The model I use for making sense of Twitter is that most of the blue check dialogue is just bringing the people-fighting-on-cable-news dynamic to the internet. Personalities on both sides of every debate have a symbiotic relationship where they have inane arguments because that's what gets boosted and gives them more visibility.

Which is fine, if you treat it as entertainment, but people think they're following the news and instead they're watching a wrestling match.

The painful realization about social media and most forms of media is that, at the end of the day, even the people you like, the people you agree with, have very little in common with you and far more in common with those they vocally disagree with, generally.

I'm generally politically very left and I listen to a show which I won't name here but is also relatively left. At some point, I realized the income the hosts make puts them squarely in the same economic bracket as many of the people that they are often calling greedy or unprincipled. From that realization stemmed the next, that these people, even if they started with perfect intention and perfect action, necessarily must be subverted towards entertainers over informers by the design of the platforms they use to spread their message.

This post feels 100% like it's about Chapo.

Yes. Surely it's about Chapo. I'd certainly not call them as 'greedy' or 'unprincipled' as the people they criticise. However I'll not waste this opportunity to call them bland, effete and ignorant.

Please stop downvoting comments just because you disapprove. This is probably the worst practice on HN of late.

This post is entirely independent of the subject being discussed. I have no opinion on these particular podcasters.

I don't even have the rep to downvote comments.

Late reply. It was your comment that had been downvoted into the negative when I came across it. So I was engaging in a kind of off-topic defense of your comment. ;-)

I was reading a book this morning about mushroom foraging and suddenly realized that I hadn't seen an advert in quite some time because it was a book and not my phone. Then I thought about getting rid of my phone and only reading books from now on. Now I'm posting this on my phone. It's quite annoying how terrible the internet is now. I used to feel comfortable having a conversation in a forum without thinking it was all generated from some AstroTurfing nonsense or would be used to send me highly personalized ads.

Install uBlock Origin and enable all filters. Enjoy the web and don't feel guilty about it. Nobody is entitled to views, ad clicks or even our attention.

Yes I did this on my laptop and it's always shocking when I look at my phone.

I highly recommend setting up a pi-hole on AWS somewhere, with custom DNS ports and using a vpn client that can redirect all DNS requests from the device there. On android NetGuard works well.

I hardly ever see an ad on the phone now. Astroturfing is a whole other question though.

I actually have been thinking very hard about the problem of astroturfing and how to combat it. Not really sure how I would go about it currently but one idea I tossed around is IP address physical location, it might work on HN...at least during working hours. Mixed with a bit of submission and comment history processing, it's almost viable as a concept.

Some eReaders (avoiding naming names to avoid advertising at you :P) also enable easy book-like reading (i.e. e-ink, no backlight/glare) without ads. I like them because I can have a whole library in the size of one book. And also I admit to a certain degree of anxiety about bending book binding, particularly in paperbacks.

I bought an e-reader when I went off to do an internship one summer and wouldn't have access to the university library.

Internship ended up being a dud (they paid me for 40 hours a week but only had work for me to do about 5-10 hours a week). I read over 50 books that summer, mostly classics that I got free from Project Gutenberg. Definitely got my money's worth.

I used to have an ereader but I guess I missed turning pages. I never felt like I completed a book or had some physical sense of where I was in a book.

Very well put. Though there is still some refuge in smaller online communities, if you know where to look. If you limit your exposure to specific places and avoid the rampant toxicity elsewhere, it's not that bad. :)

This is why I'm only on HN.

Uh....you’re the one following them. Take some freaking responsibility for yourself.

No. You see a lot of stuff that's retweeted or replied to from people you don't follow. Seems odd to have an irate opinion of someone's use of a social media platform that you are not familiar with.

Me? Hahaha. I don't "follow" anyone. I don't have any social media account. Haven't had one in five years, and I encourage everyone to do the same. I don't even use WhatsApp, for Christ's sake, and virtually everyone in my country uses it hourly! I'm responsible alright. Can you make the same claim?

If only there was an unfollow button!

Doesn't help you'll still see the retweets eventually through the algorithm or from followers you actually like, only way is to mute or block every one.