I'm not addicted to the internet or my smartphone. I'm addicted to information
The author traces their compulsive online behavior from forums to Reddit, Hacker News, and Instagram, realizing the real addiction is to information—especially good information. Personalized algorithms now serve short, hook-oriented content that milks attention without sparking ideas, leaving the brain craving the discovery and high-value posts of the early internet. The piece calls for fragmentation as an answer and wishes a rapid death to short-form, hook-oriented content.
They want my eyeballs, not my thoughts.
- karim79
I feel you. I had to brave through the font that you're using but I feel you.
Maybe try to avoid making a statement using a font which literally hurts my eyes, and possibly the eyes of many others. That's messed up.
Also information addiction should be a human "feature" I suppose, shouldn't it?
Knowledge for the sake of knowledge and so forth.
The font is actually cool but it belongs in games like Alien Isolation (and possibly others) it's just not good for blogging methinks.
- CompoundEyes
My grandma always had the morning paper delivered. When I stayed with her during the summer I’d start in the top left corner of the first page and read all the way to the bottom right corner of the last and everything in between. What a 10 year old kid got out of the grain report? I’m not sure. But I was amped up on her homemade cinnamon rolls and multiple glasses of orange juice. It was wonderful. These days I’m more selective about what information I take in!
- apothegm
Good news for those horrified by the font: reader mode seems to work just fine, fwiw.
- Maxatar
This is like saying, "I'm not addicted to smoking, I'm addicted to the happiness cigarettes give me." Addiction is a harmful dependency you pursue to achieve some desired outcome. The harmful dependency is the endless browsing, scrolling, and searching you engage in to obtain it, all the time wasted doing it and doing it in a way that consumes a significant amount of time that could be spent acquiring that same information in a more productive manner.
That's the addiction, not the information.
- dang
Hey all: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, [etc...]. They're too common to be interesting."