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I'll say it again, and I'll take the downvotes: in the future we will look back on allowing children access to social media and smart phones the way that today

I'll say it again, and I'll take the downvotes: in the future we will look back on allowing children access to social media and smart phones the way that today we look back at smoking ads targeted at children. Maybe even more incredulously.

notch898a 4y ago
And the adults' access to the phone. It's made it incredibly easy and low-effort to snitch out any kids actually independently outside no matter where they are. People would shit bricks to see the freedom I had as a kid, to roam the countryside alone with a rifle shooting rabbits. Or going miles out from age 7 up snake infested creeks. The average fat American is way too lazy to walk all the way home to snitch a kid out, but with a cell phone they can call the cops immediately.
StrangeATractor 4y ago
It's funny the lengths I've seen people go to on HN to make everyone and their kid suddenly given a smartphone not a big deal at all, which couldn't possibility have any ramifications for mental health or development.
- thriftwy 4y ago
  How about the upside of, you know, accessing the riches of human knowledge, entertainment and communication?
  - edejong 4y ago
    We decided it’s better to present this in a curated program called education.
    - thriftwy 4y ago
      What if everybody else in the same edication programme has a smartphone? What of people have, like, free time? For me, education was the worst part of my life and the Internet perhaps one of greatest.
      - lm28469 4y ago
        Internet of today has nothing to do with 1990/2000 internet in term of content and especially in term of things competing for your attention, and spread of misinformation The problem isn't necessarily the device, but the content Kids spend up to 10 hours per day on screen, most of it on smartphones [0], and they're not reading encyclopedias Average tiktok user screen time is over 25 hours per months: https://wallaroomedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/tiktok-screentime.jpeg https://wallaroomedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/tiktok-... [0] https://i2.wp.com/www.surexpositionecrans.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/temps-decran-unaf-2022-semaine.jpg?resize=640%2C448 https://i2.wp.com/www.surexpositionecrans.org/wp-content/upl...
        thriftwy 4y ago
        I understand all that but you really want to keep that baby while throwing the water off. For starters, the 1.5 hours ot TV may go.
        lm28469 4y ago
        I'd much rather put my 8 years old in front of some cartoon than god knows where on the internet. Content wise it's much less risky
  - lm28469 4y ago
    smartphone != internet
    - nunobrito 4y ago
      Let's be serious. Between 3 to 7 years: smartphone == youtube.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        ... and not the good parts of it. My kingdom for the ability to allow-list what my kids can watch on YouTube. I'd pay double what they charge for YouTube Premium just for that. Youtube-dl'ing the videos and putting them somewhere easily accessible is a giant pain. There's great stuff on there but YouTube makes it so damn hard to curate it.
        nunobrito 4y ago
        Basically that. Quite difficult to leave them alone or they'll just watch bad stuff eventually because of the fantastic algorithms.
        mdp2021 4y ago
        > My kingdom for the ability Then, for your kingdom, you will be able to afford building an app that plays YT videos only if matching some regular expression based on your whitelist. You can apparently stream YT videos through the ExoPlayer library or other tricks, see e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29607104/how-to-play-youtube-video-in-exoplayer-in-android https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29607104/how-to-play-you...
        Andaith 4y ago
        Fuck Youtube. I fucking hate it. My son can be interested in an animal, so he'll find some youtube videos of the animal to watch. This is ok because the videos he searches and clicks on are fine, usually some sort of documentary. But then the algo. within like 3 videos he's watching badly autogenerated X vs Y monsters fight bullshit videos and it just gets worse and worse. I'm seriously tempted to set up some sort of network MITM proxy that blocks any YT URL where the HTTP Referrer is a previous YT Video, so that algorithmic suggestions can just fuck off. Searching for and watching a video would be fine.
  - StrangeATractor 4y ago
    To clarify: If all smartphones were basically just an encyclopedia, instant messenging and music device I think they would be much better for people. Currently, most time on a smartphone is spent engaging with the attention economy, which I think is where most of the real poison lies. I think even if you got rid of the attention economy though, smartphones would still have negative consequences. A smartphone will help you kill some time, even if you're just browsing wikipedia. I think sometimes it's good to be bored, it can spur you into doing something new. Now we don't get bored, we get placated.
