The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now
stephendiehl.com371 points by ibobev 4 hours ago
371 points by ibobev 4 hours ago
> People increasingly behave like addicts because addiction is the business model.
I sense my internet addiction got a lot worse in recent years. I don’t use social media, but I consume news, blogs and newsletters - and comment threads - voraciously.
I think the addiction began as soon as I started to work at a desk behind a computer which had internet access - 20+ years ago. Like putting an alcoholic to work behind a bar and thinking he’d restrain himself.
It seems to have worsened in recent years. I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.
If you're interested in what helped me overcome the worst aspects of my internet addiction, I learned to reframe it.
I wasn't overcome with addiction, but I was CHOOSING to take a break. There are good reasons to read the news, there are good reasons to take breaks. End the war against yourself and take more wholesome breaks, so your subconscious doesn't take over and force them. It may involve forcing yourself to be more realistic about what you can do in a given time period, but that's a good thing ultimately.
I know it sounds like a minor change but the whole game is putting your life back in your own control. When you find yourself binging, say "I am choosing to do this," even if you don't immediately log off. Just observe your own choices as a first step.
Another tip: when you're craving a hit of the internet, ask yourself "can I wait 5 minutes before checking my phone?" If you can't, no big deal. But if you do this enough time you build up the self discipline muscle.
Forcing a short delay is such a powerful technique.
I use this when I'm at risk of binging a show. If I'm tempted to let Netflix continue into the next episode, I say "ok maybe, but let's get up and do something else for a few minutes first and see if I still want to" and before I know it I'm building a robot instead.
Thanks - useful to think about as I try and wean myself off the novel information highs. I’ve been consciously aware of the problematic aspect of my behavior since about the pandemic - but struggle to make much change.
Not bad, but leaves out crucial steps? "I chose to do this" puts the blame at your own feet without telling you how to deal with it constructively. That can lead to learned helplessness.
Contemplation has the goal of a reassessment of evaluation. The choice needs to be re-evaluated as inferior to better alternatives.
Those need to be explicitly identified. In order to do this, you need to know what led to your choice emotionally.
The other side of the coin is the intentional design of many internet sites to exploit human psychology. News for example are "infotainment", "fear-porn" and "rage-bait", etc. by design and override many "self-discipline" mechanisms.
The internet isolates people while feeding them a simulacra of social interaction without actual social functionality. Objective truth in particular isn't reliably established by "watching the news", that's merely top-down conditioning by whoever owns your "news". Finding objective truth is an active process, not a passive event.
Focusing on how other people designed it might be good to generate momentum for political activism purposes but it's not good for your own personal self improvement. And if you're getting mad about the world and not doing a significant amount of real world activism, you're getting the worst of both worlds, not helping yourself or anyone else.
I think the best attitude is "Yes, the world could be improved, but all I can do right now is improve myself." There's a raft of evidence (and not just my firsthand anecdotal experience) that shows taking ownership yields far better life outcomes.
The risk for learned helplessness is far greater if you don't even acknowledge the control you have over it. True, someone reading my comment might not go "all the way" in fixing their problems and get stuck blaming themselves, but there's only so much I can do with an internet comment. I recommend therapy too to save you from those sorts of blind alleys.
The most dangerous part of this addiction is that it doesn't feel like addiction. Suppose we spend 4 hours in an afternoon consuming random content - starting somewhere on a Google search, landing on Wikipedia, end up reading dozens of articles on various topics in that 4 hours. Unlike alcohol or drugs, this is knowledge addiction - afterall, we learned about a bunch of things in those 4 hours, didn't we? We didn't spend any money (well, other than the laptop, electricity and internet bills), we didn't harass anyone (like alcoholics sometimes do) etc. Heck, we didn't even "waste" time like we think we do, when we play video games. So it feels somewhat better.
But, all that we learned in those 4 hours - is it really that useful? Some of it might be, lets say an hour of it. What about the other three? That could have been spent on something healthier - having fun with friends, play sports, or even just sleeping!
I understand the irony of typing this, but I too am in the same boat - consuming things voraciously, most of which is just useless knowledge, at the cost of relationships, health etc.
> The most dangerous part of this addiction is that it doesn't feel like addiction.
