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Comment by traceroute66 | Hacker News Reader

I think its a rather stupid concept to claim there is such a thing as internet addiction, because otherwise we would have to roll back time and ask equally stupid questions such as :

  - Is there such a thing as library addiction ?
  - Is there such a thing as school / university addiction ?
  - Is there such a thing as newspaper/book reading addiction ?
  - Is there such a thing as chess club addiction ?

Because as we all know, you can do the above and more on the internet.

The internet, just like your personal life, is what you make of it. Its a fabulous resource.

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I think a more analogous question would be:

  - Is there such a thing as food addiction?

Food is certainly something with a lot of utility, which we need to survive, and there is a lot of healthy food out there. But we're also able to create hyper-palatable foods - like cakes and fast-food hamburgers - which effectively hack the brain's reward system: i.e. the reward signal you get from eating these foods is greatly outsized compared to their actual utility.

Some people are able to enjoy these foods in moderation, and other people cannot resist the temptation and eat these to the point that it's detrimental to their health.

I think it can be argued that the internet is a lot like that.

I think what you’re saying is that there are certain facets of the Internet one can get addicted to (such as social media), but not the Internet as a general concept. I think I agree with this, because the Internet is just too diverse.

Rather than just comparing the amount of time people spend on activities, it's important to examine the intention.

"I only want to spend an hour browsing my phone but I end up spending 8"

Did people really interact with libraries the same way? In my experience the vast majority did not. But when it comes to phones, most people report that they use their phone more than they want to.

Do you feel compelled to go to the library or to the chess club as you are talking to a friend?

I am sure the vast majority of people don’t, while so many people feel completed to check something on the Internet.

Do you feel uncomfortable if you know in advance you won’t be able to use the library or the chess club for a whole day?

> Do you feel compelled to go to the library

As someone who is not Gen-Z and remembers what life was before the internet, I can sure say that the internet beats any library I've ever spent time in.

The volume, diversity and ease of research ... all at your fingertips.

Why would anyone want to spend time trawling obscure library database systems only to find the library doesn't stock the right books or that someone has taken it on loan for an unknown period of time ?

Or worse .... microfiche. My god how that's a hellish storage medium I will not miss !

> Why would anyone want to spend time trawling obscure library database systems only to find the library doesn't stock the right books or that someone has taken it on loan for an unknown period of time ?

You're setting up a bit of strawman, I don't see anyone arguing the internet is inferior to the library, but that library usage (for example) doesn't trigger the dopamine release cycle in the way refreshing a frequently changing webpage does.

> You're setting up a bit of strawman, I don't see anyone arguing the internet is inferior to the library

I think you're missing the point a little.

Back in the day, nobody who spent 8 hours a day 5 days a week in the library would be accused of "library addiction".

But suddenly, anyone who spends a long time on the internet just gets tarnished with a brush that says "internet addict" irrespective of what they do on the internet.

I suspect that the majority of people don't spend their time posting conspiracy theories on Twitter. Which is just why lumping everybody into one "the internet" category is more damaging than it is useful.

(Before anyone takes it too seriously, the references to long hours above were purely examples and not meant to be judged or interpreted !)

I think you're the one missing the point. If someone is spending all their time online reading scholarly articles or learning skills nobody is going to accuse them of internet addiction. That does not mean internet addiction is not real.

To make an analogy, lots of people are able to enjoy drinking alcohol without issue, but that doesn't disprove the existence of alcoholism.

I believe that there are many in between the two extremes you mention for whom the draw of connection is far from benign, which is why I would not be so dismissive of addiction concerns.

Indeed. I was kinda ”library addicted” when I was young. But one had to work much harder back then to find the really good and interesting stuff. Scanning through shelf after shelf. Finding a librarian to aid me if I wanted to look at a title in the closed archive in the basement. And I couldn’t stay in the library till 11 pm since it would close at 7pm or so. When I was about to head home I couldn’t carry 60 books in my backpack. So it was much less accessible than what the Internet is. The library was good! But it was different both in quality and quantity compared to the Internet.

Thanks for bringing up friends. I find I’m compelled to talk to my friends regularly, on a daily basis. If I don’t get enough interaction with them, I get depressed. I start suffering withdrawal from lack of contact with friends. Also, like a true addict I can’t account for how much time I’ve spent with my friends in the last month. I can’t estimate how much I’ve lost career wise because I chose to prioritise this addiction instead.

You’re going to say “no no, friends are different.” That it’s actually healthy compared to let’s say, grinding WoW with friends from your guild. But it’s no different really. Why is it unhealthy if I spend hours playing WoW with friends but it’s healthy if I play football instead?

The dominant narrative on HN is that of course internet is an addiction. And that it’s pushed by evil companies that seek to profit off of it. Here’s a different perspective - the idea that it’s an addiction and that you’re powerless to solve it on your own is pushed by people who want you to turn to them to solve it. And pay for that privilege. In reality it’s not an addiction like heroin. You can beat it on your own without rehab or buying their 30 day detox program.

This is the crux of the issue. Anything can be classified as an addiction by the metrics being used, but certain things "don't count" as they've been classified as entirely good. The next question would be why.

