9 ms·

Some people are alcoholics. They can't exist near an open can of beer without their life going to shambles. But most people aren't and don't have the urge to bi

Some people are alcoholics. They can't exist near an open can of beer without their life going to shambles. But most people aren't and don't have the urge to binge drink. I'm not sure how this is any different. The author of this article is an Internetaholic, therefore I should cut my tether to the Internet? And what of my LTE connection?

unlmtd 10y ago
Alcohol is a poison. Not a fitting allegory.
Trundle 10y ago
I see it a lot particularly with regard to facebook. People take "I have a problem" and turn it in to "this thing is a problem".
- edoceo 10y ago
  This
- kakarot 10y ago
  But Facebook is a problem. Social media has its place somewhere in society but Facebook in particular is definitely a problem, for a multitude of reasons.
  - hilbertseries 10y ago
    Care to list some?
    - nkristoffersen 10y ago
      As a digital nomad for the past several months, Facebook has been crucial in keeping in touch with friends and family back home, but also a perfect platform for staying in contact with new friends I make on my travels :-)
      - jimmies 10y ago
        I am an immigrant. I've been living mostly away from home for 10 years. I have people (friends, relatives, family, people that I know and love) that are easily reachable on Facebook. I deleted my facebook account and realized that I can still reach all the people I want to reach if I had really wanted to. Stuff that is "on Facebook" seems optional to me. When the only way I know them is their Facebook profile then I'm fucked. Now I learned to ask people for their email addresses, I personally think it will live far longer than Facebook.
        h2hn 10y ago
        are you american or what? That's really insane man. Take care of yourself. :)
      - jimmies 10y ago
        Sorry, I can no longer edit my comment, so I am adding another comment here. I'm in no way criticizing your way of communication. I think Facebook is an excellent communication tool. However, to me, there is something special about emails that makes them a much personal way to communicate. When I send an email to a friend, I feel like I made a personal connection. I feel I like the person a lot more when I write an email to them and get an email back. When I commented on/liked a facebook status, it just feels like it's some shit I have to do when I am bored. Since I deleted my facebook, it turns out that there are very few friends/acquaintances that I added on Facebook that I feel like I need to connect on a personal level. That's very strange.
        kakarot 10y ago
        I'm a few months into the no-facebook game and it certainly is strange to realize how vacant most of our interactions on the platform were. In some ways it feels like I've never been this lonely before. It makes me realize just how superficial most of my connections really were. I moved around a lot and had a sizable group of friends I would interact with on facebook, but now that it's gone... only three of them still make the effort to text or call me at least once a week to catch up. Sure, I have more friends who are simply indisposed and busy, but because they have social media they don't seek much interaction outside of it and so we don't talk. It honestly hurts and the last two nights I've actually broken into long crying fits over how lonely I feel, because I feel like I don't connect with anyone, even the people I do talk to. I know facebook wasn't providing that level of connection I desired, but I realized it had tricked me into thinking it did. I realized that in the past, when I felt this kind of loneliness-induced depression creeping up, I would get on social media just to look at other human beings and remind me I'm not on a rock by myself and other people are dealing with the same emotions. Decent short-term solution for getting rid of the symptoms, but it did nothing to address the problem itself. Incentivised social media like Facebook is really not healthy for the developing psyche. It's shaped the way I think and feel, and what triggers my brain's reward systems, and now I'm suffering for it.
    - franciscop 10y ago
      It's not a problem per-se IMO, but Facebook is highly optimized for being addictive. They A/B test the addiction out of it! There's a GREAT book that I am careful recommending as indeed I think it explores ideas that can be abused easily: Hooked, how to build habit-forming products ( https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Products/dp/0241184835 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Prod... )
    - kakarot 10y ago
      I'll list two because I've been on HN too long today already. 1) Facebook is part of an initiative to lay down internet infrastructure in Africa, with the catch being that access to Facebook, Google, et al. is heavily subsidized. They are attempting to trap an entire continent on their platform, with subsidized tax money, knowingly simultaneously creating the most advanced social monitoring tool ever to exist. The CIA already has "social unrest" prediction mechanisms and, regardless of what some people involved think they're doing it for, this tool will be used to enslave the continent, continue preventing its people from achieving economic parity with the West, and provide better data for three-letter agencies to use in their sociopolitical and economic targeting (targeted propaganda, red herring social issues, media blackouts, even full-scale political coups) I have not read this article but I was in a hurry to find a source to give you. I'm hoping the Guardian doesn't let me down here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/01/facebook-free-basics-internet-africa-mark-zuckerberg https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/01/facebook-free-... 2) They have better data than anyone else with respect to gauging addicting user behavior, and instead of taking the Nintendo approach ("Why don't you take a break and play outside?") they actively exploit these behavioral patterns to increase user engagement. 