451–460 of 511 posts
HN is social media. Social media is a spectrum. You can imagine HN like a documentary channel compared to Facebook’s reality TV, but even “documentaries” can be dopamine sinks that aren’t actually informative (or accurate). (But personally, I see lots of short and pure opinion posts here, documentaries are long and at least pretend to contain facts; so I’d hesitate to compare it to a documentary channel even with the…
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The historic reason attitudes towards immigration changes is because of scale. This [1] page has a nice graph of the foreign born US population. Towards the end of the 19th century it hit 14.8% which led to significant pushback that culminated in various laws and acts against immigration. That's precisely where the paperwork started to form. Following those acts and laws, immigration declined to a valley of 4.7% fore…
People aren’t, and will not, have as many kids going forward. We are seeing this in rich countries and poor countries. Right before the baby boomers are fully retired is a heckuva time America decided it wants to contract its population by prioritizing keeping the working adult out.
Facebook just isn't a social media site anymore. They pivoted, and did so multiple times. Remember when they were going to be a games platform, where Farmville was their big hit? They eventually abandoned that and then wanted to be a video and streaming platform. Then Metaverse VR was going to replace everything. Now they're some sort of AI company. People long ago started migrating to Whatsapp, Discord, and similar…
Short form video media is massively profitable and those same people are eating it up.
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Night Watch (2002), by Terry Pratchett. > People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't…
My favorite quote from any novel comes from that book as well; "Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes."
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This is so different from my personal experience that I feel like one of those kids being told chickens used to be dinosaurs. I have an account on facebook, on which I am pretty active. If I attend some infrequent event (Which I do fairly often) I will take a picture of it and post it there, with a description of what it's about. That's pretty much the extent of what I put on facebook. Sometimes I see similar posts f…
So you infrequently post on FB, that is exactly in line with the article. You didn't mention whether or not the content you see in your feed is from people that you know in real life or not, so I can't evaluate if your experience is inline with the article. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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> history is, as always, not just repeating, but practically plagiarizing itself Every time in US history that there's been an influx of immigrants, there were people spouting essentially identical arguments to the ones they're spouting now (stealing jobs, lack of assimilation, etc.), and every time it's turned out to be basically a non-issue in the long run. I've long had the opinion that most of the people vehement…
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It's not even clear you've read what I did say, because literally the first few words of my comment were "Every time in US history". If you're somehow trying to infer my view of Israeli foreign policy based on that, it doesn't sound like I have any ability to influence what you decide you think I'm telling you.
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This comes up often, particularly on Reddit, and I don't think we're doing us any favors by counting it as social media. It has a few substantial differences to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, et al: - The focus isn't on connecting. It has a "friends" feature (I believe?), but the social graph is extremely weak. - You are not expected to use your real name. On the contrary, it comes off as weird unless you're a…
Reddit absolutely has algorithmic feeds since it ipo'ed (maybe earlier but I used third party apps so I wasn't subjected to them). 90% of my home page is bullshit I didn't ask for.
I've stopped using YouTube and Reddit since early April and it's been a mixed bag. On one side my interest level has adjusted so that normal activities make sense again - like sitting in the garden or playing a game with my kid. I've also completed dozens of projects like replacing old silicon in the entire kitchen or updating the garden playground. On the other side I'm feeling more isolated and lacking information…
YouTube recommendation is never that good to me. I frequently just scroll desperately and ended up not watching anything, and when I'm peak bored I resort to rewatching my list of liked videos. That's why I feel weird whenever I see projects that want to make YouTube less engaging, it's already not engaging enough for me.
If you're on Android, you can use revanced to patch social network apps, to, among other things, remove content from non-friends (and ads). It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this. It can be full days with the same post at the top. And the worst part is that I hadn't noticed how empty it was until I did the change.
> It's scary how empty the feed is once you do this. what if your friends used it too? would there be more content (as they seek to connect to real peopl), or less (as they leave)?
Let's not kid ourselves. They won't.
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> just as susceptible It’s really not though. There is no personalized algorithm, which is 98% of the issue with social media. It may seem pedantic, but it’s like saying a horse and a car are essentially the same thing, the car just has an engine.
The personalized algorithm is not the root issue though. The root issue is that social media sites live by increasing engagement of its viewers. Because of this, they all get away from the original stated purpose of bringing people together, and go all in on maximizing engagement by increasingly shady ways. Of course, the personalized algorithm is a huge one, but there are also things like "Show HN" controlling what…