It's the internet. When you talk to people online, it often descends into pettiness. When you talk to people in the real world, that rarely happens. But it's much easier to talk online, so people get the wrong impression.
You should talk to strangers. It's never gone wrong for me. Most people have a warmth and agreeableness that comes out when you are there with them, talking about stuff. There's also the interesting effect that people will give you their innermost secrets, knowing you won't tell anyone (I actually met a serial killer who did this, heh). For instance I was on a long haul flight earlier this year, and my neighbour told me everything about her divorce. Like a kind of therapy.
I also find when I have a real disagreement with someone, it's a lot easier when you're face-to-face. For instance, I have friends who are religious, in a real way, ie they actually think there's a god who created the earth and wants us to live a certain way. Being there in person keeps me from ridiculing them like I might on an internet forum, but it also keeps them from condemning me to hell.
So folks, practice talking to people. Much of what's wrong in the current world is actually loneliness, having no outlet for your expressions.
Online, it feels like we're all half-performing for an invisible audience, so the incentives skew toward snark or point-scoring. In person, there's no scoreboard, just two humans trying to get through the moment together
An interesting "control case" is random-chat websites like Omegle. I spent many many hours on that site before it shut down. Omegle pairs you up with a single random stranger, so there's no audience. I typically used it in text-only mode, so there's no face-to-face communication either.
I'd say my experience was closer to the "30 minutes with a stranger" study than it was to modern social media. It was fairly common for a conversation to degrade into insult-trading. But it was more common to have a deep, heartfelt conversation. (Oftentimes I felt like I should follow up with the person I talked to, but I rarely did so in practice, even when we traded contact information.)
Another interesting "control case" is Usenet. You mention the concept of point-scoring. The point-scoring metaphor is rather literal on a website like HN which has upvotes/likes/etc. Usenet didn't have that stuff, but I'm told it had flamewars nonetheless.
Surely some HN users reading this comment are old enough to remember Usenet. Was it better or worse than modern social media in terms of civility? I'm especially curious about Usenet after Eternal September, once small-group norm enforcement broke down, and the underlying characteristics of the platform shone through. If we score early Usenet as 10/10 for civility, and modern X or reddit as 0/10, what score would latter-day, post-AOL Usenet receive?
Another thought: It occurred to me that "point-scoring" could actually be less of an issue with pure-anonymity platforms like 4chan, since you have less of a persona to defend. I've barely used 4chan though, so I can't say much here.
Point scoring isn’t referring to literal points. A better term might be “dunking on someone”.
The same thing happens in social circles in a school. Kids are more likely to make fun of and ridicule other kids when they have an audience to show off to.
I don’t think the anonymous nature helps either. Because the person doing the ridiculing is looking for validation that they are indeed correct and the subject is an idiot, therefore the critic gets to feel good about being smarter than their victim.
So the only dynamic required is just someone telling you how smart you are when you cut someone down. Whether that’s upvotes, or just someone commenting in agreement, it doesn’t matter.
My view is that USENET ran the gamut, depending on what group you were reading. Some would feel more like your typical HN thread or a well-behaved, niche Reddit topic, and others could be just as messy as you could find today. Just in text form rather than images and whatnot.
There is an overall style shift over the long term, e.g. USENET was a little more like email lists and less like chat. More like writing letters to one another rather than having an interactive conversation.
But, those social network problems already existed. There were various kinds of trolls, just like today. Some were just permanently in it for a laugh, others seeming more focused on dealing out grief, and some who (rumor had it) would escalate their newsgroup beefs into real life harassment and stalking. I think there was a period where using real identities, e.g. university email IDs and real names, was typical but then eventually it was mostly pseudonyms whether by explicit blind mailers or just the wave of random usernames at random commercial ISPs.
I don't know what drove what, but I'd say many groups died by attrition. People with niche interests and finite patience started finding other venues like web rings and web forums. Eventually it was mostly trolls, floods of binary attachments, and newsgroup necromancers.
The snark is not Internet specific. It comes from the top down, whether it's the talking heads on Fox News, your favorite podcast/streamer or popular Twitter posters. A few decades ago, it might have been popular opinion writers or radio personalities. This is how we learn to discuss things.
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I also find when I have a real disagreement with someone, it's a lot easier when you're face-to-face. For instance, I have friends who are religious, in a real way, ie they actually think there's a god who created the earth and wants us to live a certain way. Being there in person keeps me from ridiculing them like I might on an internet forum, but it also keeps them from condemning me to hell.
My life experience differs: I, for example, am likely more disagreeable in real life than on the internet. :-)
In internet forums, all answers are "delayed" (since you have to put them into a coherent text). Thus you rather have to think through your arguments, and thus react less on impulse (the impulse is typically already over when you have finalized your post). On the other hand, in real life, things that you strongly disagree with might trigger a very spontaneous emotional reaction.
Also, in internet forums, you want to "win internet points". Thus, you only tangentially write your arguments for the counterpart (who you will likely not convince), but more importantly to convince the many people who read your post. So your arguments are better well-thought and well-researched.
In real life, there is often no additional audience to appreciate and be convinced by "your great arguments" ;-) so it's an "all-or-nothing" to bring the truth to this ignorant being. Since the counterpart has such as "stupid" opinion, rational arguments are likely not the best way for this (because if the counterpart was capable of rational thinking, they would immediately see how "stupid" their opinion is ;-) ), so you better "hammer" your arguments into the counterpart. :-)
There's definitely an aspect of "dehumanization," when it comes to remote communication (not just the Internet, but I think store-and-forward leaches the most humanity, compared to realtime).
It's the having time to consider responses, that I think actually makes it more difficult to accept the person on the other end as "human," more than the physical separation. You can see this in formal debates, where the emotional feedback is strictly regulated.
I've actually met a number of killers (long story for another venue), and will probably continue to do so, for the remainder of my life. I even call some of them friends. I enjoy the story, and accept it as true, because I have heard much more unbelievable true stories.
I think it's an exaggeration of the "city effect": the denser an environment is, the more likely it is that people who see you out to talk to you are going to have a negative agenda, because everyone else is trying to keep their head down.
If you meet a stranger at the North Pole, where you're the only two humans around, you're going to talk to them. If you meet a stranger in a remote village, you're probably going to talk to them. If you meet a stranger on the street in New York, you're probably going to put your hand over your wallet. Adverse selection wins.
It sometimes feels like social media has gone from a place to make friends to a place to make enemies - or at least to bond with a group through the medium of hate. Bonding through hate of the outsider is hardly new, but it's especially negative on the Internet where it can be amplified over and over.
The idea of the city effect is suburbia romatization. My view is that people (me included) tend to be biased in what they like. I love cities and dense areas and hence most interactions I have are positive.
I like what you said about the kinship through hate, I feel no connection to a city though rather I see the segregation of suburbia as the breeding ground for hate.
Most interactions in a city are neutral: you can walk past a thousand people in a subway without conceiving of it as an interaction, you just ignore them and they ignore you. In a way you couldn't do it you met in a wilderness.
That is a bold statement I do not understand why you think it is true.
I am trying to understand how your concept about a common hate connects to cities. You are comparing leisure time "the wilderness" to work time "the big city". A city lets you choose your interactions, and it forces you to see things that are not only the hate in your bubble. The possibility to have an interaction that changes your world view is greater in an integrated city.
Hate can grow even if we all sit in a corner of the woods on the internet, or if we listen to the same radio host.
There are too many cultural aspects in your view of the city, I do not know where you come from here. FWIW I have lived in mega cities, and also for years outside of cities in some of the least populated spaces in the "developed world". My experience do not reflect yours at all.
You're simply not going to have time to speak to everyone in a subway to fish out that positive interaction, even if you wanted to.
I don't think most interactions will be hateful, but if the odds are .1%, you have some 50/50 shot of a bad interaction with 1000 people. It's just statistics.
Dehumanization is a poor framing, really. It was never humanized in the first place.
Sure, those of us who have a technical understanding understand that it is likely that there are humans involved as an implementation detail, but from the user perspective there is no other human to be seen. If the technical backend were replaced by a sufficiently capable LLM (or whatever technology) absolutely nothing about the user experience would change. From the user perspective, it is a solitary activity.
Human interaction hasn't gone away. Online discussion is a different tool for a different job.
But much of internet interaction isn't solo, in all those places where online and offline have connections. There will be a ton of dehumanization once in the morning we type a quick and lazy "/greet Mary" on the console and the AI agent takes over fully, sends a personalised email to Mary in my voice, and adds a "Welcome back from vacation!" note, after consulting my agent-managed calendar. Fully decoupling us from each other.
...and on the other side Mary's agent would summarize your greeting as part of her regular notification digest. There would be no gradient. You and your correspondent would continue to pay equivalent proportion of available attention to each other; thus you would remain equally human as before.
At least relative to each other (and to each of the rest of your contacts.)
It's one's idea of humanness that will be substituted piecemeal by a "doppelganger concept", as a result of the perceptual decoupling provided by ever-thicker interfaces. That concept would continue to fulfill the exact same function in one's life that formerly would've been fulfilled by one's previous opinions on "what it means to be human" (if any).
Happens all the time, things changing people's minds. Happens surreptitiously, too. Of course, it's more comfortable to consider at least our inner lives remain inviolate to the vagaries of technocapital - but where could all their content come from, other than entirely from the outside world, same one that software was proclaimed to be "eating"?
Subjectively, you'd hardly (if ever) experience that kind of "world model spoofing" as anything close to a distinctly recognizable perceptual phenomenon (since it's language-based anyway). Rather, you'd continue to experience everything as the usual "being a person comprehending a world" bit - and, as ever, flavored by whatever life-scripts you've been allocated.
On average, however, the substitution would result in effects as simple as the population allocating that much more of its resources to, say, the organization representing the machinic quasi-intelligence in question - the one that has interposed itself as normative communication medium by providing useful summaries.
Or, not as simple.
It's already ended up very much like that "isn't there someone you forgot to ask" meme. Except the 3rd party pictured as JC, should rather be labeled "VC".
> talking to people face to face is really a solitary activity
There is no doubt a lot of truth in that statement at some kind of fundamental level, but as far as language goes, that's literally the opposite of what we consider a solitary activity. Staring at a computer screen on the other hand...
No, I don't think it's anonymity. You can see absolutely rabid, hateful, unhinged things people post under their real names on Facebook, LinkedIn, nextdoor.
There is a kind of 'bubble effect' where people are wrapped in their own world. A similar effect can be seen once people drive a car and there's a behavior change towards other people on the road, and 'road rage' becoming a thing.
I think people (myself included) have a mental model of the other driver that seems to default to the worst possible interpretation of their motives.
If I was in a grocery store and someone "cut me off" and forced me to slow down because they misjudged the timing, I would think nothing of it. I certainly wouldn't make an obscene gesture and shout at them.
Also, when we are driving, we're in a pretty high state of anxiety; just as a baseline.
I find it amazing, that, when I'm driving, and some knucklehead does something that almost makes me crash (and thus, maybe kill me), I get incandescent with rage, but, five minutes later, I've all but forgotten the incident.
I could easily see myself fanning that rage into something that could result in self-destructive road rage.
I agree. I think that it's the removal of an emotional connection, and that happens naturally, after a certain pause (an interesting study, would be to find out how long, and I'll bet there are people who can explicitly prevent the analytical part of their mind from taking the wheel).
I disagree that removing an emotional connection removes emotional responses of hate and wild dehumanization. I would categorize all such interactions as emotional. I argue that it is in fact the opposite: Having no analytical consideration for how another human might respond enflames emotions, not dampens them.
If that is the case: I disagree that rage is the natural response to a loss of empathy AND switching to an analytical mode of thinking. I don't think rage (an emotion) stems from analytical thinking. Loss of empathy may be a required precursor to rage comments, but I don't see how analytical thinking fits anywhere in there. And if analytical thinking is a function of time: I would expect to find calmer comments after deliberate thought.
It would be testable - if you had the data - if it was the case that rage comments are thought out, or spur of the moment. I'm betting on the latter. Rage never seems well thought out to me.
I don't know if it's as "advanced" as empathy. I think it's "reptile-brain" level stuff. Herd/Pack instinct.
Anyway, that's not my wheelhouse. I've spent a lot of time, around a lot of pretty damaged folks, and this is just an observation that I've come up with, on my own.
I've just noticed that direct, realtime communication, has a lot more emotional connection (for both good and bad), than ones where there's a "handshake," so to speak.
It's not always bad. I think we've all been told to "Think about what you're going to say in response." "Count to ten", etc.
If we want to be angry, then the pause allows us to ramp it up, but if we want to be reasonable, it gives us the chance to defuse it, but, at the same time, maybe leach some of the emotional warmth from it.
A lot of it happens in out of band posts like these.
It seems to happen less in interactive (i.e. chat, etc.). Make no mistake, it absolutely happens there.
But not as much as in async posts (I don't think).
I don't think it happens much at all with video.
Most of it is surrounded by context (or lack of). How difficult it is to communicate (typing like this is not easy, and certainly not for the impatient).
I have to keep telling folks when they get that Look in their face because of what someone said or didn't say over email or an instant message to not judge on that. If it's that important to you, CALL them. TALK to them, you simply can not rely on typed conversations for anything that impacts you emotionally.
I know that my idea is completely rectally-sourced, but I feel that the less time that we have to think about an element of an interaction, the less likely we are to go into the nasty "flame mode" we see.
But there's exceptions to every case (especially when human nature is involved). I actually know people that are so emotionally broken, that every interaction that they have; regardless of the context and medium, is a fight.
They tend to be lonely and angry. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think that part of it, is that when we are engaging with people in realtime (especially face to face), our emotional driver is behind the wheel, and when there's a pause between responses, our analytical driver has time to grab the wheel, and that's where the "dehumanization" comes from.
That's not always a bad thing. In emotionally-charged situations, that "few seconds of consideration" can help stabilize the interaction.
People claim that it's the lack of consequences, and illusion of safety, but I feel as if it's really the emotional disconnection that does it.
Anonymity is one aspect, for sure. But also, people often have not taken in the lesson of interpreting generously. They take the worst interpretation of the words, and often add a few imagined things that were never written (oh you like healthcare, you communist?). This is worse in written form because the feedback loop is longer, but it being written makes it feel like the author has had plenty of time to think about it.
Forums are also the kind of place that everyone thinks are populated by political bots. Believing every other comment is written in bad faith is going to change how you behave.
When you think of arguments as a kind of battle, you end up forgetting the person on the other side.
A long time ago, you would only interact with humans from your own tribe. Most of your actions had direct consequences for you, and you interacted with these people every day. Your life and wellbeing depended on that group and your social status. Then came local communities, followed by the global village, with access to eight billion people you will never meet or know. You can say whatever you want to them and face no real consequences, you can simply block them if you wish.
I remember talking to a doctor once (in a social situation). We were talking about non doctor things and he mentioned that most people find out he's a doctor and start talking about medical issues.
I think this happens to some people (doctors, lawyers, police).
And to a smaller extent it happens to all of us (sometimes). Older people might talk about divorce, or their operations, or their kids.
I enjoy helping others, and I like hearing someone's life story. Not everyone needs to like that though, people are different.
Hearing the same story from the same person can be very tiring and I have family members like that, but with strangers it's a different person, different context, different story.
> You should talk to strangers. It's never gone wrong for me.
I guess it depends on your definition of wrong.
I feel the opposite, where it has never gone right. I can’t remember any actual interesting conversations I have had with strangers. I can remember a lot of bad, awkward, and boring ones, though.
Lots of context we're missing here obviously and we might not even be talking about the same thing but in what way were conversations you have had with strangers "bad"?
I agree, but another aspect is what’s lost in text. Even when I don’t have negative intentions, my messages can come across as rude or brash. I feel like I get more negative responses from my friends in the group chat compared to in person, where I’ve never had a single argument with them. In person, the recipient can see my smile and body language, which makes it clear that I don’t mean anything negative by my words.
Beautifully said. I believe wholeheartedly that in real life, disagreements between two people hinge on an ability to disarm each other through charm and disposition. The less you know someone, and the more they appear to earnestly try to understand you - becoming heated and firing phasers just feels unbecoming; why would I perpetuate personal loneliness or ennui in a moment that is genuinely devoid of it?
I learned the hard way that religion is something best left aside in discussions.
I am an absolute atheist, and I believe that people who are educated in science and are religions have some kind of mental illness. This is just too set the context :) I also used to be very active on radio about science vs religion.
First, people who are hard core religious may get off their way to cure you. I had people yelling in front of my house. I never saw physicists doing the same.
But that's a perk of the "atheism job" :)
I had something much worse happening to me. A friend of mine was religions, from a very religions family. We had long discussions and she gradually realized that her while world is going to shit when she discovered the insanity of religion. She got into a deep depression and tried to commit suicide. I was with her 7 years until she somehow snapped back to a normal life.
I never attempted to turn an individual anymore. Sure, general information about rational hygiene (religion, homeopathy, ...) but not on z 1:1 basis.
When I was an intern in a small town, I took a trip to London. On my way back, I caught a cab from the provincial station to my house.
The cabbie seemed fun. We were talking about football. Just ordinary banter with a cab driver. Out of the blue, he asks me "hey mate, just for fun, what would you do if you'd murdered someone and had a dead body to dispose of?"
I was a bit surprised, but it's not that odd a thing to think about. People watch crime flicks all the time. But I hadn't thought much about it and gave a bland answer like "maybe dig a hole in the roadside, something like that". But I did think it was an odd switch in mood. He drops me off, end of that.
A few years later, I've graduated, I'm watching the news. A cab driver has been convicted of murdering multiple women, in the town I was in. Over the same period. He's buried the bodies in various places. I happened to run into a detective from the same town, to whom I explained my anecdote. He's pretty sure it's the same guy, but the cabbie has been sent down for life, so I wouldn't really be adding anything if I reported it.
A Russian backpacker once told me about a conversation with an Afghan cab driver on a trip to the US. Apparently it was quite friendly for a conversation that started "I used to kill people like you".
Think I'd take the Reform bollocks to that opening line though
That is an interesting story, thanks for sharing. However, the prospect of speaking to a serial killer does not make me more likely to want to strike up conversations with strangers.
It is bizarre to me that you relate this experience like it's fun and whimsical trivia. Maybe that's because I'm a woman and identify more with the victims...
> So folks, practice talking to people. Much of what's wrong in the current world is actually loneliness, having no outlet for your expressions.
If I had a penny for every bizarre theory people who ruin the world believe about who/what is actually ruining the world.
My favourite was an interview with Jerry Springer. He also had a theory of what's wrong in the current world and none of it had anything to do with what he did.
Well obviously. Someone saying that the world is "being ruined", and theorizing on the causes of the same, implies that the speaker is experiencing the world they inhabit as changing in a manner that's unacceptable to that person.
Nobody goes around thinking "people like me are making the world unlivable for people like me"; even if that's a useful and sometimes even a correct notion - what reason would anyone have to entertain it?
> it often descends into pettiness. When you talk to people in the real world, that rarely happens
If you are talking about one on one with a stranger, then I can see that, yeah, but if you have worked with people, then you know it is a huge mess, creation of cliques, gossip, and all sorts of crap, including heavy pettiness, greed, jealousy / envy, and so on.
>Much of what's wrong in the current world is actually loneliness
Okay cool. How do we fix it? We don't have places to just "talk to people". Maybe some places still has a mall area, but most businesses discourage soliciting. So you're mostly asking people to pay to talk to strangers.
A part of this is behavorial, but the UX of life also kept pushing Gen Z onto the internet, the only "third place" left for them.
People become jaded dicks online. Rare good faith effort is punished by unassailable trolls, cynical jerks, etc. Makes it easy to become one of them because extending an olive branch is taken advantage of.
> Most people have a warmth and agreeableness that comes out when you are there with them, talking about stuff.
I really hate saying this, but I live in the Deep South and people here can quite repulsive under the veneer of manners. The amount of hate, anger towards people different from them, and just rampant racism is quite difficult to deal with. And these are things that get exposed when having these conversations.
I do as you suggest. But I'm always ready to just walk away from a conversation. There's no winning with these people and the moral injury you sustain by being in their presence is awful
Yes, moral injury. Thanks for giving me a new way to frame that experience.
The natural impulse to be sociable and get along with people combined with minor insecurity or social anxiety has led to social experiences that when I reflect on them, I can only cringe in shame at my timid response to some awful statements.
It's not like you have a lot of options. You won't be changing these people. It's not your job. But you do need to protect yourself.
It is okay to interrupt them and walk away, especially to any stranger or faint acquaintance. And to say "I'm not sure I agree with that" and let them keep talking will at least let them know where you stand.
I'm increasingly convinced that social isolation is the single great social ill of our time. I am not one for "respecting others' opinions" at all, make no mistakes, if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected. But so much of the hate simmering away like a pot about to boil over is the result of loneliness. The evidence on this is startingly clear.
In richer societies you can afford to be alone. This isn't good for tribal beings, humans didn't evolve as lone wolves. Even something as cooking for more than one person involves so much interaction.
At the lower end of the global income scale , you can't afford to be alone in your giant house. You might need to share communal goods.
Not everyone, but just having a role in society can be a major help for many people. The biggest crime of the modern era is the disposable human. You work for an anonymous corporation, that does some nonsense you can't even hope to understand, in exchange for currency, to support the basics of your existence.
You don't get to have any real status in that, for example In many places there was just one or two bread makers for the entire community. Baking bread isn't the most prestigious job, but you matter.
Tell me, fellow techy, working on serving ads. Who exactly would be disappointed if you failed in your duties today. Would anyone in your community be upset that they didn't get as many advertisements
I accidentally ended up at a job in the ad-serving business for two years and this is so accurate. (Who knew "analytics" really meant "ad conversions"?) If there are entire product lines dedicated to blocking the thing you do, it's very demoralizing.
No, it's very demoralizing to find that what you are doing for a living (that isn't what you expected to be doing) is so disgusting to other people that there are commercial tools devoted to blocking you.
You can't afford to be alone in any society. Not in the monetary sense, but in the sense that it will make you depressed. The fact that many people don't realize this is troubling.
If the society was truly communal, then the people able to employ you should be the same ones gossiping. The question then becomes why they won't employ you. I do agree that living communally can be unpleasant if you're an independent thinker with views different from everyone else in a way no one can appreciate.
I agree with 99.9% of what you wrote. It’s presented very clearly. We are social animals even if we don’t like to admit it.
A while ago I would say I agree 100%, but more recently I learned that ads have value. Therefore i can’t agree with the final sentence in this post. It’s not easy to recognize but I’d like to try to share how I see it now.
Any time you think or say one of these things, it means that someone did not do a good job advertising:
- I would have gone to that concert but did not know about it
- It was that cheap on sale? Too bad I did not hear about it a week ago.
- DeVaughn’s closed!? I completely forgot about that restaurant. They had great food.
- Why didn’t anyone tell me earlier that there is a tool for easily finding a time for a meeting.
Advertising can be valuable. When done right, it does not have to be intrusive or annoying. This does not mean that every job provides value, but not knowing about something can cause people to feel negatively. Marketing is telling people about things.
Ads are agents in a zero-sum war for your attention.
If you have focus, if you're not aimlessly wandering around, ads try to distract you. They attack your personal agency and sovereignty, trying to divert you from what you were doing, to pay attention to what they're pushing.
Because they're in a zero sum competition, the dynamics are to escalate. There's only so much inventory, and the winners of the bids for your attention need to have more and more effect on your behavior to justify the escalating costs. Text isn't enough, images are needed. Images aren't enough, videos are needed. Videos aren't enough, interstitials with tiny close buttons are needed, with mandatory pauses. If advertisers could reach out and physically grab you by the head, they would.
All of this is true for a large portion of web ads.
Then there is the ad for your kids' school fundraiser.
Or the ad for a used car that your cousin would love.
Or the poster for the concert at your local community hall.
These ads also are "trying to divert you from what you were doing, to pay attention to what they're pushing".
Yet these feel ads differently despite also being "agents in a zero-sum war for your attention".
I don't think people appreciate how much good and positive advertising exists because they are conditioned and on-guard for the kinds of ads that you describe.
All of that is true for all web ads. The friendly types of ads you're describing only work as offline ads.
If I am online I don't want any of that offline context following me around at the behest of a creepy surveillance industry. A web page knowing what is local to me or what I might be interested in is a bug. Frankly I categorize it in the realm of security vulnerabilities.
