Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

My experience (with alcohol addiction) is: Tried to help once, got into problems (set family up with house of a friend), almost got into financial problems myself (almost lend them money but was stopped by wife, would have lost it all). But at least I could tell myself I tried. But how far would you go? An addict will take you away from your family and kids if you let them.

So what to do? Hope they take the first step themselves. Be clear that you will help them take steps, but only steps you agree with (I once got alcohol for said family, the begging and bad state got to me, at some point an alcoholic will improve on alcohol), but I still feel bad about that today.

yes

I don't know. What one person calls an obsession can easily be called a hobby by someone else.

Personally, I like my little obsessions. I like them a lot better than judgemental people in my life. If someone were to start a "rational conversation" with me where they made me feel like I had to justify my "garbage obsession", well, I wouldn't want to talk to them anymore.

I really can't tell if this is a sarcastic comment or not, so just to be clear none of these examples are examples of purpose. How one spends their time isn't purpose, it's just a description of their day.

Don't tell her what to do, or how to fix her life.

Go to her and tell her you are worried about her, that you are always no matter what there for her. And if she ever needs help you will be there for her.

Don't judge dont advice but make sure to let her know you care and will help when she comes around.

Honestly, it doesn't have to be that complex. I was shocked to read about the platform and the eCommerce site. That's such a HN solution to an ultimately human problem.

I believe the only thing you need to focus on right now is to understand where she's coming from. Do you know why she does the thing she does? Do you know what she feels about it?

That's it. Simple. But it'll be hard for sure. Because to you (and me), it's very clearly an issue that needs to be "fixed". But how would you feel if someone keeps telling you solutions to things you don't think are a problem? Like: "Hey, do you want a custom social media site so that you don't spend so much time on HN?" - the implication is that you're a HN addict. My first response would be defensive. "I think HN is good. You haven't even spent much time on it. How would you know anything about it? "

I think that unless there's this common ground of understanding and support, you'll never get anywhere.

Also, is it possible she's just depressed? I her a couple therapy sessions would help. These methods are how i got out of my video game hole, and i woulda killed for someone to go through this with. I can't tell you what to do, but what I've heard so far it doesn't sound impossible. It does sound like you've accepted the barrier to assistance she's set up. Maybe when you're ready to leave someday you can make a final push

it’s more difficult to even suggest what to do. what are your thoughts on genuinely being interested in her? not for the purposes of helping her. but being interested in her so that you spend time in conversations? start with a minute here and there reminiscing about moments between you two (and perhaps the larger family) that you both enjoyed, and gradually moving into longer conversations? i think what i’m saying here is that you might need to rebuild trust then build a new relationship on top of that. how to go about that? i really don’t know.

And what is wrong with education? This one truly baffles me. Kids these days learn more math faster than kids 50 years ago. They learn about a large and varied swath of subjects. High school's as i understand haven't really changed much except for upgrading curriculum and expectations occasionally. Colleges definitely aren't cheaper, but there's a lot more options out there, more degrees, more possibilities, maybe not more but different jobs to go to.

I do think it's bad to let children in school have iPad time, any at all. They should learn to use the internet in the proper way, focused on learning and informational resources. But my phone has been immensely useful for my education! Actually irreplacebly helpful and expanding. I've got dozens of textbooks on here that I've used for many things over time. I've got a youtube tuned to educational content and i don't let myself have enough time to get off track. This phone is what I'm reading your comment from! It's what I'm engaging in this conversation with.

I'd say yes, finding meaning is different now. The old tricks don't work anymore because you just don't have to. What did people used to do who didn't find meaning? I do think GP should at least attempt to help his sister, that's his responsibility to bear in society. I think phones do make certain things harder, and others, like wasting away, much easier. I don't think having more churches would solve that. I think we need actual education in schools about this, the same way we talk about drunk driving, "be careful, you don't wanna waste your life, or someone else's".

