9 ms·

I feel like this is general knowledge for the past 5 or so years, but the real question is "What do we do about it?". Personally, I put real effort into not spe

• cj 7mo ago
  "Make the drug less good" likely isn't the answer. Nor is banning it. What caused Gen Z to drink less than millenials? Maybe Gen Z has the answer.
  • fakedang 7mo ago
    Make it legal and expensive?
  • SirFatty 7mo ago
    yeah, it's called "smoking weed".
    • observationist 7mo ago
      Technology, culture, legalization of pot, adtech, covid, there are a metric ton of factors that all had significant impact on both decreasing socialization and reduction in drinking. And lowering the birth rates, and the number of healthy relationships, healthy friendships, etc. I'm for legalizing all drugs, regulating the sale, ensuring quality and purity, and educating the public. Cognitive liberty is sacred - but the dip in drinking has a whole lot of causes. A healthier society would be more social and get out and drink more, I think.
    • GuB-42 7mo ago
      Millennials love their weed, party drugs too, it took over Gen X drinking in some way. But I find Zoomers to be rather tame in terms of drinking, smoking, drugs, unsafe sex, etc... Few of the traditional vices, really.
  • barbazoo 7mo ago
    You're only allowed to drink as an adult. We're talking about letting those companies rot our brains in those first 18 years.
    • XorNot 7mo ago
      In my experience the 60+ demographic have had far more damage done.
      • autoexec 7mo ago
        We just haven't seen what 60 year old ipad kids look like yet. It's not going to be pretty
        • pjc50 7mo ago
          We can see what Trump is like, as an 80 year old radicalized by Twitter with an army at his command.
      • Rapzid 7mo ago
        Just as they were settling into middle age far-right propaganda, conspiracy, and hate "entertainment" escaped AM radio and flooded cable news and social media. They never stood a chance.
  • jqbd 7mo ago
    Decades of science communication and real life examples of knowing (of) alcohol addicts
    • input_sh 7mo ago
      I'd wager how expensive it has gotten plus a year or two of lockdowns which lead to a whole generation of people not going out to get wasted as soon as they're legally allowed to had way more effect. Oh, and weed being increasingly legal to consume.
      • asdff 7mo ago
        I also noticed a trend that happened at my old college and a number of others that I've never seen anyone write about: the great buyout of the old college area slumlords. All the dive bars where you could black out off $10-20 I drunk at in college are gone. They all faced the wrecking ball, and were replaced in the past 10-15 years with apartments over targets and cvs and family friendly restaurants. A huge concerted effort to buy up these properties in piecemeal then destroy entire blocks at a time. I have no clue where kids at my college go to drink now. I have little interest in going back either as an alumnus as they destroyed all the places of my memories.
    • aerodexis 7mo ago
      Real life experience with alcoholics would at-best be constant over time, or be diminishing (since gen Z drinks less). Also seems like the science on whether science communication actual changes behavior doesn't point towards it being much of a cause here.
  • darth_avocado 7mo ago
    Gen Z drinks less because alcohol isn’t enough of a fix and hard drugs are way cheaper. The answer isn’t what you’re looking for.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • slopinthebag 7mo ago
    Inflation, mostly. And a lot of us lack social skills so they don't have many friends, thus no reason to go out and get drunk. But like, when a pint is $12 and mixed drinks are $15+ sobriety starts looking more appealing. Source: Am gen Z.
  • dehrmann 7mo ago
    > What caused Gen Z to drink less than millenials? Social media addiction?
    • pixelmelt 7mo ago
      As one of said generation, I would chalk it up to instant communication creating innumerable shallow remote relationships that significantly replace time spent with others in person.
  • bdangubic 7mo ago
    Gen Z never touch grass, you need to first leave the house before drinking comes up.
  • linhns 7mo ago
    > What caused Gen Z to drink less than millenials? Money.
• AndrewKemendo 7mo ago
  It’s like asking how do you get people to stop drinking alcohol As long as there are people who don’t acknowledge or care about the health effects it will exist. If that’s a plurality of your population then you have a fundamental population problem IF you are in the group who thinks it’s bad. Aka every minority-majority split on every issue ever. So the answer is: live in a society governed by science. Unfortunately none exist
  • brookst 7mo ago
    Not a fan of conflating personal enjoyment of a vice with promoting hatred.
