There's a brazillian song called Tédio (Boredom) that was popular in the 80's. It talks about not withstanding boredom inside home, while life goes on out there. It's curious how the depicted feeling is so unrelatable today.
I think boredom is a real force that pushes ourselves to the edge, to hopefully make a change in life, like going out to see real people.
Social media creates this cozy, safe place to keep your mind occupied, letting life pass without realizing it.
But why do people blame social media for that? Every entertainment is equally at fault, wherever it's fictions, movies, tv series, comics/webtoons, games etc
It’s a difference of degree not kind. The constant audiovisual stimulus running through the internet is much more powerful than any of those things, and more widely available. Cable TV was close. It was always on in the room, but you had to be in the room, and you had to negotiate with your cohabitants over what to have on, or else you could go somewhere and be bored. There are no constraints anymore, with exceptions for the most impoverished among us - there’s always something close at hand to tickle your particular reptile brain until you fall asleep.
Computers with social media are so extremely reactive. Literally within half a second I can react to my boredom and find new content. I've noticed myself beginning to read a sentence, get bored half-way through, switch tabs, look over the new recommendations, do it again 30 seconds later.
Never bored, and yet never really entertained or satisfied.
The best is when you're on reddit, think "this is boring", open a new tab and type in "reddit.com"...
On that topic, I've luckily managed to make reddit boring that I open it, scroll for a minute or so, and close it again: I unsubscribed from the "interesting" subreddits like politics or tifu or askreddit.
One trick I've found to help with this is to live-stream. I once streamed a game on Twitch, nobody really watched, but it forced me to sit down and actually play the game for a good 2 or 3 hours. It was draining, gloriously draining and satisfying. You can stream programming and other personal projects as well. It doesn't matter if you get many viewers or not, just forcing yourself to maintain a consistent course of action helps. If you do get some real viewers though, all the better, you can monetize your work and enjoy free advice and socializing with viewers.
Yes, normally I would play for 30 mins and then do something else. It was Outer Wilds though, a mystery / puzzle game similar to Myst and so the problem solving made it more tiring and more tempting to take breaks.
That's not what happens when people doom scroll. They are not perfectly entertained. They are profoundly bored on social media. But they still scroll for scraps of entertainment because more promising alternatives are not really accessible to them at that moment, because of physical limitations or their state of mind or their energy levels.
Agreed, and quite often there was nothing of interest. On the net I can almost always find something of interest or at least interesting enough for me to crap my time away
yeah, internet has near no constraint and this is the key problem
TV had time.. you may be able to store it but you'd need tapes .. still space and efforts constraints
today your hard drive and infinite connection create an infinite pit
I also believe our brains love, just like muscles love exercise, prioritizing, you feel better when you made a smart decision. the feeling of never having to choose, skip through many videos, pausing them, in any order tickle the gluttony in us but then you get stuck and rot
I don't think novelists have yet figured out how to completely occupy your cognitive apparatus or put you under pressure to stay engaged. When I'm sitting in my comfy chair reading a novel, I can close my eyes without worrying that I might miss something while I'm asleep.
How is this different than closing your phone, screen shotting a FB post, pausing your video? Really. Even live streams, for the most part, are able to be paused and watched at a later date albiet without chat interaction. I fail to see the difference.
If you fall asleep during a video, now you'll have no idea where you were. Similarly if I lose concentration watching a video, I now have to either go back or hope I didn't miss anything important. If I lose concentration while reading, the page is still there, I just have to skim it until I find where i went on a tangent.
You really don't see a difference between skimming a single page and scrubbing through a video that could be hours long? And scrubbing only works when the video is visually distinct enough between parts that you can tell without having to watch a few seconds at multiple different points.
Social media has feedback loops that can adjust themselves orders of magnitude faster than legacy media, to keep you addicted (er, "engaged") with near zero friction.
