Even further off-topic, but I recommend you and the parent poster watch the Buffy episode Normal Again, and the 116 episodes before it. Not waking up, but also an example of the "none of this is real" idea.
I'm not sure if I'm entirely joking with this recommendation. For those who haven't watched - even for a show about a vampire slayer, it gets decreasingly plausible as the series go on (as do many long running shows). I remember being hit pretty hard when this episode suddenly offered a sensible explanation for everything, but a stone-cold path to get there.
Should I feel compelled to not offer spoilers on what is probably a joke recommendation anyway (117 episodes of a decades old TV show)?
I can imagining that being scary two different ways. I would not want to wake up because whatever this thing is, I love it. I'm having an amazing time, dream or not.
Wait till you're 65. It's more than disbelief, people start to actively moronify you. I'm not that age yet, but I've see it happening to purple my parent's age
If I may offer: Because they have become fiendishly adept at exploiting an addictive behaviour/weakness in our brains WHILE masquerading as some sort of social utility (AND perhaps vestigially retaining some semblance of that) - which, incidentally, is what (some) originally might have been, before encrappification.-
I suspect the OP understands this. Since few of those on HN (I am assuming) no longer have a FB presence, the question is why hasn't everyone arrived at this same conclusion and walked away from that addiction?
Meta should really have gone the way of MySpace a long, long time ago.
People educated in math and probability are actually still prone to gambling addiction and things.
It doesn't matter what your high level brain knows, there is a structure and organization of your brain that only changes on geologic timescales, and that structure has serious, easily attackable flaws.
I like your use of "attackable" (and of flaws, obviously).-
PS. F'book commoditized social interaction to their ends while abusing these attackable surfaces. Kalshi and that ilk have now done away with the whole pretense of communication itself and are abusing the same addiction mechanisms to commoditize OPINION to their ends. Opinions: Everybody has one.-
PS. At some point somebody is going to commoditize mere bodily movement wrapped into such an addictive mechanism and we will get people with "weird" performative "palsies" walking about.-
Social media is a habit more than an addiction. It's easy to stop if you engage in other social activities. The trouble for many people who grew up online is that they don't have much experience doing that.
And/or MySpace should have gone the way of F'book :)
Though I hear it might make a comeback.-
PS. To your point, I am guessing: For one thing it takes the ability to thus conclude, to begin with. THAT, in turn takes intellect and time AND evidence such as has been accruing. AND third, probably, because addictions are by definition hard to quit. ALSO: I think few times in the history of addictive behaviours has the enabling agent had such a low low low entry threshold, such presumptive innocuousness, and such assumed and granted "utility". It began by hijacking human communication, "socialization". It is devious.-
People always say this and so I decided to go look at my Facebook feed and it’s entirely people with their families posting completely innocuous photographs. The one exception is that Sadiq Khan the mayor of London is inexplicably on my feed eating at the restaurant Darjeeling Express. Did I follow him accidentally? Who knows.
In any case, the reason I haven’t bothered is that the Facebook feed is entirely harmless. I wish I could show you guys.
Is this entire phenomenon one of those things that people believe is happening to others and not them? Having scrolled that feed, I am confident that an unfiltered HN read would have more outrage porn than that.
this sounds like you have some form of adblock installed that is removing half or more of the posts?
the fundamental issue is that the user has no actual control over what ends up on the feed, and everyone's experience is based on what facebook decides you should see.
i manipulated mine to show only leatherwork, but it'll never ever show me stuff from my friends. instead of showing me what my friends are up to - deletig any likes and telling it to never show me suggested junk - it shows an error for "add more friends" rather than show content from my friends which they definitely do have.
i get the sense that facebook has marked my friends as not worth having their posts seen, so it cant add their stuff to my feed even when i dont have anything else on my feed.
That's a fair complaint. I use the chronological feed on Twitter/X as well because the algo feed is kind of meaningless. I just want to know what people I follow are saying.
