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.
I don't really understand why they were able to exist as they do and not lose users. I have not had Chrome for over a decade, I use Gmail exclusively for my actual real identity, which I don't recall the last time I used - I can only access my Gmail from a tablet I never use. I used to use Google search, when all other options failed - but these days, google is the first to fail, I literally do not remember the time I used it.
It is a genuinely novel experience for me, to see any sort of ad on the internet - that is not hyperbole.
I am not as capable as so many of the people who frequent HN, tbh - very little of what I do is hard, why do all of you live as you do??
I don't understand at all.
Think of some very fringe group of 0.1%, which you question from time to time how they function/exist/for what purpose. That’s basically how general populace looks at people who go through efforts of de-Googlifying. Stuff that matters to you (privacy, owning your data and etc.) does not matter to super majority of the people, especially outside of the tech circles.
I’m somewhat in-between of two extremes, but in grand scheme of things I don’t really care, as I have completely different priorities in life. Convenience services enable me to focus on those priorities, and I don’t really care about all other stuff to a specific degree.
I’ve been lucky enough to see how people from every walk of life interact with the Internet, and realized the way I function is extremely different. To them, I am the “flat earth weirdo and do stuff differently than the others”.
To give another example - I’m expecting people in HN type about 100 words per minute on average because of our general exposure to coding, typing, internet and etc. That puts us to 99th percentile. Average person does not live like us, nor cares about it.
Frankly I just don’t care that much, I hate Google and llms have mostly replaced the search but after work I want to spend time with family and do hobbies and degoogling is a nice to have that is nowhere near the top of my priorities list.
I don’t know if they did or didn’t try to kill bookmarks.
But on the commercial incentives, it does make sense for them to kill it.
Companies pay good advertisement so they show up first on the search result when a user want to find them.
Eg you want to go to carglass website: you type carglass in google and the company will most likely pay Google to show up first in the ads section because competitors are trying to sway away customers from them. If they didn’t outbid their competitors, even though the customer want to go to carglass, he will click on first result and may end up buying from their competitor without even noticing.
That wouldn’t happen if people had put carglass.com website in bookmark.
Google doesn't show ads on navigational queries because of the potential trademark-infringement legal issues that could result from recommending a competitor when somebody searches for a trademark.
Search for [carglass], no ads. Search for [facebook], no ads. Search for [spotify], no ads. Search for [american airlines], no ads. All of these would be very desirable queries to advertise a competitor on.
(IIRC they've gone back and forth on this depending on what the lawyers thought they could get away with; ISTR when Bing launched Microsoft would run ads on [google] that pointed to Bing. It's been a long time since I've seen an ad on a navigational query though.)
As a counter example, a couple days ago I was to install DaVinci Resolve on a new windows installation, so I searched "davinci resolve." Since I was used to having adblocker, I just clicked the top result, which is titled "DaVinci Resolve" but actually takes you to some awful shady thing like wondershare or softonic/uptodown, I forgot.
I feel like, navigational queries or no, Google should be held liable for allowing scam sites like that to advertise. I think there was a trending HN post recently on that front.
> As a counter example, a couple days ago I was to install DaVinci Resolve on a new windows installation, so I searched "davinci resolve." Since I was used to having adblocker, I just clicked the top result, which is titled "DaVinci Resolve" but actually takes you to some awful shady thing like wondershare or softonic/uptodown, I forgot.
I just tried this query on chrome / android.
This is the first link on the page at the very top:
When people tell me this stuff about their Google searches it drives me insane, I want to know why our experiences are so different. It is regional? Is it OS, is it browser, is it something else? I want to know!
You know your search results are personalized right? If I google something and my girlfriend googles the same thing, on the same network, we get different results.
>You know your search results are personalized right?
Of course.
But these results don't seem to change on a degoogled chromium on desktop, with no google account login personalization, no account logged in, in incognito, using: Ublock origin lite, User Agent / OS Randomizer, Privacy Badger, and using a VPN to other locales.
That's why I want to know, I've been curious about this for years, and nothing I've looked at seems conclusive.
My biggest guess is country or native language, but it's been hard to pin down. I think that may be the biggest factor (with local laws contributing maybe to how search results get displayed).
I'm curious! I want to know the driver behind the bad experiences people are having with it. (I've been using it literally since it was released.)
This a search domain term that means a search query where the user is trying to find a specific destination/product. I don't know how Google search works, but often a search will first go through an intent classifier and then use a different model based on the query type.
A "navigational query" is a query with a certain website in mind. So like if you search for [facebook], 99.99% of the time you are looking to go to Facebook, if you search for [hacker news] 99.99% of the time you are looking to go to news.ycombinator.com. Basically it replaces the address bar for people who don't know what URLs are. You aren't looking for information about the business, you want to go to the site/business itself.
In my experience, those commercial seeking queries are what google can't do. Many stores in the result ship to USA only, and there's also no good way to compare prices and features.
Google used to not have any ads for many years while they got market share. Then only small ads off to the side. Eventually the ads moved inline and were half the results, etc.
AI summary seems like the same play, even if it hurts their current ad business some. After all why search for stuff when a chatbot can just tell you? Makes sense they'd view it as an existential crisis and push their AI.
Google will be well positioned when ads start being added to AI for most users.
Are you sure you don't have any privacy protections enabled?
With my normie setup (logged in account, granted location permissions, no PiHole, no particular anti-tracker mechanisms beyond classic ad blocking), I get decent local results on Google, in contrast to basically any other "privacy focused" search engine.
Chat GPT and Claude seem to be struggling a lot more. I suspect this is because OpenAI and Anthropic aren't talking to the local companies here, and they may have some robots.txt shenanigans going on.
This resonates with me. I record every purchase I make and every bill I pay in a budgeting app. 90% of the process is automated. So, there's very little I have to do once the budget categories, the goals and limits are set. The system works for me, it gives me certainty and peace of mind with very little effort. Yet, every relative and friend that hears about it treats me as a freak despite them being the ones complaining about money and not knowing "where the money goes every month". It's a lost cause.
Pairs up with my EU and Revolut bank perfectly, auto imports transactions, most of which you can set rules that auto assign to categories. And as they said 90% is automated, I just categorize a few transactions a week manually.
I tried something like envelope budgeting before in excel but didn't work really since I was lazy to manually add transactions, this is much easier. Budegting for a house and a USA trip without worries now :)
Several budgeting apps use open banking api to connect to bank accounts and update the entries (money in or money out). Once it's synced you can assign the appropriate category. Usually, the budgeting app "learns" over time and it does the categorisation automatically based on the payee and your budget.
The system isn't perfect but, in my experience, it works 90% of the time. The remaining 10% requires manual categorisation. I suppose it also depends on how simple or complex your budget and your spending are.
> 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...")
>If software developers want their users to manage their own ordering schemes or use customization features, make it easy and convenient to do
This is akin to telling parents that if they want to their children to clean their rooms, you should make it easy and convenient to do. Obviously this is non-sensical: if you make a mess it might be hard and inconvenient work. Thats why kids don't do it!
I find some tech criticisms to be simply inane; the tech companies are not going to absorb the costs of educating users or fixing unworkable strategies. Not because Bezos needs to buy another yacht, but because the companies that try to do that all die before they get big. There is a giant graveyard of startups who have tried to be the "responsible and patient parent", and they have all died. Users don't want to put up with it, and if given the option will run to the company that just handles everything for them with a subscription fee or reselling their data.
> This is akin to telling parents that if they want to their children to clean their rooms, you should make it easy and convenient to do. Obviously this is non-sensical [...]
Doing exactly that, by coming in and helping them with it (initially doing most of the work) as they get into the habit if it being a regular task, actually seems to work pretty well (at least, in the n=1 experiment conducted with my son).
Not sure what the basis for “obviously non-sensical” is, other than the (very common) fetishization of struggle.
Yeah, imo the only way this is changing at all is if for some reason organization is inherent to the value offered. I guess Notion kinda did that, Obsidian too.
Organization (like other hard / unpleasant things) is something that people will do if 1) it helps them and 2) there's no other way.
What tech companies understand well is that if a competitor takes away people's pain and you don't, people will use that competitor.
It was technically possible to copy mp3s one by one to a USB mp3 player, and many people did if they had no other options, but marking an artist in iTunes for sync was a lot easier, so consumers preferred iPods. And managing syncing and purchasing itself was a chore, which Spotify proved was entirely unnecessary to the music listening experience for most people.
Sure, there's a small but loud minority for whom the process of purchasing / organizing music itself is enjoyable, and that minority will often try to push their views on everybody else, but the majority of the population wants a "magic box" where they can type "Taylor Swift" and get Taylor Swift music to play. Or they just want "radio, but without the battery drain, commercials, useless yapping and inability to skip songs they don't like."
> oh well obviously keeping your stuff in order is an unworkable strategy
Volume makes all the difference. If you could only visit sites you bookmarked first and you had only say 200 bookmark limit, you’d keep your bookmarks in perfect order.
That’s an occupant completely ridiculous proposition in 2024; in 2027 you’ll only need to bookmark the AI chatbot services you pay for, because the rest of the internet will become completely unusable by humans.
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.
Users have to see the value of it. Some never grow up to organize their things but we can do a lot automatically. I think as the volume of things grows you first want
- a flat list of items, then you want
- folders (or categories), beyond that you want
- tag clouds, beyond those you want
- keyword and strong search, beyond that you want
- natural language queries.
Or any combination of those.
(There are more ways to organize/sort but I either don't know where to put them or they serve a specific type of data. I like the file system representation where each file and folder is a box the size of its size.)
Doing some of it by hand allows a workshop with more tools while preserving sanity.
The actual goal is actually really simple. There clearly is an agenda to get rid of any and all user generated media asap. Anything that works in the opposite direction will help reclaim the users executive function.
When creating a software or other products I always jokingly ask myself what kind of people I want to target and what I want to make them into. The joke is the limited room.
Building your own library should obviously be more awesome than borrowing. It might take the user a decade to see it but when they are old those child hood activities are a joy to be reminded of.
I have an obsession with record keeping and sorting and categorization. Problem is, I don't actually have the patience to categorize because its often multi dimensional and analog versions of categorizing only allow for single dimension (you cant put a document in more than one folder for example)
Now I have LLMs build me tiny apps that let me upload docs and images with local processing and human verification.
But categorizing is fine if you can put multiple categories on things. That's the whole difference between flexible tagging and rigid folder, i.e. the one thing GMail got right vs. the real world analog of a folder.
The real world solves it too btw. in the same way a relational database did: Indexes ;) Tagging is nothing but different indexes of the same underlying thing. Be it a book or an email or whatever else.
And this top level comment is actually weird to me. Maybe I'm just a non-Chrome-user? I use Firefox. I never bookmark anything any longer. I literally just know what to type to get to what I need to from the history. Like HN. I literally just type n into a new tab and HN is the first suggestion based on how often/recently I went here. No manual bookmarking or anything non-local needed.
Similarly at work I just know how to find certain things by typing into the search bar. And it even learns from recency. Our app URLs recently changed and I had to start typing the new unique parts of the URL recently for a few tries until it went up in the recency bias calculation. Sure like I had to scroll down a few entries in the history search a few times. Now I just know what to type to get where I want to again.
I see others struggle with rigid bookmark structures that they can't find anything in like ever on the regular though (URL change or not) :( And (at least with firefox) those bookmarks would even get searched too! Of course, unlike history they would have to manually update bookmarks. I really don't get it how people even still use bookmarks any longer.
I personally dont usually use bookmarks unless its something truly obscure that I may want to refer to later (like an article or something.)
I like the concept of indices but a lot of indices i see (like in textbooks) are incomplete. I have to think "ok what might be related to this?" And it certainly is not an easy problem!
That's not the problem of the concept of an index. It's bad implementation. If your index only indexes as if it were a static folder structure, then you have to think exactly like the guy that built the index. If you instead allow multiple indexes/index entries for the same underlying thing, then you have tagging.
Bookmarks are folder structure. Theoretically you can bookmark the same thing under a different part of the structure of course. I've never really seen people do that though, except accidentally because they found something the liked, bookmarked it in on place, later found it again, didn't remember they already bookmarked it and bookmarked it in a different part of their folder structure. In a way they also "tagged" except that the actual bookmark, the thing is not the same. It's a copy. If your bookmark goes to some address that might change while pointing to the same actual thing, you'd now have to update (and first find) a multitude of bookmarks in your folder structure. A file system that has hardlinks could implement "tagging" too :)
The last startup I worked for (Edvo, since shut down) was actually trying to solve this, not in a bookmarking way but in a way that was like "bookmarks represent knowledge or ideas" and was meant to be a graph-based mind mapping tool.
The tech was cool, but I think they ran into the issue you just suggested - people dont really bookmark, and it was hard to make people see it as anything other than a bookmarking tool with categorization.
There are aptitude tests for those two traits: Analytical Reasoning and Ideaphoria at Johnson O'Connor. You, like me, probably will score high on both.
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.
Same. My very first email with them was deleted, because I was using it via POP3 instead of logging into the site. I should probably just self-host an email for junk, then I can remove the very last Microsoft thing in my life.
Same! When I started driving I continued the trend until I got an app that did it for me, then cars started doing it for me, then I switched to an EV and it does some calculations that I never bothered trying to understand.
> most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do.
Yes, and that's IMO perfectly understandable. What was that greeting card text? "A clean apartment is a sign of a wasted life."
Not from the US, we didn't have "balancing the checkbook" over here, but watching my parents and grandparents, and trying to mimic them growing up, I have a distinct impression that all that bookkeeping - from budgeting to gas refills to blood pressure measuerments (which my grandfather did diligently in his final decade of life) - was done as much of immediate necessity as it was of habit.
People did their book-keeping by hand because there was no external authoritative source to track it for them, but also because they needed to know - there were consequences for not knowing some numbers or their history on-demand. As soon as either becomes false, people stop. Very few people I know "keep books" for their individual spending - and it's not because auto-pay, it's because the bank gives you that information for free, effortlessly, in near real-time. The bank is now the authoritative source of how much money you have.
(That's the "external authoritative source". Auto-pay is a masssive QoL improver, but it's a consequence, not cause. The cause here is achieving "not really needing to know" by keeping your earnings higher than spendings. Then you literally don't need to care about money day-to-day, and only check balance when you're planning larger purchases - and only then, manually paying bills becomes "a sign of a wasted life".)
> 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.
That's a problem - but zooming out a bit, back to "bookmarks", the problem is that sometimes you need to do some book-keeping yourself - you may have your own reasons to need to know, and there is no authority other than you. Unfortunately, it turns out, modern software is then useless, because it doesn't stop at not requiring users to keep things tidy - it purposefully doesn't ship the necessary tools and affordances to keep things tidy.
I think bookmarks, files, and folders (to nostrademons point) is too coarse an abstraction for different organization domains. Music ks a good example. Most people want to organize by album, artist, year, genre, or song title. Files and folders or bookmark trees can mimic that structure but can't replace it. I like to order my photos by outing or by subject.
In either cases while you can reify your organizational system into files and folders it's just inferior to a personal classification system.
I think the best approach is still files with embedded metadata (eg. EXIF for images/videos, ID3v2 for MP3s, resource forks in classic MacOS apps). That way you store, organize, and move around the content as a unit, and then you can display it in whatever way you want. And you can write new apps to display things differently as consumer tastes change.
Personal classification is key, I guess, because your two examples are alien to me.
> Music ks a good example. Most people want to organize by album, artist, year, genre, or song title.
