Especially educated people should stay away from that toxicity. Boards like HN and occasionally Reddit, where it's mostly about discussing and being anonymous are the only places worth contributing on the internet other than personal blogs.
It's toxic in some ways; sure--but it's easy to care about.
who gives a shit about famous people? authors I assumed died decades ago? Literally I do not give a single shit what Stephen King or JK Rowling thinks
have fun with that, but you just explained why it never appealed to me. Weird idolatry. Reddit has the same problem.
Interesting people talk about ideas, not other people
> something insightful enough
you mean if you play the game and are sufficiently blessed by the algorithm your demigod may offer you a blessing. The algorithm doesn't reward insight, lol.
You're here in the comments of Hacker News so you clearly are interested in social networks. You reguarly check in here to see popular links others have shared, and occasionally participate in conversations. It's seems pretty easy to understand that others might be interested in a slightly different UI on top of this.
I meant, like, Joyce Carol Oates; who I had mentally placed in the same "historic personage" category as Sylvia Plath and Angela Carter before learning she had a twitter account.
And, yeah, it's somewhat toxic to engage in idolatry; yeah, I would more profitably spend my time trying to become a research director or founder myself. Having John Carmack like my Arxiv recommendation isn't an achievement, the way inventing the fast inverse square root algorithm is. But it sure does feel nice!
Lots of people. That's why they're famous. You may not, but many do, and that's okay.
But, indulging (in moderation) in ice cream or Factorio is one of the great things about living in the modern era. Just don't let it rewire your dopamine receptors too far to enjoy the real stuff!
Hollywood actors are now routinely cast (in part) based on how many social media followers they have, leading to a lot of weirdness around their agents and agencies buying followers, accusing other competing actors of buying followers, etc.
A bit closer to the HN crowd, there is definitely a correlation between speaking at conferences and having an "audience" and being a well-known figure online.
Similarly, the "build-in-public" indie folks are active on social trying to break the build it and they will come cycle.
There are ways to participate and filter through the noise that are positive, but certainly a lot of negative as well.
> Especially educated people should stay away from that toxicity
I believe commerical, closed social networks are the ones that specifically breed this 'toxicity' people talk about. They're incentivised to promote engagement bait to drive DAU, page views and ad revenue.
Granted, it's audience is significantly smaller, but I think Mastodon immediately showed what a social network that had incentives aligned with users could look like. Bluesky has neat features putting users in control, like user-built custom moderation settings to hide things you don't want to see (like engagement-bait accounts, politics, spoilers, gaming etc). I think these are all user-centric features that Twitter or Facebook would never add people they conflict with their other business goals of promoting ads or other partner content.
Reddit is the center of toxicity. One dissenting opinion and mods banish you.