Comment by andix
10 hours ago
Modern social media is nothing like social media in early days (myspace, early Facebook and even early Instagram). Back then it was a platform to communicate with friends, and maybe even find new friends to meet up with.
Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them. The content must either be addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the content doesn't matter at all. Connecting people to do stuff outside of the virtual world would actually hurt their business model. People turn off their devices and go outside, instead of watching ads.
So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine. Probably even Reddit - which does have an algorithm to show specific content - is not as bad.
Reddit has been a cesspit of recycled pablum, populist image macros and low effort reply comments for more than a decade. Enthusiast subreddits are astroturfed to hell and back by people with a Shopify storefront and a dream trying to growth hack their way to a hockey stick. The low barrier to entry to each community means that this vapid culture eventually diffuses itself across subreddits that might otherwise be good. It's a postmodern toilet that flushes into its own tank.
I don't care if I sound old and salty when I say this: I miss phpBB and Invision forums. Even those are being bought up by marketing companies to sell ads and transformed with social media features... Xenforo (which everybody uses now) allows liking posts and supports Instagram-style content feeds.
> I miss phpBB and Invision forums.
As someone who's paid for an Invision Power Board licence before: I remember when they screwed all existing "lifetime/perpetual" licence holders with v3, and once again with v4.
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Agreed. I wish they would consider charging a small fee (~$1) to create an account. That alone would cut down on all the AI spam and give subreddit moderators a fighting chance.
> give subreddit moderators a fighting chance
Moderators are part of the problem really, there are a handful of moderators holding the reins over all the popular subreddits, and "smaller" (even big ones) subreddits suffer from the same problem.
As an example, r/MistralAI, r/LocalLLaMA, r/ChatGPT, r/OpenAI and r/grok are all run by the same person.
The only survivable places on reddit left are the subreddits with small amount of contributors that aren't trying to gain something by participating and organizing. But they're so few.
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But one problem on reddit were the mods. It was why I retired.
Bots and AI spam can be annoying but mods that lock you out of discussions are much worse.
$1 is far too low to discourage abuse. Spammers and scammers will still make exponential returns. PR agencies are paid tens of thousands to craft narratives for their clients. With institutional actors the sky is the limit. Even just your average basement dwelling troll might consider it worth their while to pay a dollar for a sock puppet account.
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Reddit could pay the mods. Let us not act like spam accounts are undesirable for the lil piggy. MAU doesn't differentiate between real and fake users.
Something Awful has retained a weirdly high level of quality these days by (still) charging :tenbux: to register an account.
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>Xenforo (which everybody uses now) allows liking posts and supports Instagram-style content feeds.
On spacebattles you get infracted for chan-like (or instagram-like) behaviour. It's all about how strict moderation is. They do allow likes (but there's no algo)
Oh man spacebattles is still active? I haven’t been there regularly in 20 years.
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phpBB was quite nice, but you must remember that people used phpBB less and less over the years. Many phpBB style webforums are dead, and died before discourse etc... came about.
People's habits changed.
I do agree that things got worse in the last ~16 years or so.
What really killed phpBB and that generation of boards was mostly the sketchy codebases they ran off.
The code was rife with vulnerabilities, so the boards needed constant patching (which was a non-trivial that sometimes killed the database). If you didn't patch on time, a script inevitably dropped by, exploited the software, dumped all credentials, and nuked the database.
Those old forums were not built with the adversarial nature of the 2010s internet in mind. Boards were dropping like flies a few years there. Most simply never recovered.
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I still use it for private and semi-private forums. The access controls make it much easier to stop drive-by spammers or at very least prevent anyone seeing their crap posts.
The legal landscape has also changed. 20 years ago I helped run a web forum, but with today's legal landscape - DMCA in the US, various different laws in the EU and other countries - I would never do so. The amount of liability on the host for user-created content is far too high.
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There's one or two still kicking around that I visit myself, but I'll admit I don't miss not having threaded conversations. Trying to follow a conversation with other people butting in with low effort shit posting is way harder with everything being linear.
