[blueterminal]

> These apps are absolutely addictive because they were explicitly and intentionally designed to be.

Same goes with fast food, TV shows etc. It's your responsibility to not over-consume anything; and if you have children, teach them to not do that as well. The problem is not with FB, Google etc. The problem (which is over-consumption of everything) is cultural. Blaming some specific corporations is easy but it won't lead to any positive solutions. We desperately need stoicism in the west.

[diob]

Speaking as someone who came from a rather colorful childhood of abuse, I'm wondering what your personal past is? You're assuming so much about the lives that folks lead, and to me it speaks of a lack of empathy for the personal struggles each individual is enduring.

Stoicism will fix things in the west? I assume you mean the USA, but as a person in the USA, I have to say that we are about as stoic as you can get. We lean on personal responsibility for every little thing.

"Oh, you went bankrupt from cancer. Why didn't you plan for that? Don't you know around 50% of folks get that?"

"Oh, you went to college for a useless degree? Why didn't you have someone in your life teach you that was a mistake? Why didn't you reject the counselors in public schools who encouraged you down that path?"

"Oh, you eat too much sugar? Why didn't you reject the industry sponsored studies that downplayed their health effects?"

"Oh, you got covid? Why didn't you stay at home? What do you mean you're an essential worker? Why didn't you take care of your health so you weren't predisposed to it?"

It's not stoicism the west needs, but a dire injection of empathy and community.

[merpnderp]

It's not just an argument about stoicism vs empathy, but freedom vs control. How much paternalism do you want from your politicians? How much control over your daily routine do you want to give some barely accountable millionaire legislator/governor/president who's loyalties are only to you based on how many votes their donors can buy (the rate differs greatly depending on the politician). The more effectively money buys their votes, the less they give a crap about you.

[jessaustin]

We need a better word than "paternalism" for "not inclined to use a pandemic as an excuse to give trillions of dollars to the rich".

[Nasrudith]

Stoicism would be helpful because of how common emotional manipulation is as a vector from sociopaths and how those they manipulate wind up /acting/ almost indistinguishable from sociopaths except they don't even remotely serve their own interests. Look at the Covidiots spreading disease because a politician doesn't want to admit the obvious - that they fucked up big time.

Or the long list of fucking stupid moral panics oriented around children from people trying to get reelected and everything "satanic" which ironically enough many children could have told them was just plain dumb. While empathy would be good emotions alone aren't enough as even "a desire to protect one's offspring" may be twisted horrifically. Community I am deeply skeptical of as a value in itself given how often it winds up something deeply toxic and stupid from acting like dumb herd animals. Sure internal investment would be good but given their record community itself can piss off.

[skummetmaelk]

Good old personal responsibility. It's your responsibility not to walk into traps laid out to catch you.

Why stop people from laying out the traps? They're just trying to make a living, it's perfectly fine!

[afarviral]

Absolutely. Let's lay out traps for the trap layers then, and find a way to do it for a living. You're saying that's fine, so lets do it.

[kbenson]

Except the trap layers are bigger (more money), stronger (good lawyers from that moeny), and there are more of them than you (lots of people and lawyers).

How do you fight that? With a bigger group of people. Since they are so large, that means a nation or state (if you're a big one, as if you're small they probably won't care, that's how big they are).

If there's a pride of man-eating lions roaming about, you don't set out by yourself to fix the problem. That's just an imaginative attempt at suicide. You get a large group of people. That's why regulation is what we need, because that's what it means when you get a really large group of people to impose their will in the modern age.

[skummetmaelk]

Except you don't lay out traps for the trap layers. You make it very clear that if they lay out traps then they will face consequences.

They are the ones acting in bad faith and trying to extract resources from you via subversion.

[blueterminal]

What do you propose to solve this problem besides teaching others to take personal responsibility?

[nschucher]

Maybe we can look for historical examples of how legislation had a positive impact on a widespread harmful habit.

  Early on, the U.S. Congress adopted the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 and the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1969. These laws—

  * Required a health warning on cigarette packages
  * Banned cigarette advertising in the broadcasting media
  * Called for an annual report on the health consequences of smoking

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/history/inde...