It is different for different users and different at different times. It is probably especially bad with few contacts that write on FB or if you log in like twice a year.
Similar confusion on HN comments about SaaS UX arise when there is AB testing and some are victims and some are not.
As many have pointed out, a lot of daily community activities are conducted primarily through Meta-owned platforms. Quite annoying, but maybe there wasn't enough effort earlier to get all these schools and other community groups using other tools to get the word out?
However, companies could en masse decide to start filtering resumes containing Meta employment history. This already happens with some other questionable industries when reviewing applications. I know I'd be hard pressed to hire anyone with a Meta background.
> This already happens with some other questionable industries when reviewing applications. I know I'd be hard pressed to hire anyone with a Meta background.
Most people that I know who use it basically only use it for Marketplace and one or two groups. (It would be better to not use it at all, but that seems fine.) Someone showed me their feed and it’s all slop, worse than Twitter.
Many people understand that it’s a waste of time, but people with low impulse control get sucked in. Same as with gambling and Candy Crush style games. And substances, for that matter. This isn’t their fault, some people are wired that way.
We really need a revival of Craigslist to eliminate the Marketplace hold on local P2P commerce.
i recently downloaded it again after nearly a decade to use marketplace to buy a bike for my wife. Got the bike and deleted the app. but my god opening it up was hell. the interface on mobile is just....stressful. super cluttered, shit all over the place with notifications and things to see. first post i saw on there was someone i used to be friends with but havent thought about in years just blatently reposting ACTUAL racist shit... bought a bike in one day and deleted the app once again. horrible experience aside from the nice old dude who sold me the bike lol
My experience with Instagram too. Signed up to talk to one person who only uses Instagram, and it's just garbage all around.
I think it's a frog boiling situation. Early users got gradually accustomed to the gradually increasing garbage, but anyone who enters the ecosystem now is immediately turned off.
I use Instagram on Android because it's heavily modified and stripped to its bare essentials just for responding to friends. Prior to this I used the web app. If those two disappeared I would be done.
Instagram on Android was caught bypassing OS security requirements by opening a port on localhost, which webpages with Facebook tracking scripts would connect to to get your identity.
The modified version I use disables all telemetry. I'm also doubtful my Pihole wouldn't just black it anyways. And ultimately, I use Firefox on Android with Ublock and strict tracking protection, so it doesn't seem I would be susceptible to this particular cookie interception Meta relies.
That said, I see your point. I wouldn't use Instagram if I couldn't do these things. If Google cracks down on user choice to a degree that even adb can't work around, then I'm out. Motorola's Graphene OS phone can't come soon enough.
at the very least, insta is a semi cleaner and its the content itself thats abrasive... for now... thats the only other thing i use purely to keep up with family and i do photography so its somewhere to share some pics with family and friends.once you spend an entire night flagging everything you dont wanna see it becomes pretty clean. and then i put a 15 min timer on top of it. so it barely gets used but its semi well-tailored lol
I had a similar experience logging in to FB to delete my account which was inactive for almost a decade. It’s legit was like the movie Idiocracy. Casino vibes, over stimulation, people saying stupid thing, trying to sift through lots of garbage to find the thing you’re looking for.
thats exactly what i was telling my wife, a casino is way more accurate than what i said. i was like it felt like signing on to Temu with all of the shit all over the place
I remember going to Las Vegas once after I turned 21, realizing that it totally wasn’t my thing, and especially being scared by the expressions on the zombie seniors sitting in front of the slot machines shoveling quarters in.
I see that basically every day now with people watching TikTok or Instagram while walking, on the bus, or even driving, barely able to tear their attention away. It’s like a casino except that it’s available 24 hours a day with no limits.
> especially being scared by the expressions on the zombie seniors sitting in front of the slot machines shoveling quarters in.
It's not just seniors.
I used to date a woman who worked as a cocktail waitress on the floor of a major casino on the strip. She referred to the people at the slots as "trained monkeys".
