Infinite scroll and engagement maximizing algorithms are the nicotine.

I'm continuously shocked at how addictive phones can be for some people. There seems to be something about the form factor. Laptops and desktops don't do it the same way. Something about that touch screen in your pocket and your hand that you can just grab and scroll and get dopamine hits is really intense.

I have for a while called social media the "tobacco companies of the mind."

Social belongs in quotes too. As social media has evolved it has become progressively less social, less about communication and connecting people, and more just a crowdsourced chum factory built around addiction. Do Instagram or TikTok even have a concept of a social connection? Do people actually use these to talk to their friends?

Instagram publicly states that most activity happens in DMs. I'm there entirely for my personal network.

You can follow people on TikTok and if people mutually follow each others they are your “friends”.

TikTok has DMs.

Yeah, these things count as social connections IMO. Even though your FYP (the “For You Page”) is determined algorithmically to show you things that you might be interested in from any user across the platform.

(They also have a specific friend feed you can look at instead of the FYP. But if most people are like me then they still mainly scroll the FYP, not the friend feed on TikTok.)

That's not right though. In the analogy, ads are payment for the cig, and anything that results in impressions is the nicotine. The fact that the misaligned incentives result in a bunch of tar, filler, and who knows what else pushed into cig/impression is just industry immaturity.

But here's the thing: like pure nicotine, it turns out that getting rid of all the other crap, while it might be an improvement, still doesn't make nicotine good for you. The addictive substance, in and of itself, even if was given away for free, is terrible for your body and your mind.

I'm not really addicted to ads, though.

I mostly feel like I'm surrounded by dealers willing to stab me with a needle full of the stuff when I least expect it.

I interpret the OP point as addicted to the result of ads (free stuff), not necessarily the ads themselves.

This shows up in a lot of threads about paid search engines and the number of people unwilling to pay $10/month when Google provides similar quality results for “free”.

I'm deeply against advertising and the harms that social media cause, but if you just removed ads entirely it would not fix the problem (even if you could because where do you draw the line on what "influencers" do).

Unless you were home schooled or truly isolated, I'm confident everyone experienced or witnessed at some point the cruelty and mob behavior of children and young adults. Now couple that with the difficulty of scrubbing one's past online.

I fail to see how one arrives to this conclusion. Nobody likes ads, back when I worked in adtech we ad such little engagement from ads we wondered why people even paid for them (it wasn't bad targeting and our business was very profitable)

Literally no one in the world browse instagram or youtube in the hope to see more ads

"Nobody likes ads" -> A lot of people pay a lot of money for them, because they have to or because they see results from revenue.

Also, like in the late stages of addiction, "we wondered why people even paid for them" -> the effect is muted and the drug is still around "for some reason".

While ads targeting teenagers are a problem, it’s not the biggest problem with social media.

The issue is that algorithms give users a distorted view of the world that isolates them from alternative viewpoints. Social networks breed all kinds of extremism from political to body image. Not to mention the potential bullying that can occur.

It’s not just dangerous teenagers. It’s dangerous for adults.

Nitpick, but it's 'bad rap', as in rap sheet.