  • nemomarx 7mo ago
    We handled smoking pretty well by making it cost more and banning it in public places. If tiktok was banned from official app stores it would essentially go away.
    • bdangubic 7mo ago
      Social media addiction is much deeper than nicotine addiction. And people still smoke, see Phillip Morris stock and earnings :)
      • thewebguyd 7mo ago
        I don't think deeper is the right word. Nicotine has a physical addiction element that social media does not. You cut off social media, you at worse face some boredom and FOMO. And PM's earnings are mostly from developing countries at this point. In the US alone, the adult smoking rate has fallen nearly 73% from 1965 to now, so clearly the regulations are working. We need to do the same for social media. People didn't quit smoking because they suddenly got more disciplined. We just made it inconvenient. The biggest start would be get rid of algorithmic feeds and "recommendations" keep it purely chronological, only from people you explicitly follow.
        • 7mo ago
• toomuchtodo 7mo ago
  Regulate it. Laws, consequences, etc.
  • bborud 7mo ago
    Laws appear to have fallen out of fashion. And a disturbing proportion of the loudest people like it. Then you have those who ought to know better but are attention-seeking, selfish assholes who somehow find it «interesting» or think they adhere to «principles». The latter category know who you are. You downvoted this comment.
    • toomuchtodo 7mo ago
      I recently provided guidance to state legislators, with that guidance making its way into law in regards of balcony solar. If you don’t think that making law works, I would encourage you to get involved somewhere that means something to you. It turns out that if you present as an honest, non-interested party, people will call you and ask you for your advice. I do admit that the ease of this is going to be a function of the people you are up against and the subject being regulated. My point of this comment is: default to action. “You can just do things.”
      • bborud 7mo ago
        The issue is not laws, or the making of them (although Congress hasn't exactly been overly productive). The issue is the executive branch not abiding by laws.
    • autoexec 7mo ago
      > Laws appear to have fallen out of fashion. Laws are very much fashionable, but only for us. “Rules for thee but not for me” is what's in season right now.
      • toomuchtodo 7mo ago
        Importantly, seasons change.
• b65e8bee43c2ed0 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • surgical_fire 7mo ago
    Things that are not illegal can and should be made illegal if need be. Many things were not illegal before they became illegal.
    • b65e8bee43c2ed0 7mo ago
      okay. go ahead and make "conspiracy theories" illegal.
  • DonaldPShimoda 7mo ago
    > >"What do we do about it?" > nothing. if it isn't illegal, it isn't illegal. Are you suggesting that because something isn't illegal, it shouldn't be illegal? Are you perhaps a representative of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory?
  • bigfishrunning 7mo ago
    I'm not suggesting that it should be illegal, I'm just seeing this monetization of bad vibes and wondering how we can have less bad vibes. Pump the brakes a little.
  • munk-a 7mo ago
    Nothing is inherently illegal. Laws are created in response to an undesireable outcome - murder wasn't illegal until it was made illegal.
  • sigmar 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    • b65e8bee43c2ed0 7mo ago
      [flagged]
    • 7mo ago
• munk-a 7mo ago
  "What do we do about it?" Shut down the behavior with regulations or shut down the companies. Meta and TikTok have no natural right to exist if they are a net negative to society.
  • bdangubic 7mo ago
    regulation will never happen because these are instruments to control the masses
    • autoexec 7mo ago
      All the more reason for regulation. If people catch on to the fact that they are being manipulated and abused by the platforms to "drive engagement" they might abandon them or spend less time on them. If the government regulates these platforms so that they are safer or at least less harmful people will feel better about using them giving the government a larger platform to use to control the masses.
      • bdangubic 7mo ago
        > If people catch on to the fact that they are being manipulated and abused by the platforms I am not trying to be funny or anything but this sounds like "if only fat kid realized that eating 10 apple pies before bedtime might be the reason s/he is fat" We already know what social media platforms are doing, not to just young people but to all people. > If the government regulates these platforms This is like saying "congressman care about our debt so they will vote to reduce their own salaries by 90%" - the government is not going to regulate tools they are using to control the narrative/masses etc...
