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by basisword
18 days ago
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>> 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, |
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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.