[wackget]

You are not acknowledging the fact that the companies producing these addictive apps are very much doing it intentionally. They are specifically making it as engaging as possible because that's how they make money. And they have billions of dollars to sink into making their products as irresistable as possible.

The average person has zero chance against all-pervasive, ultra-manipulative, highly-engineered systems like that.

It is, quite simply, not a fair fight.

[TheOtherHobbes]

That's not wrong, but it's a selective take. The entire economy operates like an addiction machine, using proven psychological techniques to modify individual and collective behaviours and beliefs.

It's not just social media. It's gaming, ad tech, marketing, PR, religion, entertainment, the physical design of malls and stores... And many many more.

The difference with social media is that the sharp end is automated and personalised, instead of being analysed by spreadsheet and stats package and broken out by demographics.

But it's just the most obvious poison in a toxic ecosystem.

[enaaem]

Every country in the world already does tons of intervention combatting addiction. There are already bans and restrictions on gambling, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes etc… Wether we consider social media addiction to be harmful and how to do it is a good question to be asked, but intervention into harmful addiction is generally uncontroversial.

[Thiez]

Note that gambling is currently the only recognized non-substance-related addiction in the DSM-5. As a society we speak of things like 'tiktok addiction', 'gaming addiction', 'food addiction' and 'porn addiction' but none of these are real recognized disorders. That is not to say that certain behaviors cannot be maladaptive and hard to quit, but this is not enough to make something an addiction - we don't call hypochondria a 'cleaning addiction' even though it might look like one.

[wat10000]

There's a big difference in terms of frequency and availability.

Physical design of stores gets you when you're shopping, then it's done. Organized religion tends to get its hooks into you once or twice a week. Marketing, PR, ads, all sporadic. Social media is available essentially 24/7 and is something you can jump into with just a few seconds of spare time.

If more traditional addiction machines are a lottery you can play a few times a week, social media is a slot machine that you carry with you everywhere you go.

[GorbachevyChase]

I don’t know what personal religious experience you’re speaking from, but my church is a little more oriented toward helping people overcome addictions and personal failings. If you’re in Europe, then I think the messaging in the mosques about consuming alcohol are pretty strict. I can’t speak from firsthand knowledge.

[swiftcoder]

> personal failings

I'm sure your specific church is lovely, but depending on the church, "personal failings" may include such gems as "being gay", depression, autism, PTSD, poverty...

[wat10000]

Well sure, they don't want the competition. Churches have naturally evolved to use techniques that keep people coming back. The ones that don't do that die out.

[cess11]

Are you sure churches are a natural phenomenon rather than a cultural one?

[dragonwriter]

Culture is a natural phenomenon.

[wat10000]

Where did I suggest anything of the sort?

[forgetfreeman]

"The entire economy" here being a pseudonym for marketing and advertising?

[finghin]

Though capitalism is to blame for plenty of problems, I don't agree with this take, and I see it repeated quite often.

Economies, capitalist or otherwise, are very much defined by needs and wants. (With this, I presume, you agree already.)

But addiction is another topic altogether from everyday needs and wants like oil, aspirin, or cinema tickets.

[pardon_me]

Manufactured consent, planned economies, controlled economies, imbalance of wealth or power, tariffs, subsidies, tax breaks, lobbying, ad networks, tracking, algorithmic content delivery, AI generation, asymmetric access to information, social effects, requirements to live despite inaccessible resources for basic needs, government control, private property but no free land available, and international trade laws, are a few things that come to mind which very much go against the idea that we are living in anything like the model of capitalism we learn about in school.

2026 is not based on wants and needs except in isolated situations. We are at the hypernormal point of manufacturing problems to sell solutions, because there's very little rent or work left to extract from assets. Lives of excess are maintained by depriving others of necessities. The intense control and misdirection required to keep this somewhat stable is starting to be felt.

[Nasrudith]

Manufactured consent as a notion always felt like projection to me because of its advocates. As it was a notion pushed by people who insist they know "the interests" of people who are "voting wrong". All the while disregarding the fact that if we could rely on others knowing the interests of others better than others then aristocracy would be a superior system as the nobles being more educated would know the interests of the peasantry better.

[Thiez]

So do you believe that propaganda doesn't exist, or doesn't work, or that only ever accurately shows the truth? Because as I see it you must believe that people cannot be misled by propaganda to deny the possibility of manufactured consent.

[saubeidl]

Yup. It's capitalism that's the core problem. Social media is just a particularly nasty outgrowth.

