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Comment by globalise83 | Hacker News Reader

Something a little sad about this loss of youth from our cultures. Instead of seeing new trends and radical fashions everything seems just as it was 20 years ago except the young are more reticent. A critical mass of boisterous youth is needed for the production of new culture, and I suspect that in ageing societies we fell below that threshold about 2 decades ago.

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That critical mass may be online now. And the internet is so silo'd that it may not form or may not be noticed.

it feels like we are all walled off from anything but our own echo chambers :(

This is an interesting observation, it might not even be possible for the vast majority of users, by definition, to be outliers enough to move the needle appreciably.

i.e. readers will only care to remember the most notable/unique/etc... fraction of comments.

And everything else will just meld together into one big mental blob.

Maybe that is why there's been a flight to smaller online communities?, even 'Joe Average' has realistic prospects of writing something memorable if there's only a few hundred folks to compare against.

Literally impossible given the size of the internet. It's not like there are groups out there funded to control discourse or introduce/censor topics for their own nefarious (relative and inconsequential in the scope of history) goals. They have nothing to gain at all from such distraction, thats what Netflix is for. Society has never been freer in terms of personal expression! Your comment is actually ludicrous and ridiculous. The focus on more important issues, as is apparent in the open forum, will only naturally arise. There is no fear of doing essentially nothing, repeating the same pointless discourse... for what may now seem like in perpetuity, and all the while never progressing, with 'frivolous discourse' and trivial ego-protecting topics (let's be honest, we are all free-thinking individuals here), for another year. And perhaps the year after as well.

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