I've started framing addiction as something that we feel compelled to do even when we know it has a detrimental effect on more important aspects of our life. In that respect, yes, it does feel like an addiction.
> Unlike alcohol or drugs, this is knowledge addiction - afterall, we learned about a bunch of things in those 4 hours, didn't we?
Did we learn anything? If we aren't using that knowledge, even in casual conversation, chances are that retention is very low. I'm not even talking about useful learning here, since it is pleasurable to learn something for its own sake. I'm talking about the stickiness.
Another way to think of it is: are we even interested in learning? I have downloaded the entire Wikipedia to my computer, along with Project Gutenberg, as well as various technical documentation. (Kiwix is wonderful.) On top of that I have enough books (digital and physical) to last a lifetime. I have a multitude of resources that I can tap into without touching the Internet, and accessing it is all very low resistance (e.g. I don't have to get off my ass to go to the library). So why do I even have home Internet access? Communicating with people certainly doesn't require a high speed connection.
What if you consume those things but still have time for relationships and health etc?
It's not learning unless you put it into practice. 4 hours of woodworking videos is nothing for you unless you get to work.
I've been watching framing videos for weeks feeling like I'm being less unproductive than if I were playing video games. But at a certain point it's just as bad. Not a single nail driven.
It's all about balance. Learning about various stuff from well written articles and Wikipedia for one hour is good. Doing the same thing for the whole weekend isn't.
Even reading books all the time to the detriment of other activities isn't good.
What's good is doing a bit of everything. Reading a book an hour before sleep, doing a hour of exercise two to three times a week. Reading a few blog articles, wikipedia, long and well researched magazine articles. Making time for in person social interactions. Playing games, video games, board games, card games from time to time. Engaging in a few online discussions every week. Etc
It's all about balance or at least that's the way I see it.
That’s a good point. Internet addiction didn’t have a name, or a stigma, in the way alcohol or other drugs did so in a sense I had no idea that the slide I was on was harmful. It also felt a lot like what I did a lot of at university - library research.
Piggybacking onto your post to sort of expand this. I feel like there are a few views of what those 4 hours can encompass on the internet. My view is that reels/shorts << rage gaming <<< background noise-tier youtube << social/healthy gaming <= information binging. My problem is most reddit or twitter-esque sites make it easy to fall on the side of rage consumption, without constant self enforcement.
Now I don't think that most knowledge is really that useful in general, maybe 1% of 4 hour binges have any real consequences. But occasionally it really does turn out to be very useful. I spent maybe 4-5 hours reading and watching videos about window air conditioners, having known basically nothing but the terrible shaky units from my childhood. After that period of research time, I bought two new replacements, saved $80 with National Grid rebates, and reduced my summer monthly kwh consumption by 200-250. It also led me to information about heat pump systems which I will consider in a future house purchase, and additionally more information which led me to avoid purchasing cheap peltier dehumidifiers for one with a compressor.
I guess my point is, it can definitely be worse. You can at least point to an Ortega hypothesis-like effect of learning a bunch of random stuff. But I agree that even just going on a walk and doing literally nothing feels way, way better than spending that time online. The balance is so heavily tilted towards internet addiction that I expect that having multiple "real" offline hobbies will increasingly be seen as green flags. In my experience, "bookworm" has not been a pejorative in a long time. stackbutterflow's comment about balance seems like the most sensible way to approach timespend in this sense, though. /rant
I've recently spent a night or two with near insomnia going down a performance / security rabbit hole in open source .NET libraries.
It feels useful, it feels important. But it's not, it's just addictive behaviour, because "you found a way to make <library> 5% faster / 5% fewer allocations" is a dopamine hit that feeds back into wanting to prod some more.
It feels like I'm learning an absolute ton about high performance .NET and the kinds of crazy things that maintainers need to consider when taking in untrusted input.
But it's the equivalent of empty calories. The maintainers don't really want to know, and I'm not really learning anything actually useful. It's not actually enlightening work, it's just keeping myself busy while helping feed maintainers a maintenance headache.
The security angle is also horrifying in a different way, it puts me off wanting to put anything near the internet. I used to think the concept of "net crash" and an internet abandoned to "rogue AIs" in cyberpunk was entertaining fiction.
While I don't think the network itself will host those rogue AIs, I do worry that there'll simply be a critical mass of bad actors armed with AI that will render the net effectively inoperable.
