I wish I shared your optimism. It would be immediately weaponised (on social media, of course) as an attack on free speech, or whatever is needed to get the right people riled up.

Social media is awful but a) the vast majority love it (if you told my mother she was losing Facebook she’d be livid) and b) it serves the interests of the powers that be.

But I beg folks, please don't use 'weaponizing' and 'freedom of speech' in the same sentence, because doing so renders this principle/moral into a cynical shell instead of something that is part and parcel of core democratic values (and has had an ancient political history and evolution, with many sacrifices along the way).

Everyone says that but what specifically are you looking for? What’s the social media equivalent to no smoking indoors?

There's no (in the U.S.) legal precedence to regulate "misinformation" and hate speech, not because these things are good, but because they, unlike smoking, require authorities to create sets of approved and unapproved information, . There is a precedent of governments controlling harmful information and it isn't good - thus the bar should be set way high.

I'm not sure what you mean by "everyone says that." A lot of people say these are private platforms and rebut that one can always create a competitor, for example. Certainly it's a common refrain about techie communities such as this.

Tech (big and small) is regulated today and there are rules on the books which protect at least some of the individual privacy points you highlighted. [1] You, and many others, have stated that you find those rules insufficient and would like new/different rules in place.

Can you provide specific goals that address the issues that you think exist, and that law makers could use to draft new policy?

[1] https://www.rocketlawyer.com/business-and-contracts/business... and https://www.rocketlawyer.com/business-and-contracts/business...

Sorry, but it's literally as simple as closing the tab. I stopped using Facebook on a regular basis in 2019 by uninstalling the app from my phone as well as just not logging on from the desktop. I never found it so addicting that I couldn't go without it for awhile.

It’s literally as simple as not putting a cigarette in your mouth and smoking it.

> I never found it so addicting that I couldn't go without it for awhile

Crazy thought but what if we had a sample size bigger than you.

Literally the approach I used when I quit smoking.

> Crazy thought but what if we had a sample size bigger than you.

Well, that sounds like something everyone can agree on. Or do you just mean your opinion is bigger than anyone who disagrees?

Most of all, don't try to legislate away everyone's freedoms because you have a problem with something.

https://m.economictimes.com/tech/internet/social-media-more-...

So far as I know, there was never a system where each cigarette could advertise a politician, but if there were, when world today may look different.

They haven't learned anything except how to be sneakier. They haven't changed, except as to the minimum possible extent demanded by law.

Which I think helps prove your point.

Edit: i mean political parties and not just a single supposed monolith that is government. The two aren’t quite separate though.

However now if I make a plain html website nobody will see it because google will not rank it above all the SEO blog spam and portal results (e.g. Reddit, Quora) and everybody is too busy arguing about something on Reddit/Twitter/Facebook and watching the latest viral 30second tiktok vids to care. Everybody is in one pasture or another being shepherded by vampire corporate interests harvesting their time and emotions.

You're misunderstanding the true sticky feature of Facebook for the billions of normal non-geek users. It's not html/css authoring; it's the real names database. In other words, the so-called "social graph" of known identities rather than something like HN/reddit which have mostly anonymous or pseudonymous ids.

I tried to explain the "Rolodex of real names" aspect in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18728061

A cigarette does the same. It provides value the moment it is lit and the first drag enters the lung.

I quit smoking a little more than 9 years ago. There are still quite a few moments I miss this felt value.

I quit Facebook about a year ago. I still keep the account but removed everything I ever posted there. Still as I recently started to do genealogy my SO showed me the groups she uses for that on Facebook (it is the only thing she does there). So probably I will start using FB again once I dig deeper into my ancestors as these groups are really helpful and provide value.

If these groups were some other place I would gladly be there. Sadly they are not.

Personally my ideal "social network" would be personal RSS feeds for everyone, but that's never going to be the winning method. It needs to be something dead simple for a non-techie.

I don't mean to be obtuse, I hate Googlebook more than most, but... have you tried? Where I lived before I had a fixed public IPv4, and I put a box up with Caddy on it serving markdown to the world and people actually did find it and sent me e-mails about it. All I did was post links to small forums. Granted, it wasn't exactly mainstream content. But it worked.