This is just the first time anything like this has happened in society to my understanding. I'd blame the corporations who parasitically feed on the time, attention, lives of people who are unlucky enough to get sucked in. We have the term "whale" to describe a person who gets too financially invested in a game (phone or other). Perhaps we need a derogatory term to describe people who get to chronically invested in social media. Something good, to really discourage people from wanting to be like that. There's lots of solutions, i don't think bringing back "traditional family values", "christain morality", or homeschooling is gonna fix it. Those are our old tools, useful at times for certain things. We need to build some new ones.

Here are a few things that stick out. There is some motive force that animates your sister.

She travels to and from work regularly. Is able to go out and get surgery and cosmetics.

She has reduced interaction with immediate family - more precisely, she has reduced her interactions over several years.

You describe interactions as situations where “ ..doesn't share her actual thoughts and gets angry when asked about it”, / Emotional Upheaval.

There are many skills that are at play here. Decision making, planning, goal setting, even basic skills like getting out of the house. It will be tempting to “judge” and comment how those skills are being used - ignore that urge.

Secondly, you describe your efforts to provide assistance - suggesting Building sites, or expanding on her interests, which result in a “I dont know.” Of the methods attempted, loosely classified, they focus on action, doing things.

Assuming that you are helping in the manner you would expect to be helped - it may not be the manner in which she understands help or needs to be helped.

In the off chance that this extrapolation based on limited data is correct, then your sister may simply connect or need help in different ways.

From experience - some people dont need a plan or help, they need to understand themselves, this is sufficient information for them to make their own plans and act on their own. Others prefer concrete, actionable plans and dont really need this kind of help.

When two such individuals attempt to help each other, the usual outcome is either “You want me to do more, after I am already struggling?” Or “Why are you wasting my time when I need concrete solutions”.

If it helps - ‘thinking’ something through, is also a project. You are building yourself. Often people forget who they are, what their strengths are, become too tired, expect themselves to perform even though they are dead tired - they make errors in their projects.

In such cases some objective reassurance of their capabilities, a genuine analysis of their situation, helps. Often the best person to do this is a professional, because the emotional state interferes with the objective evaluation (“I will fail” vs “No shit - I cant be creative if I am this stressed”)

I dont have a solution, but I hope some of these thoughts aligned with the circumstances you find yourself within.

If it helps - I use something like this to work situations like this out.

Over engineered: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-KD6jm0l4c-thought-council

Base version: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-Cdq3drl87-two-guides

Non ChatGPT + version: https://chat.openai.com/share/d37ce786-20a4-482e-b348-87cd03...

People can learn coping skills to deal with things they can't control. Reasoning can override emotion.

For myself, learning I was bipolar allowed me to understand what was happening and be able to put things in context. I still need medication but I don't need as much of it.

Older folks like myself (GenX) learned the "classic" way...face to face. There were checks and balances. If you said something that skewed hostile you found out it could have immediate direct negative consequences. It could literally leave a mark.

Similarly if you went too far some other way...you found out immediately and directly how that could work out (we were just as cringy...we just didn't have it preserved digitally for prosperity).

Kids today (even writing that makes me wince) have less accountability for what they write than what we had to have for what we said. Also due to scale the effects are amplified. And also you are in a digital bubble that allows you to ignore anything that isn't positive. If you piss someone off by what you said so what? You'll never interact with them directly and there will be 1000s who agree w/ and encourage you.

Also old man shouts at clouds.

1) Your attention on social media is monetized by others, which means there is always something tugging on it like so many street peddlers, in addition to all the 'organic' content made by other users. When there's a shortness of attention, you're always going to be more snippy and inclined to the short pithy retort, instead of long conversational openings and explorations of topics. Those require a lot of social trust-building and responding to feedback when you do them IRL, which is difficult on social media because...

