So in my view, the solution has to abide by this law of the jungle, but also short circuit the psychological mechanisms that tech companies are using to harvest attention. Somehow, people will have to pay for their freedom, similar to how drug addicts can pay for rehabilitation once they see the damage the drug has done to their life. It’s still a business, but one that contributes to the greater good.

Most of the solutions in this article require some kind of government intervention, which I don't see happening any time soon. Eventually, maybe, but probably only after society has nearly (or completely) ripped itself apart due to social media, the negatives are laid bare, and people start pushing for change.

> What might actually work

This section is idealistic. I guess the author was too damaged by his own experience to actually study the wave of twitter replacements. I would love to see an analysis of those. "Different Funding Methods" is clearly required but perhaps not sufficient.

Eyal wrote another book 5 years later trying to help people control their attention & not falling victim to the playbook he outlined in Hooked.

As someone who's a lifelong Muslim and even more dedicated to that in my late 30s and now at 40 I'll say we were put on this earth for a purpose. As engineers we need to understand our own design. We need to understand that all the things we constructed for ourselves isn't all for our benefit but actually a lot of it is harmful, whether it be the digital life or processed food. This is a more holistic way to live. The author obviously wanted to get people offline. I think the issue is when the algorithm of silicon valley is making money then anything inherently social becomes about addiction and gamification. There are alternative routes forward but probably by first getting offline or reassessing ones relationship with the world..

Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these companies feel they’re beholden to shareholders and can’t act on their own agency of course they will turn to addiction research not as a warning but as a guidebook. It’s Stanford Prison Experiment stuff.

I hate being reductionist, and I am posting this on a historically YC forum so of course there’s nuance, but there’s a pretty huge throughline of outside investment and addiction engineering. It sucks we’re seeing less grants and less security net to encourage risks under current administration, because it leaves investment as the quickest path to starting or scaling a company. Donate to open source, IMO

> We built these platforms. We can build better ones. But only if we're willing to abandon the economic models that made the current ones inevitable. Until we change those incentives, every attempt to fix social media will become part of the problem it’s trying to solve. We’ll keep wondering why we can’t just put our phones down, not realizing that billion-dollar companies have spent a decade making sure we can’t.

> The solution isn't another app. It's changing the rules of the game entirely.

In direct language, what exactly is the author suggesting we do here?

It’s nothing to do with social media, and everything to do with the wrong KPIs.

Unpopular opinion but I think we need to stop building social networks if we want to bring people together. Let people meet each other in real life. Let the relationships flourish organically. No amount of tech will ever build the trust that face to face interactions can build. When people are in presence of each other they are just not exchanging ideas. There is so much of non verbal exchange through body language, tone of voice, facial expressions. I think all this helps in building trust. Social media on other hand just does the opposite unless the user is very conscious of the effects of social media.