I always disliked Facebook and still don't care much for it, but having worked on ranking there for a few months, comments like this just sound incredibly naive.

Facebook is not "specifically designed to cause addiction". It's designed by a complicated process with many people trying to maximize many competing metrics, some of which might go up when people are "addicted". In fact the complete opposite is one of the main goal metrics for most teams (measures of well being) and only a small fraction of people are even trying to increase time spent.

On what basis are you claiming that that most teams at FB are optimising the product for well being as opposed to ‘engagement’ (addiction)? Do you have first hand knowledge? Do you know the people involved? Do you have citations?

I stopped using FB a few years ago after I had an argument with a friend on the platform. The algorithm decided to keep showing us one anothers’ content - I assume so we would both write more angry comments (“engagement!”). I ended up blocking the friend, then on reflection left the platform entirely, since as far as I can tell FB was optimising as intended to manipulate me.

Has it changed since then?

If facebook only shows content you agree with, it's creating social bubbles where everyone is cheering each other on and criticism is not allowed, and you end up with anti-vax groups.

And if facebook emphasizes content you engage with (albeit negatively), you end up with anecdotes like yours.

Facebook is a tool, use it as such rather than being entitled and feeling disempowered. You can hide people from your timelines, get "less messages like these" and more.

Entitled is a loaded word. That makes it seem like the user is unreasonable and he should take whatever facebook gives him. Be quiet you don't matter, you are lucky they allowed you on the platform.

Is it unreasonable to expect facebook to be able to determine the tone of the conversation. They probably already do this or are in the process of researching this. This is a great feature and I look forward to getting content aligned with my mood. I'm mad, show me angry posts, I'm nervous show me calm posts. I'm bored show me exciting videos. Maybe a box on top how do you feel to determine current mood.

Users complaining give free feedback. As a developer it helps shape the product.

I absolutely think the user is unreasonable in this context. what about people who actually enjoy discussing other people's conflicting opinions? (maybe hard to believe that exists any more, even moreso on facebook, but still...) how would you allow this positive engagement to keep happening but avoid OP's example of negative engagement?

the tools are there on facebook to control the content of your feed to quite an extent. if you don't use this and demand that facebook change its system to adjust the feed for everyone based on your personal tastes, yes I think that's entitled.

not saying I like or even use Facebook, but still.

> Be quiet you don't matter, you are lucky they allowed you on the platform.

That's actually the feeling I get from YouTube when you try to Like a video when not signed in: "Like this video? Sign in to make your opinion count." -- I always found it mildly condescending.

> If facebook only shows content you agree with, it's creating social bubbles where everyone is cheering each other on and criticism is not allowed, and you end up with anti-vax groups.

Just because the solution would be hard or complex doesn't mean FB gets to continue its problematic behaviour.

> Facebook is a tool, use it as such

It is not. It is a corporation and you definitely don't get to use it like a tool.

At its most charitable, it is a tool like a beehive is a tool to make honey. Which are less dangerous than Facebook and still require protective gear to operate.

and if they optimized for me clicking away from Facebook, and visiting less?

both the examples you've listed are still with the goal of having people spend more time on facebook

Is there a mechanism to show a linear list of posts, sorted by time descending, of the direct posts of everyone I am friends with?

Anti-vaxxers are relentlessly criticized everywhere. They don’t have a protective social bubble. The criticism they receive from people they assume are brainwashed idiots only strengthens their beliefs.

the reason they're able to dismiss criticism is because there's a bubble of people and content (blogposts, videos) that are being fed to them via social media, gradually convincing them that they are right. if social media like Facebook showed a more "objective" collection of content in your feed, you would end up with <1% anti-vax, flat-earth, climatechange-denial etc. content, and it becomes much harder to hold on to this conviction.

I'm not disagreeing with your point that FB sometimes ranks content more highly when it is likely to increase engagement at the expense of your long term happiness and continued use of the site. The point I am making is that FB is well aware, doesn't want that, and devotes far more resources to fixing it than to increasing "engagement".

Also "engagement" is not the same as addiction. People who follow more close friends are more engaged on FB, but they are not addicted.

> Also "engagement" is not the same as addiction.

