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

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

#141

Post by mayankkaizen »

donky_oaty wrote: post #95
myth2018 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so grateful for having abandoned social networks. My main motivator were the fights over political weaponization of COVID-19, but then I went on and abandoned youtube and news as well. Now, I'm halfway with my first book, found a new hobby and developed my previous ones, rediscovered programming for fun, am learning a new foreign language, found a new job with very good compensation, lost 10 kg and became a bette…

Is browsing and commenting on Hacker News not considered social media use though?

I am bugged by this question too. I've stopped reading newspapers 8 years ago. Closed FB account 7 years ago. Never been on IG or Tiktok. Never watched more than 2 YouTube Videos in a month. Twitter? 10 minutes in every three days and I only read tweets about STEM topics. Heck, I don't even join WhatsApp groups. Reddit and HN is what I browse. I very rarely post on Reddit and stay away from all political posts. The amount of time I spend on Reddit is gradually decreasing.

So that leaves me with HN. I like HN because topics I encounter here are not nonsensical or political. There are no memes, gifs or cheap jokes here. I find myself in awe of the knowledge people have here. I am forced to read stuff here rather than fast paced casual browsing. As a meme reads, "On Internet, typing is fun and reading is hard" but HN is exact opposite of that for me.

But deep inside my heart, I know HN is also a social media in many ways and I need to cut down the time I spend on this. I am addicted to this. I realized browsing HN is essentially a coping mechanism for my depression and lifelong failures. HN gives me a false sense of "look I am not wasting my time in frivolous stuff". HH helps me escape from harsh realities of my life in much the same ways drinking helps people cope with their life. In subtle ways, HN has polluted my mind and corrupted my ability to think in realistic ways.

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

#142

Post by DieAgainAli »

agumonkey wrote: post #110
yazboo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

yeah, internet has near no constraint and this is the key problem TV had time.. you may be able to store it but you'd need tapes .. still space and efforts constraints today your hard drive and infinite connection create an infinite pit I also believe our brains love, just like muscles love exercise, prioritizing, you feel better when you made a smart decision. the feeling of never having to choose, skip through many…

We

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

#143

Post by nicbou »

makeitdouble wrote: post #114
highspeedbus wrote: post #27

There's a brazillian song called Tédio (Boredom) that was popular in the 80's. It talks about not withstanding boredom inside home, while life goes on out there. It's curious how the depicted feeling is so unrelatable today. I think boredom is a real force that pushes ourselves to the edge, to hopefully make a change in life, like going out to see real people. Social media creates this cozy, safe place to keep your m…

> to hopefully make a change in life, like going out to see real people. I’m fascinated by this narrative on the “real” people outside. I wonder how having more people working remote could change that cultural landscape, and how much time it will take for people to go over the dichotomy of “real” vs “online”. There are wonderful people with tons of insight and many things to share in the “outside” world. But thing is…

And the activities you perform there are not necessarily more genuine.

I understand why riding a bicycle or meeting other people is better than staying home.

But you could also go to the restaurant and go shopping. How is that form of consumption better or more real?

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

#144

Post by BatteryMountain »

mayankkaizen wrote: post #141
donky_oaty wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is browsing and commenting on Hacker News not considered social media use though?

I am bugged by this question too. I've stopped reading newspapers 8 years ago. Closed FB account 7 years ago. Never been on IG or Tiktok. Never watched more than 2 YouTube Videos in a month. Twitter? 10 minutes in every three days and I only read tweets about STEM topics. Heck, I don't even join WhatsApp groups. Reddit and HN is what I browse. I very rarely post on Reddit and stay away from all political posts. The a…

HN is a social media site if you visit multiple times a day and post comments and spend your mental energy on the site, and allow yourself to into rabbit holes for hours.

If you want to cut down on time spent on HN, on F-Droid there is an app called Glider. Its a typical HN client. It has a feature/button called Catch Up, where it gives you top posts by week/month, similar to how you can filter things on reddit and typically reddit clients.

I highly recommend experimenting with batching time spent on certain sites to once a week and once a month, that is, 5 or 6 visits a month, and get a high level overview of what happened (instead of multiple visits daily, which interrupts your flow). Then limit yourself to only look at the top 5 top-level comments (and not go into comment rabbit holes). Same for reddit, or skip reddit if you can, its mostly noise. Skip other social media sites too.

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

#145

Post by kranke155 »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #92
kranke155 wrote: post #88

I’m a writer and I always do my best work when I leave the phone at home. In fact when I can, I leave it at home for several days in a row.

