jtgi

why does reading / listening to a book almost never have regretted user minutes and social media does?

for me its because its easy to stop reading. if i can't pay attention or its boring its natural to stop. there's nothing pulling me or dragging me back, its an active process. with social its more passive: you have the world's most potent memetic content surfaced and even autoplayed to keep you going well past when you might have stopped.

the feeling of regretted life minutes is familiar to me, its the same feeling as losing more than you can afford gambling, having bad sex, or doing drugs.

memebuilding • prev manifold.xyz, twilio.com

was thinking about this recently through the opposite lens - what has "meaningful user minutes"? i realized I couldn't really name a podcast episode or tiktok that had a meaningful impact on me, but many movies, songs, even youtube videos had. I think part of it is how long labore to  make the thing you consume. 

and social media is countless relatively low effort, unmemorable content

agree — social media tends to be short, shallow, lossy, temporal, and ephemeral. The half life is too short to justify anything else.

Other mediums like books trend the opposite way.