Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

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To the framing issue - I can frame an alternate lens through which we balance enrichment against engagement.

Media can enrich people - expose them to new ideas, new stories, different views and opinions. This expands worldview and generally trends in the same direction as education.

Media can also be engaging - Use tools that make it compelling to continue viewing, even when other things might be preferable, on the low end: cliffhangers and suspenseful stories. on the high end: repetitive gambling like tendencies.

I'd argue if we view tiktok through this lens - banning it seems to make sense. Honestly, most short form social media should be highly reviewed for being low value content that is intentionally made addictive.

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It's not society's job to cater to the whims of fucking for-profit, abusive, media companies. It's society's job to enrich and improve the lives of their members. Get the fuck outta here with the lame duck argument that I need to give a shit about some company's unethical profit motives.

I also don't care if meth dealers go bankrupt - who knew!

I fundamentally don't think governments should do a careful cost-benefit analysis of everything in society and then ban it if it falls on the wrong side. Just on basic principles of personal freedom. That's why the "addiction" framing is so important, because it implies that citizens don't have agency, and so justifies the authoritarian intervention.

PS if we apply your analysis to video games they surely would have been banned too.

Edit: by the way I remember back in the day we searched for "addicting flash games" and it was seen as a positive ;p

It is completely unreasonable for a society to do a careful cost-benefit analysis of everything in society - it's completely reasonable for a society to identify highly harmful things (especially those that hijack our brains through direct chemical or emotional addiction) and police those, or, as per Portugal's approach, make available societal supports to allow people to better cope with that addiction. The later isn't very reasonable to expect in a world of rising austerity due to financialization so the former seems more realistic.

"Hijack our brains" - exactly what I mean by pretending people don't have agency. Who gets to decide what counts as hijacking and what is just normal culture? Anything is "hijacking" to some extent - boy bands hijack teen girl brains, the BBC created Teletubbies to hijack toddler brains, heck any artistic representation is a hijack to the extent that it is interpreted by your brain at least partially as something other than what it really is i.e. some colours on a flat surface. The point is a new form of culture, communication and coordination is emerging and the old powers are shitting their pants.

(Fully agree on the Portugal approach though. The difficult to accept answer is that if people are choosing a shit life of scrolling 10 hours a day maybe we should do the actual hard work of improving the kind of life open to them.)

I remember that website, it was called addictinggames.com and I remember finding that bad grammar offensive. (I was obviously a lot of fun at parties.)

With social media, the cost benefit analysis doesn't deliver marginal results, just less stark/concentrated results. Drink driving is self evidently bad even though 99 times out of 100(?) it does no harm, because one time out of a hundred its consequences are catastrophic. Social media on the other hand is harming essentially 100% of the population in initially milder ways - even if you don't use it you're forced to live in a dumbed down society where wealth and power is becoming concentrated in the hands of those who pedal digital dopamine and in a democracy being undermined by disinformation. Of course 'initially milder harm' is step one in frog boiling.

> * even if you don't use it you're forced to live in a dumbed down society where wealth and power is becoming concentrated in the hands of those [...] *

Exactly the same applies to TV but where is all the handwringing about that? Remember those stats about people watching 7 hours of TV a day? Those people need some serious help too. What's happening is clearly just the old mass-media-supported order refusing to yield power to new media used by younger people. Governments couldn't care one bit about false information[1], nor about zoomers getting brainrot, it's all about controlling the flow of information.

[1] ("disinformation", another nice example of framing which ignores the fact that people have agency)

edit: the system is escaping my asterisks automatically now, anyone know how to get italics now?

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