The problem with analogies to things like cheeseburgers, gambling, drugs, cigarettes, etc., is:
1. Availability -- you have to go somewhere to acquire/participate in these things*
2. Cost -- you have to have money to spend. That is, it's not something you can consume/participate in for free -- you have to have money to spend.
* Gambling is theoretically freely available via gambling apps. But still comes at a cost.
With social media, anybody can do it for unlimited amounts of time, and for free. All you need is a phone/laptop/desktop with internet access -- which nearly every person on the planet has.
To your points I would add the following difference between TikTok on the one hand and cheeseburgers, drugs, cigarettes, etc. on the other.
3. Targeting -- even under the (debatable) premise that they are intentionally designed to be addictive, cheeseburgers, drugs and cigarettes do not actively target each addict by optimising their properties to their individual addiction.
If I am addicted to smoking, the tobacco industry does indeed try to keep me hooked, among other things by offering me many flavours and alternatives. However, the cigarettes I personally consume are not constantly adjusting their formula, appearance and packet design specifically to satisfy my tastes and desires.
Yes. Target the algorithms, not the method of delivery. Hacker news also counts as social media, but here we all are seeing the same feed on the same site with minimal (if not zero) tracking to try and extract info from the audience.
Even a first step of requiring transparency in the algorithms would quickly shatter this stronghold on people's minds.
Indeed. In fact, you may notice I explicitly left out gambling from the list of 'non targeted' addictions. The reason for that is that the delivery methods for gambling cover the whole gamut from zero to fully personalised targeting, and I didn't want that to distract from the point.
case in point: lots of places have lots of restrictions (either through legislation or just industry norms, usually a combination of both) about advertising for alcohol or tobacco.
And those efforts seem effective to me, at least anecdotally. I don't feel particularly bad about those restrictions either.
Social media companies are also regulated, but we are talking about whether social media companies should be liable for creating addictive content when porn has the same qualities of being easily available and free.
> having spent about 12-14 hours a day on TikTok for probably 360 days during 2024
That's a mind blowing statistic, and I'm sure this is much more common than we think.
This is why I hope we wake up and realize that social media is going to be the ruin of our society. I hope this trial is the beginning of the end of social media platforms that prey on addictive behaviors.
Sometimes when I notice friends drop off from attending things or talking in group chats, if it's because they have fallen in some pit of social media / internet addiction. I agree it's probably more common than we think because the people who have fallen in to this state are the least visible.
I think AI is going to level the playing field with all these bots that have been used for things like this (including scalpers for those low supply/high demand items), and retailers will (hopefully) have no choice but to address the issue once everyone starts to use/abuse them.
Not to mention a (potentially illegal?) 100% overlay for cookies that only has an “accept” button.
EDIT: there is at least a way to reject them by clicking the link to manage cookies. Still debatable whether this is legal, but at the very least, a dark pattern.
On Twitter/X "for you" feed, I'm frequently served posts by handles that are openly hostile toward Wikipedia. The most often cited reason is excessive fundraising / bloat (previously it was bias). But in my opinion, whatever bloat the Wikipedia organization suffers from, it is still a better alternative than all the other ad/engagement driven platforms.
For a top-10 Internet website it's not "bloated" at all, if anything it's still running on a shoestring budget. And the fundraising ends up supporting a huge variety of technical improvements and less known "sister" projects that are instrumental in letting the community thrive and be relevant for the foreseeable future. Sure, you could keep the existing content online for a lot less than what they're asking for, but that's not what folks are looking for when they visit the site. Keeping a thriving community going takes a whole lot of effort especially in this day and age, where a vast majority of people just use the Internet for 100% casual entertainment, not productive activity.
To be clear, I'm not hating on Wikipedia, just their (IMO) overly-strong push for donations.
The first word in my OP was "Except", and that was genuine -- I agree with the parent post, just outside of this one gripe. I definitely get value from it -- either directly through visits, or indirectly through it training LLMs I use.
And I don't mind them asking for support. I just disagree with how they ask, and how often they ask.
I feel like a simple persistent yet subtle "Support Wikipedia" link/button may be just as effective, and at the very most, a 30-pixel high banner once a year or so.
Maybe they've done tests, and maybe this is effective for them, but it feels like there are much subtler ways that may be effective enough.
I have supported sites and services much smaller than Wikipedia, with much less intrusive begging. But maybe that's not the case for others.
