They Stole Your Attention | Hacker News Reader

They Stole Your Attention

moai.studio

43 pointsionwake56 comments

People don't have hobbies anymore. I can probably count on 1 hand the number of people I talk to that actually have a real hobby, something they do in their spare time. Everyone’s just scrolling these days.

Or the hobby folks are all too busy with their hobbies to chat these days.

It's too bad, though. Regardless of what hobby you're in, it's a golden age to have it.

surely coding projects is a hobby surely eveyron HN is finishing all their "dream" projects that were vastly impossible to finish before AI? otherwise thats just me

I don't think it's really a golden age. Personally I find people more superficial and distracted in their hobby though. It always has to be something to be superfially shared on the internet.... some people are fine with that but I think it's a loss. Not everyone will agree but that's just different values.

That's not my experience at all. My friends have plenty of hobbies and so do I.

I can't really think of anyone I know who doesn't have a hobby. Of course, most people I've met are via a hobby.

It comes down to your definition of hobby. For instance some people consider listening to audio books as "reading books" or riding e-bike with hardly any pedaling as "cycling".

I can assure you my "hobbies" (not sure whether reading/discussing about tech, following news, watching movies, playing (video) games, travelling/hiking, ocassionally playing table tennis or minigolf qualifies as hobbies) are pretty much same as they were before smartphones, I just have much less time with work and kids than I used to have, though at least trying to incorporate kids where possible like table tennis, minigolf, hiking, playing (video) games.

why should I employ my time reading something the "author" didn't bother writing? my attention has been stolen, sure, but if wrestle it back I'll give it to anything else

I mean I spent about an hour doing research for this and building the charts I thought it was super insightful, I based my entries on stuff Im thinking about. I mean is it crap?

I think it would have been much more insightful if you just shared your thoughts directly. I'm not interested in reading Claude output.

A lot of people spend more than an hour writing a post and it usually results in a better experience for everyone.

Thank you for the feedback man, again I spent a coupe hours on this post, but Ill try to type more

For a lot of us who have spent a lot of time writing, the process of formulating our thoughts in a way that's legible to other folks has also forced us to think about the material we are writing about in ways that hopefully clarify the content for us or change how we understand the topic.

Because of that work, I have very little trust in the thinking of folks who don't care enough to engage deeply with the process of formulating their thoughts in a way other folks can understand.

"Do what thou wilt" and all, but you might consider that the process of writing is a helpful adjunct for thinking.

The data seemed like it could be interesting but I found it tough to engage with the “stylish” AI prose and UI flourishes.

Is there a human-written long-form article to go with this?

OP here sorry Ive jsut always had a instincitve attraction to design even though Im just an autistic programmer. if it looks gaudy I apologise I was just trying my best to get a Spectrum 48k loading screen aesthetic, with a 4chan green text type summary vibe. It wnated to keep the data concise and minimal hence the lack of typed out prose. Its an experiment Im doing with the way I do stuff sorry if it sucks

It is very interesting data and looks good.

Thank you for posting it.

The animations make it quite slow on my system. Maybe there's a way to figure out if users actually have webgl enabled and only then do the animations.

if added an auto low fidelity option that kicks in for visual effect if fps falls beflow 30fps ( manual toggle is top right) lmk if it doesnt work. I also dleteda buch of useless effects that were high intensity. thanks again for the feedback,

no need to apologize, I like the vibe

an artisan blogpost? Is this 1999?

Thank you so much for sharing this. Just yesterday, I was doing a thought experiment where I started counting the number of seconds until I get distracted or anxious and wanted to reach for my phone. Unfortunately for me, it was much less than 47 seconds, and on average it was around 20 seconds. This was highly concerning because it was something in the back of my mind that has been there for more than a decade.

You might enjoy reading The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, where he finds a tiny book that teaches him to see through playing cards by holding that moment of attention.

> meta earned $17 per north american user in 2011

I always find the economics around this annoying. I’d gladly pay $17 a year — hell ten times that — to not see ads on Instagram. However, the fact that I can and would pay for that means that Meta can’t afford to lose me, because it kills the value of their audience.

You can pay and get untargeted ads. That there is no option to pay and not get ads at all is a testament that the value goes beyond the individual cost.

The very next bullet is

> $233 in 2024. 13x in 13 years

So yes you would in fact need to pay ten times that and then some. And by virtue of being on hacker news I'm guessing your actual ads targeting value is more like 20x that or more.