2) Other people on social media just feel less real than those you encounter in real life, because you can't feel that bad feeling in your gut as strongly when you upset them, or the good feeling when you make them laugh. That same social distancing means you have a much easier time either idealizing them in that parasocial influencer-guru follower style, or feeling comfortable with being very harsh and combative with them. AKA the toxic gamer lobby phenomena, where people say the most heinous things you've ever heard to eachother, all the while being mostly fairly ordinary kids and adults IRL.

Both of these are kind of inherently tied up in the way we are ordering more and more of our (para)social life, so it seems very difficult to escape.

To paraphrase a point somebody made about content generated by machines purely to tug on your attention - everything feels increasingly meaningless because you have a finite amount of attention, and more and more of the 'social' interactions that your brain deals with in a day ARE meaningless and intended solely to mine your attention and keep you scrolling on ads.

I don't know how to fix that.

With that a strongly regulated social media place can be just as hostile as the most vulgar forum you can find. By experience, it can often be even worse.

Nit picking is a form of communication as well, perhaps often chosen because users want to share something difficult to do on the medium. That said, nit picking often doesn't carry hostility. Especially on tech platforms it is just meant as a contribution. Maybe there are carry over effects and miscommunication.

The advertising industry is fundamentally about intruding into your lives, and by that measure, the % of attention it can command.

The advertising industry (which is social media is that isn't colossally obvious) has relentlessly pursued increasing this percentage, and the smartphone was the physical means to achieve it, and newfound social addiction feedback loops the nitro turbo boost.

Even modern/new humans can't adapt to this. Older minds are crumbling into echo chambers, or withdrawing entirely. Paranoia takes hold.

Or is it paranoia? Or are your every move, thought, and action collected and categorized into a profile which is currently used simply for "advertising optimization", while in China it produces a worse-than-1984 dystopian system, and likely there are population profiling projects in US three letter agencies?

My internet profile is set in stone from my 20 years. Nothing I can do about it now. I'm purgeworthy whenever the totalitarianism grips the USA. Elections are becoming existential now, and that likely isn't paranoia.

While I've given a rational probability to all this, most people do not, they respond emotionally, especially to relentless stress and burden of processing unending perpetual advertising.

And as we all know, here comes the AI.

Thanks for asking the question and spawning the conversation threads!

So I'd like to point out something I've not seen mentioned yet. That is what I call 'small down behavior', that is nit picking on those that don't fall into some small group that is acceptable.

It seems that social media has not caused any new behaviors, but instead given a new and expansive venue for the behavior to spread.

Social media is a highlight reel of people’s lives. It’s the best part hand-picked out of our mostly mundane lives.

Until these teenagers understand this, they’ll never feel “good enough” to share their own situation. Instead, they’ll remain on the hamster wheel trying to live up to the ideals peddled by influencers.

if there was some way to just start arguments about nothing in real life and then pause them at will to go and cherrypick stuff that supports your argument, then come back and act smug about it (or not come back at all if you don't find anything), people would incessantly do it in person too.

So as a matter of caution we tend to impute bad motives to people we can't 'feel' clearly which means any textual claims made are subject to unnaturally high levels of scrutiny and demands for evidence/documentation.

Also the internet is forever whilst IRL conversation is throwaway.

Why specifically social media? It's a function of communication efficiency. It's why church is associated with this sort of cattiness, everyone knows everyone and is brought together regularly to provide a venue to trade gossip. It also supplies the moral standard by which everyone is evaluated and one's social status is tied to how well one appears to meet this standard. The cattiness is just status games playing out given these constraints.

There’s an unspoken burden of past Child Traumatic Stress that, consciously and subconsciously, tints individuals’ resilience and the way the now-adults view the world.

I’ve been fortunate to have a happy, normal childhood. However, based on the number of people that I’ve spoken to, I’m starting to think I am in the minority. Friends have casually talked about facing suicide, complex family dynamics, neglect, and crazy religious experiences in early life like it was nothing, when it was/is a big deal.

It’s devastating to hear, and realize that the “silent majority” are likely maladapted individuals who are not even close to unpacking their traumatic past (i.e. things like “the friendly uncle” and “the cool youth group pastor”) that got swept under the rug or repressed.

