TikTok settles just before social media addiction trial to begin

At least drugs/alcohol are self limiting: you have to meet your dealer, go to a store, eventually run out of money...

TikTok/Reels/Shorts are free, infinite, and in your pocket on a device you're now forced to use in daily life (bank/2fa/messaging apps).

It's taken a few years to get to this point, but seeing the effects and regrets from over consumption of feeds made me take action.

I wanted to make some progress on a personal project, but I had a history of abandoning things, without external accountability. I had a guy for that the previous year, which worked great, but our interests diverged, so I had to find a way to do it on my own.

I realized that I couldn't force it. I had to find a way to make it work without having sufficient dopamine. Without relying on willpower at all.

So I stumbled into environmental design from first principles. I simply designed around all the failure modes.

1. I noticed that if I skipped a day of working on my project, the chance of completely losing momentum would rise enormously. So I decided I have to work every day, but to make it sustainable it only needs to be an hour.

2. I noticed that if I put work off until later in the day, the chance of skipping a day would rise enormously. So I decided that I had to start working as soon as I woke up. (But only for an hour. I could keep going but I didn't have to.)

3. And finally I noticed that, if I started playing with my phone or surfing the internet, the day was basically over. So I made a rule that I had to keep them both off for the first hour of the day. (And I turned them off the night before for good measure. That way I am waking up into the correct state by default.)

And what do you know. I didn't miss a day for 3 months. Even my dopamine starved brain was able to persist on this project every day without fail for several months straight, because I simply made these small changes to my environment!

The project suddenly became the most fun and interesting thing I could be doing. I actually looked forward to working on it the next day, when I went to sleep at night!

Apply the argument to abusing drugs now, and see how this argument throws all nuance out the window.

Our children are effectively enslaved through basic trinkets and manipulation to serve as eye-balls for ad impressions to fuel equity value in silicon valley. It's fucked and it was intentionally designed to be this fucked.

The abstract of what you state makes sense, but the layers of manipulation on top of it are what the problem is.

Which consequences are considered significant/desirable varies depending on the person.

I am using "bad" to refer to my personal judgments of this task ("was this time well spent?") and survival/growth needs in life. Inherently, there is nothing "bad" about scrolling: many things can be overconsumed to the point of causing consequences that are bad. However, the fact that TikTok et al. algorithms (and drugs, etc.) are designed to occupy your time and attention, makes me (by extension) consider them bad, because they likely lead me to bad consequences.

If I had a pinball machine in my room and it distracted me occasionally, I would probably write it off as a bit of relaxation/fun. If I scrolled a few TikTok videos, I might say the same. But if I spent multiple hours doing each while forgetting my fundamental needs (food, water, sunlight...) repeatedly, I may well say they are bad.

It's obviously unreasonable to classify everything that doesn't advance a certain goal (money? career? education?) as "bad", so the optimum must be somewhere in the middle.

(Rambling train of thought warning)

To resolve this, I have a few heuristics. They are definitely not logically watertight, but it's what works for me.

A key tradeoff is between "how fun is this?" and "what's the opportunity cost/consequence?"

Personally, I would like to live with purpose. The algorithms that drive TikTok etc. too easily lend themselves to purposeless consumption, which can also be true for many other activities (gaming!). I feel better saying/planning "I will do 1 hour of X", then doing that wholeheartedly - but I would never consciously choose to do an hour of scrolling.

Another bias of mine is that real-world things > virtual/digital/game/simulated etc... I feel like the inherent limitations and permanent consequences of physical things make me more careful about what I'm doing and what might result. If I break a part while tinkering/messing around in the workshop, I can't just load a quicksave - it gives me an opportunity to reconsider. Given that HN is a software-heavy place, I suspect many will not feel this way - this is OK, who am I to judge?

Long term compounding benefits > short term temporary pleasures. If I devoted my scrolling time (before I blocked everything) to playing pinball, or table tennis, or Minecraft, I would probably get very good at it. Similarly, if I tinkered with a pet project or filtered some photos, there would be some result to show for it - I would be improving my skill at something. As far as I can tell, the way I was scrolling TikTok-like feeds was not bringing any long-term results that I could look back at. Famously, no one remembers most of the short videos they scroll through. It only seems to deplete my

Granted, the previous paragraph depends on what one wants - perhaps influencers analysing successful video formats would improve their ability by scrolling. I'm imagining grouping outcomes into "good", "neutral" and "bad" for me: better at programming = good, top 1% Minecraft player = neutral, 100 hours spent on Reels = bad. (Reality is more nuanced, this is just a heuristic)

Speaking of too much time pursuing interests, it's time for me to close HN and get back to my problem sets. It is definitely interesting to think about this, but considering it for too long is bad in the sense that I will feel better having finished those questions.