I'd argue that it might be (though I could be wrong on this, I haven't thought through all the possibilities) because the internet is new (or at least, the latest thing), whereas books are old. New thing bad, old thing good. For example, TV is seen as bad, but nowhere near as bad as the internet, but go back a few decades, and TV addiction is the hot issue to be solved. Perhaps if you go back far enough, you will find chess addiction or books addiction to be the hot issue.

I think it's not as simple as that. Books don't have the same reward loop as the internet, so they're not "unnaturally compelling" to the same degree.

To give a counter-analogy, at some point slot machines were new, and people might have lumped them in with the same category as chess: a fun game that you can play to pass the time. But eventually it was understood that slot machines have certain intrinsic properties which make them much harder to stop playing than chess for a lot of people, and we ended up regulating them because it was causing harm to society.

This is the case with almost anything - every addictive thing is addictive to varying degrees. The fact that many people are able to enjoy let’s say, alcohol responsibly doesn’t make it less intrinsically addictive to the other folks. And let’s take another example - sugar. I have a serious weakness for it. I just can’t stop with one of anything sweet. It’s better if I just don’t eat any of it. But that’s the addict in me talking, and I shouldn’t extrapolate my experience to the rest of society who are able to enjoy sugar responsibly.

That’s where i disagree with your characterisation of the difference between chess and slot machines. It depend entirely on the person involved. Folks who can enjoy responsibly shouldn’t penalised because there are others who can’t.

Btw, if you disagree with my characterisation of sugar as addictive, you don’t need it to survive. It’s perfectly possible to live on protein and fat alone. The withdrawal from sugar is painful, but it’s doable.

> That’s where i disagree with your characterisation of the difference between chess and slot machines. It depend entirely on the person involved. Folks who can enjoy responsibly shouldn’t penalised because there are others who can’t.

Arguably we do have that with slot machines. If you want to go somewhere to gamble recreationally, you can book a trip to Vegas or Atlantic City. But we limit access because of the potential for harm. We don't let kids gamble, and I'm certain if every gas station was allowed to have a couple slot machines inside, we'd see a lot more people throwing their life savings away because their brains aren't wired in a way which lets them resist the compulsion.

There's a spectrum in terms of how addictive things are, and how much harm they do which we use to determine how much we as a society deem it is responsible to limit access to these things in order to protect people and society as a whole.

For instance, coffee is quite addictive, but it's not vary harmful, so access is pretty much free. Sugar is pretty addictive, but only slightly harmful, so it largely gets a pass. Cigarettes and alcohol are addictive and moderately harmful, so we keep them away from kids and tax them to make them more expensive and less attainable. Hard liquor is more harmful than beer and wine, so a lot of places restrict access to specific stores to make it harder to come by.

And it might be the case that some people can enjoy heroin responsibly, but it's so strongly addictive, and so incredibly harmful that we make it illegal to obtain it at all - even that means "penalising" the few folks who could potentially enjoy it responsibly.

I don't know where social media fits on that spectrum, but it is addictive, and it is at least worth considering how much harm is being done and whether we should think about regulating it.

How are you measuring harm? By number of people who die? The cost to the healthcare system? If so I reckon the number of people suffering from diabetes vastly outnumbers those suffering from cirrhosis of the liver. Treating these people costs a lot.

Certainly we should restrict access to sugar, or at least tax it. But in most places, such policies are non starters.

You may be right about the harm with sugar. I think it is probably way more toxic than we give it credit for, but it's difficult to imagine any kind of regulation around it since it's so ingrained in society. When NYC for example tried to tax sodas there was massive backlash. When a smoker gets lung cancer, we tend to blame tobacco, but when someone gets diabetes we blame the individual's lack of self control. That's probably not entirely justified given the addictive potential of refined sugar.

But I think you're undercounting the harm caused by alcohol. There are diseases of abuse to consider, but the damage caused by alcohol is often more acute: traffic accidents and acts of violence are made much more likely by alcohol consumption.

Similarly, I think the harm caused by social media is also under-counted. In it's current state, it seems to cause an increase in the spread of misinformation, and a decrease in political stability and social cohesion.

> Books don't have the same reward loop as the internet

That's quite a broad statement to make, as reading a PDF online is just as much a part of the internet as social media or anything else. Not every website has the same reward loop, not even close.

But I'll assume your talking specifically about social media. Whilst that's a bit of a different conversation, I would argue that books are no more "naturally compelling" than social media. Something is only compelling because it triggers a dopamine hit or whatever, the only thing I can think of which would "naturally" do that is eating, drinking and maybe sleeping. But something being unnaturally compelling isn't a bad thing.

> at some point slot machines were new

Of course I'm not saying anything that is new is not addictive and we just don't know it yet, some things are. My point is that nearly every big leap forwards in technology or entertainment is branded as addictive until the next thing comes along. A few of those things are indeed proven to be addictive, others are used many generations later as the "pure" form of entertainment

Do you consciously want to stop talking with your friends but find you can't? If not, then you are not compelled.

Your argument is a strawman argument. Calling something addictive, does not equate to saying that if you stop doing it, you get hurt. With this definition living /breathing/eating would be called addiction. That's not a very useful definition, and that's not the meaning of addiction.

Ease of access is a part of maintaining addiction. There's a difference between having cancer-sticks magically appear in your pocket whenever you want one, and having to go to the store to get it, for example.

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