[haswell]

This just doesn’t land for me.

Quite a bit of social media use happens for perfectly good reasons. Organizing local events, finding and attending local events, meeting people in other regions who care about a common cause, etc.

What tends to distress people is that social media is also a toxic hellscape that simultaneously stresses them out and addicts them by playing on their evolutionary instincts and needs for social connection while feeding them engagement bait.

And so unplugging is a common topic these days, because people are trying to live better lives.

I get that it’s a pet project, but if this pet project was aimed at alcoholics trying to get sober, I think people would look at it in a different light because people take alcoholism seriously, and reinforcing negative loops that actually perpetuate alcoholism would be justifiably criticized.

I personally don’t think we’re taking social media harms seriously enough collectively, although there are signs that people are catching up. So while I think this project comes from the right place and I’m all for having a bit of fun, I think it’s actually quite problematic in its current state given the issue it attempts to address, and I don’t think the fact that it’s intended to be fun should shield it from the feedback it’s getting.

> Or should we just face it.

The sentence following this is just objectively false to a degree that I don’t even see the humor in it. It’s schoolyard stuff that perpetuates the problem.

[doublerabbit]

I use none of Social Media other than HN, which could be classified as such.

I know and see the damage upon. We've let social media control us.

[haswell]

> We've let social media control us.

For most people, social media is something that happened to them, and the nature of the relationship is asymmetrical.

The companies building these products spend millions weaponizing their apps to take advantage of human psychology, while social forces have made these apps ubiquitous and part of the fabric of many people’s lives.

I don’t think it’s fair to say people “let” social media control them any more than it’s fair to say someone predisposed to alcoholism “lets” alcohol control them.

This isn’t to say we don’t need to each take steps to improve our situations or unplug from social media, but I’m pointing this out because of how it relates to your earlier diagnosis that “Everyone who uses social media is a loser”, which points the finger in the wrong direction and frames the issue as a personal problem vs. a growing systemic social issue.