Comment by supportengineer 16 hours ago
When the world was smaller, it was easier for people to get together and find common interests. I'll never forget gathering around the coffee pot or water cooler with friends at work. "Did you see Seinfeld or Friends last night?"
There's nothing like this any more. Nobody listens or watches to the same things.
The net effect is...I'm tired. Just so tired.
> The attention economy optimizes for what is novel and upsetting
Upsetting some people has been part of art at least since the épater le bourgeois attitude of early twentieth-century modernism. One of the reasons that culture feels stagnant, is that the attention economy optimizes only such such upsetting that is conducive to maximizing engagement and selling advertising. This has resulted in a lot of stoking of outrage about the social and political contexts around art, while there is much less discussion of anything upsetting in the actual content of the art (the melodies, harmonies and rhythms that a music uses, the linguistic resources used in fiction or drama, etc.)
Yeah, I sometimes miss the way we socialized in the 80s and 90s. I was an early adopter of the Internet myself, and it was really awesome for a while. But what it has turned into now ... I can't shake the feeling that it is definitely a net negative, we would be better off forgetting it ever existed.
> But what it has turned into now
For me it's been the same as always, I'm able to connected with others that have the same niche interests as me, wherever they are in the world, and I'm eternally grateful for it existing.
Everything new always end up being "less useful" or "actively harmful" to some people once it's exposed to the real world, but that doesn't mean there is a large part of us that benefit from it many ways it regardless. I grew up in a rural place where no one cared about the same things as me, and once we got the internet for the first time, it was like a whole new world opened up. I still feel like this today.
But even so, others get pulled into it, or spit out of it, and they get harmed. And it sucks, ideally nothing should harm others. But it seems unavoidable that it does, even the bestest of tools with the bestest intentions will be misused by people, to harm themselves or to harm others. Maybe human nature just sucks.
When the world was smaller, it was harder for people to get together with their common interests. There wasn't anyone around the coffee pot or water cooler who I could talk to about the shows or music I liked.
Thankfully, nowadays I can find people from all around the world who listen and watch the same things as me.
The net effect is...Such a relief.
When the world was smaller, it was harder for people to get together with their common interests. There wasn't anyone around the coffee pot or water cooler who I could talk to about the shows or music I liked.
That was a feature, not a bug. You broadened your knowledge, and did the same for the people you talked with.
Compulsive navel-gazing is not healthy, individually, or for society.
This would be the case if the people who liked the most poopular things ever tried things outside of that, and there was a shared swapping of preferences, and openness on all sides.
But there never is. If you like things that are niche then you don't get a "Oh, that's not something I've heard of, tell me about it!" - and I agree that the world would be a better place if you did.
I dunno. I am on a discord server with a bunch of people who share theories and lament the cancellation of Raised By Wolves.
Expecting people in the office to be able to talk about that show is too much to expect. Also, I no longer go to an office anyways.
Things are different than say 20 years ago.
It's very different to discuss interests online rather than in person. Especially for people who didn't grow up online. This is part of the question about culture I think. Is shifting culture to the internet making things worse?
I don't know, but I can see why some people might think so.
> Also, I no longer go to an office anyways.
Did you consider if their observation could transfer to physical non work settings, non physical work settings, or non physical non work settings?
I think this is a salient counterpoint. While I value online interactions, I also don’t want them to be my predominant form of socialization. That works well for some people, less well for others, but it’s increasingly becoming the de facto mode of bonding with people over common interests. Because, you know, you can find that group of people really into the same thing you are. I also work from home full time and it requires a lot of continual work on my part to get my social needs met - sometimes impossible if I’m tired from working a full week.
Surely there is some middle ground. When we don’t have anything in common with our real life counterparts, there’s an issue. Likewise if we are forced to exclusively socialize with people we have nothing in common with. I feel like we’re on a pendulum swing where online interactions are taking over everything, and I’m hoping that swings back to some extent, but not to the thing we had before.
I think there's a bit of a swing taking place, at least among my age group.
I finally found out there's a "Friends only feed" on Facebook which is newish. None of my friends hardly are posting - over the last 7 days, just 5 people had posts.
Seems like the engagement beast has really driven people away, is my take.
I agree, there is plenty of good stuff still being created. But it has to compete with a firehose of sewage, so the ratio is way off.
Exactly. And the noise, in all forms, has been exponentially increasing. In every medium there is “good” - even in like the “TikTok and its clones” category… but it competes with idiotic rage bait and engagement bait like the “life hacks” that intentionally make no sense, uncreative political BS, advertisements for only fans models, and of course, AI-generated everything that masquerades as content but is actually devoid of meaning or usefulness.
I blame the ad-supported model for everything.
Ad-supported is what made the Internet’s adolescence, in the early 00s, so impactful, because it paid the bills, or at least promised a path to profitability to VCs who paid the bills.
But once the adtech got good enough and everything went mobile, ad revenue became the ultimate bad incentive driver for everyone. Nobody at NBC in 1950 could dream of getting viewers to spend 8 hours a day watching TV, but that kind of watch time is 100% possible today and the TikToks, IG and YouTubes of the world won’t rest unless average watch time reaches 24.00 hours per day.
I don't even think it mattered WHAT we watched. The A-Team and Dallas were pretty awful, but at least we were watching the same things and had some common ground, could see the humanity in the people we see every day. Now it's just "I hate everyone, no one even likes my niche anime about feet and fungi". I mean someone does, but it's some tiny group on the internet and then the tribalism and us against the world starts. The feeling of loneliness just gets worse and worse because you need to see people in your real life that you enjoy.
As another nerd who grew up on the rural side of my country, the internet was a huge blessing and once we first got our first modem in our house I finally got to experience how it felt to talk to people who cared about the same things as me.
I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.
> I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.
not even an in-person community of people with similar interests?
That would be a small slice of the section of people you'd be able to speak through the internet. I've probably, since starting to use the internet, spoken with more people in my lifetime than my whole linage before me, by just conversing on internet forums and emailing lists for decades (not that it's a leaderboard or anything, just illustrating the point).
Besides, it'd probably get boring talking to the exact same people always, new perspectives are always refreshing regardless of how much I disagree with them :)
I think what you're describing is that we used to have more common experiences.
When Seinfeld was on, there were far fewer video options, and very few high quality ones.
Just like how before there were hundreds of thousands of radio stations, most were "full service," so you were exposed to things you didn't necessarily like or want (farm news, blues, morning chat shows). But you were aware that they existed and shared an experience with people who did like them.
Even when radio started fragmenting, I think of the 80's, we all listened to each other's music. If you listen to reruns of American Top 40 on Sirius, you'll hear a disco song followed by an R&B song, followed by a rock song followed by an oldies song followed by a soul song followed by a folk song.
Today, very often people silo themselves into a single genre, or even subgenre, of music, and anything else is "other" and bad.
The internet enables the hyper-optimization of media (music, video, games, sports, politics), which drives us apart, rather than brings us together. And big tech companies are happy to carve out personalized echo chambers for each of us to wallow in.
> Today, very often people silo themselves into a single genre, or even subgenre, of music, and anything else is "other" and bad.
I heard many people who grew up before 2000 say their children, grandchildren, students, or so listened to more varied music than they did at the same ages. I heard none say the opposite.
The good: The internet enabled access to a wider diversity of cultures.
The bad (I think?): Culture decoupled from geography, which makes it harder to connect with local community.
The ugly: The attention economy optimizes for what is novel and upsetting, with a second order consequence of biasing culture to perceive everything in upsetting ways, even when it doesn't need to or benefit from that perspective. So culture as a whole has been biased towards pessimistic rituals and values.