I assumed this is because that's what software is limited to, and people cope, and the only people who really organize like that were the record stores owners. Because personally, this in no way even resembling how I think of my music collection, or how I pick what to listen to.
For me it's usually by theme, personal "feels like they belong together" connection, causal relationships (e.g. music from the same trip I went to in high school), or artist but defined loosely, I.e. tolerant of the fact that artists collaborate and perform together.
> I like to order my photos by outing or by subject.
Outing, yes, but by-subject is alien to me. Most of my photos have exactly zero people, or anywhere from 2 to 20+. Single subject photos are oddity, and I rarely feel the need to organize by them. Events, then by date, then maybe by location.
In both cases search turns out to be the answer, but with photos it's phenomenally unreliable due to vendor fucking with or stripping metadata.
No, I was the kid over there playing librarian and sorting all my books and games by author and year. Legos and Knex were also prime sorting targets, but the real joy came from getting random jars of buttons or beads. Getting one of those shelves with 100 tiny drawers was like a recipe for heaven.
Apple really got the intuition that files and folders aren't the "natural" way to organize things for most people.
For Office-style documents, there's no better way (except for search and recents), because everybody has different needs and deals with very different kinds of documents. For things that are more standardized, like music or photos, people want to think in terms of artists, albums and playlists, not in terms of some meticulously-maintained folder hierarchy.
Folders have some nifty properties, like good deletion handling, permissions management and intuitive movement from and to different drives, but they don't outweigh the advantage of specialized entities for most people.
I strongly disagree with this. In fact, of the many sins of Apple, removing files from iOS as concept is probably my largest pet peeve.
Most people don't have a problem with files. You learn what a file is in your first computer class day and you're done with it.
Files are not just about organization, primarily, they are the fundamental unit of information. They decouple data storage from processing, transformation, and transfer. It's how we give physicality to information. They give the user freedom in multiple ways:
- Freedom to open the file with whatever program I want, allowing me to experience it however (with a player), but also to create derivative works (in an editor).
- Freedom to store the file wherever I want, both locally or remotely.
- Freedom to share the files with others, via whatever mechanism I want.
Without files, computing is just about individual consumption. You don't own anything. That song you bought? You don't own it, it's some kind of abstract entity in Apple Music. The only thing you can do with it is press play. Living in an OS without files is like living in an universe where everything is liquid and containers of any kind are forbidden, all you can do is open the tap and drink straight from the stream.
Even if you create something? It's locked in some kind of vacuum that Apple controls. Wanna back it up? Pay Apple for Apple cloud. Wanna share it with someone? Figure it out, probably step one is to ask them to buy an Apple device.
I laugh whenever people say that Apple is "easier". The contortions I've seen people do just to get stuff from one device to another even within their own ecosystem.
The tragedy of all of this is that people that live in mobile are becoming less capable with technology over time. People talk of "the digital native" generation but kids these days know way less capable with machines than their parents. It used to be that everyone and their cousin knew how to use a P2P program, to burn a CD, to use external drives. Now you ask someone to send you some trip pictures and they'll just WhatsApp them to you. If you ask them to send you the high res originals they look at you with amazement: files? formats? compression? what's that???
I don't use bookmarks because what's the point in saving a link to something.
Am I going to scroll through and find it later? Barely functions with text search due to only minimal metadata (maybe a title).
Worse still, I used to use bookmarks for things I wanted to return to, but now they're all dead links pretty much.. so now I have to go through and get disappointed because something interesting has now gone.
Same reason an ATM gives you the card back before the money because too many people would forget to cleanup (picking up the card) once they reach their objective (getting money).
Isn’t it more optimal, from the perspective of play, to have them spread out?
I can see the argument that if you clear your desk, you’ll be more inclined to draw because you have the space. But if I didn’t impose that value, they wouldn’t necessarily draw. They’d just play with something else.
I don’t track my fuel usage. I did once. Economically, I don’t need to. The car tells me my MPG anyway, literally, if I care to look.
Accounts are harder to track now, with fewer physical assets and more renting and subscriptions.
The point you make seems to be that rigidity in the system would bring value. But I think the values people have often exist outside the system. The system is imposing an idea of what is worth tracking or organising in the first place.
Oddly, I think LLMs are quite intentional in their current incarnation. You start with an empty input box, state a curiosity, and go looking for information. There’s very little imposed structure around what you should care about.
That changes once OpenAI et al. start tracking what you do and recommending what you should be looking at before you’ve even formed the intention yourself.
Its better for them to put away Toy A before breaking out Toy B. If you dont teach them this habit, you will spend your entire day cleaning up Toys A-Z strewn all over the place. Children need to learn to clean up after themselves, its a failure on the parents part, especially if they force the other older siblings to be the clean up crew.
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.
1. To monitor gas mileage primarily. Any sudden decline in gasoline mileage can warn of impending engine component failure. [I haven't experienced it but I suppose it could also warn of a repair error, e.g., if you failed to put a new air filter cartridge in to replace the old one (a major oversight but nonetheless possible) then it is likely that your mileage would go up suddenly. One would have to question whether the better mileage was b/c, say, you just switched to Shell gasoline or instead did something wrong when you recently changed the air filter?!]
2. keeping receipts ensures that if there is a problem and your engine is damaged, then you can show where you bought the fuel, oil or component and get recompense. This is rare but does happen and it can be a costly repair. Examples are:
- bad gasoline - usually debris or water. Can stop fuel flow and cost you replacement of a gas filter at the least.
- incorrect oil change - you pay for an oil change but they don't put on a new oil filter or they add the wrong kind of oil or they add too little oil or they add too much oil. Don't discount the last one: too much oil can damage some engines seriously. I once had a dealer change my car's oil. Prior to service I explicitly warned the mechanic that the engine was a rare model and required less oil than most. Nonetheless he overfilled it. Luckily I spotted the difference immediately b/c the engine ran like shite right out of the garage. I made a freeway U-turn,drove back in, re-explained the car's needs and insisted they drain off the overfill and let me check it. The mechanic tried to cover his ass by treating it as another "crazy customer" but I just told his companions that
a) he'd fucked up and
b) I had specifically warned him about the problem earlier so
c) they'd better keep an eye on him - he wasn't as good as they were.
3. If you sell a car, buyers love getting the records proving that you bought good oil/gas, performed maintenance, etc. FWIW most buyers do not continue to maintain such records in my experience.
I don't maintain a log book and I know only one person who does. But I file receipts for gas, parts, fluids, filters and major maintenance for each vehicle.
It might appear that all this is good reason to buy an EV but you've got the same problems as do ICUs. Suppose you pull into a facility in Kansas for a recharge as a thunderstorm rolls in. While you're eating lunch the facility is struck by lightning and the transient currents fry one or more parts on you EV. The recharge station is unlikely to be willing to pay your repairs unless you have proof you were there during a malfunction.
I did this for a couple of years but after my mileage didn't budge regardless of summer/winter/car age/mechanical work I got bored and stopped recording :-)
These apologetic “no fan of musk”, “before Elon became crazy” are tiresome.
You got a Tesla, just own it.
We liked the guy when he started that electric car thing, now it’s different but he’s no mass murderer.
I'm not apologizing for having a Tesla, I just want it to be clear that I'm not an Elon fan boy. You don't have to go far on the internet to find people praising Tesla cars for things that are not really that impressive. When Cybercab launched there were people who were making memes that cybercab was the "cool" robotaxi because there weren't sensors everywhere like Waymo.
But it's also important to not let fanboyism cloud judgment. Tesla has great software.
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 just discovered https://hister.org/ (I think from a link here on hacker news) ... it solves the full text history search really really well.
- Local go server to index everything into sqlite or postgres
- browser extension to send the DOM for indexing.
- This happens after each page is finished rendering, so client side rendering doesn't break, and it doesn't require fetching the url a second time on the back-end.
- Filter rules to control what gets indexed (basic url regex patterns, nothing too fancy)
- Text-based query interface for terminal dwellers like me.
- Local file indexing that actually works well so that you can search your history and your documents in one place.
- Custom extractors for understanding specific sites and file formats.
It's really great, just about perfect for my needs.
I tried it after seeing that link here and it's been really useful. I happened to find myself in the type of situation where I'd need such a system after a couple days and it managed to keep the (volatile) info I wanted. Good stuff!
The "www" browser still compiles without errors today along with an assortment of other utilties. I use these with a TLS forward proxy
I use the W3C programs to retrieve HTML but not to view it. For reading HTML I use a contemporary text-only browser
"www" is a 671.0K static binary for me
I'm a text-only browser user for 30+ years so I'm probably biased in favor of text. I routinely save HTML pages from webites I find useful, almost always as plain text. No resources. This makes sesnse for me because plain text is how I search and consume information. Firefox and other popular browsers generally do not save pages as plain text, they have always attempted to save as HTML along with page resources. But I'm not interested in images, fonts, CSS, Javascript, etc. Today I notice some people writing headlless browsers, like h5i, now output pages as markdown or some "machine-readable" format
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 ;)
It can be optional. The owner of the website should get to decide what people do with their stuff. They can provide a tracker and (as long as it is alive) chose if to burn its own bandwidth or point you at a seed. [Dynamic] ads can still be inserted and blocked as usual. Should be funny to make money from a website that you don't even host anymore. Default browsers can also respect legal take down orders if they are published on the website.
A whole different world from posts vanishing into the social media memory hole.
Back in 2012 I switched almost entirely from bookmarking to web clipping into Evernote, which has been great. Evernote itself has gone downhill, and at some point soon I'll probably migrate my collection to Obsidian (which has its own web clipper), but I'm still a big advocate of the general practice. It is indeed great to have a searchable record of stuff you've bookmarked vs just a tree of links that you'll soon forget exist.
I have a wallabag setup for my interesting bookmarks, and it downloads and indexes the contents of these bookmarks.
I read the contents later in a PocketBook, free of distractions from the normal devices.
It is a bit of setup work, but just totally frictionless after it was setup.
Firefox also has Pocket, which I used before switching to wallabag.
I have this with websites I read a few months ago, stuff from 1993 that is still alive is pure luck at this point. Nothing more frustrating than wanting to share a link with a colleague that you have seen recently and remember a couple of cribs from but that doesn't stand out enough in the history to ring a bell.
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.
Browsers should've had tab groups decades ago, and bookmarks in a group should've gone into that group's corresponding bookmark folder by default. Voluntary tab groups use time at the user's convenience, while organizing bookmarks into folders tend to be a distraction or chore.
I use my bookmark tab. I am not particularly interested in storing a copy of almost any of the links I have in my bookmark tab (why would I want a copy of some Grafana instance?)
I do get that for some people it's about research and collecting documents. For me it's basically "quick access to the most recent version of the thing at this URL"
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'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.
I came to a similar realisation as you and came up with 3 questions I ask when looking at any news article:
- Does this affect me in any way?
- Was this my fault?
- Can I do anything to change this?
I can't see why I should care about any event that doesn't meet a single one of these criteria, yet when I look at the front page of any news site barely any story passes this test
spreading awareness is a thing. A lot of people don't know what our politicians are doing to us which gives them even more freedom to do even worse, self-serving things.
HN is not a general news site. I am also, as you noted, "extremely active". Having conversations in HN comment threads is the diametrical opposite to scrolling through and reading world news and local news every morning and evening.
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.
Social media had one benefit: to connect with like-minded people during the madness of the covid era. Ironically, the madness was fed by social media, in part because it allowed groups of like-minded people to connect. Note: this comment holds true no matter which side you considered mad and which side you considered reasonable.
I don't see any technical difference? On HN, you scroll through an algorithmically generated list of submissions, vote them up and down, and post and vote on comments. This is pretty similar to FB. Just replace "cat videos" with "pelicans on bikes".
Basically I agree with your second point. I'd been hung up on the notion that people were maligning specific technical choices (and indeed there are sub-threads where this argument is being advanced), but that's not the case here. Y Combinator's goal with HN is to make money indirectly, by discreetly, almost implicitly advertising itself as an outfit at the centre of things of interest to the "higher end" of the tech field, who might then (a) absorb awareness of it by osmosis and later (b) think of it first when planning their next startup. As such its goals are much more closely aligned with what that crowd enjoys, than with maximising engagement and thus eyeballs on ads.
Everyone being served the same algorithmic results is a genuine technical difference (I believe; do we actually know that HN doesn't customise the front page for logged-in users?). I think it's quite a fine distinction, though -- both sites are trying to hold the user's attention, one just omits to use an available level of customisation. I have no moral objection to either approach.
I think it's half culture, half being text-based. HN is heavily self-correcting when it comes to low quality content, trolls, spammers, clickbait titles.
It feels very healthy how I can choose what to engage with, and what to ignore.
That's just your bias talking, though. Of course different people are going to have different opinions, but Facebook users feel the same way about Facebook, TikTok users feel the same way about TikTok. Anyone who didn't feel that way wouldn't use it.
I don't entirely understand the point you're making, but I disagree with the last part. People not only have different needs from the media they consume, they also aren't equally rational with how they decide what to consume.
talking about doomscrolling and how it would be better not to do it is one of the favourite pastimes of the doomscroller. loads of fb users hate it but struggle to believe they could do without it.
It's interactive. As in, we write and talk, often about articles posted. That's completely completely different than passively absorbing content spoon fed by Silicon Valley algorithms and sweetened with graphics, attractive people and sudden music and sounds.
What's the point though? I'd like to think scrolling HN is healthier than Facebook. But is it better than curated subreddits, or Instagram/TikTok showing you stuff about your friends and hobbies?
I don't think it's pedantic to have a bit of self awareness, although engaging in the discussion instead of writing a pithy one liner would be better.
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.
Facebook actually became my preferred social site for a month or two recently - I had a relatively fresh account and managed to direct the algorithm towards mostly serving me interesting archeology, local groups, and some cute pet videos.
Then one day out of the blue it decided to serve me straight up white nationalist content out of the blue. It only happened for a day but the fact that it happened at all is horrifying when you think about that occurring on a global scale.
Now I only open maybe once a week for a minute to check messenger and I hope soon to be able to delete the app of my phone for good. I really worry about what we've unleashed on the world letting these billionaires capture our digital commons.
There are better forums than facebook for things like archeology, local groups, and pet videos. However everybody does them on Facebook these days and so we are stuck...
I gave up on facebook when it decided I wanted to see borderline child porn (the girl was wearing a diaper and positioned as if about to nurse from the topless mom - it might not meet the definition of child porn but it obviously trying to sit just above that line). When reported I was told the group is fine by Facebook's standards. But it isn't fine by mine.
A couple of years ago, I went the indie route (ex big tech). Prior to that I was absolutely allergic to social media and never really used them except maybe LinkedIn.
Sadly as an indie (or frankly anyone these days?) if you don’t have a social media following, you simply don’t exist. Distribution is one of - if not the most - important things to have, so farming social media is unavoidable. The worst part is that you can’t just post and go, these apps (and respective algorithms) expect you to use them regularly for your content to be shown to people.
Automating all of that is also super tricky since there are a billion bots out there. And the alternative being pay-to-win with expensive advertising.
I did the same thing this year, and I agree it's been one of the best decisions I've made. I'm happier, and my mind feels calmer, with less noise. I've started reading a lot, and even writing (I started a blog, and one of my first posts was about exactly this, if you want you can check it out [1])
I've also tried to stay away from the news. I have a very long list of uBlock Origin filters [2] to hide certain words and topics on Reddit (even if its politically tangent, it gets blocked), and it works amazingly well. I hate that I have to go to such lengths to avoid the worst of the internet, but I love the freedom of mind I've gained, like really it feels liberating instead of boring.
