Sifting

I sometimes find myself sifting detritus from a (digital) stream. That means browsing Reddit, Twitter, a Discord, and collecting links back to the things I saw and thought were interesting. I can spend hours on this at a time.

The odd thing is that I rarely ever refer back to those things. I will look at the quickest to parse things – images, short videos, single tweets – and the rest I mostly never revisit. While the process can be mildly entertaining, it seems the product is mostly useless.

So why insert the collecting or sifting step? Why collect so many links when I won't refer back to most of them? The pattern looks a lot like collector's fallacy or FOMO, but that doesn't feel quite right.

Something to think about.