I still need a proper mp3 player (been using an old android) and a camera though.

...and a Kindle, and a fax machine ;)

As a side note, the "old" style Nokias now seem to be running on some kind of emulation... The Nokia startup sound lagged and stuttered and made me die a little inside.

Of course, YMMV

Put another way: If McDonalds sees I eat 5 cheeseburgers a day, at what point do they have to stop serving me for my own health? Do they need to step in at all?

If Facebook knows I'm scrolling 6 hours a day, at what point do they have to stop serving me?

I tried to eat as many cheeseburgers as I could in one sitting (I easily eat double the amount of food of others in one sitting normally), and tapped out at 10 or something, which is impractical and gross, there's a physical limit unless you have certain conditions

If you only go to fast food once a week or less with your kid as a treat, I feel like you could probably exclude soda and fries and tell them to get as many burgers as they want, but they have to eat them all, and it would be more of a lesson than anything lol

3. Targeting -- even under the (debatable) premise that they are intentionally designed to be addictive, cheeseburgers, drugs and cigarettes do not actively target each addict by optimising their properties to their individual addiction.

If I am addicted to smoking, the tobacco industry does indeed try to keep me hooked, among other things by offering me many flavours and alternatives. However, the cigarettes I personally consume are not constantly adjusting their formula, appearance and packet design specifically to satisfy my tastes and desires.

Or give everyone cheap daily GLP-1 pills.

Lawsuits are the one official mechanism for righting wrongs. They're the only mechanism that the perpetrator of a wrong can't just choose to ignore.

Additionally, other content like TV and movies has content ratings, social media does not have anything of the sort.

I don't know how to draw even a blurred line between I've made my burger taste better because I added salt to it, but has now make it more addictive as a result.

You could argue an Oreo has been developed to taste good such that you want to eat them again.

I understand your point and I agree to an extent but I don't know how you do that. Becoming addicted to things comes with a level of personal accountability, to a degree.

Make your bedroom a phone-free zone, charge it in the living room overnight, use the built in parenting and screentime controls that every modern phone OS has, don't let your kids stare at the screen all day. Etc.

This isn't rocket science. Self control is one of the most important things you need to learn. It sucks and it's hard but it's basic life stuff.

The only difference with social media addiction vs drugs/gambling is that it's not socially ostracized like other addictions so people ignore it.

Pretty sure too much gambling and too much alcohol is worse than watching too many short videos. So how can we say that spending time on figuring out how to block people from watching too many short videos is a better use of our time and resources than limiting gambling and drinking.

Not to mention this presupposes that social media addiction is rampant. But there isn't a scientific consensus on that. This lawsuit reads like scaremongering of the past around television and comic books. Instead of regulating content or user privacy we get these dog and pony shows.

That's similar to dumb ideas involving social pressure. When people have a tendency to be dumb about a thing we use the law to restrict the thing, apparently. But this involves, in effect, an authoritative declaration of "that's dumb" by law. I feel personally threatened, then, in activities such as my woodwork, which might have been an equally dumb obsession! I know nobody's at all likely to regulate woodwork, but that's only because it's relatively unpopular. I could imagine a parallel universe where woodwork (portable somehow) becomes a trend that makes a young person feel socially relevant, and then it gets regulated. I think I disapprove of this interference with people's dumb notions.

My jaw is on the floor... Can you provide details of your usage, were you just going through video after video for 12-14 hours or were you involved in content production or something?

That's a mind blowing statistic, and I'm sure this is much more common than we think.

This is why I hope we wake up and realize that social media is going to be the ruin of our society. I hope this trial is the beginning of the end of social media platforms that prey on addictive behaviors.

What sort of social changes did you notice after that period of time?

I've never used TikTok, but the techniques they employ sounds seriously addictive.

Many people were completely unfamiliar with the plight of the Palestinians over the past 100 years and TikTok (and, to a much less degree, other platforms) brought the issue to their attention. Israel is no longer untouchable and many have recognized them for what they are now - the last remaining Western imperialist settler colony. This was not the case merely 4 years ago. The transformation is stark and real.

What can people do with that knowledge? That's up to them.

I don't really get the rest of your comment, unfortunately.

If you think this is meaningless, take a look at countries like Saudi Arabia pouring tens of billions of dollars in trying to achieve the exact opposite - cultivating a positive opinion/view of the country among those in the West. They wouldn't be doing this if it didn't matter. The US hegemony has thrived largely on this kind of soft power. If the whole world (instead of just half the world) had already hated the US decades ago, it would've become nowhere near as powerful.