Is it possible to be a digital "hermit"?

In such a polarized world where no one is capable of accepting blame and chooses to blame the "other side"... is it possible to isolate yourself from the soykaf on the internet? The problem is that everything has become a case of "I'll tell you that if you do this, it's wrong, but I can do it and you can't complain." If a man assaults a woman, it's gender violence. If a woman assaults a man, it's because he surely did something to her. If a police officer assaults a citizen, it's an injustice. If a citizen assaults a police officer, he's a hero. The fact that they want to polarize everything, dividing everything into sides... it's fuarrrking bullshit. I want to be myself, and it seems the only way to achieve that is by isolating myself. When I speak, people tell me things like, "I should say what others want to hear" because otherwise, "it's rude." Basically, if you don't play into the dynamics of the side in question, you're very likely to end up defamed and doxxed. I no longer have social media; I only lurk on social media, and even then, it's the same dynamic. This is the only place I have left. I'm done. I'm tired of feeling like I don't belong anywhere because it seems like I have to sacrifice my personality to fit in. >Any advice? >How do you fit in? >Do you think it's true that no one ever really fits in, but we prefer to pretend otherwise? >Are we in the worst moment for the internet? >Will social media be the last places to be invaded? (even though many already are) >inb4: Leave the internet if you don't like it It's impossible to live without the internet these days. I want to keep using it, but at the same time, I want to be myself.

You don't want to fit in. You don't want to lurk, you're wasting your time. Browsing fringe spaces and otherwise using the internet for real information (hard to get sometimes) seems like the healthiest way of doing things. Weird interests bring cool people together. You don't want normals in your life.

>Any advice? Delete all your social media accounts. Don't engage with bad-faith actors who aren't interested in legitimate debate and just want their existing views validated. Don't read the news: https://gwern.net/doc/culture/2010-dobelli.pdf >How do you fit in? I have some online friends centered around a shared hobby on an IRC channel. Other than that I'm not really a part of any online communities. >Do you think it's true that no one ever really fits in, but we prefer to pretend otherwise? How do you define "fitting in"? >Are we in the worst moment for the internet? I don't think so. >Will social media be the last places to be invaded? (even though many already are) Social media - aside from imageboards IMO - has always been terrible. It's a net drag on human society as a whole. >inb4: Leave the internet if you don't like it This might not be what you want to hear, but yeah, I'd recommend this to some degree. Your closest relationships will always be in meatspace. Find a third place centered around something you enjoy. Or if you want to stay online, maybe try taking an online course or something that involves other people.

>>45012 what do you actually want? you're title says that you want to be a hermet. you can do that by just closing the web-browser. but in your post you are just opining about wanting to fit in and complaining about criticism. hermits don't need to fit it. hermits don't talk to people

Yes. I am one two and three. There is life in energy.

>>45012 My solution is indifference, I live my days as a husk uncaring but slightly bothered. Normal people are soykaf anyways you don't want to fit in their pools of stupidity, maybe once in a while if you're lucky with destiny you can came across a good community, maybe you can find some comfort and connection there but if not then best you can do is assume that everything is fake and it doesn't really matter, we've been living in metal gear solid 2 for a while now so there's that >Are we in the worst moment for the internet? Not really, the dead of subculture and the incorporation of most of everything in the cultural mush that is the internet has some good things but also bad ones, it's easier to find cool stuff/weird people now but it all feels dull, these times we're living are bad in a metaphysical way. Now we do not care about how sickness and such afflictions are a burden to our lifes but rather complain about how this existence as a whole manages to be a nightmare at times and this is thanks to the presence of certain informations and things we can learn that all led to this ways of thinking and the creation of certain ideas that are harmful to our life perception

>>45012 >The fact that they want to polarize everything, dividing everything into sides... it's fuarrrking bullshit. You say this but it's clear from the examples you give that you're very firmly on a certain "side" and what you really dislike is that your side is the less popular one, particularly among younger people. When you claim extreme, offensive, or otherwise offputting opinions as core parts of your personality then you will always clash with other people, even if you're just "being yourself". >Any advice? Unlearn the habit you've developed of inserting politics into every social interaction. Develop a personality that doesn't center around your fringe political beliefs. Regarding "the internet", you generally see what you want to see. If you feel like everything you see is aggressively polarized politics then that just means that you've taught the algorithm that this is what you want to see. Stop engaging with it, stop responding to it, and you'll stop seeing it.

