This feels pedantic but there was a survey posted on HN very recently across the US which showed that 60% dislike it. This means a whopping 40% of people either want it or don't care.

I can tell you from observing high schoolers for a week, everybody there was using it, teachers and students alike. Do they like it? I don't know, but they are using it.

The numbers against it aren't as big as the most vocal critics would have you believe.

People use things they dislike and believe to be bad for society all the time.

It has been a majority opinion that social media is a net negative for society since, what, 2016? But Facebook and Twitter didn't vanish that year, or in any of the years since, despite ever increasing shares of people believing they are harming us. Tumblr and Reddit users have been calling their respective forums "this hell-site" since around 2014, but that didn't make them go away. "Doomscrolling" has been in dictionaries since 2020.

This isn't some crazy concept, it has a million names when looked at from different angles:

Addiction, Perverse incentive, Cognitive Dissonance, Ego Depletion, The Tragedy of the Commons, The Prisoner's Dilemma, Pareto Divergence, Externalities, The Multipolar Trap, The Race to the Bottom, The Collective Action Problem, Coordination Failure, Pluralistic Ignorance, Normalization of Deviance.

This is exactly how almost all bad things and behaviors are able to exist. Not because people think bad things are good, even the worst tyrants dislike tyranny, but because the incentives of the environment make them the right choice for the person in the moment.

I suspect you'll get similar results on the subject of high schoolers and social media: everyone uses it, quite a lot of them are unhappy with the outcome, but realize that you can't afford to not play the game.

Why wouldn't you use the cheat-at-homework machine?

A high-school teacher I'm friends with observed that her students all use ChatGPT, but will also scold her if they observe her using it, which she does, to save time.

Part of me wishes it didn’t exist (again).

Part of me likes having an easy mode button for so many things.

But all of me knows I can’t be the one person who can’t leverage it.

People can use something and still not like it.