Well, it depends. If it's not at the cost of relationship, sports and other important things, is it really an addiction? It can often be just a hobby like everything else.
One of the things I liked about my Windows phone, was the relative lack of apps made it very hard to fall into addiction 'traps'.
On the flip side, my partner has fallen deep into the cesspit, either seeing her doom-scrolling through Facebook for hours, or the way she talks about all the things she saw on there despite not handling any of the things that she said she would get done that day (FWIW... My partner does not work at this time, she quit her job under the auspices of taking care of the house. Has not gone well. I guess at least she stopped playing cow-clicker games on her phone...)
If I will give my first 'real job' some credit for anything around their Blocking policies, they had extremely strict blocks around anything that could be 'personal use' and had very alarming warnings pop up if you happened to hit one of the blocks. (To the point where even doing legitimate work research I more than once freaked out and went right to my manager and the IT managers explaining my case and what I was doing.)
But it's also part of why the open office / panopticon layout has become more popular; It provides at least some vague threat to somewhat lower the risk folks get sucked into their phones out of view...
Internet addiction in the early millennium wasn't so destructive, because so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people. You could meet cool new people (even occasionally IRL friends) from forums and blogs, and they were a hub for discussion for real-life communities like music-band fandom or travel subcultures.
Besides the deleterious nature of engagement-maximizing social media today, I think another aspect of the problem is that there is less connection to real-life socializing simply because that has collapsed in so many countries.
This is a big part of it for me. The old Internet was full of individuals sharing deep passion--whether on a personal website or on a forum. There was a sense of connecting to another human being.
This is the only forum-style site I regularly interact with, and I must admit that I rarely try to remember another username here. The effect is that I interact with ideas, not people. And there is some deep connection between behaviors I might label as addiction and a felt sense of isolation.
The internet is still full of individuals sharing deep passion for all sorts of things, but only within the walls of invite-only communities you have to go out of your way to find (Discord servers, private forums) and/or make a financial commitment towards (Patreon).
Or at least it was, before LLM "enthusiasts" started leaking into these otherwise hermetic communities and overrunning formerly safe spaces with mass-produced low-effort content nobody wants to see, particularly when anyone else could prompt the exact same thing into existence.
For me the difference today is that most people sharing their passions are now doing for The Algorithm. It's a far cry from the scrappy days of the early web where people just posted stuff because they thought it was cool. I'm not saying their passion is any less, more just that is so much noise. People are now "creators" and are pressured to constantly create.
Don't go on sites with "creators" then. When people say this they're talking about like 5 websites. They're not "the Internet" at all.
Ha, yes I wanted to keep my comment short without trying to cover every base, but figured I might get this comment. Of course such sites still exist, but still a different phenomena when that was the entire internet. There are a lot of interesting people who run YouTube channels that be so cool to see a GeoCities-type site from, for example.
Why do you assume a hobby or interest still has a significant presence on the non-algorithmified open web?
For travel-related hobbies, for instance, there is no longer any kind of significant open-web scene where people just share stuff to help others or because it is cool. (Yes, you can set up your own blog, but pretty much none of your peers will ever see it.) The community might be using a variety of apps beyond your "like 5 websites", but all those apps are designed around phones and minimize text content, and so they are just as pathological as "sites with 'creators'".
Even 25 years ago being “too online” - back then it was icq, livejournal, and forums - was already destructive as hell and always led to some pretty cringe outcomes. At least these days some people make a career out of it, back then it was purely negative
It wasn't purely negative for everyone. I still maintain ties with several people I hung out with on an IRC channel in the 2000s, and a couple of fellow heavy commenters on one blog in the same decade. Granted, this was aided by the fact that we were all in Europe and all traveled regularly, so we could do the IRL interaction that solidifies friendships.
Today, if one is heavily online, many platforms no longer offer a space where one can tell a fellow user, "I'll be in your town soon, let's meet up", or even if it does, the general culture has changed away from that.
> so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people
That still exists. Except now it's not in IRC or BBSes but in Discord "servers" instead.
Discord servers skew towards a very young demographic. One of the striking things about the early-millennium blog scene was how much quality long-form-text interaction it facilitated among relatively older people: the average age around a lot of blogs on topics like the arts or literature was like 40 or 50.
