[IvanK_net]

Internet is amazing, it is the best invention of humanity, and each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone.

Those who enjoy saying "I do not learn enough, I do not improve myself enough, I do not work hard enough" (but you say "the humanity" instead of "I"), that is just your own fault. Let people use the internet the way they want to use it.

[jimbokun]

> and each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone.

In the same way heroin proves itself more useful for everyone year after year.

[palata]

> each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone.

How in the world does that sound like a reasonable conclusion?

[privacy2]

Each year, I spend more time in my car during my commute (on average) than a year before, which shows that being stuck in traffic is getting more and more useful to me.

[IvanK_net]

You chose to do it, so it means it was better to you than all other choices. Why would you still do it otherwise?

If your goal is to suffer as much as possible, it does not matter. You are still making choices that lead you to your goal as fast as possible.

[roughly]

I chose to give that nice man my wallet instead of taking a bullet, but that doesn’t actually reveal as much about my preferences as you seem to think it does.

[dredmorbius]

This is absolute gold, thank you.

[signatoremo]

No, you chose to be able to go back to your loved ones in one piece. That very much reveals your preferences. Do you think someone who was in depression, who had a terminal illness might do differently?

[xboxnolifes]

It doesnt mean that it getting more and more useful though. The alternatives could be getting worse and worse. Or there just aren't alternatives.

Maybe this is just a disagreement of what it means for something to "become more useful"? As an example, If I need a bank account and every bank goes online only and shutters their physical locations, that is not online banking becoming more useful to me. I was perfectly happy going to the physical location, but i am now spending more time doing banking on the internet.

[IvanK_net]

You choose to spend your time on a place A instead of the place B, it means that the place A is better than the place B. Why else would you do it, if B was better? It is a simple logic.

[mightybyte]

It also could happen because tech companies have optimized their products to maximize the amount of time that people spend on them, often in ways that directly result in a worse user experience (by showing ads instead of the most relevant search results, for example).

[IvanK_net]

It makes no sense what you say. If the experience with A was really worse than with B, people would stay with B.

[cgriswald]

The original poster said “more useful”, not “better”, so you’re already arguing something different than what was said. I might spend more time with something less useful because its time efficiency is one of the things that makes it less useful now.

Regarding your argument of “better” you seem to be arguing by definition.

Edit: I now realize you are the original poster who said “more useful”, so why did you change it?

[IvanK_net]

More useful is one of many ways of being better. What are you talking about?

[mightybyte]

No, this is not at all a given. There could be switching costs that cause people to stay on a product that is actually worse. Users also simply might be unaware of alternatives or that they are better. It's not hard to imagine any number of other reasons why in our imperfect world there is not perfectly elastic competition.

[krater23]

Correct. When I spend more time in the bar and fewer time at work and with my family then this is a sign that the bar is more useful and better for me than work and family.

[pacija]

Addiction & Tolerance. You choose to take bigger doses of Heroin more frequently instead of living a healthy life. Your logic seems a bit too simple.

[IvanK_net]

When somebody talks like this, ready to ban social networks, videogames, pornography, the whole internet, and pretty much every freedom that billinons of people enjoy, by comparing it to drugs, it scares me quite a lot.

[akoboldfrying]

I think the arguments you're currently having with people come down to: To what extent do I control what I myself do?

People have a tendency to push blame to external forces rather than take responsibility for their own actions. But personal responsibility cannot be the full story, because (almost) everyone acknowledges that drug addiction is something over which people have starkly reduced control.

So the question remains: What about other things "in the middle" like social media or porn "addiction"? Is it the fault of the person, the external force (which you must admit is consciously organised with the goal in mind of promoting the addictive behaviour, since their bottom line depends on it), or some mixture?

[cgriswald]

That’s a massive leap. Recognizing a fact about those things does not equate to being ready to ban those things. The same is true of drugs!

[barnabee]

It’s absolutely not the case that people are good enough in general at optimising their time and lives that the things they spend the most time on are the “best” they could have done.

Most people will readily admit to this, especially when it comes to the internet, and it’s well documented that many people are not happy with how much time they spend on the internet or how it impacts their lives.

[nativeit]

Network effects and anti-competitive practices defy simple logic. Intermediate logic is unavoidable, I'm afraid.

[palata]

> You choose to spend your time on a place A instead of the place B, it means that the place A is better than the place B. Why else would you do it, if B was better? It is a simple logic.

Your logic seems to be wanting.

I choose to spend more time at work than on vacation. Do you think I like it better, or can you imagine one reason explaining why I work?

[arjie]

I'm sympathetic to that view, but I'm also aware of a particular way it doesn't explain the world. Often I make local choices that I enjoy while nonetheless regretting them later. Text social networks are the most common way this happens to me. But the other common failure mode was with food.

Without the retatrutide dose I'm on I frequently consume large amounts of food. I love apples, and blueberries, and chicken and rice. I can easily eat an entire Costco bag of Envy Apples at a stretch. Inevitably, I regret this once I have exited my fugue state of food consumption. So why do I do it? My behaviour on retatrutide is far superior at getting me both total content and joy (in the sense of area-under-the-curve rather than point-in-time).

This concept has been explored for a long time[0]. The earliest documented I know of is the concept of Akrasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia from the Greek philosophers. But I think any notion of utility must build in the notion of regret and perhaps the bicameral mind and perhaps also the notion of non-rationality. My utility functions for the things I do are not time-translation invariant, therefore I think any model that optimizes for greater content and greater joy must necessarily involve temporally non-local terms. I don't yet have a strong model of this.

But we know this is common to many mental disorders. Part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is an interruption of some mental pattern. My wife and I have a game we find amusing to play when we want to overrule the other's temporally local preferences: we challenge the other to a game of rock-paper-scissors to see whether the countermanding applies. When she exercises it, I frequently find that even if I win the momentary desire has passed.

tl;dr: Utility functions have different values depending on the temporal stride they take

0: Recently, Elon Musk claimed that the aim for Twitter should be "unregretted user minutes". Sadly, despite this stated aim, I found that his changes decreased these and increased regret so I had to stop using his platform. I agree with the notion of maximizing (value - regret) expressed in some abstract form, however.

[aaaashley]

Except social media feeds are designed to addict. A smoker will spend their time smoking instead of not smoking. Does that mean that smoking is good? Why else would they do it, if not smoking was better? It's not that simple. When we blame the users, we forget tech monopolies are spending billions to engineer systems which are stealing our time.

[econ]

Or that B got worse.

[akoboldfrying]

Yes, but that still means A is a better choice than B to a greater extent than it was before.

A lot of these arguments are really arguments about an unstated "baseline" that we feel we deserve.

[FeteCommuniste]

Each year the gambler spends more time, money, and energy on slot machines. Obviously his gambling habit is getting more and more useful to him. /s

[IvanK_net]

When somebody talks like this, ready to ban social networks, videogames, pornography, the whole internet, and pretty much everything that billinons of people enjoy, by comparing it to gambling, it scares me quite a lot.

[FeteCommuniste]

Nah, no bans. People should be free to spend their money and time as they please, but let's not pretend that 2000 calories of M&Ms a day is a healthy diet, either.

[signatoremo]

Your comparison may be apt for Tiktok. The OP talks about the Internet. Researching, learning, communicating, paying, shopping, entertaining, via the Internet, have steadily increased.

[palata]

People spend (on average) the vast majority of their time on the stupid addictive stuff, that's documented.

[Vegenoid]

Year over year, we eat more junk food and get more overweight than the previous year. This demonstrates that junk food and fat are becoming increasingly useful and beneficial.