[bitwank]

Certainly not. People don’t want the slop they push, the anxiety provoking, salacious, clickbaity spam that it has devolved into. Anybody that used YouTube before the last few years can tell you the difference is pretty major. This is not content people want, it’s content that maximizes clicks and ad sales.

[SpicyLemonZest]

People don't want to want it. But it's not obvious that merely allowing a choice of recommendation algorithms would allow people to escape the slop. Isn't anyone strong enough to choose a less addictive algorithm necessarily strong enough to not scroll Instagram for hours in the first place?

[bogdanoff_2]

>Isn't anyone strong enough to choose a less addictive algorithm necessarily strong enough to not scroll Instagram for hours in the first place?

Absolutely not. It's much easier to make a one-time switch than to be continuously resisting temptation. Changing the things in your environment is an important tool to break bad habits. The book "Atomic Habits" talks about this at length.

[another-dave]

I mean, the court case is about these platforms being addictive to kids, so if they said "accounts for users under X years have the algo and time caps delegated to their parents' account by default" it'd go along way to negate what they're being accused of.

They've already built all the tools they need around this at the moment, it's just they give them to advertisers rather than end-users.

[ceejayoz]

"Let the parents manage it" is, unfortunately, part of the reason we're in this situation in the first place.

[ceejayoz]

> People don’t want the slop they push…

That's also true for heroin. Plenty of people really want to break the addiction.

The slop exists because people are attracted to it.

[bitwank]

Heroin is a different business model than advertising. Respectfully, you are wrong.

[ceejayoz]

Gosh, if you say so...

[pixl97]

Heh, it's funny watching people, like the one above you, say "This thing is addictive because it is a real object, but this digital object cannot be addictive at all". The argument is so illogical you begin to doubt you're talking to a real person.

[bitwank]

I never made that claim, and in fact believe the opposite. I simply disagree that heroin is a drop in replacement as a mental model. The differences between the heroin trade and YouTube are meaningful. For example, one is a physically addictive illegal drug that is a commodity exported by certain foreign nations while the other is a digital platform that makes money by ad sales and is a monopoly. Both can be addictive, but they are not the same thing.