[Quarrelsome]

its not necessarily "capitalism". Think about how Myspace was, or early Facebook, that was capitalism but didn't have the same issues.

Its the "lean startup" culture as well as books like "Hooked, how to build habit forming products" - Nir Eyal.

The dark lean startup pattern is where you break down the big picture rationale for the company. You extract metrics that contribute to the company's success (i.e. engagement) and you build a machine that rewards changes to the underlying system that improves those metrics.

If done successfully, you create an unwitting sociopathy, a process that demands the product be as addictive as possible and a culture that is in thrall to the machine that rewards its employees by increasing those metrics. You're no longer thinking about purpose or wondering about what you're doing to your users. You simply realise that if you send this notification at this time, with this colour button, in this place, with this tagline then the machine likes it. Multiple people might contribute a tiny piece of a horrifying and manipulative whole and may never quite realise the true horror of the monster they've helped build, because they're insulated by being behind the A/B test.

[Jensson]

> its not necessarily "capitalism". Think about how Myspace was, or early Facebook, that was capitalism but didn't have the same issues.

No thats exactly capitalism, capitalism ensures processes gets more and more efficient over time, as you say previous versions were less efficient at inducing addictive behaviors but capitalism ensured we progressed towards more and more addictive apps and patterns.

Capitalism doesn't mean we start out with the most efficient money extractor, it just moves towards the most efficient money extractor with time unless regulated.

This is well known and a feature, capitalism moves towards efficiency and regulation helps direct that movement so that it helps humanity rather than hurts us. Capitalism would gladly serve you toxic food but regulations ensures they earn more money by giving you nutritious food. Now regulations are lagging a bit there so there is still plenty of toxic food around, but it used to be much worse than now, the main problem with modern food is that people eat too much directly toxic compounds.

[Quarrelsome]

That's a type of capitalism. Quakers built plenty of capitalistic entities that were primarily interested in profit but cared more for the long term with more of an eye on social and spiritual purpose. Extractive capitalism doesn't get to pretend its all of capitalism, we just assume that because its been active throughout our entire lifespan.

US hegemony has permitted and encouraged shareholder primacy, hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts in order to facilitate the growth of its markets. However we'd be blinkered to assume that this is the only way capitalism can be. Its a choice we make and we deserve this outcome where we've enslaved a generation of children to be eye-balls for ad impressions for silicon valley startups.

We could make other choices but then we'd be personally less rich and see less growth. Do we really think those extra zeros in very few people's portfolio's are worth this macabre world we've created?

[Jensson]

> Quakers built plenty of capitalistic entities that were primarily interested in profit but cared more for the long term with more of an eye on social and spiritual purpose.

And those were replaced by profit seeking enterprises, that is capitalism. Sure some try to create such benevolent entities, but the profit seeking ones out-competes and replaces them over time, that is how capitalism works.

So you can temporarily have a nice company here and there, but 50 years later likely it got replaced by a profit seeking one. The only way to get pro social behaviors from these is to make pro social acts the most profitable via regulations, but its still a profit seeking enterprise that doesn't try to be benevolent.

[saubeidl]

I judge a system by what it does, not by what it's proponents say it could theoretically do.

Extractive capitalism is real-world capitalism.

[prewett]

You're not describing capitalism, you're describing managerialism with a manager-evaluation function of profit.

Managers do not need to be evaluated by EPS, but when you are a public company with diffuse shareholders (who are the actual "capitalists", and who include any of use with a 401k or pension), that's an easy one for people to agree on. Also, when your society gives up on the restraints of (in our case) Judeao-Christian values and say "we're just overgrown apes", well, then you get HBS style of management, because there's nothing restraining acting "because we can". I think we have a spiritual crisis more than an economic system crisis.

[Thiez]

The VOC and EIC would like a word. While under these so-called 'Judeo-Christian values' Europe was wildly antisemitic, colonised most of the known world, and subjugated, genocided, and enslaved indigenous populations. The UK even wrote a slave bible. Slavery in the US also happened while these 'values' were held in high regard.

If your personal religious beliefs help you be a good person then that's great for you, keep believing. But historically it doesn't appear that more religious societies are more moral societies.

[_DeadFred_]

Early Facebook's behavior was what they wanted to do/be. But upon exposure to what others were doing Facebook chose to adopt patterns/techniques that repulsed them originally because Facebook didn't want to be out competed (so Capitalism). Capitalism/competition is what led their behavioral change.

