4 ms·

I heard someone on a podcast call social media algorithms "the modern-day cigarette" and that really resonated with me. These companies know their product is ad

• p2detar 5mo ago
  Look up images in Google with `eu cigarettes boxes`. Banning is a thin wedge, but I think we need something like these warning labels for social media.
• mrits 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  • toasty228 5mo ago
    People stuck in 1940 and not able to imagine new words for new things should not be allowed to discuss these topics online.
    • rvnx 5mo ago
      the correct modern word is censorship DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN there has to be a bug in Europe on some news websites... at least we can use VPNs, for now protecting the children is always a good pretext but the real goal with this addiction law is to have one extra leverage on the platforms
    • mrits 5mo ago
      "should not be allowed to discuss these topics online." At least you are consistent
  • tgv 5mo ago
    What are you trying to imply (while hiding behind a rather unsuitable form of irony)? Not that the EU is taking away essential freedom, I hope?
  • LPisGood 5mo ago
    Is any form of government regulation of corporate actions fascism in your view? Where is the line drawn?
    • mrits 5mo ago
      This is a clear line and we fought Europe already over this in the last century. There is absolutely no world where we need a group of people telling us how long we are allowed to be on TikTok. It is inexcusable to think this way in a free democracy.
      • vrganj 5mo ago
        Part of a free democracy is that we get to think in whichever way we want, actually.
        • mrits 5mo ago
          Democracy depends on shared rules and institutions that limit what you can do in pursuit of those beliefs. There is certainly a line to be drawn of where our freedoms begin and end. TikTok is nowhere near this
          • vrganj 5mo ago
            > Democracy depends on shared rules and institutions that limit what you can do in pursuit of those beliefs. I agree fully. As such, our elected representatives can set those rules, i. e. ban the sale of heroin or algorithmic poisons. > TikTok is nowhere near this In a democracy, you don't get to decide that by yourself.
      • LPisGood 5mo ago
        We regulate gambling companies, tobacco companies, and alcohol companies just fine. I don’t think it’s fascism to add another societal plight to that list
  • vrganj 5mo ago
    Please share the definition of fascism you used to come to this conclusion.
• shevy-java 5mo ago
  That rationale never convinced me. Smoking has definite physiological effects. Molecules bind to receptors or neurons and initiate cascades/responses. I don't see this with user interface in a browser at all. IF you wish to reason for that, why are regular ads allowed? They piss me off. Why do I have to see them? They cause my brain an addiction to want to buy crappy products. So why is there no ban here? Let's face it - the EU is on a path of "Minority Report" here. > I think the EU and other jurisdictions should really look beyond just limiting this stuff to kids Yeah they try to restrict what we can do. We oldschool people call this fascism. See the EU trying to destroy VPN. And this is a meta-strategy we see here - many lobbyists are activated and try to "sync" laws that never made any sense to as many countries as possible. I see where corruption happens. And I don't buy the "we protect kids" fake lie for a moment.
  • afavour 5mo ago
    > Yeah they try to restrict what we can do. We oldschool people call this fascism. Come on, this is an absurd statement. Governments regulate what people can do, yes. It’s part of their role. It’s why I can’t sell tainted meat on the street. It’s a good thing. Of course there is a line you can cross where the control becomes excessive but “the government sets rules around what people can do, that’s fascism!” is absurd.
    • achenet 5mo ago
      Yes. Fascism isn't government making laws, fascism is "we're the superior race, kill anyone who disagrees". I wouldn't call this move fascism, even if can be considered a bit heavy handed.
      • dylan604 5mo ago
        No, fascism is a comedian is making jokes about me and my wife that I don't like and that comedian should be fired while the company that broadcasts his show should lose their government issued license.
  • sixo 5mo ago
• wackget 5mo ago
  The modern-day cigarette is such a perfect metaphor for social media. A cabal of unfathomably wealthy companies spreading their harmful products across the world; making them as addictive as possible while actively burying the research which proves how harmful they are. I truly hope one day we'll look back on social media and smartphone use the same way we regard smoking.
  • SirMaster 5mo ago
    But if you stop using social media, you don't still have a risk of lung cancer in the future. The effects of social media usage are surely reversible by stopping using it and then some retraining of the brain. The effects of years of smoking are not so reversible in terms of what it does to your body.
    • wussboy 5mo ago
      I hope you're right but I think you're dead wrong. Social media has not only affected the mental health of millions of people negatively, it has brought about social, political and economic harms that will affect the planet for generations.