And that's still putting aside the question of why I would want to spend time/attention looking at any online ads. The ad for the local concert stuck on a bulletin board can be read while waiting for a burrito if I would otherwise be spacing out, or it can be ignored if I'm thinking about something else or otherwise don't feel like taking new input on new topics. Whereas web page ads are interspersed with what I'm already trying to do - it's like if I went to grab my burrito and the guy gave me a 30 second elevator pitch before he'd hand it over.
Whereas the alternative for online ads is blank 'white' space. If I am online, I'm positively engaged in doing something else. If I'm interested in local concert listings, then I will purposefully check out concert listings.
You are deliberately confusing ads with things that already have better names, such as notices or listings. They feel different because they ARE different.
Advertising is wildly successful because it's literally everywhere and we are conditioned from birth that the whole concept of "strangers using psychological tricks so you give them your money" is just a normal fact of everyday life. Most people are NOT conditioned to be on-guard against ads, and that is the whole problem. It's not until you make the choice to actively avoid ads where possible and give up ad-laden media consumption altogether for a while that you notice how bad (and bad for you) advertising is.
If you haven't tried switching to a low-advertising diet, you are probably missing out on the ability to focus on what really matters in life.
I am taking a broader definition of ad to include things that also have other names.
- job ads and classified ads that can also be called listings
- ads for events that can also be called notices
- product description on services like Amazon and Ebay
- websites describing products and services
- 1st hand and 2nd hand mentions of products and services online that can be as close to the
Some of the comments here seem to hold only for a narrow definition of ads.
I prefer to think of all of this as marketing, as ads are part of the marketing mix. As we see, the distinction between ads and other similar things is blurry.
I am not defending the volume of ads. There's way too much of it. I am making the unconventional and unpopular statement that sometimes marketing and ads do deliver value.
It's better to narrow the critique of ads the way you did because that leads to a more constructive conversation.
A huge distinguishing characteristic is that some of these things come to you, or are found passively, and some of them you seek out. I think that when the ad comes to you, there is a very good chance it has little or no value.
Job listings are useful, but I have to seek them out.
An event calendar is something I seek out.
Product descriptions are only shown to me when I seek details about the product.
An ad on the street is somewhere in the middle. For most people the acceptability of it is about setting (not in a nature park, please), and ignorability (LCD billboard vs. telephone pole flyer).
I think that is the distinction that people are making between marketing and what is being called ads.
I think you hit the nail on the head - people tend to think of push (outbound) marketing as "ads" while they don't think as much about passive ads.
It's true that it's harder to do push / outbound marketing in a way that does not feel annoying. I've seen it done and it seemed like the company was reading my mind in a good constructive way. That's rare though.
It can definitely be done in a way that people don’t mind/accept.
People love movie trailers to the point of seeking out good ones and sharing them. People have come to accept that broadcast media will have ads, but get very annoyed when ads are inserted where they are not expected (ads during an ad break are ok, sports betting ads mid play annoy the shit out of me).
Ads are vying for attention, true! I usually dislike commercial ads as much as anyone, especially online advertising, especially forced ads that block the thing I’m there for. That said, I don’t buy that they attack my agency and sovereignty, that’s a bit of a stretch. Online, a lot of free content comes with ads, and nobody’s forcing me to choose free content, so online at least I can avoid a lot of ads by avoiding the free content that comes with ads. When I’m not online, ads like posters or billboards rarely if ever block me in any way.
HN comments are also vying for our attention and pushing narratives, so are they ads and are they a personal attack? Usually not for money, but you didn’t make a distinction and GP comment was pointing at ads like posters for free community events. The community dance poster does want your attention, of course, but is it an evil personal attack, or just information that you can do as you please with or ignore? Is it sometimes something you did want to know, and advertises something you would like?
The way ads are run these days is almost completely wrong!
- Lies are ok
- Thrusting your product in a users face, doesn't care if the user cares, Just because I like golfing, doesn't mean every new golf ball brand needs to hit me up all the time.
- Product with Money wins, not necessarily the right product
- Most people are oblivious to their psychological drivers, Ad makers have learnt to exploit those to drive sales.
This is one area AI can be very helpful as it improves, I face a problem, I let my agent loose and it finds the right solution and thus right products, provides comparative data for me to choose without the products being thrust in my face everywhere I go (behavioral ads) or also when I don't need it.
A lot of marketing is done badly. These bad ways are the most glaring and people sometimes think that all marketing is like that.
In reality, there is a lot of marketing that is completely unnoticeable. Some people would not even consider those things marketing. That is marketing done well (or at least better).
Unfortunately, when that makes up a trillionth of a percent of all ads, it appears to me as though the overall idea is terrible, with a few who got lucky here and there.
One of the best examples of your second point is that tweet that went something like "I bought a toilet seat and now I'm getting ads for toilet seats everywhere I go". It's annoying and not even productive for the advertiser.
Apparently some of the very best-converting ads are repeat sales. Of course it helps if the product is obviously consumable, but I'm told that this counterintuitive strategy actually works well. Maybe it's because they can track conversions but not product returns, so maybe you're searching for a better one after returning the first purchase.
I would be willing to believe that most toilet seats are bought by people that buy toilet seats as part of their job (builders, plumbers and maintenance). They might buy more in a month than you buy in your life.
Follow up ads might be very productive even if you personally get swept into the professional toilet installer ad pipeline inappropriately.
I seem to get a stream of ads for terrible products on YouTube on my phone (I get completely different ads when watching on an Apple TV) - by this point I'm convinced it is Google punishing me into signing up for YouTube Premium...
It’s insane how many are some random idiot in their car, filming with a phone, trying to act like they’re having a conversation with you before it completely switches to sales mode and they’re (terribly) reading a script. They don’t even put EFFORT into ads anymore it seems.
Then you want to watch a video and it’s 3 pre-roll ads, 90 seconds of video, then another 2-3 ads.
I’ll never feel bad about using Adblock, and I hate the idea of rewarding these companies’ behavior with money.
FWIW, YouTube premium is one of my most worthwhile family subscriptions.
Anytime I use YT on a browser/profile that I'm not logged into, it's so jarring that I immediately fix it.
Edit: I dumped Spotify for YT music. I thought I liked Spotify better, though, so I tried again recently, and it turns out I didn't, so now I get YT and music for not much more than just Spotify. Definitely worth it in that context.
> What about the ad for your kids' school fundraiser?
My kids should come home with a flyer for it.
> Or the ad for a used car that your cousin would love.
I will actively seek out and research a car.
> Or the poster for the concert at your local community hall.
Presumably this physical paper poster doesn't give me malware/AIDS if I look at it or tear off a slip.
My overriding personal objective is to be able to exist without being expected to consume and spend constantly every moment, waking or otherwise. In an ideal world, I should have to give consent to be advertised to, and should be able to operate in public without being bombarded with companies trying to take my money.
> My overriding personal objective is to be able to exist without being expected to consume and spend constantly every moment, waking or otherwise
We're fully aligned. The original point I was trying to make is that advertising can be done well, in a way that is compatible with this objective. Unfortunately, in many cases they aren't.
> In an ideal world, I should have to give consent to be advertised to
I thought about this a while back, and I think being bombarded with requests for consent is worse than being bombarded with ads. Cookie consent banners convinced me.
Except that you also learnt about 10 concerts you didn't want to go to, 10 sales you don't care about, etc. And it's not even (necessarily) 10 good concerts or sales, it's just the ones that someone managed to thrust in front of your face. Filtering the barrage of information is mental effort and distracts you from other tasks.
I'd certainly like to know when my favourite bands are playing or get an alert when something I'm after is on sale. There are better and more focused solutions to these than advertising.
> When done right, [advertising] does not have to be intrusive or annoying
I consistently see marketing and advertising where I learn about events, products, or services I did not know about before. While researching potential products, I read through marketing websites (a form of ad) of different offers. I buy things on Amazon, which requires me to read through product descriptions, which are also ads for what the seller is selling.
Agreed that there is too much machine-gun advertising and you see more than you need. However, I learned to appreciate good advertising while at the same time not letting the irrelevant ads ruin my day.
source: personal experience and sample size of 1. At the same time, I am not some weirdo and other people see the same ads and marketing materials, and it's not unreasonable to think that they also derive some value from them.
> I'd certainly like to know when my favourite bands are playing or get an alert when something I'm after is on sale
If you ever had this happen, that's another case to cite for non-intrusive and useful advertising.
I do not disagree with you entirely, but I feel this almost borders on self-delusion.
The sole purpose of ads is to (probabilistically) shift the targets spending behavior in favor of the one buying the ads, nothing more, nothing less.
While ads can have utility from the victims point of view (contain relevant information), this is entirely incidental.
If you want product updates or information, getting that from dedicated, independent 3rd parties is preferable in literally every situation I can think of.
I disagree that this is the sole purpose of ads. I can see how people arrive at that opinion, but I feel it is narrow and incomplete. With a little restrospection and introspection, anyone can see examples in their own life where marketing had another purpose.
Marketing can take many forms. Many people narrowly define it as "spam emails" or "unsolicited phone calls." Those are also marketing, but there is so much more. Marketing first and foremost informs. It can inform you that the problem that you have has even has a ready solution. It can inform you about the name of the product that solves your problem. It can inform you about alternative products that also solve your problem. Or it can reinforce and expand your existing opinions and believes. What you call the sole purpose is only one of these broad purposes of advertising.
Remember the time you learned of a particular programming library that does the thing that you wanted to do? Without marketing, you would not have learned about it.
Have you ever gone on a trip to a new place? How did you decide how you will spend your time? It was either because you researched things online and found websites that told you about those things. Or you saw a brochure at your hotel. Or an ad at the airport.
Think about how you learned about your favorite web framework. It was likely through word-of-mouth advertising.
Why do you drink (coke / pepsi / fav. brand of tea / fav. brand of coffee)? What formed your opinion was some kind of marketing, either directly, or indirectly.
Many things we do and believes we hold are because of one form of marketing or another.
I feel your own examples undermine your positions:
Drinks specifically are one of the most clearcut negative examples to me, where there is zero product discovery/information/customer upside involved; the sole purpose of that CocaCola banner is to marginally shift the ad-targets consumption behavior (fully to his or her detriment, either from overconsuming and/or overpaying).
If I seek product information, ads are the absolute last place to look because they have all the incentive to hide everything negative about the product and to obfuscate any comparison with potentially superior competitors.
I'm not saying that all marketing is a wasteful detriment to humanity as a whole, but a lot of advertising has a zero-sum "benefit" to society, while binding a lot of ressources (but every rational company is somewhat "forced" to play anyway).
The original comment, and your initial response, talked about advertising. The examples you give, and this response in general, are marketing. They are very different, and marketing is much broader.
It's true that they are different, but I would not say that they're very different. There is a considerable group of people here on HN who have a narrow definition of what an ad is.
Advertising and marketing are indeed two different things, but the distinction is blurry and the overlap considerable. I've read through the comment thread and it seems that advertising and marketing seem interchangeable in the way they are being talked about.
I'd claim any extent to which ads inform the viewer is downstream of the ultimate goal of having people spend money on the product. The company behind the ad does not inherently care about you being informed, just that informing people (in very selective ways) sometimes happens to be an effective way to increase sales. Where it better serves their purpose to misinform, that's what they do (which legislation can help curb).
> Remember the time you learned of a particular programming library that does the thing that you wanted to do?
Typically by searching a package index, opposed to someone being paid to shove a product in my face unsolicited while I'm trying to look at something else.
I don't think it really helps defend meaningfulness of the job in question ("techy, working on serving ads") to expand the scope to considering other things (writing package documentation, reviewing tourist destinations, ...) and then point to the fact that some of those other things, which the employee in question doesn't do, are useful.
> Why do you drink (coke / pepsi / fav. brand of tea / fav. brand of coffee)? What formed your opinion was some kind of marketing, either directly, or indirectly.
Being persauded to buy one sugary drink over another (or over water) doesn't really seem to be a constructive outcome, especially for all the time and resources wasted. Actual information incidentally gained from Coke ads is little to none - you'd be far better with an independent review/comparison.
Companies exist to make money. They use marketing as part of that process. However, we can not forget that consumers derive value from the things that companies sell. If we only focus on the big bad companies, then it is not possible to see how marketing could also serve the consumer.
Believe it or not, some people do enjoy a sugary drink from time to time. While I don't drink soft drinks regularly, I recently discovered skyr protein yogurts through advertising. That's a product that caters to a desire that I have. Never heard of skyr before!
> I don't think it really helps defend meaningfulness of the job in question ("techy, working on serving ads") to expand the scope to considering other things (writing package documentation, reviewing tourist destinations, ...)
There was a blanket statement that all ads are negative and people making them are useless -- exaggeration and gross simplification is mine. I offered some counterpoints for more balanced thinking. There is plenty of advertising that delivers positive value, hence some advertising jobs are useful.
One problem is that people sometimes think of ads as only web display ads. They are not aware that there are many other kinds of ads. Independent review sites, travel blogs, and posts on HN about an interesting software package are also ads. When truly independent, it's called word-of-mouth advertising.
> Believe it or not, some people do enjoy a sugary drink from time to time
But does that mean spending billions in resources on getting people to consume more sugary drinks is a net positive?
I don't think so. I think the goal of having more people consume sugary drinks is a net negative even if it were achieved for free, and that the direction our decision-making needs to be pushed (if at all) is towards consuming fewer sugary drinks (to counteract our evolutionary bias towards consuming more than is healthy for us), and probably spending less of our time hearing/thinking about them too.
> One problem is that people sometimes think of ads as only web display ads. They are not aware that there are many other kinds of ads. Independent review sites, travel blogs, [...]
Still seems to come back to the same issue - sure you can hold a broad definition of "ads" that includes independent travel blogs if you want, but that isn't what the "fellow techy, working on serving ads" in question is working on, or what people are talking about when they complain about someone being paid to shove a product in their face unsolicited when they're trying to look at something else.
My point is that all ads are bad and marketing can provide value for consumers.
Pointing out an egregious case of advertising that does not deliver a net positive does not disprove that point. There are plenty of examples of bad advertising. It does not take a lot of effort to find them. But from that extrapolating that all advertising is bad and calling all jobs related to it as useless is excessive.
> Pointing out an egregious case of advertising that does not deliver a net positive does not disprove that point.
Coke/Pepsi were your own examples. I don't believe there are just a limited number of bad cases in an otherwise good system, but rather that at it's core is a huge zero-sum game of burning resources to take market share back and forth, with even the non-zero-sum impacts (people hearing more about sugary drinks instead of other things, and consuming more sugary drinks than they otherwise would) being of questionable value in most cases (in some cases potentially good, but still disproportionately small benefit compared to resource wastage).
I think it's similar to Bitcoin mining as an example of what happens when competition is not directed towards a useful end like improving the product.
> But from that extrapolating that all advertising is bad and calling all jobs related to it as useless is excessive.
A job working on serving web ads is almost guarenteed to be a net negative to society in my eyes.
I wouldn't really consider someone writing a travel blog to be working in advertising (unless they get paid to push certain destinations) and I don't think anyone here's claiming that to be useless.
Sure; but people are not typically getting paid to post Show HNs, and that content is not shown to victims unsolicitedly, so I don't have any problem with it either.
If you are a "fellow techy, working on serving ads", it is a pretty safe assumption that producing "Show HNs" is neither the main purpose of your job nor very representative.
When I read ads in the old, old National geographic magazines at my grandparents what startles me is the entire paragraphs of text laying out the case for their product. I miss that even if it was BS.
Likely false but always felt likely there was a bit of respect being paid toward the reader/viewer in terms of recognizing them as an intelligent individual.
Nowadays advertisements aimed at adults are too different than ones for kids stuff. All vulgar (not sexual) fluff and eye candy.
This is a common problem with "your job is bullshit" rhetoric. It says a lot more about the speaker than the people whose jobs they're criticizing.
The most famous example is David Graeber, an academic who wrote a whole book on what he called "bullshit jobs". He claimed over half of all jobs were bullshit. But of the jobs he identified as such, most of them were actually valuable (receptionist, lawyers, programmers doing maintenance work). He just didn't understand why other people valued them. And, he was an activist deploying flowery rhetoric to make an argument for far-left politics, which is why nearly all the jobs he identified were in the private sector. Ironically, the most obviously bullshit job revealed by his work was his own, but for some mysterious reason academic activists were not identified as people with bullshit jobs.
Lots of people noticed this. Some even did studies on it! They found that the number of people who said in surveys their jobs were useless was only 20%, and of those 20% a lot of them had jobs that were objectively not useless. Instead it was cleaners, janitors, garbage collectors and similar who tended to feel their jobs were useless. Clearly "work is useless" is simply a proxy for "I feel like a loser" and not an objective evaluation of whether the work actually provides value to others.
People are pretty rational. When you find a lot of people doing something that looks irrational and there isn't a clear link to ideology or coercion, then it probably makes sense given information you don't have.
> People are pretty rational. When you find a lot of people doing something that looks irrational and there isn't a clear link to ideology or coercion, then it probably makes sense given information you don't have.
It can be in people's/companies' rational self-interest to act in a way that is detrimental to society as a whole.
We can recognize harmful behaviour and legislate such that it's no longer profitable, but it can take a while to get to that point if there's a lack of awareness or powerful interests pushing against it.
It's extremely rare to find people who aren't criminals yet engaged in behavior that's genuinely detrimental to everyone else. The world isn't new and the obviously unacceptable behaviors have all been forbidden for thousands of years.
That's why when people talk about stuff that's detrimental to "society", they are usually trying to claim that their personal preferences are more universal than they actually are. It's reminiscent of Thatcher's observation that there's no such thing as society in the sense the left use the word. There are families and coworkers and employers and so on, but there's not some monolithic unit called society that can be anthropomorphised and given preferences.
Clearly, advertising is nowhere near detrimental to society, it's the opposite: a society without ads would be a planned communist dystopia well beyond anything seen even in the USSR (which had advertising!). Many, many people benefit from advertising, which is why it's such a big industry.
People who don't believe this is true are typically in the "don't have information others do" bucket. But a few are just trying to dress up animalistic anti-capitalism in more respectable sounding clothes.
> It's extremely rare to find people who aren't criminals yet engaged in behavior that's genuinely detrimental to everyone else.
This is such a wild thing to say. I thought it was evident that people can be bastards and do terrible things entirely inside the law, yet here we are.
> The world isn't new and the obviously unacceptable behaviors have all been forbidden for thousands of years.
I don't think this checks out at all. Slavery was only outlawed in the US ~160 years ago, and marital rape only ~40 years ago.
Some detrimental behaviors have significant money/power behind them, some detrimental behaviors are new - only enabled (or only enabled at scale) by modern advancements, and some otherwise-obviously-detrimental behaviors intentionally obfuscate their harms.
> That's why when people talk about stuff that's detrimental to "society", they are usually trying to claim that their personal preferences are more universal than they actually are.
I'd argue that pretty much regardless of what someone's belief is of which actions are detrimental, it includes at least some actions that are "rationally" in the acting person's/company's self-interest - i.e. "selfish" actions.
Since we're not oracles, it's true that any statement we make on what we believe to be true about the world is ultimately prone to human error/bias (and disagreement over terms/frameworks/etc.) but I don't think that necessarily makes it just a statement of personal preference. Disliking the taste of steak is different from arguing steak production to be a net-negative.
> Clearly, advertising is nowhere near detrimental to society, it's the opposite
If Pepsi doubles their marketing budget to push flyers through every door and take some market share, then Coke does the same to reclaim that market share, it's unclear to me what has really been gained for all that resource wastage.
Largely it seems to just be pouring resources into a zero-sum game. There are incidental secondary effects (maybe now more people drink sugary drinks, and people have spent more time reading about/trying out sugary drinks instead of something else) but it seems fairly questionable as to whether those are even beneficial in a lot of cases, and they're not in proportion to the resources spent either way.
I believe at least that marketing spend would optimally be a tiny fraction of what it is now, with resources directed towards more productive forms of competition (improving the product) rather than just repeatedly persuading the potential customer base with increasingly manipulative/invasive techniques.
> Many, many people benefit from advertising, which is why it's such a big industry.
I feel this is again conflating being profitable or in the rational self-interest of a company with being beneficial. Sneaking a JS crypto miner in the background of your website can be profitable, for instance.
You are perfectly describing another extremely common advertising tactic: fear of missing out (FOMO). The reality is that 3/4 of these are things you did not actually need or want, which is exactly why advertising exists. There are many more products and services available for purchase than any of us can afford, and all of them are actively trying to convince you that _theirs_ should be the one you agree to part with your money for.
Think of it this way: If you ACTUALLY wanted to go to that concert, you would have looked up the tour dates for the band six months ago. If you ACTUALLY needed the cheap item on sale, you would have already been looking for it at the time. If the food at that restaurant was ACTUALLY that good, you would have not forgotten about it.
There are probably hundreds of tools for "easily finding a time for a meeting" that you can buy online, so if you are looking solely at advertising to make your decision, you are likely paying more because the one you picked has an advertising budget that must be recouped. (I personally would have just asked my friends and colleagues what they use.)
These examples are firmly classified as "impulse purchases" which can be fine if your finances are in good enough shape that you have disposable income. Pretty common in the tech industry I guess, but vanishingly rare everywhere else in the world.
Most middle class households in the US pretend they have lots of disposable income, but they are setting themselves up for working their entire lives by saving/investing nothing in their most productive years. These are VICTIMS of advertising because they are constantly told by television, radio, and social media that they need to spend their money on all these wonderful advertised products that will solve all their problems or else they are not _really_ living life. Which is of course total horseshit.
> If you ACTUALLY wanted to go to that concert, you would have looked up the tour dates for the band six months ago
I am lazy, am not a super-fan and don't follow any bands, but if someone who I kind of enjoy is playing in town, I appreciate hearing about it.
> There are probably hundreds of tools for "easily finding a time for a meeting" that you can buy online
Here's the rub: there was a time where I was not aware of the fact that this class of tools existed! I learned about it through an ad.
The assumption that I see repeatedly is that we think that we know what we want. If we really strongly desire something, that might be more true. However, there are times where we are not even aware that we *can* want something. I did not know I can want a meeting scheduling assistant because I did not know that such software even existed. I did not know that I *can* want to attend a concert because I did not know the band was playing in town. Advertising enabled me to want something.
It's humbling to realize how much I don't know. I appreciate all the ways that the world let's me know about things, even if it comes from a marketing department.
I have a feeling that this is true, but my conclusion is the opposite.
If you are not the most agreeable person, but have money, you can afford to be alone - having money eases a lot of problems. On the other hand, if you are not the most agreeable person, but lack money, because you have to come to terms with other people, drama starts.
So, I would rather see the evidence on the side that a lot of social conflicts are rather a side effect of "lack of money" - people who are better left alone (and would love to) cannot afford to do this, and thus drama starts.
> Tell me, fellow techy, working on serving ads. Who exactly would be disappointed if you failed in your duties today. Would anyone in your community be upset that they didn't get as many advertisements
Just to be clear: my work is different.
But if such a person doesn't do their duties, the implications are of course not immediate, but over some time this leads to a degradation of the stock of the respective company. So, a lot of people who invested (perhaps indirectly) into this company (e.g. for their pension scheme) would care.
> You work for an anonymous corporation, that does some nonsense you can't even hope to understand, in exchange for currency, to support the basics of your existence.
Yeah, but you're alone. I think this is worse if you're rich-rich; if you move to a house you can afford you'll live with a different demographic, your employees / staff will no longer treat you like an equal, you and your possibly-family have a target on your back if you're known, and if you go to places for the rich - gyms, golf clubs, etc - you run into a completely different demographic, too.
But on the other hand you'll be able to afford experiences few people can.
> loneliness is a perceptual phenomenon that represents a paradoxical component; it is not mitigated through proximity to others
It might be better described as alienation. Then we can fit it into Hannah Arendt's theory of fascism being caused by alienation.
In the modern world, that alienation is accelerated by social media and cost of living for those without assets, who pay the cost of inflation without benefiting from asset price inflation.
Everything is more hostile, more sectarian, and you also can't even afford anything, and also you are a bad person because you are a creepy 45 year old white man with a small dick, and you better stop looking at me like that.
I do wonder if this is really the same type of alienation that Arendt refers to.
I can understand how if you are afraid the neighbor is going to be an informant, you stop interacting. Public discourse breaks down and ideology takes hold.
This seems quite different to me than the type of alienation we are talking about in 2025 from online interactions. I am not sure alienation is really the right word in terms of isolation from a group. If anything the problems from social media are from too much interaction and too much political discourse.
I would say that is completely opposite to what Arendt was talking about.
