Agreed. They also in many cases remember when the Internet "was good." When every single website, tool, or product wasn't tracking every microinteraction, when your email spam was Re: Re: Re: Re: forwards, when social media was a microcosm of what it is today , and when bots didn't make up like more than half the user traffic. So the shit purpose built to engage kids and boomers falls flat.

And to your point about lying on the Internet, they forget (or flatly refuse to acknowledge) that like a corporation or government can and have easily create user accounts that look like normal people to convince people of things. Just because the name "John Goodbrown" sounds like a down to earth American and his picture is of him and his truck and cowboy boots doesn't mean it's not one of thousands of bot accounts created specifically by the FSB to cause chaos and stir opinion.

Part of the problem here is that too many people live to work, instead of the other way around. Once they retire, they have no idea what to do with themselves and take the least-effort path to occupy their time. Which makes them perfect targets for the addictive aspects of social media.

Maybe what we need to do is flood Facebook and Instagram and all the rest with material about the rewards of volunteering for charity.

(Sometimes I'm almost thankful my mother is a technophobe.)

I’m 50, and on my computer an awful lot. I use Reddit/Lemmy/X/Mastodon but that is about it social media wise. No Facebook/Insta/Tiktok/etc. I also haven’t had cable/satellite TV in 25+ years, so perhaps not typical for someone my age.

My dad is almost 80 and has zero interest in social media/tv. He’ll watch the occasional YouTube video about something sciencey or about whatever project he’s working on, and might catch a movie on my plex server or a DVD from his small collection once a month or two.

I do see others my age (or his) glued to social media, but from my very limited data set I don’t think it’s some age related brain rot that will get us all.

Headline 40 years from now: "Torment Nexus addiction affecting millenials"

I think this is an important comment.

I also was becoming skeptical of what was and what wasn’t being reported through those channels right about the time that I got access to the Internet. That skepticism towards what we now call “legacy media” did prime me to be way more open to hearing people on the Internet claiming to know “what’s really going on”. Not proud to say it, but I did have a brief season where I was tuned in to what Alex Jones was saying.

Had smartphones been a thing then? Maybe I would have turned out like the very folks this thread is talking about.