Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?

Although now considerably less than in the past. Peak mobility occurred during the mid-1900s. Most, and increasingly more as time marches forward, will stay close to where they were born.

> That's the essential problem.

It is a problem for individuals in that situation, but does it explain a population-wide epidemic when most never actually leave their familial roots?

> If all those people were in the same city there'd be a lot more socializing.

I am among those who still live near where I was born and have known a lot of the people my whole life. Color me skeptical. Nobody has the time to. They're at work all day and when that's done it is into the car to drive their kid to who knows where to play in a sporting match thinking they are going to become a professional some day.

It was a little different 15-20 years ago. You used to be able to go down to the community centre on a Saturday night and the whole town would be there, ready to mingle. But it turns out the draw was really alcohol, and when police started cracking down on drunk drivers and health concern messaging started to gain attention, it all dwindled pretty quickly.

It's all about priorities, and socializing just isn't a priority for most people anymore. There are so many other things also vying for attention.

The only place I am usually active is on Hackernews and on bluesky as wel

> HN has obviously held up a bit better, but the AI driven mass hallucination impacting this community, combined with the increasingly aggressive manipulation of the home page, is continually making logging out for good seem like the best option.

I am not kidding, this is so true. I don't know if I can get flagged again but oh well, The amount of manipulation happening in HN is insane and flagging and just about everything

People called me bots twice on Hackernews for no apparent reason which really hurt and then I created a post about it which got flagged again as well and the responses were.. well not so sympathetic

I feel like I would be better off being an robot than a human in hackernews at this point smh. You get called bots for simply existing and showing your viewpoint or having a viewpoint (different?) or just no apparent reason and I genuinely don't know.

Bluesky has some faults as well but It's (I must admit) more focused on politics. i like the weeds of things in coding. I found some coding spaces in bluesky but they are just not there yet. I ended up spending 2 hours or something trying to build an extension which can automatically create threads for large posts because (you can see) i love writing large posts and bluesky has 300 characters limit and that annoyed me

I don't know what to do as well. I am thinking of still using Hackernews and bluesky but to an degree of moderation. I have tried discord and that doesn't work as well.

Honestly I just don't know as well but right now I atleast feel that I am not alone in this. I am not feeling lonely about feeling like this so once again massive thank you man, these are the comments which lure me into entering hackernews. Not people accusing me of being bots for no apparent reason and this happened on both bluesky and hackernews where pople called me bot and I actually try to be respectful and uh in bluesky someone went on 10 thread comment saying silence AI or silence bot when I was trying to be reasonable for the most part until I trolled them back

And in all of this questioning myself what did I do wrong, did I have a stance and they wanted to deny it and said something, the HN instance just mentioned my name as the reason I am a clanker. All of these things genuinely made me feel like people just wont trust me in being part of this community if someone (even after being a year in) trying to respond nicely and following the rules mostly can call me clanker

Like I just don't know what to do with either bots or people who accuse (you) of being bots. Both just feel the worst in social media and are actively rotting both HN and many other communties to the point that I dont even know what are some good alternatives

I think the biggest negative impact of AI is the fact that we aren't able to trust each other online in my opinion or trust art and other issues as well.

Once again thank you man for writing this. Your comment gets what I am talking about as well and I didn't know how to summarize what I wanted to say!

In previous generations, you had to interact with others to get anything done at all. Kids had to play with kids, parents had to talk to the postman, the milkman, the newspaper boy, the telephone operator, the neighbors, you name it. It was a necessity for a functional life, so people did it.