I think the extent to which social media addiction is an artificial/cultivated problem as opposed to a natural/emergent problem is dramatically overstated in general.
One of the websites I’m addicted to checking is lesswrong.com. Is that because it’s part of a corporate system optimized for money? No! It’s because it’s optimized for surfacing interesting content! Other of my addictions are tumblr and discord, which have light-to-no recommender systems.
I think discourse around social media would be a lot saner of people stopped blaming shadowy corporations for what is more like a flaw in human nature.
My problem with reducing internet usage is that I stop reading the less interesting websites first, but then what remains is the more interesting websites and that makes it even more difficult to turn off the web browser. These days it is mostly just LW and ACX, but even that is a ton of text.
That said, the corporations can make it all much worse. On LW, it is my choice whether to read something or not, but in theory if I resisted the temptation to read everything useful, the tools are there. As opposed to e.g. Facebook, which keeps my contacts hostage and pushes tons of unwanted content on me.
I wonder if I could design a tool to help me overcome the human weakness without missing out some important things, what would it be. For example, to overcome the fear of missing out, a tool could regularly download content to a local database, and only show it to me when I want. Group articles by topic. Make summaries of discussions. Make summaries of individual articles, or maybe even one long summary for the entire topic. Everything with the possibility to show the original content, but not unless I actively click it.
I think the extent to which social media addiction is an artificial/cultivated problem as opposed to a natural/emergent problem is dramatically overstated in general.
One of the websites I’m addicted to checking is lesswrong.com. Is that because it’s part of a corporate system optimized for money? No! It’s because it’s optimized for surfacing interesting content! Other of my addictions are tumblr and discord, which have light-to-no recommender systems.
I think discourse around social media would be a lot saner of people stopped blaming shadowy corporations for what is more like a flaw in human nature.
My problem with reducing internet usage is that I stop reading the less interesting websites first, but then what remains is the more interesting websites and that makes it even more difficult to turn off the web browser. These days it is mostly just LW and ACX, but even that is a ton of text.
That said, the corporations can make it all much worse. On LW, it is my choice whether to read something or not, but in theory if I resisted the temptation to read everything useful, the tools are there. As opposed to e.g. Facebook, which keeps my contacts hostage and pushes tons of unwanted content on me.
I wonder if I could design a tool to help me overcome the human weakness without missing out some important things, what would it be. For example, to overcome the fear of missing out, a tool could regularly download content to a local database, and only show it to me when I want. Group articles by topic. Make summaries of discussions. Make summaries of individual articles, or maybe even one long summary for the entire topic. Everything with the possibility to show the original content, but not unless I actively click it.