Because it's too easy now. You need a creative endeavor to seem like an easy way to replace boredom with novelty. For a lot of folks especially younger ones, there is already infinite novelty just waiting to be scrolled all the time in their pocket. No need to do anything except wave your thumb around.
lower friction makes it even easier to consume. We didn't use to turn on a tv every time you took a dump but we are on our phones scrolling through brain garbage every idle second we have in our day. that's not good, our brain is not equipped to either deal with all this stimulus or resist it.
I intentionally avoid things like TikTok because I've experienced how incessantly and constantly addictive it is. But then again, I'll also avoid particularly long TV series, games without definitive ends, etc. I think TikTok et al are unique because you're "doing something" but the effort expended to get that next hit is extremely minimal. Even though I can sink hours into Factorio, it's challenging and exhausting. I might be able to binge a TV series, but eventually I'll want to do something. TikTok hits a perfect blend of "doing" and "experiencing" that makes it endlessly addictive.
If you're suggesting they're equally at fault, you better have some numbers to back it up. Otherwise it just looks like you say they're equal because that's what you want to believe.
Clearly not. That would be like dismissing Siberian tigers as just cats, and pretending they're no more dangerous than the average housecat. The taxonomy is the same, but the similarities end there.
In that sense everything is at fault, not just all forms of media.
But social media has no downtime and is engineered to be addictive. A casino will lose it's appeal once you've run out of liquidity. Social media has next to no prohibiting qualities.
I'm so grateful for having abandoned social networks. My main motivator were the fights over political weaponization of COVID-19, but then I went on and abandoned youtube and news as well. Now, I'm halfway with my first book, found a new hobby and developed my previous ones, rediscovered programming for fun, am learning a new foreign language, found a new job with very good compensation, lost 10 kg and became a better husband. My life is so fundamentally better.
I am bugged by this question too. I've stopped reading newspapers 8 years ago. Closed FB account 7 years ago. Never been on IG or Tiktok. Never watched more than 2 YouTube Videos in a month. Twitter? 10 minutes in every three days and I only read tweets about STEM topics. Heck, I don't even join WhatsApp groups. Reddit and HN is what I browse. I very rarely post on Reddit and stay away from all political posts. The amount of time I spend on Reddit is gradually decreasing.
So that leaves me with HN. I like HN because topics I encounter here are not nonsensical or political. There are no memes, gifs or cheap jokes here. I find myself in awe of the knowledge people have here. I am forced to read stuff here rather than fast paced casual browsing. As a meme reads, "On Internet, typing is fun and reading is hard" but HN is exact opposite of that for me.
But deep inside my heart, I know HN is also a social media in many ways and I need to cut down the time I spend on this. I am addicted to this. I realized browsing HN is essentially a coping mechanism for my depression and lifelong failures. HN gives me a false sense of "look I am not wasting my time in frivolous stuff". HH helps me escape from harsh realities of my life in much the same ways drinking helps people cope with their life. In subtle ways, HN has polluted my mind and corrupted my ability to think in realistic ways.
HN is a social media site if you visit multiple times a day and post comments and spend your mental energy on the site, and allow yourself to into rabbit holes for hours.
If you want to cut down on time spent on HN, on F-Droid there is an app called Glider. Its a typical HN client. It has a feature/button called Catch Up, where it gives you top posts by week/month, similar to how you can filter things on reddit and typically reddit clients.
I highly recommend experimenting with batching time spent on certain sites to once a week and once a month, that is, 5 or 6 visits a month, and get a high level overview of what happened (instead of multiple visits daily, which interrupts your flow). Then limit yourself to only look at the top 5 top-level comments (and not go into comment rabbit holes). Same for reddit, or skip reddit if you can, its mostly noise. Skip other social media sites too.
I concur very much. HN is the only social media I use these days, after cutting reddit and others nearly a decade ago. I have had to set up blockers for the comments section, to limit my time, as I end up spending far too much time here. Even so, did I really need to spend the last few hours learning about corner-locked land, southwest's canceled flights, new rust features, wifi DFS, anecdotes about electric vehicles in winter, etc?
