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Comment by Levitz | Hacker News Reader

Sure, so on one side you have the long-term thinking and carefulness of teenagers, on the other you have literally billions of dollars and thousands of people which careers revolve around making those teenagers as addicted as they can.

I agree that the problem is in how it's used, but you could say the same thing about heroin, predatory loans or casinos. It's not reasonable to put all the weight on personal responsibility when screwing with the process of thought is one of the most lucrative enterprises in the whole planet to begin with.

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People said roughly the same things about TV, video games, and even D&D. This time may be different, but we’d need to explain what specifically about social media+mobile makes it more dangerous than those other categories. I worry about social media effects too, but another part of me wants to apply skepticism.

The article seems focused on eating disorders and other mental health problems related to one’s view of one’s body in relation to others, so I’m not sure this is something that was said before about video games and D&D, but you are right about TV.

I think the biggest difference is with TV, while a teenager would still be exposed to other teenagers with a body image that could make them feel bad about their own, it would still be within the context of fiction and at lest some kids could write it off as “those are stars” or “that’s fake”. In social medial, the new stars are influencers who otherwise seem like normal people so I feel the pressure to try and look like someone else is higher.

I know people whose marriages failed and who flunked college because of inability to pause a videogame. Also, basement guys who do nothing but play are a real thing.

As those became more addictive, they are an actual issue for actual real people.

Maybe beside the point but heroin was developed by Bayer in 1897 as a less addictive replacement for morphine. Hoffmann created it just two weeks after aspirin, really interesting story.

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