It's worse than that. At the same time families were broken, the children also stopped having freedom to roam around and make friends on their own on the real world.

This is certainly not the only anti-intellectualism, anti-education movement we've ever experienced as humans, but we had progressed forward. This regression leaves a lot of people in bad places.

Imagine being out in public at a party and you say something slightly 'spicy' and someone walks up to you and puts duct tape across your mouth. You can move to another party (or comment thread in this example), but you already were basically told "your input is useless, now leave".

I should mention that I don't see it that way, but a lot of people don't know how to separate real life from the internet - Especially Gen Z. The internet is NOT real life.

Bonus: Moderators locking threads with a condescending comment like "Locking this comment thread since some of you refuse to behave".

Reddit is the new Twitter, only the censorship isn't thinly veiled. It's not veiled at all.

Very easy to say when you aren't going viral and 100,000+ people aren't trying to get you fired or hurling insults at you ranging from calling you an idiot to telling you to die. I'm not saying you're wrong but it's much easier said than done.

Especially for people who run in youthful circles. Older people at least have the benefit of generally being around people who learned human compassion before the social internet became prevalent.

The fact that they cannot discern if I'm giving them agreement or the side eye is delicious.

You can't have a discussion with someone who wants to "gotcha" you for clout

This is something it's taken me a while to come to terms with. I used to want to fully engage with everybody and everything. It was anathema to me to just "broadcast something into the void" and ignore replies. But over time I came to realize that a. I don't scale to engaging with every single person who replies to something I say online, and b. I don't owe those people a response or any of my time/attention; especially the trolls and bots and other lamers that are so prevalent these days.

So now I'm more comfortable (albeit maybe not 100% comfortable) with treating things in more of a "fire and forget" fashion. I say what I want to say, and people can do with it what they will. I just can't be arsed to engage with the trolls and other randos. But... if somebody has a mature, reasonable, professional response then I am willing, on a selective basis, to dig in deeper and have a longer discussion.

One should hope. Disagreement is how you learn. It is why we talk to each other.

But that's not what we're talking about here. With 'Reddit' behaviour transcending beyond Internet forums, we're losing the disagreement. Now we see ostracization. There is no: "You are wrong because X." or "That is an interesting thought, but have you considered Y?" it has become "There is something wrong with you." and in the extreme "Say goodbye to your job/friends/family."

On 4chan sure, on Reddit absolutely hecking no. On the main subs in French wrongthink comments get deleted super fast, and on one English-speaking about a hobby it's an immediate ban.

Don't you think it's worrisome that we can't agree on anything? And that includes things that are supposed to have objective answers. Why can't we find the truth? We now have instant global communication available almost 24/7, shouldn't it bring the period of unprecedented unity?

I'm just a few years from 40 and I can still vividly remember a time not too long ago where this was not at all how I thought.

That's why I don't speak my opinions to anyone other than people I'm close with.

I think you nailed it on the head here, though. At a young age, we often don't carry the self confidence or self awareness to stand by our thoughts or opinions (and really, for good reason -- it's a good time to learn!). We have no sense of self or conviction at that age, despite the very unfair way popular media portrays teens (e.g. as mature adults with fully formed sense of self).

But the net result of what GP was mentioning is this lack of self confidence + an overly hostile online conversation definitely makes the resultant introversion/misplaced self worth make a lot of sense.

I regularly throw my opinions in discussions online, and often (not most the time, but often), get "downvoted" into oblivion. Part of that is that I like to play devil's advocate or I engage folks who don't agree with me, but part of it is also being a 41 year old person who honestly doesn't give a shit if they have a "popular" opinion, just a well-reasoned one. I chock that up to being roughed up by the world for a bit.

The problem is that the real world is increasingly not understanding that the internet and the world are not the same place, and they are treating software and people the same way. It turns out that people are not software. This leads to problems. Those who confuse you with software don't apply the compassion that people would otherwise normally receive, and, as a result, will be quite happy to put you in a bad place.

