"It's just been spiraling in a very dark direction for a long time. You have these blackpill depression cirklejerks everywhere. Astroturfing is getting worse every year."

Agreed.

From TFA: "This disillusionment is infectious."

I would suggest it is in part being spread by articles like this one. If you look at the press surrounding earlier advances, it was largely neutral to positive. Nowadays, as you note, it's doom stew everywhere, and the beacons of solace are pieces like this one driving home to anyone who's missed it how demoralized their peers are.

I remember reading a theory on this that basically it is a symptom of the decline of the news media industry. The positive attitude in the industry lined up with good times for them until around 2000 when their revenue peaked: https://compote.slate.com/images/42207fae-3603-4fe5-b4fe-a65...

For them it really is doom and gloom, and they spread it to the rest of society like a contagion by their writing much like the the banking crisis in 2008 poisoned the entire economy.

I'm not sure if it's true, but it makes a lot of sense to me.

Except that journals pump one super positive article after another. It is everywhere else people get annoyed ... including at journalists that pretends tech is better then it is.

"If it bleeds, it leads" is older than society. A news org can put out a perfect spread of articles that cover a whole spectrum of positive to negative, and social media and normal human beings will only attract to and focus on the negative. Social media has been enhancing that effect, because they figured out that rage bait is more effective than even the most positive message you can come up with, because we are animals.

If you want to maximize "Engagement", which these companies explicitly do, then you WILL maximize rage and doom and gloom. They drive engagement more than anything else.

Remember, our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect. We read these articles with different eyes. There are people who are the real audience and salivate when they read these sentiments.

Who's making money off our misery exactly?

I can see it as a foreign adversary psyop (they benefit from us being demoralized) or as a side effect of the attention economy (more clicks is all that matters) or even a hyper-partisanship epiphenomenon (whichever side is currently down wants people to think everything is awful).

But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-movie plot. How is that supposed to work? Are they secretly feeding creatures from the 4th dimension by harvesting misery or something?

Emotionally charged headlines generate clicks, and in 2026 displaying ads is the primary source of income for all major companies

Right, that was in my list. That's a clear case of the misery being incidental / collateral damage.

Advertisers make money on clicks, and content creators get a cut. This is the backbone that the entire internet operates on.

Fear is the best driver of attention and clicks.

Someone can choose to pass on a light-hearted fun article. If they feel their life or the fate of the universe is in the balance, they will read it.

There isn't some evil mastermind behind it, just the banal economic incentives and evolutionary psychology.

Edit: by way of example, when every woman I know got pregnant, their social media instantly filled up with stories about dead babies. Nobody hard coded that, but the algorithm picked up on the fact that pregnant women will pay attention to stories of dead babies. After all, it is incredibly heartbreaking and the next Tick Tock might include the fact that will save their own baby.

It takes a lot of self-awareness to say "while I might learn information that saves my baby, that is incredibly unlikely so I will refuse to watch this 30 sec video or read this article"

That was my point exactly.

There isn't some evil mastermind behind it--at least, in the click-case; in the psyops or vote-for-us! cases there might sort of be, but even there they aren't profiting from the misery per se.

That's the curse of free choice. People choose things that draw them in not the things good for them.

They choose sweet and salty fats in the real world and they choose things that make them feel the strongest emotion online. The system based on consumer choice delivers.

> by way of example, when every woman I know got pregnant

Impressive work, but surely there were suspicions?

Short sellers earn the most when company they bet against is crashing.

On the other hand investors benefit when they competitors are crashing.

For many labor is just expensive cost running company - I can see how some people salivate

We, developers/tech-employees (safe to assume since we’re on HN) are the “entire class of workers” that the article is talking about. The premise is losing faith in the future of our profession. Which is something that’s openly advertised to the investors by AI companies and more importantly, openly discussed.

> But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-movie plot.

That’s a curious one. I think it’d be healthier if you reflect on why you perceive it that way.

Oh, that's an easy one.

When I'm trying to model a situation I consider a wide variety of possible explanations, and then rank them by how well they fit the facts. I also note when someone is trying to push a narrative on me, and consider what might make them do that. I also watch out for instances of trope-thinking, where the explanation is just a pattern match to some other situation, and am careful to distinguish cases where the exemplar is fictional (thus the B-movie tag above).

And thanks for your expressed concern about my mental health!

TL;DR: We won't stay here in blackpill-as-entertainment long term, tech/HN will proxy the way forward, but it will take time and will be messy.

I think you make a strong point here. I will add a note of hope.

In my opinion, besides the 'this too shall pass' nature of life meaning this outrage-focused moment, we on HN have hope here.

I've been a lurker for a while around here, IDK when this account was made and I don't care, I feel confident that I've been watching the great techies of our era and HN celebrities and dang and other mods presiding over it all for at least a decade.

It's probably my own media bubble bias, but I have noticed this trend where HN is discussing a given subject that the general public is not aware of, and it after years filters into the greater consciousness. I don't think HN is necessarily magically head of the curve, but I do think it concentrates where curious and possibly-open-minded people's thoughts are at, before internet-point-seeking/popularity echo chamber communities like Reddit/FB/Twitter or algorithm-driven hivemind homogenziers like YT/Reels/TikTok/Periscope all become aware of something.

HN saw the centralization of control with the SOPA/PIPA/encryption in public fight, that has been ongoing since the clipper chip and before, but in this modern form with end-users not needing PGP and friends and just getting to have e2ee with Signal, HN was talking about and using Signal for years before now our government figures and traditional + social media companies have talked about Signal.

Similarly, the broader privacy questions, turning off Google Location History was happening on HN (and XDA back when custom android ROMs were more popular) as soon as Google Reader was axed, people only now have learned to fear 'the internet' because of how many more egregious things have happened across all powerful web platforms.

And of course we can't ignore HN playing with cleverbot and that dall-e precursor who's name I forget, ML models and markov chains and tech beyond my ability to teach about, before OAI ever released a single product like ChatGPT.

HN still has heavyweights of each industry and titans of tech who pop by on occasion to grace us mere plebians, pushing back the Eternal September for just a few happy moments (looking at you BWK, Walter Bright, and other famous names I can't rattle off) to share with us what happened 'in the room'. Just the other day someone posted 'I was the guy who controlled the rollout for Apple MacOS X Snow Leopard, it was a bugfix only release no really' ... only on HN by the power of the internet do we get that, we don't get that on a TikTok. So HN has still got 'it' at least for now, and therefore I can make a broad observation.

