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Comment by 10xDev | Hacker News Reader

The recent Twitter drama over a use of a word is all you need to see how bad things are. It takes nothing to get a mob of mentally ill people on your case which can have a psychological toll on anyone especially teenagers. And if you try to reason with such people you just get sent down a rabbit hole.

We need to have limits on what we allow our brain to process the same way we do for our body with ultra-processed foods by avoiding fast food restaurants as nothing is totally erased and everything nudges your mood and beliefs whether you feel it or don't.

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Is X/Twitter the barometer of how good social media is for us ?

Otherwise I find it interesting how people attribute toxic discussions to online media, when the wisdom of our elders were to never talk politics at dinners to avoid having people literally beating each other.

We can't be focusing on the absolute worse with the illest use cases, and make it into a societal problem. Looking at our world today, I genuinely think we're in a better place than three decades ago when we had absolutely none of our online networks.

I only highlighted the tip of the iceberg where the behaviour is not limited to Twitter and wasn't even political. And whether the world is better or not than 3 decades ago is not really the topic here, it is about mental health and how it has become worse over the past decade and whether that can be attributed to social media.

But social media is part of our life as a whole, we are a social species. If our mental health had a net decrease as a whole on the whole society, yes, we could throw stones as social media as the author wants.

But for that we'd need to first include assesment of absolutely everything touching social media and look at the net result. Doee it improve family communication? Does it help or hurt social discourse ? Does it help or hurt minorities ? What's the impact on social mobility ?

IMHO social media is just a catalyst of our social trends and while the lows are really low, the highs can also be incredibly high.

I'd be more sympathetic to an argument about raising the floor to cut te more toxic behaviors than just try to isolate it in an "adult only" corner and pretending the situation got better.

>We need to have limits on what we allow our brain to process the same way we do for our body with ultra-processed foods by avoiding fast food restaurants

This is a great analogy.

Fast information dis-eases our minds as fast food diseases our body.

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