[kyledrake]

People in here are casually linking social media to cigarettes, a product that kills half its users, and in previous iterations I've seen people compare social media to using heroin. It's completely hysterical.

I expect tabloid journalists and grandstanding politicians to do this, it really scares me when HN users that should know better do it.

[ambicapter]

This sounds like a "depression isn't real" and "if you're addicted, just stop" type of comment.

[kyledrake]

Depression is real, I'm experiencing it right now reading these comments.

You know what, why don't you go buy a carton of cigarettes and some heroin, and go use that for a few months. Since it's the same thing as looking at a news feed you shouldn't have to worry about addiction because you've already done that and not gotten addicted to it, so you should be fine, right?

[AshleyGrant]

> Depression is real, I'm experiencing it right now reading these comments.

No, you aren't. You are trivializing what Depression actually is by making flippant comments like that. You're also letting everyone know that you are utterly ignorant to what Depression actually is.

Do better.

[kyledrake]

You're mad at me for being flippant about depression while you're being flippant about social media, pot calling the kettle black. I'm not the one that started flattening every bad habit or unhealthy technology into "basically cigarettes and heroin".

If everything addictive is treated as morally and medically equivalent to hard opioid abuse or crippling nicotine addiction, then the language we use to talk about actual addiction stops meaning anything. There are people whose entire lives, bodies, families, and futures have been destroyed by heroin. Cigarettes killed my grandfather, I had to sit there and watch him die as a machine sucked black liquid out of his lungs.

Comparing that reality to doomscrolling on your couch cheapens the severity of one problem while oversimplifying the other. Internet overuse can certainly damage mental health. But pretending that checking TikTok is the same category of damage as opioid dependency is not awareness, it's insanity, and it's actively dangerous. It's also mostly happening because lawyers figured out this might be a way to sucker people into going around Section 230.

If people stop breathing the fumes of the vibes of this idea and start to process how any of this would actually work, they will eventually discover that they are proposing an internet police state where police with guns tell people what they can and can't do on internet forums. If you don't think that will slippery slope into something you don't want, please read more history. Government is fundamentally a dangerous monopoly on force and it needs to be treated with deep caution. People that want government regulated social media (remind me, who is the current US president?) so they can "own the Zuck" are playing an incredibly dangerous game, and I really hope they come to their senses soon, because the irreparable damage this idea will create will far outlive Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg.

[AshleyGrant]

> You're mad at me for being flippant about depression while you're being flippant about social media, pot calling the kettle black.

Where did I do that?

I stopped reading your comment after that since you accused me of saying stuff I never said, so whatever you wrote is unworthy of my attention.

[kyledrake]

I agree with you, please don't read any of this. Not wanting a government controlling online content (with police with guns!) on a false pretense that "Instagram is cigarettes" is apparently a fringe opinion now and I wouldn't want to damage your brain and make you addicted to my terrible posts.

To everyone else reading this: go back to when you were a teenager, and ask yourself how cool you would be with your government saying you can't look at web sites and forums because they're "too addictive", or you can't listen to Nine Inch Nails because it's "for adults only", or Geocities has to be shut down or you need to be carded to use it because it has "adult content" (it had a lot of adult content, including a robust LGBT community when it was very much not safe to host that content). How would you have felt about that?