You know, the 'Redditaization' of the world. Its funny that even here we see the internet and the world being seen as the same thing; emblematic of the exact same confusion that the comment is about.

Well, sure, you're just dealing with software. What trouble could there be?

The problem with the 'Redditization' of the world is that people fail to recognize that software and people are not the same thing, and start treating people as if they are software. That leads to social issues, just as treating people as if they were dogs leads to social issues.

And here we have proof positive of this happening: You weren't even able to recognize that the world and the internet are not the same place.

Which, to be fair, isn't surprising. If so many people weren't confusing people with software the original comment would have not been posted in the first place. We are here because that confusion has become so commonplace.

- “The climate is changing and the outcome of that is bad.”

- “The climate doesn’t have enums. Have you tried Rust?”

Very clearly I have no idea about what goes on in his head, anyone's head for what matters... But when I compare my upbringing with his, I cannot understand how is it that this happen. I had so little, and struggle so much compared to him, and it's him the one giving up on life before even trying? This is thought that hunts me the most.

Feels like giving someone way too much of anything just cripples the process of understanding the struggle as a beautiful part of the process to be something, overcome something, feel something...

All his life has been in front of screens, talking to strangers, bites of information he digests after the digital rendition of a human voice has been transferred from across the internet. There is no beauty in this way of life. No wonder kinds have no feeling for what the world has to offer, unless it's coming from an Instagram influencer.

Don't get stuck ruminating on the past , possibly infecting yourself with the same disease. Instead maybe pour that love and attention on those still around you. Care for those still with you. You are not at fault, you can't change the past, but you can change the future.

At the time, I quit everything I had on my hands and reorganized my life to be much more present. Living around for a while, trying to engage and be a part of his life as much as I could: sometimes in innocuous forms (“hey, wanna do that thing you love this week?”), sometimes straight up suggesting therapy.

You know what? No matter how hard I tried, it didn’t work. I wasn’t able to connect more with him at the time, nor to change his viewpoints. The simple act of getting in touch with him became extremely hard, to an extent none of my friends, or relatives that weren’t part of the nuclear family, were able to comprehend. Ultimately, I just think he had decided things wouldn’t just stop there, or something inside him held him back among us mortals, and that’s about it.

All I’m trying to say is don’t blame yourself for this.

We’re all doing our best and it sounds like you were already being a great brotherly figure. Blaise Pascal once said: “The heart has its reasons which reasons knows nothing of”: the inner workings of one’s mind (God’s, in Pascal’s case) are too difficult to penetrate for our logical reasoning. We’re just out there on this planet trying to figure out how to help our loved ones, and sometimes it’s not up to us.

You’re not at fault, and I hope you’ll soon find peace.

It "takes a village" to fulfill a human's social needs. No one's brother can, on their own, fulfill all another's needs. His deep thoughts, his poop jokes, his pillow talk, his watercooler chat? We need whole communities for which no individual can substitute. You might do well to recognize your own social poverty.

I'm sorry that you blame yourself. I tell my siblings not to blame themselves for my depression, isolation, and alienation. The fact is that these are statistical trends evidencing large, multidimensional social structures. They're unassailable by individuals. There was nothing "you" could have done.

A third place could be a coffee shop, a bar, a church, a softball league, a book store, or even just a nice park. By and large people don’t go to these places nearly as much anymore, except to consume and leave. And if they do go there they are on their phones until they finish their transaction and leave.

There's a million examples of this out there, regardless of what you find interesting. Art, music, sport, working out, adventure, travel, computers, flying, whatever.

I find it baffling people keep talking about disappearing third spaces. There's so much opportunity to do interesting things with interesting people!

"Everybody else is doing it" has never been, and still is not, a valid reason for anything. If other parents choose to let their kids ingest mental poison, that does not mean that one should allow their children to do the same. Abstention is not only an option, it is something which absolutely should be enforced by any parent who cares about their child's well being.

