Comment by PontifexMinimus

> battling this problem is going to require more than simply shaming them in Medium posts. We have to start reminding people that they are in control of their decisions, and that they can take steps to reduce their social media usage to healthy levels.

Yes, but that's only going to have a small effect, at best. Just like you can't solve the obesity crisis by telling people to eat less.

Things are getting more addictive (http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html) because companies under technology and capitalism form weak superintelligencies that are capable of building things that are increasingly addictive. So asking people to use willpower to overcome that is going to increasingly fail.

I think the only thing that could succeed is government intervention.

> I know the common refrain is "Delete Facebook!"

If FB and other social media providers were required to federate using ActivityPub, then people would be able to delete FB and still have access to their friends and contacts on it.

> We also need to encourage people to take control of their feeds, muting users and topics who draw them into unproductive discussions.

With ActivityPub it would be a lot easier to build applications that allow them to control and curate their feeds for themselves. The user is back in control.