I think it is the way "boredom" has quite a different meaning today than in 1990. While you can still be bored in 2025, I don't feel boredom the same way as in 1990 when none of my friends answered the phone and there was nothing on tv. 2025 boredom is more the lack of hyper stimulation and hyper novelty as opposed to the 1990 version of going through your "junk drawer" to find something again novel because you can't think of anything else to do. I can't even remember the last time I had junk drawer to even go through.
Who can afford space for a junk drawer in 2025? If junk wants to be my roommate, it better pay the rent.
I'm joking and completely agree with your point about lack of hyper stimulation, but I'm also a bit serious. About ten years ago I started getting rid of things that would entertain me once or twice a year mostly because of the real state they use. Now that I quit all social media I remember why I used to keep all that stuff around.
To me, alienation is philosopher's toy and they like to put what they don't like behind that word. It's been mostly used by Marxist philosophers rediscovering the "young Marx" to deal with the fact that the workers actually didn't seem that interested in a socialist revolution anymore (they have false consciousness !)
I am not saying this to invalidate what you are saying but would you care to explain how you think the problem described by parent (richer societies allow for more alone time thus loneliness) is better described by Arendt's concept of alienation ?
> In the modern world [...] Is it any surprise?
To me you are just describing a poverty and ideological tribalism but that still doesn't tell me what Arendt can do for us here
It's not just loneliness, it's that by being isolated you can make sweeping generalizations about other people, and fall for the hatefull narative.
When you actually and honestly communicate with people different than you, and are able yo understand them, you stop feeling that simplistic hate for them.
>When you actually and honestly communicate with people different than you, and are able yo understand them, you stop feeling that simplistic hate for them.
I find it to be exactly the opposite. It's much easier to believe someone is inherently good but just a bit misguided if you don't have to communicate with them and aren't personally affected by their "misguided" behavior.
This goes for other stuff as well, like if you're "ungrounded" by not actually observing/communicating with the thing you're judging, you can kind of just make up the perfect villain in your head and hate that
I guess same thing would go for extreme fears, like, you are so scared of something that you get even more scared of it because you know it's the scariest thing in the world, until you actually meet the thing you're scared of
From the research I have heard and seen on the subject, when people communicate with people different than themselves it can both help and hurt trust. The primary factor that I took from the research is that it depend on ethical values. If the two people are different but share ethical values, especially symbolic ones, then relationships tend to improve. If however people have different ethical values, then the results of such meeting tend to create more hostility and distrust. People can generally accept that people have different ethical values only if they don't need to actually see it.
Argument is a great way of forming relationships. The problem in modern times is that one person, typically the person such as yourself - endlessly confident in their flawless knowledge and determined to impose it on everybody, becomes belligerent when somebody doesn't simply graciously accept their impeccably perfect argument. That doesn't typically lead to good outcomes.
More generally, I think people have forgotten that two people - no less intelligent than the other - can see the exact same thing, evidence, or whatever else, and simply come to different conclusions.
Yes but i see argument as not about accepting that people come to different conclusions but actively trying to seek mutual understanding. There is a wrestling, a struggle, a fight to understanding, to communicating, that so many of us simply just run away from, and i believe it gets reinforced with cultural norms of avoidance and desire for "peace" instead of connection and deeper integration.
Brilliant. I love that snippet and will try to watch the full video later. I'm thinking to frame my work for the corporate environment so i appreciate this. Thank you!
Agreed. I just let people talk and have for many years now, no matter how well I know the person. Someone might start talking about chem trails or maybe another conspiracy and I always entertain them for the most part. Here and there I might do a "have you thought about it this way, or that?", but other than that, there isn't much reason to argue/debate unless it's at work or something that actually matters in the grand scheme of things.
This is (one of) the reasons I prefer places where you can walk, bike, or take public transit to get around. It’s one of the only times of day I’ll see and maybe talk to people very different from myself. Though this is also fading as people are on their phones and have ear buds in.
I joined a gym for a few months last year partly because I thought it would be a great way to meet some people. BIG misread on my part. It turns out most public gyms around here have a strong "leave me the hell alone vibe." Essentially zero eye-contact. Pretty much everyone had earbuds in and I didn't bother them. I said "hello" to those without earbuds once in a while but only got a silent death glare in response. So I stopped doing that.
I mean, I have earbuds. And sometimes I use them on the commute to work to practice Dutch (or did, before I worked remote). But there's definite downsides to the increased convenience of filling "empty" time.
I was thinking about this today, a lovely morning run on the beach with the Sun rising in a blue sky. Should have been a wonderful shared experience but everyone I met had earbuds in and the most interaction I obtained was a nod.
Why go to the shore with the sounds of the waves lapping gently on the shingle but then block it out with earpods? It irritated me.
Here's an interesting thing to ponder - how would we be different if not for lockdowns making work from home somewhat normal?
The overnight disappearance of those loose connections you get in the workplace had a huge impact on my mental health. Life-altering. 5 years later, I split my time between remote tech consulting from an office I rent (to make sure I don't sit home all day) and a union-protected, but completely antiquated job from a career I left behind that I returned to mostly to be with people.
By 2025, things would have probably been the same both for society and me (lockdowns coincided with me turning 30), but the abrupt change was horrible.
Humans are moored to their social web: having to exist amongst others continually pulls you towards the average feelings/views/activities of the people you are connected to. Change is slow.
When humans become unmoored from this web through loneliness/isolation/alienation, they can freewheel and drift further from that average. This can be liberating! But if you don't re-connect, either with your previous web or a new one, there's nothing stopping you falling off the deep end; nothing to give you a little correction that keeps you "normal". Political extremism of various flavors, or identity crises founded in over-rumination, are what we see - but also innovation and removal of constraints. Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies relates. The social isolation moonshot is to break from convention and be a hero auteur, but the risk of failure is very high. Nullum magnum dementiae sine mixtura ingenium fuit.
Racism and tribalism were still present when we socialized more as a society. We still did all of the bad things. It’s just that we also socialized and formed kinships and families and institutions. We were connected in a social web.
I wonder how much of this is due to social media sites and how the choice to interact that way (where the medium is geared to show off shallow facets of our achievements or amplify polarized opinions) is robbing us from traditional ways of spending time together.
True. It's so hard nowadays to go out with a friend to grab a beer or a coffee. They don't feel the urge because they satisfy social interactions online, and they think it's enough. Well, it's undoubtedly simpler that way, but it's fake.
I, personally, hate chatting through instant messengers. I lost many connections because people started moving online more and more, and I just couldn't handle that anymore. For example, I don't like interrupting what I'm doing, and people usually expect to get a response within minutes. Plus, when I don't respond immediately, I simply forget and remind myself a month later. I could be the problem too, but the way we do communication today doesn't help either.
There used to be social networks. You'd tell the computer who you knew in real life and you could talk to them through the computer.
Then it was social media. People could publish things and their friends would see what they did in a single feed. Like TV or radio media, it pushes info to you, about your friends.
Lastly it was just media. It was the same feed pushing stuff to you, but it isn't your friends any more. It's unknown micro-celebrities, ads, whatever keeps audiences hooked and makes profit for the company. Tiktok exemplifies this but they've all done it now.
The next step will be removing humans from the loop entirely, a feed of personalized AI generated slop engineered to keep you staring at it.
YouTube and Facebook are almost turning into this organically. YouTube seems to be trying to fight it. Zuck seems to just not care anymore, generally. Eventually one will fully embrace it.
Are there even any social networks anymore? Oddly enough as weird and cringe as it is I think LinkedIn kind of qualifies. It’s business but that’s a form of social interaction that involves real people doing stuff.
I think most social interaction has moved onto messengers, Discord, Slack, etc.
its the most fuzzy definition ever. the literal sense of social media would mean "mediums of socialising" like instant messengers or forums, but it actually covers pretty much any website or app with a messaging feature. it basically just means "the internet" to idiots
I know all my neighbours in my block who walk, cycle, or take the bus. Repeated interactions. The ones who take the elevator to the basement car park are the ones I never cross paths with.
That's what I was thinking, if social media was not there, would we be more social? Or is it really the fact that our necessities can be covered without being social the real "problem".
I expect the latter. Social media isn't social in any meaningful sense. It is more like an interactive diary or interactive television. Any human involvement behind the scenes is merely an implementation detail — and with the way AI is going, an implementation detail that may not even remain for much longer. Social media may reduce overall social interaction, but only in the same way that reading books reduced social interaction. There is only so much time in the day; but that doesn't make all uses of time equivalent.
I think your ordering is wrong, we don't need to spend time together anymore so we fall back to social media. I wonder how things would look like if we had social media on top of a more social world.
>I am not one for "respecting others' opinions" at all, make no mistakes, if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected.
This seems wildly incompatible with the desire to not have social isolation.
I agree with the rest of your sentiment, but that is a really anti-social idea.
Also, what is "correct" today was not correct 50 years ago or might not be correct 50 years from now (just to pick some numbers, the time periods obviously vary). And so much of this is a product of when and where we were born and what we were taught growing up.
> if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected.
This was something I believed when I was 21, and then was corrected by time. There are very few instances where anyone needs to be corrected in a social setting. Learning to move on without demanding they accept your argument is hugely important.
Right now the solution that makes the most sense to me is intentional communities. If anyone reading this has experience living in one, I'd love to chat. Email is in profile.
> if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected.
Why is that? I may feel that somebody is wrong, and that may be correct, but it could also be incorrect. A priori, they are not less correct than you are. Then why do you need to go to them and tell them that what they think is wrong and what you think is right?
I'm glad that people don't do that all the time. I'm sure I meet lots of people every day that think I'm wrong on something. Sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly. If every time they would feel that I "need to be corrected", that would be terrible.
Sure. But there is no objective arbitter of truth.
In a similar vein, if I'm standing at a train station discussing some topic with a friend on which we have different opinions w.r.t
facts, I would not feel comfortable if a stranger would come up, insert themselves into our conversation and start unasked to "correct" one of us (or both). Occasionally and if it's done very politely, maybe. But if that happened every time I'd be seriously annoyed. Correct or not.
All three of those links are claiming right wing people are mentally ill.
Academics have all kinds of indirect theories for why people outside of academia don't agree with their politics. Ironically given the subject of the website, one thing they almost never do is just go outside of academia, sit down with people who disagree with them and talk to them as equals. They spam bot-filled websites like Mechanical Turk with surveys trying to prove things about the imaginary people in their own minds, and then publish "findings", but they don't actually talk to people.
The most obvious and logical explanation for why right wing people exist is that they disagree with left wing politics, believing them to lead to bad outcomes. Papers like those three are a dime a dozen, but one thing you'll never find is studies that just directly ask people disagree with common academic beliefs. Instead it's taken as axiomatic that leftism is moral and correct, so anyone who disagrees must have some other deeper psychological reason to disagree (loneliness, reading the wrong websites, not getting enough sex, whatever). Lots of non-replicable studies get produced, grants are awarded, and academics give lots of interviews to the NYT about their search for One Weird Trick to convert people to their worldview that doesn't involve any actual policy changes.
The professors doing such studies should look in the mirror. If they're saying social isolation and informational monoculture leads to extremism, then it's hard to find somewhere more isolated and monocultural than universities. But of course they lack sufficient insight to consider that.
I just saw a class of kids on a train and they were interacting and yelling just like we did 30 years ago. I think there's hope, they're not all zombies staring at a phone yet
There’s still product-market fit frontiers waiting to be found out there! (/s)
It’s depressing how whenever I see people doing people stuff without a screen in their face I both smile internally and reflexively wonder how we could better infiltrate their demographic.
We have become the disease at this point, and now we work diligently to replace humans from any economic activity except consumption, so that the value extraction cycle can be optimized even as it collapses upon itself in a singularity of greed.
Soon, humans, the last obstacle standing between the uninterrupted flow of energy and resources into the event horizon of capital, will be eliminated from the process altogether with the removal of wages and eventually money itself through the wonders of automation.
Only then will the crystalline purity of technocapitalism truly shine: power as the new capital.
The power to convert resources and energy directly into the will and whim of the capital class, harnessing recursive automation in a macroscopic grey-goo scenario that sidesteps both workers and customers. An ever-tightening loop of resource concentration, building from a throbbing rhythm into a deafening turbine whine of conspicuous consumption. A hollow promise of “Progress” that leaves the 99 percent outside the gilded walls, merely insects at the pointy end of excavators.
I’m going to take tomorrow off and hug my grandchildren.
I know it's supposed to be fancy and cool looking but this sort of website design where you have to scroll and then the whole screen animates really bothers me. It actually gives me a headache to try and follow it versus normal scrolling behaviour and text.
As soon as I start scrolling down and I can't scroll normally and images and text start flying around I feel a disturbing feeling in my head and lose concentration and almost get brain-fog from the distracting content moving around.
Please provide more accessible versions of websites if you're going to override the default behavior. I couldn't make it 10 seconds before having to close the tab.
I usually agree with this, but I make an exception for Pudding because they consistently do this and it’s kind of their brand to have really immersive JS art/media. But I have the benefit of having read and enjoyed their stuff before.
It’s probably a false distinction, but it feels different to a SaaS product offering page, or product launch, where I need to get information, compared to someone using JS to create art.
This whole article could be summarised in about 300 words, but I would have had very little emotional or conceptual enjoyment of it.
Would be nice if we could disable JavaScript and just get access to the text.
I also dislike this style, plus it lags on my computer. I scrolled all the way down but all I got was that it is a story of how it's not so bad to talk to strangers.
I think you are missing my point, yeah :-). It would be nice to be able to access the content of this very website we are talking about right here without JavaScript.
I'll promote prefers-reduced-motion here, which I believe is the standards compliant way of signaling you want this behavior. Unfortunately, I haven't noticed many sites supporting it.
This is exactly the kind of negativity that only appears on the internet and that this study sort of shined a light on. Would you really tell this person to their face that their art sucks just because it isn't good for you?
Sometimes this is indeed merely "fancy" and vacuous, but other times it is a meaningful and more engaging way to present the content. I feel like this is an example of the latter.
Even if you're not a fan and would have done it differently, it seems a bit hard to understand what could be so bothersome that you have to close it in 10s...
Well, it literally makes me feel almost nauseous, i.e. I felt physically unwell from the images and text moving around the screen.
Note: this doesnt happen from a regular video, or normal scrolling text behaviour. Just sites like this that combine overriding the scroll bar with moving text and images.
I often like the use of advanced media. The NYT and Washington Post have done some amazing advanced media that fully exploits the richness possible with the web.
Not so sure about this one, though. Like others, I was more annoyed with the constant scrolling to get tiny niblets of information and didn't even make it through. It makes it feel like work and the mechanisms completely overwhelms the message.
Also weird that it's hogging CPU even when you're sitting on a completely static portion of the page.
Yeah, that website was horrid. I don’t know why someone would opt for a scrolljacking-based animation, let alone why they’d intersperse text boxes zooming around.
Yes I definitely was interested but the form-over-function of this presentation just got me to drop out and not finish reading. I ended up passing the link to a LLM and asking "summarize this for me"...
This is the unicorn of fancy websites because for once, it actually makes sense to override browser's standard scrolling behavior. The 30-minute timeline on the right provides an obvious context for what you're navigating with the scroll actions, and you wouldn't be able to do that with a regular scrollbar.
Usually scrolling overrides happen because the designers' mindset was that the site should be a sequence of beautiful slides. They might prototype it as a Keynote presentation that is approved by management. And then some poor web developer gets tasked with building a site that feels like the Keynote slide show that everyone loved, and the only way to do that is to turn scrolling into an annoying "next slide" action.
Took me a really long time to realize that I should scroll. Because why would I? There is absolutely no indication that there is anything to scroll to.
I clicked on the two avatars but that didn't get me very far and the only thing left to click was "by alvin chang" but that was about as fruitful as I imagined it would be.
So I assumed it was a podcast, re-checking that I had audio on etc. But nope, so I checked another browser. Same there... Then I read HN comments, ah ... Great design? ...
Same here — once you get the scrolling part it's pretty great, but like you I was stuck at the top for a while. A downwards-pointing arrow on the hero would help a lot here.
Firefox in Windows has the tiniest little scrollbar indicator in the top right that honestly blends in very well with the background. I didn't realize I needed to scroll until I came to the comments. I clicked around... got some interaction... but basically left the first time being very confused.
I have Firefox on macOS as well, but I don't see a scroll bar until I start scrolling. Could be because I'm using an external trackpad, and not a mouse.
I was going to say that somehow I knew I had to scroll the first time I entered. But I went back after reading your comment and I have no idea how did I find out the first time, there is no indication that there is content bellow.
I was viewing on desktop and the blank space all around made it immediately feel like an article that required a scroll to view the content below the fold.
Seeing the timestamps change as I scrolled and seeing a progress "bar" update within the speech balloons during the dialogs made it more obvious I just had to scroll to see the content change.
I do think the progress bar color is low contrast enough that some might not see it and not realize they have to scroll to cause the dialog to update, though.
> Took me a really long time to realize that I should scroll. Because why would I? There is absolutely no indication that there is anything to scroll to.
> I clicked on the two avatars but that didn't get me very far and the only thing left to click was "by alvin chang" but that was about as fruitful as I imagined it would be.
Thank god, I wasn’t the only one, just posted a similar comment here.
I don't mind designers overriding when they take meticulous care to craft a better tailored experience. But once I scrolled past the initial content I found the site a UI disaster. Not long after it said "Pick a person to explore", I wanted to tap a particular box to read one of their conversations, and couldn't figure out how to bring any dialog up. I wound up scrolling further down afterward to see if that was how to trigger some dialog for my selection, and all the boxes started moving around at seemingly random, performance tanked and the whole thing got stuttery. I couldn't scroll back to where I was or find that box again that I was interested in. I left in frustration. Design fail, as far as this user's encounter.
I feel the same. I don't particularly mind if a developer overrides the scrollbar, and I would actually argue that in this case it was a good way to present the story and overall I liked it, but you need to do it right. If the sites becomes all clunky, it stutters, and you get text popping up a while after you scrolled, then it's better to focus on the performance and leave aside the animations.
I'm with you and I actually love these "special scrolling" websites. They are much closer to a truly work of art exactly because of the different design.
To the haters: why do we have churches or buildings with marble statues in the walls or column instead of a standard stone wall, which was designed to do the job in a standard way?
Niches (recesses in walls for statues) and columns in church buildings are actually central features that serve the primary purpose of the building.
Niches provide spaces for statues for remembering the dead, or prayers and veneration (for Catholics), enhancing the link between the spiritual and corporeal realms. Arguably they're also used to encourage payments from patrons for a church building's upkeep or construction.
Columns allow spaces within a building to be connected, ensuring the body of the church (the people) can worship and receive teaching together. They can also reduce material cost of construction.
Yes, for historic church buildings decoration was applied, ornate capitals in the pillars and such; bright, garish paint on the statues and everything -- and expression of the vitality of the building and of worship to God.
I think perhaps your analogy needs buttressing (heh!) to make it clear? All I got really was 'I like the scrolling'.
Maybe a revolving door is a good scrollbar analogue - it's central to access to a space (website), some people hate them, but used properly they enhance access (they're really good for limiting heat exchange with the outside when compared with regular doors!).
All these things you mention are corollary to the construction of the building per-se, but are central to the "spirit" of the building. The same applies with this kind of websites and scrolling. The website has a goal in itself, uses a more creative scrolling feature as both a way to better convey the information and a work of art to be more attractive to the eye.
My parallel was that the typical HNer just ignores this and think "don't touch my browser standard scrolling behavior", that would be akin to someone just wanting a plain wall to keep the roof up, ignoring everything else: "I pray there anyway, I don't need that statue to remember it".
It's interesting but I hated this design * 1000. I would prefer a white page with purely black text than this horrible override of the scrolling behavior and images and text flying around, this sort of design makes me feel literally nauseous and I had to click away not even 5% through this page.
It's so much harder to concentrate on content like this, it's distracting, confusing, gives me brain fog etc.
I found it only slightly worse than not overriding the standard scrolling behaviour. Any time a site remains usable despite this sort of UX intervention we can consider that a win.
One of the problems with their "better / worse" statistics: Bad interactions tend to outweigh good interactions. I think the rule of thumb is that 4:1 good/bad ratio in a relationship is "breakeven" where the relationship will stay neutral; higher than that and things get better, lower than that and things go south.
So if you could talk to a stranger, and there's only a 20% chance you'll feel worse, a lot of people would still not consider it worth the risk.
Another angle that goes unmentioned: "the more you know someone, the less you like them."
Most strangers in 30 minutes won't show off their ugly side. It takes a lot longer for those rough edges to come out, and for the really bad parts to surface in human relationships.
For some people, we can look past that. For most others, our interactions would not be so positive.
> "the more you know someone, the less you like them."
That is completely the opposite of my experience. Even the handful of people who, after I got to know them, turned out to be unprincipled or toxic, I actually liked them as people and were kind of sad that they were the way they were. Their negative qualities were a mar on the their individual beauty.
There are certainly people in whom, after a relatively brief interaction, I didn't manage to see anything I liked. But I can't think of a single person whom, after seeing something to like, thereafter didn't see anything to like. Their ugly side may have made me want to avoid interacting with them as a whole, but it never completely eclipsed their good side.
For me, nearly all negative interactions come from not being able to get past various masks to see the interesting part of them or vice versa.
> Their ugly side may have made me want to avoid interacting with them as a whole
For me, that means "dislike" or "not like". When I see a part of them is not good for me, I can say I don't like that part. When that part underlies the rest of them, then I wouldn't like them very much and I'd want to keep my distance. It's human nature. Not a judgement but a preference.
You may be speaking instead about "love" which I would agree more with as a child of God. Love the person I dislike as a fellow person, because of a true beauty in them that may not be because of them[1]. I think that can also work without religion in select cases: my mom knows my sister and she doesn't like my sister, but my mom still loves her all the same.
There's also the magnitude of a negative interaction as well to consider.
If I have 99 great interactions with someone, but one REALLY bad interaction (they insult me deeply, or say something irredeemable), that can also sour the whole relationship.
It would be interesting to research commonalities amongst bad interactions -- are there patterns that emerge from certain personality types, politics, etc? What about a few "sour" people that will take any interaction and make it bad regardless of matchup -- if we removed them from the interaction pool, do the stats suddenly adjust quickly?
In my mind this would have big implications for social media sites -- not that all bad interactions need to be quelled, but if you are trying to keep conversations civil, attempt to implement X strategy or Y strategy.
Yes, we tend to remember negative experiences better than the good ones. Also, we all are so low on good emotions, we don't want to risk losing them to random strangers.
Makes me think the real challenge isn't just encouraging people to talk to strangers, but designing situations where the expected value of those conversations skews heavily positive
I think it depends on what you’re used to. If you’re in an abusive relationship or socially isolated, a single positive social interaction can feel like a breakthrough.
I would argue that a negative social interaction would feel exponentially more harmful at a time like you describe, in which you're already feeling generally unsafe or insecure. My fear of others is always so much worse when I am hurting for some positive feedback from the world.
There is a huge selection bias there. People who are very disagreeable and hard to talk to tend to not participate in such a thing. Of course the average participant was open to talk to somebody and connect.
Fair, but it's still interesting that people underestimate how much they will enjoy the conversation, even if it's with a random person on a bus who did not volunteer for an experiment.
The participants in the train study were essentially given a "job" to talk to strangers, which completely changes the mental framing.
People generally try to follow through on a job they promised to do. They'll try to make the best of it so they feel like they made a good decision accepting the job.
If the conversations go badly, they can easily rationalize it away with "I didn't want to talk to them anyway, but I didn't have a choice".
Many shy and socially anxious people do basically fine in public-facing jobs because of this phenomenon.
In my family we usually travel to many parts of the world, and we have been compiling a series of anecdotes, when we take a taxi or an Uber, we ask the taxi driver different aspects of the city then always asking him some anecdote, funny or strange, that he has had in his life as a taxi driver.
And we have collected a large number of funny stories that we constantly bring up when we are at a party.
For example, the story of the Argentine taxi driver who, when he received some Danish tourists, they realized that they had forgotten a suitcase at the airport, but since they had an Apple tracker, they started looking for the suitcase with the help of the police and it turned out that the suitcase was in the trunk of a car belonging to another police officer, unbelievable right?
Or the story of the London taxi driver who, being tired after a long shift, picked up an old lady for the last trip and the old woman lay in the back seat and fell completely asleep, when the taxi driver turned to his rearview mirror and no longer saw anyone behind he thought: "What am I doing ? I'm driving alone, I am too tired." so he decided to go home. When he got home the old lady woke up and thought that the taxi driver was kidnapping her, and called the police.
