I’m sorry but this is just not real.

There’s not a single non-quack doctor who will recommend psychiatric medication for “social media addiction,” which is not a real thing and pretty much all of the recent academic literature proves as much.

If your doctor is suggesting medication for social media use, you either have much deeper underlying mental health issues, or you need to find a new doctor ASAP and report them for malpractice.

The default should be simple, something like time-ordered of followed only with opt in for recommendations. Ideally I'd love to be able to swap algorithms for something open source but setting a standard there rather than just mandating a level of control seems a bigger hurdle.

It seems entirely anti-consumer that I am just the behest of whatever Google or Meta decide is most profitable to show me instead of finding important news or entertainment in a way that I want.

Then torpedo the damn thing and set fire to the shipyard that built it. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, about the predatory nature of Big Tech is inevitable or required for society to function. Suggesting we all just accept it is ridiculous, especially when we can trivially get rid of it with nothing more complicated than applying life-altering punitive damages to the C-suite, board, and majority shareholders.

Then facebook turned to "let's show you random political articles instead of your friends dinner plates", and people moved to instagram... which stopped showing your friends dinner plates soon after it got bought out by facebook and it too replaced the friends dinner plates with random "reels".

If the kids only saw stuff posted by their 'friends', instead of being pushed a lot of random garbage they never decided to 'follow', it would still be a much nicer place.

I disagree. When you only saw what you followed you ran out of 'content' regularly. For example, it was a common feature on Twitter clients to maintain your scroll position in your feed because keeping up to date with it and reading it in its entirety was the norm. Same goes for Facebook. Your friends only posted so much content. The 'addictive' aspect was you had to check regularly to see if there was new content. That is very very different from endless feeds full of content that is forced in front of you by the algorithm,

When I was a kid there were fines for factories that polluted water. Most of the time they were not found out, and when they did they just paid the fine that it was cheaper than to solve the problem.

Regulations changed, factories that polluted water got closed until they fixed the problem. Most factory owners fear the regulation, they are extremely pro-active to avoid breaking the law because the consequences are not worth it. (This trend reversed a decade ago when punishments started to be less harsh and government became more pro-business using the euphemism for corrupt)

It is possible to reign in Meta. Parents should be angry enough to bring governments down for letting tech treat their children as products. When citizens are angry change happens and becomes unavoidable.

Didn't tiktok get hit with this earlier in the year? Has tiktok removed these features for European users?

Of course there will be bootleggers, but the benefits would probably outweigh any of the incidental drawbacks.

And I say this as someone who drinks. I would be fine with regulation like this and making a sacrifice of something small I enjoy if it meant greater good across society.

NA beer now exists. Beer and wine places can’t sell liquor. Alcohol sales aren’t 24/7 in many places.

Germany is one such example.

(A similar thing has happened to X-formerly-Twitter, tragically. Musk and Bier are systematically destroying the usefulness of the site as a social platform.)

If anything, social media has inspired far too much passivity in our societies. People feel relieved that they could vent their frustrations online, instead of taking to the streets and seriously threatening some of the power of those putting them down.

Also, a big part of why the elites of society dislike social media is the huge democratizing effect that it has had on information. Of course, not so much in the more authoritarian societies where our leaders were hoping for this effect, but in their own backyards. The biggest example of this by far is the information about the Gaza genocide - that is presented at best equivocally in the mainstream press (with some exceptions like The Guardian), but that was clearly visible on TikTok and other social media. This led to perhaps the single largest policy conflict between the vast majority of the population and the vast majority of government elites in the current day EU.

No, and we're certainly not wired to have TV or radio being broadcasted in our homes - or sitting still and silent on a bench for the most of our childhoods having to listen to some screeching fool having their weekly psychotic fit.

There will never in history be anything more extreme than the government broadcasts, urging young people to go and die in hopeless wars in the most painful and pointless ways we can think of. Whether that's a screeching priest in the pulpit, a psychotic school teacher, some demon at the radio microphone, or reptilians in the TV studio.

I agree with your points, but also think you're jumping over an elephant if you compare pre-broadcast days with today, while ignoring the decades of non-social broadcast we had before Facebook and Instagram and such.

Atomization is a fact, and the best road out of it might be to connect with other like minded people wherever they are, but it seems that the Internet hasn't lived up to this promise. Why? What have we done wrong?

Tell me exactly what you mean by "ragebait". Shouldn't things that make people angry be reported on? Should they be swept under the rug? I'm kind of tired of hearing this word being used, without a good explanation.

Regarding kids, they shouldn't have uncontrolled access to the Internet, and that's a parenting problem. Just like a parent letting their kid drive their car or drink his whiskey.

> I can't see how these platforms' current practices need to be defended, what is your reason for doing that?

Some of their practices are good, some are bad. People addicted to TV have existed for decades. It's been a trope forever, the old lady spending her day glued to the TV. Hundreds of millions of people live like this even currently. And just like most people today are a little bit addicted to social media, everybody was a little bit addicted to TV. The evening news broadcast was a very important part of their day.

So yes, I think the reason why the people in power are more interested in throttling social media than traditional media - even though they both share the same addiction problem - is because the people in power have much less control over it than they did with traditional media.

As for ulterior motives, this is Hacker News, so I fully expect you to believe that I'm secretly a Russian spy, Iranian drone operator, AI bot, Mark Zuckerberg, neo-nazi, scientologist, jew, Elon Musk and bio-lab operator.

There are rules that a few select channels like BBC have to be prominently placed (I.e. Channel 1-4 reserved for them) which means any rival News service is disadvantaged.

And presently they are passing new laws to force Youtube and similar to change algorithm's to also make certain UK content providers prominent.

UK Media know what they can and cannot talk about- for example Judicial Corruption.

That hasn't to do with the addictive design of the broadcast medium, which is what I commented on. There are myriad of advertising rules for social media as well.

Seems like I predicted your behaviour almost perfectly, you accusing me within minutes of being - let's see: a Russian, a Jew, an Iranian, and a bot. Probably you'll accuse me of being the other things as well within little time.