I don't understand how people who are into their late 20s and 30s have time for all of this online drama
If you have to work, manage relationships, and have to cook and clean up after yourself, where is the extra time for it?
Not only that, but with what little free time that's left, people would choose to spend it on engaging in online drama instead of doing something actually pleasant
It's one of those things that I thought was funny and entertaining when I was younger, but it just seems kind of dumb to me now. Similar to the digital nomad thing. Maybe I've just gotten boring, idk
lapcat 117 days ago [-]
You've spent the time to go on Hacker News, read about the online drama, and then comment on the online drama.
The author considered their writing on social media to be social activism, so that may be why they spent so much time on it, for a higher purpose.
matrix87 117 days ago [-]
> You've spent the time to go on Hacker News, read about the online drama, and then comment on the online drama.
it's usually easier to read about something after the fact than it is to participate in it as it's unfolding. Especially if there are strong emotions involved
> social activism
It's less about the end goal than the way she goes about accomplishing it. Taking the time to seek out alt-right troll accounts to regularly engage with is probably the worst way of doing it (both from the standpoint of effectiveness and psychological cost involved)
saurik 117 days ago [-]
But, this is the drama... you are part of the drama ;P (as am I! and we are both doing this--"instead of doing something actually pleasant"--because, what? FWIW, I can see the argument that it is maybe being justified mentally as "social activism"--for both of us, though in different ways--but I actually think, at least for me, that it is a form of escapism and addiction).
matrix87 117 days ago [-]
Well as far as drama goes, this community is about as dramatic as a box of cereal
On the one hand for me, it's escapism. On the other, there's a lot of novelty available, new things that we'd never encounter irl. Which gives us new ideas for things to try irl. Sort of like the printing press spreading information faster
John23832 117 days ago [-]
Eh idk if that’s true.
Think about the drama that was the recent rust for Linux lead resigning. People then have their opinions about it and then it spills into the comments here.
I think you just care less about the social media drama as described in the submission (which is ok).
117 days ago [-]
117 days ago [-]
bongodongobob 117 days ago [-]
Anyone who describes themselves as an openly queer activist and microblogger is not really representative of the avg person. Their entire thing is being online all the time. It's not a hobby for them, it's their whole personality. I'll guess you're probably a straight white male due to the odds on this site, like me. We don't have the same struggles perceived or otherwise. It does seem alien to me. But, live and let live.
ViktorRay 117 days ago [-]
You say “live and let live” but a life spent terminally online is no life at all.
I remember when I was in elementary school teachers would talk about minimizing time spent watching tv. Parents would be encouraged to tell their kids to minimize tv watching and spend more time reading. The point wasn’t to never watch tv. But to keep the time spent watching as little as possible.
It was well understood that tv is addictive and a life spent in front of the tv is no life at all.
But now we have the internet. Far more addictive than tv. People spend hours staring at the interactive tv that is the smartphone.
People spend hours engaging in “activism” on the internet that feels good inside but accomplishes nothing. The feeling of false accomplishment feeds into the addiction. Everyone instinctively knows a life watching tv is a waste but people are deluded into thinking that a life on social media matters.
In other words it’s all a drug. Makes you feel good but leads you to waste your life. Nobody says live and let live to a drug addict.
“It’s not a hobby for them, it’s their whole personality”
Just like a life lived like this is no life at all, a personality like this is no personality at all.
bongodongobob 117 days ago [-]
Nah. The older I get the more I realize we're all making this up as we go along and there is no round two. That means different things to different people. Some people think typing on computers making bullshit B2B apps is no way to live. Some people think it is. It takes all kinds to run this big humanity experiment and it's a good thing that people value different things. We need people to have different and even bad ideas for any of this to work.
I couldn't care less how others spend their time, I'm just glad that everyone has their niche.
watwut 116 days ago [-]
> People spend hours engaging in “activism” on the internet that feels good inside but accomplishes nothing. The feeling of false accomplishment feeds into the addiction.
Most people accomplish nothing. You go playing basketball with guys after work, you will accomplish nothing with it. You sit and read books, you are accomplishing nothing. You tend to your flowers at home and you are not actually accomplishing all that much.
Insisting on accomplishment all the time just leads to mental health problems.
> Just like a life lived like this is no life at all, a personality like this is no personality at all.