1/4 of the world's population exists on an insulating platform that does not have their interests in mind. They are unwittingly paving Facebook a permanent highway over our social systems. This creates negatively-reinforcing social vacuums and a massive chilling and normalization effect. But even worse than this normalization is the ideological reinforcement and mass hyper-emotional response that tends to result from an network of humans all checking their emotional response against others in a social vacuum. To make things even worse, Facebook capitalizes here as well and exploits users' emotional response mechanisms. Here's a paper from a few years ago exploring this concept. I wanted to find a more recent article that was quite good but I couldn't locate it with a quick search: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full The article I wanted to find mentioned one of the ways Facebook would exploit peoples' emotions to provoke their addictive behavior: Facebook knows John spends about 10 minutes going through his feed at a time. During work hours, this number is 3 minutes. Right when Facebook thinks John might be about to put his phone away, they will suddenly show him a post from a friend he likes. He might stick around a little longer and comment. He scrolls a little more just because he is used to the behavior, and when Facebook thinks he is about to leave again they show him a post from someone he doesn't like. Bonus points if Facebook has determined the post is positive in nature. This triggers a negative emotional response in John and he scrolls a while longer, looking for a post that will give him another dopamine rush and return his "happiness" to him. It's disgusting. It's predatory. It's abusive. It's no different than the CIA knowingly spreading crack and fentanyl to control the population and create pockets of crime that call for increased enforcement.
    - dandelion_lover 10y ago
      http://stallman.org/facebook.html http://stallman.org/facebook.html Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11981496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11981496
- wpietri 10y ago
  One big difference is that alcohol was not engineered to be addictive. Whereas at Facebook and many other companies there are a lot of smart people continuously trying to improve metrics like DAU, UAM, response frequency, etc. And they do it with no apparent regard for the impact on users' lives. Heck, many game companies proudly advertise how they are the most addictive thing you can get right now.
  - diminoten 10y ago
    Well okay sure, but engineered or not, alcohol is very addictive. There are probably more addictive substances, but alcohol really is up there on that list. You could probably engineer a better addictive substance, but not one nearly as pervasive in global culture. There's something truly unique about alcohol that isn't true of any other addictive substance on the planet.
    - wpietri 10y ago
      Huh. It looks like alcohol is in the middle of the common drugs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_dependence#Dependence_potential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_dependence#Dependenc... I'm not sure about pervasiveness, though. In the US, a lot more people are caffeine dependent. And Facebook's MAU is way higher than alcohol's.
      - r00fus 10y ago
        pervasiveness is a factor. If you think of the addiction as an "infection" then relapse/reinfection is a lot easier when the reinfection vectors are pervasive.
    - tcj_phx 10y ago
      > There's something truly unique about alcohol that isn't true of any other addictive substance on the planet. Alcohol is a viable a substitute for carbohydrates for feeding nerve cells. Ethanol -> acetate -> ATP. Some research was published a few years ago about how the brains of heavy drinkers switch to running on acetate.... https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/joci-eba030113.php https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/joci-eba0301...
- exergy 10y ago
  What you're both implying is that, unless something is EVERYONE'S problem, no one should share their experiences. The author constantly makes the case that maybe this is too extreme for you, and you can choose not to do it. But for a lot of us here, as is clear from the activity on this thread, this IS a problem, and I'm glad the author made the post.
osdiab 10y ago
I do think that a lot of people are very dependent on the internet in this way—and that there's very few things in life that we find to be indispensable to ever be disconnected from—air, sustenance, light, and... internet? The fact that many find it to be so inconceivable to go from having the internet 24/7 to having the internet for your entire workday and any time you spend in a public place with internet, really points out how psychologically dependent we've collectively become on the web.
prostoalex 10y ago
An alcohol manufacturer rarely has an army of designers, data scientists and engineers working non-stop to make their product more addictive and measuring their success on engagement growth.
- siegecraft 10y ago
  Some do
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    I would be utterly shocked if most of the big ones didn't, and I'd be even more shocked if they (along with tobacco companies) had helped to develop techniques now taken for granted in the digital world.
- Terr_ 10y ago
  Sure they do, they just focus on marketing and packaging more than on trying to create new chemicals.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > An alcohol manufacturer rarely has an army of designers, data scientists and engineers working non-stop to make their product more addictive and measuring their success on engagement growth. They have at least the first two, and tobacco companies have, or historically have had, all three. Job titles are slightly different, but basic functions are the same.
