Comment by buvanshak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buvanshak | Hacker News Reader

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I already does not use facebook and the likes. For me, I had a similar feeling after I blocked reddit/hn domains.

>I hope this platform dies, rather quickly. Because it harms society and individuals more than we are aware of.

Reddit/HN are places where places that can make you feel like you are doing something or "contributing", without actually making any real impact. A feeling similar to the the illusionary feeling thing you refer in your comment. On one had, it helps individuals to grow and on the other, it restricts their actions to an isolated chamber where the real world remain safe from their thoughts/questions.

So I think, after a certain point. You should forcefully disconnect/distance yourself from these platform, and start to engage in more real world activities. For ex, write a blog, write actual newspaper articles. Send your thoughts to actual news papers for them to publish in such sections, engage in local activities and discussion Etc.

An example of this is that when we came to know about the testing of self driving vehicles happening, many of the people here might have asked "What are the tests there were done before these vehicles are put on road"? Is there any legal groundwork in place?

But those questions remained safely in the realm of the HN servers as some binary pattern in a Hard disk platter. They didn't get out it the real world. They didn't get translated into real question to real authorities.

>Reddit/HN are places where places that can make you feel like you are doing something or "contributing", without actually making any real impact.

Impact for its own sake is overrated. That's not to say you should navelgaze and philosophize about everything but you really do need a balance. The startup community in particular is in love with the image of hustle and whirlwind activity usually just for the sake of ingratiating a handful of egos.

Blogs and newspaper articles have been left in the dust. We can romanticize the long form journalist but really that's a step back. The pool of ideas is now open to anyone with a well worded comment. Rather than privileging a credentialed journalist to express an opinion for us there is a battle of contrasting ideas from many more (though never all) backgrounds to find consensus. To me this is the future. A handful of ivy league graduates pontificating back and forth in op-eds through limited newspaper and magazine space is the past.

You might argue that this will create an environment full of emotion and rhetoric but really that's business as usual. The well educated have just been schooled in how to dress up their opinions as though they were facts. Internet comment sections are about deciding how a problem or conversation will be framed not necessarily about solving those problems. Framing/rhetoric and analysis of virtues are a huge part of determining what "impact" will look like.

> But those questions remained safely in the realm of the HN servers as some binary pattern in a Hard disk platter. They didn't get out it the real world.

If no one would bother to read them sure. But I fail to see how the fact that information is stored in a 'binary pattern in a hard disk platter' makes it less relevant than it being stored on a slice of fallen tree... Especially in our day and age I would argue for the opposite, the virtual medium has become more important - because more people are using it to get their information.

> virtual medium has become more important - because more people are using it to get their information...

"More" does not necessary equals better..Having talk with a concerned authority or a minister might be thousand times better than communicating to a million reddit/hn readers..

Can you think one single instance where a reddit/hn comment ended up having a real world impact?

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