Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

zan.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 685 posts

Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

#31

Post by fma »

Apreche wrote: post #17

Just speaking for myself, I've noticed that my habit is to eat what is in front of me, and clean my plate. I mean this both literally and figuratively. If I have dessert in the house, like a bag of chocolate, then I eat one after dinner. If I don't have it in the house, then I just don't eat dessert. If I have a social media feed full of content, then I'll scroll through all of it until there's nothing else that's ne…

Switching Twitter to timeline mode rather than their poor excuse of an algorithm helps. Learned that from HN....but I have a browser plug-in that also removes all their recommended and "Joe also owed this tweet" junk.

Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

#33

Post by dcchambers »

alisonkisk wrote: post #26
dcchambers wrote: post #21

My completely unprofessional opinion is that almost everyone that uses the internet throughout the day has developed some form of undiagnosed ADD/ADHD. The modern internet has broken our slowly evolved brains. We are not built to cope with these types of attention destroying activities and media. At least 20 years ago you had to sit down at a specific place and use a chunky computer. Smartphones have made it 1000x wo…

is it ADD or is it just a common pattern of human nature? Is eating sugar when it is offered a disease, or an environment that is toxic to instincts that usee to suit us well?

> Is eating sugar when it is offered a disease

It's not, but it will lead to some (obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc).

In the same way, consuming infinite amounts of quick-hitting and dopamine-inducing social media is not a disease, but it can damage our brains and lead to "disease" in the same way that sugar damages the rest of our body.

Again, I'm not a doctor and I have no facts/evidence to share. Just my own thoughts on how things are going.

Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

#35

Post by MilnerRoute »

A big part of the problem: brain plasticity. (Which, ironically, I read about on the internet....)

But the idea is if you're doing a lot of one thing, your brain adapts. So if that one thing is "quickly scrolling headlines" or "consuming bursts of updates," over time your brain just atunes itself to that form of stimulation.

If that's true, who knows how far it will lead? I was on jury duty, and spoke to the prosecuting attorney afterwards. And his complaint was that over the years, "juries have gotten dumber" -- that he'd consistently seen the attention span of a typical juror getting shorter and shorter....

Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

#36

Post by NoLinkToMe »

leodriesch wrote: post #28
Apreche wrote: post #17

Just speaking for myself, I've noticed that my habit is to eat what is in front of me, and clean my plate. I mean this both literally and figuratively. If I have dessert in the house, like a bag of chocolate, then I eat one after dinner. If I don't have it in the house, then I just don't eat dessert. If I have a social media feed full of content, then I'll scroll through all of it until there's nothing else that's ne…

Doing the same, but this does not really apply for algorithmic feeds. When you open YouTube the recommendations are always the first thing you see, same for TikTok and Twitter (although at least you can configure it there). Sure you can say “just don’t use recommendation systems” just as you can say “just don’t go on YouTube”.

True, but I exclusively watch YT on laptop and have the link to my subscriptions. It really does help.

Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

#37

Post by [deleted] »

belkarx wrote: post #19

The modern internet, with ever-refreshing recommendations, is fully intended to be addicting. Possible mitigations: make it very inconvenient to repetitively view social media. Examples: - Create UBlock rules to remove recommendations, only keeping the search bar on the youtube home page so if you want to watch a video you have to explicitly seek it out - Redirect an address like reddit.com in /etc/hosts so it is ina…

[deleted]

Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

#38

Post by kradeelav »

leodriesch wrote: post #28
Apreche wrote: post #17

Just speaking for myself, I've noticed that my habit is to eat what is in front of me, and clean my plate. I mean this both literally and figuratively. If I have dessert in the house, like a bag of chocolate, then I eat one after dinner. If I don't have it in the house, then I just don't eat dessert. If I have a social media feed full of content, then I'll scroll through all of it until there's nothing else that's ne…

Doing the same, but this does not really apply for algorithmic feeds. When you open YouTube the recommendations are always the first thing you see, same for TikTok and Twitter (although at least you can configure it there). Sure you can say “just don’t use recommendation systems” just as you can say “just don’t go on YouTube”.

You can follow Youtube channels via RSS feeds, though, which removes the issue with recommendations.
Post reply on HN