Agreed, but the point is that FB's algorithm optimizing for "engagement" is in fact also optimizing for addiction[0]. And so are many others of a certain type of industry that includes YouTube, FB, Instagram, etc. It's not quite social networks, but a common factor seems to be that they're ad-funded and highly automated.

[0] and I believe it is currently way beyond our state of the art to design an algorithm that does not have this unwanted property.

> Also "engagement" is not the same as addiction. People who follow more close friends are more engaged on FB, but they are not addicted.

That's debatable. I think people who spend hours pouring through pictures from thousands of acquaintances and commenting can be considered addicted, especially when it becomes difficult to get their attention from it. I see it with people over 50 most often, I think because of an internal desire to feel connected with people who they drifted apart from years ago, or to live vicariously through others.

Facebook is not the only place for combative online interactions.

Marlboro isn't the only brand for cancer sticks.

Sorry, but you come out terrible "naive".

> On what basis are you claiming that that most teams at FB are optimising the product for well being as opposed to ‘engagement’ (addiction)? Do you have first hand knowledge? Do you know the people involved? Do you have citations?

OP answers this in his first paragraph.

> bla bla I left facebook bla bla

You are arguing that "the algorithm" didn't read your mind and figured out you are actually "mad" at your friend, not simply interacting.

ps: sentiment out of bodies of text is not a terrible old thing, is fairly new.

It may very well be a naive sounding comment, but at the same time I think your comment reads at least as naive if not more. Think about it for a moment:

First, as an employee there is a tendency to find and only focus on the good aspects of your employer. This is not a bad thing, it's what helps us get out of the bed in the morning and go to work. It can wrap your perception though and make you more biased.

Second, you were part of a company and like any other company it wants to maximize its profits, i.e. maximize the engagement. I really want to believe you (and in some degree I actually do) that there are teams that focus on users' wellbeing (however this is measured) but in the end of the day, if it will come down to decide if I will be shown a post that has higher chance of generating profit VS a post that will make me feel better, in the vast majority of cases it will show me the first kind. You don't make money by being nice, unless you can combine the two. Facebook has done everything that it could to destroy any good will that we may have had to trust that it wants to combine the two (think about the experiment about influencing people's mood from a couple of years ago)

A banner with a text similar to what blunderkid wrote would be not only fair and accurate but the least we could do. And Facebook has only itself to blame for it.

I don't think Facebook is "evil" by design, but the end result is the same. The framework is as follows:

There were probably thousands of internet companies that competed to be the dominant sites in the 90s and 00s. By several orders of magnitude the predominant business model is ads for eyeballs, and the predominant network effect scales with number of users.

Several factors influenced success but, on average, sites that captured user attention more effectively got more views and a larger userbase. Thus there was overall selective pressure for addictive properties, and sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram won over sites that were less able to hold attention like Blogger, Digg, MySpace, etc.

We cannot know, for example, that Jack Dorsey was knowingly trying to maximize outrage with his character limit, which feeds into the "two-minutes-hate" emotional addiction. But we can be sure that he was trying to maximize several KPIs like # users, bounce rate, time on page, etc.

The result? The dominant sites today == the sites that are best able to capture attention!

How successful were they? Not only have they captured a huge portion of time people spend on the internet, the amount of time people are on the internet has itself increased! So they won over other websites and also grabbed attention away from traditional media, newspapers, random thoughts while standing in line, uninterrupted dinner, etc. time.

What's the problem? I think the major challenge is that these sites feel more effective at shaping attention than many drugs (no reference for this yet)!

This parallels the opioid crisis -- maximizing certain good pain relief characteristics (short onset, hits opioid receptors) just happens to be addictive. I doubt the Sacklers cackled during dinner and clinked glasses at the future misery they were causing, but it's pretty damn easy to convince yourself that you're doing the right thing when the money is rolling in.

Jack Dorsey similarly thinks he's saving the world but he's probably the single most responsible person for the "populist politician" phenomenon.

We are all addicted to something or the other. There are people who spend insane amount of time on HN (including me) - sure it is billion times better than FB, but it is still an addiction.

