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Comment by fullshark | Hacker News Reader

The proposed solution is hinted at in this piece but dare not spoken: government regulation.

FTFA:

> Regulated Algorithms: We regulate tobacco companies because their products are addictive and harmful. Algorithmic transparency or giving users control could preserve the benefits while reducing the addictive design patterns. The EU’s Digital Services Act already requires algorithmic transparency from large platforms.

Right, maybe social networks are a utility, like electricity or ISPs

You effectively need or greatly benefit from gas, water, electricity and an ISP.

What do you really get out of social media? I mean other than most of you getting crippling anxieties about things that aren’t even real, of course.

Sure sure, I know, everyone wants it because they need to share photos of the kiddos with grandma out of country. No one needs it because they enjoy the shallow bullshit and dopamine and snarky retorts that enforce their ideology.

Social media is relied on by a lot of people for official notifications. When I was in high school, my only use for Twitter was checking if my school was closed or not on snow days. I'm sure there are lots of valid reasons for schools, hospitals, emergency services, garbage collection, official media networks etc. to have social media accounts, and for regular people to follow them.

I've always thought it would be a good idea for governments to run their own mastodon servers for this, but something else with accounts (not publicly) tied to real identities could be interesting.

> my only use for Twitter was checking if my school was closed or not on snow days

Believe it or not, they post that on their own websites.

We had to turn on the TV and watch the marquee they would add to all shows. If you missed your school you had to go to another channel to see where in the alphabet they were.

You have not made a convincing argument. Social media has specifically moved away from synchronous time-prioritized posting in favor of algorithm engagement. So I can’t accept “notifications” as a legitimate use.

Social media is a pretty wide term and includes networks where you mostly talk to your friends and relatives to networks where you mostly consume content from strangers.

The former has a clear benefit (especially where it challenges legacy industries with exploitative pricing like mobile phone networks) and even the latter can benefit you by exposing you to new ideas and information.

That social media is incentivized to push meaningless but addictive fluff over genuine communication due to monetary incentives is the point of TFA. This is a reason for making social media a public utility, not against it.

So the master plan is to let governments (known for tech illiteracy and 20-year procurement cycles) regulate hyper-evolving social media platforms? Why teach people to think critically or resist engineered dopamine traps when we can have a bunch of career bureaucrats draft laws while using Wordpad or Internet Explorer to Google “AI” xD

Regulation doesn't have to be at the level of controlling how technology is designed. It can be more creative, at the level of organizations or incentives, for example:

- Require advertising companies to follow special rules, including only doing advertising and nothing else

- Fund an agency that measures the health harms of large platforms and imposes fines or restrictions based on harm

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