30 years ago, unrestrained access was still constrained to a desktop computer hooked to dial-up. Your access was constrained to a physical location.

Today, the big issue is the lure of having 24/7 mobile access to the Internet. At any moment, you can amend your own crafted online digital identity, meshing it with your real life, as you publish your location via Snapchat, Instagram or WhatsApp with your friends. Meanwhile, you can't but be confronted with notifications telling you where your friends are and what they are up to with who ("X has posted a photo, Y is currently at Z").

On a surface level, that lure has created a host of totally new social conventions and etiquette over the past 18 years, basically since the release of the iPhone. Social conventions to which one has to conform unless you don't want to lose out on social connections.

For instance, seeing whether a recipient of a PM has "read" a message and then "leaving you on read". Having that rather unrealistic expectation that one ought to respond instantly once a message has been read. At worst, friendships are put on tenterhooks as one ties value to the time between that "read" notice, and the moment a response follows.

In reality, the world 30 years ago wasn't more beautiful and people weren't more kind then they are today. In fact, if you weren't asked by your friends to hang out, or were left out when they went to a party and had all these in-group stories to tell, you felt socially isolated either way. That's not really new.

What's new is that this new lure of 24/7 connectivity creates a potential to be confronted with those feelings pretty much every waking hour. It must be anxiety inducing to scroll through your feed, not knowing if your friends did or didn't hang out last night without asking you.

To my mind, the answer isn't outright banning social media, or mobile devices. The answer is to keep having that difficult discussion about the value of the affordances - or lack thereof - the offer to foster healthy human relationships. It's about finding better ways to teach and empower young people on how to approach these tools, built by commercial enterprises, in healthy ways. And it's about being willing to properly publicly invest in aspects ranging from education to mental health support to enforcement and so on.

Hence all the attention seekers on FacebInstaTok...

This is further compounded by the pervert effects generated by these platforms one of them being the mimetism and the general wolfpack behaviour that can surge out of the madness of crowds. Online Bullying is real.

My kids (11 and 14) are stuck on feature phones for now and i'd like, as much as possible to keep them off smartphones and their constant Notifications for the foreseeable future, until they are not kids.

Will it change? I doubt it - Google and Facebook are likely too big to fail now, Twitter is still around as a bona-fide hate platform, TikTok is unlikely to go anywhere until something else replaces it…

Banning is exactly the argument against this. They are saying we should do that to protect the mental health of teenagers.

I have heard similar arguments about corporations hehe

Very Rothbardian, Mises and Say would be proud too

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8550560/

happened, past tense. That cultural layer, to a large extent enforced by various religious traditions both in the literal and civic sense, sometimes for better or worse is pretty much gone. Nowadays it largely is a binary question of legal action on the one hand or individual choice on the other.

If you tell people they need to make change within their community 90% are going to ask you, what community? Community with a capital C where people collectively enforce binding rules, rather than occasionally go bowling isn't much of a thing.

Collective change is required and that could include the help of Government, but currently the Government isn’t doing anything, which is the premise of this post. Should they step in and if so, to what degree and how much can they really do.

Wikipedia has a better definition right at the top than I can offer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction

The crucial point is it is characterised by neurological changes that lead to short circuited reward pathways. The idea of addiction to social media a perfectly consistent with its action and moreover, consistent with the notion that its effect can be enhanced by design.

I don't disagree with your answer but... Kids cannot buy alcohol and kids cannot buy cigarettes. It's kinda the whole point of TFA.

The conclusion of TFA aren't to outlaw social media: it's preventing kids from accessing these mediocre piece of shit websites/apps before 16.

As a result governments have stepped in and now there are age restrictions on both smoking and alcohol, blood alcohol limits for driving, lockout laws, no advertisement of cigarettes in supermarkets, additional taxes on cigarettes, plain packaging on cigarettes.

