It applies to HN too, the vast majority of comments probably don't have more than, at most, a few minutes of serious, focused, thinking behind them.

And with how good LLMs nowadays, probably a numerical majority don't even contain anything worth noting.

Do you have any sort of data to support this, particularly the second claim? It seems particularly absurd to me.

The comments are the data?

I'm not really sure what your asking for.

Well I suppose you're making your own point.

You are helping me prove the point with conveniently placed examples, so thanks. But why embarrass yourself?

I think it's insulting to say that human opinion or observation is worthless because a small program with a neat dataset can answer a lot of questions.

It's like saying that talking with friends about history and engineering is boring because wikipedia has the answers.

Why did your mind immediately jump to 'worthless'?

Plenty of things in this world have some small value but are not noteworthy. In fact most conversations in daily life fall into that category.

Let's not forget about the feed algoritms that will prioritize anger and only anger because this is what drives impressions.

That's still indicative of choosing to spend your time in an environment where content is algorithmically controlled.

Which is most of the mainstream ones, but following along with the mainstream is a choice.

Which environments today aren't? Everything online is to a degree, and the offline ones are heavily influenced by online ones.

I mean, as an individual it is a choice. But as a society it’s not a choice (or, maybe, a better way to phrase it is the “mainstream” is a reflection of the choice society has already made)

I feel like we're getting into "the raindrop doesn't feel responsible for the flood" territory here, and I like your second interpretation better.

It's absolutely the choice society has made, but society is the individuals that make it up. The idea of the group is a semi-useful abstraction we use because our brains have trouble conceptualizing numbers over ~17.

The style of algorithmic feed was created and popularized by individuals about a decade or two ago. A lot of the users of this site (including me) were pioneers in that area, either creating these things, or being the first users to turn our lives over to the feed.

But, if you want to create long-lasting societal change (either good or bad), that's how you have to do it. One individual, or a group of individuals start something. A few individuals (usually weirdos) join up. And at a certain point, the increasing number of people give other more mainstream people some sort of social permission to make the same choice.

At some point, it becomes socially acceptable enough to become the default and people who don't have the time or energy to put a lot of thought/research into things start doing it without really thinking (this is generally where I consider the bounds of true mainstream).