If the HN being directionally appropriate even if getting particulars wrong is true, I'm seeing future trends that will lead us out of this populist/blackpill moment.

People will get emotionally overwhelmed/numbed to overwrought angry moments, they will want to move forward. Americans tend to be keen as a people, whatever the 'thing' is. 90s tech utopia optimism was a keen-thing. Support for or opposition to the Iraq War was a keen-thing, whatever we Americans do, we do with gusto.

So right now, we are all in on outraged doom/gloom/anxiety/this sux!! feelings.

I'm hopeful that perhaps we as a people go with a decision to move in what a figure from my current media bubble named Aaaron Renn says where there are New Constructivists, who are intellectuals on all sides of American political aisles looking to revitalize and create new institutions.

I'm fearful that we will have to fall down hard to learn our lessons first and/or learn the wrong lessons where we decide the fix to ennui is to blame 'those' people over there (whoever that happens to be). The fix to the fear and ennui won't come from us fighting with our families, community members, internet strangers, or political opponents, it will come from us choosing to change our media diets away from garbage in/garbage out (I Know, I know, you who read this and disagree with everything I say and my media diet sources want me to change my media diet, that may very well be true) that is focused on emotional inflammation (didn't we used to ban people from our forums for flaming?) instead of genuine debate and encouragement and online civility.

It's boring and its lame, but circling all the way back to the parent comment: the web used to be a homogenous unified place made up of professionals and nerds and group think. We need more diverse opinions than that, but what has happened is that the internet (and its mobile app/web/private chat mediums) has become a borderless place where people who never encounter each other have diametrically opposed views constantly, and so retreat into echochambers and don't get the media literacy experience needed to peacefully coexist with the rest of the online anglosphere without constant acrimony. Grifters feed the flames for likes/subscribes/patreon subs/etc.

If you also consider that many of us, via the companies we work for, actively contribute to making the Internet (and by extension, the world) a worse place, the question in the article's title kind of answers itself. It also makes "quiet quitting" seem almost the right thing to do: doing only the least possible to advance your company's goals while keeping both your job and your sanity, hoping that you will one day be offered a buyout package and then maybe find something more fulfilling...

A counterpoint would be that you don't really ever see investment bankers reacting in this fashion.

Because engineers and investment bankers are wired differently.

There's much more overlap than you'd think. Quants generally have a STEM background, and stay in the field much for the same sort of reasons tech workers stick around building torment nexuses for FAANG.

Aren’t quants and what you would usually refer to as “investment bankers” pretty different groups of people?

Absolutely. The quants have legitimate skills. The ibs mostly just got lucky with the big internship junior year that set themselves up for life.

They didn’t get lucky except to the extent they were born into a fourth generation Ivy League family.

Having done both I would say not by much

Because they chose to not doom scroll?

You don't really ever see investment bankers reacting how?

> If you also consider that many of us, via the companies we work for, actively contribute to making the Internet (and by extension, the world) a worse place

“Night must fall, now! Darker! — darker!”

> All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom.

No. And this shallow dismissal builds the mood you complained about.

As an experiment, completely stop consuming news and social media for a few weeks. People have lived their entire lives without these information streams, you'll survive unplugging a bit. Now I can't tell you what you will experience if you go through with this, but I can promise it's very enlightening.

My offline time is spent volunteering with asylum seekers. As an experiment, try actually caring about the people experiencing what you think of as meaningless online negativity.

I'm not sure if this is arguing for or against my point, but it's good you're touching grass I guess?

Your point is meaningless and implies that your choice of how to experience life offline is equally meaningless.

Well where does meaning come from? It doesn't seem to exist in nature. Some say it's something we have to create ourselves.

OP never claimed the online negativity was meaningless, only that you hurt yourself unnecessarily by constantly exposing yourself to it.

Look at the replies. You’re telling junkies to stop using. It won’t work. This is addiction.

Think it's often depression rather than addiction that's at the core. Trying to get depressed people to stop ruminating and to start engaging with the world is a notorious challenge, though in terms of potential quality of life improvements, it can be worth putting in the effort even if it feels like you're talking to a brick wall.

Of course, not being exposed to negativity will make you more positive. But this advice strikes me as a request to plug my ears and close my eyes. Doing these things will not stop the negative things that are happening in the world, and having the information about it at least makes me more knowledgeable about the world and hopefully prepared for when something snaps and there is a crisis that affects me in the most unavoidable and unambiguous ways - in addition to the indirect effects I've been experiencing already.

The negativity is affecting you negatively though, that's my whole point. Doom scrolling and blackpill cirklejerking hasn't fixed even one singular problem in the history of the phenomena. Depressed chronically online people have fuck-all agency, they just want to lay in bed all day reading about how bad everything is.

If you want to make the world a better place, you have to retain a headspace that actually lets you do that, and right now, the easiest fix for that is to just unplug, and then work with what you can change, which typically involves things and people around you.

Your thoughts of this are black and white seemingly. People can doom scroll news and black pill circle jerk on social media. Or they can use them to learn things they can change and work with people to change them.

Why do you believe that you will better prepared? How do you differentiate between "preparation" and doomscrolling?

>How do you differentiate between "preparation" and doomscrolling?

Deliberation. doomscrolling without a deliberate goal in mind is not productive, because you never had a goal but to pass time. Preparation is going in, getting what you need, and coming out.

I want to learn about current events and actions going on, and I focus on achieving that, not on how stupid people are (even if it can be true), not on how nothing even matters anymore, not on how my life is hopeless. I seek knowledge, ideas, and people executing on such ideas and knowledge.

Also, for me: the less comments I read, the better. That's where my real time loss is.

No thank you. I had ICE flood the streets where I live with poorly trained thugs with assault rifles recruited from the ranks of neonazis illegally assaulting, detaining and abusing citizens of my country because they had brown skin. They shot dead two citizens (Renee Good and Alex Pretti) doing what I was also doing - relentlessly recording and documenting their behavior and addition to protesting.

I don't think you realize how ridiculous and out of touch it sounds to tell me to "disconnect" from politics to be less angry. I am extremely angry, and I will continue to let that anger fuel my choices until the vile bullshit that has infected this nation is gone.

Enlightening my ass. Tell that to the trodden upon and the dead. Reality sucks and sometimes you have to do something about it or else you're the problem. Tough shit if you don't like it.

> Reality sucks and sometimes you have to do something about it or else you're the problem.