  - wpietri 10y ago
    This is just not true. Go visit a vineyard, distillery, or a brewery. People may be trying to improve the quality of the product, but they are not relentlessly trying to increase "user drinking minutes" or any metric like that. They do try to sell more of their product, but their main goal is getting better reviews, wider distribution, and more customers, not stuffing people like foie gras geese.
smhost 10y ago
Raising awareness of internetaholism doesn't seem like a terrible idea.
throwaway287391 10y ago
> And what of my LTE connection? I was wondering this too after reading the "call to action" -- do I get to keep my data plan? (Did the author keep his?) I assume the answer is supposed to be no, but that might be good to note explicitly as this wouldn't be nearly as life-changing if taken a little too literally. (Not to be too nitpicky -- the article makes great points!)
- osdiab 10y ago
  I find for myself that using my iPhone's porn filter to block timesuck sites like Reddit, Facebook, and ironically, this one—is a nice middle ground, where most of the time it's too inconvenient for me to go through deactivating the filters, but I can when I want to do something related to the service (like administering this hacker news post). Coupled with not having the native apps installed, it makes for a decent first step in reducing dependence. My general heuristic is that anything with an infinite feed is designed to suck you in—so avoid apps that provide them, as much as is feasible for your lifestyle.
haswell 10y ago
I think this blog post is entirely too idealistic about the benefits of turning off the Internet, but I don't think comparing excessive Internet use and Alcoholism is appropriate. Having personally been on the fringe of "high functioning" alcoholism on a few occasions, I don't think the comparison works. Alcoholism is inherently negative. Drinking alcohol in moderation may not be extremely harmful, but is still not necessarily great. While I certainly won't tell anyone how to live their life, cutting out alcohol use is still a "good" thing. Even if it's not a problem for you. Edit: I also still drink periodically because I enjoy it. Internet use is not inherently negative. "Addiction" to the Internet may not be great, but is not necessarily all bad. The tricky thing about Internet use is that it's generally not something with negative social connotations. So even if someone is "binge consuming", one is not likely to feel negative social pressure because of it. So I ultimately agree that he shouldn't be touting no Internet as a solution for all people, but I can't get behind the Alcoholism comparison.
- baddox 10y ago
  > Drinking alcohol in moderation may not be extremely harmful, but is still not necessarily great. While I certainly won't tell anyone how to live their life, cutting out alcohol use is still a "good" thing. Even if it's not a problem for you. I just don't know about that, even though I know you're trying to be fair and reasonable. Even ignoring the reported possible health benefits of alcohol in moderation, if it's slightly bad for your physical health it can still be a net positive in your life.
  - haswell 10y ago
    My point is mostly focused on the extremes. I realize that I brought up the moderation bit and the true benefit/harm of moderate alcohol use is up for debate. But if you look at extreme overuse of alcohol, there is nothing good about it. Pretty cut and dry. Extreme "overuse" of the Internet - may have negatives attached, but is still in that "debatable" territory. True impact (positive or negative) depends on what the person is spending their time on, depends on the nature of their work and personal relationships, depends on what they have access to away from home, etc. etc. Even the definition of "extreme" or "overuse" is entirely relative and depends on the specifics of the situation.
M_Grey 10y ago
I think the problem is that apparently many people default to some level of potential "internetaholicity"; it explains the insane success of something like FB after all. People take time to recognize the various Skinner Boxes and develop the kind of sophistication so many on a site like HN take for granted. MMORPG's, Mobile F2P Skinner Boxes, and messaging programs really are going right to the core of human behavior. How many of us didn't at least go through a phase of abusive use around the internet, or games, or something like that? When you add that having an FB account and the like is often seen as ultimately normal, it starts to add a lot of pressure for some people. As someone who has always hated something like FB, it's been disturbing to see it sink hooks into so many. That said, I saw it coming because when I was a teenager I was hooked on mIrc for a while! SO no... don't cut your tether, you're either naturally immune or like me developed an immune system. You should recognize though, that plenty of people aren't going to have such a successful outcome playing with that particular fire.
truetraveller 10y ago
Just an observation, shouldn't it be Internetic, even though it sounds wrong: Alcohol-ic so Internet-ic
- tigershark 10y ago
  I don't think so. Work-a-holic comes to mind and it has the some suffix has alco-holic. Probably I would say netaholic.
- Dunan 10y ago
  It should, but English lacks a suffix for "addicted to...", so people have taken the "-holic" of "alcoholic" and reinterpreted it to fill that void. The genie is out of the bottle now, so to speak, and we will probably continue to use "-holic" for all forms of addiction as long as English is spoken.
k-mcgrady 10y ago
I think comparing it to alcohol is incorrect. It's more analogous to cigarettes. You start and it's very hard to stop. You increase your intake and it's very hard to even reduce it. Honestly, I think the internet is much more addictive than cigarettes and more comparable to very hard, addictive drugs.
silverdrake11 10y ago
Even if I cut off my home internet, I still have my phone. Am I suppose to cut off both?

