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Comment by achikin | Hacker News Reader

Because it is proven that phone usage is not an addiction like drugs or alcohol. People put phones away easily if they have a reason to do so.

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They aren't physically addictive like alcohol or opiates but it's very clear that many people have a psychological dependency on them. Whether or not a psychological dependency counts as an addiction is up to debate (personally, I believe they are due to my experiences with self harm, which many people including myself were or are psychologically dependant on) but the differences are mostly semantic if they end up functionally the same

I have no idea what you are talking about. It walks and quacks exactly like drugs and alcohol.

Thousands of deaths every year are caused by drivers on cell phones. You'd think they'd have a reason to put them away.

There are a lot of reasons for distraction while driving, but we don’t call all of them addiction on that premise. If a driver was not looking at his phone - maybe he’d be looking at something else. The phone is not the reason - it’s just a very suitable object.

this is thoroughly debunked with hard data from distracted driving laws that focus on phone use while driving. We have the luxury of both before and after data and across different jurisidictions.

I agree, but something being distraction does not automatically mean it’s addictive. Gear shifting is a distraction, but we don’t consider it addictive.

Citation needed

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6174603/

The main idea here is that overuse not equals addiction.

The first part of the Results section says:

    [...] the majority of research in the field declares that smartphones are addictive

Though that section continues on to disagree with that majority, "the majority" declaring smartphones are addictive is certainly supportive of them being so.

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