This is one of those things where no amount of regulation or blaming FB (or instagram or twitter or HN or whatever) is going to help much. It might be more fruitful to think about why people spend so much time online outside of productive work, instead of having person to person interactions, playing sports, playing music etc. Just a small example - there is not a single park within 10 miles of where I live, but there are at least 3 big malls (sprawling ones with dozens of stores).

Exactly, people need to take some personal responsibility and stop calling a web app evil because people some donkey spends all their free time on it. Grow up and stop feeling outrage about something that doesn't even affect you, and the people that it does affect have every opportunity to do something about it.

> There are people who spend insane amount of time on HN (including me) - sure it is billion times better than FB, but it is still an addiction.

Why is it billion times better? I spend a lot of time on Facebook talking to my family that lives on the other side of the world. Is spending time talking with other geeks more valuable?

One site is owned by a huge corporation and other is owned by a company that tries to get rich by creating more corporations.

it is actually intentionally designed to be habit forming i.e. "addictive" https://www.wired.com/2014/12/how-to-build-habit-forming-pro...

I don't care if "addictiveness" is by design or emergent. Cigarettes were also not designed for cancer.

It is designed to increase engagement. It ain't designed so you use it less and/or just enough.

I like to imagine you wrote that comment while smoking a cigarette, you know, for dramatic affect.

This is more an obfuscation than any kind of defense of Facebook. Here’s a better starting point for evaluating the company:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism

I don't have the insight to disagree with you. I do worry that we're splitting hairs here:

- People use Facebook in a way which is destructive to society, and this is partially due to how Facebook is built.

vs.

- Facebook planned on being this addictive (and destructive) on purpose.

If "well being" is a core metric for "most teams" why do we have investigative exposes of the horrible conditions content moderators are forced into?

If well being were truly important, those moderators would be treated like valuable core metric maintainers, not barely paid, badly unsupported afterthoughts.

And advertising performance and monetization would take a back seat as well, which is obviously not the case.

Step out of your prior employee shell, and look at the whole picture of FB's interaction with its users. Not a net positive, and as others have said, no one but themselves (Zuck?) to blame.

Time spent isn’t the same as addiction though. The grossness of Facebook is not that people spend too much time on it (though they may), but what content they see, how they are encouraged to engage with it, and the effect it has on people’s world views and psychological health.

The addiction component would be the constant concern with either how you are perceived on the platform or outrage with what others are saying.

I see precisely nothing they’ve done to increase the well being of people who are constantly tilted by the dumbest political garbage.

Actually, we are addicted because of the tragedy of the unmanaged commons, where the commons is human attention and the mechanisms are Notifications and Updates from Your Contacts.

If Facebook doesn’t do it, then LinkedIn or Twitter will. So Facebook is like Microsoft - do whatever it takes to win.

If you disable types of notifications or otherwise remove sources of notifications on Facebook, and those are the notifications that you normally get, Facebook will start giving you new notifications for things that you weren't getting notifications for before. Things like "We have a new friend suggestion for you". Facebook is engineered to give you a steady stream of notifications, and as far as I know, there's no way to disable them completely, despite the slew of options Facebook gives you. Why do you think that is?

Notifications can be designed to be less addictive, but that's not what Facebook is doing.

Well, you are right. I am simply pointing out that Facebook is not alone in this. Even small sites like Alignable spam you with notifications like “{{PersonYouNeverHeardOf}} has looked at your profile, you’re being noticed!” in an effort to try to get people, and it works!

We have known this since 2011 when we started Qbix to build an open source alternative — see https://qbix.com/people for a list of how it is different and more responsible. I hope other companies take on board these principles. Our tagline is “Empowering People. Uniting Communities”. So I feel passionate about this.

Instead of regulation, maybe have browsers give you a warning on how the site your about to visit treats your personal data?

We already have warnings in one way or another for: expired SSL certificates, lack of HTTPS, potential malware sites, if your account may have been breached (at least in Firefox), requests for your location or to show notifications, etc.

The next logical step is to have our user agent warn us about sites that have bad reputation for protecting your data.

I use the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, which gives a letter grade based off of the trackers used and terms of service analysis from tosdr.org, in your browser toolbar. You can get it from here:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/duckduckgo-privacy...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-fo...

