It’s not just kids at risk, I also struggle with it as a millennial. I love skimming HN, comments, blogs but I almost never read a full article. I wanted to read the Bible recently, and it was such a challenge that instead I generated an app to doomscroll it called ScrollMyBible.com (plugging because it’s 100% free/ad free and has actually been helping me read more) - maybe this idea could be used for other applications where we redirect this tendency that is weaponized against us towards something constructive
Doomscrolling ourselves to death
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Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death
#92I can tell, usually within a few minutes of meeting them, who’s really into social media. There’s a little bit of frenetic emotional dysregulation, and then they say the weirdest stuff to me. I don’t think you could have made a similar argument about heavy trash tv watchers. They may have had less to talk about, you may have found them less interesting, but it didn’t literally alter their personalities. We have a big…
Before social media I remember people who had entire conversations just quoting tv shows, movies, and commercials. Which shows they quoted was their personality.
I think it is much worse with social media, the content is a lot more niche and the algorithms a lot more addictive.
It's not so much the weird stuff they say, I think that is fairly normal, especially the younger you go. It's the inability to do anything in person without talking constant phone breaks that I find most worrying.
Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death
#93Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> AI is making this worse, since it’s unleashed an epidemic of cheating and the tool itself is inimical to learning. (Learning is friction. The tool to remove friction also removes learning) I disagree with this take so strongly. Yes, in practice people are lazy and they're just going to ask for the answer. But the potential for AIs to give targeted answers to specific questions about academic topics is so far ahead…
Very few people have the discipline to use it in that way rather than as a way to remove friction, just as practically no one with a smartphone doesn’t, at least occasionally, find themselves “sucked in”.
> a way to remove friction
Hell yeah. Trudging a mile through the snow and ice from West Campus to the Engineering Quad to sit in my TA's office hours so I could hope to ask a question about problem 19 because I don't understand the second half of it is a vastly worse use of time than firing up Gemini and saying "I'm taking partial differential equations, and I'm seeing a problem where I have to..."
I would kill to go back through undergrad with an AI by my side as I study, or even in class, so when the professor loses me 10 minutes into an 80-minute lecture, I have a hope of getting back on the train and not having the lecture be a waste.
Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death
#95After a long period of reading very little fiction (and even less on deadtree), I’ve been rereading some SF in my bookshelf (the Culture series in particular) and I’ve been positively surprised how easy it has been to reach the "zone" where you aren’t constantly losing your focus or trying to fight the instinct to reach for an electronic device. Starting is the hardest part. It helps, of course, when the author’s prose is as compelling as Banks’s (RIP).
Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have examples of what weird stuff they would say? Im having a hard time imagining what you mean exactly.
if i hear 'aura farming' or 'xxx-maxing' one more time I might punch someone.
funny that, I read ZIRP and FAANG this FAANG that, zero interests cause this, cause that, for YEARS here. It's not that different if you can compare, all lead by bots and affected masses.
Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death
#97It’s not just kids at risk, I also struggle with it as a millennial. I love skimming HN, comments, blogs but I almost never read a full article. I wanted to read the Bible recently, and it was such a challenge that instead I generated an app to doomscroll it called ScrollMyBible.com (plugging because it’s 100% free/ad free and has actually been helping me read more) - maybe this idea could be used for other applicati…
> redirect this tendency that is weaponized against us towards something constructive
Who is "weaponizing" it against you, and how?
Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death
#98It’s not just kids at risk, I also struggle with it as a millennial. I love skimming HN, comments, blogs but I almost never read a full article. I wanted to read the Bible recently, and it was such a challenge that instead I generated an app to doomscroll it called ScrollMyBible.com (plugging because it’s 100% free/ad free and has actually been helping me read more) - maybe this idea could be used for other applicati…
> redirect this tendency that is weaponized against us towards something constructive Who is "weaponizing" it against you, and how?
X, FB, TikTok, YouTube, etc.
The doomscrolling algorithms are 100% weaponized against us to keep us scrolling endlessly.
Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death
#99On a personal level I have become more anxious and it has become more difficult to deal with my tendency to procrastinate the more screen time I have and the more I am exposed to social media. I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube. A few weeks ago I blocked them too. I would say in totality I read…
> I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube
Most of the people I’ve known who struggled with doomscrolling had established a similar set of social media sites at their worst point.
I think we’ve seen so many articles about how social media is bad that reference mainstream sites like Facebook and Instagram that it feels safer to retreat to sites like Reddit
Yet the most doomer, anxious, and cynical people I’ve known who got stuck in social media doom spirals were getting it primarily from Reddit, often with a helping of YouTube, X, or Twitch streamers on the side.
They would be convinced that they were “off of social media” because they didn’t consider those sites among the bad ones, but they’d open their phones or laptops and feed streams of doom straight into their brains for hours every day.
Cutting the cord on those sites was a good move if you realized you were having problems with social media. They’re not typically grouped into “social media” by people who create narrow definitions of what that means (profile picture, real names, etc) but those distinctions mean nothing for doom scrolling. When it comes to the doom part of doom scrolling, Reddit especially can be even worse than traditional social media. The content popular on that site is almost designed to fill you with dread and doom and depression.
Re: Doomscrolling ourselves to death
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to think the same way, that people have always overreacted to new technology. But over time I’ve started to feel there’s at least a bit of truth to some of those moral panics, and it's not correct to dismiss all. I remember laughing at an old article about “calcu-holism,” basically the idea of becoming too dependent on calculators. At the time it sounded ridiculous, but looking back, the point wasn’t that bad.…
Re: books Most books are useless and boring. Some books have good concept but drags things needlessly. I still read a good amount everyday but not a 300 page book where the core content is 2 page. However, a great book is still interesting and being "completely engrossed" is still possible. It is the book content quality (compared to other things in society) that dropped.
It's always surprising how many HN readers seem to read only non-fiction, sometimes only self-help style books about business and startups. Some are even proud of that.