On the flip side, without HN, my life would be totally different. I likely would not have pursued the much higher paying job I have now. My enthusiasm for technology and software would not be as high, seeing the many ways tech is used here. I would not be aware of meditation, notion, chatgpt, ml, postgres, cloud, rust go, wait but why, the inner platform effect, and so much else. For better or worse, HN shapes my outlook on the world. Is knowing all this worth the time spent, or is seeking knowledge simply addictive? I don't know.
It might be social media, but it isn't a social network.
HN has no friending or a way to link yourself to any other user, no actual customizable profiles (a tiny "about me" textbox aside), no images anywhere, no way to DM users, and most people don't use their real names either.
There are only two "social" parts of HN. First is that the links to the articles are posted (and voted on) by users. And the second part is just the fancy comment section around those posts. Most big news websites have a comment section on their articles too, and those might even be more full-featured than HN (e.g., I am pretty sure quite a few of those allow setting a profile picture).
To put it simply, I believe social network and social media are two different things. You can have them both together (e.g., twitter), or separately. I would consider the initial Snapchat app to be a social network, but they added a dash of social media later on (with the "around me" feature, stories, etc). And HN would fall under the opposite of the original Snapchat app - social media, but without much social netowork.
Sidenote: I am not an expert on this and didn't spend time researching it. What I wrote above is a purely subjective take on how I personally understand those terms, and how they apply to the topic at hand.
> Is browsing and commenting on Hacker News not considered social media use though?
Somewhat and it is quite addictive too but the quality is way better and there is even an option to turn limit your time spent on HN (no procastination flag/option).
HN is not employing dirty techniques to keep user enganged with dumbed down content, people are just commenting out on articles, it’s more like a community
> to hopefully make a change in life, like going out to see real people.
I’m fascinated by this narrative on the “real” people outside. I wonder how having more people working remote could change that cultural landscape, and how much time it will take for people to go over the dichotomy of “real” vs “online”.
There are wonderful people with tons of insight and many things to share in the “outside” world. But thing is, they are also online and will share their life philosophy or their new hiking gears in reddit threads as well.
Went to a cafe last week and after a bunch of talk with the owner, he went to ask for my Twitter account and who I was following in the same cultural sphere. And it’s not like we stopped being real the moment we moved our focus to what happens online.
It’s very difficult when you have to make a conscious decision to.. be bored. I do think most people still get stimuli like loneliness that hopefully drives them out sometimes.
Interesting. We should not forget that social media creates this cozy safe place for everyone, so even if you personally realize that, your friends and acquaintances may not.
In my own experience, since around 2010 and with the rise of social media and streaming services -especially after covid- people are more inclined to spend time at home instead of hanging out or doing stuff "in real life"
I think it also has to do with the wider socioeconomic situation. (Most) people make less disposable money on the whole than they did before. Sure, the minimum wage might increase but rent and food and insurance is going up faster! And the restaurants and mall stores (when they exist at all) and theme parks certainly aren't cheap. You could go walk a park every day but that's just tiring. There are people working themselves to the bone without enough extra energy to fulfill their children's lives let alone their own. People are being squeezed from all sides.
In contrast, I'd say social media is not the cause but the reaction to such things. I mean, we all saw particular people get genuinely addicted to scrolling Facebook in the early years of the service, but that rarely totally ostracized them from their previous social circles, it might have even grown them! But now with things like twitch streamers on a schedule, ready to be your friend Friday night, and customized YouTube feeds of endless hours of documentaries and Twitter and even HN. The opportunity is there. Someone who's already staying in can get that fix, anyone who's avoiding anything can do it perfectly. It's a cycle of control. It's soooooo much easier to sit and stare and laugh and maybe even engage than it is to text a group, see if anyone else is in the perfect intersection of bored and not tired and enough income to go to dinner.
We all got dripfed this stuff by force and sheer survival for the last couple years, and I understand it's hard to rip the tubes out of your arm.
I think boredom is a real force that pushes ourselves to the edge, to hopefully make a change in life, like going out to see real people.
Social media creates this cozy, safe place to keep your mind occupied, letting life pass without realizing it.