Lately I've been seeing many more people reading books in public.
Yesterday, 5 books on one bus.
Newspapers and magazines stay losing. Zero zero.
EBook readers occasional.
Is it some performative fad?
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
36 points (100.0% liked)
chat
8550 readers
275 users here now
Chat is a text only community for casual conversation, please keep shitposting to the absolute minimum. This is intended to be a separate space from c/chapotraphouse or the daily megathread. Chat does this by being a long-form community where topics will remain from day to day unlike the megathread, and it is distinct from c/chapotraphouse in that we ask you to engage in this community in a genuine way. Please keep shitposting, bits, and irony to a minimum.
As with all communities posts need to abide by the code of conduct, additionally moderators will remove any posts or comments deemed to be inappropriate.
Thank you and happy chatting!
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Nah.
A lot of people are realising that all they do is look at their phones and have started to actively seek out other things to do. It's a good step and I strongly recommend it. Even if you're not replacing phone use with something productive, just disconnecting is clearly helping people. Buy a DVD player and hit up thrift stores for some movies or TV box sets, read a childhood favourite book, play a video game that isnt connected to the internet. Its great.
I read The Vegetarian recently. And some Mao.
Do you think nonstop barrages of ads and AI slop have something to do with this? People doomscroll on their phones because it is easy and convenient, but when it is just a frustrating nightmare of meaningless slop it probably makes people want to do literally anything else.
I think its a mix of several things. Mostly that you spend an hour on the internet and feel worse afterwards. The internet used to be something you looked forward to using
Yeah, there's a reason Hexbear is basically 90% of my internet usage these days, this is the only place I know that feels like the "old internet"
I don't think it's like the old internet. It's just a good part of the new internet. There was never anyplace like this before.
That's true. There's parts of it that remind me a lot of old forums I used to be a part of, but there's a lot of new stuff that didn't exist back then as well.