The Mosaic browser (1993) had full text history search.
We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory.
It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead.
I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades?
A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog.
Bookmarks died because most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do.
We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach.
That and google had a major interest in killing bookmarks. Bookmarks were actively competing with google search traffic, so they put in a lot of effort to get you to stop using them. Why bookmark something when you can just search for it.
Eh, it's true that Google's incentives aren't really aligned with bookmarking tools, but the magnitude of the effect is much less than you're thinking of. Basically 100% of Google's revenues come from commercial-seeking queries, cases where the user has a purchasing intent before they came to the search engine. All of the non-commercial uses - coding, random facts, research, education, navigational queries, etc - are just loss-leaders so that your fingers automatically reach for Google when you're searching for lawyers, contractors, home-improvement fixtures, apps, furniture, flowers, restaurants, consumer electronics, etc. Google (of the 2010s certainly, but also true now) considered Amazon to be its primary competition, not Yahoo or del.icio.us.
They put precisely zero effort into killing bookmarks. I know because I was there, and probably would've been tasked with doing it. Well, that and because bookmarks still exist and I can still use them. They also put zero effort into improving bookmarks or making them easier for you to use, but it's death by inaction and consumer choice, not by anything Google did.
> My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first.
Yes, as kids probably always did since the invention of the children's room. The usual solution was to educate - and push - them until they hopefully started to understand the benefits that an orderly room can give you and maybe even had some fun thinking of a good ordering scheme by themselves.
Only in tech would the response to kids being too lazy to clean up their rooms be "oh well obviously keeping your stuff in order is an unworkable strategy".
I remember that, back when we were in school, we would actually spend a lot of time structuring the bookmark folder, making elaborate menu hierarchies. Doing this the first time was fun.
The problem was, this lasted about until the first time the PC had to be reinstalled or someone switched the browser or something else caused the bookmarks menu to be lost. Redoing all that stuff after it got wiped was much more of a chore than doing it initially.
But this would be my takeaway here: If software developers want their users to manage their own ordering schemes or use customization features, make it easy and convenient to do - and for the love of everything, threat the resulting bookmark trees, settings files etc as critical data that has to be synced, backed-up etc. If it has to be redone after a few updates or a crash, then no one will use it.
(Incidentally, tech companies have absolutely no problem "educating" their users if the behavior is something they care about. I'm pretty sure, no product or marketing person ever said "oh well, it sure would be nice if all our users made accounts or installed our app, but they're far too lazy for that, so that's a nonstarter...")
i had invested a lot into del.icio.us and other similar systems but what really killed bookmarks for me was the instability of URIs and how hard it was to search for the right page based on a title or bookmark name and not the contents. At the time, google was really really effective at search.
As an alternative to Gmail can I recommend Hotmail? I recently created an account and a nice feature is that all new email goes into the Junk folder by default. It was obviously designed by a misanthropic hermit, but the benefit is that your emails drop to almost zero. It's a bit of a bummer if you had a job opportunity or a friend tries to contact you, but on the other hand, fewer distractions.
I gave up on my book because after a couple decades I didn't have a good answer. Sure I could brag about the one full-up where I got 57mpg, and I knew about the one where it was only 36 - who cares.
Back in the 1930s the book was probably useful because changes in mpg were a sign you needed to do a tuneup early. But back then everybody knew a tuneup was every few months and once in a while something went off in between. Cars are a lot more reliable.
That was the main one, and also in case you ever ended up with car trouble you had a record of every place you had filled up and every time you had the car serviced. It was also financial: you could tell how much you were spending on gas, whether gas prices were going up or down, which stations had the cheapest gas, etc.
Nowadays a lot of this is recoverable from your credit card statements (though again, I don't know anybody who actually does this), but in the 80s you would usually pay cash for gas.
A friend of mine in high school (2012) was required to add to the notebook his parents kept in the car whenever he got gas. I wonder if his parents still do that kind of record keeping now that the car tells you its MPG, gas price historical data is easily accessible, and card purchases are tagged as "Gas" automatically in the banks that I use.
I do actually audit each transaction in my card statements each month to look briefly at the categories of spending I use most. Gas is a category, but that number doesn't really change my behavior. It's just a data point.
I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of all my fillups. Mostly because I was curious about my monthly spend on gas with it having gone up so much. But it’s been interesting to see the mpg over time.
W3C's Amaya browser [1] was as much an editor as it was a browser. Production and consumption were supposed to be symmetrical. This was the promise of the web.
Instead we turned it into a worse version of television, where you still only consume passively what is fed to you while being watched and analysed.
I am pretty sure early versions of the Safari browser (in the 2000s) did in fact store a full-text version of every webpage in the history and allow you to search that. I even remember looking at the plist files where Safari stored all the extracted text.
I relied on that a lot until one day a random system update deleted all my old browsing history.
Your chain of thoughts is dangerous, because once you realize that can you can cache website content locally, you might also want to share this cache with your friends so that traffic is reduced ;)
But what if they update the webpage to something completely different from what you bookmarked? Wouldn't you like to have access to the most up-to-date version always? /s
I cut out Social Media earlier this year, and it's been one of the best decisions I've made. Part of why I started was remembering that we didn't have doom-scrolling apps before smartphones. The change has been tremendous since I've been trying to go back to more "intentional" media. When I find myself distracted and wanting to pick up my phone, I realize there isn't really anything on it for me to do and am forced to just put it away. So I've started getting into the habit of keeping a book on me wherever I go. I've read 4 books this year!
That realization - that you realize there's really nothing [worthwhile] for you to do - after getting over that initial break from your phone, is a magical threshold that I wish I'd crossed a lot sooner. The time and energy it frees up is so powerful, no matter what else you choose to do with it. Reading 4 books is incredible on its own but in this day and age it (and any other deliberate, non-scrolling activity) has incredible effects on your attention and emotional-balance, which I'm sure you've noticed.
Our minds seem to be more like LLMs than we probably like to imagine.
In some areas of life, technology and society have forced us to be more aware, of more things, more of the time. Our 'context' is filled with more things to consider, and attention is the window in. Sleep, schedule, and planning, helps to reset us and use context wisely.
Modern life forces a lot of context in, but we still have a lot of control over the rest of our daily 'attention windows' (like cutting out the excessive attention-grabbing media). It's kind of a rigid way to think, but there seems to be something there. We do have a saying afterall: 'what's on your mind?'
I appreciated the article: it was a good reminder to manage time wisely.
I cut Facebook a while ago when I realized they wouldn't let me at what I want it for.
I'm glad Facebook told me about my classmate Eddie's death. We would never be friends but we knew each other and my life was better for having him in a class years ago. My only other chance is hope that it is discussed at a class reunion in a few years.
However Facebook wants to give me the 'you won't believe who is harming our children' overblown scare because that is what sells. I need to cut that garbage out of my life (others have discussed why in detail). Realistically Facebook has about five minutes of useful stuff per day, which doesn't make them money. However now I'm out so they get less.