Go back to the recent removal of lead article discussed here. In Capitalism government regulation has to level the playing field or else all players will stoop to poisoning society/the world because if they don't then someone else will gain and advantage. Even hyper rightwing Rayliner agreed Government intervention is the ONLY way to prevent Capitalists from injecting poison into their products if that poison gives a competitive advantage.

What leaded gas was to the boomers brains social media is to current youths' brains.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46865275

[SirMaster]

>The average person has zero chance against all-pervasive, ultra-manipulative, highly-engineered systems like that.

So you are saying I am not an average person because I have the willpower to simply not install the TikTok app or watch short form video on any platform?

Has the bar for the average person really sunk this low?

[tvink]

If only you could reach out of your own experience and ponder what might cause otherwise reasonable people to do so. Young people peer pressure, current marketing landscape, you're forced there if you want to make money as a creative, so many reasons. Great, you can live your life without. Can you live your life without assuming everyone has the privilege of your situation?

[integralid]

You also probably don't use heroin. Everyone knows it's a bad idea and yet for some reason we have very severe punishments for people that distribute it. Why?

Because addictive things are addictive, and addicted people suffer, and everyone can get addicted if their guard slips.

We prefer to regulate highly addictive things instead.

[D-Machine]

    > You also probably don't use heroin. Everyone knows it's a bad idea

About 1–12 months after using heroin, only 23%–38% become addicted [1]. Occasional and controlled heroin users do in fact exist and are documented [2]. And, most famously, the use of heroin by American soldiers during the Vietnam war was largely situational [3].

So what "everyone knows" here is not very impressive. I still very strongly believe you'd be a fool or at least reckless to try heroin, but it really isn't the bogeyman people want it to be.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

[2] https://www.drugsandalcohol.ie/3906/

[3] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.64.12...

[xeckr]

>only 23%–38% become addicted

Wow, only Russian roulette with 2 bullets odds?

[D-Machine]

Yup, hence why only a reckless person or fool would try it.

But, since only a minority of people get addicted to heroin (i.e. the evils of heroin are overstated), and since no one is actually seriously arguing that viewing TikTok is as risky (23-38% chance after exposure) as trying heroin, or has as bad side effects, I think it reveals that comparisons to heroin use in arguments against TikTok are hyperbolic and disconnected from reality, by empirical data.

[xeckr]

>I think it reveals that comparisons to heroin use in arguments against TikTok are hyperbolic and disconnected from reality, by empirical data.

I don't think that follows from your premises. Who is overstating the evils of heroin? Plenty of people argue that viewing TikTok (or AI-optimized short-form feeds) has bad side effects, mostly in the direction of eroding your ability to pay attention to anything less stimulating.

One thing that makes heroin more benign is that it's "finished" in some sense. The drug trade will find more addictive substances (e.g. fentanyl), but a vial of pure heroin isn't going to gradually become more addictive over time in ways that are imperceptible to the user but visible on the backend because the loss function trends downward.

[wasmainiac]

I don’t get it, is this some kind of gotcha?

Have you walked down the skid row of any large city? Heroin and well other drugs now are a problem, saying otherwise is delusional. Those people need help.

[D-Machine]

    > I don’t get it, is this some kind of gotcha?

Only for people who think comparing TikTok to heroin is some kind of gotcha.

    >Have you walked down the skid row of any large city? Heroin and well other drugs now are a problem, saying otherwise is delusional. Those people need help.

For sure. Two minutes from where I live, at a main intersection, they hang emergency Naloxone injection kits, in public, where anyone can grab them, on the trees and walls of buildings. I presume so addicts can save each other in cases of accidental overdoses.

Of what relevance was this all to TikTok again? And why are we comparing scrolling a phone app to literal actual heroin? Even when, empirically and factually, heroin is in fact not addictive for the majority of people?

Comparisons between TikTok and heroin are deranged and simplistic, but this is made all the more embarrassing when you realize that a dance with heroin is in fact more likely than not to just be... not the thing everyone is afraid of?

[wasmainiac]

> Only for people who think comparing TikTok to heroin is some kind of gotcha.

Do you have family? My cousins, aunts, even my mom is on it. And they all watch the most brain dead garbage. Even when they come to visit me out in the middle of no where, they still do it. The only explanation I have is that it is addictive, to not to all, but some (like you pointed out with H). Now based on how much time they spend on it I think it is harmful for them and society at large. It’s worth regulating like some non physical drug, afaik I think that is the comparison people here are making.

[zapzupnz]

Congratulations, you've won the "Works on My Machine" award, except for self-control instead of software. Well done. Everyone's very impressed.

[Jensson]

> So you are saying I am not an average person because I have the willpower to simply not install the TikTok app or watch short form video on any platform?

