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The Great Attention Heist

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Re: The Great Attention Heist

#71

Post by tomjen3 »

tomjen3 wrote: post #39
christophilus wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My phone spends 99% of its time either off or in silent mode. I turn it off/down during work hours so I can focus, and then I forget to turn it back on/up. It annoys the crap out of my friends / family, but it's worth it. I use it as an answering machine, GPS, and casual web browser. What I haven't figured out how to do is do the same thing with work communications (Slack et all). Since I work remotely, it's importan…

Have the door closed during certain hours (slack has a dnd mode, which can be overridden if it is important) then people will learn to contact you during those times, especially if you down prioritise those who accept the system. You are going to catch some slack, offset that by producing more/better than anyone.

Accept the system -> abuse the system.

Re: The Great Attention Heist

#72

Post by rdschouw »

Chaebixi wrote: post #48
chaseha wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly what they've done, training you to quickly open the app to check for notifications/messages/event invites. More recently, after running a script found on here to unfollow everyone in my feed, I've noticed that Facebook will "invent" notifications - someone's birthday, an event near me, etc - to keep the dopamine slot machine going

> More recently, after running a script found on here to unfollow everyone in my feed, I've noticed that Facebook will "invent" notifications - someone's birthday, an event near me, etc - to keep the dopamine slot machine going They crank that stuff up when you haven't visited them in a while as well. It comes off a super desperate if you're not addicted, but I'm sure it must work on someone. If try to disable your a…

When I stopped using Facebook and deleted the app, Facebook started sending me emails like "You have 7 unread notifications". They didn't even specify or list the notifications itself, just the count unread. Super desperate.

Obviously I clicked the unsubscribe link. :D

Re: The Great Attention Heist

#73

Post by Theodores »

harryf wrote: post #3

Strikes me that the ability to focus and direct ones own attention will (or already has) become a new form of class divide; those who can concentrate and those who can't. And it will likely have much different boundaries than earlier class divisions like wealth - in fact the wealthy are more likely to struggle given greater access to a wide range of digital products.

The ability to read a broadsheet newspaper rather than a tabloid 'newspaper' was the old 'class divide'. In the pre-internet days when newspapers were still allegedly important, not everyone could read a full length article in 'The Manchester Guardian'. (Not sure what the U.S. equivalent would be).

Papers like 'The Sun' and 'The Daily Mail' were there to entertain and brainwash. Their headline writers were absolutely excellent at what they did, e.g. 'FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER'. Does that not pique your curiosity? There is not a lot that can be added to that story - did the hamster taste nice? Who knows, the hamster was never eaten and the article was a bit of 'fake news' (clickbait) and was there to promote the comedian's up and coming tour.

Most people elected to read something other than 'The Guardian' even if they went broadsheet rather than tabloid. For every Guardian reader there were ten 'Telegraph' readers and maybe three 'Times' readers. Now I was a paperboy back then so I read all the papers extremely quickly. Only 'The Guardian' and 'The Financial Times' interested me enough to not speed read. It amused me to see people waste their attention on the other papers. Why spend a Sunday ploughing through The Sunday Times? It was a good all-day read back then. Yet I felt a lot of people were going through the motions, trying to focus on these stupid papers that rarely had more than one genuine bit of investigative journalism in them, if that.

As a child with every paper free to read every day I gravitated towards the newspaper requiring attention. I could have just stared at Sam Fox's breasts on page 3 of the Sun but preferred the financial pages of the Guardian, followed by the international news. Importantly I decided this for myself, not out of peer pressure. Moving swiftly on to today and here I am reading HN instead of whatever junk appears as 'news' on the Internet Explorer home page or the online version of the Daily Mail. Why am I again in the minority of people seeking more than PR pieces about 'hamsters being eaten'?

Re: The Great Attention Heist

#74

Post by Chaebixi »

rdschouw wrote: post #72
Chaebixi wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More recently, after running a script found on here to unfollow everyone in my feed, I've noticed that Facebook will "invent" notifications - someone's birthday, an event near me, etc - to keep the dopamine slot machine going They crank that stuff up when you haven't visited them in a while as well. It comes off a super desperate if you're not addicted, but I'm sure it must work on someone. If try to disable your a…

When I stopped using Facebook and deleted the app, Facebook started sending me emails like "You have 7 unread notifications". They didn't even specify or list the notifications itself, just the count unread. Super desperate. Obviously I clicked the unsubscribe link. :D

It looks like they put all their research on clickbait to profitable use.

