A question for whoever reads this:
How do you think society will eventually conquer social media addiction? Or if you think we won't how do you think this affects humanity?
I would appreciate it if you help my question spread further by boosting it.
There was a business insider article a few days ago about how instagram has been migrating from a social media platform into a content creator platform (https://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-dead-instagram-tiktok-bereal-replaced-group-chats-messaging-2023), Facebook has been trying to break into other industries with the meta rebrand for a few years, and i expect its because their social side is becoming less profitable
So I think the real question might be should/how should you fight media addiction in general
@gpowerf Social media is just a mechanism.
When did we conquer our letter-writing addiction? When the phone was popularized.
When did we conquer our phone addiction? When texting came about.
Humans aren't addicted to social media; they're addicted to being social. Social media just gives us a relatively safe space to quell those social desires with groups more like-minded than could be easily found offline.
So, to answer your question, we'll get over our social media addiction when the next, more addictive thing comes along... probably a device to allow us to upload our thoughts to the internet in real time with an ML algo to choose which thoughts are post-worthy and which thoughts go straight to the ad network for "more relevant content".
@gpowerf If it's a true addiction, then we'll treat it with harm-reduction measures like we (hopefully) use for drugs.
If it's a compulsion, then we'll use the same tools used to treat other compulsion.
If it's a shame-based stigma like "porn addiction", then we'll provide support to its users.
@gpowerf But for many people, I expect "social media addiction" is a pseudo-addiction, where people seek it and use it because it addresses an otherwise-unmet need.
@gpowerf
My hunch is that traditional 'social' media is just eventually going to die off because it's just incredibly difficult to make money off it- even with ads
Twitter has only ever very rarely made a profit, I think snapchat has never made money. Reddit still isn't profitable