Hacker News Reader

I'm old enough to remember life before internet/social media (40ish). One thing that's weird now, to me, is that it's very rare that I'm outright bored, but it's like that boredom just became diffuse into everything, almost everything in life is sort of boredom-tinted (probably just because I'm so flooded with too many dopamine-reward-signaling low-value things)

A couple weeks ago, I had a power outage, and instead of being upset I felt RELIEVED. Like, everything in life just felt calmer for a moment. It was kind of nice to just grab a book because it was the only option. (well, I mean, there was still the cell phone but at least it was the only distraction)

One of my favorite memories was a power outage that lasted the entire day. Neighbors came out of their homes to BBQ together before meat went bad. People checking on neighbors and helping old ladies open their garage doors. Kids playing in the street and grown ups shooting the shit. I played board games by candle light with my neighbors until like 2am, no distractions.

I've had my firefox browser crash twice recently and I lost the couple hundred open tabs that I must really process for their valuable information. Found through dilligent social media communication in my circles. Guess what, that was a false feeling, I felt huge relief and burden lifted from my shoulder, and I never really missed those lost tabs. The valuable information is around always, and you can collect just-in-time what you need. I now have a more casual approach to them. Sticky notes where it is okay if they fall from the fridge.

As for social media, I am using the decentralized alternatives, fediverse and atmosphere. It is all parasocial. People talk about friends networks and how cozy it all is, but you only exist as long as you produce content and engage. And content that fits the in-group at that. Produce what they want to hear. It is superficial, shallow, but you can easily be deluded it is more than that. It is not that your peers online want it to be that way, it is just that the tools we use are insufficient to forge richer and more intricate social relationships. Even while the fediverse has no algorithmic feeds, it is Twitter-like and you must stand on your soapboax, sell your warez, to get heard. It is far from social, as we understand it offline.

Note that there is value to it all. It just serves one well to be aware of the social dynamics and adjust expectations accordingly.

I've read thousands of HN posts and comments, "just in case" it'll be useful someday, but I'm not sure if my life would have been meaningfully worse had I lived under a rock instead.

> It's unfortunate that other media sites would never implement these features because their business model is entirely driven on people spending more and more time on their sites.

I don't know every social media site, but many of them do have built-in time limit functionality. It's even better documented than what's on Hacker News.

First two random ones I searched for (Instagram and TikTok)

https://help.instagram.com/2049425491975359/?cms_platform=ip...

https://www.tiktok.com/support/faq_detail?id=754359745915568...

Addictive yes, but I also realized another dynamic on that site, or at least for the first time, fully caught the weirdness of it:

In old-style forums, BBSes and chats, there was at least a premise that you were talking to specific other persons: Yes, you started a new thread by shouting into the void, but if you got replies, the "from who" was sometimes just as interesting as the "what". If you stuck around long enough, you could recognize regulars and understand the structure of the community - maybe even get to know some people.

This kind of social network still exists, but has been joined by a different kind, where you still can hold conversations - but it's been completely deemphasized with whom your holding that conversation. Instead, the platform provides technical helpers such as tree or DAG views and up/downvotes to let you follow the structure of the discussion and get feedback without needing to track who you are talking to.

HN and Reddit do this, with *chan sites having driven it to an extreme where usernames have become completely optional.

It's basically online discussion completely abstracted to "content".

It still feels surprisingly rewarding (otherwise I wouldn't do it) but is also weird if you think about it.