I like this idea, every website should have a popup warning you that it uses cookies and data. Maybe a politician older than my dad could come up with a regulation to enforce this, give it a catchy name like Governments Drunk Popup Regulation.

Education is a good idea but in reality every site with google analytics is invading your personal data and people don't really care.

I don't like the idea of my browser trying to protect me from social problems. I'm fine with my browser warning me that a site may be a risk to my machine, but I wouldn't trust my browser to display content to me reliably if my vendor was using it as a platform for any activism that isn't narrowly focused on keeping web standards open.

Perhaps I'd tolerate it as an opt-in, but even then, I'd be leary and start looking to switch because I think it's a bad precident to set, and (slippery slope warning) could go toward normalizing similar warnings for other issues.

If there's going to be a warning, I think it ought to be produced server-side.

Browsers are already opt-in; you can download another. Laws are a bit more difficult to change.

>> There should be only one regulation for fb, display following warning on all pages/screens: Statutory Warning: This product is specifically designed to cause behavioral addiction so you are guided down a slippery slope of over consumption & that is how this company makes money. Overuse of this product is known to cause - anxiety, depression, low self esteem, constant craving for attention, short attention spans, inability to concentrate on tasks, inhibited social development in the real world & possibly general "unhappiness", especially among the young & impressionable.

> Instead of regulation, maybe have browsers give you a warning on how the site your about to visit treats your personal data?

That wouldn't work. Facebook may see browser warnings like that as an existential threat. In response, they could create their own browser and heavily push it on users, a la Google & Chrome.

They've already done that. They're called the Facebook and Messenger native apps for Android and iOS. Conveniently, the Facebook mobile web app shows you Messenger notifications but won't let you read them without installing the native Messenger app, or visiting the Facebook on a desktop browser, despite the fact that direct messages have a much simpler interface than the rest of Facebook and that it used to be possible to view messages in the mobile web app, so they push for native app usage pretty hard already.

I'm not sure they'd see desktop browser warnings as much of an existential threat considering 94% of their advertising revenue comes from mobile [1].

[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2019/Q2...

I haven't used Facebook in a couple years but mbasic.facebook.com used to let you see your messages.

It still does

Thanks! I had no idea.

Sounds great to me! We need more competition in the browser market.

> Sounds great to me! We need more competition in the browser market.

I'm almost certain that a Facebook browser would end up being Chromium with tight Facebook integration and extra-invasive data collection.

If Microsoft made the decision that it was too much work to maintain an independent browser engine and they already had one, I find it highly unlikely that Facebook would come to a different decision, given they're starting even farther behind.

They would just use the chrome engine so we would be no better off.

Really happy firefox is alive and well.

Here I would distinguish between "bad reputation for protecting your data" and "literally dies if they don't sell it constantly".

And how are you going to force browsers to do that, if not through regulation?

What about mobile apps? Gotta get OS makers in that too. Put Google and Apple and all the Android variations there.

Plus there’s FB own devices, like Portal and HTC First.

Just adding my two cents regarding the DDG extension/add-on. I use it with Firefox and it works pretty brilliantly.

You make a good point. The counterpoint that springs to mind is similar to the California law that requires a warning for anything containing chemicals known to cause cancer.

I’m sure this case is commonly known but I’ll spell it out as I understand it briefly: the bar for “cause cancer” is apparently low and wide enough to mean a huge number of products have this warning, diluting the spirit of the warning. Cynics and critics suggest this over-labeling is a deliberate attempt to undermine the warning itself through over saturation.

In your Facebook example, this could end up meaning any site with user generated content and comments would have to carry the warning — including Hacker News.

It might sound crazy but the govt DID this for cigarettes. Have you read the warning on cigarettes?

I mean just look at the suggested box design here: https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/labeling-and-warning-st...

I mean really look at that, and fully take in the notion that our government required that. That, that takes balls.

If you think that takes balls, then you have no idea how big are European Union balls. Just google “cigarette packages in europe” and get ready to get seriously shocked.

As a European, I think Australia went even further and just removed all the branding from packages completely. In Europe, brands still get to have some design.