Why? Of course it is personality. It is not like the rest of us all had super special valuable personalities either. We just exist.
sieabahlpark 117 days ago [-]
[dead]
CatWChainsaw 117 days ago [-]
Even in that age range I recognized that trying to keep up with fleeting drama was a red queen's race. That said I think whichever generations are "always online" at the current time are going to find it a lot harder to leave that headspace in the future, both because of the addiction-promoting behaviors baked into platforms and because of various motivations for trying to keep up. Social topics/"politics", influencer aspirations, toxic positivity, and lack of any other meaningful interactions all come to mind.
jltsiren 117 days ago [-]
There are around 6000 waking hours in a year. A full-time job is 1/3 of that. Maybe managing your life is another 1/3. That still leaves 2000 hours, which is plenty for hobbies, vacations, doing silly things, and feeling bored.
Some people are busy because they need multiple jobs or have unexpected caretaker responsibilities. But many who feel busy are busy because they choose to be busy. They have made so many commitments that they are doing the time equivalent of living paycheck to paycheck.
dijit 117 days ago [-]
5840 hrs awake, based on 16hours per day.
2080 hrs at work, based on a 40hr work week - of course not counting days off.
Math seems to be mathing (mostly) but it feels wrong, work definitely feels like it takes up much more than 1/3rd of our waking hours.
DavidPiper 117 days ago [-]
Things get murky because you have to include commuting and preparation/returning home time. But I also like to distinguish physical time and mental time. Sure physically I'm at work for 40 hours a week, but the mental space it takes up is far more.
If anyone has good tips on how to mentally separate from work after hours I would love to hear them. I know some people can literally switch it on and off like a light but I've never been able to.
matrix87 116 days ago [-]
40 hours in software feels kind of idealistic. Where I work, it feels like they're constantly pushing people to do shit outside of business hours
fnfjfk 117 days ago [-]
Well, the author does kinda come around to that at the end:
> I’ve read more books in the last 16 months than I have in the 16 years before them. I’ve ran 5k, 8k for the first time in my life. I’m able to do more situps now than at any point since I was probably 15 years old.
At the start, I was definitely thinking "why keep going to a website you say is like hell?"
> We so belovedly called it the “hellsite” for good reason: the daily trek through the timeline was like tapdancing in a minefield. Twitter was awful because it rewarded awfulness.
bell-cot 117 days ago [-]
Drama is as much a state of mind as it is something which requires blocks of time. And younger folks are often amazing multi-taskers...at least at the functionality level needed to do drama.
And online, those who have cut back on (or are slacking off at) work, relationships, etc. are probably over-represented.
(Yes, their wanting to drama I really don't get. But I'm an old geezer, so...)
interludead 117 days ago [-]
Online drama can be a way to escape
117 days ago [-]
Jiro 117 days ago [-]
It's easy to say that forgetting is an ethical act if you're the perpetrator of things you want people to forget. Reading this article, it seems she once got her jollies making the world a worse place for her political enemies.
She seems to sincerely think that Twitter is bad, but it's not bad because of what she did with it, it's bad because well, you don't always win fights on it and when you attack someone you can get in trouble too and that's really messy and she doesn't want to deal with that. If she didn't want to deal with it, she didn't have to participate; the kind of political activism described in this article is not how most people use Twitter.
I can understand wanting people to forget if you said one or two things years ago and people took them out of context. Or even if you did one misdeed, but it was years ago. This is not, according to her article, why she wants people to forget.
at_a_remove 117 days ago [-]
Yeah, it sounds like she only regrets the swings she took that didn't land. I am not surprised, she was so often busy cranking the wheels of the Euphemism Treadmill. Anything, I suppose, to distract one from the burden of self-awareness.
ryandv 117 days ago [-]
One of the issues with removing traces of yourself online, when identity in the postmodern digital era is almost totally determined by those artifacts or representations of ourselves we publish, is that you are effectively performing an act of digital suicide. With no representations of yourself on the net, you may as well not exist, and people are free to project anything whatsoever unto the tabula rasa of your nonexistent persona.
While this is an excellent Rorshach for exposing the internal biases of others and demonstrating that even the staunchest progressives are also readily capable of misidentifying others or failing to recognize their "self-identification", the issue of not being seen for who one is and constantly "misidentified" also presents its own challenges.
Yodel0914 117 days ago [-]
> With no representations of yourself on the net, you may as well not exist, and people are free to project anything whatsoever unto the tabula rasa of your nonexistent persona
I think this is only as issue if you are a “known” person in some regard. For most of us plebs, receding into anonymous nonexistence is likely a very healthy thing.
ryandv 117 days ago [-]
Even while writing pseudonymously and innocuously you are at risk of being doxxed and subjected to mob "justice;" as an example of this see Scott Alexander's writings on Slate Star Codex.