Yes, since more people use Tiktok than not. The average person is also fat today, so this shouldn't come as a surprise to you.

People didn't grow fat and addicted to screens due to changes to themselves, its due to companies learning how to get people to eat more and watch more since the they make more money.

[foobar_______]

Maybe? I really don't know. I don't want to believe it but the data and just looking around in public and seeing the scroll addition seems to indicate otherwise?

[rzz3]

And I’m so glad they did. Tiktok has brought so many positive changes to my life, and it never would have happened if they hadn’t built a product so good that it’s literally addictive. I don’t want the government to be my parent.

Additionally, Instagram and Facebook have tried their best to make their products as addictive as possible, yet their recommendation algorithm is so absolutely terrible (not to mention their ads) that I barely stay on the platform for five minutes when I use it.

[Noumenon72]

What the TikTok algorithm does for me: surfaces exercises for all my joint problems, finds people exploring local sites and reporting on local issues, helps me discover new music, reveals how we treat prisoners, shows me what it's like to do jobs from sitcom writer to oil rig tech

What Europe does for me: Makes me click "Accept cookies"

[Quarrelsome]

> What Europe does for me: Makes me click "Accept cookies"

that's only because the implementation of the law is poor and advertisers drag their heels in having it as a brower-level setting. Not helped by the fact that advertisers run one of the biggest browsers and fund one of the next biggest.

[bondarchuk]

It's also very much an exercise in framing, though. Making your media as engaging as possible is the basic imperative of any media company. But choosing to call this specific instance of it "addictive" has everyone up in arms.

[horsawlarway]

To the framing issue - I can frame an alternate lens through which we balance enrichment against engagement.

Media can enrich people - expose them to new ideas, new stories, different views and opinions. This expands worldview and generally trends in the same direction as education.

Media can also be engaging - Use tools that make it compelling to continue viewing, even when other things might be preferable, on the low end: cliffhangers and suspenseful stories. on the high end: repetitive gambling like tendencies.

I'd argue if we view tiktok through this lens - banning it seems to make sense. Honestly, most short form social media should be highly reviewed for being low value content that is intentionally made addictive.

---

It's not society's job to cater to the whims of fucking for-profit, abusive, media companies. It's society's job to enrich and improve the lives of their members. Get the fuck outta here with the lame duck argument that I need to give a shit about some company's unethical profit motives.

I also don't care if meth dealers go bankrupt - who knew!

[bondarchuk]

I fundamentally don't think governments should do a careful cost-benefit analysis of everything in society and then ban it if it falls on the wrong side. Just on basic principles of personal freedom. That's why the "addiction" framing is so important, because it implies that citizens don't have agency, and so justifies the authoritarian intervention.

PS if we apply your analysis to video games they surely would have been banned too.

Edit: by the way I remember back in the day we searched for "addicting flash games" and it was seen as a positive ;p

[munk-a]

It is completely unreasonable for a society to do a careful cost-benefit analysis of everything in society - it's completely reasonable for a society to identify highly harmful things (especially those that hijack our brains through direct chemical or emotional addiction) and police those, or, as per Portugal's approach, make available societal supports to allow people to better cope with that addiction. The later isn't very reasonable to expect in a world of rising austerity due to financialization so the former seems more realistic.

[bondarchuk]

"Hijack our brains" - exactly what I mean by pretending people don't have agency. Who gets to decide what counts as hijacking and what is just normal culture? Anything is "hijacking" to some extent - boy bands hijack teen girl brains, the BBC created Teletubbies to hijack toddler brains, heck any artistic representation is a hijack to the extent that it is interpreted by your brain at least partially as something other than what it really is i.e. some colours on a flat surface. The point is a new form of culture, communication and coordination is emerging and the old powers are shitting their pants.

(Fully agree on the Portugal approach though. The difficult to accept answer is that if people are choosing a shit life of scrolling 10 hours a day maybe we should do the actual hard work of improving the kind of life open to them.)

[xp84]

I remember that website, it was called addictinggames.com and I remember finding that bad grammar offensive. (I was obviously a lot of fun at parties.)

[jonners00]

With social media, the cost benefit analysis doesn't deliver marginal results, just less stark/concentrated results. Drink driving is self evidently bad even though 99 times out of 100(?) it does no harm, because one time out of a hundred its consequences are catastrophic. Social media on the other hand is harming essentially 100% of the population in initially milder ways - even if you don't use it you're forced to live in a dumbed down society where wealth and power is becoming concentrated in the hands of those who pedal digital dopamine and in a democracy being undermined by disinformation. Of course 'initially milder harm' is step one in frog boiling.

