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How to stop being “terminally online”

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Re: How to stop being “terminally online”

#121

Post by jader201 »

This article (and many similar articles often shared on HN) are written as if the target audience are adults. And maybe it is. But there are already plenty of articles about how we spend too much time online, and the effects of social media.

But why aren’t there more articles like this targeting teens, e.g. when — or before — the problem starts?

Language like this:

> irony, post-irony, meta-irony, and whatever-irony are the lingua franca of the terminally online.

makes it clear that this is not written with a general audience in mind.

Are there articles that cover really good points like this in a way that really sinks in for a younger audience, to help them understand the risks and how to recognize the problem before it becomes a deep rooted and/or normalized addiction?

As a parent of teens, it would be nice to find and share articles with them that are written in a way that really sinks in while not coming across as preachy/judgmental.

Re: How to stop being “terminally online”

#123

Post by ChildOfChaos »

vlunkr wrote: post #104
ChildOfChaos wrote: post #80

I'm struggling with it. I have a website blocker on my Mac, but then I just turn it off eventually and go back to old habits, if I block hacker news, reddit etc, then I end up just having random thoughts and googling those and finding other sites to read through and of course sometimes reddit can have the answer for the thing i needed to google, so that can be annoying. I changed to a white list to try and solve this…

> trying to learn more about life, philosophy, how to be a better human, productivity porn etc IMO The internet is not usually a good way to learn this stuff. These are big life concepts that require deep focus and patience. The internet rewards the opposite of that. The Big Concepts require both study and application. If you’re mostly spending time in the study phase, it’s not working.

You might be right, where is good though?

I'm starting to just give up on it to be honest and consider more just trying to avoid this kind of information and figure out what works for me myself, my ultimate thought is to replace information consumption of this kinda thing with just more deep reflection and a bigger trial and error process.

I mean who are the people producing this content that I think will help me anyway? There just people, so I feel like I can figure it out myself maybe.

Even when cleaning i'm listening to these kinda podcasts etc, i don't know how much I get from it, I think I almost get more value from not listening to anything, as it allows my own thoughts to process.

I don't know. I feel kinda stuck with it all and this generally leads to two things, 1) Trying to find / consume more information 2) Overthinking that leads me to feeling more stuck and back to 1, i'm not sure quite what to do / where to turn, but maybe that is the issue, the whole 'where to turn' thought, is that same idea, wanting to figure out what information source will somehow make things different.

Re: How to stop being “terminally online”

#125

Post by toast0 »

coffeefirst wrote: post #108
t43562 wrote: post #46

Who really cares - 100 years ago you might as well have moaned about people living through books. We have to live and learn 2nd hand because: * Learning some things 1st hand has a high chance of being fatal * We cannot afford to live all possible lives but we do have to be able to understand each other and each other's motives to be able to get along - this means we have to imagine what it's like to be someone else.…

Eh, none of the bookworms I know ever had drastic changes in their personality consistent with anxiety or depression, or somehow became angry and bitter after binge-reading a 6 book fantasy series. It just isn't a thing that happens. I also don't think the internet itself—we didn't see this problem with blogs/wikipedia/trashy chain emails from your uncle. It's the feeds. Because everything is tuned for engagement, if…

> somehow became angry and bitter after binge-reading a 6 book fantasy series. It just isn't a thing that happens.

Some people will read the whole series when a new book comes out, sometimes in a single session. If there's something they really don't like in the last book, they might be bitter and angry.

Re: How to stop being “terminally online”

#126

Post by SoftTalker »

bootlooped wrote: post #112
Tijdreiziger wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“F’s in the chat” doesn’t strike me as a particularly obscure meme.

If you went to some public place with a fairly representative sample of the population, like a supermarket or something, and asked 100 people about that phrase, how many do you think would know provenance of it?

Never heard it before. After a couple of seconds of pondering, I assumed it meant "females" but I can see from other replies that is wrong.

Re: How to stop being “terminally online”

#127

Post by haswell »

jader201 wrote: post #121

This article (and many similar articles often shared on HN) are written as if the target audience are adults. And maybe it is. But there are already plenty of articles about how we spend too much time online, and the effects of social media. But why aren’t there more articles like this targeting teens, e.g. when — or before — the problem starts? Language like this: > irony, post-irony, meta-irony, and whatever-irony…

This is something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. How to take these problems that a growing number of psychologists, psychiatrists and technologists understand to be problems, and repackaging that in a way that is palatable and effective for various audiences.

I think articles like the one here need to exist to get communities like this one talking about how to expand the conversation.

The trouble is, what is the right way to reach someone in their teens, at a time in their life when they’re probably far less worried about the “health” aspects of time online than they are about fitting in with their peers?

I’ve wondered if the only way is to embrace the social media platforms people find themselves consumed with - to subtly deliver/grow the message that they should unplug.

I’d say this conversation should start in schools, but am not optimistic that this would actually pan out.

Re: How to stop being “terminally online”

#128

Post by zach_garwood »

djangelic wrote: post #117
zach_garwood wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never heard it. What does it mean? Is it like a Slack shortcut?

In one of the call of duty games, you attend a funeral and when you reach the casket, an onscreen prompt asks you to press F to pay your respects. This took on a life of its own, and now on Reddit threads you’ll see people saying press f to pay respects when someone was figuratively killed.

Wow, okay, and they claimed it's not an obscure reference, but you have to have played a certain level in a certain game AND been on a certain forum to know what it means? Maybe obscure doesn't mean what I think it means.

Re: How to stop being “terminally online”

#129

Post by jjoonathan »

jchw wrote: post #99
bootlooped wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I remember reading a Reddit post once about a girl whose boyfriend would say things in real life like "can we get some f's in the chat boys". Things that were clearly very niche and would either be completely unintelligible to the audience or at best sound out of place. I think it's a matter of reading the room.

Every day that goes by, the out group of internet slang and memes grows smaller. I don't really know if I'd consider this a good thing or a bad thing so much as just, a thing. But there's a lot of joking amongst younger internet folk about how they'll probably be talking internet slang in retirement homes in a few decades. It's a funny visual, perhaps because of the weird perception that we always think we will be li…

20 years ago, my mother heard me use the word "hack" in a casual context and panicked, assuming on the basis of the word alone that I meant criminal activity.

2 years ago, I was walking through Target and an advertisement came across the store loudspeakers touting "Mom hacks." Nerd culture has spread.

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