[wackget]

You are not acknowledging the fact that the companies producing these addictive apps are very much doing it intentionally. They are specifically making it as engaging as possible because that's how they make money. And they have billions of dollars to sink into making their products as irresistable as possible.

The average person has zero chance against all-pervasive, ultra-manipulative, highly-engineered systems like that.

It is, quite simply, not a fair fight.

[TheOtherHobbes]

That's not wrong, but it's a selective take. The entire economy operates like an addiction machine, using proven psychological techniques to modify individual and collective behaviours and beliefs.

It's not just social media. It's gaming, ad tech, marketing, PR, religion, entertainment, the physical design of malls and stores... And many many more.

The difference with social media is that the sharp end is automated and personalised, instead of being analysed by spreadsheet and stats package and broken out by demographics.

But it's just the most obvious poison in a toxic ecosystem.

[enaaem]

Every country in the world already does tons of intervention combatting addiction. There are already bans and restrictions on gambling, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes etc… Wether we consider social media addiction to be harmful and how to do it is a good question to be asked, but intervention into harmful addiction is generally uncontroversial.

[wat10000]

There's a big difference in terms of frequency and availability.

Physical design of stores gets you when you're shopping, then it's done. Organized religion tends to get its hooks into you once or twice a week. Marketing, PR, ads, all sporadic. Social media is available essentially 24/7 and is something you can jump into with just a few seconds of spare time.

If more traditional addiction machines are a lottery you can play a few times a week, social media is a slot machine that you carry with you everywhere you go.

[forgetfreeman]

"The entire economy" here being a pseudonym for marketing and advertising?

[finghin]

Though capitalism is to blame for plenty of problems, I don't agree with this take, and I see it repeated quite often.

Economies, capitalist or otherwise, are very much defined by needs and wants. (With this, I presume, you agree already.)

But addiction is another topic altogether from everyday needs and wants like oil, aspirin, or cinema tickets.

[saubeidl]

Yup. It's capitalism that's the core problem. Social media is just a particularly nasty outgrowth.

[SirMaster]

>The average person has zero chance against all-pervasive, ultra-manipulative, highly-engineered systems like that.

So you are saying I am not an average person because I have the willpower to simply not install the TikTok app or watch short form video on any platform?

Has the bar for the average person really sunk this low?

[tvink]

If only you could reach out of your own experience and ponder what might cause otherwise reasonable people to do so. Young people peer pressure, current marketing landscape, you're forced there if you want to make money as a creative, so many reasons. Great, you can live your life without. Can you live your life without assuming everyone has the privilege of your situation?

[integralid]

You also probably don't use heroin. Everyone knows it's a bad idea and yet for some reason we have very severe punishments for people that distribute it. Why?

Because addictive things are addictive, and addicted people suffer, and everyone can get addicted if their guard slips.

We prefer to regulate highly addictive things instead.

[zapzupnz]

Congratulations, you've won the "Works on My Machine" award, except for self-control instead of software. Well done. Everyone's very impressed.

[Jensson]

> So you are saying I am not an average person because I have the willpower to simply not install the TikTok app or watch short form video on any platform?

Yes, since more people use Tiktok than not. The average person is also fat today, so this shouldn't come as a surprise to you.

People didn't grow fat and addicted to screens due to changes to themselves, its due to companies learning how to get people to eat more and watch more since the they make more money.

[foobar_______]

Maybe? I really don't know. I don't want to believe it but the data and just looking around in public and seeing the scroll addition seems to indicate otherwise?

[rzz3]

And I’m so glad they did. Tiktok has brought so many positive changes to my life, and it never would have happened if they hadn’t built a product so good that it’s literally addictive. I don’t want the government to be my parent.

Additionally, Instagram and Facebook have tried their best to make their products as addictive as possible, yet their recommendation algorithm is so absolutely terrible (not to mention their ads) that I barely stay on the platform for five minutes when I use it.

[Noumenon72]

What the TikTok algorithm does for me: surfaces exercises for all my joint problems, finds people exploring local sites and reporting on local issues, helps me discover new music, reveals how we treat prisoners, shows me what it's like to do jobs from sitcom writer to oil rig tech

What Europe does for me: Makes me click "Accept cookies"

[bondarchuk]

It's also very much an exercise in framing, though. Making your media as engaging as possible is the basic imperative of any media company. But choosing to call this specific instance of it "addictive" has everyone up in arms.

[horsawlarway]

To the framing issue - I can frame an alternate lens through which we balance enrichment against engagement.

