[somenameforme]

Social media, even before the era of dark patterns and 'engagement' maximization was still extremely addictive. It just had a less pronounced effect in large part because fewer people were using it. For instance there was a time when Facebook was university only and invite only.

And this is all for people that are of the 'legal age' so to speak using it. For kids, who are going to be even more insecure, have more ongoing brain development, and such - I think the idea of creating a non-addictive or non-harmful social media is basically a nonstarter. The same is true of use by adults as well, but we generally are more accepting of adults' right to engage in self destructive behaviors.

[ajsnigrutin]

Back then, you had 20, 30, 50 'friends' on facebook and basically all the content you saw was made by them. Except for chatting, you could basically view all the 'daily content' (all the posts by everyone you had on your friends list) in maybe 10 minutes.

Then facebook turned to "let's show you random political articles instead of your friends dinner plates", and people moved to instagram... which stopped showing your friends dinner plates soon after it got bought out by facebook and it too replaced the friends dinner plates with random "reels".

If the kids only saw stuff posted by their 'friends', instead of being pushed a lot of random garbage they never decided to 'follow', it would still be a much nicer place.

[somenameforme]

I think you're conflating issues. There's the algorithm pushing garbage and then the general issues of social media itself - cyber-bullying, image crafting + social comparison, FOMO, and so on. The latter is the main driver of the negative effects in children. It's basically just taking all the normal negative issues that happen in a school environment and then bumping everything up exponentially.

Even consider your innocuous example of dinner pics. Kids are extremely insecure and prone to envy. Obviously some are going to be eating much more nicely than others on average. Think about the knock-on effects of that when suddenly that's being shoved in their face. And again that is for a behavior that you yourself offered as ostensibly harmless. In practice far worse things happen, and constantly.

[basisword]

>> Social media, even before the era of dark patterns and 'engagement' maximization was still extremely addictive.

I disagree. When you only saw what you followed you ran out of 'content' regularly. For example, it was a common feature on Twitter clients to maintain your scroll position in your feed because keeping up to date with it and reading it in its entirety was the norm. Same goes for Facebook. Your friends only posted so much content. The 'addictive' aspect was you had to check regularly to see if there was new content. That is very very different from endless feeds full of content that is forced in front of you by the algorithm,

[somenameforme]

You're probably speaking more from the perspective of a college student, if not adult when this stuff was kicking off.

For kids today it's an entirely different world. Take all the petty little things that naturally happen in school settings, multiply it by orders of magnitude, make it not only permanent but permanently shareable - and you have social media + kids. It's a rather horrific thing. By college a lot of things like bullying have cooled down a good deal, and college kids tend to be at least somewhat more secure, so the image crafting and other issues are at least somewhat less harmful, but this is all very different for children.

And the worst part of this is that as horrible as this all is, it remains highly addictive. It's not about perpetual browsing but about FOMO. Anytime anybody posts something, there's this concern that maybe it's about you, or maybe it's something you don't want to miss out on, or maybe it's just something generally interesting. And this again just among your 'friends.'

Even if you completely eliminated algorithmic promotion (and advertising - which is probably even worse than crap organic 'content') you'd still see significant negative effects of social media on children.

[nathias]

it isn't about avoiding all harm as sociallity itself is harmful, it's about software not hijacking/exploiting our cognition especially in times when this would mess with our development

[somenameforme]

Socializing isn't harmful. Socializing in a way that naturally trends towards mob mentality, where everything is potentially permanently recorded, and where artificial representations of people are the norm - that's all harmful, and it's inescapable in social media.