In light of this the safest recourse is to simply not post anything online at all, for fear of being doxxed at some point in the future (an inevitability given modern standards for and cultural attitudes towards privacy) and subjected to invective for years' old posts and writings. This is the culmination and terminal state of "anonymous nonexistence" you refer to.
In this way the chilling effect achieves totality, and nobody feels comfortable sharing genuine thoughts online at all. It's arguable that this is a societally healthy state of affairs.
watwut 116 days ago [-]
Scott Alexander is not an example of that at all.
Yodel0914 117 days ago [-]
Scott/SSC is an interesting example. In my dichotomy of “known people” vs “plebs”, even behind a pseudonym Scott is far closer to the “known people” end.
He writes about (sometimes) controversial stuff for a large(ish) and influential audience. He wants to be known and influential. I think he deserves the right to do so pseudonymously, but that’s tangential to my actual point.
Most of us plebs do not want to be famous or influential, and therefore it doesn’t make a ton of sense to leave a trail of possibly regrettable or easily misinterpreted bits of data attached to our real names.
seanhunter 117 days ago [-]
The Scott Alexander thing is interesting to me in terms of how online dramas work because the drama assumes its own momentum and the facts struggle to maintain the pace.
Scott Alexander was not in fact doxxed. He said in his final post before deleting his blog that the NYT planned to reveal his name, deleted his blog and the NYT published their article three weeks after he had already revealed his own name.[1]
The pros and cons of whether they would have revealed his name became this massive hoo-hah and maybe they would have revealed his name given the chance but the fact is he was not in reality doxxed by anyone other than himself.
I have never seen so very very many words written to say what sums up to “in hindsight, I wish I hadn’t posted that”.
ryandv 117 days ago [-]
All of computing reduces to "just ones and zeros." In light of this let's just dispense with the decades of verbosity and libraries' worth of extraneous elaboration.
ffsm8 117 days ago [-]
01001111 01101011 01100001 01111001
AbstractH24 117 days ago [-]
I’m not sure I agree with that.
They are just saying the person they are no longer reflects that. Because people are continuously evolving, but posts online are frozen in history without context.
There are things I did in kindergarten that I no longer identify with, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong at that age or for the world at that time.
tetris11 117 days ago [-]
Christ, that was a grandiose article to read. To compare yourself to Lord Byron and to talk about one's legacy really screams "Hello, I am a narcissist."
Take comfort in the contributions you have made to projects bigger than yourself will be incorporated into maybe some of humanities greatest works.
erik_seaberg 117 days ago [-]
This book burning vibe is pretty extreme. I wish there were a reliable way for everyone to write pseudonymously. (I don't as a reminder that legal action against an employer could baselessly unprotect the whole team.)
AbstractH24 117 days ago [-]
The problem with an anonymity is there’s no accountability. You can say or do anything and just make a new identity (as seen on sites like Reddit or even this)
The idea of pseudo-anonymity is interesting. I’m not sure how it sound work, but would love to know if others could identify it.
Only solution I can see is to stop being held accountable for every thought and action we’ve ever had. And while we can’t change society we can at least change how we look at our own past.
jmward01 117 days ago [-]
I did some cursory research on how important 'forgetting' is to neural networks. I didn't have conclusive results because I just played with a few ideas, never really making it serious, but the idea has stuck with me as important for a long time now. In a finite space the pigeon hole principle says you eventually must take something out to put something new in so finding algorithms that efficiently forget are likely key to learning. I think this applies to neural networks and, I think, to society as well. You can't preserve every building for history. You can't remember every grievance or act of heroism. Eventually you have to forget to move forward. At least that is the thought.
renewiltord 117 days ago [-]
I don’t care that much that all my past follows me. But the latest trend appears to be to visit my sins upon my children. Given that’s the case, it’s better to appear squeaky clean later on. I’ll CCPA HN and ask them to clean up.
Duwensatzaj 117 days ago [-]
Is corruption of blood a trend?
I can think of one case where a minor sports figure was fired for decades old statements from his father, but I haven’t seen any others.
floren 117 days ago [-]
"The sins of the father's are also the son's" are basically political orthodoxy for a large portion of the very online crowd these days.
HKH2 117 days ago [-]
That's covered by guilt by association, no?
bongobingo1 117 days ago [-]
Conceptually related The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang.
I'm happy I got to read this. Sometimes, I feel guilty about spending too much time watching children's shows over the weekend.
littlekey 114 days ago [-]
I don't know what's more shocking: tweeting 40,000 times, or going through the deletion process and ending up still thinking you need to keep 6,000 of those tweets.
interludead 117 days ago [-]
Forgetting can be a necessary and empowering act of self-preservation
catcatdog 117 days ago [-]
When I had Twitter many years ago, a friend would retweet lots of bloodsport tweets of the sort this post describes.