unlmtd 10y ago

Alcohol is a poison. Not a fitting allegory.

Trundle 10y ago

I see it a lot particularly with regard to facebook. People take "I have a problem" and turn it in to "this thing is a problem".

edoceo 10y ago
This
kakarot 10y ago
But Facebook is a problem. Social media has its place somewhere in society but Facebook in particular is definitely a problem, for a multitude of reasons.
- hilbertseries 10y ago
  Care to list some?
  - nkristoffersen 10y ago
    As a digital nomad for the past several months, Facebook has been crucial in keeping in touch with friends and family back home, but also a perfect platform for staying in contact with new friends I make on my travels :-)
    - jimmies 10y ago
      I am an immigrant. I've been living mostly away from home for 10 years. I have people (friends, relatives, family, people that I know and love) that are easily reachable on Facebook. I deleted my facebook account and realized that I can still reach all the people I want to reach if I had really wanted to. Stuff that is "on Facebook" seems optional to me. When the only way I know them is their Facebook profile then I'm fucked. Now I learned to ask people for their email addresses, I personally think it will live far longer than Facebook.
      - h2hn 10y ago
        are you american or what? That's really insane man. Take care of yourself. :)
    - jimmies 10y ago
      Sorry, I can no longer edit my comment, so I am adding another comment here. I'm in no way criticizing your way of communication. I think Facebook is an excellent communication tool. However, to me, there is something special about emails that makes them a much personal way to communicate. When I send an email to a friend, I feel like I made a personal connection. I feel I like the person a lot more when I write an email to them and get an email back. When I commented on/liked a facebook status, it just feels like it's some shit I have to do when I am bored. Since I deleted my facebook, it turns out that there are very few friends/acquaintances that I added on Facebook that I feel like I need to connect on a personal level. That's very strange.
      - kakarot 10y ago
        I'm a few months into the no-facebook game and it certainly is strange to realize how vacant most of our interactions on the platform were. In some ways it feels like I've never been this lonely before. It makes me realize just how superficial most of my connections really were. I moved around a lot and had a sizable group of friends I would interact with on facebook, but now that it's gone... only three of them still make the effort to text or call me at least once a week to catch up. Sure, I have more friends who are simply indisposed and busy, but because they have social media they don't seek much interaction outside of it and so we don't talk. It honestly hurts and the last two nights I've actually broken into long crying fits over how lonely I feel, because I feel like I don't connect with anyone, even the people I do talk to. I know facebook wasn't providing that level of connection I desired, but I realized it had tricked me into thinking it did. I realized that in the past, when I felt this kind of loneliness-induced depression creeping up, I would get on social media just to look at other human beings and remind me I'm not on a rock by myself and other people are dealing with the same emotions. Decent short-term solution for getting rid of the symptoms, but it did nothing to address the problem itself. Incentivised social media like Facebook is really not healthy for the developing psyche. It's shaped the way I think and feel, and what triggers my brain's reward systems, and now I'm suffering for it.
  - franciscop 10y ago
    It's not a problem per-se IMO, but Facebook is highly optimized for being addictive. They A/B test the addiction out of it! There's a GREAT book that I am careful recommending as indeed I think it explores ideas that can be abused easily: Hooked, how to build habit-forming products ( https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Products/dp/0241184835 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Prod... )
  - kakarot 10y ago
    I'll list two because I've been on HN too long today already. 1) Facebook is part of an initiative to lay down internet infrastructure in Africa, with the catch being that access to Facebook, Google, et al. is heavily subsidized. They are attempting to trap an entire continent on their platform, with subsidized tax money, knowingly simultaneously creating the most advanced social monitoring tool ever to exist. The CIA already has "social unrest" prediction mechanisms and, regardless of what some people involved think they're doing it for, this tool will be used to enslave the continent, continue preventing its people from achieving economic parity with the West, and provide better data for three-letter agencies to use in their sociopolitical and economic targeting (targeted propaganda, red herring social issues, media blackouts, even full-scale political coups) I have not read this article but I was in a hurry to find a source to give you. I'm hoping the Guardian doesn't let me down here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/01/facebook-free-basics-internet-africa-mark-zuckerberg https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/01/facebook-free-... 