But ARE you doing anything about it? Because unless you're actually taking action it's basically just self flagellation to the benefit of no one. Like if you have some measure of power (community action, organized resistance, political lobbying) and are taking action that's great, reading articles that make you sad and angry and then going to bed isn't doing anything.

Try literally responding to the comment you are dismissing

> what I was also doing - relentlessly recording and documenting their behavior and addition to protesting.

The other commenter makes an interesting point though that these behaviors really don't do anything but make people engaging with them feel that they are doing something productive against whatever they are protesting. ICE will still do whatever the hell they want as long as the president continues to give them a 500ft leash. And neither the president nor their voter base care about these protests, so what is the point? The lines in the sand in this case are already drawn and there are no fence sitters left to convince. Record all you want, put up as many cops are pigs signs as you want, they don't care. Call me jaded, but it is true. The way protesting is done in this country doesn't effect change.

certainly not true in this case. The constant protests and clashes and deaths caused a significant national backlash, to the point that operations were dialed way down and even the field chief was replaced. Without the actions of protestors in minnesota we would likely still be seeing similar militant takeovers of cities around the country - it actually did change a lot. (in my opinion of course, alternative histories cant be proven)

At least protesting is doing something. What's far worse is the people getting emotionally invested and then just arguing on Facebook or going to bed sad. That'll just make you depressed and does literally nothing.

I disagree. But if you want to have a conversation about whether specific actions achieve their intended goals, that’s very different to saying “but did you even DO anything because of what you learned???????”

It's not an interesting point at it. It's obviously idiotic.

You do have a choice, you can change things. Getting angry, especially in large numbers, is a prerequisite to change. Because getting angry is the prerequisite for violence.

His statement is "ignore getting fucked in the ass and take it". How exactly is that interesting?

It only does nothing if you believe physical action is the only means of mattering. Clearly these broadcasted events changed national and global sentiment, had a few top brass discharged, and most importantly have created communities of means to track ICE and have others get out of harm's way where they may otherwise have been next. Not to mention it's been yet another factor in Trump's declinig polling rates, which affects midterm voting.

Is it enough? Not even close. But ultimately (if you're not going to maintain a well-reguated militia yourself) this is going to be a battle of attrition and this bookkeeping is at worst going to be used for history, or at best will be used to eventually hold many of those accountable when the tides change.

> Tough shit if you don't like it.

narrator: actually, it's you who is the problem.

"I'm only happy when I'm in my misery" - Offspring

ICE killed a completely random person, who had every legal right to be here, in Biddeford Maine. There is again video evidence that ICE's claim of self defense is complete horseshit.

You can be 99% sure that the people currently saying that wasn't such a big deal are also saying you should not pay attention to the media because it is just about making you angry.

They say this as they've been consuming Conservative AM radio for decades, which was entirely about making up stories to make people angry.

Meanwhile the local legal immigrant community is terrified, many people have been literally kidnapped and are missing, and this idea that they would somehow be fine if they just didn't pay attention is absurd.

It's insane. These conservatives are acting like it's no big deal real harms are happening, like this is just some sort of game. My brother visited and talked about his complaints about what is happening as if it was a milquetoast yelp review of a local burger joint. Asshole doesn't care that his voting choices has literally killed hundreds for no reason.

Predictably, he's the kind of person that talks about sports teams as if he is a member. "We did so well" in reference to the bruins winning a game for example.

I'm sure that ignoring all of the very real problems we have and the ways we're being harmed can make some people feel better, but burying your head in the sand doesn't make any of it actually go away.

You can pretty safely ignore a lot of irrelevant rage bait, but by remaining ignorant to what's going on around you you also risk losing a lot of useful, actionable, information and being blindsided by things that could have been avoided.

I know that if I were corporation hurting and exploiting people for profit or a corrupt politician screwing over the public I'd be very happy to encourage people to "unplug" and stop stressing about things.

What are you doing to fix the issues though? Has the knowledge of the issues increased your agency in a meaningful way such that you've taken actions to improve things or are you just enjoying living in a perpetually outraged state for the sake of it? If your martyrdom isn't doing anything to help fix the problem you're just hurting yourself and stopping yourself from potentially being in a space to ever actually do anything.

And what are you doing with the happy mental space you have carved out?

Living a couple years longer in better health from less chronic stress, probably.

I'm surprised by how you need to answer that. I'm not sure if they are being obtuse, contrarian or defending their addiction (yes, I said it).

And I’m surprised by your level of investment in being a jerk in this conversation.

You are right, I'm sorry. My previous message was way over the tone

It seemed appropriate to me considering the question from @lazyasciiart.

Yes, not thinking about serious problems because they don’t personally impact you will make your life more comfortable. Butler appears to be making the less obviously self serving argument that spending time being aware of serious problems is only hurting your ability to do anything about them, which implies that he is better able to do something about them because he does not spend time knowing about them. I think that he isn’t doing anything about them, and therefore his pretense that people would be more effective by staying offline is crap.

> Has the knowledge of the issues increased your agency in a meaningful way such that you've taken actions to improve things

Yes.

Yes. Maybe I'm not taking immediate action now (as I'm still looking for a full time role), but it has shaped how I want to go about my next 2-5 years after I fix my own issues. I don't want to just lean on the sidelines, I want to do my part and help out where I can. Be it financially (when money permits) or physically.

> What are you doing to fix the issues though?

You can't always expect to be able to fix everything yourself, but you often can take steps to help or at least protect yourself. It just depends on what's in the news. Very recently, I've started avoiding produce from Taylor Farms. Good thing I was paying attention to the news when that mess started. It was only by reading the news that I became aware of a change in how postmarks were being added by the USPS and that saved me some potential headaches.

Being informed can result in things like patching vulnerable software, withdrawing supporting a political candidate, reaching out to your representatives about issues that concern you, asking your doctor about treatments/medications/vaccines, exploring new media, changing or delaying travel plans, changing your spending habits, making adjustments to investments, etc.

What does ignorance get you?

> Very recently, I've started avoiding produce from Taylor Farms Good thing I was paying attention to the news when that mess started.

This is very obviously not the type of situation and behavior marginalia_nu and then I were commenting about.

> This is very obviously not the type of situation and behavior marginalia_nu and then I were commenting about.

marginalia_nu said all news.