      • glenstein 5mo ago
        Right, the thing it reminds me of is the long-term impact of reading to your kids at a young age, it has measurable effects equivalent to expensive professional education choices you could make later on in life, although I forget the exact comparison. But also it doesn't have to exactly reproduce the harms of smoking. It could be that the effects are primarily present tense and completely gone if you stop the habit, and nevertheless, amount to a cumulative social harm that makes it a worthy analogy to smoking. Social media also doesn't cause secondhand smoke or stained teeth, or unpleasurable odors on your person or home or furniture. It doesn't leave butts or debris on the ground. There's probably a lot more I'm not thinking of either, but you can see how nitpicky that starts to feel.
      • SoftTalker 5mo ago
        Neuroplasticity wanes as people become adults. I'm not saying it's impossible, but changing ingrained patterns of thinking as an adult can be difficult or require deliberate effort and perhaps help of trained therapists.
• Aurornis 5mo ago
  If you didn’t notice, this comment is an ad for a paid app trying to capitalize on social media anger. I respect the hustle, but this is not a neutral comment on the topic due to the financial interest. There are many free alternative plugins for targeting social media feeds if someone wants to filter these.
  • jrflo 5mo ago
    I removed the link, just thought it was relevant to the discussion.
    • tolerance 5mo ago
      I was going to make a similar accusation as the above but I skimmed your comments and it didn't seem like you were the sort to have ill intent behind bringing it up. Next time you might want to include one of those stuffy "Disclosure" notices.
      • jrflo 5mo ago
        That's a good idea, thank you for the feedback. I have a hard time finding the line between "advertising" and "sharing something I built" on this site sometimes.
        • notarobot123 5mo ago
          but you should link to it in your bio for those of us still curious to find out what it is you built.
          • jrflo 5mo ago
            Thanks for asking, I put a link to my personal site in my bio if you want to find it, it's called Scrolless.
        • b3lvedere 5mo ago
          Not really anyones fault. Thanks to endless enshittification, relentless advertising and the current 'AI' some people may have become to behave like this even if your intention was good.
• kjeksfjes 5mo ago
  I agree with the cigarette analogy up to a point, but the UX consequences are easy to understate. A lot of what makes these products feel “good” in the moment is exactly what regulators may end up targeting: no stopping points, instant continuation, algorithmic relevance, autoplay, low-friction notifications. If you remove or weaken those things, many users will probably experience the result as worse UX, even if the policy goal is reasonable. So the hard part is not just “ban addictive design”. It is deciding which kinds of friction are legitimate product safety, and which ones become the digital equivalent of cookie banners: technically protective, but broadly annoying, ignored, and eventually hostile to normal use. Starting with kids makes sense politically and morally. But if the regulatory logic is “this is bad for everyone, not jus minors”, then adult UX probably will get pulled into it too.
• LPisGood 5mo ago
  This is still a recommendation algorithm, just less enjoyable/addicting one. Any process by which you decide what to show to a user is an algorithm .
  • jrflo 5mo ago
    I see what you're saying, I should have been more specific. I more so mean recommendation algorithms that are artificially created by platforms to drive more traffic. I think the HN method of user votes without manipulation by the platform is better but not ideal, the best method is 100% user curated content (i.e. following specific accounts on instagram/twitter, RSS feeds, etc), which I would argue is not really a recommendation algorithm. I think that people don't realize how much the content they see influences your thoughts, and how much that content is chosen by profitability over anything else.
• pembrook 5mo ago
  Glad to hear a false comparison to something that's actually physically/chemically addictive really resonated with you (a.k.a. affirmed your already existing beliefs in this moral panic). If we step back and look at this rationally though, can anybody point me to any peer reviewed studies (the actual studies, not clickbait articles written based off the studies) showing that social media is anywhere near as physically harmful or addictive as cigarettes? I'm totally open to the idea that engagement algorithms are inflaming social division. I'm less convinced that the children are the ones being harmed however. I think its the adults who grew up in a media mono-culture where the default was trust are the ones more susceptible to negative outcomes. When things change, the young are the ones more likely to adapt.
  • tim-projects 5mo ago
    One of the issues with social media is it's difficult to quantify the harm caused, and that holds true for any form of mental or emotional harm. One form that definitely can be quantified are the social media moderators who have to sit all day reviewing explicit and illegal content. I also think you need to review what you consider the barrier to entry for harm. If you imply that there needs to be chemical or physical evidence - congrats you just threw out most harassment cases.
    • pembrook 5mo ago
      Yes raising the barriers to what we consider harm is a good thing. Also, nobody is talking about harassment, that's already illegal. In modern developed economies we don't have a problem with the barriers to harm being too low. We've got the opposite problem, where we've become deathly afraid of trivial imagined harm, resulting in us basically never doing anything and regulating new things out of existence (just look at the housing issue in cities in pretty much every developed country for example).