2) They have better data than anyone else with respect to gauging addicting user behavior, and instead of taking the Nintendo approach ("Why don't you take a break and play outside?") they actively exploit these behavioral patterns to increase user engagement. 1/4 of the world's population exists on an insulating platform that does not have their interests in mind. They are unwittingly paving Facebook a permanent highway over our social systems. This creates negatively-reinforcing social vacuums and a massive chilling and normalization effect. But even worse than this normalization is the ideological reinforcement and mass hyper-emotional response that tends to result from an network of humans all checking their emotional response against others in a social vacuum. To make things even worse, Facebook capitalizes here as well and exploits users' emotional response mechanisms. Here's a paper from a few years ago exploring this concept. I wanted to find a more recent article that was quite good but I couldn't locate it with a quick search: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full The article I wanted to find mentioned one of the ways Facebook would exploit peoples' emotions to provoke their addictive behavior: Facebook knows John spends about 10 minutes going through his feed at a time. During work hours, this number is 3 minutes. Right when Facebook thinks John might be about to put his phone away, they will suddenly show him a post from a friend he likes. He might stick around a little longer and comment. He scrolls a little more just because he is used to the behavior, and when Facebook thinks he is about to leave again they show him a post from someone he doesn't like. Bonus points if Facebook has determined the post is positive in nature. This triggers a negative emotional response in John and he scrolls a while longer, looking for a post that will give him another dopamine rush and return his "happiness" to him. It's disgusting. It's predatory. It's abusive. It's no different than the CIA knowingly spreading crack and fentanyl to control the population and create pockets of crime that call for increased enforcement.
  - dandelion_lover 10y ago
    http://stallman.org/facebook.html http://stallman.org/facebook.html Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11981496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11981496
wpietri 10y ago
One big difference is that alcohol was not engineered to be addictive. Whereas at Facebook and many other companies there are a lot of smart people continuously trying to improve metrics like DAU, UAM, response frequency, etc. And they do it with no apparent regard for the impact on users' lives. Heck, many game companies proudly advertise how they are the most addictive thing you can get right now.
- diminoten 10y ago
  Well okay sure, but engineered or not, alcohol is very addictive. There are probably more addictive substances, but alcohol really is up there on that list. You could probably engineer a better addictive substance, but not one nearly as pervasive in global culture. There's something truly unique about alcohol that isn't true of any other addictive substance on the planet.
  - wpietri 10y ago
    Huh. It looks like alcohol is in the middle of the common drugs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_dependence#Dependence_potential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_dependence#Dependenc... I'm not sure about pervasiveness, though. In the US, a lot more people are caffeine dependent. And Facebook's MAU is way higher than alcohol's.
    - r00fus 10y ago
      pervasiveness is a factor. If you think of the addiction as an "infection" then relapse/reinfection is a lot easier when the reinfection vectors are pervasive.
  - tcj_phx 10y ago
    > There's something truly unique about alcohol that isn't true of any other addictive substance on the planet. Alcohol is a viable a substitute for carbohydrates for feeding nerve cells. Ethanol -> acetate -> ATP. Some research was published a few years ago about how the brains of heavy drinkers switch to running on acetate.... https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/joci-eba030113.php https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/joci-eba0301...
exergy 10y ago
What you're both implying is that, unless something is EVERYONE'S problem, no one should share their experiences. The author constantly makes the case that maybe this is too extreme for you, and you can choose not to do it. But for a lot of us here, as is clear from the activity on this thread, this IS a problem, and I'm glad the author made the post.

