[monospacegames]

It's funny how multiple commenters here are reacting to this article by saying that older media is also bad when the article itself is about specific observations about how relying on AI and overengaging in social media can lead to detrimental outcomes.

Ironically this tendency to form an opinion without investing time might also be a form of brain rot.

[HeinzStuckeIt]

Using a HN post to talk about something unrelated you wanted to talk about anyway, has been part of HN for years. Probably because a lot of people feel with the rise of 140-character type social media, there are fewer and fewer venues on the internet where you can substantially talk to educated and non-brand-hustling people about the things that you think about.

[Karrot_Kream]

Yes and it's largely made the site lose the rigor it used to have. You compare it to Slashdot downthread which I don't think is a good thing. The reason I joined this site so long ago is because Slashdot was more interested in tech culture shibboleths than actual tech or business. Natalie Portman!! Hot grits! Embrace, extend, extinguish!!

Unfortunate to see the same happen here but that's life I guess. The fact that the news for nerds group is so desperate to find community that they glom onto every IRC and website they can is a bit sad but I guess it's the nature of online cultures. But oh yeah enshittificiation and the year of the Linux desktop is tomorrow and Meta is going down down down or something right?

On the other hand it's funny how folks who like that culture keep putting it on a pedestal. Why? It contains little predictive power. It teaches little. It's just about opining. Is it that fulfilling to find online bytes that share your opinions? I guess I use my real life friends and family for that.

It's social media in a nutshell. We're more interested in finding people like us than confronting reality. When that happens at scale, you lose mass consensus. HN is but one piece of that.

[cloverich]

> We're more interested in finding people like us than confronting reality.

The reality is there arent many people like us outside of work. I would love to be able to talk about this kind of stuff irl but in all my years none of my irl friends, acquaintences, etc, are more than remotely interested in the kinds of topics that come up here. There is a distinct difference between echo chambers where the opinions are common (politics), and thread discussions like on HN where real life versions are fleetingly rare. I dont think its entirely fair to conflate the two. eg:

> Is it that fulfilling to find online bytes that share your opinions?

I discuss on HN as much to find and genuinely debate alternative opinions, and IME thats a pretty common pattern. i have learned so much reading other comments, formulating thoughtful responses to others, and have others break down / extend / critique my own shared opinions. Its what makes HN enjoyable and also the primary way its different than other social media sites.

[Karrot_Kream]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45848504

206 points and 129 points on a 47 word blog post where most of the thread is about what people think about the title.

Are you sure it's actually different from other social media sites or do you just find it more relevant to you than the others?

[cloverich]

HN discourages jokes, memes, and flags divisive topics. They don't support images. They frequently down rank topics that aren't generating meaningful content, especially if its getting, in effect, too much (divisive) engagement. That algorithm is the literal opposite of all the top social media sites these days. Yes, it is quite a bit different!

[HeinzStuckeIt]

I was on Slashdot 1998–2004 and found plenty of substantial tech discussion. The meme culture you mentioned was there, but it was usually in posts downvoted into invisibility unless you deliberately chose to browse at -1.

> I guess I use my real life friends and family for that.

In my region, I never had real-life friends I could shoot the shit about FOSS geekdom with. And nearly all of my friends forged in youth through shared interest in intellectual topics, drifted away from that as they married and had children and had to spend all their waking hours on family or working to support family.

Where I live has a traditional cafe culture, so there is a third place for men to go to daily and interact, but the topics that can be talked about there are very limited indeed, so obviously nerds “glom onto” internet communities.

[Karrot_Kream]

> I was on Slashdot 1998–2004 and found plenty of substantial tech discussion.

I think this was, roughly, peak Slashdot (tho I'll admit I was probably too young to be a good judge of it at this point.) From 2004 the meme discussions started overriding a lot of the regular discussion, and by 2007 ish the site was constantly getting derailed into EEE threads the way HN is constantly getting derailed into enshittification threads.

> Where I live has a traditional cafe culture, so there is a third place for men to go to daily and interact, but the topics that can be talked about there are very limited indeed, so obviously nerds “glom onto” internet communities.

My point of contention is that, this form of FOSS geekdom culture has many, many venues. Do you want to hop onto IRC? HN? Reddit? Discord? It may not be mainstream but it occupies the internet in a deep, fundamental way. On the other hand actual hard-nosed technical or business content is a lot, lot rarer. The loss of a site that discusses tech to become Yet Another FOSS Geek Social Site is to me a much sadder thing; there's a lot fewer of the former and a lot more of the latter. But, as you say, I've noticed a lot of the users are really desperate for a social venue to talk about tech nerd culture and so that's what crowds out all the other discussion.

[HeinzStuckeIt]

> derailed into EEE threads the way HN is constantly getting derailed into enshittification threads

And yet in hindsight, this seems to have been a pretty accurate way of looking at developments.

Anyway, there’s a difference between chit-chat that is just inane posting of the same old memes, and long-form-text chit-chat where people occasionally learn something new. IRC is no substitute, as long-form text isn’t part of the culture and some channels discourage social activity entirely. Reddit is enshittified and, because the standard input device is a phone screen, so hostile to long-form text that posting just a couple of solid paragraphs marks you out as a weirdo who will get downvoted.