[bondarchuk]

> * even if you don't use it you're forced to live in a dumbed down society where wealth and power is becoming concentrated in the hands of those [...] *

Exactly the same applies to TV but where is all the handwringing about that? Remember those stats about people watching 7 hours of TV a day? Those people need some serious help too. What's happening is clearly just the old mass-media-supported order refusing to yield power to new media used by younger people. Governments couldn't care one bit about false information[1], nor about zoomers getting brainrot, it's all about controlling the flow of information.

[1] ("disinformation", another nice example of framing which ignores the fact that people have agency)

edit: the system is escaping my asterisks automatically now, anyone know how to get italics now?

[programjames]

> Making your media as engaging as possible is the basic imperative of any media company.

Not so. I think your logic is that engagement often leads to dollars, and the "basic imperative of any company" is to make dollars. There are pro- and anti-social ways to do this. You can create better art for your video games, or you can insert gambling mechanisms. You can spend more time designing your cinematic universe, or you can put a cliffhanger after every episode. You can make a funny skit, or you can say, "wait for it... wait for it... you can't believe what's about to happen!" Optimizing for engagement, for the sake of engagement, is necessarily anti-social. It's trying to redirect attention towards your media without actually making the user experience better in any way.

Legally, the basic imperative of any company is to make dollars, as long as it is prosocial. You should not expect the government to turn a blind eye to scam centers or disfunctional products. The same applies to the media landscape.

[xeckr]

There's an AI behind the video feed optimized for keeping your attention for as long as possible. That is quite different from making your media more engaging.

The logical endpoint of optimizing AI for viewer retention is something that you literally cannot look away from.

[bondarchuk]

There's billions of dollars of psychology research behind mass entertainment for decades, too.

>* The logical endpoint of optimizing AI for viewer retention is something that you literally cannot look away from. *

Sure, but this was always already the logical endpoint of entertainment media. Infinite Jest was written in the 90s, no tiktok needed.

[xeckr]

True, though stochastic gradient descent replaces all that human guesswork with predictable scaling laws. The hyperstimuli of the tomorrow will be nothing like what we recognize today as entertainment.

[svara]

Everything's on a spectrum, but there's a point where you're so far along on the spectrum that it makes sense to call it something else.

See, "quantity has a quality of its own".

Sometimes you have to leave the theoretical view aside and just look out the window. How are people using this? Is it hurting them? What can we do about it?

I don't like blanket bans, but putting TikTok and, say, a publishing company marketing novels, in the same category because they strive for an audience, doesn't clarify anything. It just confuses the discussion.

[bondarchuk]

I don't know man. It all reminds me very much of people trying to ban rock n roll back in the day.

[svara]

I hear you, and that's where my mind goes first on this issue too.

But with social media, many of the people most into it, when asked, will say they wish it didn't exist.

A lot of kids feel they have to be on it, but wish it didn't exist.

People sound and behave more like actual drug addicts than just mere fans of a medium around social media.

[Lerc]

I don't think we should allow any form of abusive software, addictive, dark patterns, bait-and-switch. They all need to be robustly regulated.

At the same time I don't think you can demonstrate harm without good evidence.

Making money can not be used as a criteria unless you want to draw the conclusion that no company can turn a profit and be ethical at the same time. It would amount to demanding an outcome that you don't believe us possible.

I think considering overly broad criteria, like say, infinite scroll applied selectively to a few is just arbitrarily targeting candidates for reasons unstated outside the criteria.

The rules need to be evidence based, clear, specific, and apply to all.

Cracking down on ticktok while The Guardian has a bunch of dark patterns. Or the NYT, who is reporting on this while at the same time attracting people with online games that have an increasingly toxic user interface.

Tiktok may suck, but so do a lot of other businesses that escape scrutiny. I worry the harms attributed to TikTok are magnified to allow them to be a whipping boy drawing the focus allowing systemic issues to persist.

[eggy]

There was significant awareness and negative sentiment toward advertising long before Marshall McLuhan became prominent in the 1960s. Some of the stuff from 1900 to 1930 is interesting. I realize there is a lot at work here with multi-faceted attacks on the senses, but advertising was intentional too, and I am not sure if just making things illegal that are hard to educate people on is the right tack.

[yibg]

Where does a desirable product or experience end and addictive begin though? Pretty much all products or services sold are designed to be desirable. Some things are physically addictive (nicotine, opioids etc), so those are a bit more clear. But when we're talking about psychologically addictive, where do we draw the line between what's ok and what's not?