osdiab 10y ago

I do think that a lot of people are very dependent on the internet in this way—and that there's very few things in life that we find to be indispensable to ever be disconnected from—air, sustenance, light, and... internet? The fact that many find it to be so inconceivable to go from having the internet 24/7 to having the internet for your entire workday and any time you spend in a public place with internet, really points out how psychologically dependent we've collectively become on the web.

prostoalex 10y ago

An alcohol manufacturer rarely has an army of designers, data scientists and engineers working non-stop to make their product more addictive and measuring their success on engagement growth.

siegecraft 10y ago
Some do
- M_Grey 10y ago
  I would be utterly shocked if most of the big ones didn't, and I'd be even more shocked if they (along with tobacco companies) had helped to develop techniques now taken for granted in the digital world.
Terr_ 10y ago
Sure they do, they just focus on marketing and packaging more than on trying to create new chemicals.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> An alcohol manufacturer rarely has an army of designers, data scientists and engineers working non-stop to make their product more addictive and measuring their success on engagement growth. They have at least the first two, and tobacco companies have, or historically have had, all three. Job titles are slightly different, but basic functions are the same.
- wpietri 10y ago
  This is just not true. Go visit a vineyard, distillery, or a brewery. People may be trying to improve the quality of the product, but they are not relentlessly trying to increase "user drinking minutes" or any metric like that. They do try to sell more of their product, but their main goal is getting better reviews, wider distribution, and more customers, not stuffing people like foie gras geese.

smhost 10y ago

Raising awareness of internetaholism doesn't seem like a terrible idea.

throwaway287391 10y ago

> And what of my LTE connection? I was wondering this too after reading the "call to action" -- do I get to keep my data plan? (Did the author keep his?) I assume the answer is supposed to be no, but that might be good to note explicitly as this wouldn't be nearly as life-changing if taken a little too literally. (Not to be too nitpicky -- the article makes great points!)