What, really, is the difference between phpBB and discourse (not discord) in the context of the discussion we're having here?
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The craziest thing about Reddit for me is how most communities forbid "self-promotion." To me that sounds like a thing only admins would want because it keeps users on the site/app, but this is enforced by moderators for some reason and a lot of drama has occurred over banning creators over these silly rules.
It's a place that originally was a link-sharing platform, where you literally can't share a link to your own website on any subreddit. At least not if you are honest about it. It's okay if you pretend you aren't associated to it.
Reddit has become essentially watermarked videos posted by people pretending they aren't the creator of the video, twitter screenshots with 10 likes posted by people pretending they aren't the user who tweeted the tweet, and links to news websites posted by users whose only activity on reddit seems to be posting the same link to 5 different subreddits as if it was their job, because it probably is.
I'm not a good marketer, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but the only thing I've found that works is replying to relevant comments in popular threads with neutral looking promotional material (e.g. github links). A well placed reply in a hot thread will easily drive 10x the value of a blog post.
After a certain point, these threads start sounding like,
"I hate my rights. I hate the town square. There is litter in the common square. There is a child outdoors. Take away my pubic square."
I think it sounds more like "why is the town square covered in ads now , who installed actual mantraps in the town square , why is everything we do in the town square used against us , town squares were fine less than two decades ago and we let the rich parasitize them for profit"
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Agree on how the platform’s have changed.
However, I don’t think Reddit is an exception. Popular is often filled with content that is driven by the feelings of fear and hate. Not something I’d like to continually expose kids or teens to.
I use old.reddit.com but I feel like I have complete control over what I see. It's new posts, I check them and then I leave.
That's what I've lost on Facebook. It forces me to see things its algorithm thinks I like, but more often than not, it's things that make me want to argue. I don't have that on Reddit. Long may it last.
That feeling of controlling your feed. It's just a feeling. Carefully calibrated so you feel like you can do something without doing it.
Lately the algorithm for the front page sorted by hot or best has been changed. You'd see mostly threads from subreddit you recently visited. So you no longer have control over what you don't get to see.
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Funny that you use old.reddit.com. I used this too. I could not handle the new reddit - it was useless for me.
What I find particularly bad about Reddit is the platform is specifically designed to amplify group think and silence competing opinions. All it takes is five more downvotes than upvotes and a comment will lose visibility. It can turn subreddits into little bubbles where like-minded people upvote each other and almost never have to see dissenting opinions. That may not be a big deal on a gardening subreddit, but it can be a big problem or even dangerous elsewhere.
> That may not be a big deal on a gardening subreddit,
I had to abandon my last few hobby subreddits because there were a few chronically online people who had to control the conversation in every single post with their opinions. If anyone didn't agree, their comments would mysteriously go to -3 or below within 30 minutes of posting.
It's all little fiefdoms for chronically online people now.
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Hot take: a voting system (and generally any move toward ranking content rather than displaying it chronologically) will inevitably rot any social media platform. Just a question of time.
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HN does this too
Reddit mod cabal is destroying the site, has been for years. Not sure what the deal is, especially after IPO.
The worst part is the conspiracy theories are increasingly being confirmed in the Epstein releases which is mind blowing, eg. https://thepostmillennial.com/former-reddit-ceo-says-she-kne...
It depends on lot on the sub and how their moderators police the community, but yeah, I've seen lots of that.
I've been aggressively downvoted before for pointing out facts that people don't want to be true. (And these were not even political discussions!) I don't even bother with putting my opinions online at any rate, both because they don't actually matter to anyone but me, and because I don't get any joy out of defending them against internet randos.
Edit: It depends on the size of the sub as well. I'm a member of a few subs that I can stand because the moderators are good at moderating, and there are enough regular users coming through to counter a small number of very active cranks.
> All it takes is five more downvotes than upvotes and a comment will lose visibility.
That is true here too. And Twitter is the least transparent, with people regularly reporting that posts critical of musk or trump have reduced reach compared to their other posts.
