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Comment by hackernewds | Hacker News Reader

if the dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs, and evidently just as bad, why not ban them for adults as well?

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HackerNews included?

It does seem like a reasonable solution. A rewind back to the age when it had been just the newsgroups. Without +1 algorithms that result in the algorithm making a choice what users see and not the opposite.

Certainly a better solution, if compared to forcing everyone to show their Real Id, just to verify their age to access the Internet.

With HN and other sites with a non-personalized feed, at least what you see is the same as what everyone else sees. And if there's voting, which isn't perfect, it's based on community feedback.

How hard is it to add "upvotes" to TikTok and fake that it is based on community feedback? How do you know that HN isn't personalized for you?

Well, you can go ahead and independently verify something like that pretty easily. Kind of weird to veer towards lies and malice at the drop of a hat here

>Kind of weird to veer towards lies and malice at the drop of a hat here

What? To me it is extremely naive to think that social media services wont try to use every single loop hole.

Also, cant help but notice you didnt actually answer the question - just dismissed it.

I'm not doing your homework for you - if you think HN is personalized it should be trivial to show it.

There is just no response I can make that wouldn't be an insult, but couple of points:

- if you make a claim then burden of proof is on you

- I never actually claimed that HN was tailored, just pointed out that you can't tell if that was the case

I won't be reading more from you

As someone 8 years sober from social media, I’m convinced the benefits of banning it would far outweigh the cost.

Out of interest, what's your definition of social media? Because mine is a site / app whose value is derived from its users, where users are all of (roughly) equal importance. Which puts forums / reddit / hacker news into that category.

You can quibble about definitions, but I'd say it's got a lot to do with being personalized. So anything where you need to know something about the viewer in order to optimise what to show each individual. That can be for anything from the content itself to the advertisements, if you need to know something about who is watching, it's what we currently think of as social media.

FB, Instagram, TikTok, but also Google search, and every ad supported site.

Not WhatsApp or the chat services, interestingly.

Sounds a lot like, "I stopped drinking because it became a problem, so everyone else should too."

Drinking causes severe societal ills and is unhealthy in any amount. Everyone should indeed stop drinking. We should tax alcohol until it is unaffordable for the vast majority.

I'm glad the vast majority of people disagree with you. I will continue to drink when I want to. Everyone should not stop drinking.

The world would be better off without widespread use of alcohol. It's not even a question, everything else similar, a society that chooses not to drink alcohol would have a social, economical, and psychological edge over one which does. Individuals are better off if they don't drink, it's just not good.

I wouldn't advocate for a ban on alcohol, it's much too ingrained in culture and too easy to make, but I hope that society some day gets to the point that it rejects it, much like we reject huffing shoe polish.

I’d ban photos, pictures, video and sound. Leave text only. Greatly reduces deepfake potential, manipulation options by state actors, dopamine hits from looking at pretty cat pictures too.

I don’t want to say IRC was fine but it was better than Instagram.

Because we live in a society (that mostly) allows adults to make choices for themselves. Just because a few adults can't handle themselves doesn't mean that all adults should be punished for it. You can say the same thing about gambling, smoking, drinking, eating sweets etc.

Also, the effects on undeveloped brains are far greater. Our job is to teach kids and raise them. Not be their friends and just let them do whatever adults do.

The effects on developing versus developed brains is different for most things, including drugs and other psychological/psychosomatic stimuli.

Also, we give adults the freedom to fuck themselves up to a great extent that probably most people think it would be unethical with children.

> if the dopaminergic effects are not dissimilar to drugs

I highly doubt the implied semantics of this statement. We don't know everything there is to know about "dopaminergic effects". The pharmacology of smoking weed is probably very different than from say, scrolling through memes.

Pharmacology, yes. But we can compare social media and other addictions in terms of social harm, health harm, psychological and emotional harm, withdrawal symptoms, financial consequences, impairment to decision-making, procrastination and distraction impacting attainability of personal goal, prerogatives and decreasing motivation, relationship harm (it is difficult to form relationships with those "terminally online" for example), cognitive/executive function impairments, self-esteem harm, sleep hygiene harm, personal hygiene harm (difficult topic for some addicted people to talk about but in my opinion, it is related to internet addiction as much as alcohol or drug addictions), harm on enjoyment of life, and many others.

The effects of dopamine bombing yourself with on line content are not very dissimilar to effects of drugs. I would argue they are more similar than dissimilar.

In my experience you don't become terminally online unless there's something else going on in your life. People talking about the ills of social media seem to forget that children nowadays are: institutionalized for 8 hours of their day, raised on diets of processed garbage, etc. Like, a well adjusted kid isn't going to treat social media as more important than their friends unless they think they can make a living from it or have no friends.

I think "dopamine bombing" is not what it sounds. See discussions on dopamine fasting for what I mean. The relationship between the things you do and dopamine are complex, probably more complex than the relationship of what you physically consume and dopamine.

> In my experience you don't become terminally online unless there's something else going on in your life

That's true, but it's also true for other addictions.

> a well adjusted kid isn't going to treat social media as more important than their friends unless they think they can make a living from it or have no friends.

Probably mostly true, but also a lot of friendships are moving online.

> I think "dopamine bombing" is not what it sounds

Can you elaborate? I think it sounds like abusing the dopamine hits you get when scrolling through SM, for example.

It implies a direct connection with neurochemistry that's much less direct than drugs (and even moreso diet), which can directly stimulate the release of dopamine. For example if I'm feeling tired of scrolling through memes, I can just put my phone away. I can't stop caffeine from stimulating my neurons, or ignore a macronutrient deficiency in my body.

It might be that this is an unimportant distinction in the end, but I'm not sure we know.

Quite many people can't just put their phone away, even when they try to concentrate on something else. The behaviour seems to be very similar to other addictions.

Agreed we should!

Because banning drugs has worked so well...

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