the current state of online is the food. it just really sucks.
I check out Facebook once or twice a month because my wife tells me to like something on it. I didn't even create the account, she did it for me years ago.
Even now, I read. And read. And read. Everything from rigorous scientific studies on down to the weirdest shitposting. From great works of literature down to fringe science theories. But all I see other people doing, if I notice at all, is watching Tiktok videos. Are any of the rest of you out there reluctant to bother with consuming video/audio content, even if a search seems to indicate that it might be the only place the information you seek might be found? Well, then you might be one of those personalities for which being online wasn't/isn't so shitty.
These days we can barely survive without a mobile phone always on, permeating every little interaction we have with the world. It’s quite a difference.
and cell phones have been around a lot longer than 10 years when this really picked up steam. even if you filter this statement to exclude everything but smart phones - smart, internet connected phones were around well before ~2012 when we saw a sharp spike begin in this trend, and that’s really the dawn of dominance of the YT/FB/IG/etc era.
A beeper isn’t even in the same league and it’s really not a point here.
Nerds doing nerd stuff aren't going to affect the zeitgeist much, it's the network effect of having essentially 100% of your peers spending much of their time on social media.
You are attempting to put a square into a circle here.
reading all of these 'royal we' anecdotes makes me feel grateful that I can survive without a mobile quite fine. HN is as close to social media as I get -- so I guess i'm stuck wondering : are all these 'conditions' of the modern world inexorably linked and self-perpetuating?
Like, if I wanted to develop a mobile-phone habit would it be best for me to get interested in social media, and vice versa?
Maybe my ducking of these trends just stems from my aversion to social media all together, and that saved me from mobile-phone overuse?
I don't know. But it is interesting, and wildly segmenting, that everyone around me refers to these problems that 'we' have -- but I don't. I can't be alone in this feeling.
p.s. to be clear, i'm not gloating -- if anything it's kind of loneliness inducing that I can't relate to the struggle.. but it's kind of a bittersweet feeling like being one of the few who doesn't catch a plague and has to watch others suffer.
I think those are the main things I use my phone for, and getting rid of it would be very inconvenient at this point, especially since I have an iPhone anyway so I can shut off all push notifications and all tracking software and what have you. It's not 100% secure, but what can you do. Though, to be honest, I think this will be my last smartphone, I won't get another one after it breaks. I was in my local library the other day, just checking it out, and there happened to be a travel guide for a city I'm visiting soon. My god, that thing was way better than any info I've found online, and it was quite pleasant to sit down and read a book for a few hours, instead of frantically browsing through one million websites to find out what was cool, interesting, and legit, and what was a tourist trap. Its a shithole, the internet, its just a means for large-scale fraud, theft, and surveillance. But there are still a few good things left, and that redeems it somewhat.
I feel the same way. HN is as close as I get to social media, I don't even look at reddit.
I think it is a "good thing" people use your "royal we" term in that at least people see phone addiction as a problem. It is usually always couched in the tone of "the problem is too far gone" which isn't a good thing.
I wonder what it would be like if an entire country picked one hour during one day, and everyone just somehow disabled data on their phones, calls only, with the idea being that you only make calls that are required, not to stymie boredom.
The other half of the mobile 1-2 punch is that the UX is terrible, due to both the limited form factor and the hostile software. People are social animals so most just suffer through it for the connection, and not knowing that the experience can be so much better on a real computer. Using software that functions across devices, I do feel the same attractors on a fully fledged desktop. But it's much less concentrated as I can read the entire context without scrolling, type out a response at a comfortable speed, and then switch away from that window until I poll it again. Whereas even with a phone running mostly libre software it feels like being sucked into a tap-tap-tap morass that I'm only using because I have to.
Not that I am blaming porn. I am not. But once the screens and bandwidth became large enough, UI's easy enough to navigate etc AND the devices themselves became quite commonplace, the always online mentality became one used much less for essential communication and business and transitioned more to a cultural way of life (porn is just an easy and funny way to drive that point home).
Doom scrolling wasnt really as much of a thing until Android and iOS matured enough and gained enough acceptance that it was no longer a status symbol. Heck i cant even tell you most of the social media apps these days, much less dating, but having some conversations with my younger cousins over break, there really arent many ways to meet folks outside of some of these apps (at least to them), which is sad. Apparently something as simple as "why not just join some type of IRL hobby and meet people that way" was scoffed at.
I blame the pivot from the chronological feeds to algorithmically generated feeds based on engagement (or whatever other metric).
Ad-based social apps (all of them) replaced that with algorithmic, so you have no real signifier of how long you've spent scrolling.
Tiktok takes this one step further by stripping the date from the videos.
You didnt have people nearly as commonly doomscrolling on the subway on the way to work, or in the car, or in the living room around family, when the computer was restricted to a specific space/time etc.
This is one thing that really gets me.
Your feed is based on engagement. It doesn't have to be GOOD engagement, just engagement.
So when you angrily reply to a tweet you hate, that's engagement. You will be shown more content that makes you angry.
Most of the things people complain about in terms of what Twitter shows them, I don't experience. I don't follow people I hate, and if someone quote-tweets, I avoid replying. Definitely don't click the original tweet to see what other people have said.
But of course it's not the technical capability that's the problem, it's the always-online culture, the network effects, the constant doomscrolling through algorithm-optimized feeds, the instant notification when someone replies to your kneejerk vitrolic comment with even more vitrol.
And then again, that culture was not possible without the technical capabilities and widespread adoption of them. Nobody was motivated to build a site or app optimized for doomscrolling until there were enough eyeballs and advertising dollars to capture.
There are plenty of millennials that have been terminally online since at least their early teens and weren’t showing this same trend. I’m saying there’s nothing inherent about “online-ness” that should warrant mass levels of depression like this.
Women face all sorts of abuse and minimization online. I've heard of many women using male sounding names online in order to be taken seriously or avoid harassment. The general advice on subreddits dominated by women is to turn off personaal messaging to avoid the inevitable rape threats.
Take a look on Instagram and take a look at some musicians that are men and some that are women. The level of hatred directed towards women and the extra barriers they face will be very clear.
You also have subreddits that glorify misogyny like WomenAreThings or MisogynyKink. You have others where guys steal pictures from girls' social medias and redistribute them with captions about rape fantasy or where they use AI to force their victims into sexual media.
You look on YouTube and the algorithm wants to push misogynistic content aimed at disillusioned young boys and more and more of them are tuning in and blaming women for all their problems, asserting that feminism was a mistake.
If you're on Instagram compare how many women have their profiles set to private than men. This is to avoid the constant harassment they'd otherwise face.
I'm seeing more research every year that suggests women are actively self-censoring, silencing themselves or pretending to be men when online.
Here's a few interesting bits of further reading. I've been told off in the past for sharing these things here because women's rights are politics and therefore against the guidelines of the site but I hope it's relevant enough to the discussion here:
1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/089443931986551... 2. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/online-violen... 3. https://www.womankind.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/brea...
Everyone is a girl, online.
I didn't actually say anything about men being the problem. Hatred against women hurts women was my whole point. I hope you can appreciate the irony in your comment: I pointed out some of the ways that women might struggle online, even linked to a variety of articles about it, and you felt the need to jump in and baselessly assert that women are the worst offenders.
Females are on average far more social than males. If there's a dose-response effect social media time and mental health, then we should plausibly expect girls to be affected more.