I'll object to "no doomscrolling" a little bit. My first case of doomscrolling was on my PC, in high-school, in early years of Facebook. It happened not with social feeds, but with news. I had this stupid idea that I need to follow news to "stay informed", and it took me I think a good year before I noticed I'm constantly sad, depressed, angry at, or afraid for the world. When I noticed, I cut news out completely. Mood massively improved, and two decades later, I still don't regret a thing. Plus, I realized some time later that reading news doesn't make you more informed, but more disinformed.
The sum total of things going on in the world is far more than any one human being can process. The function of the news media (either human or algorithmic) is to cherry-pick the stories that are presented to users. Because they are cherry-picked, they necessarily present a distorted picture of reality. In the days of the big-3 monopoly of broadcast TV, they were usually cherry-picked to support national unity and common American culture; as the news media got more competitive, they started cherry-picking ones that would hold viewer attention ("if it bleeds, it leads"), and then as we switched to Internet news and algorithmic feeds they are algorithmically chosen to maximize engagement.
- in bulk, it creates distorted view of reality, by overemphasizing dramatic events;
- individually, approximately half the headlines are bald-faced lies, and the other half merely click bait
- articles usually correct the lies in headlines, but in every case I could independently verify, the text was presenting heavily distorted view of the events
Some of that can be canceled out by following multiple independent sources, but frankly, doing that is IMO one of the biggest ways to waste your life I can think of. Not worth the effort. Meme sites have similar ROI, and are much more fun.
I have followed that up with removing all algorithmical feeds from my life (I recommend News Feed Eradicator extension for that) and then setting phone to Focused mode from 9am till 2pm. It's been life changing.
I thought people at work would be mad, but everybody adjusted instantly.
Next up I'd like to pre-plan blocks of focused work - an idea I got from the Deep Work book.
There's a big difference between a forum where every visitor sees the same front page (more or less) and something like Facebook where every visitor sees a list of things curated just for them.
If you are only exposed to points of view that you already agree with, over time it's easy to forget that some people have other points of view (which are actually not always completely ridiculous, despite what you may have heard). Note that rage bait does not count as a divergent point of view; it's almost always a cherry-picked caricature, not anything close to a good faith representation.
This might not sound like such a big deal, but do that for billions of individuals and you have the perfect recipe for the political polarization we are currently enjoying.
It's less of a difference than you might suspect. The personalized curation is in which forum you choose to visit. HN is quite niche by numbers; it's a lot smaller than say bodybuilding.com or even AR15.com. That you choose to go to news.ycombinator.com is your personalization, and also skews your view on the world. Most of the world is interested in very different stuff.
Yeah, forums were social media too, but I dont remember people having such a negative reaction to forums as they do now to what replaced them, largely.
Forums have their share of negativity too. HN included.
There was always this curve where a forum would be fun because it was a small group of likeminded individuals. And as it got larger, more trolls came in, more newbies with different interests, and others that might not have shared the same cultural mentality that started that forum. And the forum would begin to shed its original members who draw the crowd. Then what’s left is people who have less interest in the community spirit. And that forum starts to shrink again as more people become disinterested and more infighting happens.
Good moderation can help but nonetheless I’ve seen this happen across dozens of forums. In IRC channels, newsgroups and so on too. So it’s not even a phenomena specific to HTTP message boards. Some communities even have a terms for it like “the eternal September”.
To be clear, this is a separate problem to the addictive design of modern platforms. That’s a whole other level negativity. But people seem to forget that the internet could be a cesspit even before Zuckerberg poisoned the well.
Forums were best before up/downvoting/likes/reactions and before sort-by-most-popular became a thing. When they were simply a discussion in historical order (possibly threaded) by topic. HN is halfway down the engagement slope with its voting mechanism, its inability to track which comments you already read, and its locking of discussions after a day or two. The last two points prevent long-form asynchronous discussions. The first prevents a shared and stable discussion order, and diverts attention capacity to giving/receiving up/downvotes and to one’s karma level.
You know what they mean though. Don't be so dense. This feed is not algorithmically built to maximize engagement, and it has no eye-catching and bait-facilitating photos. Meaningfully different.
Some people will quibble with the definition, but I agree with the spirit of this. I have pruned all my web traffic down to a few sites, and Hacker News and Reddit are the two that remain where I feel that pull for my attention. Hacker News is better than, say, TikTok, but I still find myself reaching for it to distract me from other things in my life. It is "easy". Like 24 hour news, the FOMO is still strong (you can always refresh and find some novelty), and reading a bunch of internet comments is a guaranteed cheap fix for dopamine (or whatever).
When I have experimented with banning these sites, I have felt a positive boost in my mental wellbeing, where I go back to being bored, which is great and leads to me doing more focused activities like reading more. I just don't know how to solve the "head in the sand" issue. This site has legitimately helped me in my career for example. I think I will land on a middle ground somewhere will be the ultimate answer, like catching up once per week or something.
Nah, it's just a news aggregator and discussion forum. I'm not here putting my life on display for everyone, and there isn't even a way for me to do that, so it's not social media. Not only do I not have a non-anonymous presence on this site, but there's not even info to link me to one, so it's still not social media... and not even close.
I noticed that i often spend lots of hours on my computer without doing anything useful but instead doomscrolling on hacker news and watching countless Youtube videos i hardly understand and give little attention. I think i could solve this by making a list of things i want to do on my computer before turning it on, but i haven't tried yet
The great internet dishes your a personalized world, that is just designed to your order. This is not something specific to internet.
The physical world around you is also sculpted by your actions. You "feel at home" while at home only because you have adjusted it to become your mould. You become an integral piece in your world, making you a piece in jigsaw puzzle which won't be complete without you.
Your bookshelf, for example, is moulded around your interests. Your wine cellar has your favorite wines. Your clothes just fit your fashion. That's your world. When you visit internet, it presents your own world. It reflects an awareness about you, just like your wardrobe does.
In wardrobe case, you intentionally made your choices. In the internet case, you intentionally expressed your interest by your implicit interactions that were enough to be translated into your selections.
> But like every habit, the only thing you have to do is to keep at it. And if you pay enough attention to it, something will click in your brain.
a bad habit i noticed after taking hiatus of focused work was me jumping into different windows and tabs and just mindlessly consuming content without finishing them. after noticing this pattern, i decided i will focus on one task at a time and finishing it, like reading the OPs article. it did wonders for me and i noticed i'm now even more focused that ever. the lesson is indeed being aware first, and then practicing the habit.
> You didn’t really have one big app that you could open and order it to entertain you. Instead, you had a few dozen of bookmarks to websites, each with a specific idea in mind.
This overlooks how common custom homepages such as Lycos, Yahoo! and MSN were and how the browsers pushed these as their default home pages.
While they may not be as addictive as "the algorithm" of today, they were still packed with clickbait images/links to attract your attention and ads to drain your wallet.
Peak internet was the brief period of time when it was available but we weren't permanently connected. It was an intentional decision to log on, do what you wanted to do, and then disconnect.