[messo]

Some basic rules and regulations would be great :)

This should of course not replace taking personal responsibility, but humans are way to easy to influence / hack to leave it entirely to market forces. Some common ground and basic rules is at the very core of any healthy society or community.

Speed limits, traffic lights and bike lanes creates great conditions for a healthy marketplace. An absence of regulations benefits only the biggest and meanest, and usually ends up creating unsustainable systems that is crushed under it's own weight.

[blueterminal]

> Some basic rules and regulations would be great :)

Any specific ones? I personally can't think of any at all that would work.

[mrow84]

I can see two obvious interpretations of what you might be implying:

1. That, because you are unable to think of rules and regulations that would work, there must not be any.

2. That, in order for anyone to legitimately suggest that something might be worth attempting, they must already have a working solution.

Is it one of those two, or something else?

[smeeth]

Some (including myself) would argue that a repeal of section 230 would go a long way towards solving some of these issues.

A large part of the problem is that social media companies algorithmically serve content to serve their purposes, but are not liable for the consequences of algorithmically served content.

To me, using an algorithm to select what content to show a user is exactly the same thing newspapers do: editorializing. I don't understand why its treated any differently.

[Nasrudith]

Those people who say that about section 230 are better known as either dishonest or complete fucking morons.

The entire mutually exclusive division between platform and publisher is a zombie propaganda lie that won't stay dead.

[anigbrowl]

I personally can't think of any at all that would work.

This rhetorical technique is called 'poisoning the well,' preemptively injecting doubt into whatever follows. The GP gave several examples of regulatory mechanisms that already work to some degree, and an argument for why, but you chose to ignore that completely for some reason.

[kbenson]

The GP gave examples of regulatory mechanisms that work for other situations, but I also am unsure of what specific regulatory mechanism would work well for this, and those examples don't really bring anything to mind, even though I am in favor of a regulatory solution. I think coloring the question as poisoning the well might be a bit premature.

That is, what are traffic lights and safety lanes for social networks? How do we enforce those for private products when generally they are things why apply to our public spaces? A social network is much more of a mall than a public park, so what restraints are we willing to make towards a private property, and what will actually work? I think those are very valid questions, and while the argument from blueterminal may have gotten there in a roundabout way (and in a way that some consider not in good faith), I they are well worth considering in detail.

To me it's blatantly obvious something needs to be done, I'm just not sure what that is, and am slightly afraid we'll implement a fix that if not as bad as the problem, is still much worse than it needs to be unless we consider it carefully.

[mensetmanusman]

Yes, make facebook news feed default to first in / last out, and let users upload community created filtering algorithms so they can decide whether they see certain news/sites etc. or if they just see their grand kid’s picture (and if there are none, they would probably log off of FB quite quickly, which is why FB does not offer this as an option now)

[messo]

@blueterminal: There are many proposed solutions, some better than others. GDPR is a step in the right direction, it should not be easy or trivial to collect huge amounts of data on people. There is no good rational justification for this behavior. Consumer protections is important and should be extended to how algorithms are used. Fine-grained targeting of ads (political or not) should not be allowed, due to the obvious negative consequences for societies. An expert panel could be given the task to make some sensible compromises.

The irony is that such regulations would ultimately benefit the companies that are currently being criticized, making long term survival more likely. Regular people would be better of too, and I would not need to discuss movies like The Social Dilemma on HN.

[rapnie]

Stop people from laying out the traps, and saying it is not really fine. Guess that means regulation and enforcement thereof. Things go both ways, of course. There is a certain level of personal responsibility to teach and take into account.

[blueterminal]

> Stop people from laying out the traps, and saying it is not really fine. Guess that means regulation and enforcement thereof.

What kind of regulations would you impose? Any specifics?

[Nasrudith]

How about stop the hysterical hyperbole of calling speech traps instead?

[jayspell]

Not the original poster - just replying with some ideas...

