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The reality is that the addictive algorithm of commercial social media platforms is the product. These alternative platforms are like nicotine free cigarettes.

The reality is that the addictive algorithm of commercial social media platforms is the product. These alternative platforms are like nicotine free cigarettes. They might garner small communities, which is totally cool and valid, but they will never slay the giants.

Morromist 7mo ago
Old-school social media can be addictive too. I don't use any social media where complex algorithms decide what I see, but I have trouble wasting far too much time on discord.
- nine_k 7mo ago
  Discord is communication with fellow humans. Tiktok is one-way consumption mostly. Discord is mostly text. Tiktok is mostly speech-free momentary videos, adjusting to the minute hints in your reaction. There's no comparison.
  - 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
    Discord is designed to gamify communication. It has 'features' like likes, reacts, gifs, roles, badges, etc. Many communities add bots that enable profile leveling, quests, challenges. These things are designed to reward and drive engagement, and lights up the reward centers of the brain. Between an IRC user and a Discord user, the Discord user's going to be much more addicted.
    - porkloin 7mo ago
      Clearly discord has more of a vested interest in boosting engagement - especially now that they are showing people "quests". What a quirky and fun way to say "ads"! But at the same time I don't necessarily buy the idea that all of their reactions/roles/badges/etc are exclusively malevolent engagement-driven design decisions meant to hook people. I do think that some of them are legitimate improvements to chat communication, and as a result many of those features have proliferated across other messaging platforms. Hell, most of them didn't even originate at discord at all but were cribbed from their competitors. To be clear, I 1000% agree with you that IRC is less addicting. Even just by simple merit of not having multi-device push notifications. Those pull me back into the app. But push notifications across devices are also just objectively useful. I name that one in particular because it's one of the biggest and most notable features that prevents me from returning to IRC, where I happily did most of my chat until the mid 2010s. I'm actively shopping for a discord alternative as a regular user who is fed up with discord's march toward enshittification, and matrix looks like it gives me most of that convenience without the worst parts of discord.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
brutal_chaos_ 7mo ago
To be fair, you don't need to slay giants to be a viable product.
- echelon 7mo ago
  "nicotine free cigarettes" are a product too. We have limited time on earth, so many tend to evaluate things on how big of an impact they make or how large of a demand they satisfy. It's okay if not everything is big, but it's also okay for people to use scale as a criteria for sizing things up.
  - wongarsu 7mo ago
    I guess there is an argument that every food product should add opium to their ingredients to make sure it's bought by as many people as possible and eaten as frequently as possible But I don't think that's healthy for either the product or society
rustyhancock 7mo ago
As is the incessant stream. If there is a pause at all in the next video loading the addicted user can break free. One of the issues with federated anything is that there will be good servers and bad servers. Good servers get hammered, and if you're popular you might end up perversely paying for people to watch your videos having to fund your server to maintain its performance. This happened with mastadon, matrix and will be far worse if they want to deliver tiktoks insane performance.
- echelon 7mo ago
  Birth rates took a dip with broadband, smartphones, and TikTok. Dopamine and attention sinks are pulling society in directions counter to evolutionary programming. Our runtime algorithms optimize for different things. No value judgment, but it's interesting. I haven't had kids (yet?), and I feel the internet (and the career that revolves around it) is the biggest reason why.
  - aaronbrethorst 7mo ago
    Citation needed
    - echelon 7mo ago
      I actually looked at several graphs before posting. Wasn't easy to share crude data so I didn't link it. Now that I'm googling for more deliberate correlations, I see other people are talking about this: https://roytriggs.medium.com/internet-use-and-birth-rates-analysing-the-data-fdf6f079f850 https://roytriggs.medium.com/internet-use-and-birth-rates-an... https://fortune.com/well/2025/03/28/phones-declining-birth-rate-elon-musk/ https://fortune.com/well/2025/03/28/phones-declining-birth-r... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/opinion/dating-marriage-children-fertility.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/opinion/dating-marriage-c... "The phone killed babies" tracks with my intuition about this. Data correlates. Finances aren't keeping me from having kids. The internet is. Smartphones are. Weird as that sounds. I can unpack more and expand this into a conversation.
skirge 7mo ago
happiness is addictive. Solution is to replace with something completely different. Why not free hacking challenges / courses for teenagers?
socalgal2 7mo ago
Social media is its own problem . It’s got nothing to do with the algorithms and everything to do with being able to trivially broadcast to the entire planet. Even with no algo the people posting want maximum exposure and have every incentive to try to get it.
mghackerlady 7mo ago
I wonder if it'd be possible for the host to use custom algorithms, that way you can have instances with very limited recommendation systems or ones with something more tiktok-like