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I've been on reddit long enough to get sick of the constant reposts. They really should have a filter for that.
I agree completely about Reddit. It's a clickbait factory with a misinformation density that makes my Facebook feed look downright informative.
I was an early Reddit user. It felt like there was a distinct shift when the site went from programming and news topics to being meme-heavy. Then again recently when they started recommending niche subreddits into everyone's feeds so that even the small subreddits couldn't count on being islands of quality.
Now it's just a doomerism factory. The young Redditors I've known feel like they've had their hope about the future hollowed out and crushed. They open the site and consuming a stream of content telling them that everything is awful and will continue to be awful, and anyone who disagrees is shouted down and downvoted. It's a real crabs-in-a-bucket website now.
> It felt like there was a distinct shift
Yeah there definitely was a change in reddit, probably more than once. It changed indeed. To the worse, too.
Smaller subs can still be decent but I agree about popular and larger subs. They’re just brain rot and engagement bait now.
I don't know any more. Even the small subs I previously visited for good content have turned into their own little echo chambers, along with a lot of drive-by posts because small subs get recommended in other people's feeds now.
In some of the hobby subreddits where I had good discussions in the past it's now just one big echo chamber of people parroting the same information around, whether it's true or not. If you want to participate you either need to toe the line of the accepted brands/methods/techniques or keep your mouth shut. Most of us just get tired and give up
Yeah that's really the issue with all social media. If you restrict yourself to just checking what friends post on Facebook, or what people you subscribe to post on YouTube, those platforms are pretty healthy too. It's when you go to the infinite content feed that sites become an issue.
> Modern social media is nothing like social media in early days
Indeed. I no longer call them social media. They have all become attention media platforms. I recently expressed my thoughts about this on my blog at <https://susam.net/attention-media-is-not-social-media.html>.
These days I typically resolve the domain names of these attention media platforms to 127.0.0.1 in my /etc/hosts file, so that I do not inadvertently end up visiting them by following a link somewhere else. I think there are very few true social media platforms remaining today, among which I visit only HN and Mastodon.
> I no longer call them social media.
Social media is the correct name for what they are now, they're channels that push curated content out to their users.
The thing they used to be is social networking.
What is social about it tho?
I wouldn't be surprised if Meta turned WhatsApp into a TikTok clone just to get around the restrictions. They know that banning WhatsApp for teenagers in Europe is almost impossible. I look at my kids, all their sports clubs and other extracurricular activities are organized through WhatsApp. I already had to block Youtube on their devices. I was alright with them watching a couple of long-form youtube videos every day, but now if I unblock Youtube all they do is watch Shorts, with no way to disable it.
You're in luck! They recently rolled out updated parental controls letting you block it.
https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/updates-youtube-supervi...
"YouTube has introduced enhanced parental controls allowing parents to manage or block YouTube Shorts for teen accounts. Parents can set daily time limits for Shorts ranging from zero to two hours, configure custom bedtimes, and set "take a break" reminders" (AI summary)
You can block shorts this way? Neat! Excuse me, I need to go set up a subaccount for my newly adopted fictional child.
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If WhatsApp got banned, all those groups would simply switch to Telegram or Signal or similar. It would be very easy.
Check out the NewPipe app. It works only on Android — it’s YouTube for minimalists. No Shorts, no feed, no ads.
The second a ban is announced everyone would just migrate to the next thing. That's the nice part of social media and communication apps, they're easy to migrate off of.
> extracurricular activities are organized through WhatsApp. I already had to block Youtube on their devices. I was alright with them watching a couple of long-form youtube videos every day, but now if I unblock Youtube all they do is watch Shorts, with no way to disable it.
If you want to block Shorts. I recommend you to try out revanced which gives you youtube without any ads and a lot of other customizations.
To be honest, I find it funny that paid youtube customers might shift to revanced which is technically piracy jsut to remove shorts.
I was this close to rooting the phones but she had just bought a new phone.
But if pricing wasn't the concern for me (which right now it is but I don't think for many HN users it might be), here's what I suggest.
