Ask HN: Do you think the internet changed how people seek self worth? - mrwnmonm
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jlukecarlson
Yes definitely. Succinctly, its converted intangible social norms into
concrete numbers that people can compare and fret over.

Before, popularity could be described as a general sense of "people enjoy
being around you". You could conceivably say that one person was more popular
than another but that would be pretty subjective. Now it can be quantified
directly in terms of number of followers or likes on a message.

I doubt people used to worry so much about whether they had 97 acquaintances
who valued what they say vs having 102. Now those are very real worries for
some people who regularly engage with social media and web forums.

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themodelplumber
Sure. A few positive ways it's changed how people seek self worth:

\- We have more community options that match our individual psychology. This
means we can verify our self worth with lower risk of being labeled harshly
(e.g. weird, toxic) or ignored (irrelevant input).

\- We have more communication methods that allow a variety of psychological
distances. You know that feeling when you accidentally start a video chat with
your mom, even though you meant to text? The array of communications tools
that even makes that feeling possible is actually a really clever new
relationship-energy-saver. It allows you and mom (or whoever) to find a win-
win communications setting more easily. This is likely to have positive
ramifications for your sense of self worth, especially as a delta vs. "either
you call my phone and do this my way, or we don't do this relationship".
Everyone is invited, encouraged to be more flexible in communications.

\- We have more tags and categories and subreddits and wikis than ever before.
Discrete sets of these things can be viewed as patterns of identity, which
means it is way more likely for someone to feel like they found a positive
sense of their "worth" in the form of a set of those things that matches their
past experience, i.e. who they are.

A few negative ways:

\- A community or individual's stuff can be exposed all at once--hypertext and
search give no assurance of linear access to anything. So some people will go
digging through the garbage, even on themselves, without putting things into
context. So direct access robs linear/big-picture context of some due credit.

\- Likewise, if the in-door says "google me / my friend / that person," the
out door says "wipe me off the net completely, here's my credit card." There's
still a risk that direct access sends marginalized people running, screaming
away from the net really fast. And that's a painful experience.

\- And related, they may return as anonymous cowards, in which case they may
come across real people, and get into worth-impacting conversations because
they can't reveal their ID, maybe even end up being doxxed or just feeling
frustrated that they're in this limbo-like zone.

Eh, not all great thoughts but some thoughts. :-)

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tartoran
It made it easier for likeminded people to communicate and even exist in some
cases: people with odd hobbies. It also creates these type of phenomena that
were not possible before in the pre-internet era: the rise of the internet
celebrity with thousands, hundreds and millions of followers. Unfortunately,
narcisistic tendencies have also shot through the roof - a lot of young people
dream of having followers online, that says a lot about seeking self worth

