Almost half of British teens feel addicted to social media – study

This is the solution for a lot of behavioral problems. The instinct is to do the bad behavior less, but the solution may instead be to do something else more.

Yes this is why I've been trying to ski as much as possible this winter.

1. Helps my eyes by letting them see things at a distance. staring far into mountains on the lift ect.

2. Keeps me away from internet. I have dumb phone and a whistle with me in my pocket.

3. Helps me reconnect with my body and rediscover what it can do.

4. Mountain air seems to clear up my sinuses

5. And ofcourse benefits of physical excerscise.

6. I just feel very fulfilled at the end of day a stark contrast to depression of day filled with daze of the internet.

7. This is bit of bro science but seems to improve my digestion. Being in internet daze all day seems to put a pause on my digestion.

> Instead of simply abstaining from using my phone, I put time into activities

My relationship with social media, even HackerNews, really clicked when a meme (oh irony) said: ”You’re like a tiger in a cage. You know how they pace in circles when their enclosures lack enrichment? That’s you bouncing around apps on your phone”

Haven’t quite figured out how to reliably stop that, but it’s true that when there’s enough enrichment, I can go days forgetting that my phone and the internet even exist.

"The Myth of Normal" by Mate Gabor is a great place for people to start this work.

Later it dawns on you that sure, like everybody else you have weaknesses and traumas that you've learned to cope with, but that doesn't excuse some people deliberately designing and pushing a product to specifically exploit that. That should give you dose of healthy positive anger of the kind that is transformative when acted upon.

any tips on how to identify what you're coping for?

I think this is an unfortunately not enough discussed topic. As sciences are young (as psychology relatively is) you work on broader problems and much more aggregated results. You make naive assumptions like everything exists in normal distributions or data is i.i.d. So you get results that are big generalizations and sometimes not even reliable. But then as a field advances, it naturally shifts into requiring more and more nuance and specificity. Where you have to start considering multivariate solutions (even if that's a mixture of gaussians, which, awesome tool btw) because you approach a natural wall at the explainability of your data with naive methods. And let's be clear, if we wanted to really rigorously study psychology -- at the same level as, say, physics -- then there would need to be a lot of crazy math invented and we'd probably still end up needing to do unethical things because holy fuck how do you control all those variables. (definitely warrants being open about error and unknowns)

There's nothing wrong with that. But I do think it's wrong that we're not open about it, in so much that it isn't even always explicitly stated during a science education. We might say something like "all models are wrong" but I don't think that solidifies this thinking enough for novices and can create experts who still don't get it. Wherein it becomes a classic clique, where everyone knows the phrase but doesn't understand or practice the lesson.

There's some noticeable downsides too. If you're constantly not reiterating what your base assumptions are and acknowledging the limitation of those assumptions, you forget they exist. It also becomes hard to communicate the significance of your work to the public and I think in some cases is often why the public ends up calling (sometimes rightfully, sometimes not) bullshit. I think there's also a major advantage to science, in being open about these helps newcomers (such as those entering graduate school) more readily understand the limitations of the field and what work needs to be done. But I think some incentive structures we have in place don't encourage great scientific behavior in this way. Speaking of which, other metrics can even end up making bridging this multivariate gap more difficult. Such as the all too well known p-value weirdness, you may end up rejecting works making progress towards this bridging by having these arbitrary requirements rather than evaluating works with more nuance, which can even then discourage attempting to build such bridges. I guess coming full circle to: it's complicated? Like everything else lol

You've really nailed from my perspective.

I used my phone as a way to withdraw and escape. Even the most mundane situations warranted some degree of escape. Very stressful times would boost my screen time dramatically.

It seemed painfully simple in retrospect. Like any behavioural addiction, though, I had an endless supply of reasons to be on a screen at any given time. Scary stuff. I don't think I'm the kind of person people would think behaves that way, nor did I necessarily. But we're all human, and this is a very human thing. It sneaks into your life in such an insidious way, and does so much damage before you can consciously see it or feel it.

The root cause is that social media apps are designed to be addictive whereas other software is not. This was encouraged by all the SV cheerleaders (remember Nir Eyal's "Hooked" being a must-read for all product bros?), before it was clear that Facebook and others conduct significant levels of experimentation to extend screen use time.

Places with far weaker car culture and world class mass transit and which have stronger "third places" culture are still phone and social media addicted. See Singapore, Japan, or South Korea as an example of this.

Well, yes if the suggestion is some sort of intervention. There are large groups of people that will say they are addicted to coffee, TV, video games, etc. Not a lot of them will meet the medical definition of addiction.

