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-Facebook is a closed system

-Anyone who feels strongly against Facebook will have stopped using it

If both of these are true, the typical person commenting about its evils will have a poor idea of how it's actually used. So someone telling me it's damaging my mental health because of social gratification - I haven't posted anything real-life in years - falls about as flat as someone saying Reddit is a website for sharing weight loss pictures.

There are important points to be made about Facebook but they're lost in the noise.



> -Anyone who feels strongly against Facebook will have stopped using it

That's a pretty big assumption. People's feelings can and do change based on new information.


I don't think it's an assumption, I think it's a tautology. It's not nicotine; if you're using it you don't feel strongly against it.


> It's not nicotine

Neither is alcohol, nor is gambling.

To be less facetious, I don't see why the claim that facebook can't possibly be addictive, is so self-evident that it's a tautology. I can understand people having different stances in the debate on whether it's addictive, but denying that there's a debate to be had seems completely misguided.

(Also, there can be reasons other than addiction for people using facebook despite feeling strongly against it — e.g. peer pressure.)


I assumed you meant it as an assumption because you said "If both of these are true".

So, more precisely, your point was actually "anyone who had been feeling strongly about it at some arbitrary point in time will have stopped using it by that arbitrary point in time". Yes, that's a bit easier to justify but still quite uncertain (IMO) and also a much weaker statement.

Also, just because the stimulus isn't a molecule it does not follow that it's not biochemical in nature. Physics and biochemistry play a role all the way down. The very notion of "stimulus" depends on where we draw the murky, fuzzy and ultimately arbitrary border between "us" and "the world".


> -Anyone who feels strongly against Facebook will have stopped using it

Please define "strongly".

I know many people who really dislike Facebook, but still use it for business reasons or since their parents, best friend, local community, ... use it to share information or scheduling events.




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