But if things interest you, does that not also provide dopamine? If the interesting things are easily available, are they "free" and addictive and bad? If they're good because they're interesting, is TikTok not interesting to those who like it? If you had a pinball machine and it distracted you, would that be bad, or a hobby? Is TikTok more compelling than pinball because of the algorithm? Is the algorithm not merely providing things that will likely interest you? Is interest bad now?

> If I can get distracted from my real world tasks anytime, anywhere, the immediate incentives to work on real things disappear. Effectively, one can get stuck in a local minimum.

> I don't know how to solve it, ...

> but personally I've chosen to block as many feeds/algorithms as I can, ...

I think you solved it :) (at least, for yourself)

There are many things "out there" that are addictive and distracting and thus unhealthy, but we all have to find some way to overcome

I just bought a flip phone and a cool pocket sized camera. I've gotten down to leaving my phone at home a fair amount, and leave my phone on a speaker that's not near anything I sit on when at home.

It's awesome, come on back out to reality. I frequently go out at this point, come back home and go to see if I have any messages and realize my phone was on me the whole time and I had no idea (I also silence pretty much everything...).

I'm super pumped to have an actual camera to play with that's pocket sized too since I did miss the camera. But now I'll have something tremendously superior and can leave that aging device filled with way too many 2FA codes I don't want to inadvertently lose at home.

This is what drugs and alcohol can become if not used in moderation.

Once we have the AI holodeck (the full-sensory interactive, possibly multiplayer one), can you only imagine?

TikTok is only the punch card phase of this. TikTok may as well be black and white television. Just imagine what we might have in twenty years.

Maybe this is why we haven't found alien life. If their biologies have attention mechanisms like ours, maybe they automate highs and turn inward instead of outward. (I do like that better than AGI gray goo taking over galaxies.)

I was reading a few weeks ago that it's more about easy dopamine rather than free that is so incredibly destructive.

Scrolling for hits of satisfying novelty is a proposition that will not be sustainably met.

Part of me also wonders if things like this can be used for not so great things, can they be used for good things?

> But I feel the exact same about cheeseburgers.

The problem with analogies to things like cheeseburgers, gambling, drugs, cigarettes, etc., is:

1. Availability -- you have to go somewhere to acquire/participate in these things*

2. Cost -- you have to have money to spend. That is, it's not something you can consume/participate in for free -- you have to have money to spend.

* Gambling is theoretically freely available via gambling apps. But still comes at a cost.

With social media, anybody can do it for unlimited amounts of time, and for free. All you need is a phone/laptop/desktop with internet access -- which nearly every person on the planet has.

Addiction + Free + Widely available = Destruction

To add, McDonalds is required to list calories and nutritional information. There are various agencies and regulations guarding us from them selling us rat meat instead of cow. Education on “junk food” is widespread and has (had…) widespread government education programs.

There is a great deal of information given to parents on what is in McDonalds.

I would say that most parents, not those on a tech site, have no idea how tiktok works, what studies have shown about it or its dangers.

I think the line is the same as vapes/cigarettes. It's less about the product itself and more how its advertised and marketed. Internal memos from Meta are pretty damning in that they know they're actively harming kids and not adjusting their product for harm reduction. I imagine TikTok has the same problem, prompting them to settle out early.

You're getting some mild heat in sibling comments here. Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation goes into a lot of detail on this exact point about parental responsibility.

There are others that touch on personal vs. societal responsibility too and the difficulties with parental/personal moderation and change (Stolen Focus by Johann Hari and Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke off the top of my head).

There is an enormous amount of nuance that goes into answering your questions and addressing your assumptions that HN is probably not a great medium for, if you're serious about understanding the answers.

What if while you were eating a cheeseburger, McDonald’s was magically replenishing that burger so that no matter how much you kept eating there was still some left. Moreover you had little control over the ratios of fat and sugar used to replenish it and they earned more the longer you spent eating it. Would you consider them harming you if they were prioritising stuffing it with ingredients that maximised the amount you ate and ignored sensible limits on sugar and fat?

> Should I be able to sue McDonalds if I let my kid eat 100 of them in one sitting?

If McDonald’s is handing them out for free at the playground, yes.

The evidence doesn’t seem to support your claim that cheeseburgers are as addicting as social media.

Maybe if you had picked gambling or alcohol…

China imposes strong restrictions on the Chinese version of TikTok, see here:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069527/china-ti...

Excerpts: Douyin [Chinese version of TikTok] introduced in-app parental controls, banned underage users from appearing in livestreams, and released a “teenager mode” that only shows whitelisted content, much like YouTube Kids. In 2019, Douyin limited users in teenager mode to 40 minutes per day, accessible only between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. Then, in 2021, it made the use of teenager mode mandatory for users under 14.

My personal vice is junk food. I wish they banned junk food. I'm not sure how the law would work but it would be objectively better for me as a human if they did.

(This is completely disregarding how practical such a ban would be)

Food and nutritional science is something many of us know (to a degree) and has been taught often in high schools. That is partly why you know that cheeseburgers aren't great for you, because you know they're highly processed, high in salt and high in fat and that's written on the label.