Incredible stories and anecdotes are collected when you start talking to strangers and they feel confident expressing their ideas.
It's part of living, talking to strangers is very satisfying.
"In 2014 in the 2014 study on Illinois trains and buses reach our searchers followed up with people who were asked to talk to strangers The people who predicted they wouldn't enjoy the experience. What these participants reported back was almost no rejections, pleasant conversations, and an overall positive experience."
This is basically fear the emotional pain of rejection or embarrassment, brought on by a fear of the unknown.
Between 18 and 24 months old, we begin to develop the 'ability' to feel embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, etc. This is self-consciousness, a part of self-awareness. Embarrassment, shame, etc have important functions. They signal a violation of social norms. This helps create and reinforce the interpersonal boundaries and rules that govern how we deal with people in society.
When you perceive others are observing you, you imagine what their impressions of you will be. If it's a stranger, a lot of people jump to a negative conclusion. Part of this is a mirror of how we see other people. Part of it is a human heuristic to fear the unknown, which keeps us alive in the jungle. And part of it is you making a snap judgement about what kind of person someone is based on how they look or what environment you're in.
So when you're afraid that talking to a stranger will be a negative experience, really you're just trying to avoid getting eaten in the jungle by someone you fear. But we aren't in a jungle - we're in a society, with rules, laws, and norms. There is no threat to a conversation. And, as the study shows, your fears are usually unfounded. So go ahead and strike up a conversation with a stranger - it's safe.
Just an observation, not a mean critique about the project or even the conclusions.
There's 180 participants.
There's 26 people marked at "very liberal", which is 14% of the sample.
There's 39 people marked at "very conservative", which is 21% of the sample.
-----
Then we have 31 people marked as liberal, which is 17% of the sample.
And we have 63 people marked as conservative, which is 35% of the sample.
That already I would say is kind of an issue: more than a third of the sample are conservative people and 17% are their liberal 'counter part' or 'equivalent' (sorry for my wording, I'm not native speaker).
---
If we do a little additions we therefore have:
39+63 = 102, which means that 56% of the sample is conservative
31+26= 57, which means that 31% of the sample is liberal
The rest of the sample are centrists or "neutrals" (whatever this means)
---
I am NOT saying that the study is invalid
I am not saying that it's poorly done
However, I think it's fair to say that the sample is skewed towards people with conservative views, by a HUGE amount, not just "a little bit".
---
Aside from this: amazing UI design, I'm jealous and admirative of the results ^^
>There's 26 people marked at "very liberal", which is 14% of the sample.
> There's 39 people marked at "very conservative", which is 21% of the sample
I think these numbers are off. Where are you getting that from? Is there raw data somewhere?
I counted the people on the page and see 39 very conservative and 47 very liberal (not 26).
I did not check the other numbers. But with that its 78 liberals which is 43%. And the total liberals + conservatives are 180. So I dont think the total participant number is 180 - thats just the total of liberals and conservatives.
And if its a 56/43 (~1.3) split for conservatives that seems to actually udnerrepresent conservatives compared to the general population without moderates. Where we see a 36/25 (1.44) conservative/liberal split in terms of ideology, not voter registration, which I think aligns more closely with the "political views" label.
>The way Americans identify themselves ideologically was unchanged in 2021, continuing the close division that has persisted in recent years between those describing themselves as either conservative or moderate, while a smaller share identifies as liberal. On average last year, 37% of Americans described their political views as moderate, 36% as conservative and 25% as liberal.
Okay, they messed up something here. The number of little ASCII-art person squares depends on the size of your browser window. The squares get smaller when you make the window narrower, so it looks like it was coded to try to keep the number roughly constant.
If I make the window narrow enough, there are 10 squares in a row and 19 rows, a total of 190 squares. The number that are coloured "very conservative", "conservative", "centrist", "liberal", "very liberal", respectively, are 39, 67, 24, 31, 29.
It's weird that the number of squares increases and decreases when you resize the window, and I would argue it's misleading because there's an animated transition that is obviously meaningless. But it's a lot worse that the proportions aren't consistent! All of us saw exactly 39 in the "very conservative" category, so maybe it is failing to proportionally scale that category while scaling the others?
Conclusions:
1. There's a programming bug that misrepresents the proportions.
2. The sample is significantly skewed toward conservatives.
Great work... I thought I noticed something similar on the resizing. I guess they prioritized looks over accuracy which is kind of fair although its not obvious why they would have to do it this way.
In any case, it would be good to see the actual data for this stuff.
In the US, registered liberals/Dems outnumber conservatives. However this study has more conservatives. It could be geography. Some states are more conservative than others. Or it could be that the $15 on offer is more appealing to conservatives.
The study denotes "political views", not party registration, which have historically deviated. Part affiliation has been quite even for a long time between Republicans and Democrats but political ideology has had a significant conservative skew going back at least 30 years https://news.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx
I think spending 30 minutes with a stranger can be surprisingly powerful. You never know what perspective, idea, or connection might come from an unexpected conversation.
I remember that once spent 30 minutes with a stranger at a cafe who turned out to be a trader in a completely different market than mine. In that short conversation, I picked up a few strategies and a perspective on risk management I’d never considered before. It reminded me that sometimes the most valuable insights come from unexpected places and just half an hour with the right person can change how you approach your work.
Pretty sure I read somewhere that many people prefer Waymo over Uber because there's no driver, which kinda contradicts these findings.
How about HN users? Do you typically enjoy chatting with an Uber driver?
If this "30 minutes with a stranger" experiment was performed during the pandemic, it could be that people were short on human connection at the time, and that explains why they valued it so much.
It doesn't necessarily contradict the findings. People in this study also predicted that they would hate interacting with a stranger.
I've had interesting conversations with uber drivers and not so interesting conversations. I prefer to use one of those charge-by-the-minute rental cars if they're available, because they tend to cost 1/3 as much and I'm perfectly capable of driving myself.
Not really though. When people are busy and attempting to go from A to B, they may want to eliminate variables to better focus on their friends or something else in the Waymo.
This is similar to the experiment where an incredible musician played violin in the subway terminal and people 'ignored' him. It's all about intention, when people plan to talk to a stranger, they're geared for that, if they are on their way somewhere, it's not the time or place to stop and 'smell the roses' most of the time as they are in a rush, doesn't have much to do with how great the musician is in the subway. When people go to a concert, and if that's same musician in the subway, they'll most definitely enjoy it, because they're planning on enjoying music at that time.
The Pudding is such a cool publication. They have incredible research and dataviz, in particular on cultural topics but not only. It’s worth subscribing to their newsletter. Glad to see them there!
Beautiful. I have certainly noticed that, at work, despite my desire to be efficient, without this sort of thing, it becomes unbearable no matter how interesting the actual work is.
UI Feedback - I was having trouble figuring out what to do with the website, possibly due to the lack of text. I was tapping everywhere just to find the interactive areas (invisible buttons: who invented flat UI without shadows to hide all the interactivity?), and it took me some time to realize the website was scrollable (invisible scroll bars: who thought hiding the scrollbars without any indication of scrollable content was a good idea?). These issues are typically not the fault of the website, but rather the general UI/UX trends we have accepted nowadays. I’m using Firefox on Android.
Regarding social media - it has created more gaps rather than making us more social. It's ultimate goal is to capture our attention for as long as possible rather than connecting us. And lately, with the celebrities populating it, it has become a showoff/bragging machine.
On a site designed like this where I tend to not notice the scroll bar, I usually just click on the things I see to try and make something happen. In this case, not much happens from clicks (because the site desperately needs a graphic to encourage you to scroll), so I quickly lose interest and bail.
I don’t really understand this viewpoint - scrolling has always been the default way to see more content on a webpage. Clicking on things to navigate is very much a secondary activity. Why would you not scroll every web page to see if there is more content that didn’t fit on your screen?
For us that spend a lot of time on the internet, it's easy to forget that most people are not that different from you. I believe comments online, on Hacker News on otherwise, tend to be made by people with fairly extreme views - you have to feel something very strongly to shout your opinion into the internet! But most people are, well, normal, including you. Step out of your bubble every now and then and you'd be surprised at what good may come out of it.
As someone who is generally shy, this sparked some hope in me. I have a really stressful time meeting new people, I just have absolutely no idea what to say, I panic and I leave. Well done for the execution, it's a very nice way to reveal interactive content!
Same. However, I had a few encounters where I was scared initially that I won't know what to say, and the talk will be quiet and weird, but my freshly met partner was so into the chat that I had problems cutting into. It was fun. Remember that the other person doesn't want to be weird either and will try to maintain the chat, unless it's totally not interested.
Not a fan of fancy websites, but this one really hits the nail on the head.
It's telling about society how much of these conversations revolve around work. It makes sense, since it's where we spend most of our time, but at the same time a lot of people are not happy at work. Recently I've been avoiding this type of smalltalk because it has this pattern that starts with "and what do you do for a living". I'm trying to make the world a better place is not usually the answer. I wish it gets normalized to ask "what do you like to do in your life" as a first question. I like to cook and fix bicycles and in general do something practical.
I wonder if the participants were American? When I moved to Ireland I had to learn to stop asking that when I met people because it was a bit rude to start off like that.
This is interesting, but I’m curious how much of the effect is due to getting paid $15, and how much the data was affected by the fact that everyone was isolated in COVID lockdown at the time.
Another potential self-selection bias -- if people know they are signing up to have a conversation with a stranger, perhaps they are already predisposed to be more "pleasant" in conversations, vs a potential curmudgeon who doesn't ever want to speak to anyone, even for money.
A good conclusion at the end. I'm right now going to therapy, feels good and helpful. But remembering recent experience (before therapy), I can say that I am very similar to the wounded in the sense that even thinking of making a new acquaintance, I evaluated people with suspicion. Now, during therapy, I'm all for new acquaintances and even started taking the first steps towards it.
I've been interested in this general question for a while. Years ago I ran a startup that connected strangers for spoken conversations. After tests, we kept it to audio only - no video, no text, no profile info. That was what kept the conversations civil. Add video, or text, or profiles and behavior changed (basically became a dating site). Results: F-M talks were only about 10% longer than F-F and M-M talks.
(Longer-term we focused on connecting people recovering from serious health issues.)
You're thinking of Clubhouse? Raised around $200M. Fast up and down. The behavior our old startup had noticed 10 years earlier was that while people were happy to engage with audio only, retention was tough unless there was something more. For us that meant focusing on the health-related talks. Patients and their doctors and support group leaders took the talks as part of the recovery process. Very different retention came from that.
The Pudding is one of the bright spots of the internet for me. Does anyone have any recommendations for other new / blog interestings websites on the same level?
It's not only the scrolling that isn't normal, I got dizzy when some image-like thingies starting flowing around the screen, had to close the browser tab at once. Maybe the page wanted to tell something, but whatever it is they could have done it via pure text form, that's what reading is all about.
I'm surprised with how most of the people that felt worse after the conversation seem to be paired with someone that felt better after the same conversation. I would expect any negative feelings to be reciprocal so I wonder what happened in these interactions...
Following the book "The Power of Strangers" I once did an experiment with talking to random strangers, it is amazing what you'll learn from random conversations: https://willem.com/en/2023-10-13_hello-stranger/
You need structure for this to be amazing. Talking to a random person at a train station and asking for their destination isn't a meaningful conversation, even if they divulge a bit more about their travel plans.
Instead, I've personally really enjoyed talking to strangers while having a meal in the dining car of Amtrak trains, where they will force you to sit with three other people. This gives you more time together and more structure. I've talked to a retired real estate agent who told me stories about the houses his clients bought; I've talked to an old lady who told me first hand stories of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s.
I would like to do that but I live in Sweden, talking to stranger is considered rude. Would be cool if there were a serious version of those random cam chats like omegle.
Well, that's not entirely true, you just have to be a bit particular about when and how to start the conversation.
Things I find work most of the time in Sweden to get started is complaining about something mutually bothersome, annoying or scary that you don't have any power over, things like:
- A third party being rude. So if you notice that someone gets annoyed by someone else you can huff and puff a little over that.
- the weather, obviously and often!
- if someone hurts themselves or trips (doesn't have to be as big an injury as in the article)
- children are great conversation starters, regardless if they are cute, loud, awake, still or whatever. And this is one of the few positive topics that work.
The trick is also to not keep talking about the annoying thing, because that is quite boring!
If you get more courageous you can also just ask about a place, piece of public art or even the way to some random thing, in my experience (a whole life) swedes are very helpful :)
My favourite question is to ask people who clearly hope to see me go away about the names of places, I don't know why that topic works so well to tear walls down, but it does.
> The trick is to trick us into not realising we are interacting, then we are quite friendly and polite :)
i dont think you can be friendly and ALSO dislike talking to strangers. I think thats what it means to be friendly, or at least its a necessary component of it
Very cool design. I would love to listen to those conversations that grinded to a halt. I saw one profile where their affect before was 9, at beginning was 6, by middle and end was a 1. Their partner went from 7 to 8. Is it miscommunication or misunderstanding of how they were perceived?
Many HN users are always looking for an excuse to complain about the format or appearance of the linked sites. So much so that the following had to be added to the guidelines (but doesn't seem to be enforced that much):
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
Such a minor thing but I absolutely love the way the faces / avatars are rendered here. Just characters in a PRE tag. Gives me Commodore 64 vibes. I'd love to know how they came up with those and put it all together.
There have been a few of these types of website designs on science/popular science topics, while very cool at first then the novelty fades - I wish they just get to the point.
I have significant social anxiety and was bullied much growing up, but I painstakingly built a small but close group of friends as a teenager and into my 20s. At the same time, the Internet was changing everything, I thought for the better, and goodness it really did seem like it made things much easier for me. Like my meatspace friends, I fell into a familiar pattern of carefully constructing a consistent circle. More often than not this translated into online friends becoming IRL friends.
Then social media happened. Again, that feeling that this makes things so much easier for me. Occasionally I noticed I was not carefully curating friends anymore, I was unwittingly in a race to collect acquaintances and to attract attention. But I’m working at a startup, I don’t have time for the old ways! I stopped seeing people so much (even old friends and family), it seemed we had nothing to talk about because everything was already posted online. I’m spending more and more of my time arguing with strangers, who I see as little more than NPCs, through distant connections. I’m getting more angry, feeling more hopeless and alone, disliking people more, and finding myself brimming with hostility governed by a hair trigger. I am thinking about moving to a more remote place with my wife to get away from people.
This is what social (and mainstream traditional, I suppose) media has wrought. It’s hard to say if it was always intended to be this way, but the truth is all sorts of malevolent individuals and groups picked up on its ability to divide and conquer us unlike any propaganda tool in history, so it certainly is now.
I few years ago I killed all my accounts (except this and one other thing… I do still feel a need to find and connect with interesting people, but sparingly and only where I feel relatively in control). I started calling people and trying to hang out in person again. I have even found myself daring to talk to strangers, even when I know we are on completely different ends of the ideological spectrum. And much like the subjects in this article, I almost always feel better. I am rediscovering the terror and joy of making friends and temporary acquaintances again.
Go to an event that you have an interest in, and strike up conversations with random people who are unoccupied. You at least have one common topic to talk about, and in my experience the odds you find someone you want to grab a bite or a drink after the even with are pretty high, and at the very worst the next time you go to a similar event you might see some familiar faces.
There's something comforting about conversations with strangers. It gives me a feeling that we are all in this together.
One subtle effect of living as a visible minority is people assume you can't speak the local language. Even in minute everyday moments like stepping into a crowded elevator people avoid saying a few words. No one means any harm but it can feel surprisingly isolating. Almost like everyone else is in some grand linguistic conspiracy against you.
How do I load this into a database and query it with an LLM? I applied to get access to the dataset as a random. Guess I just have to wait and see what they say.
It looks nice and I really want to engage with the page further but since my time is limited today and I'll have forgotten about this by tomorrow: What's the tl;dr?
Claude to the rescue: This is an interactive data story from The Pudding about research showing that talking to strangers makes us feel better, despite our expectations.
The piece follows conversations from a study of nearly 1,700 video calls between strangers with different backgrounds (age, race, politics, etc.). While people predicted they'd have negative experiences talking to strangers, the vast majority actually felt better by the end of their 30-minute conversations - regardless of how different they were from each other.The story argues that we've lost "bridging social capital" (connections with people unlike us) and explores how this contributes to declining social trust.
It ends with a personal reflection on helping a bleeding teenager on the subway, suggesting that despite our fears, most people will help strangers when needed - and that these connections are crucial for tackling big societal challenges.
Words to the effect of "we live around people who act and feel like us":
Yeah, but maybe not for the reasons you think. I'm not sure the reasons are a priori discoverable, although they can be revealed by statistics. Or to put it another way "is it something in the water, or new car smell?" So something happens in groups which amplifies similarities.
The State of Washington collects voting results by precinct, and precinct sizes are typically in the hundreds of voters.
What got me started with this was King County making their canvass available in digital form. At the time I was feeling bored and like I needed some additional exercise, and publishing a quarterly zine and knocking on doors and delivering it to everyone in my precinct seemed like a natural thing to do; I had the thought that I might be able to see some effect, of some kind, in the canvass for my precinct (just a rather arbitrary notion, I like measuring things). As I kept doing this over a number of years it gained the attention of the established political order.
Anyway I started clustering the results because I had the software, and hammer... nail.
One of Cialdini's "weapons of influence" is "liking", and again that may not mean exactly what you think it does. There was contemporaneous research going on about this. One of the notions was that you would be more likely to sway people who were "like" you. So where do you find these people? Well, maybe in precincts which vote similarly to yours. So this raises an issue for politicians: maybe they should identify people who are on their side in places where they are weak and prevail on those people to talk to their neighbors. Just a thought. But the reality was that trying to get for instance a "90%-er" to go to actively meet and court "40%-ers" was like asking them to lick dog vomit. On the other hand I used cluster correlations to identify an "like" precinct in another part of the City and took a walk; I was shocked at how similar it was in terms of physical features. I know, I know, confirmation bias.
I suppose it does take a certain mindset to make knocking on stranger's doors a good time; and I don't know that that is a good idea everywhere. But I like talking to strangers, hearing their stories, and flipping each other shit. It's a skill which has served me well in my life.
It's the internet. When you talk to people online, it often descends into pettiness. When you talk to people in the real world, that rarely happens. But it's much easier to talk online, so people get the wrong impression.
You should talk to strangers. It's never gone wrong for me. Most people have a warmth and agreeableness that comes out when you are there with them, talking about stuff. There's also the interesting effect that people will give you their innermost secrets, knowing you won't tell anyone (I actually met a serial killer who did this, heh). For instance I was on a long haul flight earlier this year, and my neighbour told me everything about her divorce. Like a kind of therapy.
I also find when I have a real disagreement with someone, it's a lot easier when you're face-to-face. For instance, I have friends who are religious, in a real way, ie they actually think there's a god who created the earth and wants us to live a certain way. Being there in person keeps me from ridiculing them like I might on an internet forum, but it also keeps them from condemning me to hell.
So folks, practice talking to people. Much of what's wrong in the current world is actually loneliness, having no outlet for your expressions.
Online, it feels like we're all half-performing for an invisible audience, so the incentives skew toward snark or point-scoring. In person, there's no scoreboard, just two humans trying to get through the moment together
An interesting "control case" is random-chat websites like Omegle. I spent many many hours on that site before it shut down. Omegle pairs you up with a single random stranger, so there's no audience. I typically used it in text-only mode, so there's no face-to-face communication either.
I'd say my experience was closer to the "30 minutes with a stranger" study than it was to modern social media. It was fairly common for a conversation to degrade into insult-trading. But it was more common to have a deep, heartfelt conversation. (Oftentimes I felt like I should follow up with the person I talked to, but I rarely did so in practice, even when we traded contact information.)
Another interesting "control case" is Usenet. You mention the concept of point-scoring. The point-scoring metaphor is rather literal on a website like HN which has upvotes/likes/etc. Usenet didn't have that stuff, but I'm told it had flamewars nonetheless.
Surely some HN users reading this comment are old enough to remember Usenet. Was it better or worse than modern social media in terms of civility? I'm especially curious about Usenet after Eternal September, once small-group norm enforcement broke down, and the underlying characteristics of the platform shone through. If we score early Usenet as 10/10 for civility, and modern X or reddit as 0/10, what score would latter-day, post-AOL Usenet receive?
Another thought: It occurred to me that "point-scoring" could actually be less of an issue with pure-anonymity platforms like 4chan, since you have less of a persona to defend. I've barely used 4chan though, so I can't say much here.
Point scoring isn’t referring to literal points. A better term might be “dunking on someone”.
The same thing happens in social circles in a school. Kids are more likely to make fun of and ridicule other kids when they have an audience to show off to.
I don’t think the anonymous nature helps either. Because the person doing the ridiculing is looking for validation that they are indeed correct and the subject is an idiot, therefore the critic gets to feel good about being smarter than their victim.
So the only dynamic required is just someone telling you how smart you are when you cut someone down. Whether that’s upvotes, or just someone commenting in agreement, it doesn’t matter.
My view is that USENET ran the gamut, depending on what group you were reading. Some would feel more like your typical HN thread or a well-behaved, niche Reddit topic, and others could be just as messy as you could find today. Just in text form rather than images and whatnot.
There is an overall style shift over the long term, e.g. USENET was a little more like email lists and less like chat. More like writing letters to one another rather than having an interactive conversation.
But, those social network problems already existed. There were various kinds of trolls, just like today. Some were just permanently in it for a laugh, others seeming more focused on dealing out grief, and some who (rumor had it) would escalate their newsgroup beefs into real life harassment and stalking. I think there was a period where using real identities, e.g. university email IDs and real names, was typical but then eventually it was mostly pseudonyms whether by explicit blind mailers or just the wave of random usernames at random commercial ISPs.
I don't know what drove what, but I'd say many groups died by attrition. People with niche interests and finite patience started finding other venues like web rings and web forums. Eventually it was mostly trolls, floods of binary attachments, and newsgroup necromancers.
The snark is not Internet specific. It comes from the top down, whether it's the talking heads on Fox News, your favorite podcast/streamer or popular Twitter posters. A few decades ago, it might have been popular opinion writers or radio personalities. This is how we learn to discuss things.
> I also find when I have a real disagreement with someone, it's a lot easier when you're face-to-face. For instance, I have friends who are religious, in a real way, ie they actually think there's a god who created the earth and wants us to live a certain way. Being there in person keeps me from ridiculing them like I might on an internet forum, but it also keeps them from condemning me to hell.
My life experience differs: I, for example, am likely more disagreeable in real life than on the internet. :-)
In internet forums, all answers are "delayed" (since you have to put them into a coherent text). Thus you rather have to think through your arguments, and thus react less on impulse (the impulse is typically already over when you have finalized your post). On the other hand, in real life, things that you strongly disagree with might trigger a very spontaneous emotional reaction.
Also, in internet forums, you want to "win internet points". Thus, you only tangentially write your arguments for the counterpart (who you will likely not convince), but more importantly to convince the many people who read your post. So your arguments are better well-thought and well-researched.
In real life, there is often no additional audience to appreciate and be convinced by "your great arguments" ;-) so it's an "all-or-nothing" to bring the truth to this ignorant being. Since the counterpart has such as "stupid" opinion, rational arguments are likely not the best way for this (because if the counterpart was capable of rational thinking, they would immediately see how "stupid" their opinion is ;-) ), so you better "hammer" your arguments into the counterpart. :-)
Skill issue. Or social anxiety. Ask me how I know!
Point scored!
There's definitely an aspect of "dehumanization," when it comes to remote communication (not just the Internet, but I think store-and-forward leaches the most humanity, compared to realtime).
It's the having time to consider responses, that I think actually makes it more difficult to accept the person on the other end as "human," more than the physical separation. You can see this in formal debates, where the emotional feedback is strictly regulated.
I've actually met a number of killers (long story for another venue), and will probably continue to do so, for the remainder of my life. I even call some of them friends. I enjoy the story, and accept it as true, because I have heard much more unbelievable true stories.
The dehumanisation of online dialogue is interesting. Is it because of 'anonymity' or is there more at play?
I think it's an exaggeration of the "city effect": the denser an environment is, the more likely it is that people who see you out to talk to you are going to have a negative agenda, because everyone else is trying to keep their head down.
If you meet a stranger at the North Pole, where you're the only two humans around, you're going to talk to them. If you meet a stranger in a remote village, you're probably going to talk to them. If you meet a stranger on the street in New York, you're probably going to put your hand over your wallet. Adverse selection wins.
