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

Social media may prevent users from reaping creative rewards of profound boredom

bath.ac.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 161 posts

Re: Social media may prevent users from reaping creative rewards of profound boredom

#121

Post by makeitdouble »

mrbombastic wrote: post #15
tcmb wrote: post #6

I did not read the study, but the finding seems trivial and limited at the same time: Anything you do to alleviate or prevent boredom that is not creative can be said to 'prevent reaping creative rewards' of boredom. Not just social media (or any media consumption, really) but also sports or calling a friend or helping in a soup kitchen. If you didn't do it, you'd feel boredom, and might pick up something creative in…

This is no doubt true but smart phones basically give you the option to never be bored, and get instant gratification whenever you feel like it. I don’t think it is limited to social media but I imagine there are pretty profound consequences to that.

> smart phones basically give you the option to never be bored

Is it true though ?

I have the feeling people say this the same way they assume living in a high population density area gives you option to never be lonely.

I’d argue having stuff to read/watch is orthogonal to being bored, it’s not a state of mind you can fill with any random crap in your feed.

Re: Social media may prevent users from reaping creative rewards of profound boredom

#123

Post by trhr »

quaintdev wrote: post #14

The whole problem with social media is the feed. Remove that feed and replace it with something that is not the mechanism to keep users captive and most of the issues with social media are solved. One of the ways to achieve that is to make people at the center of app. The user chooses avatar from multiple avatars on main screen and view their updates. Once they have viewed someone's update they can go back do it for…

I don't come on the orange site to feel attacked. I come here to mindlessly scroll the news.

Re: Social media may prevent users from reaping creative rewards of profound boredom

#124

Post by malikNF »

quaintdev wrote: post #14

The whole problem with social media is the feed. Remove that feed and replace it with something that is not the mechanism to keep users captive and most of the issues with social media are solved. One of the ways to achieve that is to make people at the center of app. The user chooses avatar from multiple avatars on main screen and view their updates. Once they have viewed someone's update they can go back do it for…

With twitter setting your feed to show the latest instead of the top shows you the latest stuff from just the people you follow. [1]

I have noticed doing this has massively reduced the amount of time I spend there.

[1] https://mashable.com/article/set-twitter-timeline-most-recen...

Re: Social media may prevent users from reaping creative rewards of profound boredom

#125

Post by dawatchusay »

tarboreus wrote: post #113
Buttons840 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One trick I've found to help with this is to live-stream. I once streamed a game on Twitch, nobody really watched, but it forced me to sit down and actually play the game for a good 2 or 3 hours. It was draining, gloriously draining and satisfying. You can stream programming and other personal projects as well. It doesn't matter if you get many viewers or not, just forcing yourself to maintain a consistent course of…

Playing the game was what was draining?

Yeah, wow

Re: Social media may prevent users from reaping creative rewards of profound boredom

#126

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

wst_ wrote: post #119
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you fall asleep during a video, now you'll have no idea where you were. Similarly if I lose concentration watching a video, I now have to either go back or hope I didn't miss anything important. If I lose concentration while reading, the page is still there, I just have to skim it until I find where i went on a tangent.

You still need to skim the page. The same way you can skim video to find the place you remember. I don't see a lot of difference here.

You really don't see a difference between skimming a single page and scrubbing through a video that could be hours long? And scrubbing only works when the video is visually distinct enough between parts that you can tell without having to watch a few seconds at multiple different points.

Re: Social media may prevent users from reaping creative rewards of profound boredom

#127

Post by byecomputer »

tarboreus wrote: post #113
Buttons840 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One trick I've found to help with this is to live-stream. I once streamed a game on Twitch, nobody really watched, but it forced me to sit down and actually play the game for a good 2 or 3 hours. It was draining, gloriously draining and satisfying. You can stream programming and other personal projects as well. It doesn't matter if you get many viewers or not, just forcing yourself to maintain a consistent course of…

Playing the game was what was draining?

The act of performing in front of others was probably the draining part.

But also, yeah. If you need someone to watch you do X so you can enjoy X, maybe you don't like X all that much in the first place.

Re: Social media may prevent users from reaping creative rewards of profound boredom

#129

Post by pronlover723 »

yazboo wrote: post #53
411111111111111 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why do people blame social media for that? Every entertainment is equally at fault, wherever it's fictions, movies, tv series, comics/webtoons, games etc

It’s a difference of degree not kind. The constant audiovisual stimulus running through the internet is much more powerful than any of those things, and more widely available. Cable TV was close. It was always on in the room, but you had to be in the room, and you had to negotiate with your cohabitants over what to have on, or else you could go somewhere and be bored. There are no constraints anymore, with exceptions…

Agreed, and quite often there was nothing of interest. On the net I can almost always find something of interest or at least interesting enough for me to crap my time away
Post reply on HN