Social media addiction affects kids and parents alike, and proposed bans miss the real culprit: toxic business models.
The Problem with Bans
Banning kids from social media criminalizes families while ignoring adult vulnerabilities. You really think we adults are able to resist the influences of 10,000 psychologists trying to addict then manipulate us into eating E-numbers and voting against our best interests in the next election?
Governments dodge the core issue—platforms like Twitter and Instagram amplify rage for profit, harvest data, and turn users into products. Profit = rising GDP figures and tax revenue – a government’s lifeblood.
Rage Machines vs. User Control
Current platforms:
- Agorithms push toxic content and farm our attention.
- The business model normalizes invasive data sales to advertisers.
- Social media companies enable government surveillance via blanket data dumps “under sub-poena”.
Nostr reverses this
- Users own their content, and demand privacy.
- No real names, emails, or IDs required.
- Apps compete on user trust.
- If app owners misbehave, users switch instantly to another social media app, no friction.
- All your content and followers go with you across to any app using the Nostr protocol!
- Nobody can switch off all the servers hosting content posted to Nostr
How Nostr Works
- Interoperable: Posts work across apps—social, e-commerce, music, chat.
- User-curated: No algorithms. You build feeds by actively following people or topics that interest you, rather than relying on suggestions from app owners incentivised to ply you with rage-bait.
- Market-driven: If you talk shit, you’ll be ignored. Add value? Earn likes, reposts, even tips in real money.
No Chaos, Just Adults
Without central control, you’d expect anarchy. Instead, Nostr’s raw global feed stays surprisingly civil—no forced outrage means calmer discourse. Compare that to Twitter/X feed where you see the soft underbelly of a very disturbed human race. Guess what. Adults treated like adults and not as products to be enraged behave quite well!
The Old Twitter Was Better
Pre-2014 Twitter felt like a social club—you joined as anyone, found your crowd organically, distanced from creeps quietly. Algorithmic greed killed that. Nostr revives it.
Path Forward
Skip bans. Or if doing nothing is not acceptable, ban social media companies until they revise their business models.
Promote user-sovereign platforms like Nostr. If there’s a central owner, the platform is prone to slide into censorship, draconian rules, and increasing personal info demands. Think Bluesky or the Mastodon server owners and how, with the best of intentions, they still become power crazy and controlling.
Educated about the horrors of current social media business models, people should naturally gravitate to healthy spaces, leaving rage machines behind. Kids (and adults) thrive when controlling their own networks, not fighting corporate ones.
Reality check
Will parents try out Nostr and having seen its merits, encourage their kids to use it? Not en masse.
Will governments ban social media for under 16’s amid applause from parents who just want something done that doesn’t involve much effort from themselves? Damn right.
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