Are we on information overload? (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Are we on information overload? (2012)

salon.com

57 pointsdeepbow27 comments

I hate it.

I believe it comes down to the fact that most things are optimised for different things than what you use or want it for.

i.e the best social network would connect you to the world, let you see what was important and give you that as easily and quickly as possible so you can spend as much of your life enjoying actual life and less using the tool, however it's ad supported and there goal is to keep you on it as much as possible, so they have to give you a little of what you want, so they can get as much of what they want as possible.

And it's the same as anything, you want news, you want to be informed, they want clicks and page views, most news it could be enough to just read the headline, but they have to put it in a clickbait way and then burry the important sentence within a huge article of adverts, what's worse is that sentence wasn't even that relevant when you actually found it.

Youtube should be great for content, but it becomes a business and 'content creators' are't really producing that valuable content, they are producing content that feeds the algorithm and grows there subscribers, there can be some value in it but the value is massively diluted by any major content creator to fit in with the rules.

It's annoying and I haven't found a solution. It feels like a losing battle.

Yes, there's in fact an incentive mismatch here between the creator and the media. But it doesn't mean it wasn't there before to some extent. There are still great resources out there. So how do you spot them?

Information does not come easy, and never has. If it's easy, you most likely won't remember it, which essentially makes the whole thing a loss of time. What I would aim for is focus. This is the big difference I think. If the content is selected for its quality, I'm in. And quality almost always mean quantity. Learning takes time and reflection. If you don't do either of these you're just consuming things on a surface level.

Replace Twitter with internet forums, replace articles with books, instructional videos with real documentaries, etc. All these things call for your full attention, and that is, I believe, the most important. Paradoxically, I've found that the best "content producers" instinctively know this and don't spend much time on YT/social media.

To be fair, I think the signal to noise ratio of your local branch library is a lot higher than what you’d find digitally these days

Yeah but turn your signal producer into one that has less noise and find out that the world is noisy and entropy wins in the end and that people are just other systems inside the system and all of it has it's own goals.

And so why bother? Embrace correlation, seed the world with noise, burn yourself up as you and all of it burns down and we wait for the telomeres to do the inevitable.

True but there is less signal available. It was much more effort and time consuming to learn. Now the effort is spent in filtering out the noise but it still seems like a net gain. Things like learning to cook or fix a bicycle, or find books and music are so much easier, despite the overwhelming amount of garbage/noise. At least that's my take as an adult who has lived in both worlds.

If you paid for that it would be. There's your solution.

Personally, I'd be glad to pay to "fix" this but it doesn't seem to be an option. I pay for YouTube premium, for example, so that I and my kids (especially) aren't constantly bombarded by ads. Taking that option doesn't change the fundamental nature of the ad-based ecosystem/algorithm though. And I still get in-content plugs for SquareSpace, BetterHelp, Athletic Greens, etc, etc, etc...

I think that this is a good summary of the problem. The incentives seems misaligned. And I am not sure that paying for content would magically make this disappear. Or if so, then the companies should offer completely different products to paying customers, not just ad-free experiences.

There's a dilemma. If the news sources knew what your preferences were, and you'd somehow pay the cost of filtering the news, then they could ship you just what you wanted. No more stories about mishaps across-the-ocean, or on topics that disinterest or rankle you, or from agencies you don't trust or want to support.

OTOH, who wants their detailed preferences out in the wild? Clearly a tailored model is better; how can that be implemented, in a way that doesn't filter out what you do want to hear about?

Seems like the filtering should happen at the client end. Are there ways to do that? (EG I might temporarily want to follow something for a week. Then not.) But: what's the incentive for the sources to feed your filters?

If only HN had some collaborative filtering to present me only the stuff I need to know about ...

I disagree. It's still pretty difficult to come across neutral, high-quality and well-presented information; not as difficult as when you had to walk to a library and hope that your topic is well covered, but it certainly isn't constantly thrown at you for free in the form of 30-second video clips.

At least for me, the feeling of overload comes from filler and clickbait, not information. They trigger the expectation of satisfaction, consume mental processing power, and then disappoint, leading to frustration.

I agree that it is exhausting. But it seems that it's a challenge of information parsing and application - not necessarily the volume of information itself.

I think there can be no doubt that the volume and accessibility of information exploding is a good thing. It will take time for us to find our rhythm with the new reality - we need tools on an individual and social level to cope.

yes?

but jokes aside - the luddite movement that a few gen z teens have started seems to have caught on. phones like the nothing and others seem to be gaining traction too if one believes the media.

i’m curious for hn’s perspective - how do you constrain and curate information? what’s the best line here?

Disconnecting works for me. I don't participate in social media outside Hackernews and only read RSS feeds and newsletters from high signal-to-noise sources. About phones, I have a basic smartphone that I use for calls, messaging, calendar, and some day-to-day life apps.

I used to be hooked on social media like Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and mainstream media. But over time, I've grown increasingly disillusioned with the quality of the content soup on them. So for me, there was never a need to constrain and curate information actively.

As Matthew McConaughey wrote in their book "Greenlights" - "When we decrease the options [choices] that don't feed us, we eventually, almost accidentally, have more options in front of us that do." Worked out that way for me with information. Just decrease the amount of algorithmic sludge you consume, and you'll find that the quality of the information you take in increases.

This is good. There's also the digitalminimalism sub on reddit, which all revolves around methods and ways to curate use

I rarely use my phone for internet access, except in emergency or necessity, which is very rare. I have good taste. And have a very good bullshit filter. And no social media accounts, unless HN counts.

Plus adblocking.

FLOPPY FLOPS OF BYTES ENTERING MY MEAT NETWORK.

Braining my brain until it can brain no more.

As the buffalo prance through the grammar and the correlations break the symbolic network that used to think it could know.

For sure, and we have been for a while. Humans are simply not built for being inundated with information outside of the local tribe or community. It's a strange philosophical consequence that humans create technology that outpace humanity's emotional and general intelligence.

If there is information overload, there is also many times more garbage overload.

Pundits have been saying that we are in an information overload since the 60s. I think people have responded by getting better at filtering unwanted information.

Yes. Without a doubt. Newspapers were supposed to be curators of valuable content, but most went down the road of click-bait for advertising. I've also tried paid solutions, but most fail with the exception of the economist. Its the only one I pay for today....

Not just news papers. The entire aggegrate output of "media industry" with it's various forms of text, audio, video, games is a deluge ("X days of video uploaded every minute", a dozen or more games come out on Steam every day and that's just Steam).

Take not just momentary but also the historical output and you're looking at an amount that is by many orders of magnitude overwhelming the comprehension capacity of any single observer, arguably even for the metadata.

Is anybody even trying to keep track? Most of this can't be made to last...

I also pay for the Economist. It was key to keeping my sanity during the news cycle in 2020.

But somehow what I actually read is Hacker News and has been for 10 years. The only thing that keeps staying.

So you don’t regularly read The Economist? Why don’t you just cancel your subscription already?

Remember when there was a project that curated the best articles from hacker news and published them in a PDF monthly? Someone should bring that back!

It was a question back in 2012. Today nobody has any doubts anymore.

We're definitely on information overload article overload, seems like there's one every week.

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