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Comment by trident5000 | Hacker News Reader

I do think those things are great but I would say that culture is substantially worse. People are less kind/patient, more disrespectful, more isolated, more narcissistic, less family oriented, more politically combative, have shorter attention spans, and are less happy than prior generations.

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>I do think those things are great but I would say that culture is substantially worse.

Only if you aren't a misfit. If you had some "weird" hobby or interest, like anime, or science fiction, or heck, even computers, you'd have maybe one, two other people in your life who were interested in that. If you openly talked about your "weird" hobby, you'd be as likely as not socially ostracized and made fun of.

Today, thanks to the internet and social media, one can find forums and discussion groups for any hobby, no matter how weird or esoteric, and have fun conversations with people that have nothing to do with weather, politics, or sportsball.

I was (am) some sort of misfit and I get that it feels good to find community online, but not everything that feels good is the best for us or for society.

Having a village full of people who don’t engage with each other because they’ve found more interesting people online is troubling.

And I don’t know, but it’s plausible that learning a healthy way to integrate with your local community is an important life skill that gets disrupted by these online connections and makes the big picture of one’s life worse than it would have been otherwise. Connecting online may relieve stress the way alcohol relieves stress — genuinely useful in any moment, but easily problematic if you become too reliant on it.

>it’s plausible that learning a healthy way to integrate with your local community is an important life skill that gets disrupted by these online connections and makes the big picture of one’s life worse

Yes, let's go back and tell all the kids that were being bullied in high school merely for being different that their bullies are teaching them important life skills and that they shouldn't retreat into online spaces because that will make the "big picture" of their life worse.

>Having a village full of people who don’t engage with each other because they’ve found more interesting people online is troubling.

Maybe we should think creating a world where everyone can move around and form the sorts of villages they like.

People are much more able to find community niches though, and jerks can be found quite publicly being jerks.

There's huge kindnesses enabled by tech and the internet, like organizing group support, and healthcare kickstarters and so on.

I think youve got rose coloured glasses about the past more than today being particularly worse

That’s a people problem. People can change. Technology just is.

Your observation about the culture being worse is accurate, but none of them are caused by tech.

Do you have evidence about that? Don't you think so many people being terminally online affects the way they act towards others?

Personally, I believe it does. It's even ironic to me that your comment was downvoted, like, why? Is this really how we think about the world nowadays? Dislike/like. No discussion.

Anyways, I have to say Hackers News has been the source of well spent evenings with this nice community, so there's at least one data point there that these changes in culture weren't caused by tech.

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