Attention

Attention and information diet: doomscrolling, feeds reshaping minds, focus sovereignty

A topic in the tpot Community Archive, drawn from 5,790 posts.

Trusted voices in Attention

Ordered by the trust Attention's own network concentrates on each poster, most first.

  1. visakanv — trusted by 183 posters here
  2. QiaochuYuan — trusted by 158 posters here
  3. nosilverv — trusted by 141 posters here
  4. RichDecibels — trusted by 110 posters here
  5. m_ashcroft — trusted by 103 posters here
  6. AskYatharth — trusted by 94 posters here
  7. eshear — trusted by 118 posters here
  8. eigenrobot — trusted by 93 posters here
  9. the_wilderless — trusted by 95 posters here
  10. DefenderOfBasic — trusted by 92 posters here
  11. TylerAlterman — trusted by 90 posters here
  12. goblinodds — trusted by 75 posters here

Top posts in Attention

Ordered by the recorded like count from the source corpus; a like is not an endorsement.

  1. i do not have anything useful or valuable to report back to you after having spent half a year off twitter. the flip side of insulating myself from a million random psychic influences was… (QiaochuYuan) — 60 likes
  2. so about half the reason i stopped using twitter is b/c after reading scattered minds i decided i didn't want a million random psychic influences on my mind all the time. i don't intend for this to… (QiaochuYuan) — 53 likes
  3. I am absolutely begging you to read this quote and then have a long think about how you use twitter https://t.co/rjWmjV62dE (PrinceVogel) — 51 likes
  4. we fucked up when we switched from excellent metaphors like web-surfing and hyperlinking and internet exploring and netscape navigating. We were voyagers. Now yall doomscroll. wtf is that. If you’re… (visakanv) — 40 likes
  5. have you seen this triangle? i stared at this dozens of times. it took me five years to realise https://t.co/faOYAeycLt (AskYatharth) — 40 likes
  6. the flattening of attention metrics is something that seems to trip up even the most thoughtful of people 1 follow or view from the right person is worth 10,000 casual randos, maybe 100k. this is… (visakanv) — 37 likes
  7. Twitter is like the strangest lottery in the world: you spend hours doomscrolling and then, every once in a while, there's some post so insightful it reorganizes the last 5 years of your life for you (nosilverv) — 37 likes
  8. We talk a lot about the general grey fog of modernity that saps aliveness and all that, but The sniper-precise anti-eros lasers are fucking impressive too So many funnels for finding *exactly* what… (the_wilderless) — 36 likes
  9. a thing that took me 5+ years to learn, maybe closer to 10 years – and I resisted it for a long time – is something very foundational about attention sovereignty. basically you begin with the… (visakanv) — 35 likes
  10. getting very tired of anything that smells like insight porn. i don’t wanna read it and i don’t wanna write it. it’s time for insight fucking (QiaochuYuan) — 33 likes
  11. each year I spend on the internet as an extremely online person makes me happier, more relaxed, more grateful, more excited, etc. they should study me in a lab tbh (visakanv) — 33 likes
  12. i hate to admit this but i dont really love tweeting the way i used to. sometimes i write out a good tweet and just delete it anyway because i just dont feel like it anymore. i'd mostly rather be… (visakanv) — 33 likes
  13. day 17 of no porn, no TV, no movies, and no video games and i can feel my long-atrophied imagination coming back to life (QiaochuYuan) — 28 likes
  14. If there’s something taking over your timeline that is bad for you or makes you dislike others: don’t engage, mute keywords, mute ppl who won’t stop talking about it. you control your information… (eshear) — 28 likes
  15. Introducing Umbral, a new certification available for devices. Umbral devices have no lights, no screens, no chimes or noises. The device equivalent of organic food. Look for Umbral devices for your… (eshear) — 28 likes
  16. fr it’s been STRIKING me lately how many of the sounds I hear in a given day are sounds that were specifically chosen because they put the human body in a state of panic-coded alert attentiveness… (the_wilderless) — 27 likes
  17. reminder for the new year: replying to stuff you think is bad will only show you more of it, this is true on basically all the apps. focus on what you want to see more of and scroll past what you… (visakanv) — 27 likes
  18. I unfollowed about 200 "spiritual" accounts and started following a bunch of regular moms and dads just posting about their families, and my timeline is probably 3x wiser and more loving now (vividvoid) — 27 likes
  19. you know how you look at the clock in the middle of a chess game and you're like "what? i'm two minutes down on my opponent? how?? when did that happen???" that can happen irl too. you stop paying… (mechanical_monk) — 26 likes
  20. i know “addiction” is the mainstream, andrew huberman, overton window frame for our relationship with our phones, but it so impoverished humans have a need for trance. phones offer that. humans have… (AskYatharth) — 26 likes
  21. we can remake the republic of letters. we have the technology. one of the most important things to do is to unlearn the fixation on “average reader”. you want to reach 0.1% of exceptional readers… (visakanv) — 26 likes
  22. For many people thinking is an addiction. Many things go better when you just turn your brain off. And if you're wondering whether you might be addicted to thinking.. just consider you're on a… (nosilverv) — 26 likes
