I don't know how to solve it, but personally I've chosen to block as many feeds/algorithms as I can, so I have to make a conscious decision to search for something (making it just as hard as making the conscious decision that I'm likely putting off). The only feeds I have right now are the FT and Hacker News. Everything else is just a blank home screen with a search bar.
Our children are effectively enslaved through basic trinkets and manipulation to serve as eye-balls for ad impressions to fuel equity value in silicon valley. It's fucked and it was intentionally designed to be this fucked.
The abstract of what you state makes sense, but the layers of manipulation on top of it are what the problem is.
So they build useful things and then make them pretty bad and less useful. If they were useful your interest or need would complete and you would move on.
Fundamentally I think it is important to say this. Addiction confounds some things in the space of designed systems
Hooked - How to build habit forming products - Nir Eyal.
We did it intentionally.
If done successfully, you create an unwitting sociopathy, a process that demands the product be as addictive as possible and a culture that is in thrall to the machine that rewards its employees by increasing those metrics. You're no longer thinking about purpose or wondering about what you're doing to your users. You simply realise that if you send this notification at this time, with this colour button, in this place, with this tagline then the machine likes it. Multiple people might contribute a tiny piece of a horrifying and manipulative whole and never quite realise the true horror of the monster they've helped build.
I don't mean to make you do all the work here: I can see a couple of pages from the introduction which mention "variability" and "investment":
> What distinguishes the Hook Model from a plain vanilla feedback loop is the Hook’s ability to create a craving. Feedback loops are all around us, but predictable ones don’t create desire. The unsurprising response of your fridge light turning on when you open the door doesn’t drive you to keep opening it again and again. However, add some variability to the mix—suppose a different treat magically appears in your fridge every time you open it—and voila, intrigue is created.
So that's "variability". I'm not hugely impressed. "Investment", meanwhile, is when you set preferences or connect to friends, so you feel like you lose out if you stop attending. I can see that these might be foolish ideas. But I can also see that foolish ideas are part of "engaging" with anything - something traditionally wholesome such as a piano, for instance. Imagine I'm a Victorian lady, and I've bought a piano and I invite my friends over for a regular evening of singing art songs, so that's "investment": also we buy new song sheets every time, so there's "variety". I'm totally hooked on this harmless positive thing, am I? Or do I in fact just like it and have free will?
An increasing number of young people get their news from social media and what is "engaging" isn't necessarily what's true. This leads to greater political polarisation, nuance is lost, tribalism increases, people treat conversations as things to be won as opposed to opportunities to share information. People spend their entire time doomscrolling because everything is "engaging" so it caters to their paranoia and attempts to keep them glued to their phone, ramping up their anxiety and paranoia because it makes them more money. People stay up late scrolling a feed that hooks them, sleep less, perform less well at work, may lose their job and all the ramifications that go along with that. Parents spend more time on their phones than with their children, a generation of babies and toddlers are having to compete for attention with these apps and in many cases fail because they're designed so well. What's worse is the babies get thrust an ipad and then are brought up by arbitrary strangers who may not have their best interests at heart and are exposed to considerable amounts of advertising at far too young an age.
I could go on but I feel like you're just going to give another one liner where you pretend that actually there's nothing wrong with this or smth.
I'm going to acknowledge "anxiety and paranoia" as something that it's particularly unethical to pander to. But I feel like that deserves a name in its own right, separate from addiction. I'm having a tip-of-the-tongue moment about it.
- I guess that's (automated) fearmongering and hoaxing.
My perspective might be a bit nannying but I think we're arguing the nation-building vs individualism axis and the free-will vs regulation axis.
For example, smoking has some benefits, its a cheap stimulent, helps you focus, good for people with undiagnosed ADHD. However its highly addictive and causes terrible long term health issues, so where do we fall on the line of its regulation? Should we allow everyone to persue their "free will" and advertising to be unregulated? Tobacco companies have a perverse incentive to downplay and suppress the health costs, fabricate positive research and lobby governments. Last time we allowed that everyone smoked, that might be good for free will, but is that good for society, for nation building?
I'd make a similar argument for our addictive online services, I think they should probably be age gated and increasingly regulated. While they're beneficial for the US economy they're detrimental to the nation-building of all nations exposed to them.
I would ask you to consider how the internet would look if online advertising was banned. While its an unrealistic aim, I think that view is extremely informative to the idea of _actual_ free will. If you remember how the old internet looked, its clear how the profit motive has distorted the internet beyond recognition.