I would purpose that Google in particular be broken into many different companies. The fact that they own such a large part of mobile, browser, search, video, email, news aggregation, online office products is hugely problematic. I believe one of the issues that was not highlighted is the overall reach of these companies, they focus in on the mobile aspect, but there are huge swathes of data being collected via other means. Search in particular should not have a bias in the autocomplete - search should be agnostic, like Wikipedia. When I search it should show the same results as when you search. Next there should be a requirement that these companies provide access to a users data back to them, along with the analytical output that creates their digital avatar. There should be the ability to FULLY delete the data per a request. Next there should be a requirement that the sites provide ability to utilize their services with browser anonymity enabled. Much of the data leakage is harvested automatically from the mobile device or browser, the ability to slow the trickle of information should be required by law. Perhaps a requirement that a price that an advertiser paid for each ad should show up, and an opportunity for the user to opt-out and pay for the service instead at the same rates in truly anonymized fashion. More extreme options - restrictions on access based on age, we do this for cigarettes and alcohol, perhaps this should be applied to social media as well. Perhaps there should be a throttle on data gathering or hard limits placed on how much data can be pulled in and kept. Require maximum data retention periods on this data to make the models dumber. We have data retention periods set for health data - why not restrict it for social media.

[afarviral]

Time and time again I see it suggested that these "lets be evil" giant companies like Google be split up. I'm coming around to this. They aren't able to be accountable because they are far too giant (not necessarily in the head-count sense) to be influenced by human conscience. They take on a life of their own, unconstrained by their externalities, adapting like DNA, optimizing for their survival at any cost. Force these tech giants to split up, because we agree as a society that they are evil (or at least problematic). The individual people that make up the mini-corps will then have more influence to steer these mini-hydras. What about shareholders?

[TheOtherHobbes]

This is like arguing that the fast food industries, the sugar industry, and the ad industries have no role to play in diabetes because it's your fault you can't control yourself.

Never mind that you will have been exposed to tens of thousands of hours of literal behaviour modification programming. You should somehow magically still have the personal, emotional, and cultural resources to override it. And if you don't - it's your fault.

But curiously it's not the fault of the corporations, because there is no equivalent requirement on them to control themselves, or to take corporate-personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

[blueterminal]

How would you try to help an alcoholic? Would you tell him that it's alcohol producers' who is at fault? Or would you tell him to try and get help? Why would an advice be different for over-consumption of social media, coke, big macs, tv shows, casinos etc.?

[mthoms]

The answer to that is extraordinarily complex, and dependent on the abusers' history and personal circumstance so it's not really answerable here.

Cigarettes might be a more apt analogy IMHO. It's extraordinarily hard to quit, but at least we've come to a point where there is enormous social pressure to do so. And not just for health reasons: it's widely considered an unattractive habit.

Contrast that with the 50's where it was not only accepted by society but considered "glamorous". That's (sort of) where social media is today. Its image needs to go from fun and youthful to gross and harmful in the popular perception (barring that, the entire model needs to be re-invented).

Educating people on the long-term harms is the primary (perhaps only?) way forward at this point. This movie does that very well but it will be a long slog.

I'm not even sure this war can be won, but we must try.

[klyrs]

That's weird framing. The individual needs help, but there are significant regulations on alcohol companies, too. We went too far, by prohibiting it altogether, but we still limit alcohol advertising, we have age limits, etc. None of that is "telling him" to blame the alcohol producers; we need both regulations against harms facilitated by corporations for profit and support for those harmed.

[save_ferris]

> Why would an advice be different for over-consumption of social media, coke, big macs, tv shows, casinos etc.?

Of course, different people deal with these kinds of issues differently, but it's also important to recognize the vast differences between consuming too much alcohol vs consuming too much tv. Firstly, if you've spent any significant amount of time around a recovering alcoholic and discussed the issue openly with them, you realize pretty quickly that it's usually not just a raw craving. A lot of alcoholics drink in response to trauma of various kinds, and your backstory as an alcoholic plays a fairly significant role in how to seek the best recovery strategy. There isn't a one-size-fits-all solution there.

TV is much different for several reasons. First, there's not a universal societal acknowledgement that TV is addictive like alcohol. The US went through prohibition because alcoholism was rampant in society, TV hasn't disrupted society in the same way. That's not to say that TV isn't addictive or capable of being abused, it's simply that TV is much more passive in terms of how it's consumed, and it's higher order effects on people who consume too much. This is also true of social media.

