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.