Hacker News Reader

Comment by 411111111111111 | Hacker News Reader

But why do people blame social media for that? Every entertainment is equally at fault, wherever it's fictions, movies, tv series, comics/webtoons, games etc

View on HN

It’s a difference of degree not kind. The constant audiovisual stimulus running through the internet is much more powerful than any of those things, and more widely available. Cable TV was close. It was always on in the room, but you had to be in the room, and you had to negotiate with your cohabitants over what to have on, or else you could go somewhere and be bored. There are no constraints anymore, with exceptions for the most impoverished among us - there’s always something close at hand to tickle your particular reptile brain until you fall asleep.

That's not what happens when people doom scroll. They are not perfectly entertained. They are profoundly bored on social media. But they still scroll for scraps of entertainment because more promising alternatives are not really accessible to them at that moment, because of physical limitations or their state of mind or their energy levels.

Computers with social media are so extremely reactive. Literally within half a second I can react to my boredom and find new content. I've noticed myself beginning to read a sentence, get bored half-way through, switch tabs, look over the new recommendations, do it again 30 seconds later.

Never bored, and yet never really entertained or satisfied.

The best is when you're on reddit, think "this is boring", open a new tab and type in "reddit.com"...

On that topic, I've luckily managed to make reddit boring that I open it, scroll for a minute or so, and close it again: I unsubscribed from the "interesting" subreddits like politics or tifu or askreddit.

One trick I've found to help with this is to live-stream. I once streamed a game on Twitch, nobody really watched, but it forced me to sit down and actually play the game for a good 2 or 3 hours. It was draining, gloriously draining and satisfying. You can stream programming and other personal projects as well. It doesn't matter if you get many viewers or not, just forcing yourself to maintain a consistent course of action helps. If you do get some real viewers though, all the better, you can monetize your work and enjoy free advice and socializing with viewers.

Playing the game was what was draining?

Yeah, wow

The act of performing in front of others was probably the draining part.

But also, yeah. If you need someone to watch you do X so you can enjoy X, maybe you don't like X all that much in the first place.

Streaming games live is a job that people burn out doing, it is very draining.

That's because it really doesn't pay to do so... Even though a lot of streamers act like they're making money, they're really not getting paid much.

Yes, normally I would play for 30 mins and then do something else. It was Outer Wilds though, a mystery / puzzle game similar to Myst and so the problem solving made it more tiring and more tempting to take breaks.

> Never bored, and yet never really entertained or satisfied.

Social media in a nutshell

> Never bored, and yet never really entertained or satisfied.

"Nobody is bored, everything is boring." -- K-Punk

yeah, internet has near no constraint and this is the key problem

TV had time.. you may be able to store it but you'd need tapes .. still space and efforts constraints

today your hard drive and infinite connection create an infinite pit

I also believe our brains love, just like muscles love exercise, prioritizing, you feel better when you made a smart decision. the feeling of never having to choose, skip through many videos, pausing them, in any order tickle the gluttony in us but then you get stuck and rot

Agreed, and quite often there was nothing of interest. On the net I can almost always find something of interest or at least interesting enough for me to crap my time away

I don't think novelists have yet figured out how to completely occupy your cognitive apparatus or put you under pressure to stay engaged. When I'm sitting in my comfy chair reading a novel, I can close my eyes without worrying that I might miss something while I'm asleep.

How is this different than closing your phone, screen shotting a FB post, pausing your video? Really. Even live streams, for the most part, are able to be paused and watched at a later date albiet without chat interaction. I fail to see the difference.

If you fall asleep during a video, now you'll have no idea where you were. Similarly if I lose concentration watching a video, I now have to either go back or hope I didn't miss anything important. If I lose concentration while reading, the page is still there, I just have to skim it until I find where i went on a tangent.

You still need to skim the page. The same way you can skim video to find the place you remember. I don't see a lot of difference here.

You really don't see a difference between skimming a single page and scrubbing through a video that could be hours long? And scrubbing only works when the video is visually distinct enough between parts that you can tell without having to watch a few seconds at multiple different points.

Social media has feedback loops that can adjust themselves orders of magnitude faster than legacy media, to keep you addicted (er, "engaged") with near zero friction.

Because it's too easy now. You need a creative endeavor to seem like an easy way to replace boredom with novelty. For a lot of folks especially younger ones, there is already infinite novelty just waiting to be scrolled all the time in their pocket. No need to do anything except wave your thumb around.

lower friction makes it even easier to consume. We didn't use to turn on a tv every time you took a dump but we are on our phones scrolling through brain garbage every idle second we have in our day. that's not good, our brain is not equipped to either deal with all this stimulus or resist it.

I intentionally avoid things like TikTok because I've experienced how incessantly and constantly addictive it is. But then again, I'll also avoid particularly long TV series, games without definitive ends, etc. I think TikTok et al are unique because you're "doing something" but the effort expended to get that next hit is extremely minimal. Even though I can sink hours into Factorio, it's challenging and exhausting. I might be able to binge a TV series, but eventually I'll want to do something. TikTok hits a perfect blend of "doing" and "experiencing" that makes it endlessly addictive.

If you're suggesting they're equally at fault, you better have some numbers to back it up. Otherwise it just looks like you say they're equal because that's what you want to believe.

    > Every entertainment is equally at fault

Clearly not. That would be like dismissing Siberian tigers as just cats, and pretending they're no more dangerous than the average housecat. The taxonomy is the same, but the similarities end there.

In that sense everything is at fault, not just all forms of media.

But social media has no downtime and is engineered to be addictive. A casino will lose it's appeal once you've run out of liquidity. Social media has next to no prohibiting qualities.

I think social media does negatively affect your inspiration. Boredom on the other hand is absolutely vital to seek out any inspiration.

Yup that too, but TV was strictly scheduled until the 80s(?) people who read books were unsocial nerds who didn't go out.

Traditional media is a static website. Social media is infinite scroll.

Social media is an active mechanism to keep you hooked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com