4 ms·

I'm talking exclusively about the addictive and distracting quality of these platforms, not fake news. I think it would probably be bad if Ugandan's were taxed

• claudiawerner 8y ago
  I totally agree that the platforms are addictive and indeed distracting (though I do question the idea that distraction is intrinsically bad, the idea seems to be tied up in the rather pernicious notion that we ought to be productive all the time), I really don't think that depriving people of the ability to access it is beneficial, and for the reasons I mentioned in my comment. It severely limits expression, and by limiting even the possibility of discussion the status quo is maintained. Social media, while often entangled with mass media, offers a unique way to subvert mass media too. That's important to keep. A HN thread a while ago talked about how old forums moved from phpBB to Facebook; although the post was lamenting this fact, it remains that car forums (to use the commenter's example) among other groups have moved to Facebook (which I think is rather sad) -- but such "special interest" forums occupy exactly the same space as HN. So you can't consider HN is a separate category, the categories are intertwined and they have been for quite some time now.