"Europe" is not a single place with one set of regulations - in the UK for instance there is no branding on packages at all. It's called "standardised plain packaging":

https://ash.org.uk/category/information-and-resources/packag...

Canadian packages too. They required a rather graphic health warning over 50% of the surface area (showing a smokers lungs with explanation, etc) and also removed branding. So it’s a giant health warning over the top half, and then a plain brown lower half with the name/type

Curious - do these packages work? Have they reduced smoking addiction?

(I don't smoke btw, but my father-in-law smokes like a chimney)

Its hard to relate cause and effects, but I see a noticeable decline in smoking among younger people, and smoking has become very uncool. People will also make a big deal about second hand smoke, for instance if you're near a bus stop or busy sidewalk you may get called out.

I don't know if anything besides medical intervention can stop a seasoned veteran smoker, though. Packaging certainly hasn't had any effect on my few family members that smoke.

In the U.S smoking has dramatically decreased, and we don't have totally insane packaging like Canada/some of the EU. [1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/08/cdc-says-smoking-rates-fall-...

Smoking has just generally fallen by the way side worldwide.

I don't know if it apply to the whole country or only my province (Quebec) but since then we also added that they can't be marketed at all. That include not being visible in a convenience store. I don't know how effective the pictures were, but not being visible that must have affected the statistics too.

Maybe. What helps more is 1) indoor smoking bans, stopping people from smoking socially inside bars and restaurants, 2) heavy taxation, 3) vaping.

Seems like some EU countries are now requiring a plain packaging too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_tobacco_packaging#By_cou...

What are you talking about? That (and way more explicit) has been standard in most western countries for decades. The US is just slow to adapt modern practices. No balls involved there.

I would argue this site can make you feel the same way :)

HN is addictive, but I think we're dramatizing things. Is a product that people like to use a lot a bad thing? Maybe that just speaks to having a good product that gives people what they want, rather than some insidious mind-control scheme where people have no agency to stop using it. Are creators supposed to make their products worse so people don't use them as much? I don't get it.

I think the split comes now that companies, such as FB, have focused to maximize 'engagement' with zero thought on the repercussions. Cigarette companies knew people were addicted to nicotine, but I guarantee in their planning sessions they talked about engagement or some other corporate fluff word.

It's less about having a good product or making a worse product, and more about the moral and ethical responsibility to consider what that addicting product's end result will be.

Exactly. No site gives me more anxiety than HN while being so addictive at the same time.

Well you should stop coming back then. You have identified a destructive behaviour, that's step 1. Step 1.1 is ACT right now: set up a very long noprocrast in your profile and keep on living your life. You really won't miss anything actually important by not coming here as often.

HN has a timer you can turn on to avoid procrastinating on other things by spending all your time here. I tried it in the past and it does work.

So bookmark the search page and blacklist the home page. Only read what you specifically search for.

You know, there's the 'noprocrast' option, which you can very easily set to yes, if this site sucks too much of your time.

I don't think that Facebook offers anything comparable.

I AM NOT ADDICTED

”I can leave anytime I want!” :-)

At least HN isn't designed to keep you addicted (sorry, engaged) :)

Well, it is in its format. Like Digg and Reddit before it, the addictive part comes from a constant stream of new "stuff" for us to consume.

To anyone looking at us pre reddit/digg many of us would look "addicted" to HN based on our usage of it.

Yes I won't deny the format is addicting, it's just not specifically designed to optimise addiction like certain other sites.

If that were the case, they'd hide the karma score.

If FB is addictive then you need the medical community in on this, but the fact that they aren’t means you’re left alone making medical arguments about the affects of FB. Maybe my speech, this very one, is designed to give you the flu. But when we’re talking stakes like serious medical claims, then we should have serious medical consensus.

I don’t know if you work at Facebook or really believe what you’ve written. My spouse and I got so bad that we’d be on our phones over brunch or dinner looking at Facebook instead of having a conversation. It took us a couple years to break the habit and we both eventually deleted Facebook.

I defend big tech all the time (see my post history), but saying FB isn’t designed to be addictive isn’t accurate.

