[mordymoop]

Social media is addictive in roughly the same sense that not punching yourself in the face is addictive. The "dopamine hit" aspect is grossly oversold. Social media is distraction from suffering. Most addictive behavior is, but social media is almost entirely distraction from suffering.

If you don't do something about the background suffering that's leading you to the distraction, you'll just fill that void with something else.

[beshrkayali]

Dozens of studies show the opposite of what you're saying. Social media companies do every tick in the book, and then some, to get people addicted. In certain cases what you're saying is true, but it might as well be the other way around for the rest.

[mordymoop]

Let's say for the sake of argument that I was being hyperbolic with my "punching yourself in the face" statement. Let's say you are addicted to social media, and you use it for 5 hours a day. Let's say I take away your phone. For a week. You will probably feel gradually diminishing impulses to look at your phone, which will eventually subside almost entirely within a handful of days. You will not experience withdrawals. You will not lose sleep. You will (probably) not try to scam somebody else out of their phone. If I hand you your phone back after a week, there's a good chance you might just delete the social media apps off the phone yourself, having realized how much time you were wasting.

In other words, if the social media companies are doing every trick in the book, it's not really amounting to much. If you were spending 5 hours a day on Facebook, it probably had a lot more to do with the general shape of your life and opportunities for actualization and socialization, than it had to do with intermittent reinforcement schedules.

And fundamentally what I'm saying is correct: it is mundane daily suffering that creates the void filled by social media and other distractive addictions, giving them a foothold in your life. This is orthogonal to any claims about whether social media is "actually" "addictive".

[beshrkayali]

I think you're still generalizing based on how you feel, instead of analysing this objectively. I quit a few years ago and for the most part I didn't even notice after a month. But I've seen friends get offended and get into arguments over likes, and teens online cry and go through withdrawal-like symptoms over losing followers. The full effects of this stuff is yet to come with young gen.

And no, it's not like anything physically addictive of course, but it still has a hold on some, and the patterns are similar to other non-physical addictions.

Edit: And how can you even say conclusively that it's mundane daily suffering that creates the void filled by social media, and not that social media is causing the creation of this void that is leading to mundane daily suffering?