Our book club has actually noted that more and more mainstream books are written for low attention span. Repeating details ad nauseum and simplifying the plot significantly. So I don't think books are immune to this automatically.
I am not sure that that's recent. Most books, even before the internet, were kind of low-effort shit.
You've always had terrible borderline-porn romance novels at grocery stores and terrible pulp novels and the like. We just don't read terrible novels from 100 years ago; whatever we read from that era now has survived the test of time. The same cannot be said about anything released in the last couple years.
Grocery store softcore porn was still very expensive in time, money, and space. The amount of energy required to move a book around is monumental in comparison to how much energy it takes to move the same number of bits of information contained in the book. The speed at which just the information moves (in modern digital networks) is nearly instantaneous. The space the digital book carries is not measurable by the human senses.
It was nearly impossible for most people to afford to fill every waking moment with a book in front of them, bar a few addicts. Now there is a river of information actively fighting for your eyeballs at every moment. And how the meme-gene works, the most addictive types will rise as the victor.
> every other modern app tries to claw your eyes out.
They do, and it's annoying that even apps for "real work" do the same thing by flashing notifications/tips in your face, advertising a new feature you don't want to use right now, or warning you that everything is about to break soon.
I remember reading an article in I think “net” magazine (Brits, remember that?) in the, I guess, early 2000s, that was predicting the “push” (as opposed to “pull”) internet. At the time I thought that sounded awful, and yep, it’s not good.
I hope that soon before we can rename "social media" to "AI media," there will be a renaissance of the old internet, where there's a mainstream desire for human-generated content, life events, and real exchanges with each other.
> Instead of picking what we want to see we let other people decide what is supposed to be good for us.
100% agree, and this is exactly why I disable any sort of algorithmic recommendations on the platforms I’m active on. I do this either through the app itself or by using those platforms on the web and hiding distracting elements with an extension like uBlock or AdGuard.
My final feed consists only of channels/profiles I directly follow. Oh, and there’s also RSS…
I really recommend everyone do the same. It really clears your head.
There are a few particular problems with this. Let's go with the most extreme example I can think of.
You walk up to the interface of an infinite digital library. In this library there are an infinite amount of books that you'd like to read, or even contain anything coherent for you to read. The problem is there is also an infinite amount of books you don't want to read, can't read, or aren't even coherent information. And this second infinity is so much bigger than the first infinity that it is infinitely improbable that you will ever pick out a coherent book.
Everything you do in a coherent informational world is directed by sets of biases. Algorithmic recommendations are just another one of the tools used to traverse this infinite world, and if you understand the biases they impart you can use these tools successfully.
Ok but why "find me a book that explains how car insurance works" no find book that explains how car insurance works but find exactly one car insurance company?
This is also why I view advertisement, in general, to be an invasive and incredibly dangerous. TV, online or elsewhere. It's all bad. It doesn't just let people know a product exists. It shapes the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. I view it like a cancer that we need to cut out.
Everyone likes to think they're 'immune' to advertisement. That they're somehow mentally above the whole concept and it doesn't affect them at all. Total nonsense.
I know the post mostly already says this, but related, this is also part of the danger of modern social media algorithms. Negative, outrage-inducing topics tend to get more attention in the short run. However, if someone watches it even once, that causes the algorithm to send a more of that kind of content. Before you know it, some people are getting fed and endless stream of the worst possible news, the most depressing takes, over and over. It can aggravate existing mental health issues or give them to people who did not have them before. The algorithm isn't 'designed' to do this, it's just trying to maximize metrics like time spent. It doesn't 'care' if the topics are negative or positive. But they have to be reshaped to consider the damage they can do when you start multiplying that by hundreds of millions of people.
My antidote to this was 100% selfhosting from home as you are now on par with the platforms and have a choice to serve yourself.
You cannot stay focused all day and theres nothing wrong with "just show me random dumb stuff" i mean i wont lie, im old and RTL2 was a thing you know even in educated circles. These no tv people read bad fiction instead.
And i actually kinda like the youtube algo to wind down - but i can also just switch to a timeshift archive.
I think the problem is more that these platforms are reeeally comfortable to use and its not that easy to have the same - doable though.
Oh and btw if you wanna go back to blog circles and xmpp and vpn lan games im all in but times are changing.
I think in the next five years the internet will change drastically. Walled gardens, invite only, and companies that verify you're a human (I.E. use government identification).
There is now no way to tell if somebody online in a human or a robot. Even video/zoom/voice is no longer a distinguishable.
There could be a technology that cryptographically ensures that each letter/character came from a physical keypress/touch from a human when you want to interact with a human online in written form, but then again a robot could also be pressing the physical switches or interacting with a touchscreen. Perhaps this technology could handle copying/pasting too as long as the text originally came from a human.
I hope we'll develop more robust mechanisms for detecting non-human generated content (including text) that aren't only enforceable by law (e.g. labeling AI-generated content in the EU). Apple Reference Image is one of the steps in this direction.
At the end of the day I see no path to human victory in a digital world.
It's kind of like a human moving to a planet with a nitrogen atmosphere. We have to wear a space suit to survive. No matter how much we slim it down, it's still a system on top of our existing systems.
The internet is the same. We have to put a digital suit on our analog meat to explore a digital world that is becoming crowded with evolving digital natives, and those natives are rapidly becoming smarter and better than us in these spaces.
Really, I encourage you to log off and go outside a while, take a look a what the local flora and fauna are about and learn about that, maybe use online tools or communities to learn, but remember to log off and go outside and experience the natural world where you can.
I think this needs a strategic change. Unless you have a clear cut life objective and you are really into it, everything else you try to improve are at most tactical wins that will be lost to time. And those small wins actually make the end frustration worse because you thought you won strategically this time.
I’ll also going to declare that doom scrolling-ish working on non-impactful personal projects is as BAD as doom scrolling twitter.
Alternatively we can have a committee distribute attention over things that are useful to the country/humanity/the economy etc.(can't think of the right word) Say, if someone next door is looking for an employee with exactly your expertise and experience and they are willing to pay for it the job offer is worthy of being at the top of your feed.
That the person might not like seeing the perfect offer is less important than filling the hole in the economy.
I wrote [something extremely similar](https://blog.scoopy.zone/posts/attention/) a bit ago. It is much harder to accomplish, but like the article says, you can still experience an Internet like the past.
> LinkedIn will bury any relevant career news between the opinion of complete strangers. It is surely just a coincidence that those strangers happen to be shilling whatever Microsoft is invested in at the moment.
The browser extension LinkOff makes the feed much more bearable, even useful. [1]
Also, though I dislike the posts that LI pushes into my feed, I've never gotten the sense that this was motivated by a desire to boost Microsoft's investments. Perhaps I just wasn't paying attention, or am not cynical enough?
This is a story of enshittification but... I don't see any of it and neither should anyone who reads HN:
* adblocking is simple both in browser and on the dns level,
* revanced youtube allows you to even skip sponsored segments, regular ads don't deserve a mention, you will see none,
* reddit hasn't been good in forever, it's why we're here,
somehow Twitter/Spotify/YouTube/TikTok algos work just fine for me with this one simple trick: I watch the good stuff, and skip/block/mute the not-so-good stuff. This works less well on LinkedIn but it's a Microsoft product, what did you expect, really.