It sometimes feels like social media has gone from a place to make friends to a place to make enemies - or at least to bond with a group through the medium of hate. Bonding through hate of the outsider is hardly new, but it's especially negative on the Internet where it can be amplified over and over.
What if you meet them in a remote corner of an unpopular online RPG?
It reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIFty-O4rOE TLDR: amazing things can happen, and people are actually nice in this kind of environment!
Is pvp enabled?
I must invite them to duel. Vampire rules.
The idea of the city effect is suburbia romatization. My view is that people (me included) tend to be biased in what they like. I love cities and dense areas and hence most interactions I have are positive.
I like what you said about the kinship through hate, I feel no connection to a city though rather I see the segregation of suburbia as the breeding ground for hate.
Most interactions in a city are neutral: you can walk past a thousand people in a subway without conceiving of it as an interaction, you just ignore them and they ignore you. In a way you couldn't do it you met in a wilderness.
That is a bold statement I do not understand why you think it is true.
I am trying to understand how your concept about a common hate connects to cities. You are comparing leisure time "the wilderness" to work time "the big city". A city lets you choose your interactions, and it forces you to see things that are not only the hate in your bubble. The possibility to have an interaction that changes your world view is greater in an integrated city.
Hate can grow even if we all sit in a corner of the woods on the internet, or if we listen to the same radio host.
There are too many cultural aspects in your view of the city, I do not know where you come from here. FWIW I have lived in mega cities, and also for years outside of cities in some of the least populated spaces in the "developed world". My experience do not reflect yours at all.
>I do not understand why you think it is true.
You're simply not going to have time to speak to everyone in a subway to fish out that positive interaction, even if you wanted to.
I don't think most interactions will be hateful, but if the odds are .1%, you have some 50/50 shot of a bad interaction with 1000 people. It's just statistics.
> where it can be amplified over and over
Especially if a corporation that controls the venue, deliberately amplifies the rancor.
Dehumanization is a poor framing, really. It was never humanized in the first place.
Sure, those of us who have a technical understanding understand that it is likely that there are humans involved as an implementation detail, but from the user perspective there is no other human to be seen. If the technical backend were replaced by a sufficiently capable LLM (or whatever technology) absolutely nothing about the user experience would change. From the user perspective, it is a solitary activity.
Human interaction hasn't gone away. Online discussion is a different tool for a different job.
I never thought about it this way. That technically every internet interaction is solo. Mind bending.
But much of internet interaction isn't solo, in all those places where online and offline have connections. There will be a ton of dehumanization once in the morning we type a quick and lazy "/greet Mary" on the console and the AI agent takes over fully, sends a personalised email to Mary in my voice, and adds a "Welcome back from vacation!" note, after consulting my agent-managed calendar. Fully decoupling us from each other.
...and on the other side Mary's agent would summarize your greeting as part of her regular notification digest. There would be no gradient. You and your correspondent would continue to pay equivalent proportion of available attention to each other; thus you would remain equally human as before.
At least relative to each other (and to each of the rest of your contacts.)
It's one's idea of humanness that will be substituted piecemeal by a "doppelganger concept", as a result of the perceptual decoupling provided by ever-thicker interfaces. That concept would continue to fulfill the exact same function in one's life that formerly would've been fulfilled by one's previous opinions on "what it means to be human" (if any).
Happens all the time, things changing people's minds. Happens surreptitiously, too. Of course, it's more comfortable to consider at least our inner lives remain inviolate to the vagaries of technocapital - but where could all their content come from, other than entirely from the outside world, same one that software was proclaimed to be "eating"?
Subjectively, you'd hardly (if ever) experience that kind of "world model spoofing" as anything close to a distinctly recognizable perceptual phenomenon (since it's language-based anyway). Rather, you'd continue to experience everything as the usual "being a person comprehending a world" bit - and, as ever, flavored by whatever life-scripts you've been allocated.
On average, however, the substitution would result in effects as simple as the population allocating that much more of its resources to, say, the organization representing the machinic quasi-intelligence in question - the one that has interposed itself as normative communication medium by providing useful summaries.
Or, not as simple.
It's already ended up very much like that "isn't there someone you forgot to ask" meme. Except the 3rd party pictured as JC, should rather be labeled "VC".
You could say the same about NPCs in a holodeck, effectively declaring that talking to people face to face is really a solitary activity
> talking to people face to face is really a solitary activity
There is no doubt a lot of truth in that statement at some kind of fundamental level, but as far as language goes, that's literally the opposite of what we consider a solitary activity. Staring at a computer screen on the other hand...
No, I don't think it's anonymity. You can see absolutely rabid, hateful, unhinged things people post under their real names on Facebook, LinkedIn, nextdoor.
There is a kind of 'bubble effect' where people are wrapped in their own world. A similar effect can be seen once people drive a car and there's a behavior change towards other people on the road, and 'road rage' becoming a thing.
I think people (myself included) have a mental model of the other driver that seems to default to the worst possible interpretation of their motives.
If I was in a grocery store and someone "cut me off" and forced me to slow down because they misjudged the timing, I would think nothing of it. I certainly wouldn't make an obscene gesture and shout at them.
Also, when we are driving, we're in a pretty high state of anxiety; just as a baseline.
I find it amazing, that, when I'm driving, and some knucklehead does something that almost makes me crash (and thus, maybe kill me), I get incandescent with rage, but, five minutes later, I've all but forgotten the incident.
I could easily see myself fanning that rage into something that could result in self-destructive road rage.
I agree. I think that it's the removal of an emotional connection, and that happens naturally, after a certain pause (an interesting study, would be to find out how long, and I'll bet there are people who can explicitly prevent the analytical part of their mind from taking the wheel).
I disagree that removing an emotional connection removes emotional responses of hate and wild dehumanization. I would categorize all such interactions as emotional. I argue that it is in fact the opposite: Having no analytical consideration for how another human might respond enflames emotions, not dampens them.
It's called flame wars, not analytical wars.
It’s emotional connection that I’m talking about.
I feel that you are referring to the inwardly-focused thing that happens when we lose connection.
The analytical thing is the loss of emotional connection.
Do you mean empathy, by emotional connection?
If that is the case: I disagree that rage is the natural response to a loss of empathy AND switching to an analytical mode of thinking. I don't think rage (an emotion) stems from analytical thinking. Loss of empathy may be a required precursor to rage comments, but I don't see how analytical thinking fits anywhere in there. And if analytical thinking is a function of time: I would expect to find calmer comments after deliberate thought.
It would be testable - if you had the data - if it was the case that rage comments are thought out, or spur of the moment. I'm betting on the latter. Rage never seems well thought out to me.
If I misread your comment, I am sorry in advance.
I don't know if it's as "advanced" as empathy. I think it's "reptile-brain" level stuff. Herd/Pack instinct.
Anyway, that's not my wheelhouse. I've spent a lot of time, around a lot of pretty damaged folks, and this is just an observation that I've come up with, on my own.
I've just noticed that direct, realtime communication, has a lot more emotional connection (for both good and bad), than ones where there's a "handshake," so to speak.
It's not always bad. I think we've all been told to "Think about what you're going to say in response." "Count to ten", etc.
If we want to be angry, then the pause allows us to ramp it up, but if we want to be reasonable, it gives us the chance to defuse it, but, at the same time, maybe leach some of the emotional warmth from it.
Also, you see other people doing it, and it rapidly starts to seem "normal." At least for some.
I think it's the bandwidth, or lack there of.
A lot of it happens in out of band posts like these.
It seems to happen less in interactive (i.e. chat, etc.). Make no mistake, it absolutely happens there.
But not as much as in async posts (I don't think).
I don't think it happens much at all with video.
Most of it is surrounded by context (or lack of). How difficult it is to communicate (typing like this is not easy, and certainly not for the impatient).
I have to keep telling folks when they get that Look in their face because of what someone said or didn't say over email or an instant message to not judge on that. If it's that important to you, CALL them. TALK to them, you simply can not rely on typed conversations for anything that impacts you emotionally.
"What do you think they meant by that?" Oh no.
It's just an awful medium.
That sort of is what I find.
I know that my idea is completely rectally-sourced, but I feel that the less time that we have to think about an element of an interaction, the less likely we are to go into the nasty "flame mode" we see.
But there's exceptions to every case (especially when human nature is involved). I actually know people that are so emotionally broken, that every interaction that they have; regardless of the context and medium, is a fight.
They tend to be lonely and angry. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think that part of it, is that when we are engaging with people in realtime (especially face to face), our emotional driver is behind the wheel, and when there's a pause between responses, our analytical driver has time to grab the wheel, and that's where the "dehumanization" comes from.
That's not always a bad thing. In emotionally-charged situations, that "few seconds of consideration" can help stabilize the interaction.
People claim that it's the lack of consequences, and illusion of safety, but I feel as if it's really the emotional disconnection that does it.
Anonymity is one aspect, for sure. But also, people often have not taken in the lesson of interpreting generously. They take the worst interpretation of the words, and often add a few imagined things that were never written (oh you like healthcare, you communist?). This is worse in written form because the feedback loop is longer, but it being written makes it feel like the author has had plenty of time to think about it.
Forums are also the kind of place that everyone thinks are populated by political bots. Believing every other comment is written in bad faith is going to change how you behave.
When you think of arguments as a kind of battle, you end up forgetting the person on the other side.
A long time ago, you would only interact with humans from your own tribe. Most of your actions had direct consequences for you, and you interacted with these people every day. Your life and wellbeing depended on that group and your social status. Then came local communities, followed by the global village, with access to eight billion people you will never meet or know. You can say whatever you want to them and face no real consequences, you can simply block them if you wish.
In a more poor society, It is a false nicety. These are the people who wouldn't blink twice while killing you as a part of the mob.
> For instance I was on a long haul flight earlier this year, and my neighbour told me everything about her divorce. Like a kind of therapy.
this gets old fast, it's like being emotionally vomited on.
Only if the person is unable to tell if you’re actually engaged or just humoring them. Most people are actually pretty good at reading social cues.
sometimes.
I remember talking to a doctor once (in a social situation). We were talking about non doctor things and he mentioned that most people find out he's a doctor and start talking about medical issues.
I think this happens to some people (doctors, lawyers, police).
And to a smaller extent it happens to all of us (sometimes). Older people might talk about divorce, or their operations, or their kids.
That's a very negative reaction.
I enjoy helping others, and I like hearing someone's life story. Not everyone needs to like that though, people are different.
Hearing the same story from the same person can be very tiring and I have family members like that, but with strangers it's a different person, different context, different story.
> You should talk to strangers. It's never gone wrong for me.
I guess it depends on your definition of wrong.
I feel the opposite, where it has never gone right. I can’t remember any actual interesting conversations I have had with strangers. I can remember a lot of bad, awkward, and boring ones, though.
Lots of context we're missing here obviously and we might not even be talking about the same thing but in what way were conversations you have had with strangers "bad"?
> I actually met a serial killer who did this
I don’t think this is the fun anecdote you make it out to be
Talk to strangers it has never gone wrong for me and I even met a serial killer who killed a lot of women who asked how I would dispose of a body.
So much to unpack.
You got lucky if you were a woman you probably would have had a poor outcome.
I would prefer a rude online person who is petty vs a serial killer wanting advice on how to get rid of the body.
sarcasm
even the most prolific serial killer has killed way less than 1% of the people he’s met. Nothing to worry about!
/sarcasm
Get the best of both worlds: meet rude petty people afk!
I agree, but another aspect is what’s lost in text. Even when I don’t have negative intentions, my messages can come across as rude or brash. I feel like I get more negative responses from my friends in the group chat compared to in person, where I’ve never had a single argument with them. In person, the recipient can see my smile and body language, which makes it clear that I don’t mean anything negative by my words.
Beautifully said. I believe wholeheartedly that in real life, disagreements between two people hinge on an ability to disarm each other through charm and disposition. The less you know someone, and the more they appear to earnestly try to understand you - becoming heated and firing phasers just feels unbecoming; why would I perpetuate personal loneliness or ennui in a moment that is genuinely devoid of it?
I learned the hard way that religion is something best left aside in discussions.
I am an absolute atheist, and I believe that people who are educated in science and are religions have some kind of mental illness. This is just too set the context :) I also used to be very active on radio about science vs religion.
First, people who are hard core religious may get off their way to cure you. I had people yelling in front of my house. I never saw physicists doing the same.
But that's a perk of the "atheism job" :)
I had something much worse happening to me. A friend of mine was religions, from a very religions family. We had long discussions and she gradually realized that her while world is going to shit when she discovered the insanity of religion. She got into a deep depression and tried to commit suicide. I was with her 7 years until she somehow snapped back to a normal life.
I never attempted to turn an individual anymore. Sure, general information about rational hygiene (religion, homeopathy, ...) but not on z 1:1 basis.
> I actually met a serial killer who did this, heh
Would love to hear the story behind this one.
When I was an intern in a small town, I took a trip to London. On my way back, I caught a cab from the provincial station to my house.
The cabbie seemed fun. We were talking about football. Just ordinary banter with a cab driver. Out of the blue, he asks me "hey mate, just for fun, what would you do if you'd murdered someone and had a dead body to dispose of?"
I was a bit surprised, but it's not that odd a thing to think about. People watch crime flicks all the time. But I hadn't thought much about it and gave a bland answer like "maybe dig a hole in the roadside, something like that". But I did think it was an odd switch in mood. He drops me off, end of that.
A few years later, I've graduated, I'm watching the news. A cab driver has been convicted of murdering multiple women, in the town I was in. Over the same period. He's buried the bodies in various places. I happened to run into a detective from the same town, to whom I explained my anecdote. He's pretty sure it's the same guy, but the cabbie has been sent down for life, so I wouldn't really be adding anything if I reported it.
Still a better conversion than the typical Reform party bollocks I get from the cabbies at the airport.
EDIT: if I had to dispose of a body I’d find a farmer willing to lend-out his pigs with no questions asked.
A Russian backpacker once told me about a conversation with an Afghan cab driver on a trip to the US. Apparently it was quite friendly for a conversation that started "I used to kill people like you".
Think I'd take the Reform bollocks to that opening line though
I'd be smart from the very beginning.
https://ask.metafilter.com/7921/If-you-killed-somebody-how-w...
That is an interesting story, thanks for sharing. However, the prospect of speaking to a serial killer does not make me more likely to want to strike up conversations with strangers.
So never talk to anyone because there's some small possibility that they might be a bad person? I think you've missed the point of the OP.
He got caught, so I don't think you gave him very good advice.
> Out of the blue, he asks me "hey mate, just for fun, what would you do if you'd murdered someone and had a dead body to dispose of?"
Ah yeah, the exact sort of thing you want to hear from your cab driver
It is bizarre to me that you relate this experience like it's fun and whimsical trivia. Maybe that's because I'm a woman and identify more with the victims...
A stranger was trying to impress GP by pretending to be a serial killer and the GP is naive enough to believe them.
No ... read above why they have good reason to believe, after the fact, that he was a serial killer.
> So folks, practice talking to people. Much of what's wrong in the current world is actually loneliness, having no outlet for your expressions.
If I had a penny for every bizarre theory people who ruin the world believe about who/what is actually ruining the world.
My favourite was an interview with Jerry Springer. He also had a theory of what's wrong in the current world and none of it had anything to do with what he did.
Well obviously. Someone saying that the world is "being ruined", and theorizing on the causes of the same, implies that the speaker is experiencing the world they inhabit as changing in a manner that's unacceptable to that person.
Nobody goes around thinking "people like me are making the world unlivable for people like me"; even if that's a useful and sometimes even a correct notion - what reason would anyone have to entertain it?
> knowing you won't tell anyone (I actually met a serial killer who did this, heh)
And why would you not tell anyone about the serial killer?
> it often descends into pettiness. When you talk to people in the real world, that rarely happens
If you are talking about one on one with a stranger, then I can see that, yeah, but if you have worked with people, then you know it is a huge mess, creation of cliques, gossip, and all sorts of crap, including heavy pettiness, greed, jealousy / envy, and so on.
>Much of what's wrong in the current world is actually loneliness
Okay cool. How do we fix it? We don't have places to just "talk to people". Maybe some places still has a mall area, but most businesses discourage soliciting. So you're mostly asking people to pay to talk to strangers.
A part of this is behavorial, but the UX of life also kept pushing Gen Z onto the internet, the only "third place" left for them.
People become jaded dicks online. Rare good faith effort is punished by unassailable trolls, cynical jerks, etc. Makes it easy to become one of them because extending an olive branch is taken advantage of.
> Much of what's wrong in the current world is actually loneliness, having no outlet for your expressions.
A dramatic line. I made a note of it.
> There's also the interesting effect that people will give you their innermost secrets, knowing you won't tell anyone
This is exactly what David Choe says in this interview: https://youtu.be/HrBhuzHHlhQ?t=127
> Most people have a warmth and agreeableness that comes out when you are there with them, talking about stuff.
I really hate saying this, but I live in the Deep South and people here can quite repulsive under the veneer of manners. The amount of hate, anger towards people different from them, and just rampant racism is quite difficult to deal with. And these are things that get exposed when having these conversations.
I do as you suggest. But I'm always ready to just walk away from a conversation. There's no winning with these people and the moral injury you sustain by being in their presence is awful
Yes, moral injury. Thanks for giving me a new way to frame that experience.
The natural impulse to be sociable and get along with people combined with minor insecurity or social anxiety has led to social experiences that when I reflect on them, I can only cringe in shame at my timid response to some awful statements.
It's not like you have a lot of options. You won't be changing these people. It's not your job. But you do need to protect yourself.
It is okay to interrupt them and walk away, especially to any stranger or faint acquaintance. And to say "I'm not sure I agree with that" and let them keep talking will at least let them know where you stand.
I'm increasingly convinced that social isolation is the single great social ill of our time. I am not one for "respecting others' opinions" at all, make no mistakes, if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected. But so much of the hate simmering away like a pot about to boil over is the result of loneliness. The evidence on this is startingly clear.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795362...
https://www.psychiatrist.com/news/hate-lies-and-loneliness-f...
Had a chat about this with a friend yesterday.
In richer societies you can afford to be alone. This isn't good for tribal beings, humans didn't evolve as lone wolves. Even something as cooking for more than one person involves so much interaction.
At the lower end of the global income scale , you can't afford to be alone in your giant house. You might need to share communal goods.
Not everyone, but just having a role in society can be a major help for many people. The biggest crime of the modern era is the disposable human. You work for an anonymous corporation, that does some nonsense you can't even hope to understand, in exchange for currency, to support the basics of your existence.
You don't get to have any real status in that, for example In many places there was just one or two bread makers for the entire community. Baking bread isn't the most prestigious job, but you matter.
Tell me, fellow techy, working on serving ads. Who exactly would be disappointed if you failed in your duties today. Would anyone in your community be upset that they didn't get as many advertisements
I accidentally ended up at a job in the ad-serving business for two years and this is so accurate. (Who knew "analytics" really meant "ad conversions"?) If there are entire product lines dedicated to blocking the thing you do, it's very demoralizing.
It's demoralizing because people block you?! That's why you found it demoralizing?! Not for commodifying people's attention?
It's demoralizing because ads are so detrimental to society that blocking them is widespread
No, it's very demoralizing to find that what you are doing for a living (that isn't what you expected to be doing) is so disgusting to other people that there are commercial tools devoted to blocking you.
You can't afford to be alone in any society. Not in the monetary sense, but in the sense that it will make you depressed. The fact that many people don't realize this is troubling.
While very true, highly communal societies can be extremely toxic too.
Imagine not being able to get a job and having everyone actually gossiping about you. Pretty much middle school fears realized.
If the society was truly communal, then the people able to employ you should be the same ones gossiping. The question then becomes why they won't employ you. I do agree that living communally can be unpleasant if you're an independent thinker with views different from everyone else in a way no one can appreciate.
I don't have to imagine! I grew up in a village. On the whole, I think it's a plus, but you're right that this happens a lot.
I agree with 99.9% of what you wrote. It’s presented very clearly. We are social animals even if we don’t like to admit it.
A while ago I would say I agree 100%, but more recently I learned that ads have value. Therefore i can’t agree with the final sentence in this post. It’s not easy to recognize but I’d like to try to share how I see it now.
Any time you think or say one of these things, it means that someone did not do a good job advertising:
- I would have gone to that concert but did not know about it
- It was that cheap on sale? Too bad I did not hear about it a week ago.
- DeVaughn’s closed!? I completely forgot about that restaurant. They had great food.
- Why didn’t anyone tell me earlier that there is a tool for easily finding a time for a meeting.
Advertising can be valuable. When done right, it does not have to be intrusive or annoying. This does not mean that every job provides value, but not knowing about something can cause people to feel negatively. Marketing is telling people about things.
Ads are agents in a zero-sum war for your attention.
If you have focus, if you're not aimlessly wandering around, ads try to distract you. They attack your personal agency and sovereignty, trying to divert you from what you were doing, to pay attention to what they're pushing.
Because they're in a zero sum competition, the dynamics are to escalate. There's only so much inventory, and the winners of the bids for your attention need to have more and more effect on your behavior to justify the escalating costs. Text isn't enough, images are needed. Images aren't enough, videos are needed. Videos aren't enough, interstitials with tiny close buttons are needed, with mandatory pauses. If advertisers could reach out and physically grab you by the head, they would.
All of this is true for a large portion of web ads.
Then there is the ad for your kids' school fundraiser.
Or the ad for a used car that your cousin would love.
Or the poster for the concert at your local community hall.
These ads also are "trying to divert you from what you were doing, to pay attention to what they're pushing".
Yet these feel ads differently despite also being "agents in a zero-sum war for your attention".
I don't think people appreciate how much good and positive advertising exists because they are conditioned and on-guard for the kinds of ads that you describe.
If I wanted notices about fundraisers it should be because I signed up for them.
If I want to know about concerts I would've subscribed to a feed.
If I wanted to help my cousin find a used car I'd actively go searching for one.
If I have a problem in need of a solution, I'll search for it.
All of that is true for all web ads. The friendly types of ads you're describing only work as offline ads.
If I am online I don't want any of that offline context following me around at the behest of a creepy surveillance industry. A web page knowing what is local to me or what I might be interested in is a bug. Frankly I categorize it in the realm of security vulnerabilities.
And that's still putting aside the question of why I would want to spend time/attention looking at any online ads. The ad for the local concert stuck on a bulletin board can be read while waiting for a burrito if I would otherwise be spacing out, or it can be ignored if I'm thinking about something else or otherwise don't feel like taking new input on new topics. Whereas web page ads are interspersed with what I'm already trying to do - it's like if I went to grab my burrito and the guy gave me a 30 second elevator pitch before he'd hand it over.
Whereas the alternative for online ads is blank 'white' space. If I am online, I'm positively engaged in doing something else. If I'm interested in local concert listings, then I will purposefully check out concert listings.
Upgrade to the Burrito+ community to eliminate pre-burrito adroll!
You are deliberately confusing ads with things that already have better names, such as notices or listings. They feel different because they ARE different.
Advertising is wildly successful because it's literally everywhere and we are conditioned from birth that the whole concept of "strangers using psychological tricks so you give them your money" is just a normal fact of everyday life. Most people are NOT conditioned to be on-guard against ads, and that is the whole problem. It's not until you make the choice to actively avoid ads where possible and give up ad-laden media consumption altogether for a while that you notice how bad (and bad for you) advertising is.
If you haven't tried switching to a low-advertising diet, you are probably missing out on the ability to focus on what really matters in life.
I am taking a broader definition of ad to include things that also have other names.
- job ads and classified ads that can also be called listings
- ads for events that can also be called notices
- product description on services like Amazon and Ebay
- websites describing products and services
- 1st hand and 2nd hand mentions of products and services online that can be as close to the
Some of the comments here seem to hold only for a narrow definition of ads.
I prefer to think of all of this as marketing, as ads are part of the marketing mix. As we see, the distinction between ads and other similar things is blurry.
I am not defending the volume of ads. There's way too much of it. I am making the unconventional and unpopular statement that sometimes marketing and ads do deliver value.
It's better to narrow the critique of ads the way you did because that leads to a more constructive conversation.
A huge distinguishing characteristic is that some of these things come to you, or are found passively, and some of them you seek out. I think that when the ad comes to you, there is a very good chance it has little or no value.
Job listings are useful, but I have to seek them out.
An event calendar is something I seek out.
Product descriptions are only shown to me when I seek details about the product.
An ad on the street is somewhere in the middle. For most people the acceptability of it is about setting (not in a nature park, please), and ignorability (LCD billboard vs. telephone pole flyer).
