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Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs. If you came up with a substance that caused young people by the millions to bec

• haolez 6y ago
  Add to that recent games like FIFA or NBA that have casino-like mechanics with real money.
  • ForHackernews 6y ago
    Watch out, they'll outlaw Robinhood
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• simias 6y ago
  I've always been a bit extreme on this but I more than ever believe that it's insane that we consider that leaving teenagers with unsupervised internet access is reasonable. Maybe I'm prude or naive but I remember vividly when I first saw a pornographic movie at like around 17. It really shook me at the time. I wasn't traumatized or anything but it made a strong impact on me. These days I expect that most teens experience this at like 12yo on their smartphones. Last week I was linked a reddit video of some guy dying in absolutely gruesome circumstance due to an industrial accident. And then there's the constant influx of disinformation. Did you know that Hydroxychloroquine cures HIV? I saw a Youtube video claiming just that yesterday. Leaving a kid on the internet is like living them on a shaddy part of town for hours at a time. I'm old enough that I only had internet at home when I turned 18, in hindsight I feel like I dodged a bullet.
  • ramphastidae 6y ago
    I agree that kids shouldn’t use the internet unsupervised, but what is the alternative? We were all 15 once. It is 100% impossible to stop kids from using the internet if they want to. So what’s the alternative?
    • kibwen 6y ago
      Active and available parenting, ideally starting long before the teen years where they no longer want to take advice from their parents. Saying that it's 100% impossible to stop kids from using the internet is as true as saying that it's 100% impossible to stop kids from trying alcohol. But there's a difference between a kid getting drunk once at a party and a kid being a habitual, daily alcoholic. As a parent you want to guide them towards healthy ways to engage with things that could otherwise destroy them in excess. Social media in moderation is fine. Social media in excess isn't, and that's where a lot of parents have left their kids (because even they don't know how to use it in moderation; society hasn't caught up yet).
      • darkwater 6y ago
        > Active and available parenting, ideally starting long before the teen years where they no longer want to take advice from their parents. This, 1000 times this. Also, leaving kids completely without supervision or using screen time/smartphones to babysit them it's easy but it's just like tech-debt and really any other form of debt. You will pay the consequences 10x during their teen years.
  • meowkit 6y ago
    I’ve been saying that the internet was designed by engineers, for engineers. I don’t mean this literally, but in the sense that methodical, reasonable adults built out these systems without thinking about how the average person, let alone teenager, would be using it. And at this point even a lot of engineers I know fall into the traps of addiction and echo chambers quite readily. I find of Tristan Harris’s “pointing supercharged AI at our brains” line to be accurate.
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• Bakary 6y ago
  I recently saw a tweet that for once seemed insightful: "the internet did to boomers what boomers thought it would do to us", presumably posted by someone under the age of 25. Young people are vulnerable to social media, and your point still stands, but I am also under the impression that it has impacted previous generations to a far greater extent, breaking their link to reality altogether.
  • titzer 6y ago
    I'm 40, and grew up programming in my early teens, so I've seen the Web's entire arc. This social media stuff was fun for a time but it turned very dark, almost exactly in proportion to the money involved, like everything else on the Web, IMHO. Also, the gamification of many things. Even HN karma. The thrill of watching the upvotes roll in! (even now...)
    • Bakary 6y ago
      Is it the money, or just society in general moving into the space? Darkness is an inherent part of human life, and the internet is now the agora. For a social animal, any aspect of existence will have been gamified from the start...
  • vlunkr 6y ago
    I have a theory that older generations are much worse at identifying fake information on the internet. I clicked a few bogus banner ads (punch the monkey and win 100$) and got my fair share of malware from limewire, so I learned that you should treat everything on the internet with skepticism. Older people grew up with media that wasn't always accurate, but at least wasn't directly lying or trolling you. Now the internet has been delivered right into their pockets and they aren't prepared for it. They see a video about ballet boxes being stuffed, and of course they believe it. Their friend Gladys shared it on facebook, of course it's real!
