I keep telling people here that reddit is actually an underappreciated goldmine, but I guess feeling better than others feels too good to pass on.
In my mind, reddit is like of HN, except instead of being just tech and business oriented people, it's every subject under the sun. Most of it is garbage (like on HN) but if you're willing to search it's a goldmine.
When I go to reddit, I see posts about astrophotography, vintage computers, ham radio, classic cars, typewriters, film photography, sculpture, gardening, woodworking, firefighting, archery, fencing, outer space, watches, cutaway drawings, the Sega Saturn, and more topics I'm interested in.
When they go to reddit they see stuff they don't like, and people arguing about it.
I just want to shout "yes, you do, because your brain is damaged and you asked it to show those things to you".
It's the same with all social media. When I go to instagram I see people I know personally and have been in the same room with doing things I am interested in. I don't see any rage, titillation, celebrities, or gossip. Just my friends and acquaintances being friendly. (It IS annoying that I keep having to turn off suggested posts)
Even when I click on the magnifying glass, which is where people say Instagram shows them titillating things in order to get them hooked, I see scuba diving, aviation, vintage Macs, watches, and astronomy.
What is going on? Do I have a "only show this guy nice stuff he's interested in" cookie following me around the internet?
And YouTube. People will complain about YouTube showing them shit. When I go to YouTube.com, right now, I just opened it in another tab, the top six videos are: Dutch firefighters battling a stable fire, a homelabber messing around with vintage linksys equipment, a history of the development of nuclear weapons, a review of a handheld video game emulator, a guy with a VAX setup in his basement working on restoring those machines, and a video on new theories about how the moon was formed.
The next six are also laser-focused on my interests including a two hour video about various motifs found in Indo-European mythology and their origins which I am totally going to listen to in the background while at work.
I did nothing, NOTHING, except subscribe to/follow things I like and people I know, and it's great.
When people log into reddit and see people arguing about bullshit, instagram and see models bouncing their tits, and YouTube and see garbage, the only logical conclusion I can reach is that their brains are damaged and they set up the systems to show them these things then decided to complain about it as some kind of hobby or something.
If anything, HN is the worst of them all because I can't tell it "show me more 'floppy disk raid array' and less 'crypto and AI bullshit'".
Not everything is a personal moral failure when society is literally out to get each and every one of us. Many of us have been damaged by the ‘net, it’s purveyors of crap, intentionally for their gain.
Don’t just turn and point fingers at the endusers. They sure as fuck didn’t design the algorithms.
I am convinced that is a skill that can be learned or taught.
> personal moral failure
I didn't imply it's a moral failure, just a failure.
10 years ago I used to be mindblown by the amount of books about any subject we can find online. Today we have people making videos about any subject.