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Comment by farceSpherule | Hacker News Reader

Social media is the new smoking...

Widespread adoption before understanding risks - embraced globally before fully grasping the mental health, social, and political consequences, especially for young people.

Delayed but significant harm - can lead to gradual impacts like reduced attention span, increased anxiety, depression, loneliness, and polarization

Corporate incentives misaligned with public health - media companies design platforms for maximum engagement, leveraging psychological triggers while downplaying or disputing the extent of harm

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Not an accurate analogy in my opinion, but close.

- Smoking feels good but doesn't provide any useful function.

- Some social media use feels good and doesn't provide any useful function, but social media is extremely useful to cheaply keep in touch with friends and family and extremely useful for discovering and coordinating events.

Fortunately the "keep in touch" part can be done with apps that don't have so much of the "social media" part, like Telegram, Discord, and even Facebook Messenger versus the main app.

I think most of the social media power users don't connect with friends and family at all through the platforms. Young Gen Zers just scroll Tiktok (or whatever clone they prefer) and share the ones they like through snapchat/discord/telegram/messenger/sms/whatsapp. Some will post stuff for their friends to see through "close friends" or whatever, but it's much less personal than it once was with Facebook groups and whatnot

Agreed. And it's not necessary when you have so many apps. They're using Tiktok for scrolling and Discord when they actually want to chat with their friends.

'Smoking get's me taking breaks, going outside more, and makes me more social chatting with my coworkers/others on smoke breaks'

Smoking, too, also has useful functions related to socialization. It was a product and drug first, but a social tool second. Half the reason people smoked is because other people did. They wanted to go outside, have a chitchat, and have a smoke.

Now that smoking is gone in the US, a lot of that is dead, and for the worse. A lot of places now don't even have balconies or other outdoor sections. Every piece of area is dedicated towards productive activity, whether that be shopping, working, or eating. There's very little "just sit around" places in modern businesses and workplaces. The joy of random encounter has been significantly decreased. Everything is now in passing.

This analogy undersells the negative impact of social media. Smoking wasn't a propaganda machine at the hands of a few faceless corpos with no clear affiliation, for example, nor did it form a global spynet

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