Adults could potentially protect themselves, children absolutely can't.
I take steps by not using my phone during work or after a certain time but it is extremely difficult and I still fall into the trap and watch some shorts for 2-3 hours at a time. I'm not stupid either, graduated with honors in CS and people consider me really smart. My brain just likes how it makes me feel.
Now, I have a fear what all this stuff will do to my child, if even I have trouble with it.
I hate almost everything about the modern commercialized web and really miss irc and forums.
reddit is 95% bots echoing the sentiments of a few liberal elites and the 5% of real users are childless aged women. No sexism, this is facts.
Reddit is one of the worst offenders for rage bait, algorithmic feeds, content farming, and vacuous content.
> (forced refresh if you turn your screen off on mobile, minimum and deliberately bad moderating).
Reddit absolutely refreshes your feed under certain circumstances depending on the platform, such as hitting the back button.
Your claims about moderation are also completely backward. People complain about Facebook being too sensitive about moderation, but Reddit is basically the wild west. Nearly anything goes on Reddit and the mainstream subreddits are frequently full of highly upvoted misinformation.
I had a friend who developed a problem with alcoholism. He went through a period of time where he'd stop by the bar several nights a week to have a single beer because he thought it was important to his social circle.
To no one's surprise, that one drink often turned into two drinks. Two became four, then six, then eight, then he was blacked out on a Wednesday again.
It took some time, but he finally admitted that his habit of visiting the bar was a trigger for the exact behavior he was trying to avoid.
When I see someone talk about how they have a severe social media addiction that they're trying to overcome, but then go on to talk about how they're a moderator on the platform they're trying to avoid, I see the exact same thing.
I don't know what else to say, other than that my friend is doing fantastic now that he's stopped visiting bars at all. He discovered that once he removed the bar as an option for his free time, he realized how many healthier alternatives there were in the real world. He wasn't constantly playing the game of moderating his alcohol intake because he wasn't in environments where he had to. He's much happier now.
Privacy reasons aside, a big reason I ditched social media and much of the normiesphere technology is the distract-ability. I take great care and pride in reducing unwanted automated interruptions to zero. My phones only make a noise if a cleared human on the other side is initiating the noise. There are zero "check this out" or "your coins reward is ready" crap pinging me, and I won't have it!
ADDENDUM: my abridged phone stack is:
GrapheneOS (there is nothing better)
Mullvad (audited by police raid) & Tor
Syncthing-Fork (because f' the cloud)
Fennec (+uBlock Origin,Sponsorblock,Tampermonkey)
Tor Browser Bundle (anti-glowie browsing)
BraveNewPipe (multiplatform and search settings)
Seal (decent yt-dlp wrapper)
Session F-Droid & Briar (anti-glowie messaging)
It is obvious that even adults are suffering negative consequences from social media, and if it isn't obvious, take a look at any of the studies showing the negative impact on adults of social media usage.
Every single consumer is outmatched. The only winning choice is to not play at all.
If someone can't handle their social media usage, you're right that they should stay away.
But this idea that "every single consumer" can't handle it is patently false. The vast majority of social media users aren't completely sucked in to their apps and phones. The time spent on platform graph for every platform has a long tail where the addicts reside, but most people just don't get in that deep.
It can seem that way when you're surrounded by addicts or, more commonly, when your social interaction comes primarily through social media (because addicts are over-represented, obviously). However, what you're missing is all of the people who aren't engaged in social media all day every day.
If the adult an protect themselves, they can protect the children they're responsible for too