> good luck forcing Meta

When I was a kid there were fines for factories that polluted water. Most of the time they were not found out, and when they did they just paid the fine that it was cheaper than to solve the problem.

Regulations changed, factories that polluted water got closed until they fixed the problem. Most factory owners fear the regulation, they are extremely pro-active to avoid breaking the law because the consequences are not worth it. (This trend reversed a decade ago when punishments started to be less harsh and government became more pro-business using the euphemism for corrupt)

It is possible to reign in Meta. Parents should be angry enough to bring governments down for letting tech treat their children as products. When citizens are angry change happens and becomes unavoidable.

> highly personalised recommendations, autoplay and infinite scroll

Didn't tiktok get hit with this earlier in the year? Has tiktok removed these features for European users?

Young people are drinking much less alcohol now. Some people call it a crisis. It's probably related to the reason they date less and have less sex and do less of all the other things you're not supposed to do but people did anyway, and that reason probably has something to do with social media taking their attention instead.

Yes, that would help. Putting regulatory caps on the strength of alcoholic drinks would probably go a long way towards reducing harm across all of society.

Of course there will be bootleggers, but the benefits would probably outweigh any of the incidental drawbacks.

And I say this as someone who drinks. I would be fine with regulation like this and making a sacrifice of something small I enjoy if it meant greater good across society.

Good idea. There’s an objective measure of alcohol content. All you need to do to make this analogy work is to create one for social media. Best of luck with that.

What’s your point? We do this.

NA beer now exists. Beer and wine places can’t sell liquor. Alcohol sales aren’t 24/7 in many places.

In quite a few countries, you can drink less-acoholic drinks, eg. beer and wine, much younger than high-alcohol drinks, eg. whiskey, vodka, etc.

Germany is one such example.

Back then, you had 20, 30, 50 'friends' on facebook and basically all the content you saw was made by them. Except for chatting, you could basically view all the 'daily content' (all the posts by everyone you had on your friends list) in maybe 10 minutes.

Then facebook turned to "let's show you random political articles instead of your friends dinner plates", and people moved to instagram... which stopped showing your friends dinner plates soon after it got bought out by facebook and it too replaced the friends dinner plates with random "reels".

If the kids only saw stuff posted by their 'friends', instead of being pushed a lot of random garbage they never decided to 'follow', it would still be a much nicer place.

>> Social media, even before the era of dark patterns and 'engagement' maximization was still extremely addictive.

I disagree. When you only saw what you followed you ran out of 'content' regularly. For example, it was a common feature on Twitter clients to maintain your scroll position in your feed because keeping up to date with it and reading it in its entirety was the norm. Same goes for Facebook. Your friends only posted so much content. The 'addictive' aspect was you had to check regularly to see if there was new content. That is very very different from endless feeds full of content that is forced in front of you by the algorithm,

it isn't about avoiding all harm as sociallity itself is harmful, it's about software not hijacking/exploiting our cognition especially in times when this would mess with our development