I had wondered about how much being involved in this bloodsport impacted the participants.
Interesting read.
paganel 117 days ago [-]
> Eventually, trolling right wingers just became who I was. I was good at it—I still laugh at how I got Zuby banned for saying “ok dude” to me and then him writing his most popular song about it
Somehow this person (hope this doesn't get me banned as well) felt that that was ok to put down into words. Twitter brain-rot at its finest, Musk did these people a lot of good when acquiring said company because it has allowed some of them to try and get some sort of normal life back.
echelon 117 days ago [-]
HN should allow for post deletion.
117 days ago [-]
peterweyand38 117 days ago [-]
[flagged]
paulryanrogers 117 days ago [-]
Is this an excerpt from a dystopian novel?
ryandv 117 days ago [-]
Crass of you to dismiss someone's lived experience so flippantly.
> I just want to live long enough to watch everyone destroy themselves out of evilness and stupidity.
It happens eventually. Turning the other cheek is a good mechanism for letting the wicked dig themselves even deeper holes (even while they don the clothes of the righteous).
ThrowAwayAcct12 117 days ago [-]
Hey, I think you should consider talking to a doctor about what you're experiencing.
I'm really sorry you're in so much pain.
117 days ago [-]
darby_nine 117 days ago [-]
[flagged]
krapp 117 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ryandv 117 days ago [-]
[flagged]
saagarjha 117 days ago [-]
There's obviously a balance here which involves understanding how words make people feel and also understanding that people don't have bad intentions. You don't have to go all 1984 on it.
ryandv 117 days ago [-]
The point is that intent has been rendered irrelevant; all that matters is the impact of the words on the audience, and therefore the audience can unilaterally determine the impact (and thus the moral valuation) of those words. Good intentions are not sufficient to exonerate you from mob invective. Social incentives further encourage reading maximum offence into language, as being offended offers one moral leverage over others in public discourse.
Rendered at 08:11:05 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
If you have to work, manage relationships, and have to cook and clean up after yourself, where is the extra time for it?
Not only that, but with what little free time that's left, people would choose to spend it on engaging in online drama instead of doing something actually pleasant
It's one of those things that I thought was funny and entertaining when I was younger, but it just seems kind of dumb to me now. Similar to the digital nomad thing. Maybe I've just gotten boring, idk
The author considered their writing on social media to be social activism, so that may be why they spent so much time on it, for a higher purpose.
it's usually easier to read about something after the fact than it is to participate in it as it's unfolding. Especially if there are strong emotions involved
> social activism
It's less about the end goal than the way she goes about accomplishing it. Taking the time to seek out alt-right troll accounts to regularly engage with is probably the worst way of doing it (both from the standpoint of effectiveness and psychological cost involved)
On the one hand for me, it's escapism. On the other, there's a lot of novelty available, new things that we'd never encounter irl. Which gives us new ideas for things to try irl. Sort of like the printing press spreading information faster
Think about the drama that was the recent rust for Linux lead resigning. People then have their opinions about it and then it spills into the comments here.
I think you just care less about the social media drama as described in the submission (which is ok).
I remember when I was in elementary school teachers would talk about minimizing time spent watching tv. Parents would be encouraged to tell their kids to minimize tv watching and spend more time reading. The point wasn’t to never watch tv. But to keep the time spent watching as little as possible.
It was well understood that tv is addictive and a life spent in front of the tv is no life at all.
But now we have the internet. Far more addictive than tv. People spend hours staring at the interactive tv that is the smartphone.
People spend hours engaging in “activism” on the internet that feels good inside but accomplishes nothing. The feeling of false accomplishment feeds into the addiction. Everyone instinctively knows a life watching tv is a waste but people are deluded into thinking that a life on social media matters.
In other words it’s all a drug. Makes you feel good but leads you to waste your life. Nobody says live and let live to a drug addict.
“It’s not a hobby for them, it’s their whole personality”
Just like a life lived like this is no life at all, a personality like this is no personality at all.
I couldn't care less how others spend their time, I'm just glad that everyone has their niche.
Most people accomplish nothing. You go playing basketball with guys after work, you will accomplish nothing with it. You sit and read books, you are accomplishing nothing. You tend to your flowers at home and you are not actually accomplishing all that much.
Insisting on accomplishment all the time just leads to mental health problems.
> Just like a life lived like this is no life at all, a personality like this is no personality at all.