One last thing: I've started to notice that the corporate claws are no longer in my head. On the train, I see something like 50–70% of people scrolling through algorithmically curated feeds, and I think about how much influence Zuck and company have over what so many people see and think, with almost no effort. The thing is, I feel like the "old man yells at cloud" meme, like I am the crazy person doing crazy things, but I feel better this way, so I will keep doing it.
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.
Isn't that the whole point? That I have chosen to visit that and personalize? Otherwise, you could say all personalization skews the worldview, and you'd be technically right (the worst kind of right).
When you're talking political polarization on a societal level, it's a distinction without a difference. The distinction is that when you personalize by site, it's an explicit coarse-grained choice by the individual. When you personalize by algorithm, it's an implicit fine-grained choice by the individual, which is then aggregated and turned into an explicit stream of content by the algorithm. In both cases, you are adapting the content someone sees by what they want to see.
The sort of national unity that we took for granted between 1945-1995 (and to some extent from 1920-1945) was explicitly manufactured by mass media. Here technology presented the same content to all people, because it was cheaper to do it that way. Before the invention of consumer radios in 1920, we had a similar political polarization as we do today, if not even moreso. Also the Federal government was significantly weaker, lacking even powers like direct taxation, let alone the mass surveillance it has now.
>When you personalize by algorithm, it's an implicit fine-grained choice by the individual
I'd argue it's not so much a choice by the individual in that the individual often isn't consciously aware and may actually choose to use the same thing without the algorithm that pushes them towards things such as bubbles if that were even a clearly presented option.
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
I once came across the concept of a “day list,” and it’s helped me reduce similar habitual distraction/procrastination. It’s like a to-do list, but reframed as “these are the things I could do with my time. Not must.” I describe each item in the simplest possible way, even if it represents a complex task.
Of course, I still use task managers, calendars, and notes apps, and they’re useful in their own ways. But physically writing a day list with pen and paper reliably keeps me on track. If I start to drift, I look back at the list and it brings me back.
From time to time I remind myself of a rule that has worked well for me. I call it 'no idle screentime'. It makes me more cognisant of when I am browsing without purpose or going off on an unhelpful tangent.
yeah same here. I actually don't spend too much time on my phone and I feel pretty smug about it until I realise I just replace the smaller screen with the bigger one a lot of the time :<
I'm always telling every teacher at school that i spend less than 30 minutes on my phone, while i don't tell anybody i use my laptop for upp to 10h without noticing..
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.
rms (Stallman) used to (still does?) do that where he would download the web requests and emails on a daily basis and then work offline the rest of the day and then sync overnight. At least that's what I remember reading.
I remember thinking about how different that workflow is but it must be incredibly productive. Everything would be lightning fast (even stable Internet isn't always snappy and sometimes it's a chore) and there would basically be zero inline ads or any context switches.
> "I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it."
"intentional web surfing" is a phrase i've been exploring recently. hosting an event to turn it into an activity here in my city, should be interesting to see how people respond.
One way to do this is by going mobile-internet only with limited data. It doesn't stop doomscrolling on sites like this, but it does stop TV and online gaming and that could be very helpful for many people.
> 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.
Even a library with all the books ever written, even those forever lost to time, would be very much finite. And even if such a library was possible - I would really be careful in using the term such as infinity with anything that is in anyway dependant of physical resources - the first ”bias” or rather a filter limiting the books you can read would be the languages you can read. Then time you have to read it. Whether you understand the subject matter. Etc. This already starts to resemble an algorithm of sorts, yes.
I think the mistake you are making is that you believe you can know what decisions and on what basis algorithms on platform apps make for you. Well you cannot. First of all they have again and again been shown to have a hidden agenda’s and besides, they change all the time. In the end it is basically same as letting Zuck or Musk select everything you read.
Instead you can select your own algorithm. It is pretty simple, I did one at age of ten at our local library before I even knew what algorithm was. Only think I knew was that I really liked this book Hobbit by someone named JRR Tolkien.
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?
> 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 have this same problem. I am not sure if medication will help but I really don't want to go there. My brain is a scattered mess. Even now, I am doing 3 other things at the same time. Is it a matter of "getting good" and just focus? I just don't think there's a secret technique to this.
I think a lot of people struggle with this. Technical work already promoted this kind of behavior since it rewards a very heavy "just in time" lookup style for finding information (we've all had hundreds of chrome tabs open at work before, right?)
And on top of that work chat
And now agents, which are basically all designed for you to spin up several different conversation threads and hop between them constantly while the agent works.
It's no wonder people can't focus. Both work and leisure are basically designed to split up your attention into microscopic fragments.
> 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.
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 play tennis regularly, and I roller skate (inline) regularly. I find that these things provide me a great amount of balance (mentally) as a reminder that 99% of the world is physical / analogue, and that the electronic / digital part is, well, small and unimportant (no matter what is said by those with an axe to grind about the importance of their specific digital service).
I don't read books as regularly as I should, but I always enjoy when I do. I donate plasma once a month and the 'enforced idle time' is perfect for catching up on an hour of reading.
(I'm not very good at either tennis or skating, especially since I've been doing both for 10-odd years, but I enjoy them, they keep me fit, and I'm slowly improving or at least arresting the natural decline that comes with age, and planning on not giving either of them up until I'm literally physically unable to keep doing them)
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.
> It was nearly impossible for most people to afford to fill every waking moment with a book in front of them
I'm not sure I agree with that. Public libraries have been around for a very long time, certainly well before the internet. People could get all the books they wanted to read for free. During summer vacations when I was in grade school, I would read multiple books per month, sometimes multiple per week, because we lived close to a public library.
I don't know about your library, but my library would let me check out multiple books at once; I think 5 was the limit for children and 10 for adults. It was pretty easy to have a constant feed of text being sent into your bain.
I would argue there is some recency: it used to be the case that editors were working with authors in the sense of building their careers. Not even 10 years ago it could be expected an author might not hit it big until their 3rd or 4th book (George RR Martin was like this) and editors were focused on building the skills of their authors in storytelling. Now editors are also pulled in a billion different directions and work more like project managers on way too many books at a time, and things like typos and whatnot are being introduced into traditionally published books with glossy special edition covers.
I generally do not read anything from this century and definitely bothing mainstream, but just going trough what ibooks and book stores offer, it seems that it really is bunch of romantasia and other porny pulp for mainly women (supposedly because men have stopped reading completely). Sure some of it might be ok or even good, I wouldn’t know, but the sheer amount of it makes me doubt anyone actually reads them in full.
Sure, in the 90’s everyone bought John Grisham’s newest thriller which they started and never finished, but at least it kinda had a plot, characters and maybe it tried to even say something (although I might be pushing a bit too far there). It wasn’t good, but at least you read a story, not just barely disguised fanfiction of werewolves having sex.
Or maybe I am just an old man and have no idea what kids are up to. Time for your meds granpa.
I've started avoiding many things created in 2023 or later - you can be pretty sure writing prior to that wasn't some AI slop someone threw together with a half-arsed prompt.
These days I have this vague paranoia that most of what I'm watching, listening to, interacting with is just the product of some meat proxy somewhere trying to put some more half baked crap in front of my eyeballs.
I wish I had a portal to human curated, absolutely non-AI, non-clickbait BS like the very old internet (which still wasn't perfect). I think that dream is effectively dead now. But old books/movies/music are still good. Now I sound like an old grandpa reminiscing about the old days.
> 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.
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.
"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."
This is also a great line. We all know the previous sentences but the 'sth will click' is not well-known. I experienced it when reading long novels from Trollope (and I have ADHD).
Upon my third 800-page novel, my reading speed quadrupled, and my concentration came back to me.
I've been trying to motivate myself to read more. I also have ADHD and the constant content drip is like catnip, despite my best efforts (switching to a Minimal Phone, disabling my youtube feed/history, etc...)
I used to be a voracious reader and I LOVED books. They were the distraction I used to escape the world, rather than youtube videos. Or I'd pick up my guitar. Or teach myself how to set up an IRC server. I miss the days when I had that kind of attention and desperately wish I could get it back.
I have ADHD. What I found that works for me:
1) ban Meta, TikTok and the like from your life. It will take awhile, but you will feel better. This improved my life more that quitting cigarettes.
2) physical exercise several times a week. Go to gym, run, walk, whatever. As long as you get sweaty and exhausted. I find it needs to be pretty hard exercise. My brain is silent after workout for a bit.
3) This sounds crazy, but I swear it works. But a timer on 20minutes. Then just stair at your hand or the empty wall in front of you trying to do the whole 20. After that your brain is so screaming for dopamine that washing dishes feels like a drug.
4) in general, try to be bored. Being bored is good. Having nothing to do is good. Then you just have to be by yourself and think your thoughts.
5) after being bored read, write, play guitar or draw. You will notice how much easier it is to do that and how much your brain rejoices.
It is def possible. There's a quack on Tiktok claiming ADHD is 'the failure of exec function' and 'no matter what you won't achieve your goals' which is definitely not true. But then he is selling pills, so it makes sense.
ADHD can worsen if:
1. you avoid sunshine and daily walks in nature.
2. don't sleep early and skip morning exercise and breakfast.
3. watch short videos or even long ones for 'fun'.
After taking care of these three, the next step is to claim your attention back by reading long books. It's not that difficult. As all real ADHDs know, even doing toilet needs dopamine and is hard to do (boring). So I place a book on the ledge beside me, and when I toilet, I just read. I've read four such novels in two months now, and all in the toilet!
I discovered now that I can read anything just as fast and my attention stays and my brain works better. Try it. Trollope is great, but only if you're a overthinker like me. I recommend Lewis's "The Monk" if you're into morality/ethics + adventure, or Lermontov's "A hero of our time" if you want to see poetry in prose, and also learn a lot of street wisdom (the kind we ADHDs usually lack). I read both BTW (see my blog for reviews, link on my HN profile).
And finally, don't ever be discouraged. That mental model is easy to fall into, but there are many mental models! :)
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.
Ted Nelson apparently predicted it as early as 1965. In his autobiography Possiplex there is a chapter named "My Box of Crayons, 1965", where he shows some of his early sketches, one of which looks just like any ad-infested blogspam website from today. He used it in an ACM presentation, but I can't find it on the web.
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.
>It doesn't just let people know a product exists. It shapes the way we think about ourselves and the world around us.
I completely agree, and I wish people talked about this more. Even if you ignore all the manipulative messaging of the advertisements themselves the fact that there are now posters everywhere telling you to buy things, do things, be better than everyone else is corrosive in itself. Nobody is paying for an advert that tells you "you are fine the way you are, you don't need to buy anything, you should go for a nice walk in the park, it's free".
I've thought before about how the west basically abandoned religion and instead now we just get preached at by corporations and advertisements instead. Whether you like the idea of Christianity and religion or not, at least the message of Jesus was "everyone is equally loved, don't try and be superior to others, don't cling to material possessions". Now instead of just getting preached to at church we get preached to all day from all angles, and the message is the complete opposite.
I realised this about advertising once when I was listening to the cicadas in summer, brands are like those cicadas, they have to shout louder and louder to be heard, to survive. It’s a tragedy of the commons, and what separates us from the animals is that we do have the ability to reason about it and change it. It doesn’t have to be this way.
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.
I actually no joke had the idea of making this in Rust. Basically store snapshots of the history alongside an eventlog (binary file containing compressed chronological input events).
But the problem with this is that someone could write an agent to mimic a human. And if there is a financial incentive to prove that you're not AI, which there always will be, it is inevitable.
I've considered learning to handwrite to write my first drafts like that. But then I could use an AI to generate realistic looking scans of handwriting.
I guess I could physically mail the originals to a third party verifier. That's what it may come down to for creatives.
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.
The solution is simple, if unpalateable: No restrictions, but if its ever detected you are running a bot, you are punished in a way that ruins your life, without exception.
Are you the global government that is going to enforce this law? How do you establish identity? How can identity be revoked? How do you keep it from being an authoritarian nightmare?
I live 20 minutes metro ride away from the best coffee shop the entire Asia Pacific (awarded 2026), Only Coffee Project in Crows Nest, Sydney. And it's really, really good. But that level of quality is not particularly unique here.
Sydney and Melbourne are known to have the best coffee in the world on average. Italian immigrants came over and took what the Italians started and perfected it. McDonald's McCafe was conceptualised and started in Melbourne in 1993, because of Melbourne's strong coffee scene. Australia is the only country that Starbucks failed in, because the coffee here is already too good.
Having said all of this, I still think that about 2/3 of coffee being made by baristas in Sydney is undrinkable. If the beans aren't poor quality or stored incorrectly, the barista will use tap water that is too hard or soft, grind the beans on the wrong setting, over or underextract, overheat the milk until it denatures, not wipe out the previous grind from the portafilter (leading to an ugly, bitter flavour), and do many other little things that ruin the coffee.
I can literally walk into most coffee shops and hear the milk frother "screaming" as the proteins are being denatured. This is the coffee snob capital of the world, and most people still drink terrible coffee without giving it a second thought.
The average consumer doesn't have enough knowledge to have good taste. It's tragic. It sucks. We would have a better world if people cared just a tiny bit more about the things they consume. But they don't, because there isn't enough time and energy in their life to dedicate to truly looking into something.
And this is why I think that there will unfortunately be a demand for AI art. I don't want this to be the case. I hate it. I hope you do too. I hope we all demand higher standards from the art, culture, and goods that we consume.
But as long as people drink bad coffee, they'll read AI slop and recommend it to their friends. It's just how it is.
You've been downvoted, but I couldn't agree with you more!
Here in the UK, I've recently driven a few thousand miles on longer, road trip-style holidays. That has meant more time in service stations than I'm used to, and I'm shocked (but actually not surprised) at the low bar for everything... food, drink, hygiene; all at exorbitant prices. That's before we get to the bits that really indulge our chimp-brains like the fruit machines and "special, limited edition, collaboration-with-contemporary-film milkshake/slushy/burger" that are just complete marketing exercises.
I was left wondering why people accept this? Am I just a snob, or are people legitimately fine with this? One argument is that we're all struggling — financially, emotionally, existentially — and just trying to survive and get through the day. Who cares if this coffee is £7, loaded with sugar and fat to contribute to our systemic illnesses and contains only the barest minimum of lowest-quality coffee? _"It's a hit, and it gets me through."_
And I think this answers a lot! There's a line from the last Bond film, where the evil villain utters something like "people want oblivion, they want no choices and then to die when they're not looking". It's extreme (he's a Bond-baddie after all), but I don't think it's inaccurate. We're so accustomed to everything being a bit shit that we've collectively checked out and accept it. It explains why so much that would have once been unthinkable socially/politically/morally is now just "fine". AI replacing us in the workplace but also in our hobbies is just the next in a long line of insults.
Perhaps we need to put the French in charge for a while? Nothing a good revolution couldn't fix, and at least we'll be manning the barricades with a good coffee in hand...
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.
I agree that clear cut life objectives are important. This generates a competing interest which is the best way to defeat any addiction.
But working on non-impactful personal projects is also not as bad as doomscrolling twitter. Personal projects are a good way to build skill and grow your own confidence. Twitter doesn't build anything of significance.
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 noticed the Tetris effect when watching Lex Fridman interviews with Academics. Every expert saw the universe through that lens and thought it was the most significant and most interesting way to look at everything.