You are making valid points, but most people will spend their day reading about other places governments or presidential scandals. For 99% of people, knowing what Trump or whatever politician is doing does not change anything in your life. Also, you have no control or power for changing something about it. If you spent 70% of your day worried about Trump while you live in Estonia (random example), not reading the news is a good choice. You sound like someone who can avoid these traps, but I can say that this is not a common behavior. Most people will bite the ragebait

Accepting the 99% figure, 1% is not a particularly small number. That's about 3.5 million people in the US alone. And it becomes much greater when you consider anyone who cares about someone in that 1%.

If you are American, yes. If you live in a random country, and don't have personal relations with the USA, reading about Trump's actions will only give you anxiety (if you disagree with his positions, of course)

> but most people will spend their day reading about other places governments or presidential scandals.

Okay. I can't control most people. I can control myself. Even if I did want to control people, influencing comes by the minority choosing to be aware and spread that to others.

We are indeed in this situation mostly because "most people" think that they can't do anything. "most people" in my generations (as a very late millenial, so I have some Gen Z exposure) chose not to vote in 2024, given turnout numbers. I want to at least put some effort in addressing that notion.

>If you spent 70% of your day worried about Trump while you live in Estonia (random example), not reading the news is a good choice.

And I'm sure Estonia has its own domestic issues too. I'm sure they can still influence their representatives to take actions based on Trump if that's a strong influence.

They can't do much in the US, but I'm mostly talking to a US audience here. That's my target.

Why does one need to be proactively doing anything to justify awareness and holding a point of view?

Yes, it has. Not "tuning out" the news has helped me mitigate significant problems for me personally, which a delay of a couple days would have meant it was too late.

I think your word choice ("enjoying living in a perpetually outraged state", "martyrdom") seems to show more outrage than a lot of the people you rail against.

It's also my impression that most people who want everybody to turn off the news agree with or don't care about any bad things happening to people that are being reported on.

People always say this like it’s a panacea but n=1, I did exactly that for about 5-6 months in 2024 after I quit Twitter and didn’t want to get sucked back in to endless election drama like in 2016.

For the first couple weeks it seemed like a mild to moderate improvement. Especially not having Elon’s tweets and the Twitter memes of the day in my head 24 hours a day.

But after a month my baseline pretty much reset with the same levels of anxiety, just with different sources/triggers to attribute those feelings to.

And after a few more months, I started to feel to absurdly detached from the real world that it started to become a problem in casual conversations and stuff just being so out of touch with everyone else’s collective experiences.

My boss referenced some big natural disaster or something that everyone knew about from the news and looked at me like I was crazy when I had no idea what he was talking about. Little awkward moments like that kept popping up, never a big deal but started to feel uncomfortable as they added up.

The tipping point was when Biden dropped out and I didn’t know about it for like three days and had to nod along when a friend mentioned it obliquely while I was internally like “uh wtf” until I had a second to Google it to get caught up.

All in all the net change in negativity/anxiety was pretty much a wash, the mind finds different ways to justify how it feels even after losing the ‘20s go-to of “doom scrolling” as the universal source of all life’s problems.

But feeling like an alien interloper posing as a resident of “America, Earth” tipped the scales into hurting more than it helped.

For better or worse we live in a highly interconnected world of immediate information delivery, there’s no quick fix to make that all go away by pretending it doesn’t exist.

I still miss a lot of the people I got to know on Twitter, and with hindsight that was probably more emotionally valuable than the negativity and addiction that came with the package (I know many/most of them have left by now too, so can’t teleport back to that point in time either). But that’s just life, it is what it is.

I think this idea (and I necessarily don’t believe in it, but let’s give it a fair chance) is more like a few-weeks detox. Avoiding any news at all half a year seems a bit disorienting (as you experienced).

Rather than giving up on news entirely, in the long-run, I’ve just dropped political podcasts and opinion pieces. I think these products exist to give us the feeling of being informed, but mostly it is just speculation.

Politics matters a lot, but for most of us are just going to vote or donate. I don’t need to hear somebody’s opinion for that, and I especially don’t need to hear speculations about political events that’ll happen in the next couple days (the speculation possibilities will collapse before I do either).

> I think this idea (and I necessarily don’t believe in it, but let’s give it a fair chance) is more like a few-weeks detox.

> Rather than giving up on news entirely, in the long-run, I’ve just dropped political podcasts and opinion pieces. I think these products exist to give us the feeling of being informed, but mostly it is just speculation.

The idea was this would teach something. And another idea was All the news is just outrage porn and non-stop predictions of impending doom. What could someone do for months or years? Cycle outrage porn and detox. Or avoid all news. But you saw news differed and you could control your news.

Doomscrolling vs. no-news-at-all is a false dichotomy. There are calm sources of news. And nothing wrong with learning events from others a few days later. What would you have done with the Biden news?

No-news-at-all was the suggestion in the post they responded to. It seems like a detox type idea (it doesn’t seem sustainable).

I think you are right that there’s some middle ground between 0 and doomscrolling that is preferable, though.

I saw this: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...

here on HN in 2013. I'd read "Amusing Ourselves to Death" so it particularly resonated with me at the time. I've watched the world get even more sucked in each passing year.

eh, it sounds like you don't really have a community you can socialize with. You just had a digital community. Digital communities are easy to come by but they lack the nutrition your soul aches for.

Cutting off corporate media is good, but you don't have to cut off all sources of media. I'm a fan of alternative media myself, so I listen/read things like Citations Needed, Zeteo, American Prospect, Dropsite News, or specific journalists like Edward Ongweso Jr. One thing to remember that it's still just consuming news, consuming things are very little part of the human experience. You need to actually socialize and discuss things with other humans, it's a real need; but you can still find high quality people to follow the news, maybe this is up your speed:

https://www.slow-journalism.com/

Creating is a human urge that you need to fulfill, as is socializing; with socializing it comes in many forms, but a core component needs to in some form of mutual aid. You need to have solidarity with your fellow man for we all share the same struggles together.

The urge to create for others is a human trait founds for 100s of thousands of years before industrial usage (people created + shared art with one another before things like replicated tool usage). Don't deny your urge to create and share with others. For some it's baking, for others it's raising children; you just need to create tangible things and share them with others. You can do this digitally but it's very hard, and IMO after 10ish years of doing so, also not really rewarding compared to writing music for friends or baking deserts for family. Got way more fulfillment out of helping children set up a bake sale than any amount of open source I've done in my entire life.

Just my experience, but I know I'm not along in thinking so because I ask people about this all the time. Seems to be the simple way to live a meaningful life for very little cost.

Please find your tribe, it is out there and it may give you more meaning in your life than any form of digital consumption/creation.