I think that is the distinction that people are making between marketing and what is being called ads.
I think you hit the nail on the head - people tend to think of push (outbound) marketing as "ads" while they don't think as much about passive ads.
It's true that it's harder to do push / outbound marketing in a way that does not feel annoying. I've seen it done and it seemed like the company was reading my mind in a good constructive way. That's rare though.
It can definitely be done in a way that people don’t mind/accept.
People love movie trailers to the point of seeking out good ones and sharing them. People have come to accept that broadcast media will have ads, but get very annoyed when ads are inserted where they are not expected (ads during an ad break are ok, sports betting ads mid play annoy the shit out of me).
Ads are vying for attention, true! I usually dislike commercial ads as much as anyone, especially online advertising, especially forced ads that block the thing I’m there for. That said, I don’t buy that they attack my agency and sovereignty, that’s a bit of a stretch. Online, a lot of free content comes with ads, and nobody’s forcing me to choose free content, so online at least I can avoid a lot of ads by avoiding the free content that comes with ads. When I’m not online, ads like posters or billboards rarely if ever block me in any way.
HN comments are also vying for our attention and pushing narratives, so are they ads and are they a personal attack? Usually not for money, but you didn’t make a distinction and GP comment was pointing at ads like posters for free community events. The community dance poster does want your attention, of course, but is it an evil personal attack, or just information that you can do as you please with or ignore? Is it sometimes something you did want to know, and advertises something you would like?
The way ads are run these days is almost completely wrong!
- Lies are ok
- Thrusting your product in a users face, doesn't care if the user cares, Just because I like golfing, doesn't mean every new golf ball brand needs to hit me up all the time.
- Product with Money wins, not necessarily the right product
- Most people are oblivious to their psychological drivers, Ad makers have learnt to exploit those to drive sales.
This is one area AI can be very helpful as it improves, I face a problem, I let my agent loose and it finds the right solution and thus right products, provides comparative data for me to choose without the products being thrust in my face everywhere I go (behavioral ads) or also when I don't need it.
A lot of marketing is done badly. These bad ways are the most glaring and people sometimes think that all marketing is like that.
In reality, there is a lot of marketing that is completely unnoticeable. Some people would not even consider those things marketing. That is marketing done well (or at least better).
Unfortunately, when that makes up a trillionth of a percent of all ads, it appears to me as though the overall idea is terrible, with a few who got lucky here and there.
One of the best examples of your second point is that tweet that went something like "I bought a toilet seat and now I'm getting ads for toilet seats everywhere I go". It's annoying and not even productive for the advertiser.
Apparently some of the very best-converting ads are repeat sales. Of course it helps if the product is obviously consumable, but I'm told that this counterintuitive strategy actually works well. Maybe it's because they can track conversions but not product returns, so maybe you're searching for a better one after returning the first purchase.
I would be willing to believe that most toilet seats are bought by people that buy toilet seats as part of their job (builders, plumbers and maintenance). They might buy more in a month than you buy in your life.
Follow up ads might be very productive even if you personally get swept into the professional toilet installer ad pipeline inappropriately.
Watch people buy watches.
Camera people buy cameras. Particularly if your talking about lenses, I might buy 3 in a month.
Toilet seat people buy toilet seats too, I guess.
I seem to get a stream of ads for terrible products on YouTube on my phone (I get completely different ads when watching on an Apple TV) - by this point I'm convinced it is Google punishing me into signing up for YouTube Premium...
It’s insane how many are some random idiot in their car, filming with a phone, trying to act like they’re having a conversation with you before it completely switches to sales mode and they’re (terribly) reading a script. They don’t even put EFFORT into ads anymore it seems. Then you want to watch a video and it’s 3 pre-roll ads, 90 seconds of video, then another 2-3 ads.
I’ll never feel bad about using Adblock, and I hate the idea of rewarding these companies’ behavior with money.
FWIW, YouTube premium is one of my most worthwhile family subscriptions.
Anytime I use YT on a browser/profile that I'm not logged into, it's so jarring that I immediately fix it.
Edit: I dumped Spotify for YT music. I thought I liked Spotify better, though, so I tried again recently, and it turns out I didn't, so now I get YT and music for not much more than just Spotify. Definitely worth it in that context.
Advertising is already rich people begging for your money. Not free exchange of information to allow value discovery. Don't conflate the two.
What about the ad for your kids' school fundraiser?
Or the ad for a used car that your cousin would love.
Or the poster for the concert at your local community hall.
> What about the ad for your kids' school fundraiser? My kids should come home with a flyer for it.
> Or the ad for a used car that your cousin would love. I will actively seek out and research a car.
> Or the poster for the concert at your local community hall. Presumably this physical paper poster doesn't give me malware/AIDS if I look at it or tear off a slip.
My overriding personal objective is to be able to exist without being expected to consume and spend constantly every moment, waking or otherwise. In an ideal world, I should have to give consent to be advertised to, and should be able to operate in public without being bombarded with companies trying to take my money.
> My overriding personal objective is to be able to exist without being expected to consume and spend constantly every moment, waking or otherwise
We're fully aligned. The original point I was trying to make is that advertising can be done well, in a way that is compatible with this objective. Unfortunately, in many cases they aren't.
> In an ideal world, I should have to give consent to be advertised to
I thought about this a while back, and I think being bombarded with requests for consent is worse than being bombarded with ads. Cookie consent banners convinced me.
> My kids should come home with a flyer for it.
Fliers are ads.
> I will actively seek out and research a car.
Probably in some classified ads.
Except that you also learnt about 10 concerts you didn't want to go to, 10 sales you don't care about, etc. And it's not even (necessarily) 10 good concerts or sales, it's just the ones that someone managed to thrust in front of your face. Filtering the barrage of information is mental effort and distracts you from other tasks.
I'd certainly like to know when my favourite bands are playing or get an alert when something I'm after is on sale. There are better and more focused solutions to these than advertising.
> When done right, [advertising] does not have to be intrusive or annoying
Citation needed.
I consistently see marketing and advertising where I learn about events, products, or services I did not know about before. While researching potential products, I read through marketing websites (a form of ad) of different offers. I buy things on Amazon, which requires me to read through product descriptions, which are also ads for what the seller is selling.
Agreed that there is too much machine-gun advertising and you see more than you need. However, I learned to appreciate good advertising while at the same time not letting the irrelevant ads ruin my day.
source: personal experience and sample size of 1. At the same time, I am not some weirdo and other people see the same ads and marketing materials, and it's not unreasonable to think that they also derive some value from them.
> I'd certainly like to know when my favourite bands are playing or get an alert when something I'm after is on sale
If you ever had this happen, that's another case to cite for non-intrusive and useful advertising.
I do not disagree with you entirely, but I feel this almost borders on self-delusion.
The sole purpose of ads is to (probabilistically) shift the targets spending behavior in favor of the one buying the ads, nothing more, nothing less.
While ads can have utility from the victims point of view (contain relevant information), this is entirely incidental.
If you want product updates or information, getting that from dedicated, independent 3rd parties is preferable in literally every situation I can think of.
I disagree that this is the sole purpose of ads. I can see how people arrive at that opinion, but I feel it is narrow and incomplete. With a little restrospection and introspection, anyone can see examples in their own life where marketing had another purpose.
Marketing can take many forms. Many people narrowly define it as "spam emails" or "unsolicited phone calls." Those are also marketing, but there is so much more. Marketing first and foremost informs. It can inform you that the problem that you have has even has a ready solution. It can inform you about the name of the product that solves your problem. It can inform you about alternative products that also solve your problem. Or it can reinforce and expand your existing opinions and believes. What you call the sole purpose is only one of these broad purposes of advertising.
Remember the time you learned of a particular programming library that does the thing that you wanted to do? Without marketing, you would not have learned about it.
Have you ever gone on a trip to a new place? How did you decide how you will spend your time? It was either because you researched things online and found websites that told you about those things. Or you saw a brochure at your hotel. Or an ad at the airport.
Think about how you learned about your favorite web framework. It was likely through word-of-mouth advertising.
Why do you drink (coke / pepsi / fav. brand of tea / fav. brand of coffee)? What formed your opinion was some kind of marketing, either directly, or indirectly.
Many things we do and believes we hold are because of one form of marketing or another.
I feel your own examples undermine your positions:
Drinks specifically are one of the most clearcut negative examples to me, where there is zero product discovery/information/customer upside involved; the sole purpose of that CocaCola banner is to marginally shift the ad-targets consumption behavior (fully to his or her detriment, either from overconsuming and/or overpaying).
If I seek product information, ads are the absolute last place to look because they have all the incentive to hide everything negative about the product and to obfuscate any comparison with potentially superior competitors.
I'm not saying that all marketing is a wasteful detriment to humanity as a whole, but a lot of advertising has a zero-sum "benefit" to society, while binding a lot of ressources (but every rational company is somewhat "forced" to play anyway).
The original comment, and your initial response, talked about advertising. The examples you give, and this response in general, are marketing. They are very different, and marketing is much broader.
It's true that they are different, but I would not say that they're very different. There is a considerable group of people here on HN who have a narrow definition of what an ad is.
Advertising and marketing are indeed two different things, but the distinction is blurry and the overlap considerable. I've read through the comment thread and it seems that advertising and marketing seem interchangeable in the way they are being talked about.
That’s jesuitical hair-splitting.
> first and foremost informs
I'd claim any extent to which ads inform the viewer is downstream of the ultimate goal of having people spend money on the product. The company behind the ad does not inherently care about you being informed, just that informing people (in very selective ways) sometimes happens to be an effective way to increase sales. Where it better serves their purpose to misinform, that's what they do (which legislation can help curb).
> Remember the time you learned of a particular programming library that does the thing that you wanted to do?
Typically by searching a package index, opposed to someone being paid to shove a product in my face unsolicited while I'm trying to look at something else.
I don't think it really helps defend meaningfulness of the job in question ("techy, working on serving ads") to expand the scope to considering other things (writing package documentation, reviewing tourist destinations, ...) and then point to the fact that some of those other things, which the employee in question doesn't do, are useful.
> Why do you drink (coke / pepsi / fav. brand of tea / fav. brand of coffee)? What formed your opinion was some kind of marketing, either directly, or indirectly.
Being persauded to buy one sugary drink over another (or over water) doesn't really seem to be a constructive outcome, especially for all the time and resources wasted. Actual information incidentally gained from Coke ads is little to none - you'd be far better with an independent review/comparison.
Companies exist to make money. They use marketing as part of that process. However, we can not forget that consumers derive value from the things that companies sell. If we only focus on the big bad companies, then it is not possible to see how marketing could also serve the consumer.
Believe it or not, some people do enjoy a sugary drink from time to time. While I don't drink soft drinks regularly, I recently discovered skyr protein yogurts through advertising. That's a product that caters to a desire that I have. Never heard of skyr before!
> I don't think it really helps defend meaningfulness of the job in question ("techy, working on serving ads") to expand the scope to considering other things (writing package documentation, reviewing tourist destinations, ...)
There was a blanket statement that all ads are negative and people making them are useless -- exaggeration and gross simplification is mine. I offered some counterpoints for more balanced thinking. There is plenty of advertising that delivers positive value, hence some advertising jobs are useful.
One problem is that people sometimes think of ads as only web display ads. They are not aware that there are many other kinds of ads. Independent review sites, travel blogs, and posts on HN about an interesting software package are also ads. When truly independent, it's called word-of-mouth advertising.
> Believe it or not, some people do enjoy a sugary drink from time to time
But does that mean spending billions in resources on getting people to consume more sugary drinks is a net positive?
I don't think so. I think the goal of having more people consume sugary drinks is a net negative even if it were achieved for free, and that the direction our decision-making needs to be pushed (if at all) is towards consuming fewer sugary drinks (to counteract our evolutionary bias towards consuming more than is healthy for us), and probably spending less of our time hearing/thinking about them too.
> One problem is that people sometimes think of ads as only web display ads. They are not aware that there are many other kinds of ads. Independent review sites, travel blogs, [...]
Still seems to come back to the same issue - sure you can hold a broad definition of "ads" that includes independent travel blogs if you want, but that isn't what the "fellow techy, working on serving ads" in question is working on, or what people are talking about when they complain about someone being paid to shove a product in their face unsolicited when they're trying to look at something else.
My point is that all ads are bad and marketing can provide value for consumers.
Pointing out an egregious case of advertising that does not deliver a net positive does not disprove that point. There are plenty of examples of bad advertising. It does not take a lot of effort to find them. But from that extrapolating that all advertising is bad and calling all jobs related to it as useless is excessive.
> Pointing out an egregious case of advertising that does not deliver a net positive does not disprove that point.
Coke/Pepsi were your own examples. I don't believe there are just a limited number of bad cases in an otherwise good system, but rather that at it's core is a huge zero-sum game of burning resources to take market share back and forth, with even the non-zero-sum impacts (people hearing more about sugary drinks instead of other things, and consuming more sugary drinks than they otherwise would) being of questionable value in most cases (in some cases potentially good, but still disproportionately small benefit compared to resource wastage).
I think it's similar to Bitcoin mining as an example of what happens when competition is not directed towards a useful end like improving the product.
> But from that extrapolating that all advertising is bad and calling all jobs related to it as useless is excessive.
A job working on serving web ads is almost guarenteed to be a net negative to society in my eyes.
I wouldn't really consider someone writing a travel blog to be working in advertising (unless they get paid to push certain destinations) and I don't think anyone here's claiming that to be useless.
Show HN is advertising.
Sure; but people are not typically getting paid to post Show HNs, and that content is not shown to victims unsolicitedly, so I don't have any problem with it either.
If you are a "fellow techy, working on serving ads", it is a pretty safe assumption that producing "Show HNs" is neither the main purpose of your job nor very representative.
When I read ads in the old, old National geographic magazines at my grandparents what startles me is the entire paragraphs of text laying out the case for their product. I miss that even if it was BS.
Even TV ads used to be a bit closer to that.
Likely false but always felt likely there was a bit of respect being paid toward the reader/viewer in terms of recognizing them as an intelligent individual.
Nowadays advertisements aimed at adults are too different than ones for kids stuff. All vulgar (not sexual) fluff and eye candy.
> I would have gone to that concert but did not know about it
The best concert I ever saw was one that I only knew was coming to town because of a TV commercial.
Ads are information. As long as you understand the source of the information is biased and treat it accordingly, information is useful.
This is a common problem with "your job is bullshit" rhetoric. It says a lot more about the speaker than the people whose jobs they're criticizing.
The most famous example is David Graeber, an academic who wrote a whole book on what he called "bullshit jobs". He claimed over half of all jobs were bullshit. But of the jobs he identified as such, most of them were actually valuable (receptionist, lawyers, programmers doing maintenance work). He just didn't understand why other people valued them. And, he was an activist deploying flowery rhetoric to make an argument for far-left politics, which is why nearly all the jobs he identified were in the private sector. Ironically, the most obviously bullshit job revealed by his work was his own, but for some mysterious reason academic activists were not identified as people with bullshit jobs.
Lots of people noticed this. Some even did studies on it! They found that the number of people who said in surveys their jobs were useless was only 20%, and of those 20% a lot of them had jobs that were objectively not useless. Instead it was cleaners, janitors, garbage collectors and similar who tended to feel their jobs were useless. Clearly "work is useless" is simply a proxy for "I feel like a loser" and not an objective evaluation of whether the work actually provides value to others.
People are pretty rational. When you find a lot of people doing something that looks irrational and there isn't a clear link to ideology or coercion, then it probably makes sense given information you don't have.
> People are pretty rational. When you find a lot of people doing something that looks irrational and there isn't a clear link to ideology or coercion, then it probably makes sense given information you don't have.
It can be in people's/companies' rational self-interest to act in a way that is detrimental to society as a whole.
We can recognize harmful behaviour and legislate such that it's no longer profitable, but it can take a while to get to that point if there's a lack of awareness or powerful interests pushing against it.
It's extremely rare to find people who aren't criminals yet engaged in behavior that's genuinely detrimental to everyone else. The world isn't new and the obviously unacceptable behaviors have all been forbidden for thousands of years.
That's why when people talk about stuff that's detrimental to "society", they are usually trying to claim that their personal preferences are more universal than they actually are. It's reminiscent of Thatcher's observation that there's no such thing as society in the sense the left use the word. There are families and coworkers and employers and so on, but there's not some monolithic unit called society that can be anthropomorphised and given preferences.
Clearly, advertising is nowhere near detrimental to society, it's the opposite: a society without ads would be a planned communist dystopia well beyond anything seen even in the USSR (which had advertising!). Many, many people benefit from advertising, which is why it's such a big industry.
People who don't believe this is true are typically in the "don't have information others do" bucket. But a few are just trying to dress up animalistic anti-capitalism in more respectable sounding clothes.
> It's extremely rare to find people who aren't criminals yet engaged in behavior that's genuinely detrimental to everyone else.
This is such a wild thing to say. I thought it was evident that people can be bastards and do terrible things entirely inside the law, yet here we are.
> The world isn't new and the obviously unacceptable behaviors have all been forbidden for thousands of years.
I don't think this checks out at all. Slavery was only outlawed in the US ~160 years ago, and marital rape only ~40 years ago.
Some detrimental behaviors have significant money/power behind them, some detrimental behaviors are new - only enabled (or only enabled at scale) by modern advancements, and some otherwise-obviously-detrimental behaviors intentionally obfuscate their harms.
> That's why when people talk about stuff that's detrimental to "society", they are usually trying to claim that their personal preferences are more universal than they actually are.
I'd argue that pretty much regardless of what someone's belief is of which actions are detrimental, it includes at least some actions that are "rationally" in the acting person's/company's self-interest - i.e. "selfish" actions.
Since we're not oracles, it's true that any statement we make on what we believe to be true about the world is ultimately prone to human error/bias (and disagreement over terms/frameworks/etc.) but I don't think that necessarily makes it just a statement of personal preference. Disliking the taste of steak is different from arguing steak production to be a net-negative.
> Clearly, advertising is nowhere near detrimental to society, it's the opposite
If Pepsi doubles their marketing budget to push flyers through every door and take some market share, then Coke does the same to reclaim that market share, it's unclear to me what has really been gained for all that resource wastage.
Largely it seems to just be pouring resources into a zero-sum game. There are incidental secondary effects (maybe now more people drink sugary drinks, and people have spent more time reading about/trying out sugary drinks instead of something else) but it seems fairly questionable as to whether those are even beneficial in a lot of cases, and they're not in proportion to the resources spent either way.
I believe at least that marketing spend would optimally be a tiny fraction of what it is now, with resources directed towards more productive forms of competition (improving the product) rather than just repeatedly persuading the potential customer base with increasingly manipulative/invasive techniques.
> Many, many people benefit from advertising, which is why it's such a big industry.
I feel this is again conflating being profitable or in the rational self-interest of a company with being beneficial. Sneaking a JS crypto miner in the background of your website can be profitable, for instance.
You are perfectly describing another extremely common advertising tactic: fear of missing out (FOMO). The reality is that 3/4 of these are things you did not actually need or want, which is exactly why advertising exists. There are many more products and services available for purchase than any of us can afford, and all of them are actively trying to convince you that _theirs_ should be the one you agree to part with your money for.
Think of it this way: If you ACTUALLY wanted to go to that concert, you would have looked up the tour dates for the band six months ago. If you ACTUALLY needed the cheap item on sale, you would have already been looking for it at the time. If the food at that restaurant was ACTUALLY that good, you would have not forgotten about it.
There are probably hundreds of tools for "easily finding a time for a meeting" that you can buy online, so if you are looking solely at advertising to make your decision, you are likely paying more because the one you picked has an advertising budget that must be recouped. (I personally would have just asked my friends and colleagues what they use.)
These examples are firmly classified as "impulse purchases" which can be fine if your finances are in good enough shape that you have disposable income. Pretty common in the tech industry I guess, but vanishingly rare everywhere else in the world.
Most middle class households in the US pretend they have lots of disposable income, but they are setting themselves up for working their entire lives by saving/investing nothing in their most productive years. These are VICTIMS of advertising because they are constantly told by television, radio, and social media that they need to spend their money on all these wonderful advertised products that will solve all their problems or else they are not _really_ living life. Which is of course total horseshit.
> If you ACTUALLY wanted to go to that concert, you would have looked up the tour dates for the band six months ago
I am lazy, am not a super-fan and don't follow any bands, but if someone who I kind of enjoy is playing in town, I appreciate hearing about it.
> There are probably hundreds of tools for "easily finding a time for a meeting" that you can buy online
Here's the rub: there was a time where I was not aware of the fact that this class of tools existed! I learned about it through an ad.
The assumption that I see repeatedly is that we think that we know what we want. If we really strongly desire something, that might be more true. However, there are times where we are not even aware that we *can* want something. I did not know I can want a meeting scheduling assistant because I did not know that such software even existed. I did not know that I *can* want to attend a concert because I did not know the band was playing in town. Advertising enabled me to want something.
It's humbling to realize how much I don't know. I appreciate all the ways that the world let's me know about things, even if it comes from a marketing department.
> In richer societies you can afford to be alone.
I have a feeling that this is true, but my conclusion is the opposite.
If you are not the most agreeable person, but have money, you can afford to be alone - having money eases a lot of problems. On the other hand, if you are not the most agreeable person, but lack money, because you have to come to terms with other people, drama starts.
So, I would rather see the evidence on the side that a lot of social conflicts are rather a side effect of "lack of money" - people who are better left alone (and would love to) cannot afford to do this, and thus drama starts.
> Tell me, fellow techy, working on serving ads. Who exactly would be disappointed if you failed in your duties today. Would anyone in your community be upset that they didn't get as many advertisements
Just to be clear: my work is different.
But if such a person doesn't do their duties, the implications are of course not immediate, but over some time this leads to a degradation of the stock of the respective company. So, a lot of people who invested (perhaps indirectly) into this company (e.g. for their pension scheme) would care.
> You work for an anonymous corporation, that does some nonsense you can't even hope to understand, in exchange for currency, to support the basics of your existence.
Dwarf Fortress lever welfare already exists IRL.
On the other hand, I get to move around freely and I make enough money to live just about anywhere, and some places like a king?
Yeah, but you're alone. I think this is worse if you're rich-rich; if you move to a house you can afford you'll live with a different demographic, your employees / staff will no longer treat you like an equal, you and your possibly-family have a target on your back if you're known, and if you go to places for the rich - gyms, golf clubs, etc - you run into a completely different demographic, too.
But on the other hand you'll be able to afford experiences few people can.
I mean its definitely a factor. There are many factors. I think another is if you are even part of the same culture as your neighbor.
> loneliness is a perceptual phenomenon that represents a paradoxical component; it is not mitigated through proximity to others
It might be better described as alienation. Then we can fit it into Hannah Arendt's theory of fascism being caused by alienation.
In the modern world, that alienation is accelerated by social media and cost of living for those without assets, who pay the cost of inflation without benefiting from asset price inflation.
Everything is more hostile, more sectarian, and you also can't even afford anything, and also you are a bad person because you are a creepy 45 year old white man with a small dick, and you better stop looking at me like that.
Is it any surprise?
I do wonder if this is really the same type of alienation that Arendt refers to.
I can understand how if you are afraid the neighbor is going to be an informant, you stop interacting. Public discourse breaks down and ideology takes hold.
This seems quite different to me than the type of alienation we are talking about in 2025 from online interactions. I am not sure alienation is really the right word in terms of isolation from a group. If anything the problems from social media are from too much interaction and too much political discourse.
I would say that is completely opposite to what Arendt was talking about.
I think it is the way "boredom" has quite a different meaning today than in 1990. While you can still be bored in 2025, I don't feel boredom the same way as in 1990 when none of my friends answered the phone and there was nothing on tv. 2025 boredom is more the lack of hyper stimulation and hyper novelty as opposed to the 1990 version of going through your "junk drawer" to find something again novel because you can't think of anything else to do. I can't even remember the last time I had junk drawer to even go through.
Who can afford space for a junk drawer in 2025? If junk wants to be my roommate, it better pay the rent.
I'm joking and completely agree with your point about lack of hyper stimulation, but I'm also a bit serious. About ten years ago I started getting rid of things that would entertain me once or twice a year mostly because of the real state they use. Now that I quit all social media I remember why I used to keep all that stuff around.
To me, alienation is philosopher's toy and they like to put what they don't like behind that word. It's been mostly used by Marxist philosophers rediscovering the "young Marx" to deal with the fact that the workers actually didn't seem that interested in a socialist revolution anymore (they have false consciousness !)
