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Have attention spans been declining?

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Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#161

Post by yamazakiwi »

skilled wrote: post #145
yamazakiwi wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people's lives are not that good, there are many people with bad jobs they hate, or partners they can't stand. It's easy to imagine why humans act this way. What makes you think your life is so much better?

Because I happen to come from the gutter like most people. I was manipulated, bullied, I was a drug addict and I did a lot of other dumb shit. I am so extremely experienced in how gullible humans beings are it’s honestly sometimes hard to live in this world. And if you’re wondering why it’s hard, it’s because those experiences define who you are. Do you think I chose them because I thought it would be fun? Nah, those…

>Your plan is to spend the rest of your life feeling sorry for yourself?

You are the only one feeling sorry for other people in this conversation.

Even people with what would be generally considered great lives chase dopamine. Believe whatever narrative you need to, but in general this behavior is not that deep or problematic vs an actual drug addiction or real problems. It seems you have an axe to grind with anything "self-control" related.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#162

Post by chiefalchemist »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #99
Tenoke wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if HN titles actually had to match submission titles.

There are some good reasons this isn't the case. Often the submission title itself has something wrong in it, or is click-bait-y, or just needs some pointless fat trimmed from it to get to the point. It's definitely not black and white.

But if the source can't get the title right in a clean and objective sort or way, isn't that a signal for "there's got to be a better source"? For example, how many times have we've seen a click-bait-y title followed by content or narrative reflective of that mindset?

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#163

Post by trailingComma »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #122
colechristensen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But also now I have a magical machine in my pocket where I can tap the screen a few times and get a book read to me sped up to my optimal input speed. Those two things (audiobooks on my phone, the default feature to enable play at 2x-3x speed) have vastly increased the information I absorb. Now if only someone could come up with a screen/document reader with a decent text-to-speech and decent content filtering, it wo…

You can listen and understand faster than you can read and understand? I am far quicker at reading than listening.

Some people are visual learners. Some people are auditory learners.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#165

Post by dv35z »

colechristensen wrote: post #115
jjoonathan wrote: post #33

There is far more content than there used to be but no more hours in the day. Our filters must reject more. Yes, there are costs -- deep work & study both suffer -- but there are benefits too: informational content that can be compressed does get compressed. An introduction to a concrete skill that would at one time have been padded out to fit into an hour long movie or lecture might become a 30 minute youtube video…

But also now I have a magical machine in my pocket where I can tap the screen a few times and get a book read to me sped up to my optimal input speed. Those two things (audiobooks on my phone, the default feature to enable play at 2x-3x speed) have vastly increased the information I absorb. Now if only someone could come up with a screen/document reader with a decent text-to-speech and decent content filtering, it wo…

I used Amazon Polly (text to speech engine) on a project a few years ago - the “neural” voices were decent. I’ve since heard much better synthetic voice engines, but don’t know names. What’s the best quality one you have found recently?

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#166

Post by notahacker »

allturtles wrote: post #140
notahacker wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average person in 1926 didn't and wouldn't read Hemingway either. The first print run of Sun Also Rises was 5000 copies. Most people didn't read much and a significant proportion couldn't read at all, and I suspect most of the silent movies of the time would seem quite trivial compared with much amateur YouTube content today I suspect that in 100 years time, bestselling books particularly popular with today's tec…

Hemingway was never JK Rowling, but he wasn't an obscure writer known only to academics and literature aficionados either. Your print run figure undersells his popularity quite a bit. "The Sun Also Rises" was his first novel when he was an unknown. Wikipedia goes on to say that it was on its 8th printing two years after publication.[0] This says that it had sold a million copies by 1961 [1]. The first edition of "For…

I certainly wouldn't claim Hemingway was obscure, but I don't see any of those figures undermining my point that the average person in 1926 wouldn't feel the inclination to read him over more digestible stuff (and the Bible) if they read at all.

Sure, the first eight print runs of The Sun Also Rises probably had a total circulation equivalent to the playthrough of some tediously-narrated niche videos on YouTube, and by 1961 when Hemingway was firmly established as a Great American Novelist it had as many copies over more than quarter of a century as Where the Crawdads Sing sells in a quarter, but I don't think you can infer anything much about attention spans from the appeal of literary fiction.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#167

Post by skilled »

yamazakiwi wrote: post #161
skilled wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I happen to come from the gutter like most people. I was manipulated, bullied, I was a drug addict and I did a lot of other dumb shit. I am so extremely experienced in how gullible humans beings are it’s honestly sometimes hard to live in this world. And if you’re wondering why it’s hard, it’s because those experiences define who you are. Do you think I chose them because I thought it would be fun? Nah, those…

>Your plan is to spend the rest of your life feeling sorry for yourself? You are the only one feeling sorry for other people in this conversation. Even people with what would be generally considered great lives chase dopamine. Believe whatever narrative you need to, but in general this behavior is not that deep or problematic vs an actual drug addiction or real problems. It seems you have an axe to grind with anythin…

[flagged]

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#168

Post by asdff »

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #40

I like the theory that the reason attention span has declined is because the demand for quality has hugely increased. Since there are so many blogs, films, books and videos out there, we no longer want to waste time on things that don't entertain or provide value to us. If in the past you might've given in and read or watched through boring parts because there was less options available, now people demand less B.S. a…

It's not like people are reading high quality things though. They are watching tick tock. There is no demand for high quality work. People aren't reading gonzo journalism books, they are eating up soundbites and clickbait and very pleased about it.

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#169

Post by n0on3 »

fikama wrote: post #121
ceejayoz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whereas in the HN title it reads as if it's saying a "65% decline in attention span". Perhaps the submitter's attention span ran out.

I know that HN is maybe not a place for such comments, but I strongly belive we need to make "attention span overflow" a thing

(I'm not sure if you were joking or not and I know it's probably not in the same spirit you intended it here / a bit OT but...) I've been using literally that exact expression for a while to describe the situation in which, during somewhat complex discussions within a group, in order to not be perceived as jerks participants are forced to follow an unnecessarily long, repetitive, trivial and most often also completely pointless "line of reasoning" just to have their own attention completely derailed from any productive/actually-interesting argument anyone was trying to make, often ultimately resulting in giving up because recalling those lost mental threads is by then even more difficult and there is only so much mental energy (for you and collectively) to dedicate to that discussion.

Just saying, imho it's already a thing (with different incarnations in different contexts).

Re: Have attention spans been declining?

#170

Post by cwkoss »

deathanatos wrote: post #132
cwkoss wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recipe tiktoks are like 30 seconds long - faster to watch the whole thing than scrolling to find the recipe on a bloated blogspam recipe site.

I see recipes Tiktoks get readily debunked in longer-form content, such as by channels like "How To Cook That"¹; the Tiktoks amount to little more than content farming. What real information might be present is drowned out by fakes and bad advice that exist for no other reason than to soak up eyeballs. I get far more out of longer-form videos, IMO. (And yes, the bloated recipe blogspam is also a form that is rapidly…

Huh, the two recipes I tried came out great.

Any examples of fake tiktok recipes? All the top "How To Cook That" debunking videos seem to be about other youtube videos or just weird food videos that aren't recipes.

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