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Comment by hisfraudulency | Hacker News Reader

There's an incredible cultural contempt for social media, everyone recognizes the harms, but we collectively spend more and more time on social media apps.

Wat mean?

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Ask yourself the same question but replace "social media" with "tobacco"

Have you ever tried quitting smoking?

Easy. I've done it five times in the last three years alone.

I don't think this is what quitting means, or was that part of the joke?

That was the joke: it's not easy to quit smoking.

That seems like a bizarre comparison. Is TikTok high in nicotine?

Short Form Content is high dopamine low effort. Yes, it's addictive, close to Nicotine even.

The harm is it's wasting an insane amount of your day. You could spend6 hours doing anything more productive

> close to Nicotine even

I find that incredibly hard to believe especially since nicotine causes a physical chemical dependency. Sure it is hard for some people to get off of social media, but let's no go overboard here with the social media == big tobacco metaphor.

Let's hear what you think about gambling addiction then. People have destroyed their lives and families due to it. No chemical dependency either.

I think it's possible to criticize things for what they are, without having to resort to conflating them with other things. Excessive gambling doesn't have to be equated to physical addiction in order to be regarded as a bad thing -- it can be a bad thing as a result of its own consequences without having to be compared to anything else.

Think about it for a minute, the harm from gambling is intrinsic because you are statistically likely to lose money. It's not so different from a behavioral addiction like gaming, but you can lose your house.

Chemical dependency just makes addictive behavior that much worse. Moreover there is literally no evidence that social media is harder to quit than cigarettes.

I think you're engaging in moral panic.

> Short Form Content is high dopamine low effort. Yes, it's addictive, close to Nicotine even.

Sorry, but this line of argument just isn't acceptable. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter created by the body itself, and is released naturally as a response to a wide variety of experiences. Nicotine is an exogenous chemical substance that alters the body's biochemistry and creates physical dependence.

Extending the meaning of "addition" to cover anything that people enjoy doing and are thus motivated to do more of is a disingenuous equivocation.

If the best you can do to argue against something is to attempt to lump it in with something qualitatively different in the hopes of attaching the connotations of the latter also to the former, then I'm afraid you've lost the argument.

> The harm is it's wasting an insane amount of your day. You could spend6 hours doing anything more productive

Claiming that one particular pastime is any worse than any of the others people have wasted time on -- readying mediocre novels, watching television, drinking alcohol -- etc. is just a case of judging other people's choices by your own particular preferences.

I agree with you that the vast majority of social media is stupid and a waste of time, but other people's time is theirs to waste.

It means it's addictive

When I have true contempt for something, I find in quite easy to quit.

There are things I am likely addicted to that I don’t like. I wish I didn’t do them and could stop, but I don’t have contempt for them. I have contempt for social media and even tell my own mother I won’t join when she tells me it would make her so happy if I was on Facebook.

Alternatively, it may mean that people are largely hypocritical, and evaluate themselves and other people by different standards.

I have observed people who objectively were destroying their lives and yet they themselves were happily in denial.

The clichéd and sadly true "I am in control I can stop everything is fine".

Humans are strange.

1. Because people like it. 2. “Social media” is not the right term to describe those apps anymore. There’s nothing social about them - just an algorithm feeding you stuff. True social media aren’t that different from forums - places where you can interact with other people (in either healthy or unhealthy way).

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