I just read this from Nokia's blog of all places[1]:

> A fresh U.S. residential IP address (especially one behind carrier-grade NAT and harder to block individually) is “gold.” Customers pay up to $95 to lease a single U.S. residential IP address for 2 weeks (versus $0.30 for an Eastern European IP).

That's bananas. The place I found a link to that story was jwz's blog, a site that is actively getting hammered by one of the many Rube-Goldberg machines behind these scrapers.

I take your point wrt, say, recommendation engines. But this is a bizarre and fascinating period we're living through right now. I don't plan to stop reading blogs and news any time soon.

1: https://www.nokia.com/blog/one-year-later-the-residential-pr...

I feel like your last paragraph could be said about any time in the last 10 years. That was my biggest wake-up call to stop following mainstream news. Whatever shows here or in my social circle are enough to be informed as much as needed (YMMV)

Did you read the paragraph before that about paying ninety-five dollars just for two weeks of proxying through a single U.S. IP? There's nothing in the last 10 years even remotely as economically bizarre as that. You'd have to go back over 20 years to Bittorrent where-- for the first time I know of-- an increase in demand for a resource caused a decrease in the time to get that resource.

If I'm wrong give me another case that isn't a crypto scam and I'll read up on it.

I don't think a Nokia blog talking about the economics of renting out area-based IP addresses is anywhere close to mainstream. we'd be in a much much better society if it was.

That's true but it also seems to downplay how much elites + corporations have control over our society and somehow when people want to build a better world, you have to first explain the problems of the current world.

> As an experiment, completely stop consuming news and social media for a few weeks.

The assumption I had not was false.

No thanks. I went too much of life being a low information mostly non-voter. This is how authoritarians win, because too many people don't pay attention, don't protest, don't vote, don't express their disapproval.

Nobody said to stop voting. You could spend the two weeks before polling day educating yourself on the options and you would be much better informed.

This works really well because most of us are very privileged. I'm white, I have a good job. Yes I live in a republican hellhole state with just about the worst policies on anything you can imagine. But I am isolated because of my status. Things can be shit and I can be fine, and I am. I have gone over 6 months without social media, and it works.

But... you do notice the cracks. Slowly. You see it at Walmart, I see it when I go out to the clubs. Lots of cops around. Nobody dancing. A bouncer for the bathroom? Hm, okay. I travel to south Texas sometimes and you see it there, too. Lots of protesting. Fear everywhere. You drive through maybe 50 abandoned, impoverished towns. I see it in my community. Businesses closing left and right. Replaced. I say "I give them six months". I'm wrong, they close their doors in three. Weird.

And then I got cancer. I knew the healthcare system was bad, but I was young and healthy, so out of sight out of mind. Not anymore. However bad you think it is, it's worse. 10 people in the infusion room, one nurse running with her head cut off. My IV has been beeping for 30 minutes. The oncologist? She's not in the building, because she's the one oncologist for three different clinics 50 miles apart. Luckily, I only have to pay an arm and a leg for this. They had iPads in the infusion room. They removed those after a couple weeks, I guess they were too expensive. And I can't trust my care team. I have to review every single medication, every single scan, everything. My oncologist mentions medications I've never took. She misreads tests. I don't blame her, I know she's overextended, she probably barely knows who I am. So, I review everything, which means I need to call and request they fax it to my line. I guess a portal is too expensive. My primary care? The next appointment is in two months. Well that's okay, I only have cancer. He barely knows who I am, too. "You never did chemo, right, just surgery?". No... I did four cycles of chemo, we talked about this a couple months ago. He sets his phone down on the table and records our conversation. OK, I guess that's a thing now. I go home. Bills just show up every few days. I don't even know what for most of the time. I had surgery a year ago at this point. Random departments in the hospital still send me bills. I did prepay ~3,000 dollars for the surgery, but I guess that money is for something else? Not sure. I would call the hospital and ask to speak to billing, but I don't have the time or energy to be on hold.

Anyway, I guess my thesis is: yes things are good, for us. We need to remain humble and recognize our experiences are tinted by our privilege.

I'm not saying I can't, as someone who's abandoned almost all mainstream social media.

But I literally cannot afford to engage in this experiment since I'm still looking around on LinkedIn for job calls and have a few messages I'm waiting on.

> '90s going online ... '20s going offline

It feels to me like the change from:

- old: going downtown to the restaurants and shops of your small village to enjoy a relaxing evening.

- new: downtown is a crowded confusing mishmash of unregulated blaring music, over-the-top blinking flashing signs, intrusive people accosting you and dangerous thieves lurking everywhere. don't go.

there's no "regulated" that makes thing better for anyone, it just gets morphed into oppression of the vistors making them more vulnerable without fixing any problems.

There have been many times throughout the past when going "downtown" elicited a "don't go" response. And yet there were times when going "downtown" was a fun thing to do. Somehow we got from past "don't go" to future "downtown is fun" back to what we have now. Things will change if people stop going. And then they'll change again.

I live in San Francisco and life is quite nice. There are many obvious ways that this city is shitty that I’ve noticed other civilizations don’t have a problem with but also I’d say the overall experience is positive. Neither offline nor online reality is defacto unpleasant.

As far as the disillusionment sense, I think that’s an active selection bias. I think people (including me) like to feel angry and so we go out there looking for and finding people who will give us that. The key, for me, is to curate one’s feed. On HN, for instance, I usually block the majority of repetitive boring posters using a chrome extension. The majority of these people have very low context sensitivity which annoys me.

There are also abrasive people or generally sad people, both groups of which are safely blockable because they have a comment style where P(token|context) = P(token). There is no surfeit of humans on the Internet and no surfeit of interesting information. Almost all humans can be safely excluded from my feed and I can still get information.

By the way, I know you from your search engine. This might be an out there question but do you offer your search index as a downloadable structure? If so, how much does that cost?

> By the way, I know you from your search engine. This might be an out there question but do you offer your search index as a downloadable structure? If so, how much does that cost?

Shoot me an email and we can discuss, but the index is somewhere in the ballpark of 20 TB, so there are some quite significant logistical obstacles.

Thank you. Emailed!

>I think that’s an active selection bias. I think people (including me) like to feel angry and so we go out there looking for and finding people who will give us that.

Well, it's subjective so I can't speak for you. But personally I want to try and find the good in people and in life. And I see a lot of good.