osdiab 10y ago
I find for myself that using my iPhone's porn filter to block timesuck sites like Reddit, Facebook, and ironically, this one—is a nice middle ground, where most of the time it's too inconvenient for me to go through deactivating the filters, but I can when I want to do something related to the service (like administering this hacker news post). Coupled with not having the native apps installed, it makes for a decent first step in reducing dependence. My general heuristic is that anything with an infinite feed is designed to suck you in—so avoid apps that provide them, as much as is feasible for your lifestyle.

haswell 10y ago

I think this blog post is entirely too idealistic about the benefits of turning off the Internet, but I don't think comparing excessive Internet use and Alcoholism is appropriate. Having personally been on the fringe of "high functioning" alcoholism on a few occasions, I don't think the comparison works. Alcoholism is inherently negative. Drinking alcohol in moderation may not be extremely harmful, but is still not necessarily great. While I certainly won't tell anyone how to live their life, cutting out alcohol use is still a "good" thing. Even if it's not a problem for you. Edit: I also still drink periodically because I enjoy it. Internet use is not inherently negative. "Addiction" to the Internet may not be great, but is not necessarily all bad. The tricky thing about Internet use is that it's generally not something with negative social connotations. So even if someone is "binge consuming", one is not likely to feel negative social pressure because of it. So I ultimately agree that he shouldn't be touting no Internet as a solution for all people, but I can't get behind the Alcoholism comparison.

baddox 10y ago
> Drinking alcohol in moderation may not be extremely harmful, but is still not necessarily great. While I certainly won't tell anyone how to live their life, cutting out alcohol use is still a "good" thing. Even if it's not a problem for you. I just don't know about that, even though I know you're trying to be fair and reasonable. Even ignoring the reported possible health benefits of alcohol in moderation, if it's slightly bad for your physical health it can still be a net positive in your life.
- haswell 10y ago
  My point is mostly focused on the extremes. I realize that I brought up the moderation bit and the true benefit/harm of moderate alcohol use is up for debate. But if you look at extreme overuse of alcohol, there is nothing good about it. Pretty cut and dry. Extreme "overuse" of the Internet - may have negatives attached, but is still in that "debatable" territory. True impact (positive or negative) depends on what the person is spending their time on, depends on the nature of their work and personal relationships, depends on what they have access to away from home, etc. etc. Even the definition of "extreme" or "overuse" is entirely relative and depends on the specifics of the situation.

M_Grey 10y ago

I think the problem is that apparently many people default to some level of potential "internetaholicity"; it explains the insane success of something like FB after all. People take time to recognize the various Skinner Boxes and develop the kind of sophistication so many on a site like HN take for granted. MMORPG's, Mobile F2P Skinner Boxes, and messaging programs really are going right to the core of human behavior. How many of us didn't at least go through a phase of abusive use around the internet, or games, or something like that? When you add that having an FB account and the like is often seen as ultimately normal, it starts to add a lot of pressure for some people. As someone who has always hated something like FB, it's been disturbing to see it sink hooks into so many. That said, I saw it coming because when I was a teenager I was hooked on mIrc for a while! SO no... don't cut your tether, you're either naturally immune or like me developed an immune system. You should recognize though, that plenty of people aren't going to have such a successful outcome playing with that particular fire.

truetraveller 10y ago

Just an observation, shouldn't it be Internetic, even though it sounds wrong: Alcohol-ic so Internet-ic

tigershark 10y ago
I don't think so. Work-a-holic comes to mind and it has the some suffix has alco-holic. Probably I would say netaholic.
Dunan 10y ago
It should, but English lacks a suffix for "addicted to...", so people have taken the "-holic" of "alcoholic" and reinterpreted it to fill that void. The genie is out of the bottle now, so to speak, and we will probably continue to use "-holic" for all forms of addiction as long as English is spoken.

k-mcgrady 10y ago

I think comparing it to alcohol is incorrect. It's more analogous to cigarettes. You start and it's very hard to stop. You increase your intake and it's very hard to even reduce it. Honestly, I think the internet is much more addictive than cigarettes and more comparable to very hard, addictive drugs.

silverdrake11 10y ago

Even if I cut off my home internet, I still have my phone. Am I suppose to cut off both?