It is both fairly common to say you're addicted to something as a way of saying you're really into something as well as to indicate actual addiction, and you can't expect people asked a question like that without detailed additional guidance to be able to give a clinical assessment of whether they are in fact suffering from an addiction.

Unless you probe what the respondents mean by addiction, or provide them a clear definition before asking, there's very little reason to assume they will be using a definition of addiction that justifies assuming anything approaching a clinical definition, or even anything negative.

My opinion goes in other direction: I think even with that caveat, what she went on to say suggests she's making assumptions about what people meant - especially given the age of the respondents - that I don't there's basis for unless the survey provided a lot more context than just the question given in the article.

Seems reasonable to separate self-identification from a diagnosis. Flip the logic: if someone says they aren't addicted to something, does that make it true?

Social media addiction is a meme (in the technical, mind virus sense), gambling addiction isn't.

I don't know if this is what the study authors were thinking, but I see it as a bit like not taking people's word for it that they're gluten intolerant. It is a real thing and people do know that they have it, but also it's a trendy thing and there are a lot of people trying to convince you that you have it when actually you're perfectly normal.

I remember when stores used to be closed on Sundays.

We can close social media on Sundays and reopen monday morning aha

>9-5pm maybe

i feel like that would just be convenient for work and nobody else.

That's a great idea. Utah thinks so too. Well, at least between 10:30 PM to 6:30 AM

https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title13/Chapter63/13-63-S105.html?...

I would miss it. I would also make it a matter of principle to refuse if someone tried to force a shutdown on us - I've got my Mastodon and Lemmy instances, and if we were to have to go underground, we'd go underground.

LeechBlock on Firefox has timed blocks. It works on Android and desktop.

Delete the apps, use the websites.

Plenty of people use it responsibly. Why should they be punished just because some people can't seem to control their behavior?

Would this be the same 8 hours for everyone worldwide, would it be by the user's timezone, or would we get to choose our own 8 hours?

This question was brought to you by memories of not being able to set the timezone of my tamagotchi and it subsequently dying because it was awake when I was asleep.

Nah bro. What about, for example, people who happen to be busy during all but the hours you select for the shutdown. Since it’s forced, they effectively just don’t get to use it at all. In my opinion though, social media can be used in a productive way in moderation, like how a lot of people use it to keep up with the news or stay in touch with family.

I just don't want legislation telling competent people what to do here. I want the legislation to be more analogous to child protective services.

I feel that a guardian should have a choice up until they are negligent or inhibiting (however a society deems it - specifically left as this definition).

If said guardian is able to raise a kid in a healthy environment, with a healthy relationship to technology, then I do not want to step on their toes.

I think we need to 'reverse Chesterton's fence'(?) our liberty here, let's not lose our freedom and build a restrictive fence or Berlin wall. I know many people disagree with me, but the fact that there isn't consensus here means we should tread carefully lest break some cotton mills.

Or they'll find a massive brain drain, unless you find some non-authoritarian way to leave. China probably has a lot of netizens that want to experience the rest of the Internet, or game more than two hours a night, but they won't be able to escape without the CCP threatening their families.

One contributing factor is the surprisingly recent meme that corporations exist solely for the benefit of their shareholders. It’s a totally ahistoric and obviously antisocial meme that gets repeated like it’s gospel, even by otherwise intelligent people. This perspective should be literally laughed at and made fun of as a moral system suitable only for the greediest and most myopic among us.

Overdramatic. Social media may be bad but it is not like heroin or ecstasy.

Engaging in moral panics, on the other hand, seems to provide a high to some individuals just like heroin or ecstasy. Let's regulate them instead.

I'd be a completely different person if I'd grown up under a 21 drinking age. It was often my only social outlet.

Even the kids used to go out until the RAVE Act.

(When doing "X let alone Y" the more outrageous thing goes in Y.)

I strongly agree with your point, it should be possible to ban this stuff for minors at least. Under 13s are already effectively banned but banning all minors altogether would be much more effective.

hacker news is social media

a poor take.

cigarette consumption is way, wayyyyyyy down, and is effectively gone in the first world outside of small pockets. compare to the 1950s where everyone smoked, all the time.

or think about asbestos, or lead. we figured out those are bad and made drastic changes to start removing those -- and did.

nature is a little harder, esp. given that the largest corps in the world + plenty of soverign wealth funds, are trying their hardest to keep people from thinking about it as it collapses.

They hide behind the "someone else would have done it and the paycheck was nice" defense.