Maybe you're not the type of person who's struggled with addiction, but it can do awful things to you. Yes, including being addicted to scrolling social media. It screws with your head to the point where you don't know how to live in the moment anymore.
IMO it's a feature that's not valuable enough to justify the fact that it contributes to poor quality of life for people who can't put it down.
What will stop the addicts from just installing a modified build? Will distributors of modified builds be subject to jail sentences like drug dealers? What about authors of auto-paginate scripts like Reddit Enhancement Suite, or the various HN client apps?
During the few days TikTok was banned in the US a significant chunk of users went over to Xiaohongshu. This isn't merely a hypothetical.
This is also only addressing half of my comment. Will mod makers also face criminal penalties? If I make a HN client or even just a userscript, should I be delisting them or pushing an update that prevents EU citizens from using them?
The first step to get on track in life is to stop blaming the outside for all problems. Yes some people had really bad luck but in the end you can only change yourself.
> Treating social media design as equal to something that can kill people in excess unnerves me.
As it should, because there's a really obvious "slippery slope" argument right there.
But… it can kill people.
There is a certain fraction of the population who, for whatever reason, can be manipulated, to the point of becoming killers or of causing injury to themselves. Social media… actually, worse than that, all A/B testing everywhere, can stumble upon this even when it isn't trying to (I would like to believe that OpenAI's experience with 4o-induced psychosis was unintentional).
When we know which tools can be used for manipulation, it's bad to keep allowing it to run unchecked. Unchecked, they are the tool of propagandists.
But… I see that slippery slope, I know that any government which successfully argues itself the power to regulate this, even for good, is one bad election away from a dictatorship that will abuse the same reasoning and powers to evil ends.
I've always found the notion of "stochastic terrorism" to be elastic, effectively transforming "speech a given person dislikes" into "danger" so censorship looks like virtue.
Not to mention - you have to account for what happens if someone you hate may be in power and could wield any sort of system to stop "stochastic terrorism" against you. This is often dismissed as an abstract what-if, but....given what's been happening with world leaders these days, it should be a central consideration.
You are worried about the “what if” fallout over the multiple world leaders actually engaging in it. Their followers enact violence on their behalf while the leader maintains plausible deniability/enough perceived distance from the act they can never be explicitly blamed.
You can be worried about more than one thing but clearly one is a bigger issue than the other right now.
I never said "multiple". Just the leader in the jurisdiction you live in.
And I'm genuinely not sure how to interpret your last sentence. In the US we have a President that is increasingly going after people for their speech, in quite a few cases by using the laws and policies put in place to go after dissent. He is going after colleges and businesses who have "bias against whites" using policies put in place to punish hate speech against minorities and women.
I agree with that all that. That is why I am surprised you’re downplaying the idea of “stochastic terrorism” and discouraging the term’s usage. I don’t really get it.
It’s also important to note that the MAGA movement doesn’t care what restraint is shown when they’re out of power, they simply use every tool in their toolbox and bury the sword to the hilt every time.
Yes - and the point I'm making is that their toolbox has a few additional, nasty tools for censorship because they were originally enacted with the belief that only good, honest people would use them.
"Not thrilled with that" is also something they exploit to manipulate you.
Seeing this in black-and-white terms like "robs people of any notion" makes it easier to turn your dislike into a false choice, like any half-decent stage magician, between comfort and "not thrilled".
Humans are not machines. If your goal is to control rather than educate and guide, then we do not have shared values upon which to debate the contours of.
Were this the case, we could survive any poison or injuries, and discern truth from falsehood, simply by willing it so. We would never fall to drugs, nothing would get fetishised (in any sense of the word), political parties would be evaluated on merit alone rather than which name they proclaim.
And a lot of stage magic just wouldn't work. Special offers wouldn't be in exciting colours, gambling done with the same methods wouldn't ruin people; get-rich-quick schemes would fool nobody; photosensitive epilepsy wouldn't be a thing, and neither would the so-called "god helmet" (which, ironically, had one attempt to replicate the god helmet correlated only with suggestibility): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet
> If your goal is to control rather than educate and guide, then we do not have shared values upon which to debate the contours of.
The guidance I offer is only these:
1) you cannot escape a box whose existence you refuse to acknowledge.
It looks to me like you're adding the conflation to "all addictions" because you can clearly distinguish between "sugar" and "cocaine" as both forms of addictions.
Why would you not be willing to include "scrolling" as another form of addiction? Just because it's labeled the same way you yourself are demonstrating that we handle that in different ways.
Social Media is being treated as "sugar" in this instance instead of as "cocaine".
(As I get older, unironically. I want my productive worker bees to be drug free, addiction free, enjoying simple pleasures that do not put me at risk. They pay Social Security. Everything is nice and safe. Freedom? Yeah no thanks, get to work and pay your taxes.)
I mean, lets do the opposite where a large corporation gets people intentionally addicted to drugs and then bilks them for every penny they have until they are husks. Remember, free market comes first!
Thank you from talking about the Holy Freedom, my brother. Looking forward to enjoying further freedoms thanks to laws that protect me from behavior that makes me unfree and in need to constantly control me and my surroundings!
‘Freedom does not consist in doing what we want, but in overcoming what we have for an open future; the existence of others defines my situation and is the condition of my freedom. They oppress me if they take me to prison, but they are not oppressing me if they prevent me from taking my neighbour to prison.’ -- Simone de Beauvoir
We live in a society. We chose rules that we think will make society better. Freedom is meaningless without context. Freedom to doomscroll or freedom from doomscrolling. American propaganda really likes to divorce the concept from reality.
Social Media companies have actively and intentionally tried to make their products more addicting... now they have to face the very obvious consequences of that decision.
Because it impacts me, and I don't want it to impact me anymore?
Not because I use these products, but because I have to live in a society with these people, and if they are unhappy and angry, that impacts me directly, through various second-order effects.
People have less free will than we'd like to admit. I'd like to have freedom from outdoor advertising and online monopolies shoving short video formats down my throat.
We have great freedoms in Europe. We just need to apply in advance with our detailed plan, in three copies and the Commission will decide whether to deny our application or to deny it and fine us for unhealthy thoughts, too.
Sarcasm now, but maybe what the near future will look like...
More to the point: this is indeed a massive overreach with the Commission being the police, judge, jury, and executioner... what could go wrong? Exactly what we are seeing is taking shape, precedent by precedent.
Why would someone care about a destructive addiction that's plaguing the lives of the majority of the planet, leading to mental health issues and proliferating massive levels of misinformation. I wonder. Freedom to be manipulated by algorithms, yay!
