Personalised is too vague of a term. IMO what destroyed social media was ending the chronological friends feed. When social media stopped being photos from your friends and family and started becoming endless content creator posts and ragebait.

Social media should not show any posts from people you haven’t friended.

You could make social media based on anonymous queries without personalization or likes. It wouldn't be useless, it would just be unrecognizable as social media.

Personally I would prioritize banning things like smoking, alcohol and meat.

But then again, it’s kinda a free world. You can’t just ban everything. I think an age ban is a good middle road.

> these apps are virtually useless without personalization

Social media was popular before the algorithmically tuned endless scroll.

Regulation by powerful for profit companies who spend more on mind control than many countries gdp is ok though right?

Freedom and all that.

Porn is way more regulated and the addiction to it is not a mental health pandemic like social media addiction

The worst part are other parents that don't give a shit. You wouldn't have to fight if everyone would keep their kids off socials.

I live with my older in laws and it’s not just affecting the younger generation. The older generation will also happily doom scroll whatever slop the algorithm feeds them. Usually not uplifting stuff…

A society without rules is not really a society.

You can't have freedom if a few people have a microphone that reaches hundreds of millions of people have zero responsibilities for how they use that microphone.

If you actually haven't used social media recently then I get why you'd be confused, because back in the day Facebook had a chronological timeline of people you specifically added in. The way a modern social media recommender algorithms work is completely different. If you, for example, say "I want to hear everything that Bob has to say" by "subscribing" to Bob or whatever, you "might" see when Bob says something, or instead you "might" see Mary's post from the other side of the world that has some strangely aggressive opinions about someone the billionaire platform owner happens to hate.

Social media companies have decided by buddying up to the US administration that they get to decide what everyone around you sees or hears. If a couple of billionaires decide that they don't like phyzix5761 you might just get lynched by an angry mob. That's not gonna do much for your freedom, in-fact it's kind of the opposite.

It is easy to say that we shouldn't limit what a person is allowed to do. That a person should be allowed to use their free will. That sounds nice because nobody want to be controlled by anyone else. But let's turn it upside down and instead say that we disallow companies from doing certain things.

- Instead of saying that a person may not install unsafe wall sockets, we can say that companies are not allowed to sell unsafe wall sockets. - Instead of saying that a person may not take any job they like, we can say that companies must provide workplace safety. - Instead of saying that people are not allowed to smoke or use social media, we can say that companies are not allowed to sell addictive products.

So it is a question of perspective where both viewpoints are valid.

And of course addictive is a scale from nicotine to deep fried chicken to infinite scroll. And then it is a question about the customer's ability to see through and make rational choices which of course depend on age, knowledge, existing alternatives etc. It is not that easy for a teenager to resist the works of thousands of engineers and data statisticians who are working on increasing retention.

So just saying that it should be allowed because of Free Will is to ignore all the complexities around it.

The personalised feeds is the whole point of their reason of being. No personalisation no profits. There just isn't a world where these huge companies can exist without personalised feeds. Meta platforms as well as YT would die and you would have instead something like Nebula which you pay for like Netflix but offers content creators content. Most people wouldn't pay for Nebula and so, you are back to the original point. People would put pressure to restore personalised feeds. Everyone supports these bans until they are the target of them.

This isn't a technological problem but a human one. The fundamental problem is that we haven't developed generalisable, scalable and profitable business models on the internet that aren't toxic.