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Comment by oytis | Hacker News Reader

I would be pretty happy about social media being banned for everyone if not the immense possibilty for the government to abuse this law to disrupt undesired communication altogether.

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This website is social media.

This is true, it's also not devoid of addictiveness :)

But you know what I mean, right? The ones using intricate algorithms and tracking to keep you "engaged" and manipulate what you read and see

I know what you mean, but I think the issue is not social media, but rather big corporations being shitty. PepsiCo makes addictive beverages that cause people develop to diabetes and heart disease, but that doesn't mean beverages should be illegal. I think it would be better to regulate or ban the specifically harmful things, rather than a blanket ban on something that is actually useful. And like you alluded to, banning social media could easily lead to a general crackdown on freedom of expression, journalism, etc, now that it is the primary way people communicate with one another.

I'll also add that I'm not specifically opposed to banning minors from using social media. It would probably also be better if it was illegal for children to buy their own soda tbh.

Technically true but I've found it to be less addictive than other text forums (like the R-site and Lemmy), let alone the algo-powered video-based abominations that normies are all hooked on.

I'm thinking that it comes down to one thing in particular: the absence of response notifications. There's only so much addiction you can get out of a page of text without so much as a bell icon.

What exactly do you mean by “social media”?

There are a lot of communities built around things like Discord and Telegram. IRC existed long before these.

There are many websites that allow you to post pictures and have other people comment on them. DeviantArt pre-dates the vast majority of modern apps.

There are also vast numbers of iterations on forums.

At what point should you prevent people from finding and talking to each other?

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