• bluetomcat 6y ago
  Social media provokes behaviours which are unnatural or even impossible in an ordinary "social" setting. On one hand, it is the instant ability to have others react on whatever you may say or post, regardless of the context of what is being expressed. In an ordinary social gathering with people talking, there is a collective subject discourse and you cannot just express your preference for cats in the middle of the conversation. Second, the format is designed to encourage hyper-expression and hyper-reactivity. Personalised likes, notifications, a time-trackable identity linked to your emotional preferences like movies, sports, lifestyle etc.
• linuxftw 6y ago
  It's called "parenting" which is not in vogue right now. Currently, people treat children like adults, expecting them to navigate the world as an adult would, and that's dumb. Reject a failed society. It's okay to be an individual, you don't need to be part of the collective.
  • vonwoodson 6y ago
    This is called victim blaming.
  • lovecg 6y ago
    Do they? I keep hearing how college age students are “coddled” and the whole helicopter parenting thing. Your comment is the first time I saw the opposite view expressed in a while.
  • meowster 6y ago
    I think we have different definitions of treating children like adults. It seems to me like they are barely treated as people. Yes, parenting is not in vogue, and that's the problem. People do not know how to parent. It almost seems like many people are treating them like pets.
    • Nasrudith 6y ago
      They treat them like adults if the adults are prisoners essentially.
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• csallen 6y ago
  Amusingly, you could analyze anything this way if you ignore the benefits and only look at the costs. "Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system that required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and subjected them to invasive scans and searches of their personal materials." "How are schools allowed! They literally imprison our kids for upwards of 7 hours a day, feed them substandard food, and subject them to Orwellian surveillance, exorbitant record-keeping, cruel social hierarchies, and a stress-inducing grading system akin to a dystopian social credit system." I'm not saying the downsides aren't in fact downsides. They are. But you can't accurately assess the whole picture without taking the upsides into account, too.
  • kibwen 6y ago
    Rather than alluding to vague upsides, can you list what upsides you want to assert that social media provides, so that we can do as you say and perform a cost/benefit analysis? As both an early adopter and former user of both Facebook and Twitter, my eventual conclusion was that whatever benefits they offered were vastly outweighed by the mental toll they took on me.
    • nyanpasu64 6y ago
      To quote @mumblemumble: """ There's another side to this, though. Letting kids roam the internet can give ones who might otherwise be doomed to become misfits an opportunity to find community. Being a queer kid pre-Internet, for example, sucked, and the Web rolling out to households changed a lot of kids' lives. And we have a poor cultural memory of what that experience used to be like, because, before the rise of online communities, a big part of being queer - especially being a queer kid - was being subjected to systematic erasure. I'm not sure how you balance those two things. My sense, though, is that the balance was better 20, 25 years ago, when the Internet had more small, individualized communities. Most of them have since been squashed by the rise of the social media oligopoly. """ I don't know if the downsides are worse for Facebook or Twitter (engineered for eyeballs and ad clicks), than forums, or where Discord lies on the spectrum.
• serial_dev 6y ago
  > Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs. I don't think you need young in that sentence. I see social media's negative effects on all age groups. I see it in my own life (I'm 30): somehow, I feel compelled to keep track of politics, and I watch political shows way too much. I don't learn anything from it 98% of the time. After I watch/read about that topic, I can't concentrate on anything for long, I want to know more. The moment I wake up, I reach to the mobile to read the news. Then, I visit some meme sites, then I go to Hacker News. When I don't want to wake up yet, I repeat. As a defense mechanism, I deactivated Facebook, I only post programming content on Twitter and I aggressively mute anyone who brings political tweets in my feed. I disabled notifications from most apps. I set up content blocker extensions so I don't accidentally wander to sites I don't want to visit. When I visit YouTube, I intentionally focus on the task at hand and try to not let the algorithm distract me (which is hard, because their recommendations almost always resonate with me). It works "okay", but I still didn't break the habit and I need strong self-control. I see it also with my mother and sister, they are approx 60 and 35. They never get bored of scrolling through their feeds, they can't focus on anything else. They also often feel bad because their lives don't match what they see on the web. They make up a persona online that don't match their reality (which I see). I'm not advocating for banning these things for adults, but I'd raise this issue to the people who read my comment: most adults behave very similarly to children, so observe your behavior and adapt.
