https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43587448
And yet, this absurd sensationalist dreck will probably stay up here for longer.
I could agree with only one thing, that porn addiction is not the worst one out there, but blamed the most. For some reason, it's ok for mobile games to make gambling addicts from kids, but no one seems to care about that.
And don't get me wrong, I am not saying that there are not people with a sex or porn addiction, but I think it is woefully uncommon. I'm pretty sure if you take the average person that the Internet classifies as a "gooner" or "porn addict" and took away all of their porn, they would be completely fine. It's the same for those stupid mobile games, too. They get the vast majority of their money from a small minority of people, and even then, not all of those whales are addicted either, some of them are just well off enough and choose to spend their money on frivolous things, no different than people with thousands of vinyl figures (and although I think they have a bad taste in figures, I doubt most of them have a serious problem.)
What I do think was normalized in the late 90s and early 2000s was extrarordinary crudeness and overt sexuality, but I don't think there was really a point at which people were normalizing getting psychologically dependent on pornography. It'd be kind of hard to normalize that since it's more about the specific person than it is the thing they're dependent on.
This also does not mean that social media or algorithms aren't fucking with our brains in other ways. And I'm going to be honest, I have absolutely no idea what the porn algorithms are or what they're doing. I don't use Pornhub or sites like Pornhub (yes, I know, "sure you don't", but I'm serious.) I do use YouTube constantly, and I don't think I'm addicted to YouTube. I'm not addicted to Technology Connections or Practical Engineering. I'm sure the YouTube recommendation algorithm is fucking with my brain, but I wouldn't call anything it's doing an addiction. I'm also sure this is true for a majority of TikTok users, even though it's a ton more... well, what us laypeople would call "addicting".