The Internet is Worse Than Ever – Now What?

What Hacker News said

Strong rec johnsmith1840 · 2025-11 · on “How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity”

I view social media through this lens now. [this video] It's less that we are in echo chambers and more of being completly flooded with too many opinions. Avacados == liberal Steaks == conservative The point I take is that the only way to prevent this is decrease the amount of information you recieve not increase. If you constantly read extreme opinions everywhere your brain cannot process it and therefore starts dropping everything into really big buckets. The more sides you read the bigger your buckets becomes. Sure you're less informed but I don't think humans were designed to grok the entire world's information either.

Recommends audunw · 2023-12 · on “Elon Musk brings Alex Jones and Infowars back on X after user poll”

Sure, bring him back or whatever. But don’t pretend it has anything to do with free speech. That’s undermining the importance of the concept free speech. Free speech has never been about forcing all (social or not) media platforms to publish the opinions of all people. The concept of “free speech” that Elon Musk is chasing is noble in a twisted way I suppose. But it’s naive. Especially in the coming era of “AI”, where it will be increasingly easy to generate fake activity if you have the money. I think people will seek platforms that do work like open forums, so you get the opinions and ideas of people outside your immediate network… but people will increasingly value that those opinions and

Recommends rockbruno · 2023-12 · on “Ask HN: Reddit died, nothing took its place. What will happen when HN dies?”

Why do you think that being spread out is an issue? Niche forums like HN were exactly how the internet worked before mass social media arrived and ruined everything. Going back to this old format is exactly what we should be doing in my opinion. I find that Kurzgesagt's video on social media touches this subject very well: [this video]

Recommends jug · 2023-12 · on “People aren't posting on social media as much”

There is a Kurzgesagt that I can recommend about this! How our puny brains are ready for socializing and it’s been very important for us, but more on an isolated “tribe” level or at the very least without social networks, arguing that returning to special interest bulletin boards online will probably have us feel better. [this video]

Recommends lorean_victor · 2024-02 · on “Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?”

I've got to disagree on this point. I am a firm believer in "democratisation" of anything, including "publishing content that many other people will see". this is what social media mainly have done, in my opinion. they have made it extremely easy to publish content. the "social" part is just to further lower the barrier: it is easier to quote or comment on something someone else has already said compared to posting something out of the blue, and features like "like" or "share" allow you to create content with push of a button. they have also used other techniques that has no social aspect (Twitter's character limit, TikTok's musics and video length limit, Snapchat's stories, etc). of course,

Cites ajoseps · 2023-12 · on “Ask HN: What other good forums are out there?”

weirdly enough, i was just thinking of this same question as well after watching this recent Kurzgesagt video: [this video]

Cites FirmwareBurner · 2023-12 · on “Ask HN: Reddit died, nothing took its place. What will happen when HN dies?”

Argh, I wish you hadn't linked the video directly to the timestamp of the ad. Here's the 'right' link: [this video]

Cites UncleOxidant · 2024-01 · on “Software Engineers Say the Job Market Is Getting Much Worse”

According to this Kurzgesagt video [1] the problem isn't echo chambers, the problem is the opposite. Encouraging online dialog isn't the solution if he's right. He suggests we go back to smaller online communities and more IRL interaction. [1] [this video]