It’s not a gotcha. It’s more of the Socratic method.

Yes I read your comment. So if a man is compelled to murder two hobos a month and can’t break the habit, that would not be a strong indication of an addiction?

So how many hours of TF2 can you play a day before doctors will diagnose you with an addiction? Four, eight, sixteen?

It is correct. If you do heroin everyday, you will have physical problems. If you stop playing Team Fortress 2 and it causes you to start shaking, vomiting, and shitting your pants, then that’s comparable to heroin. But you won’t do that so they’re not the same types of addiction. That’s why the medical community defines addiction by how something affects your life and not by some arbitrary number of times you do it.

That’s a physical addiction. Drug addiction is a problem physicians handle. Psychologists handle addiction to video games, gambling, sex, the Internet, etc and that’s how they define addiction.

He’s right. Clinical addiction has nothing to do with how much you do something, it has to do with how much it causes problems in your life. I know everyone on Lemmy is tripping over their own hard ons to kill corporations, but there are people using lemmy 16 hours a day and if laws are passed to fight Internet addiction, they will not specifically target corporations. We all go down together. Just ask the creator of Urban Dead.

The problem is there are a lot of subreddits that are an excellent resource. As far as I know, there aren’t any Blender help instances with a 100,000 people. I really wish there were.

That’s like saying that famine and starvation is a perk of communism when someone like Mao fucks up. In both systems, what matters is trying to find the most efficient way to generate and distribute wealth. Profit in capitalism is a byproduct of what matters. It’s important for people to remember this so they don’t fall for MLMs, pyramid and Ponzi schemes.

use something without an algorithm.

Lemmy uses an algorithm.

No no. You’re right. The algae rythmz just got me. I suddenly believe the Earth is flat and I’m going to go eat some Tide pods.

You’ve never come across something and view it out of curiosity? The algorithms love when you branch out like that.

The problem with tech companies is that they’ve hyped up their tech so much that people actually think it’s sentient. Algorithms don’t love anything anymore than a cake recipe loves anything.

You’re being amazingly condescending to people being abused and guided by the algorithms, acting like you’re above it.

No, I’m being normally condescending which is difficult not to do when people are being pushed around by their computers and phones. It’s like somebody getting manipulated by a light switch. “Oh my god! It knows when I want the light to be on! Get out of my mind!” I’m not acting like I’m above it.

You’re 3 clicks away from conspiracy theories flooding your feed by way of “here’s how flat earthers explain gravity” because your chosen video, the bridge video, and the conspiracy videos are all using the same keywords.

So? I get curious and look at that stuff but I don’t go walled-eyed and start drooling. If I don’t look, it goes away. Or better yet, if it doesn’t go away, I search for videos I’m actually interested in.

You’re not noticing all the “harmless” unrelated suggested content from the games you don’t play like Factorio, Stardew, Hollow Knight, No Man’s Sky, or Star field but it’s there, just as predatory, seeing where you’ll bite. The overlapping keywords and viewerships are there. It’s exactly the same situation.

This is some weird conspiracy stuff. So Hollow Knight and Stardew Valley is trying to eat my soul? This is the same kind of cryptic talk that people freaking out about heavy metal and DnD in the 80s used.

This category association is how people get drawn into deep, dark corners. This is how segmented conspiracy groups converge. This is how the manosphere becomes an echo chamber. This is how self-harm and self-hate content puts someone in a hole by themselves.

That and the search bar. Most people who get stuck in that stuff are seeking it out. It’s what they’re interested in.

You’re acting morally superior without an actual understanding of what these platforms are designed to do.

No, you think these algorithms are way more effective than they actually are. A lot of what you describe happens because algorithms can’t read people’s minds. They’re just dumb machines. Bare in mind that chess AI from the 80s can wipe it’s ass with your face and those mighty algorithms were like 25KB in size. Just 5KB is enough to present challenging AI. This is enough to give the appearance of Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde having different personalities.

And it’s pretty well established at this point that social media is harmful to mental health, is it not?

In the same way it was well established that heavy metal was harmful to mental health in the 80s. The moral panics of the 80s seem goofy to people today, but back then it was just as deadly serious and real as the magical mystery algorithms hacking and controlling our brains today.

The evil YouTube wizardry is currently recommending me videos about the Flax engine, Blender, Satisfactory, and old clips of Norm MacDonald. If it’s telling you to kill yourself, that’s because you’re asking it how to. It’s just matching keywords in videos: user watched video with keywords Einstein, gravity, and relativity therefor, recommend Einstein Oppenheimer clip, Kerbal Space Program review, and Sabine Hossenfelder video. Replace those keywords with nasty ass shit and you’re getting more nasty ass shit.

On Reddit, I always find it hilarious when people out themselves when they’re complaining about porn sites sending them some weird ass videos. “Oh man! I don’t understand why Pornhub keeps showing me videos of women being strangled!” No, no, you don’t understand but I sure as hell do.

This is the modern version of the Judas Priest backwards masking case.

If ICQ held on for just two more years…

Too late. Nobody told me. I thought they all required email. I might sign up for a different account if that isn’t frowned upon.

Are we safe here on Lemmy?

Every other post here I’ve seen is low key promoting violent revolution. So I’d imagine there’s at least one FBI agent hanging around and writing reports.

I’m new to Lemmy. Why does Lemmy.world require an email and Lemmy.org doesn’t? I assumed all the Lemmies and Piefeds and whatnots required an email.

The sick world you live in is online. It’s not real. The world you see through your black mirror isn’t the same as the one you see outside the window. News has always been a litany of human misery. Online news is pure and condensed human suffering.

I’m not exactly rejecting it, but I can’t afford to build a new computer that can run it till the AI bubble bursts.

That’s just because he looks like depression.