To throw up a more middle ground example based on a video I saw a couple of days ago: there's a popular "health food influencer" on tiktok who gives contradictory advice based on products he's promoting and their ingredients list. In January sugar is a terrible ingredient but in March its entirely fine. He's shilling via product placement and there's no regulation of his platform. If people lack critical thinking they just blindly buy these products and learn nothing about health. You might state they're exercising their free will, but is that genuinely true? Maybe he only obtained his traffic because he had no qualms about how manipulative his content was. Did he get his early numbers via botting and then ending up towards the top of the list? Perhaps he threw $20k at another popular influencer to spam mentions and that's how he got his early traffic. An entirely unregulated system permits this. If the money wasn't there the only people talking about health foods would be people genuinely interested who gave reliable advice. The profit motive creates this distortion because its profitable to be misleading and sensationalist. There is a nuanced conversation to be had around people being able to make money on the platform and dedicate a career to it and banning advertising doesn't allow that. Somewhere there's a middle ground, I'm not sure where that is but I don't think we're anywhere near it today.
If you want a genuinely dark example then look up subliminals [0]. Its a niche community of grifter adults and tragically sad children, where the children seem to be labouring under a bizarre misconception peddled by the grifters that by repeatedly watching a specially prepared video they can become taller or have a prettier nose.
We're already in a future where "news entertainment" has replaced news and journalism is inherently unprofitable because it lacks the same attention grabbing properties of not caring for the truth. The new chapter in this is that "news entertainment" doesn't need on the ground journalism, and advertising rates pay better in the developing world. This means that all the facebook grandmas and grandads as well as the children are getting hooked on foreign-based indignance mills that are not regulated in the slightest. These foreign-based "news entertainment" shows only care for impressions, so simply re-enforce the desired ignorance of their audiences and tend towards pushing bigoted world views, in some cases even encouraging racism towards the very countries that are actually producing the content! In the very worst case scenarios foreign state actors use these channels in order to push their propaganda and stir up unrest in rival nation states.
It is free will, but in the big picture, its harmful to society.
Sidetrack: I had the idea recently that unscrupulous advertising might be a tragedy of the commons for the clients en masse, and harmful for the economy in general. Based on the intuition that lying can't be doing any good.
I used that word mostly because of the name of that book "Hooked".
> like the snake oil salesmen of yore
the problem is that you could run that guy out of town in the past and his damage was localised. Nowadays he can be the biggest player in town.
> Sidetrack: I had the idea recently that unscrupulous advertising might be a tragedy of the commons for the clients en masse, and harmful for the economy in general. Based on the intuition that lying can't be doing any good.
I'd go further and state that all advertising is bad, but I might be a touch too radical. Also it might be too late, given how strong "native advertising" and product placement now is. The content and the adverts have merged. LLMs might offer some brief respite as I think it will be hard to reliably advertise inside that content.
The answer to this (if it exists) is to withdraw the motivations for spreading misinformation or find another means of tempering their impact.
Idk what the solution is, I just find it odd we make our society obviously worse in order for someone to sell some diet pills or smth.
Which consequences are considered significant/desirable varies depending on the person.
I am using "bad" to refer to my personal judgments of this task ("was this time well spent?") and survival/growth needs in life. Inherently, there is nothing "bad" about scrolling: many things can be overconsumed to the point of causing consequences that are bad. However, the fact that TikTok et al. algorithms (and drugs, etc.) are designed to occupy your time and attention, makes me (by extension) consider them bad, because they likely lead me to bad consequences.
If I had a pinball machine in my room and it distracted me occasionally, I would probably write it off as a bit of relaxation/fun. If I scrolled a few TikTok videos, I might say the same. But if I spent multiple hours doing each while forgetting my fundamental needs (food, water, sunlight...) repeatedly, I may well say they are bad.
It's obviously unreasonable to classify everything that doesn't advance a certain goal (money? career? education?) as "bad", so the optimum must be somewhere in the middle.
(Rambling train of thought warning)
To resolve this, I have a few heuristics. They are definitely not logically watertight, but it's what works for me.
A key tradeoff is between "how fun is this?" and "what's the opportunity cost/consequence?"
Personally, I would like to live with purpose. The algorithms that drive TikTok etc. too easily lend themselves to purposeless consumption, which can also be true for many other activities (gaming!). I feel better saying/planning "I will do 1 hour of X", then doing that wholeheartedly - but I would never consciously choose to do an hour of scrolling.
Another bias of mine is that real-world things > virtual/digital/game/simulated etc... I feel like the inherent limitations and permanent consequences of physical things make me more careful about what I'm doing and what might result. If I break a part while tinkering/messing around in the workshop, I can't just load a quicksave - it gives me an opportunity to reconsider. Given that HN is a software-heavy place, I suspect many will not feel this way - this is OK, who am I to judge?
