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Re: undefined

#51

Post by streamofdigits » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 3:38 PM UTC

kishinmanglani wrote: post #46

streamofdigits wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your framing is wrong at multiple levels. i) facebook has not contributed an iota to the consumerist utopia you seem to cherish. it is the result of a long period of scientific / technological development. communicating instantly with people around the globe can be done perfectly well with, e.g. Signal. you do not need the apparatus of surveillance capitalism to deliver it. ii) said consumerist utopia is neither avai…

Facebook hasn't contributed one iota? Facebook has contributed an immense amount to the developer community, small businesses and literally everyone else. Free communication with almost any human on the planet: check. Advertise alongside industry incumbents with any ad budget: check. Oh yeah and React, React Native, GraphQL, pyTorch, and a whole lot more.

"Free communication" in... exchange for personal data. But thats a price that is invisible to fanboys. Exploiting those who either can't understand or who can't afford the tiny cost of communicating with data privacy.

As for small businesses, its walled garden simply cannibalized their earlier websites and made every small trader dependent upon opaque and arbitrary discovery algorithms that can wipe them out without warning.

The open source projects you mention have multiple alternatives, many from genuine community projects that will sustain irrespective of a corporate sponsor.

Re: undefined

#52

Post by dyeje » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

This company is developing a track record of clickbait articles. They also did the "Study finds 83% of software developers feel burnout" piece.

Re: undefined

#53

Post by Aditya_Garg » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #24

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #13

The mental drain of the world exerted by social media is completely enormous. It explains so much about the dystopia we find ourselves in. What happened to the talks of breaking up Big Tech? It seems to have disappeared.

I've always thought when I see one of these numbers about how people are collectively dumping millions of hours into Youtube or WoW or whatever else every day, imagine if that'd be spent on something genuinely social instead, learning, creating something, contributing something to the commons, volunteer an hour at the soup kitchen, clean the local park, however trivial. A billion hours of that every day instead of re…

People choose to spend time on social media, instead of going to park and volunteering. Banning social media isn’t going to fix that, people will waste time in other ways.

At some point there needs to be personal accountability

Re: undefined

#54

Post by seoulmetro » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 12:44 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #24

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #13

The mental drain of the world exerted by social media is completely enormous. It explains so much about the dystopia we find ourselves in. What happened to the talks of breaking up Big Tech? It seems to have disappeared.

I've always thought when I see one of these numbers about how people are collectively dumping millions of hours into Youtube or WoW or whatever else every day, imagine if that'd be spent on something genuinely social instead, learning, creating something, contributing something to the commons, volunteer an hour at the soup kitchen, clean the local park, however trivial. A billion hours of that every day instead of re…

Agreed. I absolutely hate the things I dump my hours into. There are things which I have to, chores, work, sleep. But then even the things I don't have to, the ones I do to "de-stress" I end up hating and loathing after I've done it. And yet I'll continue to dump hours and hours into it. I could have learnt a language by now, or two. But the path of least resistance always wins, then you regret it immediately. Addiction and laziness are at fault to be honest and it's a vicious cycle.

Note: Here my de-stress is playing video games. I don't do it much, but a couple hours here and there adds up to thousands eventually.

Re: undefined

#55

Post by yunohn » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 3:24 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #50

yunohn wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say this, but here you are wasting time on HN. Please stop with this appeal to get others to be constantly productive; it is not helpful advice, and being unproductive is crucial to helping the brain relax. I’m not endorsing toxic social media, but I’m debating your overall gist nonetheless.

read carefully, I suggested people ought to be more social in a genuine sense of the term and not more 'productive' in some superficial corporate sense, the examples i gave should have made that clear. Secondly I surely do waste too much time on social media, I don't see how that should stop me from appealing to others as well as myself though, consider me included in the criticism, I'm not a saint. However this holi…

> ‘productive' in some superficial corporate sense

While you didn’t use the word, the exemplar “social” activities involve more productivity in the general sense of the word, than doom scrolling on social media does. There is space in our lives for both.

> holier than thou silencing tactic of thinking we can't criticize culture just because we're also part of perpetuating

That is not what I meant. You implied that people should not want a certain aspect of relaxation, while enjoying the same aspect yourself. This is akin to rich people saying “money doesn’t buy you happiness” while enjoying the outcome of having money. There are nuances, but the appeal is flawed nonetheless.