>>45147 >Regarding "the internet", you generally see what you want to see. If you feel like everything you see is aggressively polarized politics then that just means that you've taught the algorithm that this is what you want to see. This is a common but superficial and erroneous understanding of the way the algorithm works. It's designed to exploit human reward systems by deliberately interspersing desirable content with undesirable content. Basically, if you do something that results in something your brain perceives as high-value, there will be a neurochemical signal to mark it as such so that you will seek more of it in the future. But if the reward is consistent, the signal will be associated with the reward, not the activity that triggers the reward. If the association between the activity and the reward is inconsistent - (sometimes it results in a reward, sometimes it doesn't) - then your brain learns to frontload the signal to the activity instead of the reward itself - you become intrinsically motivated to engage in the activity, rather than just being motivated by the reward. This is why slot machines are addictive (sometimes produce a reward, but often don't.) If you were only provided with the optimal rewarding content, it would actually reduce the amount of time you spent engaging with the website - you would simply find good content, watch it until you were satisfied, and then you would turn it off after your satiety mechanisms have been triggered. But instead you have a progressively intensifying need to 'search' and scroll through novel content - and you will eventually develop the addiction-related brain changes associated with that. This is also a well known and established fact - not a conspiracy theory - they hire many of the same experts that design casino games to help design social media. Social media sites are not addictive because our 'brains aren't ready for them' or whatever nonsense - they're addictive because they were consciously, deliberately designed to be as addictive as possible. It's not some random accident. The way to reduce the addictiveness is by changing the way the sites are designed. There isn't an easy way to do that on a wide scale as of yet, but on an individual level you can use non-addictive interfaces for popular sites. E.g I use Newpipe on my tablet to view youtube - algorithmic recommendations are turned off, comments are turned off, there's no scrolling - the only feed I get is from channels I'm subscribed to. This literally eliminated the addictiveness/attention fragmenting effect overnight. I just watch soykaf I like, in a relaxed manner, I don't feel short-circuited afterwards (I actually feel like my attention is stronger after using it), I'm never forcibly shown content I don't want to see, etc.

>>45012 You sound a lot like me. Mid-30s, disappointed in society. Trying to find a third space to fit in The amount of isolation that we're all feeling right now (assuming you're a single white male tech worker) is suffocating and there's no real path to any kind of life fulfillment anymore. When I think about third spaces and the choices I come up with are "go gambling" and "go to church that's some sickening soykaf.

>>45164 Also certain types of content are artificially pushed or suppressed by the algorithm for ideological/political/whatever purposes. There have been plenty of publicized examples of this. Racial/gender related topics are artificially promoted by youtube. Gender constructionist views are also promoted, and videos that discuss biological or neurological sex distinctions (even if it's just dry, non-political, academic type content) get downranked in the algorithm and demonetized. The reasons why they'd do this are speculative, but it seems logical that big corporations would want people bickering about stupid culture war crap rather than focusing their attention on the actual oppressor class (the economic elite.) I also kept getting that idiot retarded psychologist jordan peterson recommended to me on youtube for years and years no matter how many times I clicked 'not interested' - someone at Youtube must really want people to listen to his retarded psychobabble.

>>45164 >>45173 You're wasting a lot of words to repeat what I already said: If you feel like everything you see is aggressively polarized politics then that just means that you've taught the algorithm that this is what you want to see. It may be a complex process but no matter how the system works, what you're shown is the result of what you click. >I also kept getting that idiot retarded psychologist jordan peterson recommended to me on youtube for years and years no matter how many times I clicked 'not interested' Imagine writing all that just to show at the end that you don't understand how it works. You can click "not interested" all you want but you're clicking things that tell the algorithm that you actually are interested. The sort of topics you reference and your specific phrasing ("gender constructionist views", "neurological sex distinctions") along with your tryhard grammar tells me exactly what sort of person you are and frankly, based on nothing but your posts here, I would also recommend jordan peterson to you. That you may not actually be interested doesn't matter: you're presenting yourself as the sort of person who likely would be interested and as long as that's the case, you'll keep getting those types of suggestions. Like OP, you have very specific, very fringe political viewpoints and you spend a lot of time interacting with related content on the internet. Not surprisingly, the result of this is that you get fed political content. I personally have never been recommended any kind of political content on my youtube because I don't click on political content. Once you start engaging with something then it will keep feeding you that type of content and clearly you've spent a lot of time clicking on political content.

