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You are right. That feeling of touching a human live wire who is doing something different or new or weird is very good. And there is a lot of that here.
I overstated my case, no doubt. Because looking for live information wires is a big part of the internet.
There is a thing that Adam Smith said about people not only wanting to be loved, but to be lovely. Perhaps this is a better way of putting what I want to get at: I think the main way we feel lovely is to be found lovely by others. And while there may be much iron sharpening of iron on here, at least some good things are made because the maker finds them lovely and wants others to as well (maybe even in the hope that this loveliness will be reflected back upon them).
I know that saying I am here for attention sounds kinda bad, but I don't mean it to be a negative thing. I don't think it is shallow or wrong that people feel good when others admire them nor that such feelings can motivate some people to make interesting things in the world.
As bots take over the internet, I am hopeful that this desire to be found lovely will keep people hungry. Hunger may be our savior.
When the villagers in Seven Samurai ask the old man how they will find samurai to help them he says
Find hungry samurai. Even bears come down from the mountains when they are hungry.
There is a thing that Adam Smith said about people not only wanting to be loved, but to be lovely.
STOP IT! Just when I picked up Russ Roberts' book after sitting like a decade on the bookshelf unread... you, mister, quote his most heavily emphasized line. I now believe the internet is dead and Scoresby is the reincarnation of my personal surveillance agent.
Yes, absolutely. I don't think that feeling lovely, and searching for signal are mutually exclusive, at all. In fact, I'd say they are interdependent: without the love, a search for signal becomes signals intelligence. We're all humans, and of course this is a basic need, unless we're at war.
I'm still not sure about the attention part, but if I frame it as "feedback" then I agree with that, yes. The crappiest thing is of course to put your blood, sweat and tears into something and get zero replies, of any kind. No feedback is the worst outcome in a community.
Disclaimer: I fell asleep on the couch last night with your comment open. Woke up after 30 minutes, closed laptop, went to bed, woke up 4h later, sat on the couch, opened laptop to your comment, fell asleep again despite the red bull I drank. Each time I dreamed about this. So... I may be emotional about it now that I literally slept on it, lol.
I think that personally I am. You see, we may nowadays each have an army of bots that have read every book, article and magic scroll the world has ever produced, and there may even be more than one hidden statement of obscure genius that accidentally got contextually activated in the 500 pages of slop in your conversation with it, and that's nice, but it is not enough to get inspired. It's boring and it doesn't help if you live on the edge. As to my view, a much-more-significant-than-elsewhere portion of stackers actually live on the edge - or jumped right over it. The result is that within our particular community, there is - for me personally - a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than I would get anywhere else right now. I shudder when I recall my X following tab being abhorrent despite limiting my follows and aggressively unfollowing.
For me, the number one reason to be here is therefore the free exchange of information, views, ideas. (Not facts or data! Information!) To discover content you can use without being lead into a never ending journey of disappointment by slop and retardation. To be triggered into processing novel or enhanced ideas, incorporating them into our thinking and adapting to those. This is actually why I came here. Both before creating an account, at that moment, and after, all the way until today. The reason for interacting on SN is therefore not so much getting attention, but testing ideas. Like I am doing now.
Information isn't scarce, I think that it hasn't been for a longer time. But finding the useful information is. I expect that you intrinsically experience this too though? You do a lot of research, after all.
But what I'd pose is truly scarce isn't information or attention: it's useful signal. Threads to unravel. Developments to adapt to. Relevant news. And not needing to waste half one's total useable time and effort on filtering out the rotten stuff.