alt Hacker NewsThis kind of absolutism is unhelpful. At every point on the spectrum between "a good app that people choose to spend time on because it's valuable to them" and "heroin marketed to preteens in schools" there is no clear line or delineation between addictive abuse and autonomy.
But we still don't let liquor stores sell to kids. We still criminalize a lot of drug use. And while there are tons of different opinions about whether specific instances of those restrictions are appropriate, pretty much everyone agrees that there are qualitative differences between predatory behavior-influencing and bad choices.
It's a question about where to move lines that society already broadly agreed to put in place, not about whether to have lines at all a la "well you might as well just make bad choices illegal then". We already do that, and it succeeds at mitigating harm in many (not all) cases.
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The point of the absolutism is that the line will be drawn not where society broadly agrees it should, but where governments find it most useful, and that line will always move in the direction of increasing censorship and propaganda. If Hacker News becomes enough of a threat to the regime it will be classified as "social media" and all of a sudden it will be illegal to moderate without a court order or some nonsense. This is a fundamentally different argument than with liquor, or cigarettes, because those don't intersect with fundamental human rights. Social media intersects with free speech. I know people here don't want to admit that, but it's true.
It used to be understood within hacker culture that government influence over speech is never good. For some reason when it comes to social media we're suddenly willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Even banning algorithmic feeds is a problem. Do those feeds push harmful and extremist content? Yes. But they push everything else as well. Making it more difficult to find related content of any kind is a kind of censorship.
Drugs and alcohol are explicit substances with an explicit definition.