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Comment by heinrichhartman | Hacker News Reader

> but I don't really support the government saving us from ourselves.

I don't understand that argument. By the same reasoning all drugs should be legal:

Everyone know's it's bad. People get trapped. It has severe consequences for personal health and the society as a whole. But, hey, "it's not impossible to break free from it" by yourself. No need for Government action.

The key metric for me is impact to society. You can do all bad things to you if you want to, and they only impact yourself, but if things have large impact on:

- Social fabric (stability of families and communities)

- Political Culture (erosion of discourse culture)

- Education (lower attention span)

- Healthcare (burnout!)

- Working productivity

It might be a good idea to change the rules to prevent these effects.

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> By the same reasoning all drugs should be legal

Yeah, that actually works pretty great for Portugal and the war on drugs shows that just changing the rules doesn't work (another example in the same vein: the prohibition). People aren't that stupid that they need someone else to tell them what's good or bad for them. They know that. They just don't act accordingly, and that's the real problem, and you can't just fix that by saying no you can't do X. Everyone already knows they shouldn't do X. Your rules aren't adding anything.

That's not how decriminalization works. Drugs are not legal in Portugal. What decriminalization means is that you don't go to jail if you use or abuse them; AFAIK the government has rehab programs and actively helps you to get rid of these drugs.

It's not like in Portugal you go and buy cocaine and the government expects you to self-regulate; that just doesn't work. Libertarianism works well for perfectly rational individuals, but rationality can't coexist with addictive drugs. Individuals need help breaking from destructive forces that are greater than themselves.

The idea here is not to punish people for using social media, but to punish social media companies for making their apps addictive. Just like in Portugal you can't get jail time if you're addicted, but you certainly do go to jail for dealing.

Plenty of people think that drugs should not be criminally illegal. They would argue that prohibition does more harm to society than the drugs do, and that the money would be better spent on treatment and public health services. Don't forget, the US imprisons more of its citizens per capita than any other country in the world.

So following that line of thought, shouldn't we try to help people who are addicted to smartphones manage their lives and addictions, instead of trying to ban them from using a smartphone?

> I don't understand that argument. By the same reasoning all drugs should be legal.

Do you really believe it's the illegal nature of drugs that keep the vast majority of people from using them? It's the fact that they know it's bad. In the future social media could be no different.

I don't know if I would be in favor of legalization, but Portugal has had reasonable success with decriminalizing all drugs.

This doesn't seem as unreasonable as your incredulity makes it sound. Alcohol is uncontroversially wayyy more dangerous than a handful of illegal drugs, and it's in incredibly wide usage. Same for cigarettes in the past: it took a sui generis effort to dramatically shift culture to lower cigarette's popularity (in the US), and it was fragile enough that a rebranding to "Juul" is starting to undo a lot of that work.

FWIW, from a selfish perspective, I wish most drugs were legal: ; I used marijuana responsibly before it was legal and continue to use psychedelics responsibly, and the reason I don't do meth or cocaine isn't because it's difficult to get, but because I'm aware of how dangerous they are. But I'm genuinely curious as to what could make you think that, for the average person, legality doesn't drive a substantial amount of their attitudes towards usage of a given drug.

You are conflating legalization of drugs with he decriminalizing of drugs by people

it is still illegal to manufacture and sell fetanyl to the public, just as the OP is suggesting regulating the addictive nature of social media/technology.

No one is saying let’s criminalize using smart phones.

How do you regulate this away though? The fact that people like to get the latest news or see likes on their posts is vulnerable to abuse by social media, but it also drives a site like HN for what I'd say amounts to a social good. I'd rather we don't outlaw everything that is addictive, because our reward circuits drive good behavior, too.

There's also an absence of morality in these businesses. Facebook and many others established themselves with a giant bait and switch. Get the users, then put the pinch on them by selling every bit of info and using dark patterns to a point just shy of them quitting. That's an accepted way to do things. There is an underlying attitude that any legal and profitable venture is valid. Caveat emptor, greed is good, social darwinism. I'd regulate against that but I don't see how.

You could form some sort of regulatory body that decides itself what practices are acceptable and leverages fines against those that aren't, but that kicks the can down the road and also entrenches big businesses who can afford to interact with such an entity. Barriers to competition help create the monopolies and cartels that prevent consumers from punishing bad business practices.

> Facebook and many others established themselves with a giant bait and switch. Get the users, then put the pinch on them by selling every bit of info and using dark patterns to a point just shy of them quitting.

Can you elaborate on why you think Facebook was a bait and switch? "They trust me, the dumb fucks" was during Facebook's infancy, and came to public attention years and years ago. More concretely, Facebook has consistently been amoral and user-hostile, and anyone paying even a little bit of attention knew that by, say, 2012. Hell, there were complaints about its addictive (+stalkery) potential when the news feed launched, in 2006! I'm what way is this a bait and switch, instead of clearly signaling the company they were the entire time?

Im referring to the early years specifically, when it had no ads and no obvious business model. They jump started their Network effect by being useful and unobtrusive and then the monetization set in. Still, it's only recently that those concerns you mentioned really became mainstream. The well-informed public is a small sliver of the public overall, because it takes effort to stay informed, and there is a lot of deceptive junk and sponsored opinions to sift through.

Most people still don't really care that much about privacy, and polls continue to bear this out. The bulk of complaints are based on its direct effects on user's mental well-being, as well as perceived damage to the health of civil society.

The upshot is that people don't really see a problem with obtrusive monetization directly (FB ads aren't particularly egregious from a UI perspective), but rather attempts to increase engagement, which of course substantially predate their monetization efforts. The News Feed and related controversy are an easy, early example, as is the promotion of Farmville-style "games" (ca 2009/10), which also substantially predates Facebook's mainstreaming and the bulk of their user growth.

All drugs SHOULD be legal.

That's only feasible if we don't allow predatory sales of the drugs. Non-prohibition works in places where they instead address the motivators for drug use. I don't think it would work if we let companies have big marketing budgets pushing the drugs. Legalize possession, but not marketing.

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