You used to be able to receive and reply to Facebook messages via email. They took out the reply feature and recently they've taken out the content as well. Now their notifications are just "you have 23 unread messages." Their only goal now seems to be to force you onto their app.

Re: The Great Attention Heist

#75

Post by mantas »

colmvp wrote: post #25
harryf wrote: post #3

Strikes me that the ability to focus and direct ones own attention will (or already has) become a new form of class divide; those who can concentrate and those who can't. And it will likely have much different boundaries than earlier class divisions like wealth - in fact the wealthy are more likely to struggle given greater access to a wide range of digital products.

It reminds me of Cal Newport's book Deep Work, where he argues those who can deliberately focus in the 21st century and actively deny themselves from being distracted (scheduled e-mail reading, banning Slack, only reading news certain times of the day) and go deep in subject matters will have massive advantages in the knowledge economy. The open office trend certainly hasn't helped. One of my friends who is a ML code…

> And I'll print things from the web so that I can concentrate on it without distraction in a quiet room with no digital distractions.

Kindle paired with Instapaper or similar service is great too. Saves a tree or three in lifetime as well :)

Re: The Great Attention Heist

#76

Post by tomjen3 »

tschellenbach wrote: post #40

I'd really like my phone to be able to prioritize notifications and only bug me for important things. Calls, SMS, notifications etc should all be hidden and prioritized. A call from my wife, or someone I know should be immediately shown. Notifications about important emails as well, not so much about the latest offer available on amazon.com. Phones make it hard to control the level of notifications and could do a bet…

Gmail with the split inbox has that feature (although for the life of me I can't get it to put updates/promotions into the same bucket, though they are) and inbox allows you to bundle and split things even more.

Re: The Great Attention Heist

#77

Post by tomjen3 »

pbkhrv wrote: post #46

Every other month I go on a media diet: no social media, no news, no unnecessary browsing of any kind - only books and a small number of podcasts are allowed (plus whatever Internet usage is necessary for work). I've been doing this for more than a year now, and it has helped me feel a lot less "fragmented". I highly recommend it.

What do you do when you need to know something? (recent example: my toilet stopped refilling, I had no idea what was wrong and found the information on the internet). Also, which podcasts do you prioritize?

Re: The Great Attention Heist

#78

Post by dnate »

marcosdumay wrote: post #67
colmvp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference that I justify for using HN over a lot of other aggregators in the quality of the content tends to be much higher. I still have a large backlog of repos and writeups that I'd like to study, all found from submissions on HN.

> I still have a large backlog of repos and writeups that I'd like to study, all found from submissions on HN. :) I have one too. The relevant question is, are those things relevant for your work and projects? If not (that's my case), there isn't much difference.

There is. Watching memes all day is way less productive than reading about some obscure processor bug, or doing a tutorial in the newest functional js dialect.

Re: The Great Attention Heist

#79

Post by knownothing »

harryf wrote: post #3

Strikes me that the ability to focus and direct ones own attention will (or already has) become a new form of class divide; those who can concentrate and those who can't. And it will likely have much different boundaries than earlier class divisions like wealth - in fact the wealthy are more likely to struggle given greater access to a wide range of digital products.

So will the wealthy be disproportionately affected by issues with concentration? That seems to be the implication of your statement. However, I'm also unconvinced that the ability to concentrate (above an average level, at least) has historically been an important component of accumulating wealth.

Re: The Great Attention Heist

#80

Post by ferdbold »

fortythirteen wrote: post #52
remir wrote: post #49

We haven't seen nothing yet. Smartphone addiction is a thing, but at least you can put your phone in your pocket on silent and go on with your day. But AR lenses are coming and will be the next big thing in my opinion. Imagine being immersed in this semi-virtual world all day long. Imagine being a child and grow up in a world where these things are ubiquitous. Imagine what this will do to their attention.

Imagine the world a hundred years from now, where almost everything is presented as augmented reality, and where someone who doesn't have permanently augmented vision is seen as an outsider, much like the Amish today. Think about nothing being sold with a color or pattern anymore, because you can just customize it to whatever you want in your AR view. Think about products not having any sort of printed imagery, becau…

There's a game exactly about this coming out soon named The Last Night, you might want to look into it

http://oddtales.net/

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