Why? Of course it is personality. It is not like the rest of us all had super special valuable personalities either. We just exist.
Some people are busy because they need multiple jobs or have unexpected caretaker responsibilities. But many who feel busy are busy because they choose to be busy. They have made so many commitments that they are doing the time equivalent of living paycheck to paycheck.
2080 hrs at work, based on a 40hr work week - of course not counting days off.
Math seems to be mathing (mostly) but it feels wrong, work definitely feels like it takes up much more than 1/3rd of our waking hours.
If anyone has good tips on how to mentally separate from work after hours I would love to hear them. I know some people can literally switch it on and off like a light but I've never been able to.
> I’ve read more books in the last 16 months than I have in the 16 years before them. I’ve ran 5k, 8k for the first time in my life. I’m able to do more situps now than at any point since I was probably 15 years old.
At the start, I was definitely thinking "why keep going to a website you say is like hell?"
> We so belovedly called it the “hellsite” for good reason: the daily trek through the timeline was like tapdancing in a minefield. Twitter was awful because it rewarded awfulness.
And online, those who have cut back on (or are slacking off at) work, relationships, etc. are probably over-represented.
(Yes, their wanting to drama I really don't get. But I'm an old geezer, so...)
She seems to sincerely think that Twitter is bad, but it's not bad because of what she did with it, it's bad because well, you don't always win fights on it and when you attack someone you can get in trouble too and that's really messy and she doesn't want to deal with that. If she didn't want to deal with it, she didn't have to participate; the kind of political activism described in this article is not how most people use Twitter.
I can understand wanting people to forget if you said one or two things years ago and people took them out of context. Or even if you did one misdeed, but it was years ago. This is not, according to her article, why she wants people to forget.
While this is an excellent Rorshach for exposing the internal biases of others and demonstrating that even the staunchest progressives are also readily capable of misidentifying others or failing to recognize their "self-identification", the issue of not being seen for who one is and constantly "misidentified" also presents its own challenges.
I think this is only as issue if you are a “known” person in some regard. For most of us plebs, receding into anonymous nonexistence is likely a very healthy thing.
In light of this the safest recourse is to simply not post anything online at all, for fear of being doxxed at some point in the future (an inevitability given modern standards for and cultural attitudes towards privacy) and subjected to invective for years' old posts and writings. This is the culmination and terminal state of "anonymous nonexistence" you refer to.
In this way the chilling effect achieves totality, and nobody feels comfortable sharing genuine thoughts online at all. It's arguable that this is a societally healthy state of affairs.
He writes about (sometimes) controversial stuff for a large(ish) and influential audience. He wants to be known and influential. I think he deserves the right to do so pseudonymously, but that’s tangential to my actual point.
Most of us plebs do not want to be famous or influential, and therefore it doesn’t make a ton of sense to leave a trail of possibly regrettable or easily misinterpreted bits of data attached to our real names.
Scott Alexander was not in fact doxxed. He said in his final post before deleting his blog that the NYT planned to reveal his name, deleted his blog and the NYT published their article three weeks after he had already revealed his own name.[1]
The pros and cons of whether they would have revealed his name became this massive hoo-hah and maybe they would have revealed his name given the chance but the fact is he was not in reality doxxed by anyone other than himself.
[1] eg this article cites an anonymous source saying that none of the proposed article about him had yet been written at the time he took his blog down https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/16/21325678/venture-capitali...
They are just saying the person they are no longer reflects that. Because people are continuously evolving, but posts online are frozen in history without context.
There are things I did in kindergarten that I no longer identify with, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong at that age or for the world at that time.
Take comfort in the contributions you have made to projects bigger than yourself will be incorporated into maybe some of humanities greatest works.
The idea of pseudo-anonymity is interesting. I’m not sure how it sound work, but would love to know if others could identify it.
Only solution I can see is to stop being held accountable for every thought and action we’ve ever had. And while we can’t change society we can at least change how we look at our own past.
I can think of one case where a minor sports figure was fired for decades old statements from his father, but I haven’t seen any others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...
I had wondered about how much being involved in this bloodsport impacted the participants.
Interesting read.
Somehow this person (hope this doesn't get me banned as well) felt that that was ok to put down into words. Twitter brain-rot at its finest, Musk did these people a lot of good when acquiring said company because it has allowed some of them to try and get some sort of normal life back.
> I just want to live long enough to watch everyone destroy themselves out of evilness and stupidity.
It happens eventually. Turning the other cheek is a good mechanism for letting the wicked dig themselves even deeper holes (even while they don the clothes of the righteous).
I'm really sorry you're in so much pain.