Tobacco doesn’t consume time.

In an economy, time is an important asset. When people are scrolling, they are neither creating nor consuming (spending money), which makes them inert from the GDP standpoint. It’s an economic blackhole.

This is why the government needs to care. If it goes unchecked, it will bring the economy to its knees. No country in the world can afford to have a significant portion of its population burn their time and energy like that.

I think they might doubt that it will doom Meta

You mean my "away" autoresponse I set for MSN for an hour or wast it AIM? jokes aside, yeah they all copied it, look at YouTube too.

The notification spam on your phone is something that did not exist in the 2000s, no?

I remember that with the advent of smartphones suddenly all websites wanted to send status updates...

You havent met people who are terminally on Discord yet have you? I don't know that IRC had that level of addiction. People become insanely attached to 'servers' on Discord.

One thing that Discord reliably does is to lock me off the account and force me to go through _all_, complete verification hops (starting form the sms to my phone).

Nothing changes between my sessions, IP from the same ISP, same device, same times, not even new servers, just a normal, human pattern of use on the decent, old account.

Just discord being discord.

Irc had screensharing and group video chat i had no idea

I would lump Tik Tok as the direct IG competitor imho. It doesn't make sense because that was not its roots, but the way I see people use IG is the way I also see people use Tik Tok.

This is a fair call out, though I agree and disagree to a point. Some people get really into specific communities, if banned they will spin up as many new accounts as they can get in just to be in again, its really weird to me, I just move on from communities I am no longer allowed in.

Are you sure? It seems like to me, they just pay these people to shut up. And that's it then.