In the past we could stay online for long hours doing some few activities (chatting, playing games, browsing few sites).
These days we can barely survive without a mobile phone always on, permeating every little interaction we have with the world. It’s quite a difference.
>These days we can barely survive without a mobile phone always on, permeating every little interaction we have with the world. It’s quite a difference.
reading all of these 'royal we' anecdotes makes me feel grateful that I can survive without a mobile quite fine. HN is as close to social media as I get -- so I guess i'm stuck wondering : are all these 'conditions' of the modern world inexorably linked and self-perpetuating?
Like, if I wanted to develop a mobile-phone habit would it be best for me to get interested in social media, and vice versa?
Maybe my ducking of these trends just stems from my aversion to social media all together, and that saved me from mobile-phone overuse?
I don't know. But it is interesting, and wildly segmenting, that everyone around me refers to these problems that 'we' have -- but I don't. I can't be alone in this feeling.
p.s. to be clear, i'm not gloating -- if anything it's kind of loneliness inducing that I can't relate to the struggle.. but it's kind of a bittersweet feeling like being one of the few who doesn't catch a plague and has to watch others suffer.
> I don't know. But it is interesting, and wildly segmenting, that everyone around me refers to these problems that 'we' have -- but I don't. I can't be alone in this feeling.
I feel the same way. HN is as close as I get to social media, I don't even look at reddit.
I think it is a "good thing" people use your "royal we" term in that at least people see phone addiction as a problem. It is usually always couched in the tone of "the problem is too far gone" which isn't a good thing.
I wonder what it would be like if an entire country picked one hour during one day, and everyone just somehow disabled data on their phones, calls only, with the idea being that you only make calls that are required, not to stymie boredom.
I don't think it's a plague, but more like a bunch of attractors now that ~everyone has expectation that everyone else is "always online". I'd say I'm in a similar position as you with regards to not opting into most of it, yet I still feel the social pressure of being drawn into crap like group texts. People, who a decade or two ago wouldn't call you back for days, now pile on within the hour with walls of emote-laden content-free well-wishes. If I were 10 years younger I'd probably have declared bankruptcy already and written an LLM autoresponse bot.
The other half of the mobile 1-2 punch is that the UX is terrible, due to both the limited form factor and the hostile software. People are social animals so most just suffer through it for the connection, and not knowing that the experience can be so much better on a real computer. Using software that functions across devices, I do feel the same attractors on a fully fledged desktop. But it's much less concentrated as I can read the entire context without scrolling, type out a response at a comfortable speed, and then switch away from that window until I poll it again. Whereas even with a phone running mostly libre software it feels like being sucked into a tap-tap-tap morass that I'm only using because I have to.
I don't use social media, but I have Whatsapp groups for organizing, and its useful if I want to read something I don't have immediately on hand on the go, or if I want to take a picture, or take a call, or check the map if I want to go somewhere or if I get lost. I can look up recipes or set timers while cooking, use it as an alarm clock, stopwatch. Plus the one, billion, quadrillion apps; though, they were a lot cooler back when smartphones first came out, and, as I said, I usually don't use any apps besides email and the browser and maybe also a music streaming app.
I think those are the main things I use my phone for, and getting rid of it would be very inconvenient at this point, especially since I have an iPhone anyway so I can shut off all push notifications and all tracking software and what have you. It's not 100% secure, but what can you do. Though, to be honest, I think this will be my last smartphone, I won't get another one after it breaks. I was in my local library the other day, just checking it out, and there happened to be a travel guide for a city I'm visiting soon. My god, that thing was way better than any info I've found online, and it was quite pleasant to sit down and read a book for a few hours, instead of frantically browsing through one million websites to find out what was cool, interesting, and legit, and what was a tourist trap. Its a shithole, the internet, its just a means for large-scale fraud, theft, and surveillance. But there are still a few good things left, and that redeems it somewhat.
15 years ago, we would somewhat choose whom to be “always online with”. It was more of a selected in-group of people, having similar interests and ideas. Right now, it just feels like “everyone screaming into the void” as “every app is for everyone”. It feels much different for some reason. Or maybe I’m just getting older and not a teen anymore.
I agree this might be the distinction. Communities are too permeable. The constant conflict we're seeing now reminds me a lot of e.g. harry potter fandom ship raids, except at a broad scale and for everything. We're not hissing about how people who want Harry and Hermione to fuck are dirty traitors to Ron and Hermione, we're trying to get someone's source of healthcare (employment) to kick them off for whatever they said about Ukraine/Russia.