  23. just logged into facebook... whoa, it's like walking into the ruins of ancient civilization https://t.co/Toiwe50Pfz (visakanv) — 26 likes
  24. they don't tell you when you sign up for the internet that you're learning to notice, harmonize with, and participate constructively in a self-organizing, emergent collective consciousness at the… (tasshinfogleman) — 25 likes
  25. some of yall should reduce your twitter usage by ~98% and instead read 100 good books and write 500,000 words of introspective journalling and then you can return with real textual finesse (visakanv) — 25 likes
  26. this thread has made me realise that I have a background fear of someone doing a similarly hostile thread about my work / being it’s scary being so ‘public’ and witnessed by a vast number of eyes… (m_ashcroft) — 25 likes
  27. even during Baghdad’s golden age, thinkerbros grumbled that the public preferred food bloggers: “If you write about fish and vegetables, you garner much merit in the public’s eyes, but if you… (visakanv) — 25 likes
  28. One of the most powerful changes Twitter could make is creating an "old" feed which tries to show you ancient tweets you might like. Obviously, news and discourse ages, but plenty of art ideas,… (PrinceVogel) — 25 likes
  29. This is your reminder to turn off self-view entirely during video calls. Why would you voluntarily receive 1d4 psychic damage per round? (eshear) — 25 likes
  30. there's actually something terrible about information being easily obtainable. in grad school i used to download textbooks from libgen and never read them, basically e-hoarding. universal… (QiaochuYuan) — 25 likes
  31. It might ruin the joke sometimes, but I would appreciate a version of trending on this app that featured the patient-zero tweet for whatever nonsense is currently trending. Like when everyone is… (eshear) — 24 likes
  32. is fiction a superstimulus? https://t.co/DCax99XupD (voooooogel) — 24 likes
  33. the year is 2038. "meditation" has become the catch-all term for not looking at a screen. gen alpha influencers tout the benefits of "meditating" for 5 minutes a day. on the subreddit they discuss… (QiaochuYuan) — 23 likes
  34. collecting notes on what seems to be an emerging story of animals being onboarded onto our superstimuli https://t.co/4xWC04Vjsv (visakanv) — 23 likes
  35. here I made you a demonstration of how to farm engagement on twitter dot com https://t.co/GtXwYkjHgG (RichDecibels) — 23 likes
  36. from time to time I’m reminded that the Internet has ruined me https://t.co/HsCrCgylJk (visakanv) — 23 likes
  37. chattin with some friends who Get It about how so many people are so unserious, so absent, so distracted, so caught up in past hallucinations... that social reality ends up bending for anybody who's… (visakanv) — 23 likes
  38. Twitter Idea: set a maximum likes per post on the For You recommender. Anything more than 5k-10k likes is almost guaranteed to be engagement bait trash. (eshear) — 23 likes
  39. hey you’re probably looking at your phone right now. that’s cool you might feel quite stressed though if you look at your phone while widening your peripheral vision and noticing the sounds in your… (m_ashcroft) — 22 likes
  40. just realized that you can quote-reply ANYBODY on tiktok, not just people from your own replies. Bout to become a tiktok fiend https://t.co/xyzpt3v5fp (visakanv) — 22 likes
  41. Taking a break from poasting for a while. I'll still do gm and gn tweets but I'm going to focus inward for a while and stay off the TL. Not sure how long, maybe a few days, maybe longer. I love you.… (vividvoid) — 21 likes
  42. it’s not free money jfc doesn’t anybody know how to reason about second-order effects around here? the price of signing up for elonbux is intensifying the pull that writing clickbait has on your… (QiaochuYuan) — 21 likes
  43. just one more piece of knowledge bro i swear bro that's the one that will make all the difference please bro i stg bro the next item of knowledge that's what's gna change everything i sear bro… (nosilverv) — 21 likes
  44. reminder that we live in a hostile information environment under routine circumstances, and with something like this happening it's kicked into deathcon 3 maintain sangfroid and let other people… (eigenrobot) — 21 likes
  45. when i come back i may decide to only tweet and read notifications and just never or almost never read the timeline. whatever's going on there if it's really important someone will tell me some… (QiaochuYuan) — 21 likes
  46. woof almost got baited into discourse twice by reading For You. have to get those defensive instincts back (QiaochuYuan) — 21 likes
  47. the scariest thing about your work being all online and computers is that it doesn't feel real, doesn't feel substant, doesn't impact the people around you directly except for when money is made (exgenesis) — 21 likes
  48. putting a smartphone in everyone's hands set off the largest seismic activity in the history of humanity's collective nervous system. it's still ongoing and we are still dealing with the absolute… (visakanv) — 20 likes
  49. You haven't lost the ability to read books. You can sit long enough to meditate. You're not addicted to screens. But you HAVE been overstimulated for a long time. Take a cpl weeks off and your old… (vividvoid) — 20 likes
  50. me: wow, resting the awareness in the body is so peaceful, so safe, so nourishing me 15 minutes earlier: i absolutely refuse to stop scrolling the internet in order to rest my awareness in the body (danielbrottman) — 20 likes

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