Long term compounding benefits > short term temporary pleasures. If I devoted my scrolling time (before I blocked everything) to playing pinball, or table tennis, or Minecraft, I would probably get very good at it. Similarly, if I tinkered with a pet project or filtered some photos, there would be some result to show for it - I would be improving my skill at something. As far as I can tell, the way I was scrolling TikTok-like feeds was not bringing any long-term results that I could look back at. Famously, no one remembers most of the short videos they scroll through. It only seems to deplete my
Granted, the previous paragraph depends on what one wants - perhaps influencers analysing successful video formats would improve their ability by scrolling. I'm imagining grouping outcomes into "good", "neutral" and "bad" for me: better at programming = good, top 1% Minecraft player = neutral, 100 hours spent on Reels = bad. (Reality is more nuanced, this is just a heuristic)
Speaking of too much time pursuing interests, it's time for me to close HN and get back to my problem sets. It is definitely interesting to think about this, but considering it for too long is bad in the sense that I will feel better having finished those questions.
Apply the argument to abusing drugs now, and see how this argument throws all nuance out the window.
By the way, I'm interested in answers. I don't appreciate this being shot down as a bad take. Give me explanations, not disapproval.
Now to your main point... dopamine hits aren’t inherently good or bad. They can, however, also make things addictive, and drug abuse is indeed a good parallel here.
On the other side of the spectrum is more wholesome long-horizon activities like a challenging side project, career progression, or fitness goals. There's certainly an element of variable ratio reinforcement in all of these, but because the rewards are so much more tangible, and you get to exercise more of your agency, these activities generally feel quite meaningful on reflection.
Playing pinball is somewhere in the middle, probably on the cheaper side of the spectrum. Introspective people can generally reflect on a session and decide whether it was a good use of their time or not.
I really think that 'how do you feel after a long session of this' is a good measuring stick. Very few people will tell you that they feel good after a long session of social media scrolling or short-form content.
Another good measuring stick is 'do you want to want to be doing this?'. I want to want to go to the gym and gain 10kg of muscle. I do not want to want to spend hours on tiktok every day.
It could be a nice segue to tinkering with pinball machines though :)
Now, it is more nuanced than that. Is addiction bad for us? And at what point do we say we’re addicted to something? For me personally, when I can’t stop doing something (say, watching YouTube instead of working on a project), I won’t be happy long-term. It would be more gratifying short-term, sure, but I’d say it’s still not good.
But I agree that we should be able to decide for ourselves what is good for us – delegating it to authority isn’t a great solution, it should always be our own responsibility. We should, however, be especially cautious when making decisions about things that are known to be addictive for others.
At this point, I'd almost think you were a bot yourself, as your oblivious to the social standards of online forums and/or manipulating them intentionally.
> I don't know how to solve it, ...
> but personally I've chosen to block as many feeds/algorithms as I can, ...
I think you solved it :) (at least, for yourself)
There are many things "out there" that are addictive and distracting and thus unhealthy, but we all have to find some way to overcome
It's taken a few years to get to this point, but seeing the effects and regrets from over consumption of feeds made me take action.
It's awesome, come on back out to reality. I frequently go out at this point, come back home and go to see if I have any messages and realize my phone was on me the whole time and I had no idea (I also silence pretty much everything...).
I'm super pumped to have an actual camera to play with that's pocket sized too since I did miss the camera. But now I'll have something tremendously superior and can leave that aging device filled with way too many 2FA codes I don't want to inadvertently lose at home.
I still need a proper mp3 player (been using an old android) and a camera though.
...and a Kindle, and a fax machine ;)
As a side note, the "old" style Nokias now seem to be running on some kind of emulation... The Nokia startup sound lagged and stuttered and made me die a little inside.
I also got a really nice pocket camera which I'm much more excited about. It's called a Ricoh, so the camera and the phone should fit in my pockets without any real trouble or bulge. Plus keys, and wallet, and I feel like I'm set.
I can just ask people if I need directions. I'm already don't use location services on maps, and usually look things up before I leave anyways.
Just leaving the phone at home is really the nicest thing, and I'll probably continue doing that a fair amount as well.
Once we have the AI holodeck (the full-sensory interactive, possibly multiplayer one), can you only imagine?
TikTok is only the punch card phase of this. TikTok may as well be black and white television. Just imagine what we might have in twenty years.
Maybe this is why we haven't found alien life. If their biologies have attention mechanisms like ours, maybe they automate highs and turn inward instead of outward. (I do like that better than AGI gray goo taking over galaxies.)
At least drugs/alcohol are self limiting: you have to meet your dealer, go to a store, eventually run out of money...
