[pavelludiq]

I know multiple minimum wage workers who nonetheless spend a significant portion of their income on tobacco products, all of them taxed at enormous percentages. Taxation is literally the worst addiction cure in existence with 0 evidence that it works(and quite a bit of evidence that it does not and disproportionately hurts the poor).

"hey I don't really need this" is such a naive westie hipster take at it's not even funny. People do actually need social media, poor people and underprivileged communities especially. Your relative is working abroad? You need social media, your community suffers from serious corruption, you need social media. Natural disasters happen in your area often? You need social media. You need to find someone to barter with for old used items because you have no credit card access? social media can help you. You work in the city and need to make your way back home to the country on weekends? Car pooling groups are a life saver.

Social media globally is a tremendous net benefit to humanity. Just because the biggest ones are run by horrible SV oligarchs and infested with state security unscrupulous spammers and that some users can't seem to keep their face out of their phone doesn't mean the thing is bad, just that it has costs.

This is such a blatantly obvious social control and fund raising scheme not meant to actually help anyone, I'm confused how supposedly well educated thinking people can think it's a good idea in the benefit of it's victims.

[bachbach]

> People do actually need social media, poor people and underprivileged communities especially.

Lower classes need time, money and knowledge. None of that comes out of social media, even LinkedIn is a big reach.

I'm blue collar myself by the way. The attention spans of my coworkers are shot and the younger they are the worse it gets. You're supposed to have a short term memory of about 5-7 items - today it's about 2-3. That's an immense cost.

If you talk of groups with intense focus like the forums peripheral to some activity - that is completely different to what social media is.

You know what blue collar workers need? Self Driving cars. Silicon Valley should concentrate on making that deliverable because it is itself distracted.

> This is such a blatantly obvious social control and fund raising scheme not meant to actually help anyone

Sure but often immoral motives have positive side affects.

If the Internet went down tomorrow for about a week, I wager the general sentiment would that of relief. It could be an annual holiday from the information stream.

It's like how when people stop watching television news they become less neurotic.

As the phrase attention economy implies, there are limits, and for many people the Internet has been a DOS on their brains.

> I'm confused how supposedly well educated thinking people can think it's a good idea in the benefit of it's victims.

Probably because we think the world's an ecology and not a us vs them dialectic.

[tmpz22]

Hey you could have made your point without calling me a naive westie hipster.