I think for people that age now, the internet is a much lonelier place.
> Internet addiction in the early millennium wasn't so destructive, because so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people. You could meet cool new people (even occasionally IRL friends) from forums and blogs
My experience has been the opposite. The people I knew who got seriously addicted to the internet a couple decades ago were mostly not thriving online among cool other people. They were getting dragged down into swirling cesspools of the time.
4chan has been around for over 20 years. A lot of the gaming communities and forums were toxic and brutal back then. There were social news sites, content mills, and personality cults back then too.
I think there’s some glorification of the past that happens in these threads. The old internet was full of toxic and addictive things, too. It was just less common to be immerse in it because you had to go to a physical computer and, if you go back far enough, dial up and occupy the house phone line. There were natural limits to how exposed most people would get.
> You could meet cool new people
My first date was a guy with fake photos. Ten dates later I settled for a married guy cheating on his wife. He eventually divorced but then I left him.
Sorry, but teenage me, growing up late 90s, wildly disagrees with this statement.
It's always been addictive and destructive. I was staying up past 3am to talk to my American friends, knowing I'd have to get up at 7am to get to school.
Painting the past with such a rose brush does not help anyone.
I was staying up till 3 am listening to my iPod and reading books without internet then going to school at 7
I do think the internet was less bad back then (but still bad) and i also think sometimes teenagers just be teenagers
Yep... back then, the internet was a way people would discuss and organize their real world interests and activities, like clubs and usergroups would organize their next meeting... and then meet, off the internet.
Now, it's all just online drivel that never turns into anything else.
I use the Internet about how I used to 30 years ago.
I chat with friends. Sometimes, I make a new friend or lose track of one. On rare occasion we get together to do whatever it is that we have a common interest in. That used to be IRC.
I learn new shit by interacting with people I don't know at all. Sometimes, that means hanging out in much more anonymous places (like HN) and sharing ideas. That used to be Usenet.
I learn other stuff by Googling things and otherwise conducting research. That used to be AltaVista; nowadays, it's often an LLM.
I order pizzas. (I just ordered pizzas, in fact.)
How do you make new IRL friends now in 2026? Where are you hanging out online where there is a culture of people not only revealing their location and age (which platforms and individual internet users have become more guarded about), but even meeting up with other users?
Not OP, and I will assume you ask about making irl friends online: niche multiplayer videogames always were the best way to make irl friends. I still have a few friends from a web game where you had to coordinate 5-10 people for ~1h a day (and enemies could counter if they chose to connect around the same time) that I played from 2004 to 2013 (with breaks in between). Later it has mostly Hoi4 and civ6 (which are now less niche, but the mp communities used to be extremely niche before ~2020) (civ6 still is). I have a friend who I've met through another because they played on a SWTOR roleplay server together. Also, now that I remember, a friend of mine turned 40 a year ago, and I was surprised of the younger friends (less than 30) he made. They told me they met through WoW classic, managed to find out they lived close from each other, and decided to hang out/play RPGs (pen and paper) together.
How I do it:
My local IRL friends are some folks I met during my days as a BBS sysop ~35 years ago.
My far away IRL friends are folks online where we felt motivated to treat eachother as friends instead of dangerous randos.
(Risky? Perhaps. We're all simply too old to give a shit.)
That's still not answering my question. Where do you make those "far away IRL friends"? Most commercial platforms today discourage (because it is bad for engagement) users from building close ties with individual other users even if said users are willing to let their guard down. The user base of open and easily findable non-commercial platforms has collapsed. Your posts are dangling some kind of 2026 Shangri-La before HN readers, and you can understand my skepticism.
Reddit. Discord. HN. (Definitely not Facebook. That whole thing is resolutely toxic.)
I do not care what the platform encourages or discourages. If others do care and this precludes friendship, then: So it is.
You have seriously made contacts on Reddit or HN that have led to meeting people IRL when you visit their regions or they visit yours? Even way back when IRL meetups between users of internet forums were common, Reddit was already famous for having a culture where that wasn't at all likely due to the design of the site.
As for HN, there is no DM feature and only a minority of users give any contact info in their profiles. In over a decade here, I have never seen one user passing contact info to another user in public.