If you're like me, ie. on Hacker News daily, the modern Internet is a never ending series of wonders with virtually none of the inconvenience. And if on some absolute edge, you must use a website that sucks, both Claude and ChatGPT can drive a browser nowadays.
We don't have protection from attention hijacking algorithms the same way workers didn't have protection until unions became a thing. AI can do more for consumers than Unions ever could (because it'll be more uniform). Currently there's no motivation (monetary or otherwise) to make this tech easily available to the masses - and when it does the bad actors and dark pattern wizards will miss the good ole days when only the select few had access to these patterns.
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment expressed in this post. Our attention is extremely valuable (both to us and to advertisers), and consumers today broadly squander it.
For consumer digital products, the only business model that seems to work is advertising, because consumers are cheap and refuse to pay money for software. But the result is that they instead trade something far more valuable for the software, which is their attention.
The products that get built, as a result, are supremely well-engineered to attract and retain attention, to the detriment of their users. Most of the "news" that reaches us these days is not at all an attempt to actually educate us about the state of the world. Instead its just a collection of inflammatory and enraging facts that are chosen to optimize for engagement (to hold your attention)
In theory, someone could rebuild an ecosystem where people stopped squandering their attention and monetized it with money, but this would require consumers to stop chronically undervaluing their time and overvaluing their money.
I don't think social media is inherently bad. For me, the measure is whether I'm wallowing in consuming rather than doing. Although, yes, it's easy to get lost in consuming, doing takes much more intent/attention.
I mean it's no different saying a river is inherently bad. We need them for water for survival. What is inherently bad is the maelstrom of a raging torrent seeking to pull you under so no one ever sees your body again. This is what a lot of the platforms have evolved into.
> Do you want to watch a video? YouTube knows you like cooking and art streams. But why not also recommend a few clips about the stock market bubble, global warming, and the war in Iran.
I'm always fascinated when people claim YouTube pushes content like this. It's an extremely common take, but I don't think it's true.
My experience has been that if I stop clicking something, the algorithm soon stops recommending it. It occasionally brings back a blast from the past--e.g. I watched a sumo competition once, and once in a blue moon it recommends another. But you can downvote bad recommendations, and I simply don't get recommendations for ideas I've never engaged with before.
FWIW I'm not saying the algorithm is great. My feed is absolutely worthless right now, but it's all goofy Japanese content because one of my kids is extremely into that right now. There's zero political content because she isn't showing any interest in it. Heck, most of the stuff isn't even in English anymore.
Same. I don't think I remember the last time I came across actually "FAR right propaganda" recommended by an algorithm. Could be that the author and I differ in what "far right" means.
It's actually quite easy. If you watch something and you don't want more of it, delete it from your watch history. If it's particularly bad, you can block the channel entirely. I do this a lot for obvious AI slop content. Only subscribe to channels that are worth watching. Now my YouTube feed is almost too boring -- it's only showing me stuff in a pretty narrow set of interests and channels. I see very little outrage bait, celebrity news, "influencers," or politics.
And hide "Shorts" entirely. They will reappear after a few weeks, but you can hide them again.
On the social science side, The Ecology of Attention[1] talks about attention as an ecosystem and the final economic frontier for capitalism. It envisions a world where every moment of our attention is fought over by commercial entities, which feels pretty prescient at the moment.
For the same reasons we left forums in the first place.
Spam was just a very small part of why people left forums. Size of the community and network effects was one of them. A constant stream of activity on any subject you wanted was yet another. Not having to log in to 40 different places yet another.
I use SelfControl for Mac and set the down time to around 15 days. No Youtube no news sites etc. Except HN. It's helped a lot, after a week you can notice measurable change in attention and habit and productivity. SelfControl lets you add 48 hrs to your blocked time repeatedly, so you can get to a 15 day mark pretty easily through repeated mouse clicks.
We could call doing such a thing, referencing a seminal work with a similar title that's so close that you couldn't to it that have missed it, yet somehow you did, as an AliceGG's Mistake.
How could you write 600 words on the topic and not mention the paper otherwise?
Why would AliceGG need to reference the paper? Anyone who is vaguely aware of the LLM architecture knows about the paper title and it being a huge advancement in machine learning. This is an article about recommendation algorithms hijacking our attention and LLMs ruining the internet... it's pretty clear the article title is a nod to the paper?
The Mosaic browser (1993) had full text history search.
We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory.
It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead.
I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades?
A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog.
Bookmarks died because most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do.
We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach.
Was I actually the only kid who liked cleaning up toys and sorting Knex and Lego and stuff?
That and google had a major interest in killing bookmarks. Bookmarks were actively competing with google search traffic, so they put in a lot of effort to get you to stop using them. Why bookmark something when you can just search for it.
Eh, it's true that Google's incentives aren't really aligned with bookmarking tools, but the magnitude of the effect is much less than you're thinking of. Basically 100% of Google's revenues come from commercial-seeking queries, cases where the user has a purchasing intent before they came to the search engine. All of the non-commercial uses - coding, random facts, research, education, navigational queries, etc - are just loss-leaders so that your fingers automatically reach for Google when you're searching for lawyers, contractors, home-improvement fixtures, apps, furniture, flowers, restaurants, consumer electronics, etc. Google (of the 2010s certainly, but also true now) considered Amazon to be its primary competition, not Yahoo or del.icio.us.
They put precisely zero effort into killing bookmarks. I know because I was there, and probably would've been tasked with doing it. Well, that and because bookmarks still exist and I can still use them. They also put zero effort into improving bookmarks or making them easier for you to use, but it's death by inaction and consumer choice, not by anything Google did.
> My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first.
Yes, as kids probably always did since the invention of the children's room. The usual solution was to educate - and push - them until they hopefully started to understand the benefits that an orderly room can give you and maybe even had some fun thinking of a good ordering scheme by themselves.
Only in tech would the response to kids being too lazy to clean up their rooms be "oh well obviously keeping your stuff in order is an unworkable strategy".
I remember that, back when we were in school, we would actually spend a lot of time structuring the bookmark folder, making elaborate menu hierarchies. Doing this the first time was fun.
The problem was, this lasted about until the first time the PC had to be reinstalled or someone switched the browser or something else caused the bookmarks menu to be lost. Redoing all that stuff after it got wiped was much more of a chore than doing it initially.
But this would be my takeaway here: If software developers want their users to manage their own ordering schemes or use customization features, make it easy and convenient to do - and for the love of everything, threat the resulting bookmark trees, settings files etc as critical data that has to be synced, backed-up etc. If it has to be redone after a few updates or a crash, then no one will use it.