No internet use is inherently intentional. Old-style internet made you choose where to go, but that doesn't make the use intentional. We make choices all the time on auto-pilot. Choosing isn't the same as being intentional.
It's true that it's harder to stay present on addictively designed feeds. But I find it difficult to stay present even visiting traditional websites / classic style forums. We also constantly get distracted reading books. Our minds are estimated to be wandering between 30 and 50% of the time during pretty much any task, even without phones or social media [1].
Presence and intention are skills–they can be trained. Don't expect significant benefits if you switch out addictive internet for classic without also training your attention. This applies for anything of this nature. A few weeks ago I took a weekend without any devices as well as a lot of awareness practicing just during everyday tasks, and one interesting benefit was how it allowed me to take enjoyment from mundane tasks–I stopped thinking of them as things to get done as soon as possible to get back to the computer and started just being.
If you meditate just a few minutes each day, you will start actually noticing yourself getting distracted and then shift to awareness. It feels annoying that you got distracted, but that just means it's working.
The reason to do this is we are much happier when we are present–a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.
I highly recommend Born to Flourish [2] for an introduction to meditation and the science behind it (it's still easy to read).
> Presence and intention are skills–they can be trained
Please tell me how. I need to really really improve myself here. I used to be very good at being disciplined and focused, but being a parent and manager made me an ad-hoc reactive monkey that is always lagging behind with everything and not delivering on type, which I always did some time ago.
Either the book I recommended in the post or "The Healthy Minds Program" app. The Healthy Minds Program is completely free—only donations are accepted.
The book explains their system and includes meditations. I can send you the audiobook and you can download the epub ebook from that Anna's archive link. Obviously also you can buy a hard copy.
I like the Healthy Minds program app more than other meditation apps because:
It's a curriculum so you aren't just handed a library to randomly choose, there's a set path.
It's completely free with no option to pay other than to donate.
There's a lot of speaker options and I like the speaker.
I'm working on a privacy-focused frontend for the Healthy Minds program because their app is very outdated and has a ton of tracking. You can use it on the web at https://getflourish.org. Completely vibe coded, very much not done, but it has the functionality to at least demo it. The Android app is a lot better but I haven't released it yet. The web version needs a ton of work it was just done in an hour based off the Android app and doesn't even format on desktop.
If you're completely new to the idea I suggest the book With Each & Every Breath by Thanassiro Bikkhu. It's a Therevada Buddhist book but the breathing meditation instructions in it can be applied even if you want to ignore the other parts of the book.
spent a couple of weeks in the mountains without a phone and my god was that life changing. I realized most of the negative thoughts I had were not really mine, and I have more time now to spend doing something more meaningful to me rather than wasting hours (and significant brainpower) doomscrolling.
Related and not related. Fans of https://andymatuschak.org/ might want to know that he is now working at https://x.com/pico, which apparently has the same tagline as this article "Attention is all you have". But really truly don't click that link that site is a hellhole.
Plug for the app I built that's helping me significantly: NoMo Screentime
It blocks all distracting apps. To unblock, I need to choose # of minutes upfront, then pause and put my phone face down for sometime. And then, it unblocks the app for the time I requested, and blocks it again.
I discovered this post not through luck or because of prior (prescient) bookmarking but because a VC decided to build a links aggregator so that techies would hang out on their porch (web property) rather than elsewhere and therefore, would give said VC a chance to invest in their next rocketship.
Good article. I've cut out X and news scrolling. Only grab my phone to play Pokemon go, check my website visitors, read Hacker news or watch an old movie to go to bed. It's been life changing. Give it a try.
Yea, indeed I think we have to proactively keep getting away from doomscrolling/other things which hijack our attention and I don't think it's easy for anyone. It's also not bad if you do it in small doses.
> Doomscrolling will make you stay longer and click on a few more ads.
I've personally never bought something out of a Google ad. Tbh how much of their effort they're putting into ads, I don't see much interesting ads. If they would try to sell me some tech/hacky stuff, hell yeah. But random ads, nah thanks.
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.
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.
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.
> Do you want to listen to music? Just open a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm figure out what you like. Please ignore the AI slop they will insert in between real songs to avoid paying royalties to real artists.
To be honest it is worse than this. Spotify over the years just seems to have gotten worse and worse at the one job I want it to do well which is just play the music I already know I want to play, which should be incredibly obvious from my play count and what I've downloaded.
Instead I'm regularly surprised by random noise such as popover in-product ads for extra features I don't care about, and simple AI features I might want like detecting I am in this certain place at this certain time where I usually listen to these albums or playlists so maybe weight them accordingly in a quick access list on the home screen or something aren't, for whatever reason, done.
I mean this doesn't even need LLMs it's just an algorithm, but you see what I mean. Using intelligence in the ways I should obviously care about from the way I use the product, instead of trying to get me to change the way I use it (I won't, I wish there was a way I could just definitively tell them this).
Alas, after years of annoyance with this it's still just about above the bar of useful enough, so I keep paying, and just can't be bothered to invest the time switching to some other service like apple music. So in a sense I'm probably encouraging this behaviour by not churning.
My biggest complaint re Spotify was poor shuffling, hearing the same song over and over. Finally resolved by using Spotipy to regularly re-order big playlists, and just disable shuffle.
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.
You don't actually control most of the things in your world. Your neighbour, for instance, isn't a reflection of your preferences and interests.
Also - in your home, it's YOU that's rejigging things. A result of your intent, your actions. Not curated and delivered to you via some corporate monster with a variety of incentives that are directly at odds with yours.
You don't control everything on internet too. There are things like your neighbor and there are things moulded by your interests as perceived by the internet.
Intent is not a black and white thing. People sometimes read your intentions via your body language. Same goes with internet. You did express your intent in some way.
You said "The physical world around you is also sculpted by your actions" ... I mentioned many ways in which that's not true. And you now mention the internet is also not completely controlled by one's mind.
But it does feel like intentional doom-scrolling exists, some of it intentional that can be so inspiring. Mainly when I'm keeping in mind "what will I remember", some of it truly stick
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.
> 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?
nice title but then my question is more about what I should be directing my attention towards habitually
as a side note I was experimenting with the mental health implications of whatever you focus on as creating whatever emotions you experience, to some extent
You should direct your attention to what you are doing in the moment. If you are doing the dishes, you can practice awareness by noticing the sensations of doing the dishes, the movements, the various senses.
If you're doing the laundry, notice how the clothes feel in your hands.
If you're walking, notice your breath, notice how your feet and legs feel walking on the ground.
I heard the term "Gruen Transfer"[1] to describe the successful hijacking of attention in a store. I think it's useful to describe digital platforms, too - you go to YouTube to watch a video recommended by a friend, and then when you're done, The Feed attempts to pull a Gruen on you.
(what I'm describing is the first thing linked to on the wikipedia page as a disambiguation)
There was an Australian TV series named The Gruen Transfer on the topic of advertising, which had some really insightful commentary, humour, as well as a regular advertising-insider guy who gave great insights 'from the inside' but was inherently grossly dislikeable in most of the things that he big-upped.
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.
Same, and I thought it's a clever play on words on the classic "Attention is all you need" - https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 - which led us to what we have now
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 think the funny (and somewhat scary) thing about ad-supported platforms is that both the creators of the platform and the customers implicitly agree that the content just isn't that valuable. They know that if they paywalled the platform and forced people to make that value judgement then barely anyone would pay.
Which is kind of scary where you realise people spend hours and hours each day watching youtube slop, tiktok, instagram reels, while also subconsciously feeling "this content is worthless and I wouldn't pay $10 a month to keep watching 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.
> 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.
The only thing I watch on youtube.com is music stuff (electronic, industrial) and occasional tech stuff like some retro computing stuff or such. I very rarely use it. I just went to the home page to see an example because I was curious. One of the recommended videos about 3 rows down? "Donald Trump Recruits Rambo To End The Iran War". It's AI slop. I watch NOTHING about politics or similar on here. Nothing about the US or war things or anything. "The algorithm" is doing exactly what your quoted snippet indicated, scarily enough.
I tend to agree with the post, but narrowly on the hook:
> Do you want to listen to music? Just open a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm figure out what you like. Please ignore the AI slop they will insert in between real songs to avoid paying royalties to real artists.
To be honest, my Spotify recommendation algorithm complaint is about the exact opposite, that it’s too conservative in what it suggests. Sometimes I feel stuck in a musical “echo chamber.”
I hear from this post that recommendation algorithms are too broad, but it seems from policymakers the bigger complaint is again the opposite (“echo chambers” and “rabbit holes.”) Not sure which is more compelling, but they are surely not entirely orthogonal features.
It is definitely a XXIst century skill to direct your attention. I am convinced that it is not only by deliberately choosing to be outside the tech bubble, reading paper books or newspapers but also by « pruning » algorithms.
Especially on YouTube that can spiral you on a rabbit hole, it can become a very powerful learning force. I have quite a few friends that became experts in niche subjects by rabbit holing themselves on these topics on YouTube, for example, a serigraphist, a carpenter on Japanese carpenting art or a ceramist.
I think the issue already existed for those who had access to the largest libraries and book stores, only Internet reduced friction, increased span of topics and added video.
Since Da Vinci, it is not possible anymore to have all the knowledge in your mind so focus and attention is the main super power.
Just saying, the author blames corporate internet and the algorithm that feed you content, but if you browse 2 articles before (this one: https://alicegg.tech/2026/06/12/popular-upcoming) he then praised steam for removing the “upcoming game list” that was purely based on the number of wishlist a game received and is praising the new algorithmic personalized calendar of upcoming “for you”. I find it a bit hypocritical.
People use these algorithms because they love them, and yeah someone posting once every 1 or 2 month is not going to make it in these days and ages. I don’t think the internet became worst, it just adapted to other needs.
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.
> YouTube recommends videos designed to keep us watching
Yes, but you don’t have to subscribe to what it suggests. I keep a carefully curated list of subscriptions and very rarely look at recommendations. That gives me a high-quality filter without all the algorithmic BS.
is doomscrolling actually net bad for you? it seems that younger generations (gen alpha) spend disproportionately more time doomscrolling / being iPad kids, but they also seem significantly smarter than older generations.
this might be the correlation causation fallacy, but it seems to me that combining micro-pieces of reality though a continual stream might actually have net positives on information.
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.
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.
I don't really understand why they were able to exist as they do and not lose users. I have not had Chrome for over a decade, I use Gmail exclusively for my actual real identity, which I don't recall the last time I used - I can only access my Gmail from a tablet I never use. I used to use Google search, when all other options failed - but these days, google is the first to fail, I literally do not remember the time I used it. It is a genuinely novel experience for me, to see any sort of ad on the internet - that is not hyperbole. I am not as capable as so many of the people who frequent HN, tbh - very little of what I do is hard, why do all of you live as you do?? I don't understand at all.
Think of some very fringe group of 0.1%, which you question from time to time how they function/exist/for what purpose. That’s basically how general populace looks at people who go through efforts of de-Googlifying. Stuff that matters to you (privacy, owning your data and etc.) does not matter to super majority of the people, especially outside of the tech circles.
I’m somewhat in-between of two extremes, but in grand scheme of things I don’t really care, as I have completely different priorities in life. Convenience services enable me to focus on those priorities, and I don’t really care about all other stuff to a specific degree.
I’ve been lucky enough to see how people from every walk of life interact with the Internet, and realized the way I function is extremely different. To them, I am the “flat earth weirdo and do stuff differently than the others”.
To give another example - I’m expecting people in HN type about 100 words per minute on average because of our general exposure to coding, typing, internet and etc. That puts us to 99th percentile. Average person does not live like us, nor cares about it.
Frankly I just don’t care that much, I hate Google and llms have mostly replaced the search but after work I want to spend time with family and do hobbies and degoogling is a nice to have that is nowhere near the top of my priorities list.
I don’t know if they did or didn’t try to kill bookmarks.
But on the commercial incentives, it does make sense for them to kill it.
Companies pay good advertisement so they show up first on the search result when a user want to find them.
Eg you want to go to carglass website: you type carglass in google and the company will most likely pay Google to show up first in the ads section because competitors are trying to sway away customers from them. If they didn’t outbid their competitors, even though the customer want to go to carglass, he will click on first result and may end up buying from their competitor without even noticing.
That wouldn’t happen if people had put carglass.com website in bookmark.
Google doesn't show ads on navigational queries because of the potential trademark-infringement legal issues that could result from recommending a competitor when somebody searches for a trademark.
Search for [carglass], no ads. Search for [facebook], no ads. Search for [spotify], no ads. Search for [american airlines], no ads. All of these would be very desirable queries to advertise a competitor on.
(IIRC they've gone back and forth on this depending on what the lawyers thought they could get away with; ISTR when Bing launched Microsoft would run ads on [google] that pointed to Bing. It's been a long time since I've seen an ad on a navigational query though.)
As a counter example, a couple days ago I was to install DaVinci Resolve on a new windows installation, so I searched "davinci resolve." Since I was used to having adblocker, I just clicked the top result, which is titled "DaVinci Resolve" but actually takes you to some awful shady thing like wondershare or softonic/uptodown, I forgot.
I feel like, navigational queries or no, Google should be held liable for allowing scam sites like that to advertise. I think there was a trending HN post recently on that front.
Should the police be liable for not preventing your house from being broken into?
Did the police gives out keys to my house and give some of them to criminals? Then yes.
No? I'm not sure what the comparison here is.
> As a counter example, a couple days ago I was to install DaVinci Resolve on a new windows installation, so I searched "davinci resolve." Since I was used to having adblocker, I just clicked the top result, which is titled "DaVinci Resolve" but actually takes you to some awful shady thing like wondershare or softonic/uptodown, I forgot.
I just tried this query on chrome / android.
This is the first link on the page at the very top:
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
(The product page)
The next site listed was Wikipedia.
I don't have any adblockers. I am in the US.
When people tell me this stuff about their Google searches it drives me insane, I want to know why our experiences are so different. It is regional? Is it OS, is it browser, is it something else? I want to know!
You know your search results are personalized right? If I google something and my girlfriend googles the same thing, on the same network, we get different results.
>You know your search results are personalized right?
Of course.
But these results don't seem to change on a degoogled chromium on desktop, with no google account login personalization, no account logged in, in incognito, using: Ublock origin lite, User Agent / OS Randomizer, Privacy Badger, and using a VPN to other locales.
That's why I want to know, I've been curious about this for years, and nothing I've looked at seems conclusive.
My biggest guess is country or native language, but it's been hard to pin down. I think that may be the biggest factor (with local laws contributing maybe to how search results get displayed).
I'm curious! I want to know the driver behind the bad experiences people are having with it. (I've been using it literally since it was released.)
When you say "navigational queries" do you mean Google Maps?
If so, you may not be aware that the locations represented by square dots on the map are ads.
This a search domain term that means a search query where the user is trying to find a specific destination/product. I don't know how Google search works, but often a search will first go through an intent classifier and then use a different model based on the query type.
A "navigational query" is a query with a certain website in mind. So like if you search for [facebook], 99.99% of the time you are looking to go to Facebook, if you search for [hacker news] 99.99% of the time you are looking to go to news.ycombinator.com. Basically it replaces the address bar for people who don't know what URLs are. You aren't looking for information about the business, you want to go to the site/business itself.
Thanks to you and @bradley for the explanation.
In my experience, those commercial seeking queries are what google can't do. Many stores in the result ship to USA only, and there's also no good way to compare prices and features.
Google isn't trying to sell you the best site. They're trying to sell you – ok well your click to the highest bidder.
