9 ms·

3 Billion USD to get children hooked to garbage content, ruin their brains with cheap dopamine and ruin their lives. And it's perfectly legal. What a shit socie

3 Billion USD to get children hooked to garbage content, ruin their brains with cheap dopamine and ruin their lives. And it's perfectly legal. What a shit society we live in.

prescriptivist 5y ago
I've never used Tik-Tok but what weirds me out is it seems like there are a ton of people in their early middle to late middle ages desperately making meme videos to try to capture the attention of all these children. It's grotesque.
- parhamn 5y ago
  Children? Everyone I know has one.
  - prescriptivist 5y ago
    I didn't mean it in a "think about the children" sense, I was more responding to OP. It's hard for me to imagine adults spending their time watching these stupid clips constantly but you are right, it's not just limited to children.
  - syshum 5y ago
    No one I know has TikTok.... I still can not understand how we moved to a point where Vertical Video is acceptable in civil society
    - jermeh 5y ago
      When the most accessible form factor for a screen is portrait in orientation, it's kind of inevitable.
    - kflzufkrbzi 5y ago
      For some kind of videos vertical is just better, for others horizontal. I have a phone and I have a vertical secondary screen on my desktop so I can watch vertical videos without issues. Never quite understood why some people get so upset at vertical videos.
    - burkaman 5y ago
      TikTok isn't usually cinematic, it's closer to a video call, which is better vertically because people are vertical.
      - syshum 5y ago
        I am the guy in the meetings that never turns on video... Video Calling is something I can not get behind either so...
    - pjc50 5y ago
      > I still can not understand how we moved to a point where Vertical Video is acceptable in civil society - default phone capture mode - default phone display mode, both due to the way you hold it - humans are vertical: vertical video frames the whole body, useful for dance videos. Portrait mode more useful for quadrupeds
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      > how we moved to a point where Vertical Video is acceptable in civil society Think about what shape a human being is…
      - syshum 5y ago
        Are you body shaming people??? :)
    - manquer 5y ago
      Cinema screens was the most popular screen format in the early 20th century. It was cheaper to have wider halls than taller, more seats, maybe lesser construction costs so 11:8 ( standard academy) or 1.43:1(IMAX) or 2.2:1 (70mm) all became popular. The wider screens also gave more immersive experiences and film makers took advantage of that in their movies with panoramic landscape shots and other techniques. Most non professional films(post covid even a lot of professional ones) are watched today on a smart phone screen which is usually something like 9:16. So, unless you are making a movie to be released in theatres I would say film makers should default to use 9:16 not other way around. A good film maker should target the medium they are working with, there is nothing inherently special about either one. There were great directors/actors who could do amazing work without sound or only b/w etc (sometimes failed to adapt to to the transition), all mediums have some limitations we have to work with what we have.
      - syshum 5y ago
        >>usually something like 9:16. Funny way to write 16:9.... >>are watched today on a smart phone screen This is where my age likely shows as I still can not use my mobile as a video consumption device. I need 27in or larger monitor, or even better a 40in or large TV screen. I primary consume YouTube and other non-professional video from my Roku not my phone...
        manquer 5y ago
        It is not 16:9 it is 9:16, in mobile height is more than width.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
sydthrowaway 5y ago
I love coming to HN during European hours. Only then is the community is primed to deliver harsh truths.
- samhw 5y ago
  Is it a harsh truth? It's harsh, that's for sure. It strikes me as unbelievably illiberal and puritanical to suggest that it should be illegal to create content for children which (the speaker considers) is unedifying. I don't know if it's just me, but I feel like some of these attitudes which are considered progressive nowadays would have made Mary Whitehouse blush. What happened to insisting on a free and pluralistic society?
  - pjc50 5y ago
    > It strikes me as unbelievably illiberal and puritanical to suggest that it should be illegal to create content for children which (the speaker considers) is unedifying. HN is in favor of free speech, except for teenagers dancing to each other.
    - samhw 5y ago
      It's full of 40-year-olds trying to justify how their phobia of TikTok is somehow different from their parents' phobia of video games or rock-and-roll.
      - blocked_again 5y ago
        OP (myself), is GenZ for what it is worth.
        samhw 5y ago