TikTok/Reels/Shorts are free, infinite, and in your pocket on a device you're now forced to use in daily life (bank/2fa/messaging apps).
Restaurants with only QR code menus.
"Let me scan your LinkedIn app."
Verify your government ID on our app.
"Zelle me."
"Scan this code to pay."
My favorite: "Scan this code for parking or you will be towed. Also, if you leave without paying, we'll tow you next time you enter any of our properties in any state because we scanned your license plate." There's no other way to pay.
Apartment / condo door keys and entry systems.
My battery is always at 10%. I don't know how y'all do it.
This is also one of the many reasons why I think it's criminal that two private businesses are allowed to own this modern life necessity so completely.
Of course, YMMV
Scrolling for hits of satisfying novelty is a proposition that will not be sustainably met.
Part of me also wonders if things like this can be used for not so great things, can they be used for good things?
I wanted to make some progress on a personal project, but I had a history of abandoning things, without external accountability. I had a guy for that the previous year, which worked great, but our interests diverged, so I had to find a way to do it on my own.
I realized that I couldn't force it. I had to find a way to make it work without having sufficient dopamine. Without relying on willpower at all.
So I stumbled into environmental design from first principles. I simply designed around all the failure modes.
1. I noticed that if I skipped a day of working on my project, the chance of completely losing momentum would rise enormously. So I decided I have to work every day, but to make it sustainable it only needs to be an hour.
2. I noticed that if I put work off until later in the day, the chance of skipping a day would rise enormously. So I decided that I had to start working as soon as I woke up. (But only for an hour. I could keep going but I didn't have to.)
3. And finally I noticed that, if I started playing with my phone or surfing the internet, the day was basically over. So I made a rule that I had to keep them both off for the first hour of the day. (And I turned them off the night before for good measure. That way I am waking up into the correct state by default.)
And what do you know. I didn't miss a day for 3 months. Even my dopamine starved brain was able to persist on this project every day without fail for several months straight, because I simply made these small changes to my environment!
The project suddenly became the most fun and interesting thing I could be doing. I actually looked forward to working on it the next day, when I went to sleep at night!
But I feel the exact same about cheeseburgers. Should I be able to sue McDonalds if I let my kid eat 100 of them in one sitting?
Again, I get the danger here, and I don't like TikTok as a whole. I just don't really know where the line is between something that the parent is allowing kids to do (like spending a billion hours on TikTok), versus something they have no control over (like a company badly constructing a car seat, or similar).
The problem with analogies to things like cheeseburgers, gambling, drugs, cigarettes, etc., is:
1. Availability -- you have to go somewhere to acquire/participate in these things*
2. Cost -- you have to have money to spend. That is, it's not something you can consume/participate in for free -- you have to have money to spend.
* Gambling is theoretically freely available via gambling apps. But still comes at a cost.
With social media, anybody can do it for unlimited amounts of time, and for free. All you need is a phone/laptop/desktop with internet access -- which nearly every person on the planet has.
Addiction + Free + Widely available = Destruction
3. Targeting -- even under the (debatable) premise that they are intentionally designed to be addictive, cheeseburgers, drugs and cigarettes do not actively target each addict by optimising their properties to their individual addiction.
If I am addicted to smoking, the tobacco industry does indeed try to keep me hooked, among other things by offering me many flavours and alternatives. However, the cigarettes I personally consume are not constantly adjusting their formula, appearance and packet design specifically to satisfy my tastes and desires.
Even a first step of requiring transparency in the algorithms would quickly shatter this stronghold on people's minds.
And those efforts seem effective to me, at least anecdotally. I don't feel particularly bad about those restrictions either.
There is a great deal of information given to parents on what is in McDonalds.
I would say that most parents, not those on a tech site, have no idea how tiktok works, what studies have shown about it or its dangers.
Additionally, other content like TV and movies has content ratings, social media does not have anything of the sort.
There are others that touch on personal vs. societal responsibility too and the difficulties with parental/personal moderation and change (Stolen Focus by Johann Hari and Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke off the top of my head).
There is an enormous amount of nuance that goes into answering your questions and addressing your assumptions that HN is probably not a great medium for, if you're serious about understanding the answers.
If McDonald’s is handing them out for free at the playground, yes.
It’s not. But if you’re giving a kid “100” burgers “in one sitting” without the parent’s explicit sign-off, you are probably liable for damages.
This is a sign of a broken community. Handing out candy is absolutely fine as long as the kids are old enough to understand their own allergies and limits.
Counterpoint: Halloween.
Most kids are competent enough to manage their survival in such circumstances. Some are not. And sometimes it’s not the parents’ fault. But if a community is raising a generation too imbecilic to choose if they can eat chocolate, their life path is sort of already written.
