> The internet wasn’t always like that. Before recommendation algorithms where a thing, you had to decide what you would be doing on the computer.
> You didn’t really have one big app that you could open and order it to entertain you. Instead, you had a few dozen of bookmarks to websites, each with a specific idea in mind.
This overlooks how common custom homepages such as Lycos, Yahoo! and My MSN were and how the browsers pushed these as their default home pages.
While they are not as addictive as "the algorithm" of today, they were still packed with clickbait images/links to attract your attention and ads to drain your wallet.
Our book club has actually noted that more and more mainstream books are written for low attention span. Repeating details ad nauseum and simplifying the plot significantly. So I don't think books are immune to this automatically.
I think this needs a strategic change. Unless you have a clear cut life objective and you are really into it, everything else you try to improve are at most tactical wins that will be lost to time. And those small wins actually make the end frustration worse because you thought you won strategically this time.
I’ll also going to declare that doom scrolling-ish working on non-impactful personal projects is as BAD as doom scrolling twitter.
On the social science side, The Ecology of Attention[1] talks about attention as an ecosystem and the final economic frontier for capitalism. It envisions a world where every moment of our attention is fought over by commercial entities, which feels pretty prescient at the moment.
We could call doing such a thing, referencing a seminal work with a similar title that's so close that you couldn't to it that have missed it, yet somehow you did, as an AliceGG's Mistake.
How could you write 600 words on the topic and not mention the paper otherwise?
Why would AliceGG need to reference the paper? Anyone who is vaguely aware of the LLM architecture knows about the paper title and it being a huge advancement in machine learning. This is an article about recommendation algorithms hijacking our attention and LLMs ruining the internet... it's pretty clear the article title is a nod to the paper?
> You didn’t really have one big app that you could open and order it to entertain you. Instead, you had a few dozen of bookmarks to websites, each with a specific idea in mind.
This overlooks how common custom homepages such as Lycos, Yahoo! and My MSN were and how the browsers pushed these as their default home pages.
While they are not as addictive as "the algorithm" of today, they were still packed with clickbait images/links to attract your attention and ads to drain your wallet.
MSN: https://web.archive.org/web/20021108094511/http://www.msn.co...
My MSN: https://web.archive.org/web/20021107081016/http://my.msn.com...
I’ll also going to declare that doom scrolling-ish working on non-impactful personal projects is as BAD as doom scrolling twitter.
[1] https://www.perlego.com/book/1536286/the-ecology-of-attentio...
Yes. But--change your thoughts, change your life: https://thinkhuman.com/change-your-thoughts-change-your-life...
How could you write 600 words on the topic and not mention the paper otherwise?