This post is talking about the prevalance of the emotions of anger, bitterness, anxiety, and resentfulness online, and I think it's interesting and noteworthy how many of the comments here express similar emotions.
Over the past year or so I've found myself becoming increasingly intolerant of people for whom those are the dominant modes of expression. With my best friend of over twenty years, almost no matter the topic of conversation, he'll find a way to express those emotions. It's becoming an increasingly substantial issue for me, and I often find myself curbing my urges to reach out to share something I find interesting, cool, or funny, because I'm pre-emptively trying to shield myself from the negative emotions I know will inevitably be in his response.
My own emotion about this trend is mostly sadness. There's so much cool stuff happening in the world, so many interesting things to learn about, and I wish it was easier to find a community of people whose predominant response is sharing in that excitement.
> This post is talking about the prevalance of the emotions of anger, bitterness, anxiety, and resentfulness online, and I think it's interesting and noteworthy how many of the comments here express similar emotions.
I started this as an exercise, but now I am doing it every day: as soon as a comment, news post, or anything else irritates me, I close the website/app. I found this helpful expecially with Reddit. I use it so much less now that I don't even have the app on my phone. I feel better and I don't feel angry for no reason anymore.
Recently I nuked my Reddit account. I didn't delete the actual account, but I purged everything I've posted as a comment or submission in the past 10 years. I don't think it's a loss even for the cases in a thread where I was being helpful to someone. Most interactions, even this comment I'm typing right now should be considered a conversation in a coffee shop or a small convention where the topic at hand that gathered us is the OP link/post. As soon as the convention is done we all go home. Whether we want to remember the conversation and what was said is up to us. Most threads devolve to single-to-single interactions anyways or at most 3 people exchanging ideas in a sub-thread.
In my view these conversations should be ephemeral, but in reality the internet can keep them (barring digital or natural apocalypse) forever. I truly don't think there's value for keeping the vast majority of online interactions stored forever. There are actual physical limits here as well. At some point in the future there might be a case for which types of information has to be stored for future generations and which shouldn't etc.
All of us as humans have some inherent capacity of comprehending and analyzing information. The internet turns out is not like a second brain for us, but more like a crazy neighbor screaming at us at all times.
Maybe I'll nuke my HN account at some point too. Don't get me wrong I've searched old HN/forum/reddit threads to great success, but like I said above, I think we're not capable of handling all that information maturely. Who decides what's useful or not I can't say, but I'm at least responsible for my own comments so I can make that decision for myself.
Hacker news used to be a place I turned to for that sort of thing, but yes lately it has become a complete horror show, especially with the advent of AIs I mainly want to imprison the creators, inflict corporeal punishment, etc. (I have found it soothing/calming to imagine e.g. various terrible tech leaders being tortured) - not that I don't value knowing which terrible things are happening in the world of computing or otherwise but I miss when HN was spewing out interesting new frameworks every other day.
I don't think it's on HN though, every time I find a new community that is more like that it seems it slowly becomes corrupted, usually thanks in part to some idiotic tech bro "oh we made it easy so now your meditative thing has a bunch of annoying notifications, yay progress"
Over the past year or so I've found myself becoming increasingly intolerant of people for whom those are the dominant modes of expression. With my best friend of over twenty years, almost no matter the topic of conversation, he'll find a way to express those emotions. It's becoming an increasingly substantial issue for me, and I often find myself curbing my urges to reach out to share something I find interesting, cool, or funny, because I'm pre-emptively trying to shield myself from the negative emotions I know will inevitably be in his response.
My own emotion about this trend is mostly sadness. There's so much cool stuff happening in the world, so many interesting things to learn about, and I wish it was easier to find a community of people whose predominant response is sharing in that excitement.