Before cell phones there were beepers. and people could always reach you on a landline. or leave a message on the machine. payphones. people weren’t really that much farther than they are now, it just required a little more coordination.
and cell phones have been around a lot longer than 10 years when this really picked up steam. even if you filter this statement to exclude everything but smart phones - smart, internet connected phones were around well before ~2012 when we saw a sharp spike begin in this trend, and that’s really the dawn of dominance of the YT/FB/IG/etc era.
I would be surprised if the parent you’re responding to is even remotely discussing phone calls or answering machine messages, but rather the depth of what smartphones enable distraction-wise nowadays. Cell phones existed before but you weren’t browsing the entire web on them. ;P
A beeper isn’t even in the same league and it’s really not a point here.
What percentage of the population do you think had them? What percentage of school children?
Nerds doing nerd stuff aren't going to affect the zeitgeist much, it's the network effect of having essentially 100% of your peers spending much of their time on social media.
To me, with the exception of maybe a few genres in electronic, music has never been so bland and boring as of the 2000’s. Decentralization has something to do with it, as people’s attention is heavily fragmented and mostly very few marketable artists are promoted enough to stick their head out of the water. Risk taking is now at a minimum-ever for recording labels.
That’s cool! Before even seeing it, my feedback is to make sure no sexual/romance kind of encounters can take place via the app. All other people meetings apps seem to be sexually oriented.
> Why I find interesting is how some topics are basically self-censored whilst we like to pretend we’re having a free discussion
Propaganda doesn't work because people actually believe it. It works because everyone thinks that everyone else has that information, and that's what the authority wants to believe, so you keep quiet and pretend you believe it. So does everyone else. So in the end everyone complies.
But Solzhenitsyn said it better:
“We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.”
It's like these politically correct discussions, everyone knows what the elephant in the room is, but everyone pretends to not see it.
We've had a rapid uncontrolled population increase, this in combination with a overregulated housing market causes problems.
(housing regulation being rents are controlled for first party renters(artificially low)). This regulation means it's impossible to find a rental where you want to live because nobody builds them (they wouldn't be profitable).
This is not the answer, but it belive it's part of it.
That we increased our population with people who are either not educated or can't get their educations verified is also a problem.
When I was younger I had faith the government was doing what's best for it's people, that's eroded into "these populist aholes will say anything to win votes no matter how it affects people"
The superstrict regulation (but not enforcement, except when it's convenient) on drugs probably doesn't help either. I know a dude that was recently fined 19000 SEK for a couple grams of pot, he went to court and won though.
My country is broken, in a seemingly unbreakable downwards spiral to becoming a first class shithole.
Population increase yes, from immigration. The problems coming from the segregation stem from immigration (almost per definition), not "population increase" which sounds like Sweden experienced a huge baby boom.
Sugar coating the problem or painting a different picture than what it is, is part of the problem. For example, of course there are challenges and costs with immigration, and it doesn't help anyone pretending there aren't. Of course immigration from low-education countries will have on general lower education. Pretending otherwise will ensure they won't get the help they need to become a part of the society. Of course patriarchical society immigrants will generally have a patriarchical mindset. It doesn't help that turning a blind eye to that just because you (not you specifically) is afraid being called a racist for calling that out.
Now, I'm not much better, but from what I recall crime in general is going down - but there are some notable exceptions (gang crime related specifically).
A quick look at the number of shootings over the past six years shows that the number of fatalities in shootings reached a new record in 2022. Moreover, a report published by the Swedish national council for crime prevention in 2021 found that Sweden was the only European country in which the number of fatal shootings per 100,000 inhabitant increased since 2000.
I completely agree and it often baffles me the lack of nuance I see here on HN. “Reddit became crap”. No it didn’t. Maybe it’s less appealing and valuable than in the past, but it certainly still is a goldmine in more niche subreddits. Or simply to have a laugh at r/funny.
There's goldmine of information on 4chan's niche boards as well. But people referring to "4chan" the website tend to talk about the wide strokes of communities.
It's the same with reddit. Sure, I do appreciate some small gaming communities that I can't find anywhere else, but it's not what the site cares about, nor what many people see when they go to reddit.com. You need to search for those communities,and they aren't guaranteed to be good. Or active for that matter.
These days we can barely survive without a mobile phone always on, permeating every little interaction we have with the world. It’s quite a difference.