My passing thought is to prohibit advertising and user data monetization and it might solve itself.

We also have regulations on usage, like truck drivers can only drive X hours a day, force some type of consumption limit the networks are required to enforce. We have similar laws regarding where, when, and how people can consume things like alcohol so could also do something like that. Some amount of it is ok, but as you say we’ve now learned it’s so addictive we need to force people into moderation of their consumption.

Honestly this is probably the most realistic solution. The only reason all the shit ragebait addictive content is so bad is because it drives ad revenue.

I do think there's one exception/problem: youtube. While there's a lot of pregnant spiderman-elsa crap on it, there's also tons of historical, educational, investigative journalism, etc etc etc content there that strikes me as distinctly more valuable than literally anything that's ever existed on facebook, tiktok or even twitter.

And in addition to the backlog, there's an economics problem. Having good, free, easy, available video hosting is a huge good. It's also ridiculously expensive (videos are big, and you have to render multiple qualities of them, and store them forever) and a hard engineering (network and software) problem (what tiny % of video upload constitutes 90% of the actual network traffic? but you also have to brace for videos from nobodies going viral and needing to be served to the entire globe).

So how do you fund something like this? Normally I'd say, well, damn, this sounds like a utility. But given the political climate we're going into for the next 4 years, and the fact that even healthcare is privatized (well, the part of it that can generate a profit... unprofitable customers are of course pushed to the taxpayer)...

I think we'd have to carefully define what a 'social network' is. In my opinion, YT is not a social network. The UGC parts of Amazon.com, like reviews, do not make it a social network either. YT is a broadcast / streaming service with some small layer of UGC (I say small because, honestly, if the entire comment section was eliminated I don't think anyone would miss it, it's meme worthy bad in most cases.)

Or maybe it's just me and don't use it that way and others do? I subscribe to some things, watch a lot of videos mostly has a lurker and almost never even dip into the comments. I have exactly 0 connections with people I know on YT. It's more of a modern television channel than anything in my case.

There is a lot of variation in community and comment quality on YouTube. Similar to Reddit there is a massive long tail of smaller communities and topics which absolutely have vibrant and real, helpful comments. And on the biggest channels and videos there is a lot of bullshit and low quality comments. Both are true at the same time so it would be a shame to stamp out the genuine communities and connections

Is there any reasonable definition of "social network" that includes TikTok, but doesn't include YouTube Shorts?

Maybe YT needs to ditch Shorts under this hypothetical, I don't think it's the enriching part of the service the comment above was referencing

Youtube ain’t a social network and you can watch all of it without an account.

if the problem is advertising and data monetization, why am I so addicted to /this/ website?

I have had a much harder time quitting Hacker News than I ever did quitting Facebook. I've been off Facebook for ten years yet I keep logging in to leave stupid comments here.

Is that because of advertising and data monetization?

I do not see the correlation either, other than people buying stuff because an ad popped up, but that is not their primary reason for being on Facebook.

I don't think "addictiveness" is really the problem. I've been "addicted" to Wikipedia for 20+ years too.

The voting system (everything it entails in terms of visual design) is addictive.

Ads/monetization isn't necessarily the problem, but it enables Facebook to exist at the scale it does. If we're trying to reduce their scale or limit the size of the social network, it seems silly to fracture the entire market by breaking them up. You can simply cut off their revenues.

And no, I don't think HN addiction is anything like FB addiction. This site is heavily moderated in comparison and the content is higher quality. It's a 'news' site with some respectable commentary that is so rare people like us keep coming back. There's a level of decency that's expected and required here. I could go on, lack of photos, videos, etc. The content is community driven via ranking versus an algorithm optimized for financial outcomes.... I also don't actually know any of you people so how is that a social network, it's a community forum at best. The almost absence of political stuff on HN helps a fair amount.

Addiction itself isn't super bad. Addiction to harmful things is what's bad. I don't even know if I'm addicted to HN, sometimes I go weeks without coming here - but have mostly been here daily for many years. I enjoy it, it enriches my life, I feel it's a positive habit. Just because you take your dog for a walk every day, are you addicted to it? You could just let him out in the back yard? You do it because it's a healthy habit, for them and you.

Require human moderation. That naturally limits scale.

> Require human moderation. That naturally limits scale.

Does it? Does a human need to examine everything posted? You can certainly send letters without them going through a human moderator. Only what is flagged by a scanner? What if nothing is flagged? What should be flagged?

> Does it? Does a human need to examine everything posted? You can certainly send letters without them going through a human moderator.

Because those are two orthogonal things. You aren’t sending a letter to be displayed by everyone and their dog on this planet to see.

You can also print flyers, pamphlets, books, posters, and all such things without submitting them to a human censor (c.f. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/p... for this usage).

Yes. To one address at a time. If you do a mass send, you'll get regulated at some point, too.

It raises the cost of the service therefore the need of user data monetization, I feel like this would backfire. I’d limit the revenue via bans on ads and data monetization.

great way to burn out people and scar them for life, look at all the stories of facebook moderators etc.

Nah, they would use AI, and as such, would not really limit scale.

My social network is WhatsApp and Telegram: 1-to-1 messages and some groups where I usually know everybody in them. That's the threshold.

I was interpreting the poster as saying "you, yourself, the reader will be better off cutting this out of your life" in which case your questions are irrelevant.

Of course, it is possible they meant to come up with a holistic plan for improving society in three short sentences, as your reply assumes.

Which would, I suppose, indirectly make the case that social interactions online tend to be pointless and a little silly.

In the US, at least, a government-run social media site would be impossible to moderate, because of the First Amendment. It becomes a Nazi bar immediately.

Get rid of behavioral advertising. You'll find that most or all of the negative things people have in mind when they say "ban social media" go away.