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Ego Death

krisnova.net

41–50 of 122 posts

Re: Ego Death

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We literally had exactly this model on all social media platforms for years and while I certainly remember everyone had that uncle who posted everything he saw on Fox News and exchanges that made for awkward Thanksgiving dinners it wasn’t nearly as toxic as it’s gotten now, especially wrt strangers and bots.

This is how Mastodon works right now. I assure you, there’s plenty of this kind of content there.

Well I certainly don’t have empirical data or anything other than my own experience of close to 20 years interacting with people online prior, the biggest thing that has changed as far as I can tell is the drive to engagement and introduction of algorithms to further that goal.

Of course there’s always has been and always will be toxic content but to me it feels like society is breaking down in a way that is unlike what was happening before and it seems largely driven by social media interactions.

Re: Ego Death

#42
post #5

Why is it that people who quit social media always have to make it everyone else's problem?

How on earth is this anyone else’s problem?

Perhaps its purpose is simply to notify any followers why things might get quieter.

Though, of course, she probably should’ve taken account of your… feelings about potentially being exposed to her blog someday. The utter nerve, apparently. After all, you’re the main character, and people must only have motivations insofar as they apply to you, right?

Re: Ego Death

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We literally had exactly this model on all social media platforms for years and while I certainly remember everyone had that uncle who posted everything he saw on Fox News and exchanges that made for awkward Thanksgiving dinners it wasn’t nearly as toxic as it’s gotten now, especially wrt strangers and bots.

This is how Mastodon works right now. I assure you, there’s plenty of this kind of content there.

This. People keep saying how the Fediverse is awesome and different. But everytime I go to sign up for Mastodon, I'm greeted with culture war rage bait and I decide against joining.

Re: Ego Death

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? The author seemed to indicate that it was their personal problem.

If they had quit, but didn't tell anyone, would they get the validation craved?

That's a shitty thing to assume. For all you know they treated their website like a diary and just write for the sake of expressing themselves. It's not like the author posted it here seeing as they are dead.

Re: Ego Death

#45
post #9

> We aren’t using social media to drive action. We are using it to farm a false sense of worth. To cast stones at anyone who foolishly stumbles into the latest virtue-trap. Yeah, it feels like most of social media is now shit-flinging and calling the "outside group" stupid so one can feel "At least I'm not a stupid horrible person like that idiot!". I notice on Instagram you can "like" comments but not dislike them,…

I support the post author's position completely. It's incredibly clear to me now after using social media for about a decade that it's not something healthy to participate in, and I shouldn't use it beyond a few really specific scenarios, like communicating with a business.

I've watched it destroy relationships, including some of mine, and turn people into psychopaths. When I meet someone new I can observe a pretty consistent correlation between how heavily they use the major social media platforms and how awful of a human being they are.

It is not a thing you want in your life, full stop.

Re: Ego Death

#46
post #14

Funny how many "I"'s and "my"'s in this piece. This was especially ironic: > " I want to kill my ego , or at least substantially break it"

It is at least a beginning. When someone is learning something new, they will naturally take some time to be good at it. They are merely expressing their awareness that the ego is something that is the root of their suffering. For now, they are comfortable expressing it from the ego’s point of view… because it’s familiar! We’ve all been there at some point, and most of us don’t even move on from it.

It seems to me that those criticising the OP for using too many “I”s are behaving like crabs in a bucket. Let us look beyond mere words and into what OP is actually trying to communicate.

Re: Ego Death

#47

I find it so irritating and difficult to read when authors needlessly make most of their paragraphs a single sentence. Or use lots of tiny sentences that read like fragments. I guess it's to add effect? Except it doesn't read like it's profound, it's just annoying. Please stop doing this and just write like you talk. Unless that's also how you talk, in which case please just don't do that.

It’s a device used for conveying dramatic feelings in storytelling. You’d never use it in formal communication or technical documents, but there’s no reason to get worked up about it either.

Re: Ego Death

#48
post #9

> We aren’t using social media to drive action. We are using it to farm a false sense of worth. To cast stones at anyone who foolishly stumbles into the latest virtue-trap. Yeah, it feels like most of social media is now shit-flinging and calling the "outside group" stupid so one can feel "At least I'm not a stupid horrible person like that idiot!". I notice on Instagram you can "like" comments but not dislike them,…

Social media simply amplifies what is already common among human beings. One way it seems to do this is by flattening and legitimizing impropriety. Normal societies are "chunky", that is, you have niches and enclaves and varying distance unified in some increasingly "thin" manner. This enables various kinds of relationships to flourish (think of how marriage creates a special space for the couple, and then another sp…

Google solved this with circles. Too bad that thing didn't catch on.

Re: Ego Death

#50
post #11

I find it so irritating and difficult to read when authors needlessly make most of their paragraphs a single sentence. Or use lots of tiny sentences that read like fragments. I guess it's to add effect? Except it doesn't read like it's profound, it's just annoying. Please stop doing this and just write like you talk. Unless that's also how you talk, in which case please just don't do that.

IMHO it's to add clarity. The white space gives extra separation to statements. It's how I write most of my communication, like statements are lines of code.

I also hate when people wrote code with a blank line between every line.
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