(Incidentally, tech companies have absolutely no problem "educating" their users if the behavior is something they care about. I'm pretty sure, no product or marketing person ever said "oh well, it sure would be nice if all our users made accounts or installed our app, but they're far too lazy for that, so that's a nonstarter...")
i had invested a lot into del.icio.us and other similar systems but what really killed bookmarks for me was the instability of URIs and how hard it was to search for the right page based on a title or bookmark name and not the contents. At the time, google was really really effective at search.
As an alternative to Gmail can I recommend Hotmail? I recently created an account and a nice feature is that all new email goes into the Junk folder by default. It was obviously designed by a misanthropic hermit, but the benefit is that your emails drop to almost zero. It's a bit of a bummer if you had a job opportunity or a friend tries to contact you, but on the other hand, fewer distractions.
Crazy times.
It all went wrong when writing was introduced, the lazy kids became addicted to letting the technology take place of their natural human memory.
I'm curious about the history - what would you use a list of gas fill ups for? Price tracking?
I gave up on my book because after a couple decades I didn't have a good answer. Sure I could brag about the one full-up where I got 57mpg, and I knew about the one where it was only 36 - who cares.
Back in the 1930s the book was probably useful because changes in mpg were a sign you needed to do a tuneup early. But back then everybody knew a tuneup was every few months and once in a while something went off in between. Cars are a lot more reliable.
To figure out MPG you were getting.
That was the main one, and also in case you ever ended up with car trouble you had a record of every place you had filled up and every time you had the car serviced. It was also financial: you could tell how much you were spending on gas, whether gas prices were going up or down, which stations had the cheapest gas, etc.
Nowadays a lot of this is recoverable from your credit card statements (though again, I don't know anybody who actually does this), but in the 80s you would usually pay cash for gas.
A friend of mine in high school (2012) was required to add to the notebook his parents kept in the car whenever he got gas. I wonder if his parents still do that kind of record keeping now that the car tells you its MPG, gas price historical data is easily accessible, and card purchases are tagged as "Gas" automatically in the banks that I use.
I do actually audit each transaction in my card statements each month to look briefly at the categories of spending I use most. Gas is a category, but that number doesn't really change my behavior. It's just a data point.
I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of all my fillups. Mostly because I was curious about my monthly spend on gas with it having gone up so much. But it’s been interesting to see the mpg over time.
W3C's Amaya browser [1] was as much an editor as it was a browser. Production and consumption were supposed to be symmetrical. This was the promise of the web.
Instead we turned it into a worse version of television, where you still only consume passively what is fed to you while being watched and analysed.
[1] https://dev.w3.org/Amaya/amaya/AmayaPage.html
I am pretty sure early versions of the Safari browser (in the 2000s) did in fact store a full-text version of every webpage in the history and allow you to search that. I even remember looking at the plist files where Safari stored all the extracted text.
I relied on that a lot until one day a random system update deleted all my old browsing history.
Related : Hister https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743097
Do you guys know if there is an extension that textifies most of the internet?
There's a lot of reader-mode extensions out there - I'm not sure which ones are good nowadays.
Your chain of thoughts is dangerous, because once you realize that can you can cache website content locally, you might also want to share this cache with your friends so that traffic is reduced ;)
But what if they update the webpage to something completely different from what you bookmarked? Wouldn't you like to have access to the most up-to-date version always? /s
I cut out Social Media earlier this year, and it's been one of the best decisions I've made. Part of why I started was remembering that we didn't have doom-scrolling apps before smartphones. The change has been tremendous since I've been trying to go back to more "intentional" media. When I find myself distracted and wanting to pick up my phone, I realize there isn't really anything on it for me to do and am forced to just put it away. So I've started getting into the habit of keeping a book on me wherever I go. I've read 4 books this year!
That realization - that you realize there's really nothing [worthwhile] for you to do - after getting over that initial break from your phone, is a magical threshold that I wish I'd crossed a lot sooner. The time and energy it frees up is so powerful, no matter what else you choose to do with it. Reading 4 books is incredible on its own but in this day and age it (and any other deliberate, non-scrolling activity) has incredible effects on your attention and emotional-balance, which I'm sure you've noticed.
Our minds seem to be more like LLMs than we probably like to imagine.
In some areas of life, technology and society have forced us to be more aware, of more things, more of the time. Our 'context' is filled with more things to consider, and attention is the window in. Sleep, schedule, and planning, helps to reset us and use context wisely.
Modern life forces a lot of context in, but we still have a lot of control over the rest of our daily 'attention windows' (like cutting out the excessive attention-grabbing media). It's kind of a rigid way to think, but there seems to be something there. We do have a saying afterall: 'what's on your mind?'
I appreciated the article: it was a good reminder to manage time wisely.
Ecclesiastes would be an appropriate read.
I cut Facebook a while ago when I realized they wouldn't let me at what I want it for.
I'm glad Facebook told me about my classmate Eddie's death. We would never be friends but we knew each other and my life was better for having him in a class years ago. My only other chance is hope that it is discussed at a class reunion in a few years.
However Facebook wants to give me the 'you won't believe who is harming our children' overblown scare because that is what sells. I need to cut that garbage out of my life (others have discussed why in detail). Realistically Facebook has about five minutes of useful stuff per day, which doesn't make them money. However now I'm out so they get less.
I'll object to "no doomscrolling" a little bit. My first case of doomscrolling was on my PC, in high-school, in early years of Facebook. It happened not with social feeds, but with news. I had this stupid idea that I need to follow news to "stay informed", and it took me I think a good year before I noticed I'm constantly sad, depressed, angry at, or afraid for the world. When I noticed, I cut news out completely. Mood massively improved, and two decades later, I still don't regret a thing. Plus, I realized some time later that reading news doesn't make you more informed, but more disinformed.
Why do you think reading news makes you more disinformed? Because it makes you aware of what you don't know enough?
The sum total of things going on in the world is far more than any one human being can process. The function of the news media (either human or algorithmic) is to cherry-pick the stories that are presented to users. Because they are cherry-picked, they necessarily present a distorted picture of reality. In the days of the big-3 monopoly of broadcast TV, they were usually cherry-picked to support national unity and common American culture; as the news media got more competitive, they started cherry-picking ones that would hold viewer attention ("if it bleeds, it leads"), and then as we switched to Internet news and algorithmic feeds they are algorithmically chosen to maximize engagement.
Because:
- in bulk, it creates distorted view of reality, by overemphasizing dramatic events;
- individually, approximately half the headlines are bald-faced lies, and the other half merely click bait
- articles usually correct the lies in headlines, but in every case I could independently verify, the text was presenting heavily distorted view of the events
Some of that can be canceled out by following multiple independent sources, but frankly, doing that is IMO one of the biggest ways to waste your life I can think of. Not worth the effort. Meme sites have similar ROI, and are much more fun.
HN is social media :)
Yes but old-style social media, not the ones where youn dooscroll cat videos. Here we’re obviously talking about those.
Yes. This pedantic gotcha that misses the point is amazing proof of that.
Thanks for demonstrating.
What are those 4 books?
