I think some of this is caused by the non-obvious mechanisms of how interactions on these platforms work.
When you replied to a thread on a phpbb forum (or when you reply to this HN thread), your reply „lived” in that thread, on that forum, and that was that. The algorithm wouldn’t show that reply to your dad.
I remember liking a comment on Facebook years ago, and being horrified when some of my friends and family got a „John liked this comment, join the discussion!” notification served straight onto their timelines, completely out of context. I felt spied on. I thought I was interacting with a funny stranger, but it turned out that that tiny interaction would be recorded and rebroadcast to whomever, without my knowledge.
Similarly, commenting on a youtube video was a much different experience when your youtube account wasn’t linked to all your personal information.
If you comment on a social media post, what’s going to happen? How sure are you that that comment, however innocuous it may seem now, won’t be dredged up 8 years by a prospective employer? Even if not, your like or comment it’s still a valuable data point that you’re giving to Zuckerberg or similar. Every smallest interaction enriches some of the worst people in the industry, if not in the world.
The way I speak, the tone I use, the mannerisms I employ, they all change depending on the room I’m in and on the people I’m speaking to - but on modern social media, you can never be sure who your audience is. It’s safer to stay quiet and passive.
This is very well said! Probably also why social media has become so "fake" - back in the early days of Facebook, friends would talk to each other like friends. But after my religious aunt started seeing the comments I was leaving on a friend's pics, let's just say that stopped pretty quick.
Now the only thing I would ever consider posting on Facebook is "What a beautiful day! Went for a great hike with my family and enjoyed nature."
Very true! As I remember, Google+ was a step towards figuring out this issue - instead of a general Facebook-style „Friends” that includes all sorts of different people you know (or once knew), the idea was that you’d have multiple „circles” of acquaintances that you could post to separately: family, college friends, coworkers, etc.
Of course that didn’t really pan out, and the social network itself collapsed under its own weight within a couple years without ever reaching widespread adoption. It’s interesting though, because I think it really was ahead of its time - these days I just have multiple different groupchats that I text, and that’s basically the same thing.
Yeah I liked Google+, at the time Google had a much better reputation though, if they hadn't shut it down then they did Google+ would probably be fully enshittified by now!
> And it's not even worth it... none of those kids will be a professional sportis/musician, it's just wasted time...
I can’t agree there. The point of extracurricular activities is to teach the kid new things and expand their horizons, not the (admittedly highly unlikely) possibility that those activities will become their career.
Most children won’t become historians either, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t teach history at schools.
Sure, but in addition to everything they learn at school (and get tired of), do they really need 3x2 hours of violin, 3x2 hours of tennis and 3x2 hours of spanish weekly? + weekend tennis matches. (my coworkers kid taken as example, 12yo)
I like my job too, i learn a lot of it, but that's basically half-time of a second job (if you include commute) for a 12yo kid... that's just too much, both for the kids and their parents.
> Your peers are now way more aware of child abuse, kidnappings, murders, than your parents were.
They’re technically more aware of those risks, sure, but any of those crimes are less likely than ever before. This increase in awareness and anxiety isn’t based in data, it’s based on sensational lies and myths. Those lies cause strong feelings and get eyeballs and clicks, and so they spread really well through our fractured media ecosystem.
Nearly all child kidnappings are performed by one of the parents, and there’s no confirmed case of a child ever dying from poisoned Halloween candy.
Yeah, I wonder if you plotted crime rate vs time spent outside or something like that (car accident rates are usually reported as an average of an accident / # of miles, since how much you drive changes your likelihood of being in an accident)
I’ve been getting back into movies this year and my 2018 laptop has reached the stage where it’s no longer useful as an everyday tool, so I’m turning it into a home media server.
I’m only a couple days in, and I’ve already learned so much about networks, containers, codecs, ffmpeg, and so on.
Agreed. If immortality was discovered tomorrow (or at least some sort of anti-aging treatment), there’s no way it would become available to a regular person. All of us would still age and die, but we’d be ruled forever by ageless ghouls.
> Plus it raises all these difficult questions about the philosophy of mind and theory of personal identity - is the backup actually you? Or do you die, and you are survived by someone else who isn’t you but thinks they are?
You don’t need sci-fi mind backups for that. How certain are you that when you go to sleep tonight, the person who wakes up tomorrow will be „actually you”? How certain are you that all your memories were lived by „actually you”?
The answer, I suppose, is that we don’t know what „actually you” even means, how consciousness works, or why you’ve even got a (seemingly) continuous internal experience.
I think there's no "you", just an illusion that there's this uninterrupted "you"-ness from birth to death. It's a very useful illusion for the most part.
I view life (in the philosophical sense; consciousness) as the stream of subjective experiences (qualia) that arise out of life (in the biological sense; neurons and such). Right now my life consists of a collection of sustained interest in this discussion, a little hunger, the qualia of seeing the screen and the realization that I'm sitting a bit uncomfortably. In a few moments "I" will be a collection of other ephemeral qualia.
There's no "real" continuation between one experience and then next, just like there's no real continuation between my past "self" and my future "self", but they're both extremely useful illusions. I'll eat to subside that hunger that was registered a moment ago or change my position to get comfortable. I'll be responsible for "my" previous actions, as well. I'll basically be able to function as a temporally continuous being.
On the topic of immortality, I'd like to be virtually immortal so I can pursue my goals indefinitely. If I stop having goals or feel like I've had enough, I could always kill myself. My goals arise from my ethics, my biological needs and probably many other things. Why would I be OK with biology and death preventing me from achieving my goals at some arbitrary age?
So for me "immortality" is both being able to continue the illusions of self indefinitely (which I admit, feels good intrinsically), and being to continue the pursuit of my goals indefinitely. The goals seem to actually have more "real" continuity than "I" do.
The most troubling thing with immortality is the biological imperative to live that makes suicide so hard. But I think after a few centuries many people will reach that point. It's not a bad thing, it's just a personal choice.
We can't even tell for certain the we have existence in time beyond just this moment - our only source of that is a memory of time passing, which we can't validate.
A lot of institutions, even crucial ones that we all depend on to manage important aspects of society, have barely started adapting to this newfangled fad called the internet. Maybe they’ll figure out what to do about generative AI somewhere around 2060.
When you replied to a thread on a phpbb forum (or when you reply to this HN thread), your reply „lived” in that thread, on that forum, and that was that. The algorithm wouldn’t show that reply to your dad.
I remember liking a comment on Facebook years ago, and being horrified when some of my friends and family got a „John liked this comment, join the discussion!” notification served straight onto their timelines, completely out of context. I felt spied on. I thought I was interacting with a funny stranger, but it turned out that that tiny interaction would be recorded and rebroadcast to whomever, without my knowledge.
Similarly, commenting on a youtube video was a much different experience when your youtube account wasn’t linked to all your personal information.
If you comment on a social media post, what’s going to happen? How sure are you that that comment, however innocuous it may seem now, won’t be dredged up 8 years by a prospective employer? Even if not, your like or comment it’s still a valuable data point that you’re giving to Zuckerberg or similar. Every smallest interaction enriches some of the worst people in the industry, if not in the world.
The way I speak, the tone I use, the mannerisms I employ, they all change depending on the room I’m in and on the people I’m speaking to - but on modern social media, you can never be sure who your audience is. It’s safer to stay quiet and passive.
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