> Google isn't trying to sell you the best site. They're trying to sell you – ok well your click to the highest bidder.
Which explains why they push an AI Summary to the top of most searches which discourages clicking on any of the search results.
Or not.
Google used to not have any ads for many years while they got market share. Then only small ads off to the side. Eventually the ads moved inline and were half the results, etc.
AI summary seems like the same play, even if it hurts their current ad business some. After all why search for stuff when a chatbot can just tell you? Makes sense they'd view it as an existential crisis and push their AI.
Google will be well positioned when ads start being added to AI for most users.
Are you sure you don't have any privacy protections enabled?
With my normie setup (logged in account, granted location permissions, no PiHole, no particular anti-tracker mechanisms beyond classic ad blocking), I get decent local results on Google, in contrast to basically any other "privacy focused" search engine.
Chat GPT and Claude seem to be struggling a lot more. I suspect this is because OpenAI and Anthropic aren't talking to the local companies here, and they may have some robots.txt shenanigans going on.
This resonates with me. I record every purchase I make and every bill I pay in a budgeting app. 90% of the process is automated. So, there's very little I have to do once the budget categories, the goals and limits are set. The system works for me, it gives me certainty and peace of mind with very little effort. Yet, every relative and friend that hears about it treats me as a freak despite them being the ones complaining about money and not knowing "where the money goes every month". It's a lost cause.
may I ask how you set it up? I suppose you still have to enter your purchases manually, right?
Not OP of the comment, but I self host https://actualbudget.org/ and pair it with enable actual from here: https://github.com/2manyvcos/enable-actual
Pairs up with my EU and Revolut bank perfectly, auto imports transactions, most of which you can set rules that auto assign to categories. And as they said 90% is automated, I just categorize a few transactions a week manually.
I tried something like envelope budgeting before in excel but didn't work really since I was lazy to manually add transactions, this is much easier. Budegting for a house and a USA trip without worries now :)
Several budgeting apps use open banking api to connect to bank accounts and update the entries (money in or money out). Once it's synced you can assign the appropriate category. Usually, the budgeting app "learns" over time and it does the categorisation automatically based on the payee and your budget.
The system isn't perfect but, in my experience, it works 90% of the time. The remaining 10% requires manual categorisation. I suppose it also depends on how simple or complex your budget and your spending are.
[dead]
> 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...")
>If software developers want their users to manage their own ordering schemes or use customization features, make it easy and convenient to do
This is akin to telling parents that if they want to their children to clean their rooms, you should make it easy and convenient to do. Obviously this is non-sensical: if you make a mess it might be hard and inconvenient work. Thats why kids don't do it!
I find some tech criticisms to be simply inane; the tech companies are not going to absorb the costs of educating users or fixing unworkable strategies. Not because Bezos needs to buy another yacht, but because the companies that try to do that all die before they get big. There is a giant graveyard of startups who have tried to be the "responsible and patient parent", and they have all died. Users don't want to put up with it, and if given the option will run to the company that just handles everything for them with a subscription fee or reselling their data.
> This is akin to telling parents that if they want to their children to clean their rooms, you should make it easy and convenient to do. Obviously this is non-sensical [...]
Doing exactly that, by coming in and helping them with it (initially doing most of the work) as they get into the habit if it being a regular task, actually seems to work pretty well (at least, in the n=1 experiment conducted with my son).
Not sure what the basis for “obviously non-sensical” is, other than the (very common) fetishization of struggle.
Yeah, imo the only way this is changing at all is if for some reason organization is inherent to the value offered. I guess Notion kinda did that, Obsidian too.
Organization (like other hard / unpleasant things) is something that people will do if 1) it helps them and 2) there's no other way.
What tech companies understand well is that if a competitor takes away people's pain and you don't, people will use that competitor.
It was technically possible to copy mp3s one by one to a USB mp3 player, and many people did if they had no other options, but marking an artist in iTunes for sync was a lot easier, so consumers preferred iPods. And managing syncing and purchasing itself was a chore, which Spotify proved was entirely unnecessary to the music listening experience for most people.
Sure, there's a small but loud minority for whom the process of purchasing / organizing music itself is enjoyable, and that minority will often try to push their views on everybody else, but the majority of the population wants a "magic box" where they can type "Taylor Swift" and get Taylor Swift music to play. Or they just want "radio, but without the battery drain, commercials, useless yapping and inability to skip songs they don't like."
> oh well obviously keeping your stuff in order is an unworkable strategy
Volume makes all the difference. If you could only visit sites you bookmarked first and you had only say 200 bookmark limit, you’d keep your bookmarks in perfect order.
That’s an occupant completely ridiculous proposition in 2024; in 2027 you’ll only need to bookmark the AI chatbot services you pay for, because the rest of the internet will become completely unusable by humans.
> If you could only visit sites you bookmarked first
Then you could never actually visit any sites to bookmark them in the first place, rendering maintaining your list of bookmarks a trivial exercise.
s/occupant/obviously/… autocorrect got me real bad here
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.
Users have to see the value of it. Some never grow up to organize their things but we can do a lot automatically. I think as the volume of things grows you first want
- a flat list of items, then you want - folders (or categories), beyond that you want - tag clouds, beyond those you want - keyword and strong search, beyond that you want - natural language queries.
Or any combination of those.
(There are more ways to organize/sort but I either don't know where to put them or they serve a specific type of data. I like the file system representation where each file and folder is a box the size of its size.)
Doing some of it by hand allows a workshop with more tools while preserving sanity.
The actual goal is actually really simple. There clearly is an agenda to get rid of any and all user generated media asap. Anything that works in the opposite direction will help reclaim the users executive function.
When creating a software or other products I always jokingly ask myself what kind of people I want to target and what I want to make them into. The joke is the limited room.
Building your own library should obviously be more awesome than borrowing. It might take the user a decade to see it but when they are old those child hood activities are a joy to be reminded of.
I have an obsession with record keeping and sorting and categorization. Problem is, I don't actually have the patience to categorize because its often multi dimensional and analog versions of categorizing only allow for single dimension (you cant put a document in more than one folder for example)
Now I have LLMs build me tiny apps that let me upload docs and images with local processing and human verification.
My OCD is finally satiated
But categorizing is fine if you can put multiple categories on things. That's the whole difference between flexible tagging and rigid folder, i.e. the one thing GMail got right vs. the real world analog of a folder.
The real world solves it too btw. in the same way a relational database did: Indexes ;) Tagging is nothing but different indexes of the same underlying thing. Be it a book or an email or whatever else.
And this top level comment is actually weird to me. Maybe I'm just a non-Chrome-user? I use Firefox. I never bookmark anything any longer. I literally just know what to type to get to what I need to from the history. Like HN. I literally just type n into a new tab and HN is the first suggestion based on how often/recently I went here. No manual bookmarking or anything non-local needed.
Similarly at work I just know how to find certain things by typing into the search bar. And it even learns from recency. Our app URLs recently changed and I had to start typing the new unique parts of the URL recently for a few tries until it went up in the recency bias calculation. Sure like I had to scroll down a few entries in the history search a few times. Now I just know what to type to get where I want to again.
I see others struggle with rigid bookmark structures that they can't find anything in like ever on the regular though (URL change or not) :( And (at least with firefox) those bookmarks would even get searched too! Of course, unlike history they would have to manually update bookmarks. I really don't get it how people even still use bookmarks any longer.
I personally dont usually use bookmarks unless its something truly obscure that I may want to refer to later (like an article or something.)
I like the concept of indices but a lot of indices i see (like in textbooks) are incomplete. I have to think "ok what might be related to this?" And it certainly is not an easy problem!
That's not the problem of the concept of an index. It's bad implementation. If your index only indexes as if it were a static folder structure, then you have to think exactly like the guy that built the index. If you instead allow multiple indexes/index entries for the same underlying thing, then you have tagging.
Bookmarks are folder structure. Theoretically you can bookmark the same thing under a different part of the structure of course. I've never really seen people do that though, except accidentally because they found something the liked, bookmarked it in on place, later found it again, didn't remember they already bookmarked it and bookmarked it in a different part of their folder structure. In a way they also "tagged" except that the actual bookmark, the thing is not the same. It's a copy. If your bookmark goes to some address that might change while pointing to the same actual thing, you'd now have to update (and first find) a multitude of bookmarks in your folder structure. A file system that has hardlinks could implement "tagging" too :)
The last startup I worked for (Edvo, since shut down) was actually trying to solve this, not in a bookmarking way but in a way that was like "bookmarks represent knowledge or ideas" and was meant to be a graph-based mind mapping tool.
The tech was cool, but I think they ran into the issue you just suggested - people dont really bookmark, and it was hard to make people see it as anything other than a bookmarking tool with categorization.
I use Chrome at work and Firefox at home, and I still bookmark on both. It never occurred to me to not.
I agree, but my NAS is the messy room and I don't want to clean it but I want it cleaned.
I need to find the LLM tool that "cleans my room" for me by rearranging my 20+ year old dir layout that just keeps growing.
There are aptitude tests for those two traits: Analytical Reasoning and Ideaphoria at Johnson O'Connor. You, like me, probably will score high on both.
That looks cool! Id be interested in taking a test but I'm less interested in paying $1k for it :)
FWIW, it's about a 6-7 hour series of tests. Worth it, imo, but yeah, it's pricey.
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.
I lost out on subsidized housing because of Hotmail, but even to this day I still regularly get obvious spam.
Hotmail was great 20+ years ago. Now, it's junk and I only send junk its way.
They wiped my original account clean, no ifs no buts. Just gone. Years of conversation with Friend and Family. No considerations.
Same. My very first email with them was deleted, because I was using it via POP3 instead of logging into the site. I should probably just self-host an email for junk, then I can remove the very last Microsoft thing in my life.
Good to know.
> My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made
Haha, mine too! I guess it was to calculate the fuel efficiency, which is often done automatically now.
Same! When I started driving I continued the trend until I got an app that did it for me, then cars started doing it for me, then I switched to an EV and it does some calculations that I never bothered trying to understand.
> most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do.
Yes, and that's IMO perfectly understandable. What was that greeting card text? "A clean apartment is a sign of a wasted life."
Not from the US, we didn't have "balancing the checkbook" over here, but watching my parents and grandparents, and trying to mimic them growing up, I have a distinct impression that all that bookkeeping - from budgeting to gas refills to blood pressure measuerments (which my grandfather did diligently in his final decade of life) - was done as much of immediate necessity as it was of habit.
People did their book-keeping by hand because there was no external authoritative source to track it for them, but also because they needed to know - there were consequences for not knowing some numbers or their history on-demand. As soon as either becomes false, people stop. Very few people I know "keep books" for their individual spending - and it's not because auto-pay, it's because the bank gives you that information for free, effortlessly, in near real-time. The bank is now the authoritative source of how much money you have.
(That's the "external authoritative source". Auto-pay is a masssive QoL improver, but it's a consequence, not cause. The cause here is achieving "not really needing to know" by keeping your earnings higher than spendings. Then you literally don't need to care about money day-to-day, and only check balance when you're planning larger purchases - and only then, manually paying bills becomes "a sign of a wasted life".)
> 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.
That's a problem - but zooming out a bit, back to "bookmarks", the problem is that sometimes you need to do some book-keeping yourself - you may have your own reasons to need to know, and there is no authority other than you. Unfortunately, it turns out, modern software is then useless, because it doesn't stop at not requiring users to keep things tidy - it purposefully doesn't ship the necessary tools and affordances to keep things tidy.
I think bookmarks, files, and folders (to nostrademons point) is too coarse an abstraction for different organization domains. Music ks a good example. Most people want to organize by album, artist, year, genre, or song title. Files and folders or bookmark trees can mimic that structure but can't replace it. I like to order my photos by outing or by subject.
In either cases while you can reify your organizational system into files and folders it's just inferior to a personal classification system.
I think the best approach is still files with embedded metadata (eg. EXIF for images/videos, ID3v2 for MP3s, resource forks in classic MacOS apps). That way you store, organize, and move around the content as a unit, and then you can display it in whatever way you want. And you can write new apps to display things differently as consumer tastes change.
Personal classification is key, I guess, because your two examples are alien to me.
> Music ks a good example. Most people want to organize by album, artist, year, genre, or song title.
I assumed this is because that's what software is limited to, and people cope, and the only people who really organize like that were the record stores owners. Because personally, this in no way even resembling how I think of my music collection, or how I pick what to listen to.
For me it's usually by theme, personal "feels like they belong together" connection, causal relationships (e.g. music from the same trip I went to in high school), or artist but defined loosely, I.e. tolerant of the fact that artists collaborate and perform together.
> I like to order my photos by outing or by subject.
Outing, yes, but by-subject is alien to me. Most of my photos have exactly zero people, or anywhere from 2 to 20+. Single subject photos are oddity, and I rarely feel the need to organize by them. Events, then by date, then maybe by location.
In both cases search turns out to be the answer, but with photos it's phenomenally unreliable due to vendor fucking with or stripping metadata.
Yeah I do think the key is personal organization.
> Outing, yes, but by-subject is alien to me.
Hah seeing other photographers' Lightroom tags is always a trip. I know folks that even organize by exposure stops since they're after a certain look.
Was I actually the only kid who liked cleaning up toys and sorting Knex and Lego and stuff?
No, I was the kid over there playing librarian and sorting all my books and games by author and year. Legos and Knex were also prime sorting targets, but the real joy came from getting random jars of buttons or beads. Getting one of those shelves with 100 tiny drawers was like a recipe for heaven.
I never understood people who organized Lego by color. By shape is obviously superior.
Apple really got the intuition that files and folders aren't the "natural" way to organize things for most people.
For Office-style documents, there's no better way (except for search and recents), because everybody has different needs and deals with very different kinds of documents. For things that are more standardized, like music or photos, people want to think in terms of artists, albums and playlists, not in terms of some meticulously-maintained folder hierarchy.
Folders have some nifty properties, like good deletion handling, permissions management and intuitive movement from and to different drives, but they don't outweigh the advantage of specialized entities for most people.
I strongly disagree with this. In fact, of the many sins of Apple, removing files from iOS as concept is probably my largest pet peeve.
Most people don't have a problem with files. You learn what a file is in your first computer class day and you're done with it.
Files are not just about organization, primarily, they are the fundamental unit of information. They decouple data storage from processing, transformation, and transfer. It's how we give physicality to information. They give the user freedom in multiple ways:
- Freedom to open the file with whatever program I want, allowing me to experience it however (with a player), but also to create derivative works (in an editor).
- Freedom to store the file wherever I want, both locally or remotely.
- Freedom to share the files with others, via whatever mechanism I want.
Without files, computing is just about individual consumption. You don't own anything. That song you bought? You don't own it, it's some kind of abstract entity in Apple Music. The only thing you can do with it is press play. Living in an OS without files is like living in an universe where everything is liquid and containers of any kind are forbidden, all you can do is open the tap and drink straight from the stream.
Even if you create something? It's locked in some kind of vacuum that Apple controls. Wanna back it up? Pay Apple for Apple cloud. Wanna share it with someone? Figure it out, probably step one is to ask them to buy an Apple device.
I laugh whenever people say that Apple is "easier". The contortions I've seen people do just to get stuff from one device to another even within their own ecosystem.
The tragedy of all of this is that people that live in mobile are becoming less capable with technology over time. People talk of "the digital native" generation but kids these days know way less capable with machines than their parents. It used to be that everyone and their cousin knew how to use a P2P program, to burn a CD, to use external drives. Now you ask someone to send you some trip pictures and they'll just WhatsApp them to you. If you ask them to send you the high res originals they look at you with amazement: files? formats? compression? what's that???
