Comment by cosmic_cheese
2 days ago
Absolutely. Social media is designed to elicit a constant stream of dopamine hits, prey on our need for social validation, keep the amygdala engaged, stoke conflict, and bolster whatever beliefs we carry (no matter how deranged). It’s the ultimate distortion machine and is wildly dangerous, particularly for individuals who struggle to keep it at arm’s distance and fail to equip mental PPE prior to usage.
I don't think it's by design. I think it is by its nature.
Most people crave social interaction, and when others engage with them it triggers that dopamine hit. As you say, we all have need for social validation. Even HN has that effect, and it's not engineered to elicit it as far as I know.
Even USENET had that pull, and people would waste hours on it, engage in flamewars, etc.
Now platforms like TikTok and Instagram might optimize for it but even if they didn't, they would have that addictive quality.
I don't think there's any way to do social media that would avoid this.
The effect is much stronger than it has to be due to how these services have been optimized for increasing engagement at the cost of all else.
In more traditional places of online discussion, things like flamebait is at minimum penalized and often deleted. Posters with strong tendency towards incivility and outright falsehoods get banned. Participating with one’s lizard brain at the wheel is strongly discouraged.
There’s no reason why that can’t be true of social media, too. It could be tuned to elevate content that doesn’t pull people into a degenerative cycle, but that’s not nearly as profitable and so it’s not.
Both X and Meta have at various points in time hired addiction medicine specialists. They weren't hired to decrease user attention to their properties.