  • tayo42 6y ago
    I feel similar, especially durring this covid stuff my internet habits have gotten pretty bad. I turned off my Twitter, Facebook got a bit. Reddit was hard but I think keeping it read only (I gave my gf my account passwords) at least keeps me from interacting. It's hard, there's no immediate downside to checking your phone or app. I kind of think stuff like infinite scroll, gamification of social media needs some kind of regulation. I don't think we have the power to fight for our selves against these companies
• antattack 6y ago
  We become the product. Social media needs us in order to make a buck and they will do everything in their power that we need them. Some of it is to our benefit but many times it's a waste of time and trying to create a need where there was none. TL;DR yes, social media are drug dealers :)
• guerrilla 6y ago
  > Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs. I hear what you're saying but I'm pretty sure drugs (like meth) are much worse, we just manage to keep kids away from them, whereas Internet is given to them.
• Existenceblinks 6y ago
  This problem has been said again and again for almost a decade. Are we still "studying" it? I guess it's more obvious than studying criminal thinking. Not more complicated than Mindhunter sort of thing, yet there's no feasible action?
• _pmf_ 6y ago
  > Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs. So, it will destroy the youth like books, radio, rock music, rap music, Michael Jackson, TV and masturbation?
• LatteLazy 6y ago
  I think you're a little over confident in your points if you don't mind me saying. For paragraph 2, Sugar, TV, organised religion, the Boy/Girl Scouts and comic books all satisfy at least some of your criteria. None has been banned yet. Similarly, many American parents would rush to sign up to a service that let them do those things. Plenty pay for Life360 and similar just for some of those "features". Far from being illegal, many jurisdictions encourage it. I don't think social media is a force for good. But let's not pretend we really care about the kids or privacy or mental health. I actually think that many parents (sadly) prefer a kid that sits at home on the computer and is monitorable and docile (a side effect of depression). The alternative is to actually take them places or to let them go unattended, neither of which parents seem happy to swallow.
• pietrovismara 6y ago
  But these companies provide great value to the shareholders! Apparently that's enough to trump any other concern.
• CountDrewku 6y ago
  I generally dislike banning things because a few individuals can't handle it. Punishing those people that have self control seems ridiculous and I hate sin taxes for that reason. However, I think putting restrictions on stuff for younger people that don't have fully developed brains seems perfectly reasonable. If you're under 18 (21 in some cases) you cannot drink, smoke etc. Social Media should be treated the same way. Unfortunately, laws can only do so much with out invading the privacy of citizens so it's really going to take a large campaign similar to anti-smoking ads in the 90s to get the message out about the cons and parents will HAVE to put their foot down. Although, it seems like a certain portion of our society thinks children should be allowed to make decisions themselves nowadays so I expect backlash at the thought of parents actually stopping their kids from harming themselves.
  • executive 6y ago
    Wisconsin does not have a minimum drinking age.
    • CountDrewku 6y ago
      Ok? so? I don't see what that has to do with the main point of my comment. Also the law is that you have to be accompanied by an adult if you're under 21 in Wisconsin so you're being a bit disingenuous.
  • T-A 6y ago
    https://bigthink.com/mind-brain/adult-brain https://bigthink.com/mind-brain/adult-brain
    • CountDrewku 6y ago
      Ok what's your point? Legally the adult age is 18 in most states. If you want to argue changing what legal age is that's fine but it doesn't really have anything to do with the main point of my comment. Additionally, this study specifically shows it harms adolescents. If you're going to apply laws that strip rights away from people you have to have a cutoff somewhere. Unless you're suggesting a blanket ban on social media for everyone.....
• yters 6y ago
  Many of those problems apply to any form of entertainment: movies, games, music, etc. I say we ban all forms of fun.
• xen0 6y ago
  I don't think it's reasonable to compare the scales of the impact of social media and drugs, simply because far more people engage in one over the other.
• Nasrudith 6y ago
  Worse than drugs? That is downright hyperbollic and hysterical especially given that many drugs can cause permanent brain damage. I find it impossible to take the arguments for a ban seriously when they were recycled from D&D, heavy metal, video games, and goth and emo music.