I use Innoreader as a database of websites/blogposts I want to reference or read again later.
I only use it to bookmark it into the database so I can search it up later.
Firefox had a tool partnership with an app that did exactly this, but unfortunately it was put in the grave last year (now I know why).
I don't use bookmarks because what's the point in saving a link to something.
Am I going to scroll through and find it later? Barely functions with text search due to only minimal metadata (maybe a title).
Worse still, I used to use bookmarks for things I wanted to return to, but now they're all dead links pretty much.. so now I have to go through and get disappointed because something interesting has now gone.
Total waste of time.
It feels kind of weird to me that we never got "a search engine for your entire personal life", or the same idea for corporate intranets.
Spotlight tried but didn't seem to get very far, and after the mobile revolution, nobody else could due to all the sandboxing.
I guess the fact that it's very easy to search the open web (and very hard to search things behind login walls efficiently) is also a partial cause.
It all went wrong when writing was introduced, the lazy kids became addicted to letting the technology take place of their natural human memory.
Settle down Socrates.
Same reason an ATM gives you the card back before the money because too many people would forget to cleanup (picking up the card) once they reach their objective (getting money).
Why should kids put away their toys first?
Isn’t it more optimal, from the perspective of play, to have them spread out?
I can see the argument that if you clear your desk, you’ll be more inclined to draw because you have the space. But if I didn’t impose that value, they wouldn’t necessarily draw. They’d just play with something else.
I don’t track my fuel usage. I did once. Economically, I don’t need to. The car tells me my MPG anyway, literally, if I care to look.
Accounts are harder to track now, with fewer physical assets and more renting and subscriptions.
The point you make seems to be that rigidity in the system would bring value. But I think the values people have often exist outside the system. The system is imposing an idea of what is worth tracking or organising in the first place.
Oddly, I think LLMs are quite intentional in their current incarnation. You start with an empty input box, state a curiosity, and go looking for information. There’s very little imposed structure around what you should care about.
That changes once OpenAI et al. start tracking what you do and recommending what you should be looking at before you’ve even formed the intention yourself.
Its better for them to put away Toy A before breaking out Toy B. If you dont teach them this habit, you will spend your entire day cleaning up Toys A-Z strewn all over the place. Children need to learn to clean up after themselves, its a failure on the parents part, especially if they force the other older siblings to be the clean up crew.
https://montessoriacademy.com.au/montessori-work-cycle-guide...
There are whole studies and philosophies on work/play. The one here answering your question is the 'Work Cycle' and the step 'Return Work'.
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.
Captain's Log whether it's a pleaasure craft or not ;)
1. Price tracking over time.
2. MPG tracking by brand -- I get about 1.5 MPG better with BP.
1. To monitor gas mileage primarily. Any sudden decline in gasoline mileage can warn of impending engine component failure. [I haven't experienced it but I suppose it could also warn of a repair error, e.g., if you failed to put a new air filter cartridge in to replace the old one (a major oversight but nonetheless possible) then it is likely that your mileage would go up suddenly. One would have to question whether the better mileage was b/c, say, you just switched to Shell gasoline or instead did something wrong when you recently changed the air filter?!]
2. keeping receipts ensures that if there is a problem and your engine is damaged, then you can show where you bought the fuel, oil or component and get recompense. This is rare but does happen and it can be a costly repair. Examples are:
- bad gasoline - usually debris or water. Can stop fuel flow and cost you replacement of a gas filter at the least.
- incorrect oil change - you pay for an oil change but they don't put on a new oil filter or they add the wrong kind of oil or they add too little oil or they add too much oil. Don't discount the last one: too much oil can damage some engines seriously. I once had a dealer change my car's oil. Prior to service I explicitly warned the mechanic that the engine was a rare model and required less oil than most. Nonetheless he overfilled it. Luckily I spotted the difference immediately b/c the engine ran like shite right out of the garage. I made a freeway U-turn,drove back in, re-explained the car's needs and insisted they drain off the overfill and let me check it. The mechanic tried to cover his ass by treating it as another "crazy customer" but I just told his companions that a) he'd fucked up and b) I had specifically warned him about the problem earlier so c) they'd better keep an eye on him - he wasn't as good as they were.
3. If you sell a car, buyers love getting the records proving that you bought good oil/gas, performed maintenance, etc. FWIW most buyers do not continue to maintain such records in my experience.
I don't maintain a log book and I know only one person who does. But I file receipts for gas, parts, fluids, filters and major maintenance for each vehicle.
It might appear that all this is good reason to buy an EV but you've got the same problems as do ICUs. Suppose you pull into a facility in Kansas for a recharge as a thunderstorm rolls in. While you're eating lunch the facility is struck by lightning and the transient currents fry one or more parts on you EV. The recharge station is unlikely to be willing to pay your repairs unless you have proof you were there during a malfunction.
I did this for a couple of years but after my mileage didn't budge regardless of summer/winter/car age/mechanical work I got bored and stopped recording :-)
Im no fan of Musk but my Tesla app shows me a history of charging, including address. Its kinda neat to have them all in one place.
These apologetic “no fan of musk”, “before Elon became crazy” are tiresome. You got a Tesla, just own it. We liked the guy when he started that electric car thing, now it’s different but he’s no mass murderer.
Well, sure, if only because counting lives lost from policy changes is difficult to do and the methodologies are complex.
I'm not apologizing for having a Tesla, I just want it to be clear that I'm not an Elon fan boy. You don't have to go far on the internet to find people praising Tesla cars for things that are not really that impressive. When Cybercab launched there were people who were making memes that cybercab was the "cool" robotaxi because there weren't sensors everywhere like Waymo.
But it's also important to not let fanboyism cloud judgment. Tesla has great software.
Keeping track of what a car costs you.
[dead]
So true!
However we've now got local AI to do it for us:
https://github.com/corv89/rookmark
Gen Alpha kid don't say 'look up', they say 'search up'
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 just discovered https://hister.org/ (I think from a link here on hacker news) ... it solves the full text history search really really well.
It's really great, just about perfect for my needs.I tried it after seeing that link here and it's been really useful. I happened to find myself in the type of situation where I'd need such a system after a couple days and it managed to keep the (volatile) info I wanted. Good stuff!
Ok but that reeks of _just created recently_ AND you need to run a local server on your machine?
"The Mosaic browser (1993) had full text history search."
The earlier CERN, later W3C, LineMode browser, named "www", also kept a full text history by default
Each website gets a separate folder, e.g., "308" in the example below
An .index file contains a log of all requested URLs with timestamps
Pages are cached in temp files, e.g., HTTP response headers are stored in .meta files The "www" browser still compiles without errors today along with an assortment of other utilties. I use these with a TLS forward proxyI use the W3C programs to retrieve HTML but not to view it. For reading HTML I use a contemporary text-only browser
"www" is a 671.0K static binary for me
I'm a text-only browser user for 30+ years so I'm probably biased in favor of text. I routinely save HTML pages from webites I find useful, almost always as plain text. No resources. This makes sesnse for me because plain text is how I search and consume information. Firefox and other popular browsers generally do not save pages as plain text, they have always attempted to save as HTML along with page resources. But I'm not interested in images, fonts, CSS, Javascript, etc. Today I notice some people writing headlless browsers, like h5i, now output pages as markdown or some "machine-readable" format
*sense
*websites
For example,
Neither Firefox or Vivaldi on Android has an option to save pages, only to print them to PDF
Saving can be achieved in these graphical browsers, e.g., through intents ("share"), but this requires other apps
Look at the commands offered in a "web browser" in 1991-1993
https://web.archive.org/web/20240205003557if_/https://www.w3...
* headless
Related : Hister https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743097
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 ;)
It can be optional. The owner of the website should get to decide what people do with their stuff. They can provide a tracker and (as long as it is alive) chose if to burn its own bandwidth or point you at a seed. [Dynamic] ads can still be inserted and blocked as usual. Should be funny to make money from a website that you don't even host anymore. Default browsers can also respect legal take down orders if they are published on the website.
A whole different world from posts vanishing into the social media memory hole.
Back in 2012 I switched almost entirely from bookmarking to web clipping into Evernote, which has been great. Evernote itself has gone downhill, and at some point soon I'll probably migrate my collection to Obsidian (which has its own web clipper), but I'm still a big advocate of the general practice. It is indeed great to have a searchable record of stuff you've bookmarked vs just a tree of links that you'll soon forget exist.
I have a wallabag setup for my interesting bookmarks, and it downloads and indexes the contents of these bookmarks. I read the contents later in a PocketBook, free of distractions from the normal devices. It is a bit of setup work, but just totally frictionless after it was setup. Firefox also has Pocket, which I used before switching to wallabag.
How does wallabag know about your bookmarks? Or do you mean that you're using a wallabag extension for firefox?
I'm using a wallabag extension in every browser. Also using a wallabag app on Android. And also a wallabag app on PocketBook.
I have this with websites I read a few months ago, stuff from 1993 that is still alive is pure luck at this point. Nothing more frustrating than wanting to share a link with a colleague that you have seen recently and remember a couple of cribs from but that doesn't stand out enough in the history to ring a bell.
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.
Browsers should've had tab groups decades ago, and bookmarks in a group should've gone into that group's corresponding bookmark folder by default. Voluntary tab groups use time at the user's convenience, while organizing bookmarks into folders tend to be a distraction or chore.
I use my bookmark tab. I am not particularly interested in storing a copy of almost any of the links I have in my bookmark tab (why would I want a copy of some Grafana instance?)
I do get that for some people it's about research and collecting documents. For me it's basically "quick access to the most recent version of the thing at this URL"
I solved it with Obsidian Web Clipper
Same. Works 95% if the time, which is more than enough for me. Even made me read, and organize more.
Do you guys know if there is an extension that textifies most of the internet?
It's not automatic which might be specifically what you're looking for, but I like Tranquility Reader a bit more than the Firefox built in reader
There's a lot of reader-mode extensions out there - I'm not sure which ones are good nowadays.
Then there was the endless attempts at the "semantic web"
maybe bookmarks and things didn't scale, but The Algorithms can be self-hosted. We just haven't developed the tools.
But today you can just say: "Agent, please record all my page visits. Store the page texts in a file. When I do a search, ... etc."
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
When `Cache-Control: max-age` expires a new copy should be fetched. Old version can be versioned by date.
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'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.
I came to a similar realisation as you and came up with 3 questions I ask when looking at any news article:
- Does this affect me in any way?
- Was this my fault?
- Can I do anything to change this?
I can't see why I should care about any event that doesn't meet a single one of these criteria, yet when I look at the front page of any news site barely any story passes this test
> Can I do anything to change this?
spreading awareness is a thing. A lot of people don't know what our politicians are doing to us which gives them even more freedom to do even worse, self-serving things.
> When I noticed, I cut news out completely. Mood massively improved, and two decades later, I still don't regret a thing.
You seem extremely active on HN, so this story sounds pretty exaggerated.
HN is not a general news site. I am also, as you noted, "extremely active". Having conversations in HN comment threads is the diametrical opposite to scrolling through and reading world news and local news every morning and evening.
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.
Social media had one benefit: to connect with like-minded people during the madness of the covid era. Ironically, the madness was fed by social media, in part because it allowed groups of like-minded people to connect. Note: this comment holds true no matter which side you considered mad and which side you considered reasonable.
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.
I don't see any technical difference? On HN, you scroll through an algorithmically generated list of submissions, vote them up and down, and post and vote on comments. This is pretty similar to FB. Just replace "cat videos" with "pelicans on bikes".
I think HN is good, BTW.
Well, one very important difference is that on HN everyone is served the same algorithm.
And one other even more important difference is that Y Combinator does not make money from HN and so have very different incentives than Facebook.
Basically I agree with your second point. I'd been hung up on the notion that people were maligning specific technical choices (and indeed there are sub-threads where this argument is being advanced), but that's not the case here. Y Combinator's goal with HN is to make money indirectly, by discreetly, almost implicitly advertising itself as an outfit at the centre of things of interest to the "higher end" of the tech field, who might then (a) absorb awareness of it by osmosis and later (b) think of it first when planning their next startup. As such its goals are much more closely aligned with what that crowd enjoys, than with maximising engagement and thus eyeballs on ads.
Everyone being served the same algorithmic results is a genuine technical difference (I believe; do we actually know that HN doesn't customise the front page for logged-in users?). I think it's quite a fine distinction, though -- both sites are trying to hold the user's attention, one just omits to use an available level of customisation. I have no moral objection to either approach.
I think it's half culture, half being text-based. HN is heavily self-correcting when it comes to low quality content, trolls, spammers, clickbait titles.
It feels very healthy how I can choose what to engage with, and what to ignore.
That's just your bias talking, though. Of course different people are going to have different opinions, but Facebook users feel the same way about Facebook, TikTok users feel the same way about TikTok. Anyone who didn't feel that way wouldn't use it.
I don't entirely understand the point you're making, but I disagree with the last part. People not only have different needs from the media they consume, they also aren't equally rational with how they decide what to consume.
that's just simply not true.
talking about doomscrolling and how it would be better not to do it is one of the favourite pastimes of the doomscroller. loads of fb users hate it but struggle to believe they could do without it.
It's interactive. As in, we write and talk, often about articles posted. That's completely completely different than passively absorbing content spoon fed by Silicon Valley algorithms and sweetened with graphics, attractive people and sudden music and sounds.
Yes. This pedantic gotcha that misses the point is amazing proof of that.
Thanks for demonstrating.
What's the point though? I'd like to think scrolling HN is healthier than Facebook. But is it better than curated subreddits, or Instagram/TikTok showing you stuff about your friends and hobbies?
I don't think it's pedantic to have a bit of self awareness, although engaging in the discussion instead of writing a pithy one liner would be better.
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.
Facebook actually became my preferred social site for a month or two recently - I had a relatively fresh account and managed to direct the algorithm towards mostly serving me interesting archeology, local groups, and some cute pet videos.
Then one day out of the blue it decided to serve me straight up white nationalist content out of the blue. It only happened for a day but the fact that it happened at all is horrifying when you think about that occurring on a global scale.
Now I only open maybe once a week for a minute to check messenger and I hope soon to be able to delete the app of my phone for good. I really worry about what we've unleashed on the world letting these billionaires capture our digital commons.
There are better forums than facebook for things like archeology, local groups, and pet videos. However everybody does them on Facebook these days and so we are stuck...
I gave up on facebook when it decided I wanted to see borderline child porn (the girl was wearing a diaper and positioned as if about to nurse from the topless mom - it might not meet the definition of child porn but it obviously trying to sit just above that line). When reported I was told the group is fine by Facebook's standards. But it isn't fine by mine.
A couple of years ago, I went the indie route (ex big tech). Prior to that I was absolutely allergic to social media and never really used them except maybe LinkedIn.
Sadly as an indie (or frankly anyone these days?) if you don’t have a social media following, you simply don’t exist. Distribution is one of - if not the most - important things to have, so farming social media is unavoidable. The worst part is that you can’t just post and go, these apps (and respective algorithms) expect you to use them regularly for your content to be shown to people.
Automating all of that is also super tricky since there are a billion bots out there. And the alternative being pay-to-win with expensive advertising.
