…

Who's Uncle Ted and how does ine see thru his eyes?

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#868

Post by marginalia_nu »

zahlman wrote: post #861
marginalia_nu wrote: post #54

Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going…

> a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become.... Like what [person in my ideological group] did [allegedly, with no explanation or description] with [thing that happened online]... [this comment made online] I see. You complain of astroturfing, but you seem unaware of things that you have come to believe because of it.

Steve Bannon's involvement in promoting Gamer Gate and co-opting it into a (what would become MAGA) recruitment funnel is fairly well documented[1]. There's absolutely nothing "allegedly" about it, he proudly spells it out himself[2].

Everyone is running this playbook now. The far left, the alt right, IS, Hamas, IDF. Russia was an early player in the space too but seems to have lost a lot of that ability when Prigozhin fell out of a window.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gamergate-campaign

[2] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/st...

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#869

Post by dec0dedab0de »

anovikov wrote: post #613
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been in tech for the tech for over 20 years now, heck over 30 years as a hobbyist. I have lost almost all interest in it these days. It feels increasingly meaningless, and actively harmful. I know it is my own fault for neglecting my health and relationships, but I can't help but feel this career makes the most important things more difficult.

Well, being harmful is the whole thing about tech. Economic and technological development happens through harming people, this is how society grows. Finding new and new ways of harming ever larger groups of people, forcing them to adapt.

disagree

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#870

Post by miyoji »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #839
miyoji wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commutes are uncompensated labor, so you're advocating for a pay decrease for both yourself and your coworkers. Pay me for my commute and I'll gladly work from wherever you like, just recognize that I would get more done if you weren't paying me to travel to and from work. If you don't pay me for the time I spend commuting, you aren't interested in paying the total cost of employing me and you can kindly go fuck off.

I'm not paying anyone to do anything, please don't tell me to fuck off for expressing my personal experience.

You're failing at basic reading comprehension. The "you" there is obviously referential to employers, not a direct response to an anonymous internet commenter.
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