Morromist 7mo ago

Old-school social media can be addictive too. I don't use any social media where complex algorithms decide what I see, but I have trouble wasting far too much time on discord.

nine_k 7mo ago
Discord is communication with fellow humans. Tiktok is one-way consumption mostly. Discord is mostly text. Tiktok is mostly speech-free momentary videos, adjusting to the minute hints in your reaction. There's no comparison.
- 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
  Discord is designed to gamify communication. It has 'features' like likes, reacts, gifs, roles, badges, etc. Many communities add bots that enable profile leveling, quests, challenges. These things are designed to reward and drive engagement, and lights up the reward centers of the brain. Between an IRC user and a Discord user, the Discord user's going to be much more addicted.
  - porkloin 7mo ago
    Clearly discord has more of a vested interest in boosting engagement - especially now that they are showing people "quests". What a quirky and fun way to say "ads"! But at the same time I don't necessarily buy the idea that all of their reactions/roles/badges/etc are exclusively malevolent engagement-driven design decisions meant to hook people. I do think that some of them are legitimate improvements to chat communication, and as a result many of those features have proliferated across other messaging platforms. Hell, most of them didn't even originate at discord at all but were cribbed from their competitors. To be clear, I 1000% agree with you that IRC is less addicting. Even just by simple merit of not having multi-device push notifications. Those pull me back into the app. But push notifications across devices are also just objectively useful. I name that one in particular because it's one of the biggest and most notable features that prevents me from returning to IRC, where I happily did most of my chat until the mid 2010s. I'm actively shopping for a discord alternative as a regular user who is fed up with discord's march toward enshittification, and matrix looks like it gives me most of that convenience without the worst parts of discord.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

brutal_chaos_ 7mo ago

To be fair, you don't need to slay giants to be a viable product.

echelon 7mo ago
"nicotine free cigarettes" are a product too. We have limited time on earth, so many tend to evaluate things on how big of an impact they make or how large of a demand they satisfy. It's okay if not everything is big, but it's also okay for people to use scale as a criteria for sizing things up.
- wongarsu 7mo ago
  I guess there is an argument that every food product should add opium to their ingredients to make sure it's bought by as many people as possible and eaten as frequently as possible But I don't think that's healthy for either the product or society

rustyhancock 7mo ago

As is the incessant stream. If there is a pause at all in the next video loading the addicted user can break free. One of the issues with federated anything is that there will be good servers and bad servers. Good servers get hammered, and if you're popular you might end up perversely paying for people to watch your videos having to fund your server to maintain its performance. This happened with mastadon, matrix and will be far worse if they want to deliver tiktoks insane performance.

echelon 7mo ago
Birth rates took a dip with broadband, smartphones, and TikTok. Dopamine and attention sinks are pulling society in directions counter to evolutionary programming. Our runtime algorithms optimize for different things. No value judgment, but it's interesting. I haven't had kids (yet?), and I feel the internet (and the career that revolves around it) is the biggest reason why.
- aaronbrethorst 7mo ago
  Citation needed
  - echelon 7mo ago
    I actually looked at several graphs before posting. Wasn't easy to share crude data so I didn't link it. Now that I'm googling for more deliberate correlations, I see other people are talking about this: https://roytriggs.medium.com/internet-use-and-birth-rates-analysing-the-data-fdf6f079f850 https://roytriggs.medium.com/internet-use-and-birth-rates-an... https://fortune.com/well/2025/03/28/phones-declining-birth-rate-elon-musk/ https://fortune.com/well/2025/03/28/phones-declining-birth-r... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/opinion/dating-marriage-children-fertility.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/opinion/dating-marriage-c... "The phone killed babies" tracks with my intuition about this. Data correlates. Finances aren't keeping me from having kids. The internet is. Smartphones are. Weird as that sounds. I can unpack more and expand this into a conversation.

skirge 7mo ago

happiness is addictive. Solution is to replace with something completely different. Why not free hacking challenges / courses for teenagers?

socalgal2 7mo ago

Social media is its own problem . It’s got nothing to do with the algorithms and everything to do with being able to trivially broadcast to the entire planet. Even with no algo the people posting want maximum exposure and have every incentive to try to get it.

mghackerlady 7mo ago

I wonder if it'd be possible for the host to use custom algorithms, that way you can have instances with very limited recommendation systems or ones with something more tiktok-like