        Fair enough, perhaps I should have said 'adults'. Every generation of adults, since time immemorial, has complained that 'kids these days' are intellectually or spiritually degenerate compared with their own generation. It wasn't true then. It isn't true now. TikTok is not 'rewiring children's brains', or whatever it is that adults are panicking about, any more than Grand Theft Auto or Eminem did. Buck the trend.
FredPret 5y ago
Be the change you want to see - this type of defeatism creates zero progress. And there has been a lot of progress, those kids would have had to push carts up mine shafts in the previous era. In the era before that, most of them would have died from hunger or some disease
- JoeQuery 5y ago
  This comment of yours also creates zero progress, so what's your point? In fact it might be even more "harmful" because it implies we should just be okay with anything because in olden times things were worse.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - FredPret 5y ago
    It does not imply we should be OK with bad things today. It starts with the words "be the change you want to see". Defeatism short-circuits one's ability to grow and serves as an excellent excuse to do nothing.
- imback 5y ago
  What? Don't use TikTok? Encourage kids to read a book? The train has passed on this one. Pretty sure it's considered child abuse in the lower 48 if your toddler doesn't have their own smart phone and a 24/7 internet connection. I'm only slightly exaggerating.
  - throwaway2214 5y ago
    i dont know why this is downvoted if you dont allow your children tiktok/insta/etc, they get completely excluded from their community. a possibility is to move into a community that does not use social networks that much, so not using them is normalized, but sadly this is not easy in western europe (at least for me).
- throwaway34241 5y ago
dcl 5y ago
Indeed, I believe/think TikTok is probably the most psychologically harmful social media app.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Haven't ever used it, but I can't imagine it raises above Twitter... That stuff have vile real-life consequences...
buryat 5y ago
TikTok is ruining kids brains same way as rock’n’roll did in 50s, MTV did in 90s, and video games did in 2000s
- Bayart 5y ago
  It's not because those are things we have positive emotional associations with from of our childhood that they're actually positive things. I for one would have rather never played video games or watched MTV. You remember those old farts, annoying everybody with their sanctimonious imprecations about video games ? They were right.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    > I for one would have rather never played video games or watched MTV. This is rather sad; would you rather have been prevented from them? What would you prefer to have been made to do?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Bayart 5y ago
      Go out, socialize with other kids, experience a broader variety of things, grow up. I'm now absolutely certain my using video games as an excuse to stay inside as a teenager and young adult severely delayed my emotional and social growth. I was always a rather solitary kid but there was no merit in reinforcing those habits.
    - Grustaf 5y ago
      Few things are as useless as watching TV and playing video games. Especially when you're young, the world is your oyster, you should hang out with friends and do things in the real world. Yes, playing video games occasionally with friends or watching the odd film can be good things but that's obviously not what we're talking about here. I'm very happy most of my childhood memories revolve around tree houses, bicycles and gangs of friends roaming the streets.
RyanHamilton 5y ago
I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives.
rileymat2 5y ago
I guess I am a bit older than the target demographic, but is the content really garbage? I don't spend much time on it, but there are a lot of original funny bits I have seen people do in the compressed timeframe that are really quite good.
Workaccount2 5y ago
The only thing that really bothers me is TikTok has CCP party members sit on its board, that review and have final say on everything. To me this is a massive liability for the US. It's just a matter of time before China starts to dabble in "content shaping" on the platform, if they aren't already.
dang 5y ago
"Please don't fulminate." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
broknbottle 5y ago
"When I grow up I want to be a influencer"
- Ekaros 5y ago
  One might actually think that it is positive that bar for these sort of dreams have been lowered and it has become more realistic. Kids wanted to be movie stars, tv celebrities, rock stars or in reality tv. I might consider influencers to be more healthy than any of those...
  - broknbottle 5y ago
    Nice try Kim Kardashian
DLay 5y ago
Even if TikTok got banned, we still have Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Snap Spotlight, and whatever Reddit is planning on doing to fill the void. Pandora’s Box has already opened—short video is here to stay.

