Unfortunately regulations will always be one step behind. Asking for them is victim mentality. We’re responsible for our own choices.
Everyone might get addicted to TikTok for some period. But everyone needn’t stay addicted to TikTok. (Of course I use “TikTok” as a placeholder for any infinitely consumable feed of targeted content.)
Regulation has a place. For example, an obvious and easy win would be to pass a bill requiring any product with a consumable feed to offer and default to an option to sort it in reverse chronological order.
But regulation is a reactive and slow strategy to shrinking a problem that continues to metastasize. There are more proactive social strategies available to us. Education is free. Self-control is free. Unfortunately, they’re only “free” modulo the minutes of attention we can allocate to them from our finite lifetime supply.
I wonder, how many minutes of education or self-introspection is required to prevent one future minute of app usage? I’m optimistic this ratio is favorable, so that once people sufficiently internalize the effect of infinite consumable feeds, they will naturally reduce their self-sabotaging usage of them.
People will adapt. It will just take a while. Sometimes you gotta get burned to learn not to touch the stove. In the meantime, we could require the products to provide resources and tools to reduce addiction (like HN’s noprocrast). And we should also find a way to blunt the impact of social media on those who have not yet begun their journey with its addiction (like children, or people yet to be born into our satirical dystopia of a society). If kids are glamorizing social media before they are old enough to use it, they will not have an easy experience separating themselves from it later in life.
Cigarette smoking rates are way down since twenty years ago when we started convincing children it was gross and uncool. We can do that with social media too.
> Unfortunately regulations will always be one step behind. Asking for them is victim mentality.
Is this a self-serving idea you apply only to the industry you work in, or is this a general principle you apply to all industries? Do you feel this way about the petroleum and chemical industries? The pharmaceutical industries? Food processing? The nuclear industry?
Are all industrial regulations instances of 'victim mentality', or only those that apply to your industry?
I’m not sure where you got the idea that I harbor some absolutist opposition to regulation in any industry, or even in the social media industry for that matter. My comment listed specific examples of social media regulation that I would support.
My goal was simply to highlight the naïveté of thinking regulations alone will solve the problem, unless the USPS is going to send a weekly pill bottle of amphetamines to every citizen who is vulnerable to the dangers of social media addiction.
> Unfortunately regulations will always be one step behind. Asking for them is victim mentality. We’re responsible for our own choices.
We are responsible for our own choices until we aren't. Until we are deceived, directed, subverted to some choices. If that wasn't true then the whole PR + advertisement industries wouldn't be as massive and effective as they are.
I do recommend watching Adam Curtis' "The Century of the Self" to dispel a little the myth that we are solely responsible for our choices...
We are accountable to them, we suffer the consequences of them but definitely not solely responsible.
"Victim mentality" is too big of a sweeping statement for this case, actually I'd consider it extremely dismissive of pretty complicated human behaviours.
Your first sentence is wildly and dangerously misguided. Yes, it's slow and difficult but it's also the reason we have underappreciated institutions like the FDA.
Everyone might get addicted to TikTok for some period. But everyone needn’t stay addicted to TikTok. (Of course I use “TikTok” as a placeholder for any infinitely consumable feed of targeted content.)
Regulation has a place. For example, an obvious and easy win would be to pass a bill requiring any product with a consumable feed to offer and default to an option to sort it in reverse chronological order.
But regulation is a reactive and slow strategy to shrinking a problem that continues to metastasize. There are more proactive social strategies available to us. Education is free. Self-control is free. Unfortunately, they’re only “free” modulo the minutes of attention we can allocate to them from our finite lifetime supply.
I wonder, how many minutes of education or self-introspection is required to prevent one future minute of app usage? I’m optimistic this ratio is favorable, so that once people sufficiently internalize the effect of infinite consumable feeds, they will naturally reduce their self-sabotaging usage of them.
People will adapt. It will just take a while. Sometimes you gotta get burned to learn not to touch the stove. In the meantime, we could require the products to provide resources and tools to reduce addiction (like HN’s noprocrast). And we should also find a way to blunt the impact of social media on those who have not yet begun their journey with its addiction (like children, or people yet to be born into our satirical dystopia of a society). If kids are glamorizing social media before they are old enough to use it, they will not have an easy experience separating themselves from it later in life.
Cigarette smoking rates are way down since twenty years ago when we started convincing children it was gross and uncool. We can do that with social media too.