The better comparison is what if there was a bottomless bucket of candy in your 10 year olds room all the time.
Maybe if you had picked gambling or alcohol…
I'm not saying that parents don't have any responsibility, but it's about practicalities. If a teenager can easily buy smokes or alcohol, many will, no matter what the parents say. If you make the goods harder to buy, usage drops. So, shops / software vendors do have some responsibility for societal outcomes.
In a libertarian utopia, anything goes, but kids are... weird in that they often try to push the boundaries of their autonomy without always knowing the risk, and it's in our collective best interest not to let them go too far.
I'd argue most adults are just oversized kids in a trenchcoat
I tried to eat as many cheeseburgers as I could in one sitting (I easily eat double the amount of food of others in one sitting normally), and tapped out at 10 or something, which is impractical and gross, there's a physical limit unless you have certain conditions
If you only go to fast food once a week or less with your kid as a treat, I feel like you could probably exclude soda and fries and tell them to get as many burgers as they want, but they have to eat them all, and it would be more of a lesson than anything lol
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069527/china-ti...
Excerpts: Douyin [Chinese version of TikTok] introduced in-app parental controls, banned underage users from appearing in livestreams, and released a “teenager mode” that only shows whitelisted content, much like YouTube Kids. In 2019, Douyin limited users in teenager mode to 40 minutes per day, accessible only between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. Then, in 2021, it made the use of teenager mode mandatory for users under 14.
America has never been able to successfully thwart drug proliferation. Porn, Video Games, Social Media, all substance-less drugs. It's up to you to keep your kid off Heroin and it's also up to you to keep them off those other things at addictive levels.
The thing is, keeping your kid away from things like Heroin takes a village (especially if Heroin is pervasive in the environment). The same is true for those other things. Adults have to enter the room at some point.
We've been needing a trillion-dollar class action lawsuit against social media companies. Long overdue.
(This is completely disregarding how practical such a ban would be)
Or give everyone cheap daily GLP-1 pills.
Thanks for the reply :)
If RJ Reynolds was handing out free cigarettes to children, even though the parent either consented to this or simply didn't know about it, would you consider RJ Reynolds' responsible for the adverse effects of children smoking?
You're saying parental responsibility should govern because TikTok is legal, while cigarettes require state intervention because they're illegal. But they are only illegal because we made them illegal (for minors). And isn't that exactly what is being discussed here?
For the sake of consistency, do you think cigarettes should be legal for minors if they have parental consent? If not, what is the distinction between TikTok and cigarettes that causes you to think the government should be involved in one but not the other?
The harm from cigarette use is direct, and there is no level of cigarette use that can be considered safe and healthy. Additionally, it would be very difficult for parents to prevent their children from buying them if they could walk into any convenience store and buy them. On the other side, social media use can be harmful, but it is possible to use social media in a healthy way.
I'm curious where it ends when you start banning kids from things that are only potentially addictive or harmful. Should parents be able to let their children watch TV, play video games, or have a phone or tablet?
What's the distinction between those things and social media for you?
But the knowledge of the harmful impacts of social media aren't as abundant, nor are they identified or classified.
McDonalds are required to list the nutritional information of what you're consuming. TV shows and movies have content ratings to know what you're going to be consuming. Social media like Tiktok does not have any form of rating to know what you're consuming or going to consume.
There is a lot of less rigour on short from content like Tiktok, in comparison with McDonalds.
There are other options for addressing social problems besides lawsuits. Other rich places in this world are not nearly as fat as us. I suspect environments also matter for social media addiction. We should investigate why!
Lawsuits are the one official mechanism for righting wrongs. They're the only mechanism that the perpetrator of a wrong can't just choose to ignore.
It is developed to be as addictive like a drug, but it’s not even fun. Just stupid mind numbing content.gambling does the same thing, and many jurisdictions have outlawed it for minors.
I don't know how to draw even a blurred line between I've made my burger taste better because I added salt to it, but has now make it more addictive as a result.
You could argue an Oreo has been developed to taste good such that you want to eat them again.
I understand your point and I agree to an extent but I don't know how you do that. Becoming addicted to things comes with a level of personal accountability, to a degree.
Should you be able to sue a liquor store if they sell your kid a fifth of vodka?
With that being said, I don't know if McDonalds is not a really usable comparison.
McDonalds is not an endless conveyor belt of food arriving in your hands 24/7 and beeping and buzzing you when it's not to learning how and what to put in front of you to keep eating endlessly until you can't eat anymore.
There's more useful studies that doomscrolling and shorts literally decrease brain size, increase depression, and lead to dopamine exhaustion.
