Social Media Is a Public Health Crisis | Hacker News Reader

Social Media Is a Public Health Crisis

usnews.com

31 pointslaurex8 comments

The intersection of social media and mental health debates is a nightmare zone.

Social media itself has already evolved into something monstrous.

The most I can do is boycott these companies.

It's not like the typical means of communication have been shut down, even if the typical spaces have been shut down in certain regions.

From her survey:

>Another 85 percent of our respondents said critical thinking skills are generally lacking in the public. “Changing societal norms” was the most commonly cited reason for the lack of critical thinking skills.

I think the respondents were being loose with "critical thinking" here. Chronically talking past each other with bad faith doesn't require poor reasoning, it only requires a sense of spite and a need for emotional climax.

Fido may provide more love, but the blue birds provide more fight.

Right. This is about norms and structure, not skills. The same people behave differently in a rowdy bar than a library because they can read the room.

Everyone is still responsible for their own behavior, but first and foremost we need to blame the venue that year after year decided to encourage it.

I would also be interested in seeing what this number was over the previous 5 decades. My guess is that it’s not changed much. This doesn’t say anything meaningful other than that it’s a bad metric, but it has a whiff of plato complaining about the youth.

In the past, most people blamed bad reasoning for societal changes, right? It seems this survey implies the blame for cause and effect have been switched.

If its results are accurate, which I don't know how to gauge, it might be a way of saying that people blame bad ideas for others not agreeing with them. Not sure if there are any other satisfactory interpretations.

I quit smoking cigarettes 10 years ago and social media 5 years ago.

Once you are addicted you forget how good life is without. You don't notice how much of your behavior has changed to accommodate your addiction until you quit.

I have no doubt people in the future will look at this time as the equivalent of the insanity of my grandfather becoming a cigarette smoker at 13 in the 1930s. "He is just mature for his age, what is the big deal?"

One might say the Internet is as well.

That would be like saying public parks are a health crisis because occasionally people get mugged in them, i.e. a vast overstatement.

But who would go to a public park if they had to pay $60+ /month and constantly get bombarded with flashing, intrusive billboards and pickpockets just to be able to talk to their friends or play a game together?

The much larger issue is that the internet doesn't have boundaries to prevent greedy and abusive people from competing for every available inch anyone wants to be in.

The way the internet should work is that everyone has access to it, that there are a variety of large, interest based hubs that draw people together, and that anyone can host a section of it for themselves for nothing more than the cost of electricity, and that ads, if they are necessary, should be based on the current page's topics rather than uniquely generated for every denizen.

It may be too late for the current internet to have that idyllic setup, true, but that doesn't mean it isn't the way its supposed to be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com