About REDDIT NO MORE

Reddit, books, and games

I once played a very good game, full of ideas. But I never found another like it, so decided to make my own. I will fill it with ideas from books. But coding the game us exhausting. So I relax by reading Reddit. Or at least I did.

I slowly realised that Reddit, like all social media, is neither relaxing nor informative. It is designed not to inform but to to make money for advertisers. Regardless of its intentions, to succeed it must create addicts who lack critical skills. That is, it must create an ever greater noise of confusion, to attract people and not give them time to think, so they can be persuaded by the next advertiser.

Therefore a person would be more relaxed and better informed by leaving social media, and instead reading old books. So now, whenever I need time to relax, I open some old book and make notes that might be useful in my game. Thanks to project Gutenberg there is no shortage of old books to hand.

The day this blog began

This all began when my latest post to Reddit was deleted. Along with the graphic I had carefully prepared to illustrate my thesis. Some mindless algorithm counted that my title had four words in common with another post. The algorithm therefore decided that my post was a duplicate. The automated reply specifically said I could NOT appeal to the mods, and strongly hinted that I had not read the rules. I had of course read the rules thoroughly, but the automated response had not: how could it? It was simply an algorithm that for comparing key words. It had no understanding of what those words mean. And why should Reddit care anyway? Millions of people are writing material for free. Why should Reddit care about any one of those posts?

This was not the first time a carefully thought out post was deleted by Reddit without thought. And it was not the first time I realised "this machine does not care - why am I writing this stuff?" Sometimes a carefully considered post would get through, and get almost no response. While mindless grunt type replies get plenty of upvotes. Then another time I re-posted a cute animal picture (can't recall why) and got thousands of upvotes. I begin to detect a pattern.

Reddit of course is merely one of many social media platforms. And as far as I can tell, the others are generally worse. So what is going on? Why do we post? Why do we read?

Social media = machines that eats brains

In the famous words of Mark Zuckerberg (early messages leaked to Business Insider, published May 13, 2010)

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? 

Zuck: People just submitted it. 

Zuck: I don't know why. 

Zuck: They "trust me" 

Zuck: Dumb fucks

Reddit is a machine that eats human time. Why do I continue to feed it?

Social media has nothing to offer

Yes I know the answer. "Find a subreddit that suits your tastes." I did. I started a sub on the topic of idealism, the idea that drives me. I think it got two subscribers. I found another sub on the topic of panpsychism, another of my driving passions. It was similarly almost dead. Same goes for the words of hunter gatherers: nobody cares. Or the writing (not the art) of Jack Kirby. Nobody is interested.

There is also the issue that, being mildly autistic, I have no interest in creating and promoting social groups. Quite the opposite! It exhausts and repels me. I so have one good friend (my wife) and that is all I need. I also have a loving family who will probably email me if there is a war or pandemic I should know about. That is all the social networking I need or want.

I also know three people on Facebook who have expertise in Jack Kirby's writing. So I stay on Facebook to see what they say. But even here I wonder if that is wise. By focusing on too many "hobbies" at once, I don't have time to do any of them well. Any hobby that needs social media is a hobby that feeds the machine more than it feeds the humans. One day I may drop the Kirby hobby too, to focus on my original research and my game. We shall see.

How social media hooks us

So why did I ever waste time on social media? Why not do something useful? Because doing useful things takes a lot of mental effort. I have a day job. I have responsibilities. So I am often mentally  exhausted. Social media gives the illusion that you might learn something useful with minimum effort. But that is an illusion. The reality is as I have said: social media are machines that eat human time. They sell that time to advertisers, or Russian trolls, or anyone else who wants to use human minds as food. Yes, they eat human minds. They are zombie machines. Brains! Braaaaaainsss! They need the illusion of content to act as bait, in much the same way that a fisherman puts a fake feather on a hook. But when you get close to that content, or to that feather, you find it is not satisfying, but is instead designed to hook you, making it as hard as possible to get away.

The hook used by social media is easy information. Our desire for easy information is strong. But where can we get it, without sending a big red flag, a flag that says "attention all advertisers and trolls, here is a tired and busy brain, weakened and primed for eating" ?

Books do everything social media does

Luckily there is a source of easy information that does everything social media does, but without the predator at the end of the hook. This source of easy information is called "old books". Even if old books were designed as propaganda,  all their owners are now dead. And because they are fine tuned to the needs of the past, they cannot be read mindlessly: they trip your brain into working from time to time. So for example the Bible might still be used as propaganda, but you can always find passages to contradict whatever is said now.

If you are not autistic and you have a deep need for social networking, books can help here as well. Find  asocial network based on books, and you have a social network that rewards thought and allows people to disagree. That is healthy.

And so, this blog

From now on (Monday 14 April 2020) whenever I am tired, and feel tempted to browse Reddit, I will browse a book instead. And if I have my laptop, I will blog. Badly. "Badly" is important, because the whole point of social media is that you use it when your brain is tired.  I will skip chapters and spoil endings and completely miss the point. Just like on Reddit. But at least I might learn something. Something real, not just some machine algorithm based hook.

Mostly these will be old books (from around 1900 or before, i.e. copyright free), in case I want to use them in a game I am making. And I will focus on stuff that is easy to add to a game. So if it fits the "click here, something happens" model I get interested. Poetry and nuance, not so much.

Yes, I get the irony. I don't want to be slave to a machine, so I let a machine of my own making determine how I read. But this just hints at the bigger picture: writing itself is a form of dumbing down, and coding is simply writing on steroids. Socrates was correct: writing is bad. But if we want to survive in the modern world we have to use it. Which raises some even more profound questions about right and wrong. But in the final analysis the world is a social network, so we cannot move faster than the people around is, so for the time being "old books" are the best compromise between "part of a machine" and nature.

About the numbering

If this "no more Reddit" thing is to work, it has to be just as easy as reading Reddit. So I might start any book at any point, change books when I lose interest, and so on. So I will number each book to keep track. The numbers only mean "this is the same book" and is merely the order in which I happen to read them.

About superficiality

I won't be analysing the Hebrew or pointing out that their concept of God actually referred to logic, and how the nonsense "two creations" theory is disproven by the Enuma Elis, etc. I will read each book superficially, as if it was an adventure game played by a ten year old child.

Enough writing.

Let's start reading books badly!