Until now I would have said this is an extreme minority view, even though it's quite obvious and aligns with the core values I've seen on this site over the last 15 years, and thus presumed were tech in general's view.
Maybe I just need to get off X, the Everything App™, 90% of my news consumption and commentary is through there.
Or is it so addictive like social networks seem to be?
But.... I am no longer there. Too much noise and distraction drowns the sane voices. And I can't stand Musk any longer.
I tink it totally depends what your niche is. What bugged me about Twitter is that after Musk took over it was no longer mostly RSS feed-like but all the politics came in. That all ranked higher even when not from accounts I don't follow (now I get notifications from Musk even after muting him)
> Or is it so addictive
why switch one megacorp for another?
People think they need Facebook, X, whatever to stay up to date. Not so. I have a few online newspapers/sites I scan a few times a week, and that's it.
IMHO (and it's really just MO), Twitter, Facebook and alike are a 100% useless waste of time. (Maybe Facebook had some use in the beginning for staying in contact with more "friends" than I could have by other means.)
I feel better for it. And as I said, I will guarantee you that won't miss anything important going on.
I made a decade long transition from dropout waiter => startup founder => exit => Google thanks to getting to soak in all the tech stuff on Twitter, without having the formal education.
It's hard to say without being reductive, but TL;DR it's turned into a very know-nothing atmosphere, to the point it certainly swamps the prior positive effects.
Good example yesterday: OP is excited about Elon newly announcing a new interest in non-regretted user-seconds.
Elon's talked about it a bunch, so some people gently correct OP.
Some other people gently point out this...isn't something you can metric.
Everyone's being polite and pointing out indirectly the excitement is irrational: it's an old idea, and not an actual metric you can optimize for
OP half-rolls-back that its a new idea, but is still excited about the implications.
Someone tells him directly "non-user-regretted-seconds" isn't a metric, he doubles down and says its standard in industry.
I reply saying it's Elon-invented, not a good or bad thing, but certainly not a traditional metric.
OP replies saying that's not true, OP saw it in use at Google a decade ago.
It's a day later and it's completely unclear to me: A) if this is an actual phrase that was used prior to Elon B) if it is a phrase, how it could be a metric and C) if OP is right that it was in use before Elon, given our time at google overlapped by 7 years and I've never, ever, heard of anyone having a metric like that (could someone have used it as a term of art in a meeting? sure! but generic "amount of time people enjoy using our thing" isn't worth noting as a distinct term, unless you actually collect info on it)
The only way I can think of to even engage is to say pretty much the above, but it's too aggro and "cares too much" for the level of current discourse, especially since the premise is we should be excited Elon cares about this.
A more factual approach, like trying to find the first instance of "unregretted user-seconds" isn't convincing. I'm not sure how you'd prove the first use was after a certain date.
Even if I try searching for refs between 2000 and 2020 only, there's ~3 pages of obviously re-dated results, i.e. referring to Elon as Twitter owner with a date of "2013"
Then, just because it wasn't on the internet at a certain date, doesn't mean it wasn't in use regularly at Google before that date.
Then, the clunky pseudo-scientific phrasing makes it impossible to debunk there wasn't another form of "unregretted user-seconds" I should be checking.
There's only 8 pages of results for "unregretted user-seconds", all tied to Elon/Twitter, but that means nothing because again, clunky phrasing means maybe there's another form I should be checking, and maybe it was a phrase that had been locked inside companies until Elon used it publicly.
So what was the point of even reading, thinking, replying about this?
Nothing. Waste of time.
I found your writing useful.
Hopefully the landscape will improve.
Normalcy bias — it's an absolute killer. The same cognitive failure that has people in a fire thinking it's "just part of the show", or "just something in the kitchen", until it is too late, and panic overtakes everyone. I've never seen a story of a fire where someone in the situation said "I wasn't sure what was going on, but it didn't seem good so I left early, I'm alive because I did!".
Normalcy bias can kill us all if we aren't careful.
The wider public in America more or less blocks out the risks involved. "They're not actually going to blow up the power grid."
Hell, just look at the tech industry. Endless whining about not needing to be regulated, and what have they done? Built an enormous surveilance machine, lead by executives who preemptively kowtow to any authoritarian leader. Europe's attempt to regulate this is still angrily opposed by heaps, even on this very site.