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Witnessed my first real social media addict (poptalk.scrubbles.tech)

submitted 1 month ago by scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech to c/casualconversation@piefed.social

48 comments fedilink hide all child comments

A bit dumbfounded and just had to express it.

I had a 7 hour flight a couple of days ago and it had free wifi on the flight. Neat, I get to message people on the plane. However, I feel that for that long you still bring a book, or puzzles, or in my case I brought my Deck and played games for the duration of the flight.

The guy next to me though watched TikTok for the entire flight. 7 hours of constant stream of algorithm content to his face. I kind of understand why it's so addicting, it just keeps coming and coming with no end. I was just astonished with how he could keep going for 7 hours. An hour fine, it's a lot but we've all lost ourselves for an hour. 7 hours of constant feed though.

Idk, people come here to Lemmy and the Fediverse and say there isn't enough content. Well if 7 hours of content like that is expected it's too freaking much. If anything I feel I'm much healthier with social media now. Maybe they're angry because it feels more like a withdrawal.

No real point to this post beyond that. Just a very interesting thing to witness.

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[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Mine doesn't have an algorithm that was developed specifically to be addicting so it harvest data and promote ads. I think a single-player story based game is a bit different.

[–] Perspectivist@feddit.uk 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You both sat there for 7 hours straight staring at compelling content on screens.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Apples and oranges. I purchased content and chose to spend my time there. They were presented content that a megacorporation decided they should like, with a constant stream of ads. It's like saying someone reading a book is the same as someone reading the penny-saver for an hour.

[–] Perspectivist@feddit.uk 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It’s not a criticism of you - just a factual statement about objective reality. A few decades ago, you’d have been sitting there reading a book and feeling superior to someone playing Tetris. I get it. It’s only human. I catch myself doing the same thing all the time. My spending seven hours a day watching long-form YouTube videos is clearly also less bad than someone watching TikTok. And it might be. It's just the activity itself that to an outside observer looks exactly the same.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 3 points 1 month ago

That's not the point I'm making, if they say there for 7 hours on Lemmy or Mastodon or even Loops that would be different for me, it was the shovel-feeding of corporate approved content into their eyeballs at lightening speed.

A book, movie, game are all the same to me, they're telling a story and most they'll have is a sponsored item in there or something, it's the algorithmic addiction I was witnessing in person that I'm commenting on.