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Is there any benefit to social media? Just seems like a new form of cancer we have to deal with now along with everything else.

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A place for those who would be marginalised by their own community, gay, religious apostates etc etc.

Communicating with relatives on the other side of the world.

Maintaining old friendships that would have died due to distance.

Somewhere to find like minded people.

Somewhere like hacker news (I count it as social media top) where I discovered great books, expanded my horizons and learnt that there were other ways at looking at the world.

Anyway, it's not all bad :)

There are social sharing functions and then there are algorithmic feedback loops that induce doomscrolling. Pretty sure it’s technically feasible to have one without the other.

The question to me is, with enough content and a powerful enough recommendation algorithm trained with enough eyeballs can short form videos be considered addictive in a clinical sense? If so what are the deleterious effects of the addiction? Should it be regulated?

I’m all for freedom, but we regulate drugs because we deem them bad for society.

You are describing old-school social-network designs that began to be marginalized already before Covid, not modern social media. The latter would prefer that you not forge or maintain authentic connections with other human beings, but rather doomscroll through endless-scroll content.

Keeping in touch with relatives or friends in much of the world has long since moved to chat apps like WhatsApp instead of an open social network.

You can do most of that with IRC. There's a distinction imo between static webpages / IRC / forums, and modern "social media".

I don't use social media much myself, but I feel that this is going in the direction of that infamous dropbox comment.

I think it's not even that there's a benefit to it, it's that a lot of traditional communities that had their own forums are now exclusively on Facebook groups. I'm in several groups for mountain biking, for cars, for 3D printing, and those communities just don't exist anywhere else online other than small pockets with very little activity. Discord is the other one that has captured a bunch, but it's mostly centered around gaming, memes and tech.

Homemade Dog videos. Not sure of anything else

You can’t have the internet and the first amendment and not have social media, and I’d suggest both of the above are beneficial.

You should probably say "freedom of speech" so this makes sense anywhere except USA.

But more importantly I call bullshit. If something, anything, is proven to be extremely deleterious to peoples health and also to the democratic process then you absolutely can write laws banning it specifically. Eg. you cant build your own nukes or biological weapons at home. That's how laws and constitutions work.. they are developed over time as things come up.

Thank god the founders thought of people like you when they made abundantly and unambiguously clear “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press …”

Without that you do not live in a democracy, only an authoritarian state where the ruling class permits you to discuss their conduct only as they see fit and out of the goodness of their hearts, and permits you to vote only for candidates holding positions they pre-approve.

I live alone, and have friends throughout the US.

Social media kept me from attempting suicide during COVID. It helps me feel loved and connected.

Yeah, there are faults, but condemning it wholeheartedly is like suggesting we should abolish ICE cars immediately.

And suggesting we abandon it as a comment on a social media platform is ironically self-unaware.

I always try to be specific and condemn addiction engineering.

Social media before algorithmic attention hacking wasn’t nearly as bad, might have been a net good.

The first thing the algorithm destroyed was the “social” part of social media. Then it set about destroying society and kids attention spans.

> And suggesting we abandon it as a comment on a social media platform is ironically self-unaware.

Gotta reach people where they are.

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