You like business news, but IMO that’s the worst part of HN. For a site based on “anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity”, most people who are working hard to develop a startup simply don’t have the leisure time for a wide range of interests. That’s why posts on the humanities here often draw some less-than-informed responses, even though many nerds would see them as important a part of the life of the mind as hacking computers.

[Karrot_Kream]

> You like business news, but IMO that’s the worst part of HN.

I'd be much happier with an HN that actually talks about tech and nothing else. It's unclear to me why the 3000th thread about social media being evil needs 1000 posts of armchair opinion or how every thread about Meta devolves into declarations about how the company will implode (why? Because God will smite it for its sins? Lol.) Or whether or not AI will doom is all. The gravity of activity on this site is tech culture. It's not really tech. Obviously a certain person really enjoys this culture. But I'm not more intelligent, aware, or even better informed because of it. My take is the folks that enjoy this culture don't care much in the same way nobody cares about these things at a sports bar or cafe.

My guess is the reason I joined HN (this is my 2nd account, my first was in 2007) and why someone joins the site now is very different. Back then I was interested to see the developments on web tech. We watched Javascript build and mature into today's browser language. We watched the rise of dynamic languages, a rebound to static languages, and now interesting developments like Rust and Zig. TCP got improvements, now we have things like WebRTC, QUIC, Homa, and gRPC. But I suspect today people join here because they want to talk about whether AI will steal their jobs and are only tangentially interested in how LLMs and transformers actually work.

[dingnuts]

this website exists as an advertisement for a brand. the people here are hustling harder than anywhere! it's worse than LinkedIn! that's why this website is a constant dick measuring contest -- it's a news site run by a venture capitalist firm about startups!

Why would you think this place is not absolutely full of shills?

the Internet is so dead, I'm sure I'm arguing with a bot. I need to go outside..

[HeinzStuckeIt]

HN is definitely founded by a creepy VC firm and some of the posts get comments by startup-culture hustlers. But most posts don't. Instead you find the same broad population of people looking for news for nerds that used to be on Slashdot etc.

HN's interface, and showing just a username in a tiny font, honestly gives me less of that tiring feeling of people around me hustling a personal brand, than even the fediverse which is supposedly "healthy social media".

[Der_Einzige]

I hear you about being very sad about the internet "dying" and real engagement being gone.

HN is full of bullshit, shills, charlatans, and extremely bad moderation/rules. Yet it, like Linkedin, dramatically increases your earning potential if you post here.

[kjkjadksj]

Uhh, the yc job board is essentially a different site entirely than this forum.

[sureglymop]

I don't really understand how they used "brainrot". I thought brain rot was this generations surrealism, a type of art?

By all means, study the detrimental effects of social media and AI on our brains but don't correlate it with people creating art just because.

[triMichael]

There are two types of "brainrot" that are related but not the same. Essentially brainrot is anything that is anti-thinking.

The first type of brainrot is what happens when you let other things think for you and your thoughts and opinions become not your own. AI is anti-thinking because you can let the machine think for you. Social media is anti-thinking because you can let other peoples' opinions think for you.

On the other hand, memes actually communicate ideas. For example, The Simpsons Ralph meme "I'm in danger" and the dog on fire "This is fine" memes both represent understanding being in a dangerous situation while doing nothing about it. Star Trek was actually way ahead of its time with the episode "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" which was about a culture that used memes as communication.

So what do you get when you combine brainrot ("anti-thinking") with memes? You get brainrot memes, which is the second type of brainrot. For example, 6-7. 6-7 doesn't communicate ideas. It doesn't mean anything. Instead, it communicates the opposite of an idea. So when someone says "6-7", they are embracing using language in an anti-thinking way. In this way, brainrot memes can be thought of more as an anti-meme. It's as contagious as an idea, but since it doesn't contain any information, it acts more like a virus. So brainrot memes are essentially mind-viruses that embrace the lack of thinking that comes with brainrot.

[sureglymop]

> So when someone says "6-7", they are embracing using language in an anti-thinking way.

Using language in an anti-thinking way seems like a somewhat interestingly thought through mission though. If that's even the case.

The fact that you try to think about it that much though is arguably what makes it almost funny.

Art doesn't have to make you think or convey any ideas. L'art pour l'art. It doesn't matter if it's on TikTok or wherever.

[tekbruh9000]

Here's an example of how reliance on traditional media leads to detrimental outcomes: https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...

Anyone from far away lands, kings, priests, CEOs, rando on HN reaching into your mind... all engaged in information shaping to encourage allegiance. It makes instinctual sense for NY Times editors to get others to risk their health through limited coverage. Biology is self selecting and instinctual to the core; it does not run in high minded philosophy, just physics. The only way to confirm our efforts now matter is stay alive longer to verify. Something entropy does not afford our individual biology.

I have taken to ignoring those not on the cutting edge of health science and essential technology for food safety and production. Everyone else is gaming clicks.

[webspinner]

Oh, I don't exactly trust the NYT. But hey, I do read them once in a while. After that, I always do more research.