But that doesn't mean I'm blissfully unaware and won't notice (and call out) the fact that jobs are on the down and down in my country, we're looking at a generation who cannot get their foot in the door whatsoever, that leadership in the country is actively taking a wrecking ball to society, that prices for everyone working is rising faster than their paychecks, and so much more.

I personally don't actively look for misery. I just can't keep ignoring being punched in the face constantly, even if I'm not going to blame any one person for the punch. Especially after 3 years of trying to find full time career placement in times where I would at worst spend 3 months job searching.

Well it used to be that the government's job was to keep morale high. At some point that seems to have inverted.

The coalition-of-Molochs appears to be finding it much more profitable to make everyone want to kill themselves. (Not sure if that's a great long-term strategy, but they seem to have thought this through.)

I assume it had to do with the Malthusian panic (which was very effective, and remains a sticky meme, although for slightly different reasons now).

> but they seem to have thought this through

If there's one thing I'm confident of in my government, it's that they certainly did not think this through. Thus highlighting the core issue.

I can’t prove it, but my gut tells me a large amount of people on the web are basically just LARPing extremist takes or depressions as some kind of fun outlet.

Why take the web seriously? It’s more fun to be some ridiculous person. Of course, some people are genuine and this kind of behavior chews them up when they take it seriously.

Yeah I'm not sure what happened but Reddit in particular is beyond saving, and I'm not saying it was ever great. I think we simply don't know how to create online communities that make any sense yet. I'd rather have second hand smoke than any more algorithmic "engagement" maximization at this point.

I feel like we're probably going to have to give up something, most probably anonymity, to get back to anything like sanity. We'll see communities that are militantly anti-AI where it's hard to get in and easy to get kicked out, and it will probably cost money and require you to divulge who you really are. It could still be semi-anonymous at the user level but not at the administrative level.

I'd like to see something like that take off, because I'd be willing to give it a try. I also think the communities should be limited. Maybe have several sizes and see how it plays. Something that never grows beyond 250. Never past 1000. Something along those lines.

Relatedly, I'm just about on board with the idea of a modern day Compuserve or Prodigy. Pay to play, but in return you get no ads, no malware, no algorithms, no AI. A gated community for the Internet.

Those plans might work to give a nice sane internet experience to the folks that are willing to put in some money and effort.

But most people will still opt to stay on the slop-filled web because it’s free and because they like being angry. And as long as they stay the societal problems that stem from the toxic internet will live on.

I agree, it will filter for a certain kind of person, and most probably the people who are not a problem on today's Internet. If we cannot tamp down the filth that comes along with emphatic anonymity, then at least we can create some places without it. I'm getting to the point where I may pull the plug on my Internet as soon as I retire. Kinda hate to do that, because I remember when it didn't suck (at least not everywhere).

IMO once upon a time Facebook could have been that place, though maybe that ship has sailed now. There was a time when I thought they could choose to offer a premium experience for anyone willing to pay and there would have been a small but real subset of users who would go for it. Charge $25/mo (which I believe is approximately what they make off a normal US user) in return for zero ads, zero algorithm, complete control over the experience. Add another level above that which includes actively moderated members-only discussion forums.

Giving up anonymity would be giving up on the entire idea wholesale.

Small forums is the answer. In spain they are still popular and after some time it feels like an small town in the good sense, you know everyone and everyone knows you. Of course small forums will not IPO

Tildes is nice, Hubski's a nice slow and thoughtful

Thanks for the rec, I hadn't heard of it but Tildes looks very pleasant.

It really is

I'm very interested in these small-ish forum communities. They're always invite only, however. I guess that's what must be done to keep it sane.

You put it there yourself. The community can't be there to maximize engagement.

> I think we simply don't know how to create online communities that make any sense yet.

We do, and we knew decades ago.

The problem is, they can't become large or useful. That limitation is inherent, and due to human social behaviour.

When people here complain about HN becoming Reddit, they get that snide HN guideline thrown at them. I mostly refuse to abide, and continue to call out and downvote/flag Reddit-tier comments. Fighting the redditization of HN is what will save this place.

I recommend It Came From Something Awful. It's short and the thesis is that corporate co-option of counter culture pushed the internet over the precipice.

Many folks have talked about optimizing for engagement and while I do think this is a factor, I don't think this is the cause. HN has a pretty simple set of algorithms and yet it's largely followed the same trend of negativity and despair.

I'm partial to what I call the "doomer effect". If you feel sad or disenfranchised you're just much more likely to spend time online talking. A person with a fulfilling social life and a job they feel satisfied with is going to spend time socializing with friends and working on their job. They may read online feeds, they may write very occasionally, but that will be the extent of most interactions. On the other hand the folks that feel the most negative tend to spend inordinate amounts of time online posting about how sad and angry they are.

In a real life conversation when a depressed friend gets on their soapbox most folks give the friend a subtle clue that it's time to move on. If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative. Nothing like this happens offline. If you're in a bad place, as long as a forum will have your posts you can post to your heart's content. And oh boy is it finally the time to let your hair down and tell everyone how f-ed everything is on the inside. Constantly.

This makes a flywheel. People who want to avoid negativity start avoiding negative online spaces. People who are fine with it or feel similarly keep reading. Eventually negativity becomes the default.

"Misery loves company" is much older than the Internet. There's no doubt to me that the net makes it that much worse.

I’m sorry if I am being uncharitable, but are you saying the solution to depression is that people’s friends groups (which the depressed person may not have access to to begin with) is to just like, bully them out of it? lol? Tell me you’ve never had a depressive episode without telling me. hint: the people with support groups in the first place are less vulnerable and bullying depression doesn’t really help, I could point you to a ton of studies, but this post makes me a bit nauseous.

I dont disagree that depressive online spaces breed more depressive cycles, but good lord, what you seem to be implying is even worse. You can’t just brute force “hey cheer up” no matter the group structure.

like particularly this:

> If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative.

Is not ever helping a clinically depressed person. especially when offers of “help” are often quite victim blamey and threatening like the tone of your post here - stop bringing the vibe down, or we’ll make you feel even more isolated! good lord. Try bringing them a meal or giving them a compliment first? holy shit.

You are being uncharitable. In fact, you're demonstrating the dynamics I spoke of in my post.

I could give you a detailed response but, given your tone, instead I'll say: assume the best and don't make everything about yourself. Several people I know have struggled with negative mental health effects of finding themselves in a caretaker role for a mentally ill friend or partner. In my experience offline groups (not individual relationships) have pretty good immune systems for this. They also often do band together to support or help a struggling friend.