I am not saying this to invalidate what you are saying but would you care to explain how you think the problem described by parent (richer societies allow for more alone time thus loneliness) is better described by Arendt's concept of alienation ?
> In the modern world [...] Is it any surprise?
To me you are just describing a poverty and ideological tribalism but that still doesn't tell me what Arendt can do for us here
Bearded German philosopher was right once again.
Famously bearded philosopher Hannah Arendt? There's an Arendt/aren't joke in there somewhere.
It's not just loneliness, it's that by being isolated you can make sweeping generalizations about other people, and fall for the hatefull narative.
When you actually and honestly communicate with people different than you, and are able yo understand them, you stop feeling that simplistic hate for them.
>When you actually and honestly communicate with people different than you, and are able yo understand them, you stop feeling that simplistic hate for them.
I find it to be exactly the opposite. It's much easier to believe someone is inherently good but just a bit misguided if you don't have to communicate with them and aren't personally affected by their "misguided" behavior.
This goes for other stuff as well, like if you're "ungrounded" by not actually observing/communicating with the thing you're judging, you can kind of just make up the perfect villain in your head and hate that
I guess same thing would go for extreme fears, like, you are so scared of something that you get even more scared of it because you know it's the scariest thing in the world, until you actually meet the thing you're scared of
From the research I have heard and seen on the subject, when people communicate with people different than themselves it can both help and hurt trust. The primary factor that I took from the research is that it depend on ethical values. If the two people are different but share ethical values, especially symbolic ones, then relationships tend to improve. If however people have different ethical values, then the results of such meeting tend to create more hostility and distrust. People can generally accept that people have different ethical values only if they don't need to actually see it.
Argument is a great way of forming relationships. The problem in modern times is that one person, typically the person such as yourself - endlessly confident in their flawless knowledge and determined to impose it on everybody, becomes belligerent when somebody doesn't simply graciously accept their impeccably perfect argument. That doesn't typically lead to good outcomes.
More generally, I think people have forgotten that two people - no less intelligent than the other - can see the exact same thing, evidence, or whatever else, and simply come to different conclusions.
Yes but i see argument as not about accepting that people come to different conclusions but actively trying to seek mutual understanding. There is a wrestling, a struggle, a fight to understanding, to communicating, that so many of us simply just run away from, and i believe it gets reinforced with cultural norms of avoidance and desire for "peace" instead of connection and deeper integration.
Applicable in corporate world too: https://youtu.be/0MD4Ymjyc2I?t=410 (Yves Morieux; Two TVs)
Brilliant. I love that snippet and will try to watch the full video later. I'm thinking to frame my work for the corporate environment so i appreciate this. Thank you!
> if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected
One discovery I've made is that they really don't. Nothing terrible happens if you don't correct people.
You can really just accept that people have some flaws and appreciate their positive sides!
Agreed. I just let people talk and have for many years now, no matter how well I know the person. Someone might start talking about chem trails or maybe another conspiracy and I always entertain them for the most part. Here and there I might do a "have you thought about it this way, or that?", but other than that, there isn't much reason to argue/debate unless it's at work or something that actually matters in the grand scheme of things.
This is (one of) the reasons I prefer places where you can walk, bike, or take public transit to get around. It’s one of the only times of day I’ll see and maybe talk to people very different from myself. Though this is also fading as people are on their phones and have ear buds in.
I joined a gym for a few months last year partly because I thought it would be a great way to meet some people. BIG misread on my part. It turns out most public gyms around here have a strong "leave me the hell alone vibe." Essentially zero eye-contact. Pretty much everyone had earbuds in and I didn't bother them. I said "hello" to those without earbuds once in a while but only got a silent death glare in response. So I stopped doing that.
:-\ that's a shame.
I mean, I have earbuds. And sometimes I use them on the commute to work to practice Dutch (or did, before I worked remote). But there's definite downsides to the increased convenience of filling "empty" time.
I was thinking about this today, a lovely morning run on the beach with the Sun rising in a blue sky. Should have been a wonderful shared experience but everyone I met had earbuds in and the most interaction I obtained was a nod.
Why go to the shore with the sounds of the waves lapping gently on the shingle but then block it out with earpods? It irritated me.
Even the most beautiful setting can become mundane if you see it every day, but I generally agree.
Here's an interesting thing to ponder - how would we be different if not for lockdowns making work from home somewhat normal?
The overnight disappearance of those loose connections you get in the workplace had a huge impact on my mental health. Life-altering. 5 years later, I split my time between remote tech consulting from an office I rent (to make sure I don't sit home all day) and a union-protected, but completely antiquated job from a career I left behind that I returned to mostly to be with people.
By 2025, things would have probably been the same both for society and me (lockdowns coincided with me turning 30), but the abrupt change was horrible.
Societies reaction to Covid destroyed so much community it isn’t even funny.
You have to correct people with things you believe. But the biggest problem in life is loneliness.
Not correcting people is the first step towards avoiding loneliness.
Humans are moored to their social web: having to exist amongst others continually pulls you towards the average feelings/views/activities of the people you are connected to. Change is slow.
When humans become unmoored from this web through loneliness/isolation/alienation, they can freewheel and drift further from that average. This can be liberating! But if you don't re-connect, either with your previous web or a new one, there's nothing stopping you falling off the deep end; nothing to give you a little correction that keeps you "normal". Political extremism of various flavors, or identity crises founded in over-rumination, are what we see - but also innovation and removal of constraints. Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies relates. The social isolation moonshot is to break from convention and be a hero auteur, but the risk of failure is very high. Nullum magnum dementiae sine mixtura ingenium fuit.
Who would’ve thought that hating entire groups of humans and blaming them for every imaginary problem would lead to isolation and loneliness!
In case it isn’t obvious, I’m being sarcastic and agreeing with you.
I think this is a consequence of what the posted site explains in the last text block - social trust is gone.
Racism and tribalism were still present when we socialized more as a society. We still did all of the bad things. It’s just that we also socialized and formed kinships and families and institutions. We were connected in a social web.
Now we’re heavily fragmented.
I wonder how much of this is due to social media sites and how the choice to interact that way (where the medium is geared to show off shallow facets of our achievements or amplify polarized opinions) is robbing us from traditional ways of spending time together.
> is robbing us from traditional ways of spending time together.
The assumption that social-media applications are really social is robbing us of traditional ways of maintaining actual society.
True. It's so hard nowadays to go out with a friend to grab a beer or a coffee. They don't feel the urge because they satisfy social interactions online, and they think it's enough. Well, it's undoubtedly simpler that way, but it's fake.
I, personally, hate chatting through instant messengers. I lost many connections because people started moving online more and more, and I just couldn't handle that anymore. For example, I don't like interrupting what I'm doing, and people usually expect to get a response within minutes. Plus, when I don't respond immediately, I simply forget and remind myself a month later. I could be the problem too, but the way we do communication today doesn't help either.
There used to be social networks. You'd tell the computer who you knew in real life and you could talk to them through the computer.
Then it was social media. People could publish things and their friends would see what they did in a single feed. Like TV or radio media, it pushes info to you, about your friends.
Lastly it was just media. It was the same feed pushing stuff to you, but it isn't your friends any more. It's unknown micro-celebrities, ads, whatever keeps audiences hooked and makes profit for the company. Tiktok exemplifies this but they've all done it now.
The next step will be removing humans from the loop entirely, a feed of personalized AI generated slop engineered to keep you staring at it.
YouTube and Facebook are almost turning into this organically. YouTube seems to be trying to fight it. Zuck seems to just not care anymore, generally. Eventually one will fully embrace it.
Are there even any social networks anymore? Oddly enough as weird and cringe as it is I think LinkedIn kind of qualifies. It’s business but that’s a form of social interaction that involves real people doing stuff.
I think most social interaction has moved onto messengers, Discord, Slack, etc.
> Are there even any social networks anymore?
Mastodon?
its the most fuzzy definition ever. the literal sense of social media would mean "mediums of socialising" like instant messengers or forums, but it actually covers pretty much any website or app with a messaging feature. it basically just means "the internet" to idiots
This predates social media. Bowling Alone was first written back in '95.
Isolating tech goes earlier than that.
I know all my neighbours in my block who walk, cycle, or take the bus. Repeated interactions. The ones who take the elevator to the basement car park are the ones I never cross paths with.
There's an Outer Limits episode about this: https://breezewiki.com/theouterlimits/wiki/The_Haven
Season 5, Episode 15 (1999)
That's what I was thinking, if social media was not there, would we be more social? Or is it really the fact that our necessities can be covered without being social the real "problem".
I expect the latter. Social media isn't social in any meaningful sense. It is more like an interactive diary or interactive television. Any human involvement behind the scenes is merely an implementation detail — and with the way AI is going, an implementation detail that may not even remain for much longer. Social media may reduce overall social interaction, but only in the same way that reading books reduced social interaction. There is only so much time in the day; but that doesn't make all uses of time equivalent.
I think your ordering is wrong, we don't need to spend time together anymore so we fall back to social media. I wonder how things would look like if we had social media on top of a more social world.
id like to point out that youre on social media right now.
>I am not one for "respecting others' opinions" at all, make no mistakes, if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected.
This seems wildly incompatible with the desire to not have social isolation.
I agree with the rest of your sentiment, but that is a really anti-social idea.
Also, what is "correct" today was not correct 50 years ago or might not be correct 50 years from now (just to pick some numbers, the time periods obviously vary). And so much of this is a product of when and where we were born and what we were taught growing up.
> social isolation is the single great social ill
You might find this short 60-second video of interest.
https://youtube.com/shorts/XVFGEDs95MI?si=NEvRg-m2KymblwF0
> if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected.
This was something I believed when I was 21, and then was corrected by time. There are very few instances where anyone needs to be corrected in a social setting. Learning to move on without demanding they accept your argument is hugely important.
Right now the solution that makes the most sense to me is intentional communities. If anyone reading this has experience living in one, I'd love to chat. Email is in profile.
> if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected.
Why is that? I may feel that somebody is wrong, and that may be correct, but it could also be incorrect. A priori, they are not less correct than you are. Then why do you need to go to them and tell them that what they think is wrong and what you think is right?
I'm glad that people don't do that all the time. I'm sure I meet lots of people every day that think I'm wrong on something. Sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly. If every time they would feel that I "need to be corrected", that would be terrible.
There are things that are true
Sure. But there is no objective arbitter of truth.
In a similar vein, if I'm standing at a train station discussing some topic with a friend on which we have different opinions w.r.t facts, I would not feel comfortable if a stranger would come up, insert themselves into our conversation and start unasked to "correct" one of us (or both). Occasionally and if it's done very politely, maybe. But if that happened every time I'd be seriously annoyed. Correct or not.
All three of those links are claiming right wing people are mentally ill.
Academics have all kinds of indirect theories for why people outside of academia don't agree with their politics. Ironically given the subject of the website, one thing they almost never do is just go outside of academia, sit down with people who disagree with them and talk to them as equals. They spam bot-filled websites like Mechanical Turk with surveys trying to prove things about the imaginary people in their own minds, and then publish "findings", but they don't actually talk to people.
The most obvious and logical explanation for why right wing people exist is that they disagree with left wing politics, believing them to lead to bad outcomes. Papers like those three are a dime a dozen, but one thing you'll never find is studies that just directly ask people disagree with common academic beliefs. Instead it's taken as axiomatic that leftism is moral and correct, so anyone who disagrees must have some other deeper psychological reason to disagree (loneliness, reading the wrong websites, not getting enough sex, whatever). Lots of non-replicable studies get produced, grants are awarded, and academics give lots of interviews to the NYT about their search for One Weird Trick to convert people to their worldview that doesn't involve any actual policy changes.
The professors doing such studies should look in the mirror. If they're saying social isolation and informational monoculture leads to extremism, then it's hard to find somewhere more isolated and monocultural than universities. But of course they lack sufficient insight to consider that.
I just saw a class of kids on a train and they were interacting and yelling just like we did 30 years ago. I think there's hope, they're not all zombies staring at a phone yet
There’s still product-market fit frontiers waiting to be found out there! (/s)
It’s depressing how whenever I see people doing people stuff without a screen in their face I both smile internally and reflexively wonder how we could better infiltrate their demographic.
We have become the disease at this point, and now we work diligently to replace humans from any economic activity except consumption, so that the value extraction cycle can be optimized even as it collapses upon itself in a singularity of greed.
Soon, humans, the last obstacle standing between the uninterrupted flow of energy and resources into the event horizon of capital, will be eliminated from the process altogether with the removal of wages and eventually money itself through the wonders of automation.
Only then will the crystalline purity of technocapitalism truly shine: power as the new capital.
The power to convert resources and energy directly into the will and whim of the capital class, harnessing recursive automation in a macroscopic grey-goo scenario that sidesteps both workers and customers. An ever-tightening loop of resource concentration, building from a throbbing rhythm into a deafening turbine whine of conspicuous consumption. A hollow promise of “Progress” that leaves the 99 percent outside the gilded walls, merely insects at the pointy end of excavators.
I’m going to take tomorrow off and hug my grandchildren.
I know it's supposed to be fancy and cool looking but this sort of website design where you have to scroll and then the whole screen animates really bothers me. It actually gives me a headache to try and follow it versus normal scrolling behaviour and text.
As soon as I start scrolling down and I can't scroll normally and images and text start flying around I feel a disturbing feeling in my head and lose concentration and almost get brain-fog from the distracting content moving around.
Please provide more accessible versions of websites if you're going to override the default behavior. I couldn't make it 10 seconds before having to close the tab.
I usually agree with this, but I make an exception for Pudding because they consistently do this and it’s kind of their brand to have really immersive JS art/media. But I have the benefit of having read and enjoyed their stuff before.
It’s probably a false distinction, but it feels different to a SaaS product offering page, or product launch, where I need to get information, compared to someone using JS to create art.
This whole article could be summarised in about 300 words, but I would have had very little emotional or conceptual enjoyment of it.
Not quite as immersive as their deep dive into the Visual History of Rickrolling [0] but still a neat and interesting project.
[0] https://pudding.cool/2021/07/rickrolling/
God damnit, I don't know what I expected.
Would be nice if we could disable JavaScript and just get access to the text.
I also dislike this style, plus it lags on my computer. I scrolled all the way down but all I got was that it is a story of how it's not so bad to talk to strangers.
Would be nice if you would stop expecting the whole web to have stopped developing at your preferred point in time.
I don't have anything nice to answer to this ;-).
I don't know if I'm missing the mark here, but:
you can in fact disable JavaScript in your browser. In Firefox, go to `about:config` and set `javascript.enabled` to false.
Warning: lots of sites will break.
This site is nonfunctional without JS.
I think you are missing my point, yeah :-). It would be nice to be able to access the content of this very website we are talking about right here without JavaScript.
I'll promote prefers-reduced-motion here, which I believe is the standards compliant way of signaling you want this behavior. Unfortunately, I haven't noticed many sites supporting it.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...
It's art. They did it because they wanted it to be seen exactly this way. Accessibility was not the goal.
That's cool, but not all art is good. A lot of it sucks, regardless of the technical acumen involved in its production. This is one of those cases.
This is exactly the kind of negativity that only appears on the internet and that this study sort of shined a light on. Would you really tell this person to their face that their art sucks just because it isn't good for you?
Sometimes this is indeed merely "fancy" and vacuous, but other times it is a meaningful and more engaging way to present the content. I feel like this is an example of the latter.
Even if you're not a fan and would have done it differently, it seems a bit hard to understand what could be so bothersome that you have to close it in 10s...
Well, it literally makes me feel almost nauseous, i.e. I felt physically unwell from the images and text moving around the screen.
Note: this doesnt happen from a regular video, or normal scrolling text behaviour. Just sites like this that combine overriding the scroll bar with moving text and images.
I often like the use of advanced media. The NYT and Washington Post have done some amazing advanced media that fully exploits the richness possible with the web.
Not so sure about this one, though. Like others, I was more annoyed with the constant scrolling to get tiny niblets of information and didn't even make it through. It makes it feel like work and the mechanisms completely overwhelms the message.
Also weird that it's hogging CPU even when you're sitting on a completely static portion of the page.
I had NO IDEA that it scrolled until reading this comment. I was wondering wtf the page was about.
Yeah, that website was horrid. I don’t know why someone would opt for a scrolljacking-based animation, let alone why they’d intersperse text boxes zooming around.
It would be nice if more of these projects offered a "static" mode
This one is especially worse because it's an incoherent mess that doesn't make any sense, not trying to show you anything relevant to the content.
it's even worse on mobile for me: any time there's a full screen animation, the site lags to a crawl – as in, 500ms+ lag spikes and aingle-digit FPS
Maybe I'm using my phone wrong, but the mobile experience was barbaric and stopped reading
Yes I definitely was interested but the form-over-function of this presentation just got me to drop out and not finish reading. I ended up passing the link to a LLM and asking "summarize this for me"...
Really great design.
This is the unicorn of fancy websites because for once, it actually makes sense to override browser's standard scrolling behavior. The 30-minute timeline on the right provides an obvious context for what you're navigating with the scroll actions, and you wouldn't be able to do that with a regular scrollbar.
Usually scrolling overrides happen because the designers' mindset was that the site should be a sequence of beautiful slides. They might prototype it as a Keynote presentation that is approved by management. And then some poor web developer gets tasked with building a site that feels like the Keynote slide show that everyone loved, and the only way to do that is to turn scrolling into an annoying "next slide" action.
Took me a really long time to realize that I should scroll. Because why would I? There is absolutely no indication that there is anything to scroll to.
I clicked on the two avatars but that didn't get me very far and the only thing left to click was "by alvin chang" but that was about as fruitful as I imagined it would be.
So I assumed it was a podcast, re-checking that I had audio on etc. But nope, so I checked another browser. Same there... Then I read HN comments, ah ... Great design? ...
Same here — once you get the scrolling part it's pretty great, but like you I was stuck at the top for a while. A downwards-pointing arrow on the hero would help a lot here.
If you use a sane browser, the page will have a scrollbar indicator on the right?
Firefox in Windows has the tiniest little scrollbar indicator in the top right that honestly blends in very well with the background. I didn't realize I needed to scroll until I came to the comments. I clicked around... got some interaction... but basically left the first time being very confused.
I have (Firefox on macOS), still easy to miss.
I have Firefox on macOS as well, but I don't see a scroll bar until I start scrolling. Could be because I'm using an external trackpad, and not a mouse.
On chrome the scroll bar is very visible.
I don't think you can blame Chrome for this... this is just bad design by Firefox.
I was going to say that somehow I knew I had to scroll the first time I entered. But I went back after reading your comment and I have no idea how did I find out the first time, there is no indication that there is content bellow.
Same for me. It was immediately obvious I should scroll, but I don't know why.
I was viewing on desktop and the blank space all around made it immediately feel like an article that required a scroll to view the content below the fold.
Seeing the timestamps change as I scrolled and seeing a progress "bar" update within the speech balloons during the dialogs made it more obvious I just had to scroll to see the content change.
I do think the progress bar color is low contrast enough that some might not see it and not realize they have to scroll to cause the dialog to update, though.
> Took me a really long time to realize that I should scroll. Because why would I? There is absolutely no indication that there is anything to scroll to.
> I clicked on the two avatars but that didn't get me very far and the only thing left to click was "by alvin chang" but that was about as fruitful as I imagined it would be.
Thank god, I wasn’t the only one, just posted a similar comment here.
I don't mind designers overriding when they take meticulous care to craft a better tailored experience. But once I scrolled past the initial content I found the site a UI disaster. Not long after it said "Pick a person to explore", I wanted to tap a particular box to read one of their conversations, and couldn't figure out how to bring any dialog up. I wound up scrolling further down afterward to see if that was how to trigger some dialog for my selection, and all the boxes started moving around at seemingly random, performance tanked and the whole thing got stuttery. I couldn't scroll back to where I was or find that box again that I was interested in. I left in frustration. Design fail, as far as this user's encounter.
I feel the same. I don't particularly mind if a developer overrides the scrollbar, and I would actually argue that in this case it was a good way to present the story and overall I liked it, but you need to do it right. If the sites becomes all clunky, it stutters, and you get text popping up a while after you scrolled, then it's better to focus on the performance and leave aside the animations.
I'm with you and I actually love these "special scrolling" websites. They are much closer to a truly work of art exactly because of the different design.
To the haters: why do we have churches or buildings with marble statues in the walls or column instead of a standard stone wall, which was designed to do the job in a standard way?
Niches (recesses in walls for statues) and columns in church buildings are actually central features that serve the primary purpose of the building.
Niches provide spaces for statues for remembering the dead, or prayers and veneration (for Catholics), enhancing the link between the spiritual and corporeal realms. Arguably they're also used to encourage payments from patrons for a church building's upkeep or construction.
Columns allow spaces within a building to be connected, ensuring the body of the church (the people) can worship and receive teaching together. They can also reduce material cost of construction.
Yes, for historic church buildings decoration was applied, ornate capitals in the pillars and such; bright, garish paint on the statues and everything -- and expression of the vitality of the building and of worship to God.
I think perhaps your analogy needs buttressing (heh!) to make it clear? All I got really was 'I like the scrolling'.
Maybe a revolving door is a good scrollbar analogue - it's central to access to a space (website), some people hate them, but used properly they enhance access (they're really good for limiting heat exchange with the outside when compared with regular doors!).
All these things you mention are corollary to the construction of the building per-se, but are central to the "spirit" of the building. The same applies with this kind of websites and scrolling. The website has a goal in itself, uses a more creative scrolling feature as both a way to better convey the information and a work of art to be more attractive to the eye.
My parallel was that the typical HNer just ignores this and think "don't touch my browser standard scrolling behavior", that would be akin to someone just wanting a plain wall to keep the roof up, ignoring everything else: "I pray there anyway, I don't need that statue to remember it".
It's interesting but I hated this design * 1000. I would prefer a white page with purely black text than this horrible override of the scrolling behavior and images and text flying around, this sort of design makes me feel literally nauseous and I had to click away not even 5% through this page.
It's so much harder to concentrate on content like this, it's distracting, confusing, gives me brain fog etc.
I found it only slightly worse than not overriding the standard scrolling behaviour. Any time a site remains usable despite this sort of UX intervention we can consider that a win.
But here the timeline gives the scroll a clear purpose
That's exactly what they said, right at the beginning of their comment.
One of the problems with their "better / worse" statistics: Bad interactions tend to outweigh good interactions. I think the rule of thumb is that 4:1 good/bad ratio in a relationship is "breakeven" where the relationship will stay neutral; higher than that and things get better, lower than that and things go south.
So if you could talk to a stranger, and there's only a 20% chance you'll feel worse, a lot of people would still not consider it worth the risk.
Absolutely true.
Another angle that goes unmentioned: "the more you know someone, the less you like them."
Most strangers in 30 minutes won't show off their ugly side. It takes a lot longer for those rough edges to come out, and for the really bad parts to surface in human relationships.
For some people, we can look past that. For most others, our interactions would not be so positive.
> "the more you know someone, the less you like them."
That is completely the opposite of my experience. Even the handful of people who, after I got to know them, turned out to be unprincipled or toxic, I actually liked them as people and were kind of sad that they were the way they were. Their negative qualities were a mar on the their individual beauty.
There are certainly people in whom, after a relatively brief interaction, I didn't manage to see anything I liked. But I can't think of a single person whom, after seeing something to like, thereafter didn't see anything to like. Their ugly side may have made me want to avoid interacting with them as a whole, but it never completely eclipsed their good side.
For me, nearly all negative interactions come from not being able to get past various masks to see the interesting part of them or vice versa.
> Their ugly side may have made me want to avoid interacting with them as a whole
For me, that means "dislike" or "not like". When I see a part of them is not good for me, I can say I don't like that part. When that part underlies the rest of them, then I wouldn't like them very much and I'd want to keep my distance. It's human nature. Not a judgement but a preference.
You may be speaking instead about "love" which I would agree more with as a child of God. Love the person I dislike as a fellow person, because of a true beauty in them that may not be because of them[1]. I think that can also work without religion in select cases: my mom knows my sister and she doesn't like my sister, but my mom still loves her all the same.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infused_righteousness
There's also the magnitude of a negative interaction as well to consider.
If I have 99 great interactions with someone, but one REALLY bad interaction (they insult me deeply, or say something irredeemable), that can also sour the whole relationship.
It would be interesting to research commonalities amongst bad interactions -- are there patterns that emerge from certain personality types, politics, etc? What about a few "sour" people that will take any interaction and make it bad regardless of matchup -- if we removed them from the interaction pool, do the stats suddenly adjust quickly?
