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Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

> It was like 300 million junkies all lost their drug supplier at the same time.

No, it was not. It was actually nothing like that.

No babies were left to die because their parents were out searching for tiktok clips. I saw no people whoring themselves on the street just to see a few tiktok clips. I heard no stories of children stealing from their own family to get a few scrolls of tiktok. There was no people killing each other just to get a hit of tiktok.

Let's not trivialize something like drug addiction by comparing it to kids procrastinating by watching their TV phone app.

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I think you're probably vastly discounting the amount of childhood neglect wrought by social media addiction on both the parent and child's parts.

No, I'm not.

The median child of a social media user (so basically, the median child) is vastly more well off than the median child of a heroin/crack cocaine user and its not even close.

The fact you're suggesting some level of equivalency is wild imo.

Glad I could draw attention to the irrational logic of the current "social media is evil" moral panic.

True facts. My friend spent an entire day without weed once, and he killed 3 people, and abandoned seven babies. Four of which weren't even his!

Not sure if you're aware opioids and crack exist.

Let’s not pretend like all drugs are equally addictive, or that some tech products aren’t even more so. You’re comparing TikTok to crack, but it’s much more like coming off E, where your life has no sense of pleasure or happiness for weeks/months (anhedonia, I think it’s called), and you’re left on edge for any source of contentment.

So you believe clinically diagnosable Anhedonia and ecstasy withdrawal is...similar to what happens if a teenager isn't allowed to watch tiktok for a few days...hrmmm.

I'm just astonished how hard all of the supposedly rational engineering minds of hackernews are falling for this classic moral panic. The crowd of mindless pitchforks is cringe.

It must be a cognitive gymnastics that makes people here feel more important. How powerful it must feel to believe your email job can addict and destroy the world...via...javascript scroll effects on...mobile entertainment apps.

I mean, how else do you rationalize the fact that you're paid as much as a heart surgeon to implement react components and reply thumbs up to messages on slack? All this doomsday cosplaying must help square the cognitive dissonance.

Come on, that’s not a fair take. Most of us build unimportant and mediocre things at best, but TikTok is especially designed for addiction, shortening of attention spans, and making you come back.

Instagram was supposedly the same, with Meta internally knowing that. They said it themselves, the teenagers couldn’t stop using Instagram even if they wanted to. I mean, isn’t that addiction?

I don’t need to feel important. I’m an addict trying to stay away from my triggers. It’s not Instagram, but I also know how that one feels, because I had an account for years. Of course I’m not saying it’s exactly like a drug — any drug —, but that to dismiss the very real, very negative design of these tools is also folly. They hijack the same brain chemistry, to similar results, and a different scale of recovery.

No, developers aren’t special. Nobody in tech is. But Instagram themselves, in their own document, are basically admitting to behaving like a very capable dealer of a neural drug.

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