It does seem like a reasonable solution. A rewind back to the age when it had been just the newsgroups. Without +1 algorithms that result in the algorithm making a choice what users see and not the opposite.
Certainly a better solution, if compared to forcing everyone to show their Real Id, just to verify their age to access the Internet.
With HN and other sites with a non-personalized feed, at least what you see is the same as what everyone else sees. And if there's voting, which isn't perfect, it's based on community feedback.
Well, you can go ahead and independently verify something like that pretty easily. Kind of weird to veer towards lies and malice at the drop of a hat here
Out of interest, what's your definition of social media? Because mine is a site / app whose value is derived from its users, where users are all of (roughly) equal importance. Which puts forums / reddit / hacker news into that category.
You can quibble about definitions, but I'd say it's got a lot to do with being personalized. So anything where you need to know something about the viewer in order to optimise what to show each individual. That can be for anything from the content itself to the advertisements, if you need to know something about who is watching, it's what we currently think of as social media.
FB, Instagram, TikTok, but also Google search, and every ad supported site.
Drinking causes severe societal ills and is unhealthy in any amount. Everyone should indeed stop drinking. We should tax alcohol until it is unaffordable for the vast majority.
The world would be better off without widespread use of alcohol. It's not even a question, everything else similar, a society that chooses not to drink alcohol would have a social, economical, and psychological edge over one which does. Individuals are better off if they don't drink, it's just not good.
I wouldn't advocate for a ban on alcohol, it's much too ingrained in culture and too easy to make, but I hope that society some day gets to the point that it rejects it, much like we reject huffing shoe polish.
I’d ban photos, pictures, video and sound. Leave text only. Greatly reduces deepfake potential, manipulation options by state actors, dopamine hits from looking at pretty cat pictures too.
I don’t want to say IRC was fine but it was better than Instagram.
Because we live in a society (that mostly) allows adults to make choices for themselves. Just because a few adults can't handle themselves doesn't mean that all adults should be punished for it. You can say the same thing about gambling, smoking, drinking, eating sweets etc.
Also, the effects on undeveloped brains are far greater. Our job is to teach kids and raise them. Not be their friends and just let them do whatever adults do.
> if the dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs
I highly doubt the implied semantics of this statement. We don't know everything there is to know about "dopaminergic effects". The pharmacology of smoking weed is probably very different than from say, scrolling through memes.
Pharmacology, yes. But we can compare social media and other addictions in terms of social harm, health harm, psychological and emotional harm, withdrawal symptoms, financial consequences, impairment to decision-making, procrastination and distraction impacting attainability of personal goal, prerogatives and decreasing motivation, relationship harm (it is difficult to form relationships with those "terminally online" for example), cognitive/executive function impairments, self-esteem harm, sleep hygiene harm, personal hygiene harm (difficult topic for some addicted people to talk about but in my opinion, it is related to internet addiction as much as alcohol or drug addictions), harm on enjoyment of life, and many others.
The effects of dopamine bombing yourself with on line content are not very dissimilar to effects of drugs. I would argue they are more similar than dissimilar.
In my experience you don't become terminally online unless there's something else going on in your life. People talking about the ills of social media seem to forget that children nowadays are: institutionalized for 8 hours of their day, raised on diets of processed garbage, etc. Like, a well adjusted kid isn't going to treat social media as more important than their friends unless they think they can make a living from it or have no friends.
I think "dopamine bombing" is not what it sounds. See discussions on dopamine fasting for what I mean. The relationship between the things you do and dopamine are complex, probably more complex than the relationship of what you physically consume and dopamine.
> In my experience you don't become terminally online unless there's something else going on in your life
That's true, but it's also true for other addictions.
> a well adjusted kid isn't going to treat social media as more important than their friends unless they think they can make a living from it or have no friends.
Probably mostly true, but also a lot of friendships are moving online.
> I think "dopamine bombing" is not what it sounds
Can you elaborate? I think it sounds like abusing the dopamine hits you get when scrolling through SM, for example.
It implies a direct connection with neurochemistry that's much less direct than drugs (and even moreso diet), which can directly stimulate the release of dopamine. For example if I'm feeling tired of scrolling through memes, I can just put my phone away. I can't stop caffeine from stimulating my neurons, or ignore a macronutrient deficiency in my body.
It might be that this is an unimportant distinction in the end, but I'm not sure we know.
Quite many people can't just put their phone away, even when they try to concentrate on something else. The behaviour seems to be very similar to other addictions.
