[figassis]

I often feel very hopeless about this. As an adult, I have to put a non insignificant portion of my brain and willpower to fight against social media addition. I have Twitter, use it rarely. I have instagram and have both a business and a personal account. I’ve always prided myself in never giving it any of my time. It was dormant for almost a decade and my friends called me a social hermit. I liked it. Then I started taking a peek, and noticed myself sinking deeper and deeper. I enabled the timer and I ignore it every time. I’m likely going to have to delete the app. I won’t even dare install or signup to TikTok. I use HN because I actually get a lot of value from it. Great dev tool recommendations, it’s a great GitHub repo discovery tool, product ideas, I learn a lot and I get to hear/read from many startup founders.

From this experience I know kids have no hope. I mean none. And I think we all know this, and Zuck knows this, I mean everyone. So now when we argue agains regulation we’re just regurgitating things like “rights”, “free speech”, “section 230”, etc. but what do we owe do the social contract that makes us better without sabotaging future generations? What is the actual, practical solution that does not take 2 generations to improve 1%?

I know that an actual solution will hurt a lot of companies, a lot of revenue and forecasts will disappear. But should that sometimes not be the solution? It certainly is for less protected/influential people.

[jauntywundrkind]

Yeah, agreed. Being part of the noosphere, being connected to the world: it is amazing. It's epic. Our local experiences often pale in compare.

I have no idea what kind of legal solutions people would propose to forcibly disconnect people from the newly arrived noosphere. Maybe we can show harm but there's lots of things people do to themselves & with their lives that are less than sub-optimal for them. We can scare ourselves into believing the harm is too great here, into being scared enough to rescind our liberty to connect, but rarely do I see an analysis that's honest enough to admit that the underlying problem is that we are connected. You would have to work enormously hard to convince me that reshuffling how we connect is going to not still be so enticing & compelling that the risk and harm goes away.

[alephknoll]

> I use HN because I actually get a lot of value from it. Great dev tool recommendations, it’s a great GitHub repo discovery tool, product ideas, I learn a lot and I get to hear/read from many startup founders.

What makes you think people don't get value from facebook, tiktok, youtube, instagram, etc? There are tons of great material on tiktok, youtube, facebook, instagram, etc. There are tons of junk to waste time on too. You can learn computer science, math, languages, etc on tiktok, youtube, etc. Or you can watch cat videos. Also, people who waste time on tiktok, instagram, youtube, etc waste time here as well.

> From this experience I know kids have no hope. I mean none.

Most of the kids will be fine. Most parents care about their kids more than you care about them.

> ...future generations?

Future generations will be fine. It's you, me and the current generation that is doomed.

[figassis]

Sure, I also get value from social media, as a business. If I need to learn a topic in depth, I can very well look for it. Don' need to doomscroll.

Let's not kid ourselves. It requires a lot of discipline to only make the algorithm spit out useful content. It takes one slip, and all of a sudden your feed is polluted. I mean, you scroll just a bit slower on a useless post, and that is what it starts surfacing for you. Let's also not forget that it is impossible to set or reset your content preferences. You basically have to create a new account. HN does not have a content algorithm, is not engineered for attention. Most content requires reading an actual article and understanding a complex topic.

> Most of the kids will be fine. Most parents care about their kids more than you care about them.

Let's also refrain from personal attacks. You don't know whether my kids even have access to social media or if I spent the time to teach them how to use it for their own benefit.

> Future generations will be fine. It's you, me and the current generation that is doomed.

Sure, they're fine in that they will continue living and have their own definition of life.