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Stephan
@stephancill
Is it possible for social media to solve boredom without rotting our brains?
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Ryan J. Shaw
@rjs
Yes it's possible, but the economics aren't in its favor. High effort content doesn't induce as much brain rot, but produces a dopamine hit for a smaller range of people vs. low effort content. Low effort content is more likely to result in brain rot. Low effort content is cheaper to produce. => we should expect to see more low effort content than high effort content, and therefore more brain rot
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Stephan
@stephancill
That’s a fair assessment. How big of a difference does the quality of the content make if you’re consuming hours of it every day? (I get the feeling that it depends on the variation of the content i.e. going deep on a single topic enriches your brain while lots of surface level content on various topics rots it)
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Ryan J. Shaw
@rjs
Interesting, I was implicitly associating higher effort => more depth => higher quality. But I think you're saying higher effort => higher quality => but not necessarily more depth? And surface level coverage produces more brain rot than deep coverage. I think you're right, because there's a lot of "high (superficial) quality" content out there where the higher (production) quality is designed to stimulate more dopamine by making people think they're watching something with high (intellectual) quality, while in reality it's superficial. That being said, that makes the equation even less in favor of low brain rot content because we now have a mid range of brainrot occupying our global effort expenditure: Low effort producers => high brainrot content High (superficial) effort producers => mid brainrot content High (intellectual) effort producers => low brainrot content This is getting depressing, think I'll stop 😭
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Stephan
@stephancill
And the worst part is that people think they are being productive by consuming the mid brain rot 💀 (It’s me, I’m people)
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Ryan J. Shaw
@rjs
I just spent the last 20min on HN reading more stuff about OceanGate, which will be really useful one day at a braai when the topic comes up 👍
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Stephan
@stephancill
😁🤝
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