1. Continuous discovery habits by Teresa Torres
2. Life at the speed of play by Mark Pincus
3. The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman
4. Autobiography of a Yogi by Pramahansa Yogananda
I have followed that up with removing all algorithmical feeds from my life (I recommend News Feed Eradicator extension for that) and then setting phone to Focused mode from 9am till 2pm. It's been life changing.
I thought people at work would be mad, but everybody adjusted instantly.
Next up I'd like to pre-plan blocks of focused work - an idea I got from the Deep Work book.
You're on social media right now, Hacker News is social media.
There's a big difference between a forum where every visitor sees the same front page (more or less) and something like Facebook where every visitor sees a list of things curated just for them.
If you are only exposed to points of view that you already agree with, over time it's easy to forget that some people have other points of view (which are actually not always completely ridiculous, despite what you may have heard). Note that rage bait does not count as a divergent point of view; it's almost always a cherry-picked caricature, not anything close to a good faith representation.
This might not sound like such a big deal, but do that for billions of individuals and you have the perfect recipe for the political polarization we are currently enjoying.
It's less of a difference than you might suspect. The personalized curation is in which forum you choose to visit. HN is quite niche by numbers; it's a lot smaller than say bodybuilding.com or even AR15.com. That you choose to go to news.ycombinator.com is your personalization, and also skews your view on the world. Most of the world is interested in very different stuff.
Yeah, forums were social media too, but I dont remember people having such a negative reaction to forums as they do now to what replaced them, largely.
Forums have their share of negativity too. HN included.
There was always this curve where a forum would be fun because it was a small group of likeminded individuals. And as it got larger, more trolls came in, more newbies with different interests, and others that might not have shared the same cultural mentality that started that forum. And the forum would begin to shed its original members who draw the crowd. Then what’s left is people who have less interest in the community spirit. And that forum starts to shrink again as more people become disinterested and more infighting happens.
Good moderation can help but nonetheless I’ve seen this happen across dozens of forums. In IRC channels, newsgroups and so on too. So it’s not even a phenomena specific to HTTP message boards. Some communities even have a terms for it like “the eternal September”.
To be clear, this is a separate problem to the addictive design of modern platforms. That’s a whole other level negativity. But people seem to forget that the internet could be a cesspit even before Zuckerberg poisoned the well.
Forums were best before up/downvoting/likes/reactions and before sort-by-most-popular became a thing. When they were simply a discussion in historical order (possibly threaded) by topic. HN is halfway down the engagement slope with its voting mechanism, its inability to track which comments you already read, and its locking of discussions after a day or two. The last two points prevent long-form asynchronous discussions. The first prevents a shared and stable discussion order, and diverts attention capacity to giving/receiving up/downvotes and to one’s karma level.
You know what they mean though. Don't be so dense. This feed is not algorithmically built to maximize engagement, and it has no eye-catching and bait-facilitating photos. Meaningfully different.
Some people will quibble with the definition, but I agree with the spirit of this. I have pruned all my web traffic down to a few sites, and Hacker News and Reddit are the two that remain where I feel that pull for my attention. Hacker News is better than, say, TikTok, but I still find myself reaching for it to distract me from other things in my life. It is "easy". Like 24 hour news, the FOMO is still strong (you can always refresh and find some novelty), and reading a bunch of internet comments is a guaranteed cheap fix for dopamine (or whatever).
When I have experimented with banning these sites, I have felt a positive boost in my mental wellbeing, where I go back to being bored, which is great and leads to me doing more focused activities like reading more. I just don't know how to solve the "head in the sand" issue. This site has legitimately helped me in my career for example. I think I will land on a middle ground somewhere will be the ultimate answer, like catching up once per week or something.
Have you tried only using it through RSS feeds? https://hnrss.github.io/
Likewise with Reddit you can append .rss to get a feed
Nah, it's just a news aggregator and discussion forum. I'm not here putting my life on display for everyone, and there isn't even a way for me to do that, so it's not social media. Not only do I not have a non-anonymous presence on this site, but there's not even info to link me to one, so it's still not social media... and not even close.
an infinite feed with a recommendation algorithm is the root of all evil
Gottem! Checkmate.
/s
I noticed that i often spend lots of hours on my computer without doing anything useful but instead doomscrolling on hacker news and watching countless Youtube videos i hardly understand and give little attention. I think i could solve this by making a list of things i want to do on my computer before turning it on, but i haven't tried yet
The great internet dishes your a personalized world, that is just designed to your order. This is not something specific to internet.
The physical world around you is also sculpted by your actions. You "feel at home" while at home only because you have adjusted it to become your mould. You become an integral piece in your world, making you a piece in jigsaw puzzle which won't be complete without you.
Your bookshelf, for example, is moulded around your interests. Your wine cellar has your favorite wines. Your clothes just fit your fashion. That's your world. When you visit internet, it presents your own world. It reflects an awareness about you, just like your wardrobe does.
In wardrobe case, you intentionally made your choices. In the internet case, you intentionally expressed your interest by your implicit interactions that were enough to be translated into your selections.
Nothing spooky.
> But like every habit, the only thing you have to do is to keep at it. And if you pay enough attention to it, something will click in your brain.
a bad habit i noticed after taking hiatus of focused work was me jumping into different windows and tabs and just mindlessly consuming content without finishing them. after noticing this pattern, i decided i will focus on one task at a time and finishing it, like reading the OPs article. it did wonders for me and i noticed i'm now even more focused that ever. the lesson is indeed being aware first, and then practicing the habit.
I see the same pattern with people on their phones. Opening up an app, immediately switching to the next app, repeat.
> You didn’t really have one big app that you could open and order it to entertain you. Instead, you had a few dozen of bookmarks to websites, each with a specific idea in mind.
This overlooks how common custom homepages such as Lycos, Yahoo! and MSN were and how the browsers pushed these as their default home pages.
While they may not be as addictive as "the algorithm" of today, they were still packed with clickbait images/links to attract your attention and ads to drain your wallet.
MSN: https://web.archive.org/web/20021108094511/http://www.msn.co...
My MSN: https://web.archive.org/web/20021107081016/http://my.msn.com...
Microsoft is still hawking this same beat decades later
What's a good RSS service / client nowadays?
Peak internet was the brief period of time when it was available but we weren't permanently connected. It was an intentional decision to log on, do what you wanted to do, and then disconnect.
I've got two LANs at home, one of them I disconnect from the Internet by pulling a single ethernet cable (in a "try to hack this" way).
It's honestly very refreshing to have stuff I self-host and be operational without needing 24/7 Internet connection.
I'm running such a setup since years and, IMO, it helps me focus.
This is why I like books. No attempt at attention hijacking. Wheras every other modern app tries to claw your eyes out.
Our book club has actually noted that more and more mainstream books are written for low attention span. Repeating details ad nauseum and simplifying the plot significantly. So I don't think books are immune to this automatically.
I am not sure that that's recent. Most books, even before the internet, were kind of low-effort shit.
You've always had terrible borderline-porn romance novels at grocery stores and terrible pulp novels and the like. We just don't read terrible novels from 100 years ago; whatever we read from that era now has survived the test of time. The same cannot be said about anything released in the last couple years.