Your computer cant access social media? I don't mean to be glib, but I often see people discuss this as though it's a smartphone only thing. It's just as possible to doom scroll on the big screen. Maybe I'm jealous that some people can restrict time wasting to just the phone.

I’m without my laptop as well. I often just go to cafes.

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

#146

Post by wholinator2 »

40amxn40 wrote: post #138
highspeedbus wrote: post #27

There's a brazillian song called Tédio (Boredom) that was popular in the 80's. It talks about not withstanding boredom inside home, while life goes on out there. It's curious how the depicted feeling is so unrelatable today. I think boredom is a real force that pushes ourselves to the edge, to hopefully make a change in life, like going out to see real people. Social media creates this cozy, safe place to keep your m…

Interesting. We should not forget that social media creates this cozy safe place for everyone, so even if you personally realize that, your friends and acquaintances may not. In my own experience, since around 2010 and with the rise of social media and streaming services -especially after covid- people are more inclined to spend time at home instead of hanging out or doing stuff "in real life"

I think it also has to do with the wider socioeconomic situation. (Most) people make less disposable money on the whole than they did before. Sure, the minimum wage might increase but rent and food and insurance is going up faster! And the restaurants and mall stores (when they exist at all) and theme parks certainly aren't cheap. You could go walk a park every day but that's just tiring. There are people working themselves to the bone without enough extra energy to fulfill their children's lives let alone their own. People are being squeezed from all sides.

In contrast, I'd say social media is not the cause but the reaction to such things. I mean, we all saw particular people get genuinely addicted to scrolling Facebook in the early years of the service, but that rarely totally ostracized them from their previous social circles, it might have even grown them! But now with things like twitch streamers on a schedule, ready to be your friend Friday night, and customized YouTube feeds of endless hours of documentaries and Twitter and even HN. The opportunity is there. Someone who's already staying in can get that fix, anyone who's avoiding anything can do it perfectly. It's a cycle of control. It's soooooo much easier to sit and stare and laugh and maybe even engage than it is to text a group, see if anyone else is in the perfect intersection of bored and not tired and enough income to go to dinner.

We all got dripfed this stuff by force and sheer survival for the last couple years, and I understand it's hard to rip the tubes out of your arm.

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

#147

Post by kranke155 »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #92
kranke155 wrote: post #88

I’m a writer and I always do my best work when I leave the phone at home. In fact when I can, I leave it at home for several days in a row.

Your computer cant access social media? I don't mean to be glib, but I often see people discuss this as though it's a smartphone only thing. It's just as possible to doom scroll on the big screen. Maybe I'm jealous that some people can restrict time wasting to just the phone.

I time waste with any computer, so I leave them all at home and make an effort to be out all day without any computer on me. I believe it was Jonathan Frazen who said "nothing of any worth was ever written in a room with an internet connection" and I agree. You lose the subtleties of human behaviour when you can just unplug from reality.

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

#148

Post by RHSman2 »

I live in a different country, continent because of the boredom of buses in late 90’s. I would look around and just see how little was happening in my town. I hated it, it spurned me on to escape. If the monotony of bus journeys was eased by social media I am sure I may still be there.

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

#149

Post by jimmySixDOF »

jimmySixDOF wrote: post #44
armatav wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I did not read the study”

Leaning into the metaness of having this conversation on social media in social media and on the subject of it's shallowness, then detaching the headline takeaways from the study's detail as done here by GP is a useful case in point. Can a reasonable argument be made even against straw men ? Do the details matter when the sound byte talking head line is the lone subject of interest ?

Note to downvoters : no opinion is offered here, for or against.

Like it or not the memeification of a study like this compressed in to a couple of headlines which float off into the field of engagement on their own - that phenomenanon is a thing and would not happen if the bullet points didn't tap into a confirmation bias of pre existing wider interest in the topic being advanced in some small way through surfacing the conversation and I question if this holds true whatever the originating details might be. I certainly don't have a clear answer.

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

#150

Post by ImHereToVote »

themitigating wrote: post #31
amelius wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet here you are on HN ;)

Sarcastic remark but I agree with you. Everytime there's some article about Netflix, Facebook, or the like there's a bunch of people telling everyone they quit and how their life is better, etc. Many times the article isn't even about quitting social media, just some controversy. I wonder if some percentage of those people are right-wing and wait for a chance to jump in so they can harm companies they disagree with.

I love how it has become a right-wing thing to hate corporations. Those poor left-wing global megacorps, constantly attacked by the evil anti-corporate right.
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