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Comment by cracell | Hacker News Reader

> I don't buy into this victim mentality

I don't think we should be thinking about this from a psychological perspective but instead a sociological one. Yes individuals can disconnect and do whatever they need to assuming adequate resources but that's beside the point.

If you think of people as boxes with inputs and outputs I think it's very worth understanding how social media impacts those boxes and what the long term affects are.

Has nothing to do with being a victim. Just if you press this button on every box does something desirable for society happen? Or something negative? Or we can't tell still?

And if it is negative then do we as a society want regulations to reduce the impact?

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You can't really know what the impact is. You probably can't even come up with a crisp, uncontroversial definition of what "social media" actually is. Most people seem to use the term to mean Twitter, but Twitter is garbage and lots of people don't use it at all. Is Hacker News "social media"? Is Slashdot? Is the comments section of the New York Times? Is IRC?

The moment you start down the "we are weak and helpless and we need the smart benevolent geniuses in Government to help us" you're just gonna lose a whole lot of people. Because there's no reason to believe there is even a problem here, let alone a problem that needs to be solved with regulation.

The demarcation line is pretty clear IMO (it isn’t even social media). It’s technology whose goal is to manipulate its users to engage with itself. And it hires an army of engineers, designers, scientists, and soon AI to achieve that goal.

Right now it’s social media that is at the forefront of this war with people. Tomorrow it might be a different technology.

That's not clear at all. Do you think the Twitter founder's goal was literally written down somewhere as "manipulate users to engage with it"? Or for Facebook? None of these companies will agree with that assessment, so it's entirely your own subjective opinion.

Well, the interviewee in the article provides a good metric.

You don't need to look at the founders' intentions. You simply need to look at the metrics they are optimizing on. For public companies like Facebook and Twitter it's even easier. You have to look at the metrics they are talking to their investors about.

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