Go buy a phone which can be easily rooted and also use an somewhat secure os (just short of graphene)
Patch revanced (I have even made a nix flake or some nix file [i don't use nix that much but I was curious and ended up using LLMs to generate the file] whose purpose was to take android file and patch it when I was in nix, but I don't have it with me right nwo as I may haev lost it)
Have in the options the short block option.
Newpipe is great as well but it doesn't really allow having comment support.
Also given that HN is a very techie and well hacking with software community. If anyone's interested to take an challenge within Java/Kotlin (Unfortunately, they scare me) then I have got an idea for you guys:
"But the option of turning shorts back on can still be toggled. I wish if anybody whose an expert in java/kotlin can take a look at how revanced works and maybe how to have a revanced patch which can block shorts by default (additionally with ads preferably too with the download option patch as well & the sponsorblock) while atleast in the revanced specific settings option blocking just the option/toggle switch to turn shorts back on."
Also I am a teenager. I would consider the fact that I am on this website partially because of a loop of youtubers that I started following [ Fireship the goat before he turned VC -> Primagen the legend -> Theo t3 (I do feel like he's not the best guy following but he covered so much about YC that I ended up opening news.ycombinator.com and reading it and not watching him read it and ended up making account)
oh yeah before Fireship, I used to follow Code with harry when I was around ~13 yo. I learnt python from him many years ago before it was introduced to us in school so much so that I ended up picking the finance subject out of curiosity and I enjoyed both finance and tech.
One of the funniest stories from this whole is when Code with harry loved one of my comments on youtube loooong time ago and I was around 14 or osmething and then my mum saw it and she didn't know what loving a comment in YT mean and she got suspicious about it and questioned me and then I had to describe hearting a comment to her xD.
Oh yeah. I started learning about python itself around this time because one of my cousins whom I deeply respect who works in aerospace but back when in his university started mentioning how he worked on a ~2-3k loc and he mentioned python and I was like hmm what's python.
I don't know if a parent is interested to hear this but I feel like teenagers really replicate those they admire. A lot of my traits first started just being around that cousin & he actually taught me about assets/liabilities when I was in 5th grade and taught me chess which both became very obsessive points for me later down the life (My joy when I finally ended up beating him at chess fair and square)
I don't think that I do that well academically per se though, it really just depends on my mood so :/ yeah but I really ended up butchering some prestigious college's paper real hard and still tensed about it but honestly as a teen, I don't even know why I am typing this but my point is that your kid would have a personality and just nudge him in the right manners & let him think for himself to think that he reached at a particular conclusion. I do feel like that's generally how I approached and I was the youngest of my whole entire family tree so that made me more mature but I do feel like it came at a trade off of wishing to grow up fast asap when I was a child and now wishing to go back too seeing say not being able to cope up with massive study efforts or competition but that's another matter I guess.
Though parenting is definitely really really hard, kudos to every parent out there.
Did go a little tangent so sorry about that.
When did this start? IMHO it started with instagram. I remember back then there were multiple retro photo apps, insta was one of them, I had several on my phone and kept playing around with them (at the time apps felt like Christmas presents, each update exploring a device feature in creative ways).
I don't quite remember, but I don't think it was a social network then, I think you posted the photos in other networks, and then they made it into a social network and something strange happened. People started posting pictures of food and just general daily life stuff and I thought this was a small group of people who were a extroverts and just wanted to show off idk, they ate beautiful food.
Then something strange happened. This behavior started getting normalized, all other insta like apps disappeared and shortly after, it became necessary to have an instagram account.
I remember at the time I thought something was off, to this day I think I have posted a total of 10 instagram images, they still have the old filters, and stayed off of it since.
But it's been interesting watching it morph into this hydra that simply cannot be put down, to the point where it's more powerful than governments.
Really good question...TL;DR: I'd put it around when Mark Z decided Instagram also had to be Snapchat. (copied Stories) It normalized a behavior of copying.
