Unfortunately regulations will always be one step behind. Asking for them is victim mentality. We’re responsible for our own choices.
Everyone might get addicted to TikTok for some period. But everyone needn’t stay addicted to TikTok. (Of course I use “TikTok” as a placeholder for any infinitely consumable feed of targeted content.)
Regulation has a place. For example, an obvious and easy win would be to pass a bill requiring any product with a consumable feed to offer and default to an option to sort it in reverse chronological order.
But regulation is a reactive and slow strategy to shrinking a problem that continues to metastasize. There are more proactive social strategies available to us. Education is free. Self-control is free. Unfortunately, they’re only “free” modulo the minutes of attention we can allocate to them from our finite lifetime supply.
I wonder, how many minutes of education or self-introspection is required to prevent one future minute of app usage? I’m optimistic this ratio is favorable, so that once people sufficiently internalize the effect of infinite consumable feeds, they will naturally reduce their self-sabotaging usage of them.
People will adapt. It will just take a while. Sometimes you gotta get burned to learn not to touch the stove. In the meantime, we could require the products to provide resources and tools to reduce addiction (like HN’s noprocrast). And we should also find a way to blunt the impact of social media on those who have not yet begun their journey with its addiction (like children, or people yet to be born into our satirical dystopia of a society). If kids are glamorizing social media before they are old enough to use it, they will not have an easy experience separating themselves from it later in life.
Cigarette smoking rates are way down since twenty years ago when we started convincing children it was gross and uncool. We can do that with social media too.