I did the same thing this year, and I agree it's been one of the best decisions I've made. I'm happier, and my mind feels calmer, with less noise. I've started reading a lot, and even writing (I started a blog, and one of my first posts was about exactly this, if you want you can check it out [1])
I've also tried to stay away from the news. I have a very long list of uBlock Origin filters [2] to hide certain words and topics on Reddit (even if its politically tangent, it gets blocked), and it works amazingly well. I hate that I have to go to such lengths to avoid the worst of the internet, but I love the freedom of mind I've gained, like really it feels liberating instead of boring.
One last thing: I've started to notice that the corporate claws are no longer in my head. On the train, I see something like 50–70% of people scrolling through algorithmically curated feeds, and I think about how much influence Zuck and company have over what so many people see and think, with almost no effort. The thing is, I feel like the "old man yells at cloud" meme, like I am the crazy person doing crazy things, but I feel better this way, so I will keep doing it.
[1]: https://blog.benjaopazoc.cl/2026/09/social-media-is-ridiculo...
[2]: https://github.com/benja-opazo/ublock-politics
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.
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
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.
Isn't that the whole point? That I have chosen to visit that and personalize? Otherwise, you could say all personalization skews the worldview, and you'd be technically right (the worst kind of right).
When you're talking political polarization on a societal level, it's a distinction without a difference. The distinction is that when you personalize by site, it's an explicit coarse-grained choice by the individual. When you personalize by algorithm, it's an implicit fine-grained choice by the individual, which is then aggregated and turned into an explicit stream of content by the algorithm. In both cases, you are adapting the content someone sees by what they want to see.
The sort of national unity that we took for granted between 1945-1995 (and to some extent from 1920-1945) was explicitly manufactured by mass media. Here technology presented the same content to all people, because it was cheaper to do it that way. Before the invention of consumer radios in 1920, we had a similar political polarization as we do today, if not even moreso. Also the Federal government was significantly weaker, lacking even powers like direct taxation, let alone the mass surveillance it has now.
>When you personalize by algorithm, it's an implicit fine-grained choice by the individual
I'd argue it's not so much a choice by the individual in that the individual often isn't consciously aware and may actually choose to use the same thing without the algorithm that pushes them towards things such as bubbles if that were even a clearly presented option.
On one hand, you do have a point, if perhaps a somewhat technical one. OTOH, have you seen what passes for political discourse on FB?
Calling it a dumpster fire would be an insult to dumpsters.
I've seen much bigger dumpster fires on Hacker News threads than what my friends put on Facebook, which is 99% just personal updates and pictures.
Sounds like a personal problem if your friends are going around causing dumpster fires.
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.
>Don't be so dense.
I'm not the one bragging on social media how I don't use social media. I'm not the dense one here.
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
Good point. Procrastination is a big part of the issue for a lot of people. I'm a hopeless procrastinator. Some people are better at this than others.
Focusing your attention on things that matter is a good skill to have. Even if you only succeed part of your time, it's better than nothing.
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.
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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
I once came across the concept of a “day list,” and it’s helped me reduce similar habitual distraction/procrastination. It’s like a to-do list, but reframed as “these are the things I could do with my time. Not must.” I describe each item in the simplest possible way, even if it represents a complex task.
Of course, I still use task managers, calendars, and notes apps, and they’re useful in their own ways. But physically writing a day list with pen and paper reliably keeps me on track. If I start to drift, I look back at the list and it brings me back.
Your mileage may vary.
From time to time I remind myself of a rule that has worked well for me. I call it 'no idle screentime'. It makes me more cognisant of when I am browsing without purpose or going off on an unhelpful tangent.
yeah same here. I actually don't spend too much time on my phone and I feel pretty smug about it until I realise I just replace the smaller screen with the bigger one a lot of the time :<
I'm always telling every teacher at school that i spend less than 30 minutes on my phone, while i don't tell anybody i use my laptop for upp to 10h without noticing..
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.
rms (Stallman) used to (still does?) do that where he would download the web requests and emails on a daily basis and then work offline the rest of the day and then sync overnight. At least that's what I remember reading.
I remember thinking about how different that workflow is but it must be incredibly productive. Everything would be lightning fast (even stable Internet isn't always snappy and sometimes it's a chore) and there would basically be zero inline ads or any context switches.
https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
> "I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it."
"intentional web surfing" is a phrase i've been exploring recently. hosting an event to turn it into an activity here in my city, should be interesting to see how people respond.
One way to do this is by going mobile-internet only with limited data. It doesn't stop doomscrolling on sites like this, but it does stop TV and online gaming and that could be very helpful for many people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
> 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.
Even a library with all the books ever written, even those forever lost to time, would be very much finite. And even if such a library was possible - I would really be careful in using the term such as infinity with anything that is in anyway dependant of physical resources - the first ”bias” or rather a filter limiting the books you can read would be the languages you can read. Then time you have to read it. Whether you understand the subject matter. Etc. This already starts to resemble an algorithm of sorts, yes.
I think the mistake you are making is that you believe you can know what decisions and on what basis algorithms on platform apps make for you. Well you cannot. First of all they have again and again been shown to have a hidden agenda’s and besides, they change all the time. In the end it is basically same as letting Zuck or Musk select everything you read.
Instead you can select your own algorithm. It is pretty simple, I did one at age of ten at our local library before I even knew what algorithm was. Only think I knew was that I really liked this book Hobbit by someone named JRR Tolkien.
> there are an infinite amount of books that you'd like to read
if i want to read them all, I don't need help choosing. any book is one I want to read!
if I don't want to read them, I already have opinions. I should just pick one that I do want to read.
and I don't have opinions I can just ask someone for a recommendation.
big libraries existed before algorithmic recommendations, and people managed.
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
so what you are saying is you can't be intentional about picking things all the time. Small accidents are always good, right
> 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 have this same problem. I am not sure if medication will help but I really don't want to go there. My brain is a scattered mess. Even now, I am doing 3 other things at the same time. Is it a matter of "getting good" and just focus? I just don't think there's a secret technique to this.
I think a lot of people struggle with this. Technical work already promoted this kind of behavior since it rewards a very heavy "just in time" lookup style for finding information (we've all had hundreds of chrome tabs open at work before, right?)
And on top of that work chat
And now agents, which are basically all designed for you to spin up several different conversation threads and hop between them constantly while the agent works.
It's no wonder people can't focus. Both work and leisure are basically designed to split up your attention into microscopic fragments.
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
The early days of the internet, when I just had dial up access, were fantastic.
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 play tennis regularly, and I roller skate (inline) regularly. I find that these things provide me a great amount of balance (mentally) as a reminder that 99% of the world is physical / analogue, and that the electronic / digital part is, well, small and unimportant (no matter what is said by those with an axe to grind about the importance of their specific digital service).
I don't read books as regularly as I should, but I always enjoy when I do. I donate plasma once a month and the 'enforced idle time' is perfect for catching up on an hour of reading.
(I'm not very good at either tennis or skating, especially since I've been doing both for 10-odd years, but I enjoy them, they keep me fit, and I'm slowly improving or at least arresting the natural decline that comes with age, and planning on not giving either of them up until I'm literally physically unable to keep doing them)
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.
> It was nearly impossible for most people to afford to fill every waking moment with a book in front of them
I'm not sure I agree with that. Public libraries have been around for a very long time, certainly well before the internet. People could get all the books they wanted to read for free. During summer vacations when I was in grade school, I would read multiple books per month, sometimes multiple per week, because we lived close to a public library.
Could you get another book while you were going to the library and back? Would the library not kick you out if you tried to live there?
The difference between a library and the internet is the difference between obsession and addiction.
I don't know about your library, but my library would let me check out multiple books at once; I think 5 was the limit for children and 10 for adults. It was pretty easy to have a constant feed of text being sent into your bain.
I would argue there is some recency: it used to be the case that editors were working with authors in the sense of building their careers. Not even 10 years ago it could be expected an author might not hit it big until their 3rd or 4th book (George RR Martin was like this) and editors were focused on building the skills of their authors in storytelling. Now editors are also pulled in a billion different directions and work more like project managers on way too many books at a time, and things like typos and whatnot are being introduced into traditionally published books with glossy special edition covers.
I think that may be true, but also a thought terminating cliché.
It can be that most books were low-effort shit, but that the problem has become even worse with time.
I generally do not read anything from this century and definitely bothing mainstream, but just going trough what ibooks and book stores offer, it seems that it really is bunch of romantasia and other porny pulp for mainly women (supposedly because men have stopped reading completely). Sure some of it might be ok or even good, I wouldn’t know, but the sheer amount of it makes me doubt anyone actually reads them in full.
Sure, in the 90’s everyone bought John Grisham’s newest thriller which they started and never finished, but at least it kinda had a plot, characters and maybe it tried to even say something (although I might be pushing a bit too far there). It wasn’t good, but at least you read a story, not just barely disguised fanfiction of werewolves having sex.
Or maybe I am just an old man and have no idea what kids are up to. Time for your meds granpa.
I've started avoiding many things created in 2023 or later - you can be pretty sure writing prior to that wasn't some AI slop someone threw together with a half-arsed prompt.
These days I have this vague paranoia that most of what I'm watching, listening to, interacting with is just the product of some meat proxy somewhere trying to put some more half baked crap in front of my eyeballs.
I wish I had a portal to human curated, absolutely non-AI, non-clickbait BS like the very old internet (which still wasn't perfect). I think that dream is effectively dead now. But old books/movies/music are still good. Now I sound like an old grandpa reminiscing about the old days.
> 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.
Seriously. Gaming today is like...
Achievement unlocked!
Billy just messaged you!
34923748299234 sent you a friend request!
25% OFF FALL SALE ENDING SOON - check out our latest DLC in the Fall Sale before it ends! Up to 25% off!
New update available! Please restart the game to download the latest update!
Single-player games don't have any of these problems except Achievement
Relatively true, but less true every day.
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.
"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."
This is also a great line. We all know the previous sentences but the 'sth will click' is not well-known. I experienced it when reading long novels from Trollope (and I have ADHD).
Upon my third 800-page novel, my reading speed quadrupled, and my concentration came back to me.
I've been trying to motivate myself to read more. I also have ADHD and the constant content drip is like catnip, despite my best efforts (switching to a Minimal Phone, disabling my youtube feed/history, etc...)
I used to be a voracious reader and I LOVED books. They were the distraction I used to escape the world, rather than youtube videos. Or I'd pick up my guitar. Or teach myself how to set up an IRC server. I miss the days when I had that kind of attention and desperately wish I could get it back.
You've given me hope that it's possible.
I have ADHD. What I found that works for me: 1) ban Meta, TikTok and the like from your life. It will take awhile, but you will feel better. This improved my life more that quitting cigarettes. 2) physical exercise several times a week. Go to gym, run, walk, whatever. As long as you get sweaty and exhausted. I find it needs to be pretty hard exercise. My brain is silent after workout for a bit. 3) This sounds crazy, but I swear it works. But a timer on 20minutes. Then just stair at your hand or the empty wall in front of you trying to do the whole 20. After that your brain is so screaming for dopamine that washing dishes feels like a drug. 4) in general, try to be bored. Being bored is good. Having nothing to do is good. Then you just have to be by yourself and think your thoughts. 5) after being bored read, write, play guitar or draw. You will notice how much easier it is to do that and how much your brain rejoices.
Anyway, these work for me.
Much appreciated. I generally know all of this, but being reminded that it really works helps.
It is def possible. There's a quack on Tiktok claiming ADHD is 'the failure of exec function' and 'no matter what you won't achieve your goals' which is definitely not true. But then he is selling pills, so it makes sense.
ADHD can worsen if:
1. you avoid sunshine and daily walks in nature. 2. don't sleep early and skip morning exercise and breakfast. 3. watch short videos or even long ones for 'fun'.
After taking care of these three, the next step is to claim your attention back by reading long books. It's not that difficult. As all real ADHDs know, even doing toilet needs dopamine and is hard to do (boring). So I place a book on the ledge beside me, and when I toilet, I just read. I've read four such novels in two months now, and all in the toilet!
I discovered now that I can read anything just as fast and my attention stays and my brain works better. Try it. Trollope is great, but only if you're a overthinker like me. I recommend Lewis's "The Monk" if you're into morality/ethics + adventure, or Lermontov's "A hero of our time" if you want to see poetry in prose, and also learn a lot of street wisdom (the kind we ADHDs usually lack). I read both BTW (see my blog for reviews, link on my HN profile).
And finally, don't ever be discouraged. That mental model is easy to fall into, but there are many mental models! :)
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.
Ted Nelson apparently predicted it as early as 1965. In his autobiography Possiplex there is a chapter named "My Box of Crayons, 1965", where he shows some of his early sketches, one of which looks just like any ad-infested blogspam website from today. He used it in an ACM presentation, but I can't find it on the web.
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.
>It doesn't just let people know a product exists. It shapes the way we think about ourselves and the world around us.
I completely agree, and I wish people talked about this more. Even if you ignore all the manipulative messaging of the advertisements themselves the fact that there are now posters everywhere telling you to buy things, do things, be better than everyone else is corrosive in itself. Nobody is paying for an advert that tells you "you are fine the way you are, you don't need to buy anything, you should go for a nice walk in the park, it's free".
I've thought before about how the west basically abandoned religion and instead now we just get preached at by corporations and advertisements instead. Whether you like the idea of Christianity and religion or not, at least the message of Jesus was "everyone is equally loved, don't try and be superior to others, don't cling to material possessions". Now instead of just getting preached to at church we get preached to all day from all angles, and the message is the complete opposite.
I realised this about advertising once when I was listening to the cicadas in summer, brands are like those cicadas, they have to shout louder and louder to be heard, to survive. It’s a tragedy of the commons, and what separates us from the animals is that we do have the ability to reason about it and change it. It doesn’t have to be this way.
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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.
I actually no joke had the idea of making this in Rust. Basically store snapshots of the history alongside an eventlog (binary file containing compressed chronological input events).
But the problem with this is that someone could write an agent to mimic a human. And if there is a financial incentive to prove that you're not AI, which there always will be, it is inevitable.
I've considered learning to handwrite to write my first drafts like that. But then I could use an AI to generate realistic looking scans of handwriting.
I guess I could physically mail the originals to a third party verifier. That's what it may come down to for creatives.
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.
The solution is simple, if unpalateable: No restrictions, but if its ever detected you are running a bot, you are punished in a way that ruins your life, without exception.
Are you the global government that is going to enforce this law? How do you establish identity? How can identity be revoked? How do you keep it from being an authoritarian nightmare?
I live 20 minutes metro ride away from the best coffee shop the entire Asia Pacific (awarded 2026), Only Coffee Project in Crows Nest, Sydney. And it's really, really good. But that level of quality is not particularly unique here.
Sydney and Melbourne are known to have the best coffee in the world on average. Italian immigrants came over and took what the Italians started and perfected it. McDonald's McCafe was conceptualised and started in Melbourne in 1993, because of Melbourne's strong coffee scene. Australia is the only country that Starbucks failed in, because the coffee here is already too good.
Having said all of this, I still think that about 2/3 of coffee being made by baristas in Sydney is undrinkable. If the beans aren't poor quality or stored incorrectly, the barista will use tap water that is too hard or soft, grind the beans on the wrong setting, over or underextract, overheat the milk until it denatures, not wipe out the previous grind from the portafilter (leading to an ugly, bitter flavour), and do many other little things that ruin the coffee.
I can literally walk into most coffee shops and hear the milk frother "screaming" as the proteins are being denatured. This is the coffee snob capital of the world, and most people still drink terrible coffee without giving it a second thought.