Short Video players are digital slot machines. They seem to be designed to let people keep using it who might not be aware on how to build up defences, or of defences are needed. In a casino many of the things the games machines can and can't do are legislated by law. It might be surprising to learn how many of those things out right, similar to it, or unique to it can happen on a phone without circumstance. Casinos will also remind you to gamble responsibly, and be able to ban yourself if needed.
The line is really simple for kids - screens loaded with bright colors that are constantly changing with many layers of sounds from ages 1-5 pretty harmful at overriding their senses. Then, there's other content traps from there. The recent moves to schools that go screen free (or greatly reduce passive consumption) is critical. Putting a chromebook in front of a kid for 8 hours isn't always progress.
https://www.techpolicy.press/is-tiktok-digital-fentanyl/
https://www.foxnews.com/media/tiktok-is-chinas-digital-fenta...
> Certainly, some regard social media generally as addictive, and reckon TikTok is a particularly potent format. Anna Lembke, Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic, and author of the book Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance In The Age of Abundance, referred to Tiktok as a "potent and addictive digital drug":
> I can’t speak to the surveillance piece mentioned in the article, but I can attest to the addictive nature of TikTok and other similar digital media. The human brain is wired to pay attention to novelty. One of the ways our brain gets us to pay attention to novel stimuli is by releasing dopamine, a reward neurotransmitter, in a part of the brain called the reward pathway. What TikTok does is combine a moving image, already highly reinforcing to the human brain, with the novelty of a very short video clip, to create a potent and addictive digital drug.
Put another way: If McDonalds sees I eat 5 cheeseburgers a day, at what point do they have to stop serving me for my own health? Do they need to step in at all?
If Facebook knows I'm scrolling 6 hours a day, at what point do they have to stop serving me?
Sure it's a matter of degrees but I don't see a bright line between McDonald's and tiktok. Both want me hooked on their product. Both have harmful aspects. Both have customers they know are over-indulging. Why would only tiktok be liable for that?
That's the bright line. The lack of any barrier to entry.
Is McDonald's adjusting the flavour and ingredients of each cheeseburger it serves you with the express purpose of encouraging you to order the next one as soon as possible?
That likely depends on how that "something" was publicly marketed to both parents and children based on the company's available information. Our laws historically regulate substances (and their delivery mechanisms) which may lead to addition or are very easy to misuse in a way which leads to permanent harm (see: virtually all mind-altering substances); even nicotine gum is age-restricted like tobacco products. Because nicotine is generally considered an addictive substance, it's regulated, but few reasonable people would argue that parents should be allowed to buy their children nicotine gum so their kids calm down.
Consider how, decades ago, the tobacco companies were implicated in suppressing research demonstrating that tobacco products are harmful to human health. The key here will be if ByteDance has done the same thing.
Also, to play off your point on cheeseburgers: remember the nutritional quality of one cheeseburger versus another will vary. If made with top-quality ingredients (minimally-processed ingredients, organic vegetables, grass-fed beef, etc.), a cheeseburger is actually quite nutritious. However, in a hypothetical situation where a fast-food chain was making false public claims about the composition of their cheeseburgers (e.g., lying about gluten-free buns or organic ingredient status), and someone is harmed as a consequence, the victim might have standing to sue the fast food chain.
Should you be able to sue McDonald's if they delivered you unlimited cheeseburgers for free, said nothing of the dangers, and even encouraged you to eat more, and then you became obese/sick from it? Sure, it may have been your choice to accept/eat them, but you did so uninformed, and based on false premises, and the risks were hidden from you, or even explicitly downplayed.
That's what social media is. It's free delivery of unlimited cheeseburgers, but for your brain.
In the above example, you were tempted with something that seemed good, but that carried great risks, to generate business for another who knew of the risks, but either didn't tell you, or even lied to you. When the risks backfire on you -- the risks they knew about from the very start -- or even have already been backfiring on you for a while, I think it's absolutely fair to blame that business for knowingly tempting you into it, and that it's also absolutely fair to seek damages. Proving those damages is another matter, but I think it's absolutely fair to try.
Haha, wtf. You don't.
What is to stop other individuals from filing the same suit and expecting similar outcomes?
Class action suites suffer immensely from bad actors freeloading on the backs of people actually harmed. I have a friend who practices law in the area on some pretty high profile medical cases, it's a chronic problem trying to weed out people who were affected from people who shamelessly want money. Basically people playing victim to steal from actual victims, and even worse, the side doing the weeding is the side who originated the harm.
Pretty sure too much gambling and too much alcohol is worse than watching too many short videos. So how can we say that spending time on figuring out how to block people from watching too many short videos is a better use of our time and resources than limiting gambling and drinking.