Making something immediately completely illegal isn’t necessarily the correct course of action. But governments have stepped in to try and help people exercise personal accountability.

Disclaimer: the examples are from within Australia

The town square analogy couldn't be further from reality.

But that would be a fraction of what it is now

The biggest problem with the social media systems is that they are normalized. Lots of school and government stuff only comes out on Xitter or Facebook. That's horrible.

It's like dealing with a car salesman. If you engage, you've already lost as you have sooooo much less experience than who you are fighting against.

Arguably, the presence of social media homogenizes the speech we're allowed to have.

It's like we have this generation of people who believe government overreach is a) inevitably the outcome in every scenario; b) present in every situation; c) always the worst possible thing that could happen. As in, literally worse than mass sickness and death.

The more pertinent comparison would be alcohol IMO: none of the people who want "something" done about social media seem to have a problem with the widespread, massive use of alcohol within society and the incredible amounts of continuous and ongoing damage it does.

The problem is how to stop the mob attacking you from using them.

An American equivalent might be if social media existed a 100 years ago and was being used to encourage lynchings. Yes, it really is that bad in some places.

The problem is that FB does moderate things relevant to the US but ignores the rest of the world. They will remove white supremacist material in the US, but not the equivalent elsewhere.

Yes. As an extreme example: watching cheese pizza is not allowed by governments. We have collectively also come together to consider murder as socially and legally unacceptable. We can and should regulate social media if posts read as follows:

- we should invade and bomb that country to bits - we should destroy all places of worship belonging to XYZ religion - we should vote for XYZ because only he is going to save our religion from PQR - and much worse which I can't type here as moderation team of HN would omit those

IMHO: give the current form of social media another few decades and it will come out shinning bright just like opioids did in the USA.

These same social media platforms, when required by law, become very effective in moderation but there's next to no moderation in my country and most of the hate and abuse is counted as just another engagement metrics.

I would however imagine you have some relationships of some kind that you care about. Can you imagine your relationships changing if these others you cared about changed their behaviours? Then extend this imaginary possibility to the relationships of these others. It's a network we are in we are not operating entirely alone.

Care of the other is wanting what is good for the other.

Sometimes this care is not forcing the other to change, sometimes it's encouraging them to change to benefit them as it benefited you.

Because we live in a society?

Would you care if everyone around you was smoking crack, sociopathic or seriously mentally ill?

While a perfectly fine rule of thumb in general, I think you might find the sticking to "I don't care what other people do" as an overriding principle doesn't hold water in a substantial number of edge cases. One such case is where someone is willfully influencing others to act against their best interests, or against the best interest of society as a whole. That's when one needs to make a judgement call on a case by case basis. Is this such a case? Not sure. I just wanted to point out that "I don't care what other people do" can't be your guiding light, always.

I’ve done the same, but it’s not without cost:

- Two hobbies I’m involved with have large local communities on Facebook. I’m not in the loop, and sometimes miss out on events and catchups.

- I’m not on Twitter, and there’s a massive amount of chat about my field (realtime collaborative editing & local first software) that takes place there. I miss out on what’s going on, and I’m reliant on other people to promote my work for me.

Im happier. But it’s you really are cut off from a lot of society - especially in the tech world - if you aren’t on social media.

When I was in high school, Facebook was just opening up access to everyone. I remember literally everyone getting on it, and swapping between messages in MSN, and some posts on FB. We had whole school wide conversations, planning and etc. on social media, and on days when I didn’t get in front of the computer to check things, I remember feeling left out. It’s just so much worse now, because every kid expects every other kid to be on the loop of things 24/7. I think that’s where we screwed up. Having just casual access without mobile phones was the sweet spot, in my opinion.

example from real life:

My local musicians community decided to use only FB to communicate their gigs dates. I refuse to use FB. I no longer know when or where is the gig. I don't see my fellows anymore.

I think a lot of the complaints from people who "cannot stop" is just laziness. They need the government to construct an excuse so they won't have to man up and take control of their own lives.