Media can enrich people - expose them to new ideas, new stories, different views and opinions. This expands worldview and generally trends in the same direction as education.

Media can also be engaging - Use tools that make it compelling to continue viewing, even when other things might be preferable, on the low end: cliffhangers and suspenseful stories. on the high end: repetitive gambling like tendencies.

I'd argue if we view tiktok through this lens - banning it seems to make sense. Honestly, most short form social media should be highly reviewed for being low value content that is intentionally made addictive.

---

It's not society's job to cater to the whims of fucking for-profit, abusive, media companies. It's society's job to enrich and improve the lives of their members. Get the fuck outta here with the lame duck argument that I need to give a shit about some company's unethical profit motives.

I also don't care if meth dealers go bankrupt - who knew!

[programjames]

> Making your media as engaging as possible is the basic imperative of any media company.

Not so. I think your logic is that engagement often leads to dollars, and the "basic imperative of any company" is to make dollars. There are pro- and anti-social ways to do this. You can create better art for your video games, or you can insert gambling mechanisms. You can spend more time designing your cinematic universe, or you can put a cliffhanger after every episode. You can make a funny skit, or you can say, "wait for it... wait for it... you can't believe what's about to happen!" Optimizing for engagement, for the sake of engagement, is necessarily anti-social. It's trying to redirect attention towards your media without actually making the user experience better in any way.

Legally, the basic imperative of any company is to make dollars, as long as it is prosocial. You should not expect the government to turn a blind eye to scam centers or disfunctional products. The same applies to the media landscape.

[xeckr]

There's an AI behind the video feed optimized for keeping your attention for as long as possible. That is quite different from making your media more engaging.

The logical endpoint of optimizing AI for viewer retention is something that you literally cannot look away from.

[svara]

Everything's on a spectrum, but there's a point where you're so far along on the spectrum that it makes sense to call it something else.

See, "quantity has a quality of its own".

Sometimes you have to leave the theoretical view aside and just look out the window. How are people using this? Is it hurting them? What can we do about it?

I don't like blanket bans, but putting TikTok and, say, a publishing company marketing novels, in the same category because they strive for an audience, doesn't clarify anything. It just confuses the discussion.

[Lerc]

I don't think we should allow any form of abusive software, addictive, dark patterns, bait-and-switch. They all need to be robustly regulated.

At the same time I don't think you can demonstrate harm without good evidence.

Making money can not be used as a criteria unless you want to draw the conclusion that no company can turn a profit and be ethical at the same time. It would amount to demanding an outcome that you don't believe us possible.

I think considering overly broad criteria, like say, infinite scroll applied selectively to a few is just arbitrarily targeting candidates for reasons unstated outside the criteria.

The rules need to be evidence based, clear, specific, and apply to all.

Cracking down on ticktok while The Guardian has a bunch of dark patterns. Or the NYT, who is reporting on this while at the same time attracting people with online games that have an increasingly toxic user interface.

Tiktok may suck, but so do a lot of other businesses that escape scrutiny. I worry the harms attributed to TikTok are magnified to allow them to be a whipping boy drawing the focus allowing systemic issues to persist.

[eggy]

There was significant awareness and negative sentiment toward advertising long before Marshall McLuhan became prominent in the 1960s. Some of the stuff from 1900 to 1930 is interesting. I realize there is a lot at work here with multi-faceted attacks on the senses, but advertising was intentional too, and I am not sure if just making things illegal that are hard to educate people on is the right tack.

[yibg]

Where does a desirable product or experience end and addictive begin though? Pretty much all products or services sold are designed to be desirable. Some things are physically addictive (nicotine, opioids etc), so those are a bit more clear. But when we're talking about psychologically addictive, where do we draw the line between what's ok and what's not?

If my restaurant's food is so good people are "addicted" to it, that's a good thing. If it's about applying psychological patterns to trigger the addictive behavior that applies to a large swath of marketing.

[IanCal]

You really must be able to understand the difference between liking a thing and being addicted to a thing?

If not it’s probably worth just starting with basic definitions of addiction.

[moi2388]

Do they though?

I’d love to think of myself as an exceptional individual because I don’t use Facebook or TikTok, but most likely I’m not exceptional at all, and other people could also just not use TikTok.

[luxuryballs]

The government could spend effort on making a documentary and funding a study on brain scans and a little campaign to show everyone the damage and educate rather than just wielding the ban hammer. Especially because it’s often possible that they can have a different motive for ban hammering even if the reason given is valid.

