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Comment by sega_sai | Hacker News Reader

"In scary headlines like these, technology is the subject, and teens are passive victims." -- I am sorry, but how is this not true, when companies like Meta are in full control of their algorithms, tuning them to maximum addiction.

One can indeed argue what is the best way to deal with the problem of kids and social media, but I think the article is misrepresenting the situation.

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If you read the rest of the piece they do argue for more regulation. They aren’t making a personal responsibility argument like other commenters are saying.

The problem with bans is they claim the technology itself is purely bad and the only solution is to keep it from children. Which on its face is nonsensical. It’s ok for a 17 year old but not a 16 year old?

We need genuine regulation tackling the actual problems with this technology. Blanket bans do nothing but make adults feel good about “protecting the children”.

Age restrictions don't say it's 'okay' for somebody above a certain age to use something. Cigarettes will screw up your body at 18 just as much as they will at 17. But at 18 you're, legally at least, an adult, the point at which our unstated social contract starts to prioritize liberty over safety. And setting it at such an age also helps significantly reduce the peer pressure to smoke.

You’re right, and that’s the reason why some states have gone further banning cigarettes that have flavorings including menthol.

Ironic since menthols are to me associated with an older generation. AFAIK, their original purpose was for smokers with colds / blocked sinuses.

Blanket bans are better the no bans at all. I would agree we need genuine and granular regulation, though I don’t think it’s wise to ask kids what they think is best for them. Not a parent but a parent might have some concern for letting kids rule themselves.

That's an odd take in my opinion.

Is driving a car on your own ok at age 15? why 16 and not 15? Why not 14? It's ok to drink in Australia at 18 age, why not 17, or 16? Legal drinking age in the US is 21, why not 18 like it is in Australia? Why not allow 20 year olds to smoke, not just 21 year olds.

Its because it is the legal age in which we have established people as adults where they're given more liberty as opposed to safety.

The US is weird in that we can't really decide if you are an adult at 16 (can work a standard job, can drive), 18 (can vote, can serve in the military) or 21 (can drink). In fact for a while between the Vietnam War and the late 1980s, the drinking/smoking age was 18 in many states (or odd compromises where you could drink beer at 18 but liquor at 21). It was largely pressure from groups like MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) that increased the drinking age.

Considering brain development and differing effects of various substances/activities, I don't see any contradiction with having different age thresholds.

Well being able to serve in the military at 18 around weapons that potentially kill but you can't have a bear for another 3 years does sound a bit contradictory.

Indeed. Military service shouldn't begin before 21

yeah I don't like this "definition", I fully agree that the technology is the issue, but the "badness" of it is irrelevant. In my opinion giving kids unfettered access is the problem. Lockdown tcp/ip and have whitelisted apps and sites for kids at the very most, but I just don't understand the drive to have kids on the internet in general, it seems like a recipe for disaster for the kid and seems abusive, like giving them alcohol or something.

I remember the ol "family computer", the kid isn't going to go hunt porn with their parents sitting in the same room, and giving kids these 24x7 smartphones, especially unsupervised, yeah I don't get it. Yes, obviously if a parent trusts their kid but it seems like the entire tech world is being coerced into unpaid babysitting commitments lol

There plenty of stuff that switches arbitrarily between 17 and 18. Tobacco use, sexual consent, army etc.

I grow up with ICQ where you can click a button to talk with a random stranger. Boomers were crying about Internet addiction.

30 years later, I’m fine and the boomers are the ones getting addicted to fake stuff on the internet.

I know people who got into car accidents and 30 years later they were fine

Our generation did not turn out fine. Phones are hugely a net loss for society. I stand by that.

Maybe. But how do we tell the effects of social media and smart phones apart from the multiple financial crises? The endless, incredibly costly Middle East forever wars? The huge rise in costs of houses, education and healthcare? The blatantly corrupt politics? Globalisation and the resulting loss of manufacturing jobs? The inaction on school shootings? The climate situation?

Maybe without perpetual distraction some of those problems wouldn't be as bad.

Every living generation has a phone "problem", so that's not unique to one made up cohort.

I'd take this one step further and say this would be a major issue even without 'the algorithm' and other such 'engagement' maximization efforts. Way back before social media existed, things like BBS' and later on newsgroups were similarly extremely addictive. The only thing that changed with social media is that it all barriers to entry came crashing down and these sort of services became socially normalized, instead of being just made up of fringe tech enthusiasts.

And it's obviously a big problem for adults as well as kids, but I think there are many nuances there. One would be that we generally accept adults engaging in self destructive behaviors as part of the liberty of being an adult. You're free to go gamble away your life savings as an adult - but you won't even get in the door as a kid.