That is also sad, because it means those people will never grow up but will be constant children in the eyes of the state.

Then I would say there are the 0.01% who do have psychological problems and they need to see a doctor.

If you do live in a society, you do need to care, as "what others do" affects society in general, including you in the end. Affects how they behave, how they vote, what causes they support, their mental health, and tons of other things, all of which end up also affecting those who don't use those apps.

This is libertarian virtue signalling that simply does not stand up to reality.

Most (like 90%) businesses don’t have a website or when they have, it’s a static website. All the news are on social medias behind nag screens.

Histeria (and the virbrator), ice pick lobotomies, electro shock therapy, Quaalude, Benzodiazepines (valium) as mothers little helpers, MAOI's, SRRI's (PSSD), Benzodiazepines again (Xanax, klonipin). <<< (Hint all of these things turned out to be DEEPLY fucked up)

And for good measure a few variations of adrenal Ritalin and other methamphetamines.

Maybe, just maybe, and hear me out on this, we have more people with mental health issues because "self diagnosis" and "self identifications" can get you a prescription. Maybe, just maybe more people have mental health issues because there is a whole fucking industry designed to profit off of problems that have a "diagnostic criteria" and not a "test". Maybe just maybe we should remember that the "reproducibility crisis" has some of its worst offenders in psychiatry and psychology.

Or you know blame social media, like we did for books, radio, tv, Elvis and rock, rap and metal, video games, 4chan and now....

The parent commenter propose that you can not escape the negative consequences of social media, even if you fully restrain yourself, as you have the second order effects from your friends using it.

The parent commenter says that this is not an individual problem and cannot be solved on an individual level. It is a macro issue.

Just like you stopping eating meat will not really make a dent on global warming.

I think that is very insightful.

We grew up at a time where SMS was a thing when I became 16. I know that keeping up is cool, but social media is a disease. The amount of dumb and uneducated people that couldn't even listen to expert advice during a fucking pandemic is driving me up the wall.

I'm annoyed mainly because people around me make bad decisions that have an influence on my own life.

Its easy to say, that's the parents responsibility and that is a correct statement but most families require 2 working parents these days, most of whom are not tech savvy enough to understand how to limit social media or access to questionable sites.

Social media is an addictive, mind altering poison by design. Through the pervasiveness of echo chambers and intentionally addictive features such as endless scrolling and recommendations it seeks to do nothing except turn its users into revenue by keeping them online and seeing / clicking ads.

I lost my sister to it as she became so wrapped in the political side of it that any belief besides hers and those she followed meant you were a borderline nazi.

Sorry, I see this a lot but: oh well? They'll get over it. Social media on the other hand gets its hooks in deep.

If every teenager were guzzling gallons of soda everyday and telling them to stop "alienated and ostracized" them, I'd still do it for the good of their health.

if thats the case, then surely it would be reflected in the studies? (assuming that the studies are reproducible....)

If you run against convention too much, even when convention is wrong, you become the zealot guardian, which conjures a family situation with its own distinct pathologies.

The scale, extent and addictiveness of these two things are nothing compared to algorithmic social media though.

They all use Discord and/or Snapchat here in Australia. No one I've every asked about this cares about Android vs iPhone. No one.

No one apart from the Parents uses the built in messaging and SMS.

But then the Parent groups all use Facebook Messenger for most group comms.

The whole green / blue bubble thing is either over played by the Press or purley a US Phenomenon.

But given the marketshare of the iPhone with teenagers in the US, it seems it's possibly less of an issue its made out to be due to the fact that most people have iPhones anyway!

Your good friends and friendships will survive that, no doubt, but you do lose out on opportunities to make additional or deeper connections.

Is this something to do with the US healthcare system? Can you elaborate please?

(BTW if it is, one of my friends who is a type-1 diabetic was involved in the very political "humanitarian airdrop" of insulin to the USA. - so I kind of get it)