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I 100% think that social media is shrinking our collective attention spans, and the cumulative effects of this are unpredictable.

Infinitely scrolling through flashy, zero-effort "snackable" content is the equivalent of mental junk food.

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Definitely true to some extent. I think the degree to which it applies corresponds to how deeply a person engages with an individual post/thread. Having long conversations in the comments of a post is probably not conductive to shortening attention spans. Ideally we could mimic the sorts of deep conversations that can be had with small groups of people/friends in-person. Maybe Hacker News would benefit from live updating comment threads so that people wouldn't have to refresh the page frequently to have a back-and-forth conversation.

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