Also, quantity is a quality in and of itself.
Grocery store softcore porn was still very expensive in time, money, and space. The amount of energy required to move a book around is monumental in comparison to how much energy it takes to move the same number of bits of information contained in the book. The speed at which just the information moves (in modern digital networks) is nearly instantaneous. The space the digital book carries is not measurable by the human senses.
It was nearly impossible for most people to afford to fill every waking moment with a book in front of them, bar a few addicts. Now there is a river of information actively fighting for your eyeballs at every moment. And how the meme-gene works, the most addictive types will rise as the victor.
> every other modern app tries to claw your eyes out.
They do, and it's annoying that even apps for "real work" do the same thing by flashing notifications/tips in your face, advertising a new feature you don't want to use right now, or warning you that everything is about to break soon.
Good old PC video games are good at this as well. It's a joy to get into a game and not have anything else trying to pull you away with random crap.
Relatively true, but less true every day.
I remember reading an article in I think “net” magazine (Brits, remember that?) in the, I guess, early 2000s, that was predicting the “push” (as opposed to “pull”) internet. At the time I thought that sounded awful, and yep, it’s not good.
I hope that soon before we can rename "social media" to "AI media," there will be a renaissance of the old internet, where there's a mainstream desire for human-generated content, life events, and real exchanges with each other.
> Instead of picking what we want to see we let other people decide what is supposed to be good for us.
100% agree, and this is exactly why I disable any sort of algorithmic recommendations on the platforms I’m active on. I do this either through the app itself or by using those platforms on the web and hiding distracting elements with an extension like uBlock or AdGuard.
My final feed consists only of channels/profiles I directly follow. Oh, and there’s also RSS…
I really recommend everyone do the same. It really clears your head.
There are a few particular problems with this. Let's go with the most extreme example I can think of.
You walk up to the interface of an infinite digital library. In this library there are an infinite amount of books that you'd like to read, or even contain anything coherent for you to read. The problem is there is also an infinite amount of books you don't want to read, can't read, or aren't even coherent information. And this second infinity is so much bigger than the first infinity that it is infinitely improbable that you will ever pick out a coherent book.
Everything you do in a coherent informational world is directed by sets of biases. Algorithmic recommendations are just another one of the tools used to traverse this infinite world, and if you understand the biases they impart you can use these tools successfully.
Ok but why "find me a book that explains how car insurance works" no find book that explains how car insurance works but find exactly one car insurance company?
...because advertising
This is also why I view advertisement, in general, to be an invasive and incredibly dangerous. TV, online or elsewhere. It's all bad. It doesn't just let people know a product exists. It shapes the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. I view it like a cancer that we need to cut out.
Everyone likes to think they're 'immune' to advertisement. That they're somehow mentally above the whole concept and it doesn't affect them at all. Total nonsense.
I know the post mostly already says this, but related, this is also part of the danger of modern social media algorithms. Negative, outrage-inducing topics tend to get more attention in the short run. However, if someone watches it even once, that causes the algorithm to send a more of that kind of content. Before you know it, some people are getting fed and endless stream of the worst possible news, the most depressing takes, over and over. It can aggravate existing mental health issues or give them to people who did not have them before. The algorithm isn't 'designed' to do this, it's just trying to maximize metrics like time spent. It doesn't 'care' if the topics are negative or positive. But they have to be reshaped to consider the damage they can do when you start multiplying that by hundreds of millions of people.
My antidote to this was 100% selfhosting from home as you are now on par with the platforms and have a choice to serve yourself.
You cannot stay focused all day and theres nothing wrong with "just show me random dumb stuff" i mean i wont lie, im old and RTL2 was a thing you know even in educated circles. These no tv people read bad fiction instead.
And i actually kinda like the youtube algo to wind down - but i can also just switch to a timeshift archive.
I think the problem is more that these platforms are reeeally comfortable to use and its not that easy to have the same - doable though.
Oh and btw if you wanna go back to blog circles and xmpp and vpn lan games im all in but times are changing.
As logic stands, you couldn't meet a man who's from the future But logic broke; as he appeared, he spoke about the future
[Pre-Chorus] "We're not going to make it," he explained how the end will come "You and me were never meant to be part of the future"
[Chorus] All we have is now All we've ever had is now All we have is now All we'll ever have is now
[Verse 2] I noticed that he had a watch and hat that looked familiar He was me, from a dimension torn free of the future
[Pre-Chorus] "We're not going to make it," he explained how the end will come "You and me were never meant to be part of the future"
[Chorus] All we have is now All we've ever had is now All we have is now All we'll ever have is now
Flaming Lips - All We Have Is Now
I think in the next five years the internet will change drastically. Walled gardens, invite only, and companies that verify you're a human (I.E. use government identification).
There is now no way to tell if somebody online in a human or a robot. Even video/zoom/voice is no longer a distinguishable.
> verify you're a human
There could be a technology that cryptographically ensures that each letter/character came from a physical keypress/touch from a human when you want to interact with a human online in written form, but then again a robot could also be pressing the physical switches or interacting with a touchscreen. Perhaps this technology could handle copying/pasting too as long as the text originally came from a human.
I hope we'll develop more robust mechanisms for detecting non-human generated content (including text) that aren't only enforceable by law (e.g. labeling AI-generated content in the EU). Apple Reference Image is one of the steps in this direction.
At the end of the day I see no path to human victory in a digital world.
It's kind of like a human moving to a planet with a nitrogen atmosphere. We have to wear a space suit to survive. No matter how much we slim it down, it's still a system on top of our existing systems.
The internet is the same. We have to put a digital suit on our analog meat to explore a digital world that is becoming crowded with evolving digital natives, and those natives are rapidly becoming smarter and better than us in these spaces.
Really, I encourage you to log off and go outside a while, take a look a what the local flora and fauna are about and learn about that, maybe use online tools or communities to learn, but remember to log off and go outside and experience the natural world where you can.
I think this needs a strategic change. Unless you have a clear cut life objective and you are really into it, everything else you try to improve are at most tactical wins that will be lost to time. And those small wins actually make the end frustration worse because you thought you won strategically this time.
I’ll also going to declare that doom scrolling-ish working on non-impactful personal projects is as BAD as doom scrolling twitter.
Alternatively we can have a committee distribute attention over things that are useful to the country/humanity/the economy etc.(can't think of the right word) Say, if someone next door is looking for an employee with exactly your expertise and experience and they are willing to pay for it the job offer is worthy of being at the top of your feed.
That the person might not like seeing the perfect offer is less important than filling the hole in the economy.
I think HN users are usually hostile to committees, even the C++ one!
I wrote [something extremely similar](https://blog.scoopy.zone/posts/attention/) a bit ago. It is much harder to accomplish, but like the article says, you can still experience an Internet like the past.
"There’s one lesson the Tetris effect teaches us: whatever you focus on long enough will end up shaping your thoughts."
Yes. And--change your thoughts, change your life: https://thinkhuman.com/change-your-thoughts-change-your-life...
