> First came the infamous infinite scroll. I remember feeling uneasy the first time a web page no longer had a bottom. Logically, I knew very well that everything a browser displays is a virtual construct. There is no physical page. It is just pixels pretending to be one. Still, my brain had learned to treat web pages as objects with a beginning and an end. The sudden disappearance of that end disturbed my sense of ease.
Your brain was wrong. And my fingers were hurting (and are hurting when I use websites without infinite scroll, like Hacker News).
> The notification system stopped serving me and started serving itself.
Itself meaning the company, meaning their sharehodlers, meaning whatever massive circle jerk eats all that data and then shits boatloads of bullshit straight into user brains, the developing teen ones being the main target.
An infinitely growing population and economy require distributing as much productive, constructive, inspiring and stimulating output as precisely as possible or huge amounts of capital get lost. As insanely sad as it is, the big guys don't care about that because they are not capitalists. After decades I'm not even sure anymore "capitalists" and "capitalism" even exist. I actually think it's just another Utopia.
I have come to understand that our economic, social and political leaders never got the right input themselves and neither did the techies, although engineers somehow get that stuff intuitively or at least "on first look".
Notification systems are an ugly analogy to what goes wrong when you do things out of the wrong, the "Facebook kind" of motivation.
> Using these services began to feel like standing in front of a blaring loudspeaker, broadcasting fragments of conversations from all over the world directly in my face.
Exactly.
On the one hand, you can't reduce the signal-to-noise ratio without throwing it all at your users--or consumers in general--and letting them teach you what is worth it and what isn't, but on the other hand: YOU ARE A BILLION DOLLAR HEAVY COMPANY AND PART OF A MULTIMULTI-BILLION DOLLAR HEAVY NETWORK OF CORPORATIONS and you share all that data anyway and then use it for, against, by and off the people and for profit mostly.
Your employees studied and learned for at least a decade, which means that whatever you intended, had pretty much ZERO unintended side effects, which means you actually wanted to tire out users and consumers and one of your goals or your sharehodlers goals was an effective war of attrition against the good people of whatever nation.
The resulting brain fog, confusion, twitchyness, over-stimulation and/or reduced ability to distinguish signal from noise and/or the "who cares", "new times, man, nothing is important, ALL HAIL ALL THAT NOTHING THAT IS NOT IMPORTANT" and/or the exorbitant increase of stress hormone levels somehow served what exactly?
[I got a bit lost in the end ... I hope it serves it's purpose]
> First came the infamous infinite scroll. I remember feeling uneasy the first time a web page no longer had a bottom. Logically, I knew very well that everything a browser displays is a virtual construct. There is no physical page. It is just pixels pretending to be one. Still, my brain had learned to treat web pages as objects with a beginning and an end. The sudden disappearance of that end disturbed my sense of ease.
Your brain was wrong. And my fingers were hurting (and are hurting when I use websites without infinite scroll, like Hacker News).
> And my fingers were hurting (and are hurting when I use websites without infinite scroll, like Hacker News).
https://hckrnews.com/
> The notification system stopped serving me and started serving itself.
Itself meaning the company, meaning their sharehodlers, meaning whatever massive circle jerk eats all that data and then shits boatloads of bullshit straight into user brains, the developing teen ones being the main target.
An infinitely growing population and economy require distributing as much productive, constructive, inspiring and stimulating output as precisely as possible or huge amounts of capital get lost. As insanely sad as it is, the big guys don't care about that because they are not capitalists. After decades I'm not even sure anymore "capitalists" and "capitalism" even exist. I actually think it's just another Utopia.
I have come to understand that our economic, social and political leaders never got the right input themselves and neither did the techies, although engineers somehow get that stuff intuitively or at least "on first look".
Notification systems are an ugly analogy to what goes wrong when you do things out of the wrong, the "Facebook kind" of motivation.
> Using these services began to feel like standing in front of a blaring loudspeaker, broadcasting fragments of conversations from all over the world directly in my face.
Exactly.
On the one hand, you can't reduce the signal-to-noise ratio without throwing it all at your users--or consumers in general--and letting them teach you what is worth it and what isn't, but on the other hand: YOU ARE A BILLION DOLLAR HEAVY COMPANY AND PART OF A MULTIMULTI-BILLION DOLLAR HEAVY NETWORK OF CORPORATIONS and you share all that data anyway and then use it for, against, by and off the people and for profit mostly.
Your employees studied and learned for at least a decade, which means that whatever you intended, had pretty much ZERO unintended side effects, which means you actually wanted to tire out users and consumers and one of your goals or your sharehodlers goals was an effective war of attrition against the good people of whatever nation.
The resulting brain fog, confusion, twitchyness, over-stimulation and/or reduced ability to distinguish signal from noise and/or the "who cares", "new times, man, nothing is important, ALL HAIL ALL THAT NOTHING THAT IS NOT IMPORTANT" and/or the exorbitant increase of stress hormone levels somehow served what exactly?
[I got a bit lost in the end ... I hope it serves it's purpose]
Social networks ≠ social media