In the same way that you expect a depressed person to receive charity, please offer it in your responses.

I'm not the person you're responding to - but I do too wonder what you meant. I would surely think that among friends it's not going to be the case that a depressed person soapboxing is met with the response you describe. I think I would agree with you if it's somewhat of a wider circle - acquaintances perhaps - that I'd expect the average response to play out as you described. But also perhaps the term soapboxing could mean something different to me - I assumed because you mention a depressive person it would be more personal, but if it's like political venting then yeah I would probably also agree with you.

For what it's worth, I think I understood your original post as you intended it.

(Just mentioning this so you know the wording wasn't universally confusing.)

FWIW, I had a similar impression of your comment as JohnMakin.

> give the friend a subtle clue that it's time to move on

If a friend needs someone to listen about life struggles and you tell them you're tired of it and don't want to hear it anymore, then you're not being a friend. Maybe you want to be encouraging and that is fine, probably helpful. But you immediately seem to turn that encouragement into threats of social exclusion:

> If that clue isn't heeded the friend often gets targeted 1:1 offers for help and can eventually just be shut out of the group altogether for being too negative.

I've seen this many times - people suggest "solutions" to something they don't quite understand, then get angry when people don't take their non-functional solution. Similarly, in online support groups, I've seen plenty of people storm off angrily because people are being "too negative", not seeing that sharing these feelings, wanting to be heard and knowing you're not alone with certain struggles can be part of a discovery and healing process. Those people use similar language you used in your comment of "misery loves company", essentially accusing people of wanting to be miserable and choosing depression.

If you want people to read what you write in a charitable fashion, refusing to explain the background for your comments is rather dysfunctional BTW. In general, people don't all have the same mental context and experience background to understand where you're coming from.

As a person who has actually helped friends with depression, I can totally understand on the other hand where Karrot_Kream is coming from.

I think he wrote enough for an internet comment, and anyone should probably ask for more context instead of jumping to a negative conclusion.

>If a friend needs someone to listen about life struggles and you tell them you're tired of it and don't want to hear it anymore, then you're not being a friend.

That sort of feedback is exactly why males can often feel like they have no one to go to. Even if they theoretically have "friends". They are trying to reach out and instead they are rejected from their support group. If they don't have a spouse (and why should you need to be romantically involved to want to listen out to someone's problems?) then they might feel they have no one to go to.

So now they are the perfect audience for radicalization. To be told "I understand you, it's not your fault, it's [insert target to redirect issues onto]'s fault instead. We need to correct [target] and you'll feel better!".

depression is not the same as clinical mental illness. one is a symptom, one is a disease. your delusion seems to be that it can be reasoned and talked through which I interpreted by how you expressed that as bullying (it is). it can’t be reasoned with. I’m making nothing about myself - don’t really appreciate that projection by the way - I am not a depressed person, but have also been in the situation of caretaking for someone who has experienced this. I can’t even imagine acting on the reckless advice you’ve posted here. but thanks for the tone policing. have a good day.

The devil is always in the detail with these sorts of online disagreements.

Let’s say you have a friend who is always miserable, always needs support, and turns every gathering into a therapy session for them and their problem. Let’s say you’ve been friends with them for say, fifteen years. Nothing has helped.

They never go and get therapy, they never go and do any exercise, they constantly do the same things over and over and still expect support.

Wouldn’t you stop wanting to hear them talk? Maybe even stop being their friend ?

What’s the limit ?

> If you're in a bad place, as long as a forum will have your posts you can post to your heart's content.

I agree with you, but would also add that, ~99% of people do not post anything. They mostly consume. When your consumption habits are constantly doomerism, and "all the bad stuff that will happen in the next 5 years", your mind also starts thinking that way. And spirals down that way. There's a lack of healthy dose of reality in online circles. So everything just becomes outrage/doomer hell.

It's partially negativity bias, and partially the effects of being in a low trust society. Some people may say that we still have it good compared to any other time in history, but humans tend to react more towards rate of change than we want to admit. We can "feel" when things overall are starting to look up or look down, and the last few years especially definitely have a lot of "look down" effects on us.

You may try to kick things out when it gets too negative, but at some point all your friends may become negative. And then what? Do you kick yourself out of society, or do we recognize that there's systematic issues going on (a perhaps, as you say, "depression")?

You mention the election cycle and things getting worse.

I live in the US and I’ve watched in real time every sad, terrible decision made by the current administration and every sad terrible decision by what’s supposed to be the opposition party. It all makes me want to scream.

And then I’m offline and my life carries on because none it has really affected my white privileged middle class tech worker butt.

It all feels wrong.

I don't live in the US, I live in Switzerland, and what happens in the US and Iran affects the world. And when I see this kind of shit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ58s4bwzG0 ( bbc Donald Trump dons 'Trump 2028' hat and jokes about 'fourth term' ), I am like, what the fuck? Europeans as a whole didn't have much a great opinions of republicans but I don't even understand how a republican voter can vote for a russian asset who is using the constitution as toilet paper. At this stage, just turn directly to a fascist state and stop pretending.

The Republican Party is very good at propaganda. And the Democratic Party (the currently elected one, not the one the American people actually want), is happy to go along with a lot of it as long as they get to stay in power. We’re good at political theatre and pedantry here.

All that and a steady diet of “American Exceptionalism” started as early as kindergarten in our public schools deludes whole swaths of the country into thinking that all of this is somehow good for them.

I grew up going to public schools in the 90s and 2000s in a “blue” part of the country. As I’ve grown up into adulthood with kids, I’ve become so disappointed with my own education. It hasn’t gotten better and it’s worse in a lot of ways.

We homeschool our kids and don’t whitewash our history.

Just gotta stay safe and count your blessings. S178 probably did a good part in driving tech to be the canary in the coalmine of the new "forever layoff" model. That was a political decision that affected a lot of us.

even if that wasn't, I'm sure you were hit by higher prices for everything We're all being hit, it just depends on a bit of luck and how financially ready we are to buffer the storm. Most people unfortunately aren't.

Can you be more specific about what S178 you're referring to? There were several results.

Me using the right number would have helped. My apologies, I meant Section 178, not 174

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/174

As a TLDR it's a way to amortize taxes for R&D over 5 years. High interest rates hit everyone, but this was a sneaky little code that would more specifically hit places like Software.

setup to end in 2022 by the first trump administration, it was one of those "well they'll just renew it, right? And then they... Didn't. So yeah, 2022-2025 made it cost a lot more to hire SWEs than usual.