In my mind this would have big implications for social media sites -- not that all bad interactions need to be quelled, but if you are trying to keep conversations civil, attempt to implement X strategy or Y strategy.
Yes, we tend to remember negative experiences better than the good ones. Also, we all are so low on good emotions, we don't want to risk losing them to random strangers.
This hits deep.
Makes me think the real challenge isn't just encouraging people to talk to strangers, but designing situations where the expected value of those conversations skews heavily positive
I do most of my stranger-talking at niche events like board games down at the maker space or at cons. This definitely skews the results.
I think it depends on what you’re used to. If you’re in an abusive relationship or socially isolated, a single positive social interaction can feel like a breakthrough.
I would argue that a negative social interaction would feel exponentially more harmful at a time like you describe, in which you're already feeling generally unsafe or insecure. My fear of others is always so much worse when I am hurting for some positive feedback from the world.
This is the third time this is posted and the first time this makes it to the front page. I’m glad it finally got some attention!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44443348
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44269179
I was surprised I hadn't seen it on HN and saw it had so few upvotes, so figured I'd try again. Sometimes you just need some luck.
“If at first you don’t succeed, dust yourself off and try again”-Aliyah
Total banger!
There is a huge selection bias there. People who are very disagreeable and hard to talk to tend to not participate in such a thing. Of course the average participant was open to talk to somebody and connect.
Fair, but it's still interesting that people underestimate how much they will enjoy the conversation, even if it's with a random person on a bus who did not volunteer for an experiment.
The participants in the train study were essentially given a "job" to talk to strangers, which completely changes the mental framing.
People generally try to follow through on a job they promised to do. They'll try to make the best of it so they feel like they made a good decision accepting the job.
If the conversations go badly, they can easily rationalize it away with "I didn't want to talk to them anyway, but I didn't have a choice".
Many shy and socially anxious people do basically fine in public-facing jobs because of this phenomenon.
In my family we usually travel to many parts of the world, and we have been compiling a series of anecdotes, when we take a taxi or an Uber, we ask the taxi driver different aspects of the city then always asking him some anecdote, funny or strange, that he has had in his life as a taxi driver.
And we have collected a large number of funny stories that we constantly bring up when we are at a party.
For example, the story of the Argentine taxi driver who, when he received some Danish tourists, they realized that they had forgotten a suitcase at the airport, but since they had an Apple tracker, they started looking for the suitcase with the help of the police and it turned out that the suitcase was in the trunk of a car belonging to another police officer, unbelievable right?
Or the story of the London taxi driver who, being tired after a long shift, picked up an old lady for the last trip and the old woman lay in the back seat and fell completely asleep, when the taxi driver turned to his rearview mirror and no longer saw anyone behind he thought: "What am I doing ? I'm driving alone, I am too tired." so he decided to go home. When he got home the old lady woke up and thought that the taxi driver was kidnapping her, and called the police.
Incredible stories and anecdotes are collected when you start talking to strangers and they feel confident expressing their ideas.
It's part of living, talking to strangers is very satisfying.
Between 18 and 24 months old, we begin to develop the 'ability' to feel embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, etc. This is self-consciousness, a part of self-awareness. Embarrassment, shame, etc have important functions. They signal a violation of social norms. This helps create and reinforce the interpersonal boundaries and rules that govern how we deal with people in society.
When you perceive others are observing you, you imagine what their impressions of you will be. If it's a stranger, a lot of people jump to a negative conclusion. Part of this is a mirror of how we see other people. Part of it is a human heuristic to fear the unknown, which keeps us alive in the jungle. And part of it is you making a snap judgement about what kind of person someone is based on how they look or what environment you're in.
So when you're afraid that talking to a stranger will be a negative experience, really you're just trying to avoid getting eaten in the jungle by someone you fear. But we aren't in a jungle - we're in a society, with rules, laws, and norms. There is no threat to a conversation. And, as the study shows, your fears are usually unfounded. So go ahead and strike up a conversation with a stranger - it's safe.
I know this is 100% not the point of this post, but I really dug the little ASCII animations of the post. I'd love to know how they did that.
Indeed, also the ASCII avatars look really good.
I always liked the idea and practice of what they called "rejection therapy" at the time.
Probably builds high-bandwidth, interpersonal muscle like nothing else?
I love this study and the presentation - first time I’ve not hated the hijacking of scrolling on a website.
But I shudder at the thought of the new AI product that this data will inspire or train.
It’s gotten to the point that I see any significant collection of data about humans as a low-key threat to humanity.
Just an observation, not a mean critique about the project or even the conclusions.
There's 180 participants.
There's 26 people marked at "very liberal", which is 14% of the sample.
There's 39 people marked at "very conservative", which is 21% of the sample.
-----
Then we have 31 people marked as liberal, which is 17% of the sample.
And we have 63 people marked as conservative, which is 35% of the sample.
That already I would say is kind of an issue: more than a third of the sample are conservative people and 17% are their liberal 'counter part' or 'equivalent' (sorry for my wording, I'm not native speaker).
---
If we do a little additions we therefore have:
39+63 = 102, which means that 56% of the sample is conservative
31+26= 57, which means that 31% of the sample is liberal
The rest of the sample are centrists or "neutrals" (whatever this means)
---
I am NOT saying that the study is invalid I am not saying that it's poorly done
However, I think it's fair to say that the sample is skewed towards people with conservative views, by a HUGE amount, not just "a little bit".
---
Aside from this: amazing UI design, I'm jealous and admirative of the results ^^
>There's 26 people marked at "very liberal", which is 14% of the sample.
> There's 39 people marked at "very conservative", which is 21% of the sample
I think these numbers are off. Where are you getting that from? Is there raw data somewhere?
I counted the people on the page and see 39 very conservative and 47 very liberal (not 26).
I did not check the other numbers. But with that its 78 liberals which is 43%. And the total liberals + conservatives are 180. So I dont think the total participant number is 180 - thats just the total of liberals and conservatives.
And if its a 56/43 (~1.3) split for conservatives that seems to actually udnerrepresent conservatives compared to the general population without moderates. Where we see a 36/25 (1.44) conservative/liberal split in terms of ideology, not voter registration, which I think aligns more closely with the "political views" label.
>The way Americans identify themselves ideologically was unchanged in 2021, continuing the close division that has persisted in recent years between those describing themselves as either conservative or moderate, while a smaller share identifies as liberal. On average last year, 37% of Americans described their political views as moderate, 36% as conservative and 25% as liberal.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/388988/political-ideology-stead...
Okay, they messed up something here. The number of little ASCII-art person squares depends on the size of your browser window. The squares get smaller when you make the window narrower, so it looks like it was coded to try to keep the number roughly constant.
If I make the window narrow enough, there are 10 squares in a row and 19 rows, a total of 190 squares. The number that are coloured "very conservative", "conservative", "centrist", "liberal", "very liberal", respectively, are 39, 67, 24, 31, 29.
In percentages, that's 20.5%, 35.3%, 12.6%, 16.3%, 15.3%. Roughly 56% conservatives, 32% liberals.
If I make the window really wide, I see 20 squares in a row and 13 rows, a total of 260 squares. The distribution is now 39, 100, 37, 46, 38.
In percentages, that's 15.0%, 38.4%, 14.2%, 17.7%, 14.6%. Roughly 53% conservatives, 32% liberals.
It's weird that the number of squares increases and decreases when you resize the window, and I would argue it's misleading because there's an animated transition that is obviously meaningless. But it's a lot worse that the proportions aren't consistent! All of us saw exactly 39 in the "very conservative" category, so maybe it is failing to proportionally scale that category while scaling the others?
Conclusions:
1. There's a programming bug that misrepresents the proportions.
2. The sample is significantly skewed toward conservatives.
Great work... I thought I noticed something similar on the resizing. I guess they prioritized looks over accuracy which is kind of fair although its not obvious why they would have to do it this way.
In any case, it would be good to see the actual data for this stuff.
Thanks for the correction ^^
In the US, registered liberals/Dems outnumber conservatives. However this study has more conservatives. It could be geography. Some states are more conservative than others. Or it could be that the $15 on offer is more appealing to conservatives.
The study denotes "political views", not party registration, which have historically deviated. Part affiliation has been quite even for a long time between Republicans and Democrats but political ideology has had a significant conservative skew going back at least 30 years https://news.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx
I think spending 30 minutes with a stranger can be surprisingly powerful. You never know what perspective, idea, or connection might come from an unexpected conversation. I remember that once spent 30 minutes with a stranger at a cafe who turned out to be a trader in a completely different market than mine. In that short conversation, I picked up a few strategies and a perspective on risk management I’d never considered before. It reminded me that sometimes the most valuable insights come from unexpected places and just half an hour with the right person can change how you approach your work.
Pretty sure I read somewhere that many people prefer Waymo over Uber because there's no driver, which kinda contradicts these findings.
How about HN users? Do you typically enjoy chatting with an Uber driver?
If this "30 minutes with a stranger" experiment was performed during the pandemic, it could be that people were short on human connection at the time, and that explains why they valued it so much.
It doesn't necessarily contradict the findings. People in this study also predicted that they would hate interacting with a stranger.
I've had interesting conversations with uber drivers and not so interesting conversations. I prefer to use one of those charge-by-the-minute rental cars if they're available, because they tend to cost 1/3 as much and I'm perfectly capable of driving myself.
>It doesn't necessarily contradict the findings. People in this study also predicted that they would hate interacting with a stranger.
Sure, but if you've ridden in an Uber, you presumably would've noticed that your prediction was off?
Not really though. When people are busy and attempting to go from A to B, they may want to eliminate variables to better focus on their friends or something else in the Waymo. This is similar to the experiment where an incredible musician played violin in the subway terminal and people 'ignored' him. It's all about intention, when people plan to talk to a stranger, they're geared for that, if they are on their way somewhere, it's not the time or place to stop and 'smell the roses' most of the time as they are in a rush, doesn't have much to do with how great the musician is in the subway. When people go to a concert, and if that's same musician in the subway, they'll most definitely enjoy it, because they're planning on enjoying music at that time.
People often prefer things that are worse for them.
The Pudding is such a cool publication. They have incredible research and dataviz, in particular on cultural topics but not only. It’s worth subscribing to their newsletter. Glad to see them there!
Beautiful. I have certainly noticed that, at work, despite my desire to be efficient, without this sort of thing, it becomes unbearable no matter how interesting the actual work is.
what type of work environment are you usually in?
UI Feedback - I was having trouble figuring out what to do with the website, possibly due to the lack of text. I was tapping everywhere just to find the interactive areas (invisible buttons: who invented flat UI without shadows to hide all the interactivity?), and it took me some time to realize the website was scrollable (invisible scroll bars: who thought hiding the scrollbars without any indication of scrollable content was a good idea?). These issues are typically not the fault of the website, but rather the general UI/UX trends we have accepted nowadays. I’m using Firefox on Android.
Regarding social media - it has created more gaps rather than making us more social. It's ultimate goal is to capture our attention for as long as possible rather than connecting us. And lately, with the celebrities populating it, it has become a showoff/bragging machine.
Great visualisation ! We need more of this "social glue" since that's what keeps society together.
On a site designed like this where I tend to not notice the scroll bar, I usually just click on the things I see to try and make something happen. In this case, not much happens from clicks (because the site desperately needs a graphic to encourage you to scroll), so I quickly lose interest and bail.
I don’t really understand this viewpoint - scrolling has always been the default way to see more content on a webpage. Clicking on things to navigate is very much a secondary activity. Why would you not scroll every web page to see if there is more content that didn’t fit on your screen?
I suppose because modern websites are actually apps, in an app you click on stuff to see more content
If web page does not look like a blog or a newsletter, it is not wrong to assume the app format
Well don’t leave us hanging. Did you figure out that you need to scroll?
For us that spend a lot of time on the internet, it's easy to forget that most people are not that different from you. I believe comments online, on Hacker News on otherwise, tend to be made by people with fairly extreme views - you have to feel something very strongly to shout your opinion into the internet! But most people are, well, normal, including you. Step out of your bubble every now and then and you'd be surprised at what good may come out of it.
Reminds me of the most upvoted post of all time on r/slatestarcodex https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
I guess I am here to contribute a little bit of my insanity to this site.
As someone who is generally shy, this sparked some hope in me. I have a really stressful time meeting new people, I just have absolutely no idea what to say, I panic and I leave. Well done for the execution, it's a very nice way to reveal interactive content!
Same. However, I had a few encounters where I was scared initially that I won't know what to say, and the talk will be quiet and weird, but my freshly met partner was so into the chat that I had problems cutting into. It was fun. Remember that the other person doesn't want to be weird either and will try to maintain the chat, unless it's totally not interested.
Not a fan of fancy websites, but this one really hits the nail on the head.
It's telling about society how much of these conversations revolve around work. It makes sense, since it's where we spend most of our time, but at the same time a lot of people are not happy at work. Recently I've been avoiding this type of smalltalk because it has this pattern that starts with "and what do you do for a living". I'm trying to make the world a better place is not usually the answer. I wish it gets normalized to ask "what do you like to do in your life" as a first question. I like to cook and fix bicycles and in general do something practical.
People tend to enjoy talking about things they're not happy about, no? Complaining is a revered pastime
I wonder if the participants were American? When I moved to Ireland I had to learn to stop asking that when I met people because it was a bit rude to start off like that.
This is interesting, but I’m curious how much of the effect is due to getting paid $15, and how much the data was affected by the fact that everyone was isolated in COVID lockdown at the time.
Another potential self-selection bias -- if people know they are signing up to have a conversation with a stranger, perhaps they are already predisposed to be more "pleasant" in conversations, vs a potential curmudgeon who doesn't ever want to speak to anyone, even for money.
A good conclusion at the end. I'm right now going to therapy, feels good and helpful. But remembering recent experience (before therapy), I can say that I am very similar to the wounded in the sense that even thinking of making a new acquaintance, I evaluated people with suspicion. Now, during therapy, I'm all for new acquaintances and even started taking the first steps towards it.
I've been interested in this general question for a while. Years ago I ran a startup that connected strangers for spoken conversations. After tests, we kept it to audio only - no video, no text, no profile info. That was what kept the conversations civil. Add video, or text, or profiles and behavior changed (basically became a dating site). Results: F-M talks were only about 10% longer than F-F and M-M talks.
(Longer-term we focused on connecting people recovering from serious health issues.)
Wasn’t there a moderately popular audio-only social media startup a couple years ago?
You're thinking of Clubhouse? Raised around $200M. Fast up and down. The behavior our old startup had noticed 10 years earlier was that while people were happy to engage with audio only, retention was tough unless there was something more. For us that meant focusing on the health-related talks. Patients and their doctors and support group leaders took the talks as part of the recovery process. Very different retention came from that.
Yep, that's the one. I'd totally forgotten about it until this thread.
The mental health support angle makes sense, though.
The Pudding is one of the bright spots of the internet for me. Does anyone have any recommendations for other new / blog interestings websites on the same level?
I wish it would be normal scrolling.
I wish people would read the rules of the website they are using.
I couldn’t - the scrolling mess made it impossible for me.
I meant HN.
I quit reading after a couple of minutes because of the scrolling.
It's not only the scrolling that isn't normal, I got dizzy when some image-like thingies starting flowing around the screen, had to close the browser tab at once. Maybe the page wanted to tell something, but whatever it is they could have done it via pure text form, that's what reading is all about.
Exactly. Make it normal by default, and animations on toggle.
I'm surprised with how most of the people that felt worse after the conversation seem to be paired with someone that felt better after the same conversation. I would expect any negative feelings to be reciprocal so I wonder what happened in these interactions...
Possibly one-sided conversations where one person got to enthusiastically talk about something that the other person didn't care about.
Following the book "The Power of Strangers" I once did an experiment with talking to random strangers, it is amazing what you'll learn from random conversations: https://willem.com/en/2023-10-13_hello-stranger/
You need structure for this to be amazing. Talking to a random person at a train station and asking for their destination isn't a meaningful conversation, even if they divulge a bit more about their travel plans.
Instead, I've personally really enjoyed talking to strangers while having a meal in the dining car of Amtrak trains, where they will force you to sit with three other people. This gives you more time together and more structure. I've talked to a retired real estate agent who told me stories about the houses his clients bought; I've talked to an old lady who told me first hand stories of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s.
I would like to do that but I live in Sweden, talking to stranger is considered rude. Would be cool if there were a serious version of those random cam chats like omegle.
Well, that's not entirely true, you just have to be a bit particular about when and how to start the conversation.
Things I find work most of the time in Sweden to get started is complaining about something mutually bothersome, annoying or scary that you don't have any power over, things like:
- A third party being rude. So if you notice that someone gets annoyed by someone else you can huff and puff a little over that.
- the weather, obviously and often!
- if someone hurts themselves or trips (doesn't have to be as big an injury as in the article)
- children are great conversation starters, regardless if they are cute, loud, awake, still or whatever. And this is one of the few positive topics that work.
The trick is also to not keep talking about the annoying thing, because that is quite boring!
If you get more courageous you can also just ask about a place, piece of public art or even the way to some random thing, in my experience (a whole life) swedes are very helpful :)
My favourite question is to ask people who clearly hope to see me go away about the names of places, I don't know why that topic works so well to tear walls down, but it does.
> I would like to do that but I live in Sweden, talking to stranger is considered rude.
you all sound like a lovely bunch. is this a modern thing?
Not who you asked, but no, old ingrained cultural thing!
The trick is to trick us into not realising we are interacting, then we are quite friendly and polite :)
> The trick is to trick us into not realising we are interacting, then we are quite friendly and polite :)
i dont think you can be friendly and ALSO dislike talking to strangers. I think thats what it means to be friendly, or at least its a necessary component of it
Very cool design. I would love to listen to those conversations that grinded to a halt. I saw one profile where their affect before was 9, at beginning was 6, by middle and end was a 1. Their partner went from 7 to 8. Is it miscommunication or misunderstanding of how they were perceived?
I see a lot of people complaining about the scrolling thing but I don't get why, can someone explain?
Many HN users are always looking for an excuse to complain about the format or appearance of the linked sites. So much so that the following had to be added to the guidelines (but doesn't seem to be enforced that much):
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Because we're used to speed-reading content and that website wouldn't allow us.
Don't scroll too fast, the cards with texts won't show if you do and then you'll miss it
it's so refreshing to see this kind of content in HN :*)
Such a minor thing but I absolutely love the way the faces / avatars are rendered here. Just characters in a PRE tag. Gives me Commodore 64 vibes. I'd love to know how they came up with those and put it all together.
This has been one of the best things I've read in a while. I hope it is real :)
There have been a few of these types of website designs on science/popular science topics, while very cool at first then the novelty fades - I wish they just get to the point.
For those interested in the subject, recommend the book The Power of Strangers by Joe Keohane that covers this with further depth. Worth reading!
I can't read it like this. It's just too much work.
I have significant social anxiety and was bullied much growing up, but I painstakingly built a small but close group of friends as a teenager and into my 20s. At the same time, the Internet was changing everything, I thought for the better, and goodness it really did seem like it made things much easier for me. Like my meatspace friends, I fell into a familiar pattern of carefully constructing a consistent circle. More often than not this translated into online friends becoming IRL friends.
Then social media happened. Again, that feeling that this makes things so much easier for me. Occasionally I noticed I was not carefully curating friends anymore, I was unwittingly in a race to collect acquaintances and to attract attention. But I’m working at a startup, I don’t have time for the old ways! I stopped seeing people so much (even old friends and family), it seemed we had nothing to talk about because everything was already posted online. I’m spending more and more of my time arguing with strangers, who I see as little more than NPCs, through distant connections. I’m getting more angry, feeling more hopeless and alone, disliking people more, and finding myself brimming with hostility governed by a hair trigger. I am thinking about moving to a more remote place with my wife to get away from people.
This is what social (and mainstream traditional, I suppose) media has wrought. It’s hard to say if it was always intended to be this way, but the truth is all sorts of malevolent individuals and groups picked up on its ability to divide and conquer us unlike any propaganda tool in history, so it certainly is now.
I few years ago I killed all my accounts (except this and one other thing… I do still feel a need to find and connect with interesting people, but sparingly and only where I feel relatively in control). I started calling people and trying to hang out in person again. I have even found myself daring to talk to strangers, even when I know we are on completely different ends of the ideological spectrum. And much like the subjects in this article, I almost always feel better. I am rediscovering the terror and joy of making friends and temporary acquaintances again.
To me, talking to strangers is like not flexing that judgment muscle we keep on, while also gaining different perspectives and learning.
I have a laptop coil whine that syncs animation on that page exactly :O
That makes me scared of both modern webdev and hardware quality.
I remember the days using chatroulette :)
After moving to a new city I desperately need this in my life. Something like omegle but more serious.
Go to an event that you have an interest in, and strike up conversations with random people who are unoccupied. You at least have one common topic to talk about, and in my experience the odds you find someone you want to grab a bite or a drink after the even with are pretty high, and at the very worst the next time you go to a similar event you might see some familiar faces.
Chatroulette was on to something. But is it still full of men exposing themselves?
There's something comforting about conversations with strangers. It gives me a feeling that we are all in this together.
One subtle effect of living as a visible minority is people assume you can't speak the local language. Even in minute everyday moments like stepping into a crowded elevator people avoid saying a few words. No one means any harm but it can feel surprisingly isolating. Almost like everyone else is in some grand linguistic conspiracy against you.
In addition to the fascinating content, this is a very cool way to present it.
Nice project, although often the text falls off the screen of my phone.
A perfect blend of design, empathy, and data
How do I load this into a database and query it with an LLM? I applied to get access to the dataset as a random. Guess I just have to wait and see what they say.
Wow the web design's amazing
Jh
this is the best thing i have seen in a while
It looks nice and I really want to engage with the page further but since my time is limited today and I'll have forgotten about this by tomorrow: What's the tl;dr?
tl;dr the journey is the destination
Claude to the rescue: This is an interactive data story from The Pudding about research showing that talking to strangers makes us feel better, despite our expectations.
The piece follows conversations from a study of nearly 1,700 video calls between strangers with different backgrounds (age, race, politics, etc.). While people predicted they'd have negative experiences talking to strangers, the vast majority actually felt better by the end of their 30-minute conversations - regardless of how different they were from each other.The story argues that we've lost "bridging social capital" (connections with people unlike us) and explores how this contributes to declining social trust.
It ends with a personal reflection on helping a bleeding teenager on the subway, suggesting that despite our fears, most people will help strangers when needed - and that these connections are crucial for tackling big societal challenges.
The topic is about 2 humans beings talking, and you manage to insert slop in the process. That's really missing the point.
Words to the effect of "we live around people who act and feel like us":
Yeah, but maybe not for the reasons you think. I'm not sure the reasons are a priori discoverable, although they can be revealed by statistics. Or to put it another way "is it something in the water, or new car smell?" So something happens in groups which amplifies similarities.
The State of Washington collects voting results by precinct, and precinct sizes are typically in the hundreds of voters.
* http://athena.m3047.net/elections/36th-dist-colored.html
The distributions are not normal.
* http://athena.m3047.net/elections/dist-not-normal/distributi...
What got me started with this was King County making their canvass available in digital form. At the time I was feeling bored and like I needed some additional exercise, and publishing a quarterly zine and knocking on doors and delivering it to everyone in my precinct seemed like a natural thing to do; I had the thought that I might be able to see some effect, of some kind, in the canvass for my precinct (just a rather arbitrary notion, I like measuring things). As I kept doing this over a number of years it gained the attention of the established political order.
Anyway I started clustering the results because I had the software, and hammer... nail.
* http://athena.m3047.net/elections/perl/data-index.cgi?imagem...
One of Cialdini's "weapons of influence" is "liking", and again that may not mean exactly what you think it does. There was contemporaneous research going on about this. One of the notions was that you would be more likely to sway people who were "like" you. So where do you find these people? Well, maybe in precincts which vote similarly to yours. So this raises an issue for politicians: maybe they should identify people who are on their side in places where they are weak and prevail on those people to talk to their neighbors. Just a thought. But the reality was that trying to get for instance a "90%-er" to go to actively meet and court "40%-ers" was like asking them to lick dog vomit. On the other hand I used cluster correlations to identify an "like" precinct in another part of the City and took a walk; I was shocked at how similar it was in terms of physical features. I know, I know, confirmation bias.
* http://athena.m3047.net/elections/perl/cluster-correlate.cgi...
I suppose it does take a certain mindset to make knocking on stranger's doors a good time; and I don't know that that is a good idea everywhere. But I like talking to strangers, hearing their stories, and flipping each other shit. It's a skill which has served me well in my life.