[ken]

Facebook is a city. It's full of zany characters, and beautiful art, and people crying for attention for their cause, and not much privacy. The longer I live in a city, the more of a jerk I find myself becoming, and if I stay too long, I feel bad. Lots of people say they've had enough and want to go live in a cabin in the woods. Few actually do.

This is how society has worked for thousands of years. Where some people go and find success, others will follow. It's a positive feedback loop. In hindsight, did we really think the virtual world would scale less well than the physical one?

Social media is terrible, and also great. The worst thing I can say about it is perhaps: it's easy. And like anything in modern life that's easy, it brings out the worst in us. We've reached the point where large swaths of people can spend all day doing easy, nonproductive things, and it's not good for the individual or society. We want things to be easy, but we don't do well when they are.

[coldtea]

>Facebook is a city. It's full of zany characters, and beautiful art

I'd say it's the last place one would (or should) look for "beautiful art"...

[ken]

All the artists I know use it. That's the only reason I started using it. But then, I hang out with artists, and I work in the arts. Like any city, it's full of every subculture you can imagine. The city I know is not the same as the city you know.

[wutbrodo]

It always amazes me how narrow a view of the world some have, as if no experience but theirs could exist and platforms with literal billions of people on them couldn't possibly have eg art on them.

[Super_Jambo]

The problem with Facebook (and similar) isn't just that it's easy the problem is it's designed to be addictive in order to scrape data and sell adverts.

It's a honey pot of whatever can be made by frighteningly dedicated amoral money driven software engineers and data scientists. The goal is to make a zero marginal cost product that uses your friends to make content and so entrap you spending time looking at adverts to make facebook money.

We regulate gambling because a certain proportion of the populations mental heuristics can be exploited by it. But we are now seeing incredible effort expended to find more exploits of peoples mental heuristics. Perhaps you are immune to facebook as I am immune to gambling? But it's only a matter of time before all our brains fall victim to something.

[ken]

I think we're saying essentially the same thing, just with different words and from different perspectives.

Being easy is the very problem with addiction. It's not merely spending an excessive amount of time on some activity. People talk about being "addicted" to, say, running marathons, but nobody views that in the same way they do gambling or alcohol addiction.

[jacobush]

First they came for the gambling addicts, and so on.