The only silver lining of the "One Big Beautiful Bill" is that it ended up bringing back S174 for domestic labor. But companies are quick to tear down (and still have half a dozen reasons to tear down) and slow to build back up.

The fact you say "on mastodon" proves it's effectively centralized, just pointing that out

To be fair, saying "overheard an argument at the pub" wouldn't imply that theres but a single pub in the world.

Nah your pub is like saying "overheard online"

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, not really something I spend much time thinking about. I'm on a ton of different social media because I run a business and need to be where people are discussing my work.

Unpopular opinion, but Mastodon is part of the problem as much as Twitter or Facebook, unfortunately.

It's just another riff at something toxic, with the difference it's open source.

As much as I'd like to endorse the decentralization model of Mastodon, it's annoying that I'm constantly shown Mastodon messages from new, often very suspicious looking domains that then want me to enable JavaScript yet again in order to run the same damn Mastodon app.

This problem is not inherent to the task. Nitter instances can do almost everything without JS.

Our public offline lives are also miserable. If you live in a westernish society, you know exactly what are the problems, and if you are 40 something you can see that for your whole life no one has ever attempted to solve it. We just live with extreme negligence. Like child of permissive parents. And we're all, each and every single one of us both the children and the parents!

As someone who has been in the industry over 25+ hands down this is the worst period of being online.

There has always been that programmer who wanted to quit and run a restaurant, but tech world lost its original soul. We were making people’s lives better, now we are just creating more wealth gap. Majority of the industry is hostile, online communities are extremely hard to get into and very exclusive, if you are new you cannot get in. Majority of the content somewhere between bots, fake news, propaganda and rage bait. Almost all good things about tech and the internet were killed one by one.

Don’t get me wrong there are very exciting things from pure nerd perspective in this AI age but nothing is fulfilling as it used to.

For me this culminated to a deep belief that technology =/= progress. This has shaken my core to re-evaluate who will ever be allowed to benefit from my skills and time, but ruined a lot of my genuine enjoyment and enthusiasm.

> For me this culminated to a deep belief that technology =/= progress.

I landed on the opposite conclusion. People don't progress in any domain if technology doesn't force them. Sometimes the ride might be bumpy and it might be taking them forwards kicking and screaming, but without new technology no progress happens on any issue.

Science drives technology, technology drives economy and technology and economy drive culture and science. That's the virtuous feedback loop that drives itself and everything human as a side effect.

I agree that both individual and progress of humanity relies on technology. Considering the state of the planet currently, it's essential to support the population count.

To clarify, "=/=" is to denote "not equivalent", in that not all technology or advancement is progress.

I used to be naive and use/recommend things I now wish never existed. Not because they aren't useful or a potential future, but because of who owns and controls them now.

As time goes on, it's clear how dangerous certain tools can be in the wrong hands. If we aren't careful, the feedback loop can end up destroying us and/or limiting our freedoms. Unfortunately it appears this is the current road we are on.

On this forum, it's likely that the power we have starts with careful analysis of what we are building and who can use it in (unintended) negative ways.

What online communities are hard to get into or exclusive?

Try to register to a forum, try to actually communicate in X as a new account, try to use and discuss something in Reddit as a new account.

Between bots and bit protections all of these is practically impossible unless you build a reputation in relevant places by being a long term member.

Ar least that’s been my experience. I’m sure there are some very niche communities for some stuff that are welcome to new accounts, I had this problem in 4-5 different communities and simply given up.

I don’t experience this. I love the internet more these days than ever. There are so many cool people doing cool things.

I think a lot of this perception that everything is bad and everybody is sad is projection because people consume mass media which makes them feel doomed and hopeless so they continue to consume that sort of content and they project it on to everyone.

The world is much better than it has ever been.

Almost misread as ”outage porn” which would check out here on HN with all the recent outage posts

> how incredibly toxic the web has become

A reflection of human nature at scale?

I've heard someone say that this has been going on since 2012, because that is the year that 60% of all Americans (and probably most industrialized countries), owned a smartphone. This is qualitatively different from 60% of all Americans owning a computer (the smartphone and tablet, IMHO, is one of the greatest embarrassments of the tech industry: it is a practically sci-fi device that does _less_ than the clunky desktop computers, _by design_, even though they could probably do _more_[0]). The tech companies are feeding people misleading, enraging, and toxic content because this creates a strong emotional reaction, which is the first step to selling advertised products. For example, nobody will buy a thing they can't rationally justify, unless they can justify it emotionally[1].

[0]: For example, you can create pretty decent art on the wacom tablets, but that is such a niche use case. There are probably other use cases that are unrealized, because it might distract the precious users from their push notifications and doom-scrolling.

[1]: Which for the most part is _reactive_. It used to be that companies would invest in industrial design (or visual design) to make an aesthetically appealing product. The problem, is that this is very expensive, and difficult to repeat, because there is not exactly a science of aesthetics (nothing beyond philosophy of phenomenology and also some eastern philosophies). And so, companies use the only strategy that can scale: rage-bait, doomerism, etc. Somehow, I do not think that the executives and shareholders of these companies consume the same information diet (how many cigarette company shareholders and executives are chain smokers?). Maybe alignment requires that the people who sell a product are legally required to integrate it into their lifestyle (I wonder how many sex-toy-company executives and shareholders would abandon ship).

Blackpill depression post complaining about "blackpill depression circklejerks"...

> a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become.... Like what [person in my ideological group] did [allegedly, with no explanation or description] with [thing that happened online]... [this comment made online]

I see.

You complain of astroturfing, but you seem unaware of things that you have come to believe because of it.

Steve Bannon's involvement in promoting Gamer Gate and co-opting it into a (what would become MAGA) recruitment funnel is fairly well documented[1]. There's absolutely nothing "allegedly" about it, he proudly spells it out himself[2].

Everyone is running this playbook now. The far left, the alt right, IS, Hamas, IDF. Russia was an early player in the space too but seems to have lost a lot of that ability when Prigozhin fell out of a window.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gamergate-campaign

[2] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/st...

yeah, most ppl I know just don't go on social media. but they are grown-ups now... life is fine without it.

> Going online it's like everyone is really angry and tired and sad all the time, and it's getting worse every year.

Oh my. You need to step up shepherding the algorithms that decide what to put in front of your eyes. If you reject content that contains angry, tired and sad people it stops showing up. And you are left with content by cool people, energetically and optimistically doing awesome things.