Social media should be treated like the tobacco companies | Hacker News Reader

Social media should be treated like the tobacco companies

medpagetoday.com

54 pointsEnjaami9 comments

IMO the problem is the "media" part of "social media". I wish there was an online platform where my friends and I could give each other text updates and pictures about what is going on in our personal lives, but you couldn't "share" news stories or articles. I don't want to get my news through social media.

Simply removing the "share" function and blocking copy & paste would go a long way.

How much are you willing to pay for such service?

USD 5-10 a year

if it's something that allows for keeping all contacts in one place with no advertising and not selling my data I'd go for £50/year easy. would save me a ton of hassle in keeping contacts lists up to date and having to bother with multiple platforms.

USD 10/mo

I know there's going to be some debate about this response but I genuinely think Instagram plays that role in my life. I don't really have the type of friends that do a lot of reposting, but even those that do in the name of activism or donating to a cause limit it to the story feature. If you ignore stories and just focus on actual posts, Instagram is basically Flickr but with room to add captions. There's a mute story feature and also a mute posts feature if necessary.

I don't see many people repost stories or news as actual posts. I would suggest staying away from the discover tab.

The cat's out of the bag. Computers learned how to be connected to each other a while back, and everyone got at least one internet-connected computer each more recently. Social media is technology, it can't be undone.

We could identify what is it that we think is so harmful about platforms like Facebook, and place legal limits on the _scale_ at which those deemed harmful elements are allowed to function unregulated (i.e. regulate them).

Seems like you'd just end up with a cat and mouse game. People are social creatures, and there's a goldmine of real or imagined social activity on the internet. In order to use it, you must look at the screen. We can also place ads on the screen...

What can be done? Make it illegal to run a business whose incentives are to increase "engagement"? What about newspapers?

Maybe social media giants' true crime is being the first to do an old thing at a greater scale and more efficiently than technology previously allowed.

I used to believe that social media was a huge issue in society, I'm not so sure anymore.

I recently listened to a Podcast with Andreessen Horowitz, he mentioned this twitter account https://twitter.com/PessimistsArc

“No one got upset when bicycles showed up. No one said, oh my God, we just ruined society.” - https://twitter.com/i/status/1304134132709109761

We're quick to blame anything new for problems within our society.

He mentioned the point how Communism and Nazism spread without social media/internet. People seem to believe what ever their social groups believes so I'm not sure less "fake news" is going to solve that.

fyi - I deleted my Facebook account for other reasons

But the tobacco companies are still going strong?

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