> grew up in the Wild West era of early internet freedom
The Wild West era of Internet freedom was much more tame than that.
Sure, you had trolls and other nasties, but not only were those trolls for the most part doing their mischief for personal entertainment, their impact was relatively localized - their trolling didn't scale.
Now compare this to an industrial-scale trolling & spamming operation where billions are poured into research, development and infrastructure.
You're comparing a small-scale spammer using their email client to spam manually against an industrial-scale automated spamming operation. The first one can be dealt with locally, the second one might require some out-of-band intervention.
Also, back in the day, you didn't need to go into IRC or the dark corners on the Internet to participate in society day to day. Nowadays, you have to be in the social media cesspool to even be able to lookup some business' opening hours or contact them.
> Does anyone here really think there is an “addictiveness” feature in the Facebook algorithm that can be toggled on and off like this article suggests?
Yes - just give the user a chronological feed with no extra bullshit inserted into it and let the user choose what they want to see based on their follows, instead of the engagement-maximizing algorithm choosing for them.
The Wild West era of Internet freedom was much more tame than that.
Sure, you had trolls and other nasties, but not only were those trolls for the most part doing their mischief for personal entertainment, their impact was relatively localized - their trolling didn't scale.
Now compare this to an industrial-scale trolling & spamming operation where billions are poured into research, development and infrastructure.
You're comparing a small-scale spammer using their email client to spam manually against an industrial-scale automated spamming operation. The first one can be dealt with locally, the second one might require some out-of-band intervention.
Also, back in the day, you didn't need to go into IRC or the dark corners on the Internet to participate in society day to day. Nowadays, you have to be in the social media cesspool to even be able to lookup some business' opening hours or contact them.
> Does anyone here really think there is an “addictiveness” feature in the Facebook algorithm that can be toggled on and off like this article suggests?
Yes - just give the user a chronological feed with no extra bullshit inserted into it and let the user choose what they want to see based on their follows, instead of the engagement-maximizing algorithm choosing for them.