Social media and TV don't usually force people between feeding their families or consuming endlessly the way that alcohol did in the 19th century, but it does encourage us to spend more time on autopilot and less time consciously thinking and being present.

I highly recommend David Foster Wallace's talks on entertainment addiction[0]. He predicted the genesis of a lot of these issues 20 years ago, and his commentary is still so relevant today, years after his death.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoAME7gPBaw

[mikeshank]

There are four trillion bits coming at you, 99% of them are shit

[multiplegeorges]

Not a great comparison, since if alcohol were invented today I'd expect it to be banned or at least much more tightly control. It is incredibly damaging to society and we only tolerate it for historical reasons.

[lentil_soup]

all those examples you listed have restrictions and regulations in many places in addition to services that provide help to the affected. Doesn't have to be one OR the other, can do both

[bonoboTP]

> How would you try to help an alcoholic?

That's a distinct question from "How would you try to reduce the prevalence of alcoholism in your country?".

When considering a particular individual, yes you need to get them medical and therapeutic help, some kind of life coaching/counseling program etc.

When considering the whole population, you do need to think about regulation of selling, advertising, public health campaigns for prevention etc.

Similar with sugary junk food. You can tax it at higher levels, ban advertising to children etc. Be strict on forbidding misleading claims. Perhaps pub highly visible "high sugar content" warnings on the product etc.

Yes, all this stuff is very un-American and too "socialist" I guess, which leaves you with the other option of being the most obese developed nation and having a substantial proportion of people be obese at a level of it becoming a legit disability. Which is fine for most people I guess, because it's not themselves, so who cares about other people anyway.

[otachack]

One of the main issues is regulation. With TV, government was able to regulate the content via FCC. The movie's example to this was Saturday morning cartoons compared to YouTube for Kids. The latter is very much self regulated by Google/YT and parents, rather than government which, given history, has the actual power to curb it. Giving the keys of regulation to the target of it is not the way to get it done. YT in this example will set the main goal to driving their product to further profit over content regulating one way or the other.

I definitely understand your argument of "leave it to the parents" but why add to their ever growing pile of worries? What if they don't know any better b/c of technical illiteracy? This issue of an unregulated media line has been seen and dealt with before yet we're hesitant in doing anything about it.

[Nasrudith]

The reason to be hesistant is /because/ we saw how it was dealt with before! If we had the same godawful most self-righteous prude standards we would be censoring the very concept of LGBT people as "corrupting". It is no accident that acceptance's first step was from unregulated media who slipped through the crack and was able to laboriously crack and pry through the societal bullshit.

Fuck the parents - they should be adults and taking responsibility for their life's direction if they have kids.

[chipotle_coyote]

What "unregulated media" do you feel was responsible for "acceptance's first step"? I'm not an expert on this by any stretch, but I've studied both media history and LGBT issues, and the shows that get cites most often for doing a shocking amount of work in shifting American attitudes toward LGBT folk were, well, regulated media. Specifically, the network sitcoms "Ellen" and "Will & Grace," with earlier tentative steps in "L.A. Law" and, in the late 1970s, "Soap."

While "unregulated media" may have become leading edge in LGBT presentation in the years since, it's also become leading edge in reactionary backlash, from Fox to internet media to the right-wing propaganda pushed by Sinclair Broadcasting to their local TV stations -- which in many markets they wouldn't have been able to own if local TV markets were still more tightly regulated.

I'm not suggesting regulation is a failsafe panacea by any stretch -- I'm just suggesting that deregulation isn't, either. There is probably a balance to be struck, and it is not at all clear to me that the balance we have now is correct.

[Nasrudith]

They are the Johnny come lates - look at the various zines and very small newspapers published way back when homosexuality was actively illegal for one and would have been called obscene material but regulation thankfully couldn't be meaningful. Although niche they certainly had a role in growing networks of allies.

On the other end of the contact Internet contact is a later one and although nothing concrete it seems very non-coincidental that generations where straight people could watch gay or lesbian porn, and fanfics being ubiquitous enough that Draco and Harry ships were well known even among people who never read a single one due to lack of interestm

The "balance" is a golden mean fallacy. Best illustrated by a rhetorical question that sounds like a death threat: Is there a balance to be struck between you being alive and unharmed and stone dead?

