>The problem is that smoking is pretty much 100% bad

Bad FOR you, yes; bad as an experience, no. It tastes good and facilitates socialization.

>social media has some good sides in that it allows you to keep in touch with family and friends who may be far away. It was fun

Again, this speaks more to the experience than the health effects. Note that you said ‘it was fun’ in the same way that I can say the cigs I’ve smoked were fun.

I don’t think the comparisons are too wrong to be honest. They are both activities that can facilitate ‘fun’ social interactions but with a deleterious effect on one’s health (cardiovascular and mental)

> It tastes good and facilitates socialization.

Or it tastes like shit and facilitates people running away from the stink of your poison. Maybe they'll socialize over it.

I think it depends on the people and on the cigarettes. I actually like the taste of one specific cigarette brand. I very rarely smoke, less than a packet a year, if that (0 during 2020 - 2022). I do hate the smell, though.

That's subjective. I quit smoking 30 years ago and, unless someone smokes directly into my face, I still like the smell of tobacco.

I think the issue with the comparison is that cigarettes are much worse.

Like the original comment, I won’t be surprised if social media becomes stigmatized as people continue to realize more negative effects, but I doubt any of the effects are going to be as serious as cigarettes.

It’s hard to compare the data, but I’m pretty sure smoking is much worse for you. A bad smoking habit is likely to kill you. There’s a point at which you smoke so much that it’s more likely to be the reason you die than anything else. Social media just makes you miserable.

I think it’s too early in social media’s life to distinctly say it’s worse than smoking. Not enough time has passed to allow for a long-term longitudinal study on the long-term effects on social media use.

While tobacco might be a first-order cause of its ills (cancer, etc), the second order effects of social media might have cascading effects that is too early to tell on a long time frame.

I’d be intrigued to read any decade long studies looking at the well-being of users of MySpace and the early adopters of Facebook.

There are analogues to social media use in every generation. They are problems we’re already familiar with, they’ve just been amplified.

I highly doubt we’ll ever see anything even remotely akin to the risks of tobacco. Tobacco is a medical nightmare. The problems that would likely be caused by social media can be treated and reversed. It’s night and day between the two.

As the commenter stated, it’s an unpopular opinion that social media is as bad as cigarettes.

Tldr: -Problem were here before, but not on such a massive scale -No safe place -Parents have way less influence on their children -Younger people are influenced way more by external factors, than more mature people

How can you be so sure, that we will never see anything as bad / risky as tabacco? Sure, we do know a lot about the physical consequences to our body, but there is so much more to it than just that. Getting cancer, any other illness or damage to our body sucks, however these are consequences we do know exist. Do you consider, that you probably will hang out with different kind of people and as a consequent develop differently? Do you consider the addiction, not beeing able to concentrate for a long time without a breake, because you are longing for the next cigarette? Do u consider ...

This list could go on and on and each of these aspects gets worse the younger you are. Of course I can't tell if these example truely have a big negativ effect on you, but I am sure, that these and other factors shape you as a person.

Now we look at social media, which tend to have not that many physical consequences for your body. However there are so many more psychological factors shaping your brain, behavior and habits. Addiction, false role model, always having social pressure just to name a few. You are rigth, these factors did exist before, but in a much smaller scale. Furthermore a parent can only raise and help his children grow and develop as much, as they are spending time together. Nowadays kids spend a lot of time on the internet / social media, which it used to spend with other children playing and while playing with other kids, learning how to behave in a society. Of course we didn't always do as our parent told us, but we never even come close to the f*cked up stuff we see on the internet daily. We never had a million eyes watching every step and be judged by them. Home was a safe place.

I spent quit a lot of time on this comment, way too much to be honest, but what I am trying to say is:

-These 'normal' factors are on a massive scale and the impact they have, direct or indirect, shouldn't be taken lightly -There is no safe place anymore. If you are not on social media, you are 'different' / 'weird' -Parents have way less influence on the development of their children

There’s no likely avenue through which social media leads to death. It’s that simple. Tobacco products kill a lot of people.

The problems you list are significant and bad, but many of them will improve as society as a whole learns to parent in an age of social media. Not just this, but as people grow to see how negatively social media affects you, the public attitudes toward it will change and adapt. At no point in this process is social media going to be killing people.

I’m not saying that social media doesn’t cause the very negative things you outline. I’m just pointing out that it’s not as bad as smoking.

That being said, I’m all for legislation that stops young people from using social media. I think it would be totally reasonable to make it illegal under a certain age.

Social media and cyberbullying leads to suicide and has and does kill people. This is particularly bad when those alt-f4’ing their life are adolescents and not post-midlife when smoking will kill.

It seems like it’s too early to tell how severe the second and third order effects of social media are on one’s own well-being and the well-being of society.

My language allowed for the acknowledgement of few and far between cases of suicide. It’s not a fair comparison to smoking deaths. Social media suicides get a lot of attention because, like you said, adolescent suicide is particularly sad. The numbers, however, are completely different orders of magnitudes; deaths by social media are insignificant when compared to smoking.

Smoking also has a strong social component. Smokers socialize around the ashcan. It's fun and exciting to catch up with the other smokers in your building or at your work.

It does become a vile sludge, you're not wrong about that.

Smoking reduces your chances of getting Parkinson’s disease so it is probably less than 100% bad.

Yeah the problem with smoking is mostly self control. It's clearly not a good habit but you can probably smoke a cigar a month for social or even personal enjoyment reasons and get more good than bad out of it.

Oof, that is not true and frankly terrible advice. Most people who quit smoking try the 'just sometimes' approach and it leads back to the original smoking habit.

Framing it as self control problems is also a non starter. That shit is skillfully made addictive - if your outcomes are a high chance of chronic use and related illness or a low chance of occasional use and questionable benefits then the overall expected value is still deeply negative.

I have been smoking exactly one cigar or cigarette a month for over 10 years. I'm open to some hypothetical idea that one cigar a month leads to anything more than the slightest of additional risk, but I haven't found the data for it. Meanwhile it provides quite a bit of enjoyment.

That aspect at least is easy to solve by drawing a stronger line between public content and stuff seen by people you actually know. This would be more of a social change than technical of course.

The harder part is figuring out how to handle public content, because there are still innocuous or positive uses for it as well.

I wonder if there's a way to model this as a simple Lottery trade off. Imagine a lot of game that has 100 times better odds of winning a Powerball sized multi-million jackpot, but every hundredth winner of this jackpot, (distributed randomly with a probability of 1/100) is arrested and publicly fed to lions. Would ticket sales increase or decrease versus the current scenario?

> social media has some good sides in that it allows you to keep in touch with family and friends who may be far away.

Sure, but there are numerous other ways of doing that without bringing in the problems of social media.

>The problem is that smoking is pretty much 100% bad

Smoking has far more benefits than social media, especially social benefits.

If you have a pack of 20 cigarettes at a bar, you have 20 new friends you haven't even met yet. Smokers stick together. Sharing a cigarette is a bonding moment for a lot of people.

I could go on. Fuck social media. I don't want to see underage girls whoring themselves out. I don't want to see man children acting cringe for likes. If I WANT to keep up with my family, I'll call them on the phone.