Not to mention this presupposes that social media addiction is rampant. But there isn't a scientific consensus on that. This lawsuit reads like scaremongering of the past around television and comic books. Instead of regulating content or user privacy we get these dog and pony shows.
Make your bedroom a phone-free zone, charge it in the living room overnight, use the built in parenting and screentime controls that every modern phone OS has, don't let your kids stare at the screen all day. Etc.
This isn't rocket science. Self control is one of the most important things you need to learn. It sucks and it's hard but it's basic life stuff.
The only difference with social media addiction vs drugs/gambling is that it's not socially ostracized like other addictions so people ignore it.
I'm not addicted to alcohol or gambling, but I know that it takes significantly more willpower for those that are to just stop than it does for me to not have that chocolate bar at night.
There is a proportionality to it
You don't have infinite willpower. If humans had infinite willpower humanity would have worked itself to death long ago. There is a natural balance of willpower in your brain, it's called the dopaminergic system. If you have ADHD, you have much, much less willpower than a normal person because you literally lack the dopamine hormone in your prefrontal cortex. No amount of belief will magically create dopamine in your brain out of thin air.
And when the app is developed purposely to make people addict, that’s an issue.
You can’t just blame the user when their chance to have a normal app usage have been rigged.
Nobody is talking about banning anything, we’re talking specifically about holding social media companies accountable for marketing to children a product that is knowingly addictive and potentially harmful to their health.
Part of the issue with social media is that no reasonable parent lets their 12 year old watch porn or drink but Instagram and ticktock are on a lot more 12 year old’s phone’s than you realize. Social media has network effects and creates tremendous social pressure to not make your kid “different” when half the classroom is sharing TikToks.
I’m not conservative in the slightest but I see no reason to treat social media any differently than alcohol, tobacco or gambling. Available without restriction to adults but limited to children under a certain age.
That's similar to dumb ideas involving social pressure. When people have a tendency to be dumb about a thing we use the law to restrict the thing, apparently. But this involves, in effect, an authoritative declaration of "that's dumb" by law. I feel personally threatened, then, in activities such as my woodwork, which might have been an equally dumb obsession! I know nobody's at all likely to regulate woodwork, but that's only because it's relatively unpopular. I could imagine a parallel universe where woodwork (portable somehow) becomes a trend that makes a young person feel socially relevant, and then it gets regulated. I think I disapprove of this interference with people's dumb notions.
I've missed critical final exams and flights literally scrolling Instagram. Mental health disorders exist, alas.
That's a mind blowing statistic, and I'm sure this is much more common than we think.
This is why I hope we wake up and realize that social media is going to be the ruin of our society. I hope this trial is the beginning of the end of social media platforms that prey on addictive behaviors.
My jaw is on the floor... Can you provide details of your usage, were you just going through video after video for 12-14 hours or were you involved in content production or something?
I should mention that I was very financially successful due to TikTok. Around Christmas of 2023, my book got over 20M views and shot up to #122 on all Amazon books, until KDP just stopped offering it within a few hours. I wonder how high it would have gone.
But due to that success, I lost both drive and purpose. I had already made it, and it wasn't clear what else I could offer the world. So while I thought about it, I scrolled to pass the time. But that scrolling was endless and addictive. And I never made any progress on figuring out the question of what I'm good for.
In any case congrats that’s awesome. What was the book, if you don’t mind sharing?
My guess is that they do expand, but only when genuinely needed for long-term. They probably keep a certain amount of blank books in stock, and ration them out to PoD books somewhat evenly, with established books getting higher priority.
This was the video that singlehandedly got me all those sales I mentioned earlier: https://www.tiktok.com/@alwayscandid/video/73180668430448755... ... honestly it's quite poetic how it all turned out. I did almost no work making a book, I made way more money than I ever deserved, I wasted all of it, and now I'm sleeping in my car. It's very fair, it's more than fair. It's generous.
I have made and squandered a few very small fortunes myself so, respect.
Just check out hospitals or elderly shelter thing.
What sort of social changes did you notice after that period of time?
I've never used TikTok, but the techniques they employ sounds seriously addictive.
YouTube I enjoy more, but I still don’t spend much time on it. I mostly go on there looking for something in particular and don’t spend much time scrolling. Their recommendations are terrible and creators chasing the algorithm is making every interesting corner round.
Instagram I like. I love to see updates from friends and family but that runs out quickly so I don’t end up spending much time there.
Facebook is good for their marketplace when I’m looking to buy something or give something away.
Mastodon is boring, X is offensive, posts on BlueSky and Threads feel fake and performative. LinkedIn is full of journeys and learnings and I’m not interested in either.
