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Comment by ThinkingGuy | Hacker News Reader

I feel like "I only use Facebook to keep up with family and friends" is the 21st century equivalent of "I only drink socially" - True for some people, less true for many others.

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Meanwhile half the population is freebasing TikTok and insisting that it's healthy.

Half the US population. The version in China is a bitters and soda, for good reason.

I wonder if TikTok is China's revenge for opium. It's addicting and mindless and keeps our population sedated and lazy.

Nah, TikTok is something new. Fentanyl is them running opium game.

This take is so interesting; Douyin is the way it is because of government regulation. If the US tried to regulate what you can see on Instagram, many people would cry bloody murder.

Bytedance doesn't make Chinese TikTok "educational" from the goodness of their heart. Chinese companies were happy to let teenagers play video games from dusk till dawn until the CCP got involved, not because Tencent wants American teens hooked on league and Chinese teens studying.

TikTok is always painted as some masterclass psychological Chinese weapon instead of it just being a failure of our own American government to do anything but stalemate and worry about bathrooms. There is no reason to believe that if TikTok is banned that Instagram wont supplant it in serving up the same garbage to users (except no one would complain because the gripe about TikTok is xenophobia for most people, not any principled stance on entertainment).

It's worth examining how much of the current failure and stalemating in the US government is the deliberate product of mass foreign psy-op campaigns, conducted significantly via social media, to undermine the quality of the electoral field, and the electorate itself.

I'm really interested in the studies 30 years from now that tell us the long term effects. People might be more sedentary and maybe psychologically stressed, but also they're not spending their time smoking and drinking and munching cheetos in front of a TV.

You can smoke, drink, and munch cheetos while scrolling social media.

If "keep up with" involves reading people's feeds, are you just.. using Facebook normally? The "I only..." that's most common around me is only using it for Events and Marketplace functionality, but never looking at people's feeds.

I deleted my Facebook in 2016, and the only reason I've ever wanted to go back was for Marketplace and Events functionality. And if I wanted to keep up with people's feeds, I'd use Instagram (roughly the same thing, I know, but less wordy for me and more enjoyable).

Amusingly, some of my friends that use it for Marketplace express a desire for Craigslist to be popular again, if not only for the absolutely insane people on Marketplace that demand to pay $20 for an item listed at $300 and then start spamming you and making public posts about how you're a thief and scammer for trying to rip off a single parent who just wanted to get their kid a present for $20, linking your profile the entire time.

The events functionality stopped working well around then, so you didn't miss anything there

I've never met anyone who literally says "I only drink socially" that isn't somewhere on the alcoholism spectrum. I have met people who really do only drink socially, but they don't feel the need to say so.

"I read Playboy, but only for the interviews"

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