Definitely not just seniors but I saw a bus full of them unload and it was like watching a switch flip off as everyone stopped socializing and focused on the machines. So eerie.
yeah its nuts. ive hard restricted any form of social media to 15 minutes a day combined for the remaining ones i have. its been extremely healthy tbh. ive felt much better in the almost two years ive been doing it!
and i get it! the zombified rapid button pressing over and over. when i went to japan we were stoked to go check out a pachinko hall and we walked in and it was overstimulation city lol. walking in through the front door directly out through the back door haha.
I refuse to use facebook on mobile. Website only, and it’s terrible but that’s where the local community is if you need to find a lost dog or deal on a bike.
yup and thats exactly what i discovered. id rather not use it and also not lose any additional respect for people i used to like or have good memories with lol
In my area if you want to join any kind of amateur sports or outdoors group, you have to get on Facebook. If you want to know what musicians are coming to town, you have to get on instagram. Ironically it's usually the young, anti establishment types who tend to have only instagram presence.
Depending on your interests, getting off meta platform may very well result in a net loss of real life activity you can participate.
From what I have heard, Facebook is also the place to rent cheap apartments. The mom and pop landlords are Facebook only. The local Craigslist is dying and scam ridden. Big name rental websites tend to only have listing for pricier, corporate owned rentals.
I'll help you understand: Important information is many times only found on these platforms. Many local businesses and events only have their info on Facebook or Instagram. Many local community groups are only on Facebook, and you'll find information there that has a real impact on your life (like bus broke down).
The other part is messaging. In parts of Europe nobody uses WhatsApp or SMS to communicate, everybody is on Facebook messenger.
And there's still the old school social media posts: cousin had a baby, friend got married. And also content made for the general public which is not malicious.
Yeah, Instagram is by far the most reliable communications channel from my kid's school, believe it or not. Like, there are mailing lists and portals you can log into, but the IT aspect of actually getting access for even one parent, let alone both, is such a fucking slog for everyone involved (and who knows what bullshit the school has to deal with from their side) that we get info through our WhatsApp group chat from the parents who have Instagram.
Once I overcame the addiction tech, engineered over billions of brilliant-person-hours, atop research into human behavioural prediction and conditioning that’d make the KGB blush?
It’s the hundreds of people on my Facey that I have no other way to contact, and whom I can’t convince to move to e.g. Mastodon, even by offering to do or automate it for them. I suppose I could get an agent to run through the list with a script that gives my phone number to anyone who expresses a wish to remain in touch.
Quora has become a scam and CP-ridden cesspit but there are still some old-timers who can really write, and whom I’ve become somewhat emotionally invested in. And a habit of 13 years is hard to break.
I don't use FB or insta , but here are some reasons why people use it:
- Keep in touch with family
- Comfort from having their ideas reinforced
- Organize small events
- Share pictures easily
- not feel lonely
- stay current on world events
All of those have other routes to accomplish the same thing, but I guess they have the "Dropbox effect" of simplifying it so even techno challenged can use it.
Meta is easier for that stuff, I won't deny. Nevertheless, we've managed to get our families into Signal groups that largely accomplish the same things at the scale we need. And the benefits of not needing to wade through slop make up for the losses. It's so peaceful! Hopefully more people give it a try.
It's not like traditional media is any better. At least with social media platforms the means of producing media and building a following has been democratized.
I'm not sure if you're talking about Meta platforms or social media in general. It's been years since I've used any Meta platform but I'm a daily user of Tiktok.
On Tiktok I don't think the platform is paying people to rage bait, at least not directly. But wannabe influencers will still try and rage bait their way into a viral video and hopefully a following. To me it's entirely transparent and I just move on but people fall for it. Lots of people. Gender wars is easy pickings. A good example was the $3 cheese surcharge on a burger. I knew immediately that was fake and it was later confirmed [1].
