Hacker News Reader

I don't think social media needs to be banned, but maybe using complex algorithms to drive attention should be. Even Facebook was pretty good back when its feed was a simple, chronological display of all your friends posts and nothing else. It went down the tubes as they moved away from that.

View on HN

Put together, it’s likely most people’s friends wouldn’t produce enough content to drive engagement, at least in ‘public’ social media like Facebook.

I remember this phenomenon back when Facebook was less algorithmic — some days there’d just be no new content at all. Especially I’m guessing if you limit adding friends to actually just the people you’d be happy to grab lunch with.

I wouldn't ban social media.

Here in the UK we require cigarette suppliers to advertise the dangers of smoking on every package.

I'd mandate that every social media platform is required to advertise the dangers on every page, and also give a very visible option to reveal the workings of the algorithm that is feeding you the pages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com