Hacker News Reader

Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

The internet is not limited to Social networks. The "Market for lemons" has existed for decade, google is a market for lemons where people buy from SEO spam, Google assistant , Siri , amazon are also.

The logging off is a pipe dream for some people, even though they know that humans are informational creatures and that the "offline world" has never lived up to the desirable one since the time books were invented.

Doominess and gloominess is the real disease of our times

View on HN

> Doominess and gloominess is the real disease of our times

I see SIGNIFICANTLY more homeless people in the two cities I frequent than at any other time in my life, there is a snow covered tent city half a kilometer from the glass monstrosity Google has built here and mostly doesn't occupy. Facism is on the rise globally. A third world war is possibly percolating in Europe. Google is soaking up all the bulk of revenue that used to go to publishers. Amazon has destroyed at least half of bookstores.

But sure, I guess gloominess is the issue. Does all of the above make you happy somehow?

Things are undeniably better than they ever were before, especially for those outside the US and Western Europe. We need to work to continue to improve them, but we are in no way going the wrong direction outside of a few small areas such as housing access as you point out.

I’m outside the US.

I travel a decent bit. Not sure where you are, but almost without exception things are much, much better than ever before outside the us.

The internet is full of lemons, not only social media, SEO-influenced services, and services where money buys you reach.

If you take any popular medical fact (for example, about diets), you will find countless published academic articles supporting and against it. This extends into other fields like physics, sociology, and politics too. But the contradictions there (while present) are not as overtly visible.

Many popular news outlets are leaning towards reporting in a "flavor" their audience expects and mixing opinions into their reporting.

By some studies, 80%+ of internet users admit to being duped at least once by fake news or misinformation online in 2022. That's the misinformation they spotted. 50%+ Americans say they read fake news online regularly.

As for logging off, according to Reuters Institute, 41% of Americans actively avoided news in 2022. And anecdotally, my friends and I have withdrawn from social media like Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on significantly this year. It definitely feels like a lot of information online is misinformation, either synthesized intentionally or "broken-telephoned" into fantasy by mainstream media.

I do not know how to deal with this personally but disengage from most of the online world. The signal-to-noise ratio of reliable information in many regions of the internet is meager. I mainly read Hacker News (which also sometimes features contradictory research or news), some academic journals, Wikipedia, some forums in my professional field, and some RSS news sources. Everything else on the internet has become too awash with contradictions and misinformation.

I never thought I'd have to retreat so far from mainstream media and social media. Mass logging off is going to impact these areas of the internet seriously.

I am scared of what AI language models will do to professional blogs, news, and academia. Editors and peer-reviewers there are already overwhelmed with unreliable information.

Most probably it will solve itself. Altavista was a useful search engine until it was not, than it was replaced by google. Google was a useful search engine and its getting primed for a replacement. Usually things do not pan out as Utopia or Dystopia but some human middle ground of kinda shitty balance :)

I am interested to see which social media platforms double down on welcoming ai generated content and catering to the remaining users that prefer addictive content to social connection.

This is speculative but we may see a very strong pivot from the "social" aspect to the addictive content aspect in publicly listed social media companies in order to continue to appease shareholders, which could, possibly, accelerate this potential reemphasis on real world communication and connection.

Yep. Customizable TV is the future

Can you elaborate on what you mean by doom and gloom being the real problem? Are you saying it’s more of a perception issue that can be changed by the user?

No i mean things like, this article: That AI is so bad that people will want to run away. As far as i m concerned AI is a positive and desirable change in the world

It still seems derivative, not creative. It is damn good at it and will only get better but still derivative from my limited experience playing with it.

>> Doominess and gloominess is the real disease of our times

Seems more like extremely wealthy sociopaths & psychopaths that thrive in a capitalistic system are. Don’t think people would be so doomy & gloomy if it weren’t for those with the means to do so trying to shape society into their dystopian dreams.

Two examples if needed:

Thiel & Davos family

What about society being shaped in the dreams of other wealthy people, like Karl Schwab or George Soros? Is that OK?

They are all WEF cronies.

Have a look inside Mao's China or Soviet Russia to cure you of the notion that capitalism is special here.

Doom and gloom have been around for longer than a money based economy, too.

My comment is based around his specific words of “disease of our times”, being unrelated to the timeframes you’ve mentioned.

They arrive at the same endpoint through different means. Too much concentrated power and wealth.

It's not at all the same endpoint.

Ah yes, whenever someone complains about unchecked capitalism, there is always someone to bring up Soviet Russia.

It's quicker to make this argument by contrast, than to make the longer argument that capitalism is great in absolute terms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com