yes. In fact, its probably worse.
Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food?
61–70 of 75 posts
Re: Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food?
#62Do people not actively curate what they like? E.g. using more of "Not Interested". I generally follow artists because they have great taste. I am very religous in disliking if a particular post is not benefitting me in consuming it.
I do that heavily. Still, instagram decides to nuke my preferences quite often. Right now I'm on tik tok garbage, two weeks ago I had arabic muslim stuff (like videos in mosques, prayers etc). I don't use it at all when that happens, so they loose out. Give me trail running and outdoor shit and I'm happy, very easy!
Re: Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food?
#63All of the above.
Here are some key factors driving social media. The misincentives are obvious once you clearly see these.
1. It is fundamentally based on one of the strongest human impulses of community. 2. The economic model of social media is based on ads, which means they need to keep you on their platforms as long as possible. 3. They have vast troves of public, private, social and secret information on individuals. 4. They can modify their product every millisecond to adjust the product you experience based on all the factors above.
Re: Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food?
#64Do people not actively curate what they like? E.g. using more of "Not Interested". I generally follow artists because they have great taste. I am very religous in disliking if a particular post is not benefitting me in consuming it.
The algorithm figured out that you will spend more time on the platform if you get annoyed. So what you like is not really taken into account.
Re: Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food?
#65Do people not actively curate what they like? E.g. using more of "Not Interested". I generally follow artists because they have great taste. I am very religous in disliking if a particular post is not benefitting me in consuming it.
I managed to train Facebook out of showing me ads.
It took about two years of monthly clicking on "I don't want to see content from this page again" for it to stick, but now I haven't seen an ad in forever. Either I exhausted all companies in my area that advertise with Facebook, either the algorithm has stopped showing them to me.
Re: Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food?
#66Depends. I have quit social media, cigarettes, and nicotine at large. Nicotine was the easiest, cigarettes the hardest.
Ironically (pure) nicotine is not that bad for the health, it’s just really addictive so it have been added to cigarettes for just this. It can even have some good benefits if you are chronically stressed. I wonder if it could be an alternative to benzodiazepines for occasional use. I never took nicotine so I don’t know how quick the addiction would come. With benzodiazepines it’s a really hard addiction but not if y…
> so it have been added to cigarettes for just this
Erm, isn't nicotine naturally produced by the tobacco leaves? What are you on about being "added"?
Re: Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food?
#67On the basis of the headline alone, I would say "cigarettes" because I have quit two different social media sites using the technique described in the book "Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking"
Wouldn't this be consistent with social media being easier to quit than both junk food _and_ cigarettes? Given that, I'm not sure how can conclude which of them is more similar. As an alternative take, my understanding of the difference between cigarettes and junk food is that cigarettes are more physically addictive than junk food (which at least to my naive medical understanding is more of a "psychologically addict…
Each addiction has its own special properties.
The special properties of the addiction are what make it hard for the person to quit that is addicted.
These type of comparisons for social media seem like bargaining by the social media addict trying to find the least harmful addiction to frame their own addiction as.
I have quit social media, cigarettes, alcohol and I limit junk food far more than normal. Quitting social media has cut me off from many social circles and being in the know with even my own extended family.
But make no mistake though. Cigarettes are an order of magnitude harder to quit than any of these. Alan Carr's book is amazing because it is almost a type of hypnosis that gives you the will power to not cave when cigarettes start playing all the mind games of why you should just smoke one in the first month after quitting. You have to convince yourself it is easy and anyone can do it exactly because it is so hard.
Comparing social media addiction to cigarettes is just not helpful though. Cigarettes are much more addictive but social media is addictive in its own special way.
If anything social media and sex addiction have much in common. You can deal with the addiction by going cold turkey but then if you want to get back to a normal life you have to figure out something other than abstinence.
Re: Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food?
#68Do people not actively curate what they like? E.g. using more of "Not Interested". I generally follow artists because they have great taste. I am very religous in disliking if a particular post is not benefitting me in consuming it.
I find Instagram in particular is garbage. Twitter / Youtube is much better with respecting your curation to some degree.
Re: Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food?
#69Do people not actively curate what they like? E.g. using more of "Not Interested". I generally follow artists because they have great taste. I am very religous in disliking if a particular post is not benefitting me in consuming it.
Algorithms are terrible with that. For example, there was this girl on TikTok who made fun things with her hair. It was fun, I marked it as I liked it. The first few times I enjoyed the exact same joke. Then when it became too frequent I indicated that I wanted less of it. The algorithm immediately thought that I didn’t care about fun things at all. I did this about 3 times, and my feed became really boring. The same in every single social media.
And it’s even worse, because when I flagged clear lies, my feed became more bland. So at the end I’m incentivised to consume lies.
Re: Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'll find it's actually "gambling disorder" and it's the only behavioral disorder of it's type grandfathered in to the DSM.
Cool story, homosexuality was a mental illness according to your Bible at some point... Almost as if science was a fluid thing, almost as if we updated our knowledge as we go, almost as if this was only possible through debating opposing views, very weird.... But you're probably right we should stop even thinking about it, the DSM doesn't talk about it so why would we
I guess you're ignoring the part where this has been a highly studied issue over and over and found lacking.