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Comment by 7952 | Hacker News Reader

The internet has turned into a means of fufilling desire. This happened early for geeks (endless knowledge), and later for a lot of other niches. Not only does it replace existing mediums but creates whole new experiences. I am not sure if watching someone unwrap presents on Youtube is utopian exactly for me, but it is for some people. Different people have different desires.

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Who's desire does it fill? My rational system 2 brain? Or my impulsive system 1 brain. The reason you can't justify shitty content with "we're just giving you what you want" is because we really want something better, but if you give us shit that appeals to our impulses, you can make us act against our best interests. So we keep scrolling through the news feed at 2AM, thinking we should really go to bed, but failing to resist the feeling that some huge payoff lies just a few scrolls down.

Yep, it's a race to the bottom.

I seriously doubt if most folks thought about it they'd really want "7 ways to survive a zombie apocalypse. You won't believe #3"

We are creating the digital equivalent of idle and pointless chatter, only a couple/few magnitudes more damaging than real idle chatter involving humans standing around.

I agree with you. It's just stupid people having higher reach because whole system is based on democratic likes. The trend I'm personally seeing is that I have to spend more and more time going through bullshit posts to find something valuable. But it's not that there's less valuable content out here. There's more but it's get flooded with shitty one, because entry level is lower. I guess that's the reason behind rise of curated newsletters or tematic link agreggating sites(hn, reddit etc.)

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