FB has many jobs that require degrees in psychology, and there are also many scientific studies showing negative mental health effects of FB use

https://www.glassdoor.com/Jobs/Facebook-psychology-Jobs-EI_I...

There is a very simple solution to Facebook - demand that they offer compatibility through an API so that other products can offer News Feed products that are seamlessly integrated with the FB Friends. Same as having a universal messaging protocol that's compatible with WhatsApp, and an Instagram API that also allows for compatibility with competitive photo feed products. Basically - open up the social graph and allow for super aggregators with different functionality. That's allowing for competition and breaking down the artificial moat they created, where they have managed to legally extricate their users from their own data property (essentially a form of digital enclosure that violates your right to your data as your private property). They would be destroyed within a year.

Same as windows - you just force them to have an anti-monopoly function.

Alternatively, allow for other ad suppliers to work through their network with a minimal amount of friction. Then you annihilate their revenue.

> There is a very simple solution to Facebook - demand that they offer compatibility through an API so that other products can offer News Feed products that are seamlessly integrated with the FB Friends.

Allowing tons of third parties to access all your data. That’s for sure going to solve all the problems (and Facebook had same idea few years ago, that brought you Cambridge Analytica scandal)

No that’s not true at all but sure.

The problem with Analytica is it was done without your knowledge as a user. If you had volunteered to share tour data with CA how is that is that different from sharing it with Google or Instagram or any other service? We pick services to use in exchange for data everyday.

Why is it different if Facebook has access to your data from any other service? You just pick one.

Anyway this is the only solution and it will eventually be implemented. Either that or the Warren plan.

Main issue with CA wasn’t that it got data of users of an app - people have explicitly gave consent for it. They scraped data of your friends, that shared this data with you, and made it a big deal. Users explicitly granted access to data, but their friends didn’t. If you have an open API between networks, how is that different?

User A uses app X and shares data with user B. User B uses app Y. App Y is scraping data. They now have data of both user B (which expressed consent) and user A (which didn’t). It’s exactly like Cambridge Analitica.

First amendment protections against compelled speech might interfere with this heavily editorialized "warning".

I thought that Facebook's stance was that it was a platform not a publisher? If you have no editorial oversight or opinion on the content you publish (cf. not taking down known false political advertising) can you then claim "free speech"?

Similar warnings are required on cigarettes, and there isn’t much difference between the two.

Did you read blunderkid's comment? He's much farther into "opinion" territory. I don't think he's stated a single fact.

When did the court rule that cigarettes constituted speech?

They didn’t. They ruled corporations don’t have much free speech when it comes to product advertising and declarations of potential harm their products may cause their users.

> there isn’t much difference between the two

Can you post a link to RCT-based evidence backing this claim? I don't see anything on CDC website or any professional medical organization about Facebook being as harmful as cigarettes.

Commercial speech is heavily regulated.

I estimate about the same impact of this as cigarette pack warning.

Essentially no one I know now smokes. Something was effective.

Those warnings were so successful that companies threatened small nations proposing them.

https://youtu.be/6UsHHOCH4q8?t=655

wasn't it taxes?

You're being downvoted, and you're correct.

The single most important thing they did to turn the tide against smoking, to create a strong disincentive, was to make it a lot more expensive of a habit. Cigarettes used to be inexpensive when I was growing up in the 1980s. Now you'll nearly spend a car payment on just a pack per day. Chain smoker? There went your rent for the month.

Chinese men are the most voracious smokers in human history, they consume nearly half of all cigarettes smoked on the planet. They don't know cigarettes are bad for them? Of course they do. The imagery would make little difference unto itself. Smoking hasn't been made wildly expensive in China yet, that's the single biggest issue. It's also not enough of a socially excluding behavior yet in China; the party could take care of that if they wanted to (they will eventually, it will be a health & social wellness thing they aggressively focus on in the future; they allow it for now, for obvious reasons, as a placative).

The second most important thing authorities did to curb smoking, was the imagery & information campaign. That has been quite successful, it's distinctly branded as an ugly, nasty, killer, social excluding taboo habit now.

The third most important thing the authorities did, is push regulations such that smokers became quasi socially excluded and couldn't easily smoke anywhere considered a public space and at work. They added friction to the smoking process, making it a far bigger hassle.