3 Billion USD to get children hooked to garbage content, ruin their brains with cheap dopamine and ruin their lives. And it's perfectly legal. What a shit society we live in.

prescriptivist 5y ago

I've never used Tik-Tok but what weirds me out is it seems like there are a ton of people in their early middle to late middle ages desperately making meme videos to try to capture the attention of all these children. It's grotesque.

parhamn 5y ago
Children? Everyone I know has one.
- prescriptivist 5y ago
  I didn't mean it in a "think about the children" sense, I was more responding to OP. It's hard for me to imagine adults spending their time watching these stupid clips constantly but you are right, it's not just limited to children.
- syshum 5y ago
  No one I know has TikTok.... I still can not understand how we moved to a point where Vertical Video is acceptable in civil society
  - jermeh 5y ago
    When the most accessible form factor for a screen is portrait in orientation, it's kind of inevitable.
  - kflzufkrbzi 5y ago
    For some kind of videos vertical is just better, for others horizontal. I have a phone and I have a vertical secondary screen on my desktop so I can watch vertical videos without issues. Never quite understood why some people get so upset at vertical videos.
  - burkaman 5y ago
    TikTok isn't usually cinematic, it's closer to a video call, which is better vertically because people are vertical.
    - syshum 5y ago
      I am the guy in the meetings that never turns on video... Video Calling is something I can not get behind either so...
  - pjc50 5y ago
    > I still can not understand how we moved to a point where Vertical Video is acceptable in civil society - default phone capture mode - default phone display mode, both due to the way you hold it - humans are vertical: vertical video frames the whole body, useful for dance videos. Portrait mode more useful for quadrupeds
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    > how we moved to a point where Vertical Video is acceptable in civil society Think about what shape a human being is…
    - syshum 5y ago
      Are you body shaming people??? :)
  - manquer 5y ago
    Cinema screens was the most popular screen format in the early 20th century. It was cheaper to have wider halls than taller, more seats, maybe lesser construction costs so 11:8 ( standard academy) or 1.43:1(IMAX) or 2.2:1 (70mm) all became popular. The wider screens also gave more immersive experiences and film makers took advantage of that in their movies with panoramic landscape shots and other techniques. Most non professional films(post covid even a lot of professional ones) are watched today on a smart phone screen which is usually something like 9:16. So, unless you are making a movie to be released in theatres I would say film makers should default to use 9:16 not other way around. A good film maker should target the medium they are working with, there is nothing inherently special about either one. There were great directors/actors who could do amazing work without sound or only b/w etc (sometimes failed to adapt to to the transition), all mediums have some limitations we have to work with what we have.
    - syshum 5y ago
      >>usually something like 9:16. Funny way to write 16:9.... >>are watched today on a smart phone screen This is where my age likely shows as I still can not use my mobile as a video consumption device. I need 27in or larger monitor, or even better a 40in or large TV screen. I primary consume YouTube and other non-professional video from my Roku not my phone...
      - manquer 5y ago
        It is not 16:9 it is 9:16, in mobile height is more than width.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

sydthrowaway 5y ago

I love coming to HN during European hours. Only then is the community is primed to deliver harsh truths.

samhw 5y ago
Is it a harsh truth? It's harsh, that's for sure. It strikes me as unbelievably illiberal and puritanical to suggest that it should be illegal to create content for children which (the speaker considers) is unedifying. I don't know if it's just me, but I feel like some of these attitudes which are considered progressive nowadays would have made Mary Whitehouse blush. What happened to insisting on a free and pluralistic society?
- pjc50 5y ago
  > It strikes me as unbelievably illiberal and puritanical to suggest that it should be illegal to create content for children which (the speaker considers) is unedifying. HN is in favor of free speech, except for teenagers dancing to each other.
  - samhw 5y ago
    It's full of 40-year-olds trying to justify how their phobia of TikTok is somehow different from their parents' phobia of video games or rock-and-roll.
    - blocked_again 5y ago
      OP (myself), is GenZ for what it is worth.
      - samhw 5y ago
        Fair enough, perhaps I should have said 'adults'. Every generation of adults, since time immemorial, has complained that 'kids these days' are intellectually or spiritually degenerate compared with their own generation. It wasn't true then. It isn't true now. TikTok is not 'rewiring children's brains', or whatever it is that adults are panicking about, any more than Grand Theft Auto or Eminem did. Buck the trend.