>>45173 Its actually quite easy to curate the Youtube algorithm. I was recommended nothing but vtuber slop every day for years until I went into my subscriptions and unsubscribed to every single vtuber I followed. From the sound of it, either you don't watch enough Youtube or you watch the same kind of indoctrination junk that the people that watch Peterson also watch. However you are right on one thing, if you click "Don't recommend channel", Youtube will eventually recommend the channel, but usually it takes 1-2 years in my experience.

>>45174 >You're wasting a lot of words to repeat what I already said: If you feel like everything you see is aggressively polarized politics then that just means that you've taught the algorithm that this is what you want to see Ok, you didn't understand what I said at all but felt the need to respond anyways. tl;dr social media sites deliberately show you content you don't want to see to keep you on the site longer and to make the process more addictive. If they only showed you content you were likely to watch you would not browse the site for as long and they would not make as much ad revenue. >Like OP, you have very specific, very fringe political viewpoints and you spend a lot of time interacting with related content on the internet. I see that you enjoy making random soykaf up. I purely use youtube for educational content I'm interested in (linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, engineering, etc.) and music I like (traditional/choral/renaissance music). I don't watch mainstream political youtubers at all.

>>45174 >what you're shown is the result of what you click. Do you not have internet at work? I got be afraid covid fearmongering & ukraine news even pushed at work where i never clicked on anything aside from guides. YT runs a mix of propaganda + algorithm fed content and it should be obvious why - politics want public support for their wars and so they use yt for the propaganda same way kings used to use the church when churches where the mainstream distribution platform. Whatever gets popular gets besieged by people wishing to control the public.

>>45176 >Ok, you didn't understand what I said at all but felt the need to respond anyways Same to you. > tl;dr social media sites deliberately show you content you don't want to see to keep you on the site longer and to make the process more addictive There is a difference between things you purely don't want to see and things that you dislike but engage with. The latter includes what you're referring to, OP's political soykaf, and your jordan peterson videos. You may think that you don't want to be shown these videos but you have a positive response to them even if you dislike them and that's why you keep having them recommended to you. You like seeing political content that you disagree with because it lets you feel superior to these people and their "wrong" beliefs. If you truly never watched political videos then you would never be recommended them. Never in my life have I seen a jordan peterson vid recommended to me nor any other kind of politics. If I for some reason click an embedded political video on some other site, I start getting political videos recommended to me. If I remove those videos from my wathc history, I stop being recommended political videos. I can look at my youtube recommendations and tell exactly why a given video is being shown to me based on what I've watched recently. And no, none of it is stuff that I don't want to see. Everything is content that I would potentially be interested in based on what I've watched in the past. You may imagine that there's some complex process involved in showing you content you "don't want to see" but the reality is that you do want to see that content, regardless of what you tell yourself. If you didn't enjoy seeing it, even if you dislike it, then you wouldn't keep having it shown to you. You are shown content that causes you to keep interacting with the platform and if you have a basic bitch monkey brain that needs to be stimulated with "bad" content to stay engaged then that's what it's going to show you.

>>45242 There is always a basic selection of content to be shown to people who haven't clicked enough to develop a profile. I'm sure there's lots of propaganda in that content but watching even a dozen videos unrelated to that propaganda should be sufficient to avoid being shown it. Certain people really want to believe that there's some massive conspiracy behind why social media shows them what it shows them, that these companies exist not to make money but as propaganda outlets, but the reality is that their ultimate goal is profit and if you consistently refuse to engage with "propaganda", you'll stop being shown it. There is no political content of any kind on my youtube.

>>45248 my argument is the baseline mandatory propaganda never disappears. And they are making money, obviously they get paid to promote propaganda nobody wants to see. YT hat the pscore fiasco where people found scores in the sites source code, score showed yt was pushing old media channels with low activity above multi-million subscriber channels. The only valid explanation is they got paid to rig the ranking.

>>45251 Do you just not want to click "Do not recommend channel"?

>>45251 >my argument is the baseline mandatory propaganda never disappears. That's fine but as I keep saying, it literally has disappeared for me. Out of curiosity, I just now went and scrolled through a couple hundred videos on my home page. Every video was directly related to my interests and videos I've watched previously. Not a single one was political or propaganda of any kind. If you see those types of videos, it's because you've taught the algorithm that showing them to you is an effective way of keeping you engaged.

>>45255 And Youtube provides him an option to block said recommendations.

>>45255 >has disappeared for me It was worse a few years ago, they're not as aggressive with the culture war soykaf right now