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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

Why do you need to drop to some kind of simulation and memory suppressing? It seems like it would be sufficient to do what many subcultures do today - come up with reasons why my hobbies are the coolest and it’s actually the normies playing their status games who are missing out.

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This was Nietzsche’s chief criticism of Christianity. It is also a good summary of Reddit morality where social rejects build an inverted status pyramid. It’s amazing how Google made a few bad decisions on Search and it led to some of the most maladjusted people on earth becoming the internet’s point of reference for what is normal.

Wait, how does Google fit in with it?

Also, Nietzsche's Last Man

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man

> The last man is the archetypal passive nihilist. He is tired of life, takes no risks, and seeks only comfort and security. Therefore, the last man is unable to build and act upon a self-actualized ethos.

> Wait, how does Google fit in with it?

A lot of people ended up on Reddit because they learned that they could append site:Reddit.com to their searches to get better results. Reddit was never exceptionally well-managed or technically impressive, it was just accessible in search results in a way that platforms like Facebook and Twitter became increasingly hostile to in the mid-2010s.

What are the bad decisions that Google made then, in this context?

You didn’t used to have to append the operator to find what you were looking for. People only started doing it because the relevance of Google search results declined.

There’s a less cynical take:

We create new hobbies and niches because human scale arenas are important for us psychologically — so we branch culture to accommodate the necessary number of role performance arenas.

Everybody is playing status games, but we’re avoiding Calhoun-style behavioral sinks by not all playing the same game at the same table.

That's fair, I meant it in a more loving way than it came across. One of the great things about human culture is that we're happy to form impromptu hierarchies like that. You even have friend groups where people are happy to win an n=1 status game by being "the jeans guy", and everyone happily tells them how cool it is that they're so into selvedge denim.

What nobody understands is people will move on to bigger and badder hobbies, like 100 years ago your hobbies might have been playing cards or maybe woodworking. 100 years from now your hobby won’t be debugging Python exceptions, it will be working on a fusion reactor in a friend’s garage over a couple beers.

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