      • tim-projects 5mo ago
        > trivial imagined harm No harm is trivial. And imagined harm is not harm - it's lying (and should be dealt with appropriately). As a society setting laws on what level of harm should be justified without action - is obviously up for debate. But denying genuine suffering never should be. And what's genuine is up to the individual. You can't go around telling people they aren't suffering in a just society.
• ErigmolCt 5mo ago
  The problem is when the product becomes an optimization machine for attention
• tsunamifury 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• chaosharmonic 5mo ago
  I mean, I'd argue it's worse. Cigarettes don't run your communication networks, and aren't a functional necessity for businesses to advertise their services. On that note, not that I think regulation is the entire solution in the first place (see ATProto for an example of something independent of government that gives me hope for the Internet), but I feel that where a lot of the "protect kids" Internet bills fail is that many of them treat that as a separate, special concern in a lot of areas where they could cover it anyway by just trying harder to protect users. In the US, where I'm writing this, it's sort of like how our age discrimination laws are written just to protect elders, but didn't do anything to protect them from the lower floor that came from letting businesses keep spreading stereotypes about who the minimum wage is for or otherwise pushing hustle culture onto 20somethings. The use of the Internet to astroturf political discourse is an example of this -- you can't fully protect kids from school shootings with an Internet safety bill if you're not also going after bot farms that exist to benefit the "thoughts and prayers" crowd. But you're also never going to see that in an Internet safety bill for kids, because that (and for that matter a lot of our discourse about addictive mechanics in general) explicitly leaves out voters. (clarifying edit: I'm not saying there aren't valid concerns around this topic. I am saying that when we say things like "experimenting on users' mental health without their knowledge is bad," the baseline should be that you don't have to add anything to the sentence for it to be taken seriously.)
  • Ylpertnodi 5mo ago
    > aren't a functional necessity for businesses to advertise their services. Cigarettes don't collect and sell data.
    • chaosharmonic 5mo ago
      Also true.
• genghisjahn 5mo ago
  I'm not the first person to notice this but, since I switched to Pixelfed and Mastodon, I've found that I just don't spend as much time on social media as I used to. It's not that I don't follow good people, but without the algo burrowing into my lizard brain to get to keep me swiping, I just don't think about it. When I do remember to check them, it's always pleasant. I check a few posts out, look at an interesting link and 20 minutes later I'm back to the real world. That's great for me the user, but I doubt you can build an ad driven business off that. I wish I could say that I'm savy enough to not get sucked into swiping through scores of "funny" videos, but I give an hour to that crap, the hour is gone and I have nothing to show for it.
• mosquitobiten 5mo ago
  for me the problem is the amount of junk or seen stuff I have to filter to get to the genuine posts, it's like I'm going in the store to get a pack of cigs and I'm presented with an infinit amount of unkown brands, flavours and quality levels and I have no idea what to buy
• trollbridge 5mo ago
  Like the tobacco industry, they have confidential memos about how to target children whilst simultaneously claiming they would never, ever target children. And then pushed hard for legislation to make it someone else’s problem (like when the tobacco industry astroturfed for laws to make it illegal to sell under-18 cigarettes, after their own research showed it wouldn’t make much of a difference on youth smoking rates and would also improve their image as a “rebellious” thing to do). Sound familiar with Meta’s big push to have your OS declare how old you are?
• CalRobert 5mo ago
  Agreed. Imagine if you had to open a pack of cigarettes every time you wanted to check the weather… then blamed people for being addicted to nicotine.
• mock-possum 5mo ago
  Huh, and like the cigarette, even though I feel like I see what the appeal is supposed to be, I just cannot get over how gross it actually is to engage with, and feel like I’m already ‘over it’ and am just waiting for everyone else to figure it out.
  • dylan604 5mo ago
    > I just cannot get over how gross it actually is to engage with Cigarettes had the bonus of the infamous second hand smoke where it affected those not actively using the cigarette. It was the non-smokers that took action where we first started to see non-smoking sections in public places before eventually going completely non-smoking. There's really no equivalent for people using their devices in zombie mode in public places that affect those not using it to the equivalent public annoyance.
• yieldcrv 5mo ago
  I think this is even more applicable, because many people younger than me do regulate their social media use, taking "detoxes" or having a more limited use of it altogether, and they are more likely to have a social circle that reinforces that It reminds me of how I have never been tempted to use a cigarette or any nicotine product and view them as nasty, while me being a little kid telling an addicted adult "you know, those are bad for you" was met with a shrug or I can quit any time, as their social circle and support system was based on using it Makes me think my generation is cooked when it comes to social media use
• wafflemaker 5mo ago
  Funny, just heard an interview where the guest said that nowadays more people feel bad about scrolling than about smoking cigarettes.