If my restaurant's food is so good people are "addicted" to it, that's a good thing. If it's about applying psychological patterns to trigger the addictive behavior that applies to a large swath of marketing.

[IanCal]

You really must be able to understand the difference between liking a thing and being addicted to a thing?

If not it’s probably worth just starting with basic definitions of addiction.

[Thiez]

The DSM-5 acknowledges only gambling as a diagnosable behavioral addiction. Being addicted to a thing means substance addiction, not TikTok or games or internet.

[IanCal]

The dsm-5 is not the only way we use words, but even there it clearly can define between liking gambling and being addicted right?

[Thiez]

Sure, I just think we if we're going to pathologize activities with intent to pass laws we ought to at least stick to a science-based approach. Right now there is no basis to conclude that even a single person is addicted to TikTok, since no such diagnosis exists.

The word 'addicted' is used informally in all kinds of contexts where it's a wild exaggeration. Just like people say they have OCD or autism when they sort something, or say they are hypochondriacs when they wash their hands more often than average. Of course people who actually have these conditions might do the same, but a lot of the time it's just perfectly neurotypical people using hyperbole and/or a flawed understanding of psychiatry.

Let's wait until psychiatrists agree on the existence of TikTok addiction and come up with a set of diagnostic criteria. Until such time we should take the existence of such addictions with a grain of salt, and refrain from moral panic.

[IanCal]

> since no such diagnosis exists.

The very specifically American diagnostic criteria are not particularly relevant, but more to the point

> we ought to at least stick to a science-based approach. Right now there is no basis to conclude that even a single person is addicted to TikTok,

I'd recommend reading the overview

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...

> The Commission's preliminary views are based on an in-depth investigation that included an analysis of TikTok's risk assessments reports, internal data and documents and TikTok's responses to multiple requests for information, a review of the extensive scientific research on this topic, and interviews with experts in multiple fields, including behavioural addiction.

[moi2388]

Do they though?

I’d love to think of myself as an exceptional individual because I don’t use Facebook or TikTok, but most likely I’m not exceptional at all, and other people could also just not use TikTok.

[luxuryballs]

The government could spend effort on making a documentary and funding a study on brain scans and a little campaign to show everyone the damage and educate rather than just wielding the ban hammer. Especially because it’s often possible that they can have a different motive for ban hammering even if the reason given is valid.

[trcf23]

And it’s also mostly targeting children/teenagers. As a parent you can add limitations on cinema, binging series. You can’t on TikTok.

I’m quite glad that there is a form of control preventing a company from a different part of the world that don’t really care about the mental health or wellbeing of my kids to creep into their life like that…

As a parent, it’s not a fair fight and I should not have to delegate that to another private company

[luxuryballs]

This strikes me as potentially a hardware problem more than a software problem.

[trcf23]

Probably a bit of both but I don’t know any other hardware that is that addictive…

Social network are not necessarily bad, even for teens. The issue here is the effort to make any user into a scrolling machine combined to a medium always in your pocket.

[forgotaccount3]

> They are specifically making it as engaging as possible because that's [how they make money.] ... what people want.

Fixed that for you.

Your argument is basically the same as saying that Banana Ball should be banned because they are intentionally making the experience as fun as possible, because that's how they make money.

[mrpandas]

You're suggesting that it doesn't matter what children are exposed to / become addicted to because companies should be able to sell what children want? So there's no limits to that in your mind? Should every child be given cocaine because they ask for it? They're certainly given candy, right? You must believe there's no difference between cocaine and candy, I can assure you there is a difference and show you evidence to the contrary, if you're that dense.

[anthonypasq]

sigh... he is saying that addictiveness itself is not a justification to ban something. exercising is addictive to some people, sex is addictive, reading is addictive for some people. everything worth doing in life is addicting.

what matters is the negative consequences of doing something. so the justification for banning tiktok is that it destroys childrens attention spans for life and lets them get propagandized by a hostile foreign government, NOT that its addictive.

[krapp]

Tiktok hasn't been around long enough for the claim that it "destroys childrens attention spans for life" to make any sense.

And children get propagandized by hostile foreign governments everywhere online. And by their own government. The premise that TikTok was somehow more dangerous in this regard than Facebook or Twitter or even Discord is based entirely on sinophobia.

[anthonypasq]

i thought we were done with all the phobia shit. these scare words have absolutely zero power

[darkhorse222]

Yeah! Or cigarettes!

[stronglikedan]

I hate this age of zero personal accountability. It's so easy to just not doomscroll, but I should be allowed if I want to.

