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Comment by nutanc | Hacker News Reader

This is awesome. I have been telling that social media is like smoking. When cigarettes came, even doctors were advertising the benefits of cigarettes. Now we know the harmful effects. Same is the case with social media. We just dont know they harmful effects completely yet.

Ban this. I am addicted and can't stop. Or put a warning on social media apps like they do on cigarette packets. Using this app maybe harmful for your mental health.

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No we need to kill the advertisement based monetization model, so there is no incentive to produce addictive content.

If mastodon was used by teens, it would have all the same problems.

Advertisment is not the problem here.

Right now this is perhaps true, because mastodon has to compete with commercial social media.

Mastodon doesn't have the incentive to try to spy on everybody and try to get everybody hooked by any means necessary.

is that why they're trying to implement better suggestions and discovery algorithms (https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/10/mastodon-4.3/) just to get people to stick on their website even a little bit cause otherwise it's just kinda dead

Masto has no social graph. Its just like IRC and PHP forums that many of us here used as teens.

We all want this regardless. Yet we don't. We also want innovation, and that means we have to vote by avoiding the amount of shit coming down the pipe. So for starters I use an ad-blocker. But platforms will still strangle free speech because of their business model acting out.

I think for starters we should have competition, therefore mandate federation between platforms. No big winner-takes-all tech monopolies. But the USA doesn't want to give up the profit, nor the power that comes with it, to own the world.

Perhaps as an example, Google performs an auction in the milliseconds before serving up ads. So it's possible.

In the end platforms will integrate an AI buddy that will come to know us even better, and that represents our ways. Of course we'll want that, but please, federate.

Advertising is one of the less harmful monetization models out there, especially for kids. YouTubers soliciting donations, selling merchandise etc. are praying on young kids. If you take away advertising, these more direct methods will be used more heavily.

> Advertising is one of the less harmful monetization models out there, especially for kids.

No, because it incentivizes the addictive content.

> YouTubers soliciting donations, selling merchandise etc. are preying on young kids.

That's a different issue, and already happening. It should be banned too.

> That's a different issue, and already happening. It should be banned too.

There's basically no way to ban this (and advertising) without banning social media.

You can put a warning everywhere, because everything or anything may be harmful to your mental health. sighs

"This is why we can't have nice things".

You are right. The wording was wrong. It should have been, "The usage of this app will be harmful for your mental health".

I do not disagree with that.

This is an attack on freedom.

I don't know what to tell you... Minors are supposed to lack freedom compared to adults in a society.

no, it's OUR freedoms that are being messed with, not just the kids.

How do you think social media is going to verify that you're not a minor?

Let kids have guns, can drink booze, and smoke too while we're at it?

Yes and rightly so

I mean you could make an argument that outlawing murder is also an attack on freedom. That doesn't mean it isn't a silly argument however.

To be fair every single law in the world is an attack on freedom if you're a 5 IQ freedom absolutist.

You can't drive a car without headlights, you can't drive a car without seatbelts, you can't kill your neighbours if he fucks your wife, you can't open a shop selling BBQ dog ribs... life is so unfair =(

Hard agree. It's our generation's smoking. Zuckerberg's recent PR glow-up is just this generation's Marlboro man. An acceptable face on something much more sinister.

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