The recipe was: much higher cost, persistent information campaign, added friction, social exclusion.

I doubt the imagery campaign made much difference. How long has their been an anti drug campaign? Has it helped?

Marijuana use has become more socially acceptable and the number of people who want it legal has increased.

Just as an aside, the number of people who smoke weed regularly is about the same as people who smoke cigarettes.

http://pics.mcclatchyinteractive.com/news/nation-world/natio...

By definition, everyone who does illegal drugs is somewhat flexible with regards to suggestions from authority.

One of the core propositions of cigarettes was always that they were legal. They catered to both the rule breaker and (substantially bigger) rule follower markets.

So it seems apples and oranges with regards to imagery / warning effectiveness due to the only partially overlapping consumers.

Did prohibition make a difference in alcohol consumption? I can’t think of anyone who has ever said - “I really want to smoke weed. But it’s illegal.”

Yes it did[1]. And yes, those people exist.

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470475/

and It also led to other consequences according to most studies.

https://priceonomics.com/did-prohibition-reduce-drinking/

-increase in organized crime

- increase in incarceration rates.

But guess who gets incarcerated more because of the “war on drugs” and guess what happens when it starts affecting the suburbs? It’s then treated like “a disease”.

Tell me again why I want to give the government more power?

In addition to sibling comments: Also e-cigs.

There's plenty stories online about people who have, multiple times, tried to quit smoking and didn't manage it. But they had no issues switching to e-cigs, and then a few months down the line were able to stop using e-cigs - without any urges to return to any kind of smoking.

Wasn't it general awareness of the dangers, that did not existed before?

And when it started to rise generations were already addicted and simply a new generation needed to rise and slowly overcome it.

So rather .. a mix of it all? Because even though tobacco is expensive today, that doesn't stop the smokers from smoking. And people have lots of other expensive habits, so money is only a small part of it I believe.

In the UK it mostly was increased prices, coupled with free smoking cessation services, and with changes in law to make smoking illegal inside many buildings (workplaces, shops, pubs, cafés etc).

Vaping was useful to move remaining smokers to different nicotine delivery mechanisms.

Pretty sure the pub change was huge. It also practically redefined what pubs are in the UK.

I really miss smoky pubs. They were nice and comfortable in a way the modern brightly-lit bars just aren't.

I don't mind that the modern bright bars exist, I just wish that I could have an old snug with a pint of bitter and smoke a pipe or cigar.

Ironically, in the 1970s, people used pareidolia to discover scary skulls and crossbones in the smoke curls of cigarette ads. These were thought to be subliminal symbols of risk and danger, secretly engineered to appeal to smokers, who knew they were engaging in a deadly habit.

20 years later, governments mandated superliminal death symbolism.

So quite a lot?

Were they? I have seen so many people keep smoking even though the packaging in Canada have some gruesome pictures. The reduction I seen was mostly based on age, it was just no longer "cool" to smoke, it was simply a change of culture. More often than not right now, when I see younger people smoking, they are mostly from France, where the smoking culture is different, so that kind of confirm this.

So very effective?

As usual the Facebookers are coming out in mass to defend their cash cow, despite it's major negative impact on society. Par for the course on this site

There's a lot more product than just Facebook, making this look a lot like a witch hunt. There are games, foods, brand retailers, who all do this to the exact same extent. The difference is that facebook has utility that lends to participating as frequently as possible (same as MySpace and newsgroups before that). The regulation is needed because of the ubiquity, not the behavior.

Isn't that largely true of most entertainment products?

Music, Prestige and Reality TV, Cable News, Comic books - all are "specifically designed to cause behavioral addiction" if your only criteria is "attempts to attract and keep people on the platform"...

I like the idea of a black box warning like cigarette cartons. You should also be periodically warned of the risks at a timely interval, annually?

You could apply the same label to many other entertainment products and websites as well.

How many of those companies business models relies on getting you hooked so they can continue to perform mass surveillance and being careless with the personal info of users and non-users alike?

That didn't really work all that well for cigarettes.

Except it did.... smoking is at a record low

To what degree do you think warning labels played a role in that?

you forgot to to add death.