[saithir]

It's also super easy not to use hard drugs, yet that's not a reason to stop restricting them.

If something's harmful it should be controlled.

[landl0rd]

I find it pretty hypocritical that the same people who push for e.g. legal marijuana would go for banning social media apps. Don't get me wrong, I use neither and think both are mentally, physically, and morally corrosive. I would not care to have either present in the community where I live, nor for my future children to use them.

That does not mean it is the province of the state to ban them.

[rzz3]

To give them some credit, they support both positions because they were told to support them by the same people and never put much thought into it.

[Quarrelsome]

weed isn't designed to be addictive. You'll find most people would be cautious about legalising heroin, meth or crack.

[yibg]

Weed isn't designed to be anything, but it certainly is addictive in the same sense that social media is. There is no physical addiction (which is also true for TikTok), but there are definitely people that are hooked on it.

[Quarrelsome]

it is habit forming, but its not designed to be, by some of the brightest minds of a generation.

[saubeidl]

Personal accountability is contrary to human nature.

We are primates dominated by our primitive urges.

[wasmainiac]

did you see what happened when we tried to decriminalise hard drugs in Vancouver? Feel good for yourself that you have the discipline to have self control, other do not and need help.

You are free to not use TikTok yourself, no one is stopping you.

Also drug decriminalisation is very nuanced, I’m not 100% against it, I’m just pointing out just that open drug use spiked after.

[dylan604]

> Also drug decriminalisation is very nuanced, I’m not 100% against it, I’m just pointing out just that open drug use spiked after.

Was that spike a true spike in new users, or existing users just coming out of the shadows?

[amarant]

I don't like this narrative. I'm a person, and HN is the only social media I use.I tolerate this one because I find the addictiveness off-putting, but unlike other social media HN doesn't engage in that much.

I'm not some sort of prodigy or anything, just a random schmuck. If I can do it, anyone can. People just really like blaming others for their own vices instead of owning up to having a vice.

HN is a vice too. One of many that I have. And they're all mine. I've chosen them all. In most cases knowing full well that I probably shouldn't have.

[afavour]

> If I can do it, anyone can.

Right, but they don't. Not to mention a significant portion of the target market are children whose brains are still developing.

Smoking is a vice. Anyone can stop smoking any time they want. But it was still incredibly popular. Government regulation put warning labels everywhere, tightened regulation to ensure no sales to children, provided support to quit. And then the number of people smoking plummeted. Society is better off for it.

"Anyone can do it" is an ideological perspective divorced from lived reality.

[dinfinity]

Exactly. It's not that the producers or distributors (of food, content, etc.) are not malicious/amoral/evil/greedy. It's that the real solution lies in fixing the vulnerabilities in the consumers.

You don't say to a heroin addict that they wouldn't have any problems if those pesky heroin dealers didn't make heroin so damn addictive. You realize that it's gonna take internal change (mental/cultural/social overrides to the biological weaknesses) in that person to reliably fix it (and ensure they don't shift to some other addiction).

I'm not saying "let the producers run free". Intervening there is fine as long as we keep front of mind and mouth that people need to take their responsibility and that we need to do everything to help them to do so.

[programjames]

Doesn't the government try to ban heroin?? You have to live in the real world, not your ideal world, and in the real world people are not perfectly rational agents. They make mistakes. Each and every mistake could have been avoided if the individual just had a stronger will, was a little smarter, a little more prudent, or took a little more time to think, but just because mistakes can be avoided and some people are better at avoiding them than others does not change the fundamental issue: drugs, tobacco, gambling, and TikTok are trying to increase the rate at which mistakes are made. Wouldn't you rather live in a society where they aren't out to get you?

I think there's an argument that can be made, like, "well maybe 10% of the time people consuming alcohol is a mistake, but I just use it recreationally. The government shouldn't prohibit all drinking!" And sure. If it is really the case that people would take the same actions even if they had more time to think things through and were in a good mental state, the government should probably not be intervening for the 10% of the cases that doesn't hold. But you have to draw the line somewhere.

[dinfinity]

> I'm not saying "let the producers run free". Intervening there is fine as long as we keep front of mind and mouth that people need to take their responsibility and that we need to do everything to help them to do so.

[programjames]

> You: It's that the real solution lies in fixing the vulnerabilities in the consumers.

> Me: Just because mistakes can be avoided and some people are better at avoiding them than others does not change the fundamental issue: drugs, tobacco, gambling, and TikTok are trying to increase the rate at which mistakes are made. Wouldn't you rather live in a society where they aren't out to get you?