[trcf23]

And it’s also mostly targeting children/teenagers. As a parent you can add limitations on cinema, binging series. You can’t on TikTok.

I’m quite glad that there is a form of control preventing a company from a different part of the world that don’t really care about the mental health or wellbeing of my kids to creep into their life like that…

As a parent, it’s not a fair fight and I should not have to delegate that to another private company

[luxuryballs]

This strikes me as potentially a hardware problem more than a software problem.

[forgotaccount3]

> They are specifically making it as engaging as possible because that's [how they make money.] ... what people want.

Fixed that for you.

Your argument is basically the same as saying that Banana Ball should be banned because they are intentionally making the experience as fun as possible, because that's how they make money.

[mrpandas]

You're suggesting that it doesn't matter what children are exposed to / become addicted to because companies should be able to sell what children want? So there's no limits to that in your mind? Should every child be given cocaine because they ask for it? They're certainly given candy, right? You must believe there's no difference between cocaine and candy, I can assure you there is a difference and show you evidence to the contrary, if you're that dense.

[darkhorse222]

Yeah! Or cigarettes!

[stronglikedan]

I hate this age of zero personal accountability. It's so easy to just not doomscroll, but I should be allowed if I want to.

[saithir]

It's also super easy not to use hard drugs, yet that's not a reason to stop restricting them.

If something's harmful it should be controlled.

[saubeidl]

Personal accountability is contrary to human nature.

We are primates dominated by our primitive urges.

[wasmainiac]

did you see what happened when we tried to decriminalise hard drugs in Vancouver? Feel good for yourself that you have the discipline to have self control, other do not and need help.

You are free to not use TikTok yourself, no one is stopping you.

Also drug decriminalisation is very nuanced, I’m not 100% against it, I’m just pointing out just that open drug use spiked after.

[amarant]

I don't like this narrative. I'm a person, and HN is the only social media I use.I tolerate this one because I find the addictiveness off-putting, but unlike other social media HN doesn't engage in that much.

I'm not some sort of prodigy or anything, just a random schmuck. If I can do it, anyone can. People just really like blaming others for their own vices instead of owning up to having a vice.

HN is a vice too. One of many that I have. And they're all mine. I've chosen them all. In most cases knowing full well that I probably shouldn't have.

[afavour]

> If I can do it, anyone can.

Right, but they don't. Not to mention a significant portion of the target market are children whose brains are still developing.

Smoking is a vice. Anyone can stop smoking any time they want. But it was still incredibly popular. Government regulation put warning labels everywhere, tightened regulation to ensure no sales to children, provided support to quit. And then the number of people smoking plummeted. Society is better off for it.

"Anyone can do it" is an ideological perspective divorced from lived reality.

[dinfinity]

Exactly. It's not that the producers or distributors (of food, content, etc.) are not malicious/amoral/evil/greedy. It's that the real solution lies in fixing the vulnerabilities in the consumers.

You don't say to a heroin addict that they wouldn't have any problems if those pesky heroin dealers didn't make heroin so damn addictive. You realize that it's gonna take internal change (mental/cultural/social overrides to the biological weaknesses) in that person to reliably fix it (and ensure they don't shift to some other addiction).

I'm not saying "let the producers run free". Intervening there is fine as long as we keep front of mind and mouth that people need to take their responsibility and that we need to do everything to help them to do so.

[dylan604]

> If I can do it, anyone can.

This is such a normie perspective and shows just how unfamiliar you are with addiction. Yes, some people can avoid becoming addicted. Yes, some addicts can break the habit and detox and stay clean. At the same time, a larger number of addicts can detox but relapse in a relatively short time. There are also addicts that have not yet admitted they have a problem, and there are addicts that are okay with being an addict. Just because you have the emergency stop button that you can hit does not mean everyone else is the same way. Your lack of empathy is just gross

[TheOtherHobbes]

You haven't chosen anything. That's the point - the illusion of choice and agency.

If you can't stop cold at any time if/when you decide to, you don't have the agency to make a free choice.

[CJefferson]

That feels like it applies to so many things we make illegal, scams of all kind, snake-oil medical sellers, baby powder full of asbestos. Sure, people can handle all of these things, but we've decided, as a society, it's better not to allow them.

So then the question is, is it better to let these things happen, as a society?

[Quarrelsome]

> just a random schmuck

if you've even on this website you're a tiny niche of the population. You like text? Check out the weirdo over here... oh wait that's all of us.

[kalterdev]

What's illegal about intentionally making money for being addictive? "Unfair"? Maybe. But not illegal.