My situation is: I've visited doctors and they encourage me to try new things, "to keep coming out" of my comfort zone, but I can't seem to really feel excitement (passion, rather) anymore. The closest thing is my girlfriend.
I don't complain about mornings, about working, about any activity: I dig most of them, I really like some, but I just can't seem to feel alignment with this "purpose" thing. In my mind, my purpose is to live with health, enjoy life. For that I do the usual: travel, meet new people, practice a different sport or physical activity, hike, dive, go out to restaurants, play video games, watch films, go to theater, cook, draw, paint figurines, I help people (I'm no volunteer, though). I'm only missing woodworking because I live in an apartment and I can't fit any of that here, haha.
Am I cooked? Do I have depression and psychologists can't seem to adequately name it? Or can I simply go on with my life like this without feeling weird that every one else has/perceives all these issues that I don't?
I want to agree with this. Maybe OP is young or didn't frequent other communities before "social networks", but on IRC, even on Usenet you'd see these behaviors eventually.
Since they are relatively open, at some point comes in someone that doesn't give care about anything or it's extremely vocal about something and... there goes the nice forum.
MySpace was quite literally my space. You could basically make a custom website with a framework that included socialisation. But mostly it was just geocities for those who only might want to learn html. So it was a creative canvas with a palette.
>Maybe OP is young or didn't frequent other communities before "social networks", but on IRC, even on Usenet you'd see these behaviors eventually.
I was too young for IRC/Usenet and started using the net/web in the late 90s, frequenting some forums. Agreed that anyone can come in and upset the balance.
I'd say the difference is that on the open web, you're free to discover and participate in those social settings for the most part. With everything being so centralised and behind an algorithm the things you're presented are more 'push' than 'pull'.
I think the nuance here is that with algorithmic based outrage, the outrage is often very narrow and targeted to play on your individual belief system. It will seek out your fringe beliefs and use that against you in the name of engagement.
Compare that to a typical flame war on HN (before the mods step in) or IRC.
On HN/IRC it’s pretty easy to identify when there are people riling up the crowd. And they aren’t doing it to seek out your engagement.
On Facebook, etc, they give you the impression that the individuals riling up the crowd are actually the majority of people, rather than a loud minority.
Theres a big difference between consuming controversial content from people you believe are a loud minority vs. controversial content from (what you believe is from) a majority of people.
Or if the moderation was good someone would go “nope, take that bullshit elsewhere” and kick them out, followed by everyone getting on with their lives. It wasn’t obligatory for communities to be cesspits.
> Maybe OP is young or didn't frequent other communities before "social networks", but on IRC, even on Usenet you'd see these behaviors eventually
I’m not exactly old yet, but I agree. I don’t know how so many people became convinced that online interactions were pleasant and free of ragebait and propaganda prior to Facebook.
A lot of the old internet spaces were toxic cesspools. Most of my favorite forums eventually succumbed to ragebait and low effort content.
I remember a thread a while ago where someone was claiming that Hacker News comments were much more civilized and on topic in the early days.
So someone pulled up Wayback Machine archives of random dates for HN pages. The comments were full of garbage, flame wars, confidently incorrect statements, off topic rants, and all the other things that people complain about today.
It was the same thing, maybe even slightly worse, just in a different era
I think the people who imagine that social media is worse today either didn’t participate in much online socialization years ago or have blocked out the bad parts from their memory.
But Serdar was relatively easy to ignore, because it was just one account, and it wasn't pushed on everyone via an algorithm designed to leverage outrage to make more money for one of the world's billionaires. You're right: pervasiveness and scale make a significant difference.
In my country, at least on my Samsung Galaxy mobile device, they are sending Flash Messages for ads, even though I requested to be removed from their lists (and they complied... with calls and SMS).
I already see them making use of this for ads until a big group of people complain.
I'm part of a chat group related to videogames, and it took me ages to convince the Pokémon die-hard fan to stop buying the games if he found so many things he didn't like (he voiced them... ALL THE TIME).
Maybe I didn't make the best argument for it, but the general sense was: Stop buying them. If you keep buying them even when you see so many things you disagree with, they'll never improve upon them. Some were such stagnant anti-features, at that point it wasn't honest from the company to keep them in the games.
He finally understood for Sword/Shield. So he hasn't bought this last generation, although the latest calls to him because there are some interesting changes, but I told him to wait for the next refinement, assuming they really improve even more.
It drives me crazy. It happens with Claude models too. I even created an instruction to avoid them in a CLAUDE.md, and the miserable thing from time to time still does it.
I think this post is riddled with bots. One is marketing another competing offer, others complaining about the UI component not being open source too...
I've worked with several Development Leads to actually define these. After the initial adjustment period, everybody's local environment setup properly: No one ever spent time reviewing style and formatting on Pull Requests.
Just decide as a team, auto-apply if possible (less than 5 seconds for big changes), enforce, and be done with it. Stop wasting everybody's time because after weeks you cannot make your mind on it and also don't tell your team/Lead about it.
You know someone has NOT used OrbStack when they just think all they have to offer is the UI. In fact, I barely use the UI, I just see the icon in the Menu Bar, from then on I just love the performance, feels almost like being back on Linux.
While PMs have their own share of quirks to work around with and your comment doesn't say they have no faults at all, I wholeheartedly agree with you here. I've worked as a developer, QA, systems operator, and a bunch of other positions. Holy cow, we are all full of ourselves (PMs included), but the disdain of a lot of developers towards the end user (sometimes PMs fault) is incredible. A bunch of nerds ignoring common people use cases and abilities. And it keeps happening and most still don't recognize what's happening.
I've worked as a Manager so I've had to deal (and collaborate) with this kind of misunderstanding, but it truly gets tiring when developers complain about users trying dumb things (for developers) over and over again, yet they themselves have learned nothing from previous encounters with this phenomenon and complain instead about stupid users (or PM, or company, or whatever).
I don't complain about mornings, about working, about any activity: I dig most of them, I really like some, but I just can't seem to feel alignment with this "purpose" thing. In my mind, my purpose is to live with health, enjoy life. For that I do the usual: travel, meet new people, practice a different sport or physical activity, hike, dive, go out to restaurants, play video games, watch films, go to theater, cook, draw, paint figurines, I help people (I'm no volunteer, though). I'm only missing woodworking because I live in an apartment and I can't fit any of that here, haha.
Am I cooked? Do I have depression and psychologists can't seem to adequately name it? Or can I simply go on with my life like this without feeling weird that every one else has/perceives all these issues that I don't?
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