HN is the only social media site I visit with any kind of frequency.
Oh shoot, we were talking about TikTok right?
Nobody ever saw it as a bad thing though, many people even encouraged me. Looking back at it 90% what I read was absolutely useless besides some novelty and being useful for quizzes.
Wonder what I could've done with all the time I lost, probably changed my behaviour in general. Can't imagine how much tiktok changes these kids.
“IG is a drug”: Internal messages may doom Meta at social media addiction trial
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/tiktok-settles-h...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/tiktok-settles-h...
The law protects companies but rarely binds them, and the law binds citizens but rarely protects them. This is the only recourse, in our land where wealth and power mean more than the rule of law.
I wonder if the settlement amounts will ever become public. The Big Tobacco comparison keeps coming up, but those settlements were massive and included ongoing payments. Hard to imagine social media companies agreeing to anything similar without admitting some level of harm.
As a parent of two kids (8 and 6), I think about this constantly. We limit screen time pretty aggressively, but it's getting harder as they get older. The "attention-grabbing design" part isn't some conspiracy theory. These apps are explicitly optimized for engagement. The question is whether that optimization crosses a legal line.
Curious how the trial plays out with Zuckerberg on the stand.
Curious into what kind of example you as a parent are setting in limiting screen time for yourself. For me, it's easy as I'm an old fart that has had a longer time without devices than with one while also not participating in the socials. We now have parents that have had a device for the majority of their life having kids that will never know a time without devices. So this is an honest bit of curiosity at the risk of sounding judgemental.
Can't really be without a phone when they need to meet up with friends either. Completely going against smartphones and screens could end up isolating them.
TikTok, outside of the US and Zionist-controlled sphere of influence, remained the one place for this information to be available widely far beyond what was possible on other platforms.
All the other platforms have the same concepts of algorithms and targeting and bubbles. TikTok was uniquely not under Western control, and thus, needed to be pressured to conform.
The significant shift in young people's opinions about Israel in recent years is heavily attributed to the unfiltered information about their ongoing genocide against the Palestinians that they could uniquely see on TikTok and must not be understated, especially in light of all the major shifts in news, media, and social media over the past few years as they grapple with the fallout of losing the narrative.
I don't deny that social media as a whole has many harms and negatives, but there's no action like this being taken against Meta, Google, or Twitter despite the exact same harms present, sometimes even more so, on their platforms. They're already in the same overall group that supports the narrative and have done so by self-censoring their platforms accordingly. TikTok didn't play ball and got trampled.
And in the end is there anything of value left, any documentation of what happened, or how to prevent it from happening again? Nope. That thankless unprofitable work is done by others and ignored by the same consumers.
If you think this is meaningless, take a look at countries like Saudi Arabia pouring tens of billions of dollars in trying to achieve the exact opposite - cultivating a positive opinion/view of the country among those in the West. They wouldn't be doing this if it didn't matter. The US hegemony has thrived largely on this kind of soft power. If the whole world (instead of just half the world) had already hated the US decades ago, it would've become nowhere near as powerful.
Many people were completely unfamiliar with the plight of the Palestinians over the past 100 years and TikTok (and, to a much less degree, other platforms) brought the issue to their attention. Israel is no longer untouchable and many have recognized them for what they are now - the last remaining Western imperialist settler colony. This was not the case merely 4 years ago. The transformation is stark and real.
What can people do with that knowledge? That's up to them.
I don't really get the rest of your comment, unfortunately.
One could document how Israel became what it is and what actually happened, but we don't have that. We have feelings.
If I log off Facebook and it starts spamming me with fake notifications, it's addictive in a way that's more than just "Facebook provides a great service! I'm on it all the time! It's so addictive! :)"
If feeds were chronological and they didn't blatantly lie to your face, or you got messages on time (they like not sending it to you by email) it wouldn't be addictive in a lab rat style
(This is Facebook, not TikTok, but still. And yes, I know TT tries to be addictive on purpose)
TikTok blocks Epstein mentions and anti-Trump videos, users claim. Alleged censorship comes after investors loyal to Trump take over social media platform.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/tiktok-epstein-trump-cens...
>TikTok users in the US have reported being unable to write the word ‘Epstein’ in messages amid accusations that the social media platform is suppressing content critical of President Donald Trump.
>The issues come less than a week after TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, was forced to divest a majority stake in its US operations to a group of investors loyal to President Trump, who was a close associate with the late convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
I don't think the recent censorship of US American policy is a coincidence when you consider these factors.
Trump did not enforce the ban.
As soon as TikTok changed ownership last week, censorship of posts that are not in line with the Trump regime began happening.