I had gotten completely out of these apps, then ended up in a situation where I needed to use Snapchat daily if not hourly for messaging, and needed to use TikTok to be culturally literate. (i.e. I got into something romantic with someone younger).
It was a stunning experience. Seeing _everyone_ had normalized this "copy our competitor" strat, hill-climbing on duration of engagement.
YouTube Shorts is a crappy copy of TikTok with mostly TikTok reposts and no sense of community.
Snapchat has a poor clone of TikTok that I doubt anyone knows exists.
TikTok is the ur-engagement king. Pure dopamine, just keep swiping until something catches your attention, and swipe as soon as it stops. No meaningful 1:1 communicating aspect (there's messages, but AFAICT from light quizzing of Gen Zers, it's not used for actual communication)
Instagram specifically is hard for me to speak to, because Gen Zers seem to think its roughly as cool as Facebook, but my understanding is millennials my age or younger (I'm 37) use it more regularly, whereas Gen Z uses it more as like we'd think of Facebook, a generic safe place where grandma can see your graduation photos, as opposed to spontaneous thirst traps.
Reddit is plenty addictive in my experience, and I've heard the same from other people ranging from high school teachers to tradespeople.
Hackernews is also addictive. Fortnine is addictive. World of Warcraft is addictive. NFL is addictive.
Addiction does not strike to me as a unique trait of the social media.
The echo chamber bubble on the other hand, seems quite unique.
HN doesn’t optimize for addictive. Fortnite and wow do. No opinion on NFL, but they probably do at least somewhat.
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> The echo chamber bubble on the other hand, seems quite unique.
More specifically: using "engagement" as the metric to optimize.
Users' use of content is measured: how long do they watch it? Do they leave a comment? Do they give a "like"? Based on that, the algorithm finds similar content that will elicit an even stronger response.
Every action you take on modern social media is giving information to your drug dealer so they can make the next hit even better. But not better for you; better for the social media, who make money from ads.
The continuously adaptive nature of the input stream as a basis for keeping users' eyeballs leashed to ads is what separates FB, Tiktok, Instagram, and Youtube from the more benign, but still addictive alternatives (HN, Fortnite, WoW, NFL, Reddit).
Hacker News has plenty of its own echo chamber, no different to any other social environment.
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> The echo chamber bubble on the other hand, seems quite unique.
At least you can now choose your bubble and even listen to your own echo. That beats having the government beam their psychosis straight into everybody's brain by TV, radio and newspapers.
That makes the whole society an "echo chamber" of whatever the rulers have on their current agenda. And not just on your devices, but all the people you meet in real life.
> Hackernews is also addictive.
False. It is good, no more addictive than a spoon.
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i think most users need more screen blocking control than they get out of the box on iOS. tools like one sec [1] have been invaluable for me.
[1]: https://one-sec.app/
Yes, but most importantly I need to manage my children’s devices; it cannot be opt in and it mustn’t be possible to disable without me approving. Screen time is too easy for kids to work around as is. I also need in-app content type filtering (eg. no shorts, no music videos on music streaming apps) and literally no one is providing such options, not to mention it should be managed in screen time, too. Parental controls are a complete shit show in iOS and the app ecosystem.
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Myspace and early Facebook were already a downgrade to classic chatrooms. I met with so many interesting people on chat in the early 2000s and have met with many offline as well. Multiple times I've travelled 6+ hours to participate in chat meetups with 20-50 others from the same chatroom.
Those were different times: Over 4 years, I've never received a d*ckpic or was target of stalking, harassment, abuse or scam. People were genuinely interested in each other, chat was not about building a personal brand and anonymity didn't make commenters psychos.
I'm not sure if ignorance was bliss, or times changed so much, but as an adult, I feel online communication has became a battlefield where I need to protect my sanity every time I interact with it. Rage bait, fake news, ads, bot farms, lies in a never ending flood. I wouldn't let my children to even try to live the same, uncontrolled online life I had.
> Myspace and early Facebook were already a downgrade to classic chatrooms.
