You describe the apps as though they are recreational drugs with no other purpose but to produce endorphins. These 'apps' have a high level of utility - which is, I imagine, why most start to use them in the first place.

>Is it not possible for people to just delete the apps and stop using them?

Some people have friends, and some people also have friends that are very distant (geographically, life style, stage of life, etc).

Social media can allow you to keep in touch with these people in a very convenient way. For me, being able to see life updates of friends with 8h+ timezone differences is very nice perk, because planning a call or having energy to chat with someone that far away is tricky and many people understandably then drop it if that's the only way. (same applies if I want to talk to my digital nomad friend or, new-dad-overwhelmed friend). It's much easier to facilitate meeting up when I'm traveling too.

But even for people that want to use it for that purpose only, FB/Instagram will shove down infinite scroll and stories/reels/updates of people/entities you can care less about.

And yes for some it is hard to have "the willpower" as you want to frame it. (although we know it's not so much willpower, from addiction studies around nicotine and how loss of socialization around smoking usually is a detriment to quitting smoking for example)

And yes just removing / blocking those features help. There are also unofficial side-loadable app out there. So for me it works.

And for your life maybe there's no loss in socializing by just walking away. Good for you. But maybe the examples can shed some light in how social NETWORK (social media before algorithm and attention economy) is useful for many in different predicament than you, while the social media aspects, many would rather opt out.

And unfortunately only a select few of my friends (nerds/techies) are outside it (signal, discord, good old email) but almost everyone at least have an account. Many of the people I know move often enough that phone numbers aren't even a reliable way to keep in touch

HN is also social media :)

but let's say friends sending links to group chats (or through direct messages) and you open it, and uh you see you got messages from other people on Instagram, or on Facebook you see that someone had a baby/wedding/whatever, and ...

also I see that people install these limiter apps on their phones, and then just override them many times a day.

and of course if every few days you spend 30 minutes giggling while looking at funny cats/dogs, sure, great. but on bad days you end up doing it for hours and escaping into it, ignoring something else, or using it after stressful meetings to "clear my head" (which becomes a coping mechanism for anxiety)

the problem is obviously (right?) that this happens to everybody. kids are probably more susceptible, but in general we withdrew into our screens and do our flight/fight/fawn/freeze responses online (videogames, outrage porn, porn porn, food porn)

https://www.slowboring.com/p/from-bowling-alone-to-scrolling...

I beleive I deleted facebook in 2013ish.

If I need to access for some business reason, I have a fake account. Otherwise I have zero desire to be on social media.

For my son, I built a web site based on my dog. The dog aka Prof Nubbs. Essentially it's a dogs against social media, if you on social media then you are not playing with your dog! Dogs against social media.

I don’t understand either. Usually someone responds with something like “the local <whatever> only posts updates on <app> so what choice do I have” or something to do with peer pressure or FOMO. I don’t doubt that people deal with those problems but they seem like better ones to have. But it seems like a lot of people just cannot imagine living without the apps anymore.

I deactivated Instagram about 6 months ago and while there are definitely benefits I also miss out on a lot of local events and updates. It can be a useful tool if done right.

That being said I never use any of the features that feed you new content - strictly used it for people I knew in real life and events / local fitness groups / etc.

Facebook I deactivated way back and never looked back. Maybe it was useful in 2008

You fall out of society, basically. In my circles, most people expect everyone our age to have Instagram, even though it's been blocked by the government since 2022.

As far as I'm concerned, the algorithmic part that shows me content from strangers is a tacked-on extra, and not a very welcome one.

In some countries there is no alternative. News, events and many businesses only publish on social media

it may be possible for some people, I don't know.

does Meta have internal research that uses the word addiction that would come up in discovery? probably.

so there's more than one side of this. a little bit of a chance in the health & science department, a little bit of a chance in the legal department, that the plaintiffs would prevail.

that said, are people willing to ban alcohol and tobacco fully? and most "recreational" drugs? the cultural side is the least informative, because you can't litigate culture, it's arbitrary, hypocrisy is the rule, not the exception.

Nope.

in more detail: Largely no.

Theres many ways to explain this, but this is the shortest: You have an average person, with a phone.

This person, with their average life experience, average brain development and biology, is facing off against research programs, data analysis, engineering teams, product designers, financiers, operations teams, who all want to give them the best digital experience they possible can have.

The algorithms are A/B tested to as close as possible, the content is generated from a dog-eat-dog creator economy that finds the most distracting methods to grab your attention.

A good part of this is because our society has never had to deal with information technology of this scope and scale. Quantity is its own quality. As a result people never had support and the firms had carte blanche.

It took us decades to go from the Libertarian ideal of "More speech is free speech" to knowing that content moderation is required to have functional online communities.

Do individuals have free will and choice? Yes.

Are people going to respond to incentives? yes.

Are people going to be able to compete fairly against a far more resourced claimaint for their attention and money? No.