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.
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.
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.
All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.
Really? I find more interesting and valuable content from assorted so-called amateur "user generated" sources than professional outlets that I'm routinely amazed.
Is there a lot of crap out there? Sure. But I don't think the percentage has changed, we just have more of everything and more ways to get it.
I like that. Yes it means I have do more filtering for myself but I'm OK with that. I'd rather have more sources and choices than go back to the equivalent of "you can have nay color you want so long as it's black" days.
HN lets you think you're being smart.
Or not, based on how people respond. Truth is I've come across many people on HN who seem to be in-fact smart.
There's some truth in what you wrote but it's clouded by some sort of world-weariness. The world is so much bigger.
Err.
You can Google for "http://www.merlinmann.com/better site:news.ycombinator.com" for past discussions and thoughts.
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.
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.
Just something to consider.
He writes a ton of book reviews on his blog (marginal-revolution.com), but half the time the review is "I probably won't be finishing this one."
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.
Merlin wanted to stop consuming and producing half-baked ideas and content, and that is his call.
