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People don't want to want it. But it's not obvious that merely allowing a choice of recommendation algorithms would allow people to escape the slop. Isn't anyone strong enough to choose a less addictive algorithm necessarily strong enough to not scroll Instagram for hours in the first place?

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>Isn't anyone strong enough to choose a less addictive algorithm necessarily strong enough to not scroll Instagram for hours in the first place?

Absolutely not. It's much easier to make a one-time switch than to be continuously resisting temptation. Changing the things in your environment is an important tool to break bad habits. The book "Atomic Habits" talks about this at length.

I mean, the court case is about these platforms being addictive to kids, so if they said "accounts for users under X years have the algo and time caps delegated to their parents' account by default" it'd go along way to negate what they're being accused of.

They've already built all the tools they need around this at the moment, it's just they give them to advertisers rather than end-users.

"Let the parents manage it" is, unfortunately, part of the reason we're in this situation in the first place.

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