1659447091Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial
We all know they're addictive, they're designed to be addictive, and they're very, very harmful, to both adults and children. The individuals who are profiting from the harm are clearly identifiable. And that harm directly targets children. That this is allowed to continue is a symptom of a sick society.
> and they're very, very harmful, to both adults and children.
And society as a whole. Even if you don't participate you don't escape the blast radius of the harm they've caused over the past 10-15 years.
My wife and I parental lock each other’s iPhones. I have social media but have to go to my PC to check it. This friction makes a world of difference.
I was astounded hanging out with my friends in person last weekend how every one of them at some point pulled out their phone mid conversation to watch TikTok, or Wordle, or whatever. They thought I was the weird one when I mentioned all social media sites and apps are blocked on my phone. We had an overall good time but these moments stuck out.
The way we do this is just we set a passcode for the others phone but I configure my own settings and she hers. This has been available and worked for us for nearly a decade.
> I was astounded hanging out with my friends in person last weekend how every one of them at some point pulled out their phone mid conversation to watch TikTok, or Wordle, or whatever.
To kill time, sometimes I watch those random "America's Funniest Videos" type videos where it's some random family at home and something funny/weird/etc. happens. I've started noticing that in almost all of them now, everyone is just sitting around staring at a phone. Sometimes an entire family will be in the living room, three on a couch, each in their own little world.
Even my family does the same. It's a very very hard habit to break. Like smoking, except anti-social where smoking was at least social.
I've never felt the need for parental controls, I just refuse to open those sites or install the related apps. Are they really such a draw for you?
At one point I also had a few of them filtered at the DNS level at home, not to restrict my access but rather to defeat any embedded third party requests that might escape my browser filtering.
Social media feeds are designed to be slot machines. Each scroll is a pull. You may or may not get something you actually want. You can't predict what's coming up next, so you just keep mindlessly scrolling.
It's not just the scrolling, the posting side too. They all randomly boost one of your posts so suddenly tons of feedback (especially noticable when I tried threads) and then you try to get that back again. The uncertainty keeps you at it
Related: TikTok has a "heating" feature that can make a video radically more popular: https://archive.is/8YYcH
Reminds me of soda. Why the hell liquid poison is allowed to exist turns my stomach. You could fill libraries with data linking it to a myriad illnesses and causes of death. Yet they are even allowed to juke it with caffeine for no other reason than to up the addiction level. Like... what are we doing here.
>The verdict has forced those inside the companies to grapple with the fact that many outsiders do not view them as favourably as they have come to view themselves.
I'm not sure this rings true to me. Meta has to know that millenials and younger are giving up on their platforms, they have endless internal data showing it, right? If anything they are just afraid of endless litigation while they are struggling to gain an AI foothold.
> Meta has to know that millenials and younger are giving up on their platforms, they have endless internal data showing it, right?
Do you have a source for that? I don't think it's true when looking at global Meta numbers across _all_ Meta social platforms (FB+Instagram+Threads) combined.
> Meta has to know that millenials and younger are giving up on their platforms, they have endless internal data showing it, right?
If that were true, they would be going somewhere and that somewhere would be visible. The last "new" thing that got any traction was TikTok and that is almost 10 years old at this point.
For a while, the Fediverse stuff (specifically Bluesky) seemed to be getting some traction, but apparently the Fediverse wasn't ready for the influx and people have started leaching back.
The social media sites have things pretty well carved up between them. If you want competition that doesn't suck as bad, you have to break them up.
> Meta has to know that millenials and younger are giving up on their platforms, they have endless internal data showing it, right?
Facebook is dwindling, but Instagram is still thriving.
I hate that they own it. The case for antitrust is less than in the case of Whatsapp (though with Instagram Zuckerberg had to hasily backpedal in an email, probably because his lawyer furiously told him not to say certain things about buying up the competition) but they tried merging all the backend systems for messaging once
Instagram doesn't make Zuckerberg "successful". He's a black hat that deserves jail
I have no love for social media, but I also really don't like the idea of the government regulating how apps are designed, or trying to circumnavigate online privacy to "protect children" which where I see this whole thing going.
On another note, personally I'm not sure I buy the "addictive" argument with social media, maybe its just me but I find social media pretty boring, but I think for a lot of younger people it is something that fills a need for meaning and connection to the world that has been diminished due to a loss of community in our society (which does predate social media).
It's wild to me how many people are willing to throw basic civil liberties overboard because they don't like the other guys.
Today's media circus is about addictive social media. Before that it was video games and rock music and D&D clubs. Before that it the Satanic panic of the 80s, gay 'recruitment', Soviet spies. Much before that it was witches and heretics. And so on and so on, forever.
If you have a choice, maybe don't be part of the pitchfork wielding mob? The people with the pitchforks always think they're warriors of justice. They generally aren't. They just tend to make everything worse.
(Plus the economic motivations are so clear here - traditional media hate social media because social media ate the traditional media's cosy entrenched profits, so now social media are to blame for Russia, for Trump, for anxious teenagers... and must immediately be regulated out of existence)
At some point we limit your freedom of expression to do things like dump toxic waste up river. This ought to be no different. The poisoning of the american mind for profit.
Toxic waste is harmful to everyone all the time, social media is maybe harmful to some people some of the time, kinda like peanuts, should we ban peanuts? I'll further add that social media is beneficial to many people as well.
Perhaps but then you get stuff like this https://bradfrost.com/blog/post/facebook-you-needy-sonofabit...
They need to play fair or GTFO
Facebook, You Needy Sonofabitch
Several months ago, I turned off notifications from Facebook on my phone. Last week, I went ahead and removed the Facebook app from my phone. Now, I genuinely enjoy Facebook. I use it for keeping up with with my family and my IRL friends, who are spread out all over the world. (The questions I as
What would be an actually good faith way of regulating this short of banning it for children (which I’d think is fine). How do you define what is too addictive?
At any given time it seems like whatever is defined as the most addictive is just the one with most market share? For me personally I think most addictive is actually hacker news (god bless you all)