Watching ads is literally the purpose of those kinda apps though. What else would you do there if not watching ads? People love ads

Upvoted. IMHO quite shocking numbers if you think what it does with society as a whole. There will be a variation in statistical spread in different countries/cultures, I would love to see them. Where do you have the base data from?

What is more shocking what this does to people that have never been bored or cut off from media. The pure social media generation so to say.

I liked the idea attention measurement clock on the bottom of the page.

You know, "stealing your attention" is just a socially accepted phrase to mean "wasting your time." Don't waste your time.

And the article is skimmed in ... 47 seconds.

Me too but I spent minutes I said minutes reading a book today so fuck it I am proud of myself.

Current attention behavior with all of our devices reminds me of the The Box machine in Batman Forever, but way worse as it is perniciously unobvious to most.

Can you share the prompt you used?

guys can you stop winding me up now

This comment feels like it's meant to be deprecating. The content of the post is interesting regardless of whether or not it was AI generated.

Considering that AI generated content is the new frontier in stealing our attention, this blatantly AI generated article and web design diminished the gravity of your point a little bit.

Whose point? If AI it is just a prediction of maximizing a logit.

I dont know man I spent a long time on it, everyone on HN was taking the piss out of people who used LLM for coding just 6 months ago, and now you literally get fired if you dont use it. Saying "oh you used Ai to help with the design" is basically a diminishing insult at this point, you might be considered an idiot if you dont in 6 months time.

I appreciate your feedback but my point is the delineation between "hey guys screw this guy he used AI" is getting harder and harder with each passing day.

As for me, I personally have been using "variants" of AI tooling since I studied AI about 30 years ago. So i dont know man.

It's because we can't tell where your effort stopped and the machine took over. It's hard to assess the quality of something that may or may not have had any human curation in it.

Using AI is not wrong per se, but it's a fairly reliable sign that the piece might not be worth human attention.

ok thank you, ive manually rewritten the text for the blog where it was main excerpts ( not the labels eg )

You say you don't know but you have people in here telling you and you're not listening. Code is for machines, words are for humans. Do you not see a distinction? Machine time is paid for in electricity, human time is paid for by our lives. Who cares if machines churn on garbage? Why should we spend our limited time on this earth reading machine output?

I contend the whole point of the short blog post is to show you the facts and figures not to waste your lifetime by having you read my scattered thoughts , but I understand your words

Right? It's strange to me to have an article that seems set to rail against attention span bankruptcy, but then is written by AI in a way that just feeds right back into it.

Looks cool. And it stole my attention for a few seconds. ;)

Amazing! Just disable the animations it makes my system really slow.

I'm building an app to help people reclaim their attention, if you are interested in helping beta test please fill in the form ! - coghance.com

If you didn't take your time and effort writing it, why should I bother reading it? I can only assume the "author" is being ironic on purpose, pushing slop claiming that machines are taking my attention.

it took me 11 seconds to realize it was AI slop.

Im getting triggered now, I used AI to help gather the data and the charts, Ill endeavour to use more manual labour with the grammer which Im basically terrible at but thank you for the (you)

People don't really care for imageboard culture here; talking about (You)'s can be a bit alienating.

ok thanks I just thought it would be a funny injoke not alienating but its a good point

I would rather read imperfect human grammar than perfect AI corpospeak. It' s no shade to you, AI produces the most soul crushing prose imaginable. I'd rather read a teenage girl's fanfiction.

AI is a uniformizer - it's suppose to make us more machine like so that we're more replaceable. People use it because there's an economic advantage, and because it provides a dopamine hit, but that's it.

A guy I knew used to write English even though it was a second language. It was charming. Now he uses ChatGPT and it sounds soulless.

I agree. It's so grating. "This isn't an issue—it's an epidemic. Here's the takeaway: attention span is a load-bearing element of cognition. And honestly? This article nails it." (Not actually AI, I just made it up and tried to cram in a bunch of tropes)

People use markers of effort as a proxy to gauge the quality of a resource.

AI prose is low effort, even if your gathering of statistics and making charts was not. So that effort is undermined by the marker of AI prose which leads to an implication the rest of the data could be also, even if that is not actually the case.

People don't like reading articles "redacted" by AI because that feels disrespectful

Imagine approaching someone you wanna talk to and they just silently point to their assistant, suggesting you talk to them instead. I want to hear your thoughts from you, not filtered by some assistant/machine

Im not sure if Im being an idiot but I thought it would be LESS offensive

Oh, by the way, it's grammar, not grammer. ;)

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