To repurpose Winston Churchill's quote on democracy, "Wikipedia is the worst form of encyclopaedia, apart for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
It's a weird thing to hate on Wikipedia for since in general it's one of the cleaner sites I visit. The absolute garbage of the Fandom wikis shows just how bad it could be.
Eh out of all the nonprofits that incessantly fundraise, Wikipedia gets a pass the most. Nobody else can compete with their vast utility to just about everyone.
The controversy is 95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida that few care about, with exponentially growing costs, which they imply is needed to keep the wiki alive despite how cheap it actually is to run.
There are things to criticize wmf spending on, but the above is absolute bullshit. It is simply not true that "95% of spending, including 90% of staff, is on things with no relation to wikipeida".
Hosting does not include software development. It does not include sysadmins. I'm not sure if it even includes data center personel (Wikipedia owns its own servers. That means you have to hire people to plug them in. Amazon isnt doing it for you).
Software doesn't write itself, and improving the software for Wikipedia is where the lion-share of the budget is going.
That doesn't even get into less technical roles like legal or community outreach, which are very much spending for wikipedia.
Hosting is a small portion of the budget because its by far the cheapest part of running a major website. In many ways its also the easiest part to make cheap, simply by not using AWS.
By now they should be sitting on a billion dollars that safely yields a forever self-funding annual income ($30m-$50m) that would pay for all of their necessary expenses. They would no longer require any donations. It's grotesque and wildly irresponsible how they're managing the organization. If LLMs become the center of knowledge resources going forward (which they will), Wikipedia's funding will decline as their traffic declines, and they'll collapse into a spiral of cut-backs, as they operate on a present structure that burns most of its financial capability annually (this opens them up to a shock to the system on inflection, which is happening now).
LLM's can't just be "the center of knowledge" on their own, they need to learn and be trained if they are to be useful. A whole lot of LLM knowledge comes from Wikipedia to begin with.
Tailwind docs are also the source of, duh, docs. People browse them way less and as a result Tailwind gets way less funding.
The problem is that Wikipedia should be set for life at this point, and they insist on rejecting that notion. There may be a future in which Wikipedia closes, and if that comes to pass it will due to wanton disregard for people's goodwill.
statements on wikipedia are summarized from sources, LLMs once trained on wikipedia to summarize, can then summarize on their own from the source material, and probably with less bias
This. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, while some of the content needs to be updated periodically, it also has A LOT of content that will stay relevant pretty much forever.
It's very frustrating whenever this topic comes up that people see no middle ground between "the website as it is right now" and "some bloated JavaScript monstrosity". There is lots of room for improvement that would not turn it into "a bloated JavaScript monstrosity". How about bigger touch targets? Half the time when I go to vote on a comment on mobile I vote in the wrong direction and have to undo it. Same goes for using the search feature: I constantly fat-finger the drop-down search options on mobile.
Even though I usually prefer mobile websites to apps, most of the time for HN I browse using Octal instead of the website because the website is such a pain. And it wouldn't take very much to make it better, which makes it so annoying that people have knee-jerk anger to the prospect every time the subject comes up.
And lose even more precious space for reading? No thanks. Zoom in before you vote if it's a problem for you. You might say "how about drag up/down?" but then you can't scroll reliably on the page.
There's all this blank space to the left of the comment. Some of that could be used for bigger arrows.
Or some of the buttons on a comment could be hidden until you tap the comment. (And you can do it in CSS if div toggle is an offensive amount of javascript.)
There are some low-hanging fruit that would make the experience better. It's fine but it's not great.
The Octal app has better touch targets on mobile and manages to show more text at the same time. Here’s a pair of screenshots from my iPhone of the top of the “Is Rust Faster than C” comments. [0] is mobile Safari, [1] is Octal. The app shows more text.
This is exactly what makes me nuts about this whole debate: the complete lack of empiricism or nuance. People would rather just have their knee-jerk outrage about JavaScript or web design fads, instead of actually checking whether the things they’re saying are true.
The font is bigger in your first example, the text uses twice the space (or your screenshots are different resolutions?). I greatly prefer it because it's easier to read. You could zoom out if you want, I guess.
But you could move the arrows to be to the right of the [-] and space them out a bit, sure, so they're easier to touch.
Anything that would introduce any amount of unneeded Javascript would make HN worse. It's the cancer of the modern Web. The current design shows that it isn't needed at all.
This would be prefect for iPhone gyro controls, but I’m not getting it to work.
Edit: never mind, the permissions are broken:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46791545
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