  • diacritical 7mo ago
    Regulating content that makes people enraged seems like a slippery slide towards regulating any kind of "unwanted" speech. I get regulating CSAM, calls for violence or really obvious bullying (serious ones like "kill yourself" to a kid), but regulating algorithms that show rage bait leaves a lot of judgement to the regulators. Obviously I don't trust TikTok or Meta at all, but I don't trust the current or the future governments with this much power. For example, some teen got radicalized with racist and sexist content. That's bad in my opinion, as I'm not a racist or a sexist. But should racist or sexist speech be censored or regulated? On what grounds? How do we know other unpopular (now or in the future) speech won't be censored or regulated in the future? Again, as much as I'm not a racist or sexist, I don't think the government should have a say in whether a company should be able to promote speech like "whites/blacks are X" or "men/women are Y". What's next? Should we regulate speech about religion (Christians/Muslims/atheists are Z) or ethics (anti-war people or vegans are Q) or politics or drugs or sex? The current situation is shitty, but giving too much power to regulators will likely make it way shittier. If not now, in the future, since passed regulations are rarely removed.
• techpression 7mo ago
  The people who were voted to power (across the globe, not just the US) to do something about it are stuck getting their dopamine kicks posting garbage on the same platforms. It’s truly a terrible timeline we are in.
  • yoyohello13 7mo ago
    We are in a real life cyberpunk dystopia. Without any of the fun parts.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• noAnswer 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• ThrowawayR2 7mo ago
  Tax and heavily regulate online advertising. The root of the problem is that it is very, very lucrative to drive engagement and until you get rid of the monetary incentive, the problem will never go away.
• wotsdat 7mo ago
  [dead]
• jmyeet 7mo ago
  What do we do? We treat platforms with algorithmic news feeds as publishers not platforms in the Section 230 sense. Think about it this way: imagine if you took a million random posts or videos. You would find a wide range of political views, conspiracy theories and so on. Whatever your position on any of those issues, you could find content pushing those views. So if your algorithm selects and distributes content that fits your desired views and suppresses content that opposes your views, how are you different from a random publisher who posts content with those exact same views? This is kind of like the "secret third thing" of Section 230 where you get all the protections of being a platform and all the flexibility of being a publisher and we need to close that loophole. Let platforms choose which one they are. Another example: if I create a blog and write a post that accuses my local mayor of being a drug addict and a pedophile, I can be sued for defamation. You can try the journalism defense but it won't shield you from defamation. Traditoinal media outlets are normally very careful about what they publish for this reason. But what if I run Facebook or Twitter and one of my users says the exact same thing? Well I'm just a platform. I have a libel shield. But again, my algorithm can promote or suppress that claim. Even if I have processes to moderate that content, either by responding to a court order to take it down and/or allowing users to flag it and then take it down myself with human or AI moderation, the damage can't really be rolled back. We've let tech companies get away with "the algorithm" being some kind of mysterious and neutral black box that just does stuff and we have no idea what. It's complete bullshit. Every behavior of such an algorithm reflects a choice made by people, period. And we need to start treating this as publishing.
• yoyohello13 7mo ago
  I’m going to bet we do nothing and continue to complain instead.
  • bigfishrunning 7mo ago
    Oh 100%, but i can dream...
• like_any_other 7mo ago
  > "What do we do about it?" I'd suggest something like banning algorithmic amplification - your feed is posts of people you follow and nothing else. But that's not what will happen. What will happen is there will be [1] vague laws about preventing vague "harm", written to give legal teeth to the Overton window. Not in those words, but companies that would go against it will be mired in lawfare, while those that comply will be allowed to grow. And if you complain, they'll motte-and-bailey you - you're not in favor of "harm", are you? We're not an authoritarian speech police, we only seek to protect people from "harm". [1] Or rather, are - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023
• xtiansimon 7mo ago
  My IG feed is largely taken over by congressional members videos, crazy $#!t the president (and his crew) says, and the keystone cops. And boy howdy is there a lot of rage inducing behavior going on. I feel more informed than if I was only listening to NPR. That said, I stay away from anything that’s produced—sound track, too many cuts/edits, talking head commentary. I guess in this context, if I’m going to be driven to emotional anxiety, it’s going to be from something that happened or something someone said, and not the internet’s interpretation. You can’t “produce content” that I will watch _as news_. It has to be in some real way happening (with some deference to Rashomon).