But the knowledge of the harmful impacts of social media aren't as abundant, nor are they identified or classified.

McDonalds are required to list the nutritional information of what you're consuming. TV shows and movies have content ratings to know what you're going to be consuming. Social media like Tiktok does not have any form of rating to know what you're consuming or going to consume.

There is a lot of less rigour on short from content like Tiktok, in comparison with McDonalds.

>Should I be able to sue McDonald's if I let my kid eat 100 of them in one sitting?

If RJ Reynolds was handing out free cigarettes to children, even though the parent either consented to this or simply didn't know about it, would you consider RJ Reynolds' responsible for the adverse effects of children smoking?

The difference between social media and cheeseburgers here is that I don't NEED to physically go to McDonald's to find out if a business is closed or learn more about their work. (The number of businesses that only post operational updates, specials or samples of their work on Instagram is staggering. Google Maps isn't trustworthy; websites DEFINITELY aren't trustworthy either.)

> Should I be able to sue McDonalds if I let my kid eat 100 of them in one sitting?

There are other options for addressing social problems besides lawsuits. Other rich places in this world are not nearly as fat as us. I suspect environments also matter for social media addiction. We should investigate why!

> I just don't really know where the line

It is developed to be as addictive like a drug, but it’s not even fun. Just stupid mind numbing content.gambling does the same thing, and many jurisdictions have outlawed it for minors.

Yes, you should be able to recover damages from McDonald's if they made their food addictive on purpose.

> Should I be able to sue McDonalds if I let my kid eat 100 of them in one sitting?

Should you be able to sue a liquor store if they sell your kid a fifth of vodka?

it was sold so israel could have more control over the narratives visible. nothing to do with any real safety concerns

The thing I really liked about Tiktok originally was the departure from the perfectionism of Instagram, and people being ok with participating in the dance moves and trends. It was pretty positive. The thing is once you have an engaged audience sometimes you might want to keep them captivated (and their attention farmed to resell ads to).

With that being said, I don't know if McDonalds is not a really usable comparison.

McDonalds is not an endless conveyor belt of food arriving in your hands 24/7 and beeping and buzzing you when it's not to learning how and what to put in front of you to keep eating endlessly until you can't eat anymore.

There's more useful studies that doomscrolling and shorts literally decrease brain size, increase depression, and lead to dopamine exhaustion.

Short Video players are digital slot machines. They seem to be designed to let people keep using it who might not be aware on how to build up defences, or of defences are needed. In a casino many of the things the games machines can and can't do are legislated by law. It might be surprising to learn how many of those things out right, similar to it, or unique to it can happen on a phone without circumstance. Casinos will also remind you to gamble responsibly, and be able to ban yourself if needed.

The line is really simple for kids - screens loaded with bright colors that are constantly changing with many layers of sounds from ages 1-5 pretty harmful at overriding their senses. Then, there's other content traps from there. The recent moves to schools that go screen free (or greatly reduce passive consumption) is critical. Putting a chromebook in front of a kid for 8 hours isn't always progress.

The US has executed people in international waters over the claim of fentanyl being trafficked into the country. Is Insta and TikTok as addictive as fentanyl? If so, does it warrant a similar response? I think a cheeseburger is not an equivalent analogy. Singapore also executes drug traffickers, for what it’s worth.

https://www.techpolicy.press/is-tiktok-digital-fentanyl/

https://www.foxnews.com/media/tiktok-is-chinas-digital-fenta...

> Certainly, some regard social media generally as addictive, and reckon TikTok is a particularly potent format. Anna Lembke, Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic, and author of the book Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance In The Age of Abundance, referred to Tiktok as a "potent and addictive digital drug":

> I can’t speak to the surveillance piece mentioned in the article, but I can attest to the addictive nature of TikTok and other similar digital media. The human brain is wired to pay attention to novelty. One of the ways our brain gets us to pay attention to novel stimuli is by releasing dopamine, a reward neurotransmitter, in a part of the brain called the reward pathway. What TikTok does is combine a moving image, already highly reinforcing to the human brain, with the novelty of a very short video clip, to create a potent and addictive digital drug.

I'm trying to read this with the best of intentions, but you're saying you really can not tell the difference social media and a cheeseburger in terms of access, addiction, and damage?

Cheeseburgers did not come about with the intent to poison. Social media is deliberately weaponized.

> Should I be able to sue McDonalds if I let my kid eat 100 of them in one sitting?

Should you be able to sue McDonald's if they delivered you unlimited cheeseburgers for free, said nothing of the dangers, and even encouraged you to eat more, and then you became obese/sick from it? Sure, it may have been your choice to accept/eat them, but you did so uninformed, and based on false premises, and the risks were hidden from you, or even explicitly downplayed.

That's what social media is. It's free delivery of unlimited cheeseburgers, but for your brain.