Another is that lot of the undesirable things that happen in schools (gossiping, conspiracies like false reporting, bullying, in-out crowds, image crafting, etc) get greatly magnified when you introduce social media. And that would happen even if the most benign/benevolent social media, absent any 'algorithm', engagement maximizing, and so on.

> Way back before social media existed, things like BBS' and later on newsgroups were similarly extremely addictive.

Social media today is almost nothing like BBS and Newsgroups. Social media is supercharged to be a dopamine slot machine that sells attention to the highest bidder with the explicit aim of changing their behavior. None of that existed on BBS or Newsgroups.

> Way back before social media existed, things like BBS' and later on newsgroups were similarly extremely addictive.

I'm not so sure about this (having lived both). The "algorithm" has a massive addictive effect that simply was not present in the BBS days, it is nearly universally agreed. Certainly it's believed enough for Meta to spend billions on it.

This is one of those topics that LLMs are quite good at for digging up information and consensus on, because they've been trained on stuff that you may have either forgotten or not been a part of the culture of. BBS were universally deemed extremely addictive. Early telnet BBSs then brought this up to an even more ridiculous extreme. Their usage even cropped up on early studies of internet addiction like this. [1] And similarly for usenet/newsgroups.

I think the algorithm's primary purpose is to be able to more seamlessly push ads. I also think that at some point there was a sort of dystopic interest in seeing if people could be controlled by content. Facebooks emotional control experiments are public validation of that. But these are again tangential red herrings once we establish clearly that addiction happens even without such, and it certainly did and does.

[1] - https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED416838

How are you quantifying it?

This is like saying short form content scrolling apps are adictive but it's just the same as TV back in the day. Yeah there were studies on TV addiction. Yeah it was a discussed topic. No they're not equally addictive. It's not even close.

Having lived through it, participated in it, and being able to personally contrast people then and now. It's not particularly different, outside of the fact that in the past you had 0.1% of people (if that) using these services, whereas now you have the majority of humanity doing so, so all that's really changed is scale.

Beyond that I think there's also a first principles approach one can take. Not only were these services addictive, but so was Facebook (and other similar services) long before 'the algorithm' was a thing. The core interaction is interpersonal, and people simply want to see what other people are saying. We could define that as FOMO, entertainment, or whatever else - but I think this is the shared common core.

Even on this site, there are many people who are clearly addicted - myself probably amongst them. Yet there's not even a notification of when something you've written has been responded to, let alone some guiding algorithm. Even having to jump through hurdles to achieve interpersonal dialogue, it is still quite addictive.

>Having lived through it, participated in it, and being able to personally contrast people then and now. It's not particularly different, outside of the fact that in the past you had 0.1% of people (if that) using these services, whereas now you have the majority of humanity doing so, so all that's really changed is scale.

Having lived trough all the same i'd say the exact opposite and i'd even add that phones add a constant presence element that is a differernt factor but still i'd say theres a very noticable difference.

And if we look past our own experiences the reason why is fairly straightforward. The whole point of the algorithm is to make it more addictive. All those companies would not spend their time and effort on it otherwise if it did not help on this front. And the fact that they spent quite a lot of research on it and make it quite intricate with lots of computation involved and the fact that it is quoted plenty as the reason for new players such as tiktok coming to prominence should tell you it's a quite impactfull one.

Again as mentioned above I'd strongly recommend using an LLM to search for some info from this era. These systems were all considered extremely addictive.

As for the algorithm - in modern times all these companies driven by advertising. The algorithm works as a means to enable more effective advertising, and especially native advertising. It also likely helps build more effective profiles on people which can then be further monetized with advertising. I'm certain it increases addiction, but that's like saying that the special jingles and bells and whistles on a slot machine increase addiction. You're just adding to an already highly addictive baseline.

I also don't think TikTok really 'won' because of their algorithm. Facebook is now for parents and grandparents, while younger people moved onto other services to find their own place. I think the same sort of view of a service being dated became true of YouTube, even moreso as it moved more from YouTube to CorpoTube. Most, if not all, alternatives tried to be YouTube but with less content and worse CDNs. TikTok actually tried to put the 'You' back in 'YouTube' and caught on exactly like YouTube did back in the day. Go figure.

>Again as mentioned above I'd strongly recommend using an LLM to search for some info from this era. These systems were all considered extremely addictive.

Which is so relative it's meaningless. Cigarettes are also extremely addictive but i'm not about to compare it to TV

>I'm certain it increases addiction

Then what's the discussion about? Companies incentivised and given the technological means to create a more addictive product create a more addictive product. Don't tell me it's by hapenstance or that it's just an insconsequential increase on an addictive baseline when the difference is so easily noticed and the things only wielding the addictive baseline are comparatively abandoned if not for societal innertia.

