411–420 of 498 posts
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Have they? I know a lot of my peers went to college for free with the Millennium Scholarship. But so many young people vape now that it's becoming cool to smoke analog cigarettes. I barely knew anyone who smoked 10-20y ago. Many people that age now do.
Vaping is distinctly less harmful than smoking.
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You describe the apps as though they are recreational drugs with no other purpose but to produce endorphins. These 'apps' have a high level of utility - which is, I imagine, why most start to use them in the first place.
The utility is not of existential importance. Yes, you can uninstall Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and the sky will not fall, life will just go on.
It's been eye-opening to watch people fall for the "social media is hurting the children" scam. The best and largest observational studies don't show a strong correlation. Studies with an intervention are mixed/the effect isn't large. Extreme and compulsive social media use is bad, but it's almost maybe always a symptom rather than a cause. I saw the trailer for the new Facebook movie last weekend. It's comical reall…
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Have they? I know a lot of my peers went to college for free with the Millennium Scholarship. But so many young people vape now that it's becoming cool to smoke analog cigarettes. I barely knew anyone who smoked 10-20y ago. Many people that age now do.
Analog cigarettes! I love how “analog” has become synonymous with everything more manual, natural, even or better.
Pay 25% from your 2025 profit for harming children since at least 2019 and be able to continue doing so. Sounds like a loss for society and a win for Meta.
So it's 1.8 billion per year and that's a lot less than 25%.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-reaches-18-billion-set...
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smoking tobacco is bad, but smoking cigarettes is much, much worse because of all the extra shit that's added in to make them even more addictive (and more carcinogenic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_additives_in_cigarette...
If you inhale the smoke, it's quite irrelevant whether smoking an industrial cigarette, pipe or a hand-crafted cigar without additives. You'll probably get lung cancer anyway if you continue it long enough. Smoke is always carcinogenic. I don't really get the point when there are many ways of getting nicotine without the smoke.
Pipe and cigar smokers are much less likely to smoke a pack's worth of tobacco a day. You also don't inhale them into your lungs, you hold the smoke in your mouth.
Smoking cigarettes is less about getting nicotine and more about having something to do when you are stressed etc.
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>Is it not possible for people to just delete the apps and stop using them? Some people have friends, and some people also have friends that are very distant (geographically, life style, stage of life, etc). Social media can allow you to keep in touch with these people in a very convenient way. For me, being able to see life updates of friends with 8h+ timezone differences is very nice perk, because planning a call o…
People who don't use social media to catch up with distant friends and family just ... phone or video call. No addiction, no infinite scroll, no exhaustion, no casino-like mechanics, no endorphins, no political rage, no AI companions, no random posts, no influencers.
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HN is social media only in strictly technical sense of the term. HN isn't optimized daily for engagement like FB and IG are. There isn't a single image, or video on website. Ads (for YC companies) sometimes show up and are rare. Color scheme-wise it is very plain (and should stay like that). HN is not hidden behind login wall. It is not tracking you. You can access HN fully anonymously, and create throwaway accounts…
HN isn't social media at all because it doesn't have a social graph (you can't follow people here).
I would say hn is in a group of systems that include Facebook.
It's true that contemporary commercial social media tends to be associated with these big corporate services that have already been thoroughly enshittified.
But they didn't start out that way - and alternatives are possible and desirable (hn, lobste.rs, many niche forums, IRC channels, discord servers[d] etc are proofs by example).
Maybe a loose definition would be communication system that leverage the network effect?
And good social media aligns with the end-user, and bad aligns with user-hostile forces?
[d]: (I don't particularly like discord, but it is much closer to a tool that does what I want: connect with people - than something like tick-tock or Facebook as it exists today)
I think worse than social media nowadays is youtube shorts. That thing is so addictive to kids. I wish there was a way to delete shorts from youtube and have only long form videos available in the app.
If you're on Android, install F-Droid and get one of the apps there that let you watch Youtube. No ads[1] and you can disable shorts. [1] I'm not fundamentally against ads, but the Youtube ad situation has gotten ridiculous. They're far worse than cable TV ads.
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The market is telling them they need to make number go up. Once all the growth and new ideas were consumed, the only ways to make number go up, is to extract more profits. This means doing everything within the law, and as safely as they can within the grey area, to ensure they hit those numbers. They had an existential risk when TikTok showed up, and the design idea behind TikTok was even more addictive and less com…
Precisely, this is the point. There is systemic misalignment that encourages companies to behave this way.