But why am I on Tiktok? Because there's actually some good stuff on there and just some plain entertaining stuff. But what really seals it is the comments. Therea re a ton of videos where the comments are the best part. There are some funny people out there. And Tiktok more than any other platform I've experienced seems to surface such comments.
But I could best describe Facebook as your racist uncle posting conspiracy theories and that's pretty much it.
> Why anyone still engages with these platforms is totally beyond me.
Because it provides a form entertainment, low hanging entertainment. All designed to grip you in your weakest fronts.
Map out what triggers a person visually. Feed it in to a LLM model and on the evil scale, you can start exploiting those who get angry based on whatever content.
Anger is one of the easiest trigger points in form of media. Broadcast a opposite view of an individual or a group. Downvotes and Upvotes are the primitive form of this and if you lack the emotional intelligence (thick skin) to handle the flack, you end up turning on emotions.
Tabs are superior to spaces and Python is basically JavaScript with indentation.
Because they influence a lot of opinions which influences decisions which ends up influencing all our lives. Back around 2016 bots were loose on ut internet, with everyone freely gobbling up misinformation. Now there is an unofficial army of people determined to keep facts up at the forefront as well as other malicious social media negative trends at bay.
Right, the fact that the current administration had a 4 year hiatus only extended this period. Think about all the young people that grew up with this as normal.
Grandparents telling about their grandparents is a very different timescale than two presidential terms with a gap of just one between them.
The "what changed in the 1970s?" meme graphs are the kinds of timescale for forgetting what is and isn't "normal" for your grandparents, and the Great Depression for your grandparents' grandparents.
Eternal growth? Nah.
Even the worst of times will be shortly followed by a recovery, soon enough you survive on savings? Pft.
The President surely wouldn't consider to order the removal of protesting veterans, with the Army Chief of Staff implementing this order with a contingent of infantry and cavalry, supported by six tanks, burning the belongings that the veterans had left behind after being cleared from where they had been protesting? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army
Conscription? Concentration camps? These are also in the "grandparents' grandparents" timescale in the USA. Go back only a one more generation and you get lynching *postcards*.
I remember tales of how backwards and corrupt the Berlusconi government in Italy was. There was a sense that “over there” it was another world, a bad and sad and incorrigible one.
Most Americans wouldn’t remember that, and yet we pulled, and continue to pull, an epic Hold My Beer in comparison.
What would it take to get a Million Man March again? One that occupied the lawn?
Quite clear that people don't understand the basics of forensics. Watching people ruin their professional reputation over something they desperately want to believe in was quite the education.
There's a Trump hate raging, but, as you also have seen: it's nothing new.
Just the crazy partisanism that's going on in the states blinds people to the fact that they are not ruled by one part of the other, but that the parties are the smoke and mirrors of the non-democratic, unelected, unaccountable, unseen actual govt.
I am one of the people that long for the old internet. I don’t long for it because there are too many normal people on it now.
The old internet was interesting, open, simple, un-gated, and relatively egalitarian with few corporate interests in commanding positions. The new internet is basically a predatory environment disguised as a library.
Liquid Glass has no place on the desktop (or the phone really).
I migrated to Mac OS X from OpenBSD in like 2002 or so. MacOS has been a steady decline for many years, probably soon after the iPhone. Snow Leopard was probably the height of the MacOS experience. It’s been lots of little things along the way but I agree Tahoe is an inflection point.
Obviously (to me anyway, maybe folk disagree) comparing a new release to the previous versions last release (with years of bugfixing) wasn't totally fair, but my experience with Snow Leopard wasn't great either and I wonder if it wasn't quite the peak everyone thinks of it as.
Depending on your needs. I'm not sure it's that cut and dry. For developer experience I don't find it very good. My System76 laptop provides a better experience.
It is all pretty subjective though. Windows is the best option for some.
It would be dull to write about all the great new building materials our houses are made and the utter lack of futuristic convenience we actually have.
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