Why the 'but'? The article is about becoming intentional in your thoughts and not letting them be hijacked by algorithms.
> LinkedIn will bury any relevant career news between the opinion of complete strangers. It is surely just a coincidence that those strangers happen to be shilling whatever Microsoft is invested in at the moment.
The browser extension LinkOff makes the feed much more bearable, even useful. [1]
Also, though I dislike the posts that LI pushes into my feed, I've never gotten the sense that this was motivated by a desire to boost Microsoft's investments. Perhaps I just wasn't paying attention, or am not cynical enough?
1: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/linkoff-filter-and-...
This is a story of enshittification but... I don't see any of it and neither should anyone who reads HN:
* adblocking is simple both in browser and on the dns level,
* revanced youtube allows you to even skip sponsored segments, regular ads don't deserve a mention, you will see none,
* reddit hasn't been good in forever, it's why we're here,
somehow Twitter/Spotify/YouTube/TikTok algos work just fine for me with this one simple trick: I watch the good stuff, and skip/block/mute the not-so-good stuff. This works less well on LinkedIn but it's a Microsoft product, what did you expect, really.
If you're like me, ie. on Hacker News daily, the modern Internet is a never ending series of wonders with virtually none of the inconvenience. And if on some absolute edge, you must use a website that sucks, both Claude and ChatGPT can drive a browser nowadays.
We don't have protection from attention hijacking algorithms the same way workers didn't have protection until unions became a thing. AI can do more for consumers than Unions ever could (because it'll be more uniform). Currently there's no motivation (monetary or otherwise) to make this tech easily available to the masses - and when it does the bad actors and dark pattern wizards will miss the good ole days when only the select few had access to these patterns.
Is this a joke? AI chatbots... the things that literally lead users down into a hole of psychosis is the cure?
It's not a joke. It's natural fallout from holding AA meetings in a liquor store.
HN feels a bit like the good old Internet. I hope it keeps being like this, as I feel interactions are nicer and calm here
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment expressed in this post. Our attention is extremely valuable (both to us and to advertisers), and consumers today broadly squander it.
For consumer digital products, the only business model that seems to work is advertising, because consumers are cheap and refuse to pay money for software. But the result is that they instead trade something far more valuable for the software, which is their attention.
The products that get built, as a result, are supremely well-engineered to attract and retain attention, to the detriment of their users. Most of the "news" that reaches us these days is not at all an attempt to actually educate us about the state of the world. Instead its just a collection of inflammatory and enraging facts that are chosen to optimize for engagement (to hold your attention)
In theory, someone could rebuild an ecosystem where people stopped squandering their attention and monetized it with money, but this would require consumers to stop chronically undervaluing their time and overvaluing their money.
Addiction is an extreme form of attention grabbing. We've moved from chemical addicticants to informational ones.
I really liked to read this. i had this idea in mind but its nice to be remind of it
I don't think social media is inherently bad. For me, the measure is whether I'm wallowing in consuming rather than doing. Although, yes, it's easy to get lost in consuming, doing takes much more intent/attention.
I mean it's no different saying a river is inherently bad. We need them for water for survival. What is inherently bad is the maelstrom of a raging torrent seeking to pull you under so no one ever sees your body again. This is what a lot of the platforms have evolved into.
Oh funny I thought you were talking about LLMs.
> Do you want to watch a video? YouTube knows you like cooking and art streams. But why not also recommend a few clips about the stock market bubble, global warming, and the war in Iran.
I'm always fascinated when people claim YouTube pushes content like this. It's an extremely common take, but I don't think it's true.
My experience has been that if I stop clicking something, the algorithm soon stops recommending it. It occasionally brings back a blast from the past--e.g. I watched a sumo competition once, and once in a blue moon it recommends another. But you can downvote bad recommendations, and I simply don't get recommendations for ideas I've never engaged with before.
FWIW I'm not saying the algorithm is great. My feed is absolutely worthless right now, but it's all goofy Japanese content because one of my kids is extremely into that right now. There's zero political content because she isn't showing any interest in it. Heck, most of the stuff isn't even in English anymore.
Same. I don't think I remember the last time I came across actually "FAR right propaganda" recommended by an algorithm. Could be that the author and I differ in what "far right" means.
It's actually quite easy. If you watch something and you don't want more of it, delete it from your watch history. If it's particularly bad, you can block the channel entirely. I do this a lot for obvious AI slop content. Only subscribe to channels that are worth watching. Now my YouTube feed is almost too boring -- it's only showing me stuff in a pretty narrow set of interests and channels. I see very little outrage bait, celebrity news, "influencers," or politics.
And hide "Shorts" entirely. They will reappear after a few weeks, but you can hide them again.
Shorts aren't all bad. I feel like they've slowly drifted to regular-video length, and the major difference is just the tall aspect ratio.
On the social science side, The Ecology of Attention[1] talks about attention as an ecosystem and the final economic frontier for capitalism. It envisions a world where every moment of our attention is fought over by commercial entities, which feels pretty prescient at the moment.
[1] https://www.perlego.com/book/1536286/the-ecology-of-attentio...
the most intentional internet was made by people, not algorithms
now that we have cheap spam filtering, why don't we go back to forums
For the same reasons we left forums in the first place.
Spam was just a very small part of why people left forums. Size of the community and network effects was one of them. A constant stream of activity on any subject you wanted was yet another. Not having to log in to 40 different places yet another.
wait till we finally discover that attention is also all we are...!
Attention is all you _are_
Attention is the axis of reality. Focus on a thing and it gets realer. Ignore a thing and it fades away.
I use SelfControl for Mac and set the down time to around 15 days. No Youtube no news sites etc. Except HN. It's helped a lot, after a week you can notice measurable change in attention and habit and productivity. SelfControl lets you add 48 hrs to your blocked time repeatedly, so you can get to a 15 day mark pretty easily through repeated mouse clicks.
>Before recommendation algorithms where a thing, you had to decide what you would be doing on the computer.
This is just the illusion of choice. Not only that attention was already being monetized. Digital advertising didn't start with algorithmic feeds.
Click bait title :/ I thought it's a machine learning article
On the other hand, the article was exactly what I expected from the title.
That is exactly what the article is about.
What about the title implied that?
"Attention is all you need" is a famous ML paper. Though given the content of the article I don't think the author was intentionally referencing that.
Machine learning makes the doom scroll more effective/worse. That's the connection I inferred.
Given the tone of the blog otherwise, I think it was intended to both grab attention and subtly imply that AI is irrelevant with feigned ignorance.
We could call doing such a thing, referencing a seminal work with a similar title that's so close that you couldn't to it that have missed it, yet somehow you did, as an AliceGG's Mistake.
How could you write 600 words on the topic and not mention the paper otherwise?
Why would AliceGG need to reference the paper? Anyone who is vaguely aware of the LLM architecture knows about the paper title and it being a huge advancement in machine learning. This is an article about recommendation algorithms hijacking our attention and LLMs ruining the internet... it's pretty clear the article title is a nod to the paper?
For the same reason that you could tell a joke without feeling the need to explain it.