They were not a downgrade, they just worked the other way. With classic chatrooms (or a random vBulletin forums, if you wish) you would meet somebody online, then you would become friends over time and then you meet them in real life. I did that too.
With early Facebook, you would meet somebody at a party, have fun together, and decide to become friends on Facebook, not much different from exchanging phone numbers, but somehow better.
> With classic chatrooms (or a random vBulletin forums, if you wish) you would meet somebody online, then you would become friends over time and then you meet them in real life. I did that too.
And it was usually themed around a specific hobby or activity, which would naturally turn into offline, real-world activity. almost as if it was a conduit to connecting real people with real interests, who would seek out communities based around their interests, connect, and then eventually go and do those interests.
I was heavily into a few growing up, all of which revolved around real-world activities, which the forum members all actively participated in. One, in particular that really stuck with me for years, was tennis. The forum I was on had monthly meetups for my region (NYC metro area) and dozens of people would show up, engage, and enjoy each other's presence and participation. There was also a travel section, so if I was traveling to another country or part of the US, I'd be easily able to tap into that region's meetup and get a chance to hit some balls whenever I was on the road. Lovely.
What was nice is that genuine communities were formed, and people actually and actively policed their own communities not as a power trip (hey Spez!) but rather in earnest to ensure their communities were welcoming and that whoever was interested in that topic/activity could participate.
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I remember people complaining about the degradation of the Usenet experience after AOL brought more people online.
Not many digital cameras, not enough bandwidth for multimedia either. Your “face” was a nickname.
> Quality of the content doesn't matter at all
Exactly.
Engagement is prioritized over quality on most mediums. I find user generated content on social media absolutely abhorrent.
Thank goodness for hacker news. I can read something, share my views and in some cases, my views may be based on some weak intuition and I learn from polite correctness.
> Probably even Reddit - which does have an algorithm to show specific content - is not as bad.
I'm surprised Reddit gets a pass or borderline pass in social media discussions.
In my experience working with kids, Reddit was the worst of the social media platforms for mental health. By far. The kids who were into Reddit were always spouting off information they got from Reddit and had soul-crushing amounts of cynicism about the world. On top of that, they had a chip on their shoulder about it all, believing that Reddit was a superior source of truth about the world.
The whole experience caught me off guard because going into this I mostly heard about the stereotypical social media dangers that get talked about, like boys following Andrew Tate and such. Instead the biggest problem was Redditors on a fast path to doomerism.
Agree, I consider Reddit worse than Tiktok because of the downvote. Even a mild lean in one direction immediately results in extreme viewpoints bubbling up to the top and all other opinions silenced. Few people I know spend much time there, but the one that does sticks out like a sore thumb, always finding every opportunity to get upset about whatever the outrage of the day is.
It's a shame that HN's "don't talk about HN is turning into Reddit" guideline is there. It's preemptively used to shut people down when there are real issues with threads randomly devolving into uninteresting politically charged therapy sessions.
Accusations of HN "turning into Reddit" are far less interesting to read and of lower quality than the politics such comments are meant to denounce.
thanks for that insight
> ....the stereotypical social media dangers that get talked about, like boys following Andrew Tate and such
I wonder where tate got his ideas and influences from. And why he's free in the US.
> Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them.
Agreed but you have this on many websites such as youtube. Is youtube the next to get banned here? I mean you can write comments to so it is kind of a social mediua setup as well.
> So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine.
I don't know. It sounds quite arbitrary to me.
Not that I have anything against chopping down the big platforms. They truly abuse many people.
> So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine.
Even better might be to just destroy the big platforms by breaking them up.
100%. Go on Facebook or Instagram today and you’re more likely to see viral videos than to see anything to do with your friends. It’s just a moth to flame.
Tictoc, Instagram, Youtube shorts and in parts Linkedin are Digital Drugs. Similisr to smoking cigarettes or vaping.
Whats fascinating about thid is that we have managed to create a new class of drugs - that does not require physical substances to be added to our bodies...and works via visual stimulous only.
