This:

So it is somewhat difficult for me to imagine a life where I don't do it.

Contradicts this:

But I am absolutely certain that it has turned me into a smarter person than I would be without it.

Is what I'm saying. Meaning no offense, but the "I cannot imagine life without it" is kind of indicative of the brain rot people are talking about here.

If there is anything detrimental to intellectual development it’s things that leave you unable to imagine life without it. It makes you less likely to try something new and question your beliefs and habits.

But I am absolutely certain that it has turned me into a smarter person than I would be without it.

Dunning-Kruger effect in full display here...

Negative emotion smegative emotion... We're talking about what rots your brain

It's the reward schedules and the pipeline.

The most addicting form of a feed is to limit good dopamine producing content to the minimum level that will keep you scrolling. The more garbage content they can force you to scroll past without closing the app, the more likely you are to continue to doom scroll

The pipeline is the way that the "good" content gets more saliant over time. More impactful, which happens to be more extreme and usually anger inducing

It's like if you're training your dog to sit, you can start by feeding them kibble every time. But if you want them to sit on command even outside of training sessions, once they understand the command you move to a high value treat, like cheese, and you want to slowly reward them less and less often for performing the behavior. That's how you make them obey every time without thinking or looking for the cheese... You can ingrain the behavior so deeply that sitting becomes the default response to hearing or seeing the order

It's just operant conditioning, but there's another layer to the puzzle when it comes to the algorithm.

When you're doom scrolling, you're not evaluating information, you're hunting for dopamine. When you find rage bait, your brain is not going to evaluate it, you've been conditioned to scarf down the treat and look for the next one

That's how the pipeline works. It exposes you to more extreme information over time while you're in a receptive doom scrolling state. Maybe the first time you see that "illegals are stealing Medicare funds" you might think "that doesn't even make sense, that's not how federal funding works, and you need documentation to sign up for Medicare anyways"

But through repeat exposure over time and this training schedule, propoganda will slip past your mental defenses. It works on everyone - some bit of that information will be internalized without conscious evaluation

You can find all the echo chambers you want on Lemmy, but the way information is presented is not carefully engineered to rot your brain. The sort algorithms are simple, they're not tracking your clicks on rage bait and giving you an extremism score to custom tailor your feed, and if you spend 20 minutes scrolling you're usually going to hit stale content

It's the difference between looking for blackberries in the woods and going through reinforcement training to use slurs