Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food? | Hacker News Reader

Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food?

newyorker.com

47 pointsfortran7767 comments

It's more like gambling

It’s almost exactly like a slot machine. You scroll down, and get a randomly scheduled “dopamine hit”.

Do people not actively curate what they like? E.g. using more of "Not Interested". I generally follow artists because they have great taste. I am very religous in disliking if a particular post is not benefitting me in consuming it.

Some platforms don't pay much attention to these instructions. LinkedIn is impervious to my suggestions.

I do that heavily. Still, instagram decides to nuke my preferences quite often. Right now I'm on tik tok garbage, two weeks ago I had arabic muslim stuff (like videos in mosques, prayers etc). I don't use it at all when that happens, so they loose out. Give me trail running and outdoor shit and I'm happy, very easy!

The algorithm figured out that you will spend more time on the platform if you get annoyed. So what you like is not really taken into account.

I managed to train Facebook out of showing me ads.

It took about two years of monthly clicking on "I don't want to see content from this page again" for it to stick, but now I haven't seen an ad in forever. Either I exhausted all companies in my area that advertise with Facebook, either the algorithm has stopped showing them to me.

I find Instagram in particular is garbage. Twitter / Youtube is much better with respecting your curation to some degree.

Algorithms are terrible with that. For example, there was this girl on TikTok who made fun things with her hair. It was fun, I marked it as I liked it. The first few times I enjoyed the exact same joke. Then when it became too frequent I indicated that I wanted less of it. The algorithm immediately thought that I didn’t care about fun things at all. I did this about 3 times, and my feed became really boring. The same in every single social media.

And it’s even worse, because when I flagged clear lies, my feed became more bland. So at the end I’m incentivised to consume lies.

Depends. I have quit social media, cigarettes, and nicotine at large. Nicotine was the easiest, cigarettes the hardest.

Ironically (pure) nicotine is not that bad for the health, it’s just really addictive so it have been added to cigarettes for just this.

It can even have some good benefits if you are chronically stressed. I wonder if it could be an alternative to benzodiazepines for occasional use.

I never took nicotine so I don’t know how quick the addiction would come. With benzodiazepines it’s a really hard addiction but not if you take it once in a while.

The problem with nicotine is the instant effect. If you use patches, the take up and let down is so slow as to not be noticed. Inhalation is much more addictive. Quitting is actually super easy, just a couple days of irritability. YMMV. If you want to try nicotine, anything but oral/lingual is ideal.

> so it have been added to cigarettes for just this

Erm, isn't nicotine naturally produced by the tobacco leaves? What are you on about being "added"?

gp was imprecise, it's not added indeed.

what is done though is "smoking" tobacco with ammonia, smoking as in exposing to the fumes, which will "crack" the nicotine and makes it more kicking me more addictive.

I didn't knew so yes, I was wrong, thank you !

Can't use social media as money in Jail. It's not like cigarettes, ramen or condoms.

I know DSM V, what is the ICD 10?

Insane Clown Disease?

a catalogue for diseases

Broader scope than DSM

Administrated by WHO

Billing codes for doctors.

I think most of the people overemphasize the harmness of social media.

I actually find connecting with my real-life friends a meaningful and satisfying experience.

But things are getting worse once I started to follow influencers and those I don't know in my real life.

More and more social media sites don't let you just follow "your friends".

They start automatically shoving suggested accounts in your face along with ads. On Instagram and FB both every 3rd or 4th post is a "suggested page". Also the algorithm has deemed that I don't need to get posts from the actual real people I follow unless I specifically go to their pages to see.

This. Old Facebook was okay. Planing parties with friends, connecting with people you haven't seen in years and so forth. But when I noticed they put suggested posts in my feed and just hiding posts from friends, it wasn't worth the time anymore. Also lot of other problems (showing off how good your life is to get likes and so forth. Just a lot of tiny issues)

Did you read any books about it?

Junk cigarettes - it has the addictive quality of nicotine.

All of the above.

Here are some key factors driving social media. The misincentives are obvious once you clearly see these.