Probably the online dating platforms are the same way. Someone actually finding their mate, and no longer needing the platform is counterproductive to their business model.
I wish the same would happen for games like Roblox. These games suffer from all the same problems social media does.
> Back then it was a platform to communicate with friends, and maybe even find new friends to meet up with.
Those still exist... and this ban will probably outlaw them for the people who need it the most.
> Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them.
Heard the same thing about video games, TV shows, D&D, texting and even youth novels.
There are a lot of big feelings about social media, but little data.
If the goal is to make social media "less addictive", the article in the OP does nothing to stop that. The article claims that social media affects youth mental health, but does the data actually back that up?
From the Guardian[1]:
> Social media time does not increase teenagers’ mental health problems – study
> Research finds no evidence heavier social media use or more gaming increases symptoms of anxiety or depression
> Screen time spent gaming or on social media does not cause mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale study.
> With ministers in the UK considering whether to follow Australia’s example by banning social media use for under-16s, the findings challenge concerns that long periods spent gaming or scrolling TikTok or Instagram are driving an increase in teenagers’ depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions.
> Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties to find out whether technology use genuinely predicted later mental health difficulties.
From Nature[2]:
> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health
From the Atlantic[3] with citations in the article:
> The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens, It may only make things worse.
> I am a developmental psychologist[], and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find[4] compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.
> Many other researchers have found the same[5]. In fact, a recent[6] study and a review of research[6] on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report[7] concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/candi...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-t...
[4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31929951/
[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7#:~:text=G...
[6] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32734903/
[7] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27396/Highlights_...
The keyword here is monetization, it’s what ruined social media, among many other entertainment industries. If we somehow managed to ban monetization through social media or internet, you will notice how it will reset back to ol’ fun days.
reddit having tons of niche subreddits and the ability to sort them by best all time is one of my favorite ways to filter for higher-quality content. (i don't use the main feed much.)
I'd argue it's closer to the ability to search it with Google to get alright non-clickfarm responses to questions, or product reviews.
I totally agreed with you, right up until the last paragraph. Reddit is among the worst communities on the internet.
Reddit is actually the worst of the bunch.
I've noticed comments on YouTube videos about politically controversial things in the US show incredibly obvious bot activity.
It’s not really social media at all and we should stop calling it that. I call them chum feeds or scrollers. There’s no social component. It’s just addictive short form infinite scroll brain rot.
Social media deserving of the name is almost dead. It’s not that profitable and the sites are expensive to run.
likes and comments aren't social?
Only on the most shallow level. Early Facebook was like meeting up with friends. Modern social media is like shouting at strangers on the street.
Not if there's no reputation. If you see someone liked your post and then you go check out their posts, or if people recognize commenters and remember things about them, then it's social. Think engaging with friends on Facebook or participating in a hobby forum. But there's nothing social about engaging with a popular Reddit post or some celebrity's Twitter feed.
I get where you and parent are coming from. It's social in the way that anti-social behavior is social.
The content is generated by users but the consumer of the content is served whatever user content drives engagement. People aren't really having conversations on these platforms.
The only places where you can really have a conversation are places where engagement is low enough that the odds off a set very high engagement comments can't shove everything else down the page.
The medical and financial predators targeting elderly makes me wonder how to constrain it. The law doesn’t really help, short of having a court determine there’s some level of incapacity.
In theory the law doesn’t require victim cooperation. In practice, I’ve found local prosecutors won’t touch a case with an uncooperative victim. And most victims don’t cooperate whether out of humiliation or rejection pf the very idea they can be scammed. Because to them all scams are obvious, and only morons are scammed. They consistently lack imagination for the sophistication and manipulation component of scams, thinking it’s all about obviousness.
I’m sure it’s not only a case of “save the children”. Saving grandma’s retirement accounts is also important. The internet is a cesspool.
I remember when they saw what a certain game app was doing and were disgusted by it. Wild to me that those same people l̶a̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶ almost instantly chose to not only adopt the behavior but make it core functionality. It's way worse when you see the evil and STILL chose it.