In the above example, you were tempted with something that seemed good, but that carried great risks, to generate business for another who knew of the risks, but either didn't tell you, or even lied to you. When the risks backfire on you -- the risks they knew about from the very start -- or even have already been backfiring on you for a while, I think it's absolutely fair to blame that business for knowingly tempting you into it, and that it's also absolutely fair to seek damages. Proving those damages is another matter, but I think it's absolutely fair to try.

Tech companies know exactly what they are doing. They deliberately sell crack to kids- some of the people who make money from it are here on HN so good luck with getting any honest discussion.

"Again, I get the danger here..."

Haha, wtf. You don't.

It is a bellwether trial, a test of sorts combining hundreds of similar cases. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellwether_trial

This is the first of many lawsuits that was exactly the same.

Not much.

Class action suites suffer immensely from bad actors freeloading on the backs of people actually harmed. I have a friend who practices law in the area on some pretty high profile medical cases, it's a chronic problem trying to weed out people who were affected from people who shamelessly want money. Basically people playing victim to steal from actual victims, and even worse, the side doing the weeding is the side who originated the harm.

I hope nothing. Maybe if enough people rightfully sue, then these companies will be forced into going out of business since we can't put the executives away for the crimes.

It would be nice if we lived in a world where civil lawsuits were not the only way to gain any recompense from companies greed, as well.

The law protects companies but rarely binds them, and the law binds citizens but rarely protects them. This is the only recourse, in our land where wealth and power mean more than the rule of law.

I'm fully against censorship, and I don't want it covered up, but at some point profiting off of the suffering of others and distracting people with holocaust porn or influencer virtue signaling is self defeating. What did all of that social audience gain? Clicks, entertainment, dollars, while children died? That's disgusting.

And in the end is there anything of value left, any documentation of what happened, or how to prevent it from happening again? Nope. That thankless unprofitable work is done by others and ignored by the same consumers.

TikTok's algorithm is significantly better and therefore more addictive. I'm speaking from personal experience, having spent about 12-14 hours a day on TikTok for probably 360 days during 2024. Getting banned from it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Too bad it only happened in Jan 2025. Will never get that year back, or the mental health I lost from it. (I'm not going to sue, though I could definitely win such a suit.)

(in addition to other replies) I believe there was a study on brainrot where, acrosss a few different platforms, TikTok was significantly worse than e.g. Youtube. (sry, on mobile or I'd ref. hopefully later...)

They are also defendants in the same lawsuit, but they have not settled.

Because TikTok basically popularitised short form content, which is considered a more addictive form that what instagram and youtube does outside of their reels and shorts.

Oh, they’re coming for IG, too:

“IG is a drug”: Internal messages may doom Meta at social media addiction trial

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/tiktok-settles-h...

(regardless of the fact Google is included in the suit;) Youtube is a different model I think. Yes you can burn time with it forever if you are bored, but it's not the relentless dopamine machine gun that IG and Tiktok deliver. (which is why YT tried to get in on that with shorts, but failed).

Tiktok, Instagram and I think X are all getting sued at the same time.

"The defendants now include Meta - which owns Instagram and Facebook and YouTube parent Google. Snapchat settled with the plaintiff last week."

TikTok is not being singled out in this trial; the plaintiff is suing all the Socials; TikTok is merely the one to have settled most recently:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/tiktok-settles-h...

Did you read the article? Snapchat, Meta and Google are also defendants. Snapchat and now Tiktok have settled.

> We limit screen time pretty aggressively, but it's getting harder as they get older.

Curious into what kind of example you as a parent are setting in limiting screen time for yourself. For me, it's easy as I'm an old fart that has had a longer time without devices than with one while also not participating in the socials. We now have parents that have had a device for the majority of their life having kids that will never know a time without devices. So this is an honest bit of curiosity at the risk of sounding judgemental.

I think a major part of the difficulty is because kids (and arguably adults even more) are practically forced to use screens for schoolwork.

Can't really be without a phone when they need to meet up with friends either. Completely going against smartphones and screens could end up isolating them.

I mean, why not be concerned about both lol? We can do two things at once I think, and both of those things sound fairly negative.

Not drinking or gambling works so well for alcoholics and gamblers. Who needs rehab anyway?

Nice straw man.

Nobody is talking about banning anything, we’re talking specifically about holding social media companies accountable for marketing to children a product that is knowingly addictive and potentially harmful to their health.

Part of the issue with social media is that no reasonable parent lets their 12 year old watch porn or drink but Instagram and ticktock are on a lot more 12 year old’s phone’s than you realize. Social media has network effects and creates tremendous social pressure to not make your kid “different” when half the classroom is sharing TikToks.

I’m not conservative in the slightest but I see no reason to treat social media any differently than alcohol, tobacco or gambling. Available without restriction to adults but limited to children under a certain age.

That's not how addiction works. If you could "just stop" then it isn't really an addiction.

Tell that to a drug user. It works the same way.

And when the app is developed purposely to make people addict, that’s an issue.

You can’t just blame the user when their chance to have a normal app usage have been rigged.

It is not about Trump. Think a little deeper.