[dylan604]

> If I can do it, anyone can.

This is such a normie perspective and shows just how unfamiliar you are with addiction. Yes, some people can avoid becoming addicted. Yes, some addicts can break the habit and detox and stay clean. At the same time, a larger number of addicts can detox but relapse in a relatively short time. There are also addicts that have not yet admitted they have a problem, and there are addicts that are okay with being an addict. Just because you have the emergency stop button that you can hit does not mean everyone else is the same way. Your lack of empathy is just gross

[TheOtherHobbes]

You haven't chosen anything. That's the point - the illusion of choice and agency.

If you can't stop cold at any time if/when you decide to, you don't have the agency to make a free choice.

[amarant]

I can though, that's the whole point. I chose to quit Facebook and Reddit. I chose to stop drinking alcohol. I chose to keep smoking weed. Some choices are better than others, from certain perspectives, that doesn't make them any less my choices!

[CJefferson]

That feels like it applies to so many things we make illegal, scams of all kind, snake-oil medical sellers, baby powder full of asbestos. Sure, people can handle all of these things, but we've decided, as a society, it's better not to allow them.

So then the question is, is it better to let these things happen, as a society?

[amarant]

False equivalence. Unless you can point to an instance where tiktok claims to cure cancer or erectile dysfunction with their recommendations.

To be clear: I don't like these addictive recommendation engines. That's why I avoid them. Some people do like them. I don't want to take their fun vice away from them. I also don't want them to take my fun vices away from me!

Yes it'd probably be better for my health if I stopped with a few of them. I don't care. I like it. It's my health, and I'm an adult. If I can choose my vices, why shouldn't others be allowed to? Will they make choice I wouldn't have? Of course! That's the point! It's THEIR choice!

This logic does not apply to scams or firearms, there's no informed consent in getting shot. It also doesn't apply to asbestos baby powder(wtf?)

Getting scammed is not a choice. Scammers lie to you. Recommendation engines never claim to do anything other than recommend stuff you're likely to interact with based on previous behaviour. They give you exactly what's on the package label. I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would want something like that, but I also don't understand why people eat surströmming. I say let them, anyway. I can put up with the stink, it's not the end of the world.

[CJefferson]

Question, do you have the same feeling about heroin? That people should be allowed to take things which are known to be highly addictive and bad for them?

[amarant]

Sure! They do anyway, or did you think heroin disappeared since it was banned?

It does need to be regulated. Doing it well will be difficult in a lot of places. I'd suggest modeling heroin sales after Nordic alcohol market: there's a single state-owned company that has a legislated monopoly, and no profit goals whatsoever. This makes it available, you can know that it's not mixed with anything cheap and deadly, and you also avoid anyone trying to push people to buy something that is quite obviously bad for them. I'm not saying it's an ideal situation that people do heroin, it is _quite_ destructive. But people do it anyway so let's make the best of that situation.

The harsh truth of reality is that people will make bad choices no matter what you do. Thinking you can ban something out of existence is naive and harmful. Best you can hope for is the entity selling drugs not using peer pressure to push it on kids who were only looking for weed. Which is what we have now if that wasn't clear.

To be perfectly clear, I do not encourage anyone to inject heroine, it's a terrible idea! Don't do it! But I'm realist enough to realise that some people are going to anyway, bans and common sense be damned,and I want to make that bad choice as safe as possible for them. I do not condone throwing drug addicts under the bus as we currently do, pretending that they're less than human and that they have no place in our society. I don't think the "outcast" status has ever helped anyone quit, in fact I'm quite sure it makes it harder. For example in Sweden being under the influence is illegal, so you could get in trouble for seeking help with your addiction. No wonder the druggies hide!

Well out of sight != Out of mind. At least not for me.

[programjames]

You should model yourself as a rational agent that makes mistakes sometimes. Suppose it is the case that, if you had heroin on your shelf at home, you would inject it on 0.1% of days. Maybe because you are especially sad/sick/in pain once every few years. If this were the case, you would not want to buy heroin and put it on your shelf at home. 99.9% of the time you will have the willpower to not inject it, but you still expect yourself to be addicted within a decade. The point of bans is to decrease that to 0.0001%, except for those who are actively seeking it.

[Quarrelsome]

> just a random schmuck

if you've even on this website you're a tiny niche of the population. You like text? Check out the weirdo over here... oh wait that's all of us.

[piekvorst]

What's illegal about intentionally making money for being addictive? "Unfair"? Maybe. But not illegal.