1. It is fundamentally based on one of the strongest human impulses of community. 2. The economic model of social media is based on ads, which means they need to keep you on their platforms as long as possible. 3. They have vast troves of public, private, social and secret information on individuals. 4. They can modify their product every millisecond to adjust the product you experience based on all the factors above.

5. most of them allow to target arbitrary content including political disinformation based on 3., and including unhinged hate speech

On the basis of the headline alone, I would say "cigarettes" because I have quit two different social media sites using the technique described in the book "Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking"

Same as cigarettes, much of doomscrolling is just to calm down the anxiety of not doomscrolling. Anxiety that didn’t exist in our lives before social media and one caused directly by its consumption.

Wouldn't this be consistent with social media being easier to quit than both junk food _and_ cigarettes? Given that, I'm not sure how can conclude which of them is more similar.

As an alternative take, my understanding of the difference between cigarettes and junk food is that cigarettes are more physically addictive than junk food (which at least to my naive medical understanding is more of a "psychologically addictive" substance than something that the body will literally start to reach poorly to withholding after repeated intake). I haven't heard of anyone ever suffering physical withdrawal symptoms from having to wean off of either junk food or social media, which makes them seem much more similar to me than either are to cigarettes.

As an alternative to either of the headline options, maybe it would make sense to compare it to alcohol? Unlike cigarettes, most people are not physically addicted to it when using, but unlike junk food, you still shouldn't be using it when driving.

At least according to the “Easy Way” book, the physical addiction to nicotine only lasts on the order of hours. The book makes a compelling case that cigarette addiction is primarily psychological.

Alcohol, on the other hand, is physically addictive and the horror stories that I have read about alcohol addiction have been pretty upsetting.

Each addiction has its own special properties.

The special properties of the addiction are what make it hard for the person to quit that is addicted.

These type of comparisons for social media seem like bargaining by the social media addict trying to find the least harmful addiction to frame their own addiction as.

I have quit social media, cigarettes, alcohol and I limit junk food far more than normal. Quitting social media has cut me off from many social circles and being in the know with even my own extended family.

But make no mistake though. Cigarettes are an order of magnitude harder to quit than any of these. Alan Carr's book is amazing because it is almost a type of hypnosis that gives you the will power to not cave when cigarettes start playing all the mind games of why you should just smoke one in the first month after quitting. You have to convince yourself it is easy and anyone can do it exactly because it is so hard.

Comparing social media addiction to cigarettes is just not helpful though. Cigarettes are much more addictive but social media is addictive in its own special way.

If anything social media and sex addiction have much in common. You can deal with the addiction by going cold turkey but then if you want to get back to a normal life you have to figure out something other than abstinence.

Thanks to social media, Facebook in particular, and sometimes Instagram, I have gotten laid. Thanks to social media I have gotten laid more than I otherwise would have, or probably should have.

I have not had the same experience with cigarettes and junk food.

Thanks to social media I got more and more depressed and anxious in my youth. My natural shame evolved into fantastic pathological shame. Took me only 10 years to fight against it and kinda feel normal again. Thank you social media

Edit: social media wasn't the cause, but a lot of fuel

A hella lot of people have gotten laid with cigarettes, when it was cool.

Also the article is about kids. They have time for this to become a problem.

Not only was it cool, it was also social. I met a lot of people through smoking that I wouldn’t have done otherwise

Not saying it is your situation, but we often rationalize addictions and justify having them - often with some sort of utility. When I was a young smoker, I told myself smoking allows me to get laid as I would talk up to women in bars and clubs in the (calmer) smoking areas and it was easier to hit on them and get their numbers. While true, the negative impact of smoking in general does not outweigh that. And if I wouldn't have smoked, I could have just as well hit on women on the streets or in the noisy club. Just as you can get laid without social media.

yes. In fact, its probably worse.

Technofeudalism

https://archive.ph/ImFdw

That links to a paywall for me…

Oops! Try this one:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250123085124/https://www.newyo...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com