FredPret 5y ago

Be the change you want to see - this type of defeatism creates zero progress. And there has been a lot of progress, those kids would have had to push carts up mine shafts in the previous era. In the era before that, most of them would have died from hunger or some disease

JoeQuery 5y ago
This comment of yours also creates zero progress, so what's your point? In fact it might be even more "harmful" because it implies we should just be okay with anything because in olden times things were worse.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- FredPret 5y ago
  It does not imply we should be OK with bad things today. It starts with the words "be the change you want to see". Defeatism short-circuits one's ability to grow and serves as an excellent excuse to do nothing.
imback 5y ago
What? Don't use TikTok? Encourage kids to read a book? The train has passed on this one. Pretty sure it's considered child abuse in the lower 48 if your toddler doesn't have their own smart phone and a 24/7 internet connection. I'm only slightly exaggerating.
- throwaway2214 5y ago
  i dont know why this is downvoted if you dont allow your children tiktok/insta/etc, they get completely excluded from their community. a possibility is to move into a community that does not use social networks that much, so not using them is normalized, but sadly this is not easy in western europe (at least for me).
throwaway34241 5y ago

dcl 5y ago

Indeed, I believe/think TikTok is probably the most psychologically harmful social media app.

Ekaros 5y ago
Haven't ever used it, but I can't imagine it raises above Twitter... That stuff have vile real-life consequences...

buryat 5y ago

TikTok is ruining kids brains same way as rock’n’roll did in 50s, MTV did in 90s, and video games did in 2000s

Bayart 5y ago
It's not because those are things we have positive emotional associations with from of our childhood that they're actually positive things. I for one would have rather never played video games or watched MTV. You remember those old farts, annoying everybody with their sanctimonious imprecations about video games ? They were right.
- pjc50 5y ago
  > I for one would have rather never played video games or watched MTV. This is rather sad; would you rather have been prevented from them? What would you prefer to have been made to do?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Bayart 5y ago
    Go out, socialize with other kids, experience a broader variety of things, grow up. I'm now absolutely certain my using video games as an excuse to stay inside as a teenager and young adult severely delayed my emotional and social growth. I was always a rather solitary kid but there was no merit in reinforcing those habits.
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    Few things are as useless as watching TV and playing video games. Especially when you're young, the world is your oyster, you should hang out with friends and do things in the real world. Yes, playing video games occasionally with friends or watching the odd film can be good things but that's obviously not what we're talking about here. I'm very happy most of my childhood memories revolve around tree houses, bicycles and gangs of friends roaming the streets.

RyanHamilton 5y ago

I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives.

rileymat2 5y ago

I guess I am a bit older than the target demographic, but is the content really garbage? I don't spend much time on it, but there are a lot of original funny bits I have seen people do in the compressed timeframe that are really quite good.

Workaccount2 5y ago

The only thing that really bothers me is TikTok has CCP party members sit on its board, that review and have final say on everything. To me this is a massive liability for the US. It's just a matter of time before China starts to dabble in "content shaping" on the platform, if they aren't already.

dang 5y ago

"Please don't fulminate." "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

broknbottle 5y ago

"When I grow up I want to be a influencer"

Ekaros 5y ago
One might actually think that it is positive that bar for these sort of dreams have been lowered and it has become more realistic. Kids wanted to be movie stars, tv celebrities, rock stars or in reality tv. I might consider influencers to be more healthy than any of those...
- broknbottle 5y ago
  Nice try Kim Kardashian

DLay 5y ago

Even if TikTok got banned, we still have Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Snap Spotlight, and whatever Reddit is planning on doing to fill the void. Pandora’s Box has already opened—short video is here to stay.