Merlin Mann: Better

It's The Society of Drivel effect.<p>Morning radio shows on rock/alt stations perfected it a long time ago -- focus your segments around sex and alcohol. Throw in fart jokes too for good measure. Hoards of simple people will flock to you.<p>We've moved on though. More dangerous than airwave broadcast drivel is our newfound self-participatory drivel. reddit lets you think you're being clever. HN lets you think you're being smart. Brain rot personalized to your interests. It slips around your "I'm wasting my life" filters for hours (days?) at a time.<p>Sometimes it's good. You want to turn your brain off. Browsing reddit is cheaper than antidepressants. You just have to guard against too much looping. Infinite loops of social media consumption are hazardous to your health. Everything in moderation, including moderation.<p>All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.

I think it's a good time to reread <a href="http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html</a> : (<i>"A crap link is one that's only superficially interesting. Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking, because good hackers aren't only interested in hacking, but they do have to be deeply interesting."</i>)

This has been submitted to HN quite a few times. Here's the last one I personally remember: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704931" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1704931</a><p>You can Google for "<a href="http://www.merlinmann.com/better" rel="nofollow">http://www.merlinmann.com/better</a> site:news.ycombinator.com" for past discussions and thoughts.

I like reading people write about how people shouldn't write insignificant shit. While I agree with him, it's always slightly ironic.

Is Merlin telling me to stop reading Hacker News?

Very interesting to see this article on HN. Guess we're having a Merlin run here?<p>I'd actually go as far as to say that "Better" has shaped my thinking about social networking and the Internet in general. Attention is a finite resource -- even moreso for those who struggle to focus -- and as someone with an economics background I'm tempted to consider the marginal benefit vs. marginal cost of the things I read about on the Internet.<p>Usually these comparisons usually come out strongly negative, even when we're talking about Hacker News. We would get much more out of a chapter of CLRS or an OSS patch than something from Techcrunch or Daring Fireball.<p>Just something to consider.

Better is relative.<p>While I love reading well researched and thoughtful pieces on certain topics, I also like the fact that, for instance, on HN there are quite a few off the cuff "idea" posts that are half-baked but meant to inspire conversation and discussion than to be authoritative treatises on the subject.<p>Merlin wanted to stop consuming and producing half-baked ideas and content, and that is his call.

I think part of this comes with age. We realize we don't have a lot of time left, we've accumulated a lot of cruft in our information input habits as well as in what we produce, and there's a strong impulse to focus. Writers and philosophers thousands of years ago were also complaining about this same thing and coming to the same conclusion.

All I know is Merlin Mann became famous by selling productivity porn. Now he repents and he's a prophet?

In a nutshell: We don't know our neighbors, yet we spend our time reading news about countries we'll never even visit.