51–60 of 140 posts
I can’t help but feel like history will look back at this time period and ask themselves: what the fuck were they thinking? A whole generation of smart engineers optimizing addiction.
Is it just me, or does the article kind of suck? It starts with discussing who he is, and then his opinion, and the spends the next half of the article talking about what kind of person he is and how this is 'ironic' coming from _him_ of all people. Just seems weird that they give his opinion, and then we get someone else's opinion on HIM. That doesn't seem very unbiased. Maybe I am overthinking it.
These social media are not for everyone, for some one who are introvert or not a people person or just simply don't like other people then yeah twitter, fb etc are abomination. Social media is also a tools, good or bad, its what you make of it.
The rest of social media's problems have mostly to do with it being a cacophony, which you get with any large and horizontally organized group. Loudest speaker wins, shock replicates faster, etc.
I wonder what he thought made Google+ "less mindless" than the other platforms.
Tied to real identity - given the current state of the net one could make a case that the S Korean system of requiring gov ID # for all online signups would be an improvement, of course that opens the door to serious abuse but at this point would it be the lesser of two evils?
As an example, check out the myriad articles about Google users being outed as trans when Google started integrating Google+ into everything: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/07/google-ha...
I grew up with the internet, so it felt natural to adopt things like social media (early days of FB), cloud storage, YouTube, etc etc. They just seemed to work their way into my life, aided by the adoption of smartphones (essentially a pocket computer).
Today, I've become a Free Software and Privacy advocate. I use libreboot+Debian, have a dumbphone, no social media, and aggressively restrict usage of services like Google et al.
But I feel this isn't going far enough. The real toxic element is the 90% of the internet which is not designed to bring any positivity or enrichment to my life. I recently made the decision to make my main workstation air-gap/offline and it was the best decision ever. My laptop will be my internet connected machine and I'll probably set-up some sort of whitelist on it. I also find it easier to physically isolate a laptop (e.g. put it in a drawer) outside of work hours and thereby regulate outside intrusion into my personal life.
I'm also very sympathetic to the concerns about not triggering the mass bovine herd of professional offense-takers. I work as a Doctor so it's a constant effort to police my opinions and actions on a daily basis. The internet used to be a refuge where I could do daft things like engage in a flame war on a random forum about a random obscure hobby. Today, the risk of inadvertently triggering someone and having it cross into my real life removes any incentive to participate. Even HN feels like that. I've lost count of the number of replies I've typed out, only to delete without posting. I just think there's no point. It's not fun anymore.
I'll probably give up HN soon. It's the last of anything resembling social media that I use. I strongly dislike the inability to completely delete an account and past posts. It's not like I post controversial stuff, but I've grown uncomfortable about leaving any trace online.
I think he puts Twitter there because he doesn't use it. If you follow the right people it actually promotes intelligent discourse.
Instagram is particularly weird to me, look at what's trending, semi naked teenagers/stars, selfies and ads, that's all, for miles of scrolling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Instagra...
Guy Debord used "images" as a metaphor but with Instagram it's not even a metaphor anymore.
> The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
> The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered .... They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption.
> Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle [...] naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. It is the opposite of dialogue.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070206145523/http://reddit.com...
Today you have to dig deep to find anything that is not vapid bullshit. The Donald has leaked into other subreddits and the site has become a disgusting cesspool. I feel like I'm the only person that thinks that the advent of memes as means to communicate seems to have degraded discourse to a level of bite sized concepts that eliminate complex analysis of any given topic. Have an opinion of LGBT rights? Post a meme! Have a political opinion? Post a meme! If you don't agree with my 6 word statement on a silly image I will be a complete asshole to you in the comments section that exposes a market of ideas that has devolved into racist diatribes and AnCap ideology.