Social media, even before the era of dark patterns and 'engagement' maximization was still extremely addictive. It just had a less pronounced effect in large part because fewer people were using it. For instance there was a time when Facebook was university only and invite only.

And this is all for people that are of the 'legal age' so to speak using it. For kids, who are going to be even more insecure, have more ongoing brain development, and such - I think the idea of creating a non-addictive or non-harmful social media is basically a nonstarter. The same is true of use by adults as well, but we generally are more accepting of adults' right to engage in self destructive behaviors.

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