The average consumer doesn't have enough knowledge to have good taste. It's tragic. It sucks. We would have a better world if people cared just a tiny bit more about the things they consume. But they don't, because there isn't enough time and energy in their life to dedicate to truly looking into something.
And this is why I think that there will unfortunately be a demand for AI art. I don't want this to be the case. I hate it. I hope you do too. I hope we all demand higher standards from the art, culture, and goods that we consume.
But as long as people drink bad coffee, they'll read AI slop and recommend it to their friends. It's just how it is.
You've been downvoted, but I couldn't agree with you more!
Here in the UK, I've recently driven a few thousand miles on longer, road trip-style holidays. That has meant more time in service stations than I'm used to, and I'm shocked (but actually not surprised) at the low bar for everything... food, drink, hygiene; all at exorbitant prices. That's before we get to the bits that really indulge our chimp-brains like the fruit machines and "special, limited edition, collaboration-with-contemporary-film milkshake/slushy/burger" that are just complete marketing exercises.
I was left wondering why people accept this? Am I just a snob, or are people legitimately fine with this? One argument is that we're all struggling — financially, emotionally, existentially — and just trying to survive and get through the day. Who cares if this coffee is £7, loaded with sugar and fat to contribute to our systemic illnesses and contains only the barest minimum of lowest-quality coffee? _"It's a hit, and it gets me through."_
And I think this answers a lot! There's a line from the last Bond film, where the evil villain utters something like "people want oblivion, they want no choices and then to die when they're not looking". It's extreme (he's a Bond-baddie after all), but I don't think it's inaccurate. We're so accustomed to everything being a bit shit that we've collectively checked out and accept it. It explains why so much that would have once been unthinkable socially/politically/morally is now just "fine". AI replacing us in the workplace but also in our hobbies is just the next in a long line of insults.
Perhaps we need to put the French in charge for a while? Nothing a good revolution couldn't fix, and at least we'll be manning the barricades with a good coffee in hand...
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.
I agree that clear cut life objectives are important. This generates a competing interest which is the best way to defeat any addiction.
But working on non-impactful personal projects is also not as bad as doomscrolling twitter. Personal projects are a good way to build skill and grow your own confidence. Twitter doesn't build anything of significance.
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 noticed the Tetris effect when watching Lex Fridman interviews with Academics. Every expert saw the universe through that lens and thought it was the most significant and most interesting way to look at everything.
No internet use is inherently intentional. Old-style internet made you choose where to go, but that doesn't make the use intentional. We make choices all the time on auto-pilot. Choosing isn't the same as being intentional.
It's true that it's harder to stay present on addictively designed feeds. But I find it difficult to stay present even visiting traditional websites / classic style forums. We also constantly get distracted reading books. Our minds are estimated to be wandering between 30 and 50% of the time during pretty much any task, even without phones or social media [1].
Presence and intention are skills–they can be trained. Don't expect significant benefits if you switch out addictive internet for classic without also training your attention. This applies for anything of this nature. A few weeks ago I took a weekend without any devices as well as a lot of awareness practicing just during everyday tasks, and one interesting benefit was how it allowed me to take enjoyment from mundane tasks–I stopped thinking of them as things to get done as soon as possible to get back to the computer and started just being.
If you meditate just a few minutes each day, you will start actually noticing yourself getting distracted and then shift to awareness. It feels annoying that you got distracted, but that just means it's working.
The reason to do this is we are much happier when we are present–a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.
I highly recommend Born to Flourish [2] for an introduction to meditation and the science behind it (it's still easy to read).
[1] https://neurosciencenews.com/mind-wandering-focus-25745/
[2] https://annas-archive.gd/md5/0e405c329f33fcb63b4647e386f0ad7...
> Presence and intention are skills–they can be trained
Please tell me how. I need to really really improve myself here. I used to be very good at being disciplined and focused, but being a parent and manager made me an ad-hoc reactive monkey that is always lagging behind with everything and not delivering on type, which I always did some time ago.
Either the book I recommended in the post or "The Healthy Minds Program" app. The Healthy Minds Program is completely free—only donations are accepted.
The book explains their system and includes meditations. I can send you the audiobook and you can download the epub ebook from that Anna's archive link. Obviously also you can buy a hard copy.
I like the Healthy Minds program app more than other meditation apps because:
It's a curriculum so you aren't just handed a library to randomly choose, there's a set path.
It's completely free with no option to pay other than to donate.
There's a lot of speaker options and I like the speaker.
Someone else liked it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47710358
I'm working on a privacy-focused frontend for the Healthy Minds program because their app is very outdated and has a ton of tracking. You can use it on the web at https://getflourish.org. Completely vibe coded, very much not done, but it has the functionality to at least demo it. The Android app is a lot better but I haven't released it yet. The web version needs a ton of work it was just done in an hour based off the Android app and doesn't even format on desktop.
Try meditation.
If you're completely new to the idea I suggest the book With Each & Every Breath by Thanassiro Bikkhu. It's a Therevada Buddhist book but the breathing meditation instructions in it can be applied even if you want to ignore the other parts of the book.
If you're the sort of person who ignores parts of a book you're reading, try Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante G.
spent a couple of weeks in the mountains without a phone and my god was that life changing. I realized most of the negative thoughts I had were not really mine, and I have more time now to spend doing something more meaningful to me rather than wasting hours (and significant brainpower) doomscrolling.
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
Related and not related. Fans of https://andymatuschak.org/ might want to know that he is now working at https://x.com/pico, which apparently has the same tagline as this article "Attention is all you have". But really truly don't click that link that site is a hellhole.
(Edit: Wording)
Plug for the app I built that's helping me significantly: NoMo Screentime
It blocks all distracting apps. To unblock, I need to choose # of minutes upfront, then pause and put my phone face down for sometime. And then, it unblocks the app for the time I requested, and blocks it again.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nomo-screen-time/id6748623068
I discovered this post not through luck or because of prior (prescient) bookmarking but because a VC decided to build a links aggregator so that techies would hang out on their porch (web property) rather than elsewhere and therefore, would give said VC a chance to invest in their next rocketship.
"There’s one lesson the Tetris effect teaches us: whatever you focus on long enough will end up shaping your thoughts." ---
This should be said more often. In my psychological counseling sessions, I have many victims of porn state that all they think about is you-know-what.
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Good article. I've cut out X and news scrolling. Only grab my phone to play Pokemon go, check my website visitors, read Hacker news or watch an old movie to go to bed. It's been life changing. Give it a try.
Yea, indeed I think we have to proactively keep getting away from doomscrolling/other things which hijack our attention and I don't think it's easy for anyone. It's also not bad if you do it in small doses.
> Doomscrolling will make you stay longer and click on a few more ads. I've personally never bought something out of a Google ad. Tbh how much of their effort they're putting into ads, I don't see much interesting ads. If they would try to sell me some tech/hacky stuff, hell yeah. But random ads, nah thanks.
>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.
Time and attention.
Reminds me very much of this, which I have printed out and placed on my wall at home:
https://www.gurdjieff.org/lannes2.htm
> After all you’re on this blog, so you probably already have a good idea about it.
Well actually HN recommended it to me...
I made it 37 words into the article - highlight and search "Tetromino" -> Wikipedia Tetromino -> Alexey Pajitnov -> ...
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.
"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.
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.
>Nobody was going to put pictures of dead kids and far-right propaganda as a suggestion after a pancake recipe or a cat video.
Had to get to the end of the article to find the liberal brainrot.
Pastor used to say: "You become what you behold." too true.
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.
> Do you want to listen to music? Just open a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm figure out what you like. Please ignore the AI slop they will insert in between real songs to avoid paying royalties to real artists.
To be honest it is worse than this. Spotify over the years just seems to have gotten worse and worse at the one job I want it to do well which is just play the music I already know I want to play, which should be incredibly obvious from my play count and what I've downloaded.
Instead I'm regularly surprised by random noise such as popover in-product ads for extra features I don't care about, and simple AI features I might want like detecting I am in this certain place at this certain time where I usually listen to these albums or playlists so maybe weight them accordingly in a quick access list on the home screen or something aren't, for whatever reason, done.
I mean this doesn't even need LLMs it's just an algorithm, but you see what I mean. Using intelligence in the ways I should obviously care about from the way I use the product, instead of trying to get me to change the way I use it (I won't, I wish there was a way I could just definitively tell them this).
Alas, after years of annoyance with this it's still just about above the bar of useful enough, so I keep paying, and just can't be bothered to invest the time switching to some other service like apple music. So in a sense I'm probably encouraging this behaviour by not churning.
Youre hearing ads as a paying user?
My biggest complaint re Spotify was poor shuffling, hearing the same song over and over. Finally resolved by using Spotipy to regularly re-order big playlists, and just disable shuffle.
in-product ads, upsells/ads on their own features and new sub ventures like podcasts, audiobooks and show tickets.
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.
You don't actually control most of the things in your world. Your neighbour, for instance, isn't a reflection of your preferences and interests.
Also - in your home, it's YOU that's rejigging things. A result of your intent, your actions. Not curated and delivered to you via some corporate monster with a variety of incentives that are directly at odds with yours.
You don't control everything on internet too. There are things like your neighbor and there are things moulded by your interests as perceived by the internet.
Intent is not a black and white thing. People sometimes read your intentions via your body language. Same goes with internet. You did express your intent in some way.
Not really sure where you're going with this.
You said "The physical world around you is also sculpted by your actions" ... I mentioned many ways in which that's not true. And you now mention the internet is also not completely controlled by one's mind.
That's true ... and ???
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But it does feel like intentional doom-scrolling exists, some of it intentional that can be so inspiring. Mainly when I'm keeping in mind "what will I remember", some of it truly stick
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
Anyone managed to use the Google Chrome "embedded" model to sort and filter their bookmarks / tabs?
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...
> 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-...
nice title but then my question is more about what I should be directing my attention towards habitually
as a side note I was experimenting with the mental health implications of whatever you focus on as creating whatever emotions you experience, to some extent
You should direct your attention to what you are doing in the moment. If you are doing the dishes, you can practice awareness by noticing the sensations of doing the dishes, the movements, the various senses.
If you're doing the laundry, notice how the clothes feel in your hands.
If you're walking, notice your breath, notice how your feet and legs feel walking on the ground.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49795945
That's a different thing, I mean the question of if I should do dishes or laundry or something else next
I heard the term "Gruen Transfer"[1] to describe the successful hijacking of attention in a store. I think it's useful to describe digital platforms, too - you go to YouTube to watch a video recommended by a friend, and then when you're done, The Feed attempts to pull a Gruen on you.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_transfer
(what I'm describing is the first thing linked to on the wikipedia page as a disambiguation)
There was an Australian TV series named The Gruen Transfer on the topic of advertising, which had some really insightful commentary, humour, as well as a regular advertising-insider guy who gave great insights 'from the inside' but was inherently grossly dislikeable in most of the things that he big-upped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_(TV_series)
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/gruen
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.
stop recommending revanced and use morphe
Oh funny I thought you were talking about LLMs.
Same, and I thought it's a clever play on words on the classic "Attention is all you need" - https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 - which led us to what we have now
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.
Attention is the axis of reality. Focus on a thing and it gets realer. Ignore a thing and it fades away.
I really liked to read this. i had this idea in mind but its nice to be remind of it
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 think the funny (and somewhat scary) thing about ad-supported platforms is that both the creators of the platform and the customers implicitly agree that the content just isn't that valuable. They know that if they paywalled the platform and forced people to make that value judgement then barely anyone would pay.
Which is kind of scary where you realise people spend hours and hours each day watching youtube slop, tiktok, instagram reels, while also subconsciously feeling "this content is worthless and I wouldn't pay $10 a month to keep watching 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.
Interesting thread
> 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.
The only thing I watch on youtube.com is music stuff (electronic, industrial) and occasional tech stuff like some retro computing stuff or such. I very rarely use it. I just went to the home page to see an example because I was curious. One of the recommended videos about 3 rows down? "Donald Trump Recruits Rambo To End The Iran War". It's AI slop. I watch NOTHING about politics or similar on here. Nothing about the US or war things or anything. "The algorithm" is doing exactly what your quoted snippet indicated, scarily enough.
I tend to agree with the post, but narrowly on the hook:
> Do you want to listen to music? Just open a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm figure out what you like. Please ignore the AI slop they will insert in between real songs to avoid paying royalties to real artists.
To be honest, my Spotify recommendation algorithm complaint is about the exact opposite, that it’s too conservative in what it suggests. Sometimes I feel stuck in a musical “echo chamber.”
I hear from this post that recommendation algorithms are too broad, but it seems from policymakers the bigger complaint is again the opposite (“echo chambers” and “rabbit holes.”) Not sure which is more compelling, but they are surely not entirely orthogonal features.
What's a good RSS service / client nowadays?
I’m quite happy with RSS Guard. Pleasant and quick to use, plenty of features, and can stay out of your way as much as you like.
It is definitely a XXIst century skill to direct your attention. I am convinced that it is not only by deliberately choosing to be outside the tech bubble, reading paper books or newspapers but also by « pruning » algorithms.
Especially on YouTube that can spiral you on a rabbit hole, it can become a very powerful learning force. I have quite a few friends that became experts in niche subjects by rabbit holing themselves on these topics on YouTube, for example, a serigraphist, a carpenter on Japanese carpenting art or a ceramist.
I think the issue already existed for those who had access to the largest libraries and book stores, only Internet reduced friction, increased span of topics and added video.
Since Da Vinci, it is not possible anymore to have all the knowledge in your mind so focus and attention is the main super power.
Just saying, the author blames corporate internet and the algorithm that feed you content, but if you browse 2 articles before (this one: https://alicegg.tech/2026/06/12/popular-upcoming) he then praised steam for removing the “upcoming game list” that was purely based on the number of wishlist a game received and is praising the new algorithmic personalized calendar of upcoming “for you”. I find it a bit hypocritical.
People use these algorithms because they love them, and yeah someone posting once every 1 or 2 month is not going to make it in these days and ages. I don’t think the internet became worst, it just adapted to other needs.
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.
Attention is all you _are_
> YouTube recommends videos designed to keep us watching
Yes, but you don’t have to subscribe to what it suggests. I keep a carefully curated list of subscriptions and very rarely look at recommendations. That gives me a high-quality filter without all the algorithmic BS.
at least with youtube, you can be quite defensive with what it's shoving down your throat.
turn off view history, so you don't see 100 toilet videos after watching a video on japanese toilets.
aggressively click "Don't show me this" in its video suggestions, whenever it strays towards politics or similar bait.
despite the inundation of slop, rage bait, and brain rot, youtube still has a goldmine of good content if you can defend yourself from the rest.
Not abou AI. But excellent sniping indeed.
is doomscrolling actually net bad for you? it seems that younger generations (gen alpha) spend disproportionately more time doomscrolling / being iPad kids, but they also seem significantly smarter than older generations.
this might be the correlation causation fallacy, but it seems to me that combining micro-pieces of reality though a continual stream might actually have net positives on information.
> they also seem significantly smarter than older generations.
They seem or they are? In many places, statistically, they're actually NOT smarter. It's the other way around.
https://cepr.harvard.edu/news/2026/05/why-us-test-scores-are... https://time.com/article/2026/05/16/student-test-scores-read...
wait till we finally discover that attention is also all we are...!
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These days, except when i am working, i write with a fountain pen or read physical books.
It seems that as digital technology advances, analog experiences become increasingly necessary and valuable.
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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.
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.
Machine learning makes the doom scroll more effective/worse. That's the connection I inferred.
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.