[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.