>I also don't think TikTok really 'won' because of their algorithm. Facebook is now for parents and grandparents,

There I think it's actually both. It's both the new things away from the old and the algorithm was actually good whilst youtube's was garbage in comparison. There were other contenders and ones that died (vine) so i think their execution was also part of it. For all the outrage about slop, dances and dangerous and short form addictive content if the tiktok algorithm detected you liked ....let's say science and gardening videos in medium to long form it would give you exactly that and would only deviate enough (unless you searched on went on your own tangent) to see if your prefrences deviated but in a way that wouldnt be bothersome. In the meantime youtube was putting the same recommended unappealing vids among others in the sidebar for more than a year straight. It had all the annoying incentives that led to clickbait titles, thumbnails, intros, fillers. I deleted tiktok because i have an addictive personality and it was too good at giving me both that dopamine fix and what i actually wanted in the moment. Oh and as a 3rd factor it had less and less intrusive ads.

The issue I'm trying to point out is that attacking the algorithm isn't attacking the problem. It's like attacking, per your example, flavorings in cigarettes. Those certainly make them more addictive and more appealing to a certain demographic, but even without those flavorings they're harmfully addictive.

And I think without understanding the core problem, solutions are going to fail. If I were a self centered oligarch in charge of one of those companies, I would certainly ensure there was astroturfing focused on the algorithm, as the tides of society turn more towards regulating these businesses, because you can drag that issue out forever, make a surprised face when nothing meaningfully changes, and continue to play this game for decades.

And yeah I agree TikTok did some other things right as well, but I don't necessarily think it was the short-form stuff. It was the fact that 'you' - a regular nobody, could put out a video and have a reasonable chance of it reaching a massive number of people, very much like in the early days of YouTube. YouTube created a system where the big get bigger which inevitably leads to stagnation. TikTok created a more 'decentralized' system, for lack of a better term.

I don't doubt that BBSes were deemed addictive, but your argument is implying that "the algorithm" provides no additional addictive value. And I think the amount of money that goes into it strongly suggests it has a massive amount of addictive value.

It doesn't imply literally none. I'm sure flavored vapes helps improve their addictiveness for their target demographics - children, but they'd also be extremely addictive even without the flavorings. The reason I brought up advertising is because Facebook, Meta, whatever they want to call themselves, is an ad company. And the algorithm is a critical part in delivering both traditional ads as well as native advertising. It likely also helps create more complete profiles on individuals which can then again be monetized with advertising.

> this would be a major issue even without 'the algorithm' and other such 'engagement' maximization efforts

Thank you, I don't know why nobody else brings this up. The engagement algorithms certainly aren't good, we should regulate them, but it seems like a stretch to think they're the root of the problem.

Heck, you don't even have to go back to BBS and newsgroups. People can get addicted to group chats, to games, to browsing HN. Kids can get bullied on all these places. No engagement algorithm needed.

I think there's a fallacy of sorts where when something becomes harmful we assume it's evil. Computers make it really easy to shovel entertainment at our eyeballs, it's easy to get addicted to that and for it to cause social problems.

Because there is a huge difference between 0.1% of the population being addicted and 20%. It’s possible to get dropdown drunk drinking Miller Lite. That doesn’t imply that handing out bottles of everclear is safe social policy.

Exactly, it's like talking about the symptoms and missing the point of the diagnostic.

Yup. All this talk of personal responsibility in these types of situations is nothing but a perfidious form of victim blaming.

"The crack addict should've known better, it's not the dealer's fault they came back for more!"

I think personal responsibility does play into these situations to some extent, but even so, that doesn't imply there should be zero regulation.

Both for crack addicts and teens using social media, they not only hurt themselves, but also hurt those around them.

The studies on teen mental health largely suggest that mostly it's not about using a lot of social media yourself, but living in an area where social media is the coin of the realm. It's the toxic culture SM generates rather than direct use that's hurting teen mental health.

I actually thinks it’s far more applicable in the crack scenario than the social media scenario. There are lots of people who don’t use crack. The vast majority of humanity.

What percentage of teens don’t use social media? I don’t know the answer, and would adjust my thinking if incorrect, but my assumption is “a small minority”

Personal responsibility IS a factor that can’t be ignored when it comes to addiction. I say this as a multi substance addict who’s been clean for over a decade. Tech is a whole new beast though, because we are often forced to use it. It’s closer to food addiction than crack addiction, which, IMO, is the most brutal addiction of all (food). No one neeeds crack to survive, so stopping it is one thing. Stopping (junk) food addiction, or severe over eating, or whatever you want to call it… man, that must be brutal.

I don’t use social media, but I’m an old fogie. I’d imagine you kids can not very easily “just not use it” if they want to have any semblance of social life and to find a high paying job after college

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