[chipotle_coyote]

I'm not sure we're using "balance" in the same way, precisely; I don't mean "balance" in the "present both sides of every issue as if they're equal," I mean that there's a continuum of regulatory options in a given field and that "less regulation" is not always the correct direction. (Not that regulation is really a spectrum, for that matter, as you could conceivably have high levels regulation in a given field that's still regulating badly.)

So, to answer that last rhetorical question with the way I'm intending "balance" to be used: I'm not at all opposed to regulations in food safety, wiring standards, water treatment, etc., that shift the balance of likely outcomes for me toward "alive and unharmed" and away from "stone dead." :)

[TeaDrunk]

This is an utterly unscientific and healthcare ignorant view on the level of "spirits cause tuberculosis". Science and medicine have long past moved from the model of personal responsibility in treating addiction behavior. We now know that a wide variety of factors completely out of control of the user, such as trauma in childhood, genetic influence, isolation, depression, etc. contribute to someone's tendency to become addicted to something.

Additionally, we also know that it is possible to make something addictive by spacing out dopamine hits in such a way that can be designed to cause a person to pursue this over other necessary duties. Pairing this with people who are more vulnerable to addiction through no factors they could've possibly controlled essentially takes advantage of people.

[godelski]

I think this argument is odd. You are literally arguing that every individual should have more self control than can be overcome by a team of experts whose job it is to defeat your control. I'm sorry, but we're just out matched.

[II2II]

One way of promoting personal responsibility is to make people aware of a problem. Some people may be able to figure it out on their own, others find out from someone close to them, yet others will learn of it from other sources (such as documentaries).

That being said, I believe that social responsibility also has to play a role. If companies were simply interested in making a product appealing, they would look at how well it is received. When companies start employing psychology, there is a strong possibility that they are doing so to override people's judgment (thus their ability to take personal responsibility).

[blueterminal]

> One way of promoting personal responsibility is to make people aware of a problem.

Totally agree. Movies like these or like "That Sugar Film" are extremely important.

> That being said, I believe that social responsibility also has to play a role. If companies were simply interested in making a product appealing, they would look at how well it is received. When companies start employing psychology, there is a strong possibility that they are doing so to override people's judgment (thus their ability to take personal responsibility).

They are going to inevitably do that, and that's what we should expect them to do. I don't think there are any solutions to that except building some new services / protocols.

[II2II]

> They are going to inevitably do that, and that's what we should expect them to do. I don't think there are any solutions to that except building some new services / protocols.

The trouble is interoperability. Creating open social media platforms has been tried before, yet the uptake seems to be those with strong ideological views. You would pretty much have to compel new and existing social media networks to support the services/protocols in order to give people a viable option. I'm not sure that many people are ready for that type of legislation, and I'm not even sure it is a good thing. At least existing social media services have some incentive, may that be the company's reputation or the value of the data itself, to offer some degree of privacy protection.

[rapind]

I don't think it's a given that Social Media's harms are at the level of fast food. Figuring out where it falls on the "harmful to society scale" is a worthwhile discussion. Is it sugar, e coli, or something in between?

We do have regulatory protections around food. We don't think it's pragmatic for everyone to run their own home lab to determine if there's poison in their food. It may also not be pragmatic to expect everyone to check sources or even be able to locate the truth of a source (I sure can't most of the time!).

[anigbrowl]

'Personal responsibility' is often used to inhibit the formation of a consensus for collective action. The people who sell things like fast food or saturate TV with ads are acting collectively to profit themselves, but you're saying that the people who are weary of it should be stoical rather than cooperating among themselves to counter the unwanted behavior.

[tenebrisalietum]

This argument and arguments like it suck because it fails to recognize that people who can't control themselves have the potential cause harm to those who can. Stoicism would only work if everyone would instantly adopt it at once.

People who mal-consume social media contribute to cancel culture, spreading lies and propaganda, and providing the fuel for negative power-seeking behavior in political and business realms. These have very real consequences for those innocent parties that don't mal-consume social media.

Aligning with your libertarian pattern, you can say "Well it's up to the people who can control themselves to defend themselves from the people who can't", and then that's precisely why we would introduce laws/regulations limiting things.