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Comment by msy | Hacker News Reader

I find myself in an odd predicament. For nearly all my life I would have seen all of this as an unconscionable anathema. But having watched what social media has done to our society, the tsunami of bullshit collapsing critical thought, science and reason I just don’t think civilisation can survive this without controls. Too many people are too gullible, too uncritical for it to survive without the state being able to curtail harmful speech at scale. Do I hate it? Absolutely. But I hate the alternative more. And I want the bounds of acceptable speech to be decided by my democratically elected government, not a bunch of American billionaires determined to burn society to the ground so they can pan the ashes for yet more gold.

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Wouldn't it be better to curtail social media's addictive design choices, and improve things for everyone, rather than force the audience to carry the weight of responsibility?

> Wouldn't it be better to curtail social media's addictive design choices

Hacker news has a doomscroll front page. Ive never notice you have a problem with it

HN specifically does not. You have to click "more", leading to most people not moving beyond two or three pages, rather than infinite scrolling.

So clicking to the next piece of slop is ok, but scrolling is bad?

Our current research shows that people don't click. But they do scroll. So... Yes.

Infinite scrolling makes it harder to break the feedback loop, and harder to control self-interruption. It also increases the overall dopamine experienced.

Pagination, allows the user to regularly break from the cycle, and most people take advantage to do so. It allows people to notice fatigue. Which is exactly why most social media sites no longer use it.

As the 'inventor' of the infinite scroll said:

> [it is] one of the first products designed to not simply help a user, but to deliberately keep them online for as long as possible - Aza Raskin

I think you've become hysterical. So mouse clicks are your line in the sand? Beyond that it becomes an intolerable evil we must protect the children from? I can't see it

The problem isn't social media per se, but rather how social media is designed, and this design is driven by profits and big tech. There are, at least in Europe, no alternatives to the big social media platforms. I'm not too keen on social media bans, because this neither elimates the desire for social media, nor social media in itself.

>But having watched what social media has done to our society, the tsunami of bullshit collapsing critical thought, science and reason I just don’t think civilisation can survive this without controls.

None of this is new. Every single one of these things has been pointed out millennia ago.

You had already evaluated it and made your decision (against censorship) on this decades ago when you first came across it.

Changing your view now isn't a matter of new information coming to light. It's a matter of you disliking the obvious and inevitable consequences that you had been warned of going into it.

Perhaps it's time you stop changing your mind based on totalitarian propaganda and realize you don't know what you're doing, and stop supporting censorship.

found the nudge unit employee

you just gotta apply like maybe 10-15 seconds of critical thinking here and you too will also realize this is a bunch of nonsense

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