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I do agree that "social media is uniformly bad" is too broad a stroke. That said, humans aren't exactly the best at discriminating something that feels good from being unhealthy or at least unproductive.

Yeah I agree. It's easy to list some negatives of social media (doomscrolling, bullying, building unrealistic expectations for your life), but the simple ability to connect many people all over the world is pretty hard to argue against. Social media companies push shallow, easy to digest content, but that doesn't mean that there aren't thousands of meaningful interactions happening every day.

"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realise half of them are stupider than that"

Yeah, the same way people get value out of gambling.