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Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial

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Re: Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial

#171

Post by slopinthebag »

twoodfin wrote: post #119
slopinthebag wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It's been established that social media use can produce addiction-like behaviors, that it uses mechanisms similar to gambling and substance addiction, and that a subset of people experience significant impairment as a result of social media consumption. It's still debated if it should be classified as a form of Substance Use Disorder, which is what the term "clinically meaningful" refers to, but the debate is mor…

Ah. “Can produce addiction-like behaviors”! Like, I dunno, really getting into running or yoga or fantasy football? Where is the line, according to experts in addiction-like behavior?

Believe it or not, you might find the answer to that question inside the paper I shared with you called "Toward the classification of social media use disorder: Clinical characterization and proposed diagnostic criteria".

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235285322...

Re: Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial

#172

Post by intended »

czhu12 wrote: post #84

What would be an actually good faith way of regulating this short of banning it for children (which I’d think is fine). How do you define what is too addictive? At any given time it seems like whatever is defined as the most addictive is just the one with most market share? For me personally I think most addictive is actually hacker news (god bless you all)

The same methods that are used for gambling are a good start.

I know lootboxes in video games are regulated in some countries. Not sure if they are banned in some places, but I do know that they have to show the odds in some places, and in others they have to be deterministic.

The crux of the issue is personalization and behavior psychology. If you move to a boring feed design, you end up addressing most of the current issue.

Another option is to allow for interoperability between social media platforms, which is a competition respecting way of giving people the ability to move to platforms that “work” for them better.

I’d hazard that Civil liberties are not really at risk here, only the bottom line of social media platforms. However, theres enough money to protect the bottom line even if it costs civil liberties.

Re: Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial

#173

Post by [deleted] »

jimmyjazz14 wrote: post #144
shoobiedoo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of soda. Why the hell liquid poison is allowed to exist turns my stomach. You could fill libraries with data linking it to a myriad illnesses and causes of death. Yet they are even allowed to juke it with caffeine for no other reason than to up the addiction level. Like... what are we doing here.

its called freedom, do we really need the government to protect us from everything they deem bad or unhealthy?

[deleted]

Re: Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial

#174

Post by slopinthebag »

ehnto wrote: post #158
jimmyjazz14 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its called freedom, do we really need the government to protect us from everything they deem bad or unhealthy?

At some point we end up defending the freedom for corporations to exploit people though. I think addiction is one of those times. If a company has a product that relies on addiction mechanisms to succeed, that is a different situation, that is a corporate entity exploiting citizens for profit. Cigarettes are a great example of where we can draw lines in the sand. If you want to smoke them go ahead you have that freed…

Both cigarettes and vapes are ways of consuming a drug. Are you just plainly against drugs? We know how blanket bans on drugs have gone historically and besides the obvious personal freedoms that are lost by mandating what people can and cannot put into their bodies (hello bodily autonomy??), trying to prevent people from consuming drugs does more harm than good (like prohibition, the war on drugs etc).

This ruling was about liability, in that an entity created a product with risks without disclosing them. It's actually worse, they purposefully engineered the product to be harmful. Thus they are liable for that harm. This is subtly different from banning these products - arguably many products that are sold are harmful, the difference is that they either are not acutely harmful (junk food), or the acute harm is well known (alcohol, cigarettes). Some countries mandate disclosure at sale or on the packaging as well.

Re: Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial

#175

Post by nunez »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #25
jfengel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The personalization component takes this a step above. Making something very broadly appealing is one thing. Targeting what will keep you specifically from turning it off is a whole new level.

So if social media removed personalization from their algorithms and only applied them broadly across large demographic groups you'd be fine with them? (Genuine question I'm curious)

This would be great, yeah. Disable infinite scrolling and page caching (so that you’re not infinitely scrolling horizontally) and video autoplay too. Also add opt-out time limits and breaks.

Re: Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial

#176

Post by dingaling »

munificent wrote: post #65
wincy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife and I parental lock each other’s iPhones. I have social media but have to go to my PC to check it. This friction makes a world of difference. I was astounded hanging out with my friends in person last weekend how every one of them at some point pulled out their phone mid conversation to watch TikTok, or Wordle, or whatever. They thought I was the weird one when I mentioned all social media sites and apps are…

> I was astounded hanging out with my friends in person last weekend how every one of them at some point pulled out their phone mid conversation to watch TikTok, or Wordle, or whatever. To kill time, sometimes I watch those random "America's Funniest Videos" type videos where it's some random family at home and something funny/weird/etc. happens. I've started noticing that in almost all of them now, everyone is just…

30 years ago they'd all have been staring at TVs in their respective rooms.

50 years ago they'd be reading their own newspapers and magazines.

The name changes but the song remains the same; people have their own interests, even within a family, that aren't shared with others. I wouldn't bore my partner by monologuing about my hobbies, and she likewise. At least we're in the same room together.

Re: Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial

#177

Post by nunez »

dolebirchwood wrote: post #90
maxaw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know a single person who after exposure to short form video has not had to exert special effort to regulate their consumption.

Is this a young people thing? I'm 40. I have never liked Shorts. What am I supposed to get out of 10 seconds of video? And all the sudden jump-cuts, and big obnoxious one-word-at-a-time subtitles... They're all literally unwatchable.

Same here. In fact, I uninstalled the YouTube app because there was no way to disable Shorts within it while I can use browser extensions to do so in Safari. (I pay for Premium.)

Then again, I hardly use YouTube, so I don’t think I’m the target audience for this.

Re: Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial

#178

Post by nunez »

ktimespi wrote: post #76

The fact that I couldn't turn off shorts recommendations on youtube is just so, so annoying. It's such a time sink and I'm glad that the tides are finally shifting against addictive algorithms like these.

Uninstall the app and use it in a browser that lets you disable them. It’s the only way.

Re: Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial

#179

Post by ktimespi »

nojvek wrote: post #127
ktimespi wrote: post #76

The fact that I couldn't turn off shorts recommendations on youtube is just so, so annoying. It's such a time sink and I'm glad that the tides are finally shifting against addictive algorithms like these.

Yeah not having a switch to turn off shirts is a great indicator that Google’s “do no evil” is a relic of the past. Google gives no fucks other than printing more billions every quarter.

It's a major disservice to me as a paying user too.
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