The general problem is that nobody actually needs cigarettes but communication is fundamental to the human experience. How do you even propose to define "social media" in a way that can distinguish between it and any other public forum for discussion?

The actual problem is not that kids are using group communications technology, it's that the network effect in public interaction has been captured by private companies with a perverse incentive to maximize engagement.

That's just as much of a problem for adults as for teenagers and the solution doesn't look anything like "ban people from using this category of thing" and instead looks something like "require interoperability/federation" so there isn't a central middle man sitting on the chokepoint who makes more money the more time people waste using the service.

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dylan604 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> but communication is fundamental to the human experience.

Humans survived well before the internet, the telephone, the telegraph, or even international post.

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AnthonyMouse 3 hours ago | parent [-]

In those days they did this by having physical public spaces for interaction, which we've since priced people out of through artificial scarcity of real estate via zoning laws. And even if people were willing to solve that one, it would take time to actually build new buildings, and doing that would have to be done first.

It's also assuming that we're willing to abandon a technological capacity (not having to personally travel to someone's location to communicate with them) that humans have had since before Moses came down from the mountain, which seems like a fairly silly constraint to impose when there are obviously better alternatives available.

	▲	pinnochio 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> In those days they did this by having physical public spaces for interaction, which we've since priced people out of through artificial scarcity of real estate via zoning laws. IDK where to begin with this, because we clearly do have physical public spaces for interaction, whether free like parks or not free like coffee shops. People also hang out at each others' homes. Moreover, supply of public spaces increases when there's demand, much of which is being soaked up by social media. You're also acting like we can't meaningfully distinguish between social media and other forms of communication and that we have to be all or nothing about it, which is a bewildering take. Even social media can be meaningfully distinguished in terms of design features. Facebook back when it was posting on friends' walls, no likes, comments, shares, friend/follower counts, or feeds, was fun and mostly harmless. LinkedIn was genuinely useful when the feed was nothing more than professional updates. They've all since morphed into toxic cesspools of social comparison, parasociality, polarization, disinformation, and other problems. Interoperability/federation doesn't solve those problems: most of the interoperable and federated solutions actually perpetuate them, because the problematic design features are part of the spec.