- gnu8 4y ago
  “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
nixpulvis 4y ago
I'm pretty down on social media. But, you can easily argue that "my child should never smoke". You cannot easily argue that "my child should never use social media". Part of raising a child in the modern era needs to be teaching how to manage and handle the use of these things. Hell, online games are a great example of a social platform where kids are often in the majority.
- colpabar 4y ago
  > But, you can easily argue that "my child should never smoke". You cannot easily argue that "my child should never use social media". That might be true now, but it could always change. Don't forget that we all used to think smoking was perfectly healthy. I'm hoping that movies/shows in the future show how we currently use social media and it shocks people the same way media made now does with cigarettes because we realized how unhealthy it is.
  - notch898a 4y ago
    I would argue the effect of smoking was also a lot longer to see the effect. I've been to countries where kids smoke (middle east) and there's no apparent effect on the smoking kids. You'd probably have to wait until their 30s to really see the damage. Watching a kid watch TV there is almost an immediate feeling of unhealthiness that isn't as apparent from watching a kid smoke. The smoking kid will keep on playing soccer, the kid on the TV is sucked into the sedentary low-thought activity like they're in a trance.
  - nixpulvis 4y ago
    No, it will not change. Humans are social animals. We depend heavily on each other. Perhaps, we will rebrand social media... but the underlying fundamental issues will persist. Even if the next wave of tech is called Group Links, people will still need to learn how to navigate the noise. I suppose I could be wrong. If we abandon the internet, disband the newspapers and the post, and generally give up on democracy entirely. But I don't like the sounds of that either. Smoking is simply a bad comparison, though it's true, both are currently harmful. One however needs to be addressed in a way that promotes healthy use, the other pretty much falls under the umbrella of adults can choose to make their own choices. Now before I go off down the "but think of the children" path too much further... I'll reiterate; this all falls primarily on better education, not stricter laws and enforcement. Censorship is a double edge sword and implementing it above the scale of the household is very dubious. There's a reason minors are admitted to rated R movies with their parents, for example. Even drinking ages are sometimes flexible. Anyways, I feel like I could rant about this topic forever right now, but I'm just stop here.
13years 4y ago
We might even look at all social media by all participants the same way we now look at smoking. It is isn't healthy for the adults either.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  The problem is that smoking is pretty much 100% bad (excluding a brief period of being more alert) - social media has some good sides in that it allows you to keep in touch with family and friends who may be far away. It was fun and exciting to catch up with people I'd moved away from. And then it became a vile sludge of toxic positivity mixed with outrage.
  - InfamousRece 4y ago
    Smoking reduces your chances of getting Parkinson’s disease so it is probably less than 100% bad.
    - notch898a 4y ago
      Yeah the problem with smoking is mostly self control. It's clearly not a good habit but you can probably smoke a cigar a month for social or even personal enjoyment reasons and get more good than bad out of it.
      - burnished 4y ago
        Oof, that is not true and frankly terrible advice. Most people who quit smoking try the 'just sometimes' approach and it leads back to the original smoking habit. Framing it as self control problems is also a non starter. That shit is skillfully made addictive - if your outcomes are a high chance of chronic use and related illness or a low chance of occasional use and questionable benefits then the overall expected value is still deeply negative.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
barrysteve 4y ago
It is worth pointing out that pre-2010, the internet and social media was a nice place to be. Even if myspace was kind of ugly, social media did not drive negative mental health outcomes until upvotes/downvotes and dark pattern engagements were applied to everyone.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  I think we had different places. I remember the first teenager who was driven to suicide from social media way before 2010. Just googling showed me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Megan_Meier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Megan_Meier who died in 2006 from cyberbullying.
- newman8r 4y ago
  That's also around the time when smartphones started to see huge adoption. It became something you'd never be able to get away from.
- rcarr 4y ago
  Disagree with this. Even myspace sowed a bit of discontent with it's "top friends" feature, with some people getting into arguments about being left out of the "top 8" or where they had been placed in the ordering. When Facebook came around people had already cottoned on to trying to shape their presence a bit better but then shit really hit the fan when Instagram came around and everyone started curating a completely fake presentation of what their life was like. Before Instagram there were no influencers. There were influential bloggers like Tim Ferris but 'influencer' and 'content creators' weren't job titles. To this day, I'm wary of anyone who isn't a photographer that says that Instagram is/was their favourite social media platform.
endisneigh 4y ago
they say on social media, lol. also, adults are not somehow immune to the ills that children are susceptible to.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > they say on social media, lol hn hasn't much in common with tiktok &co > adults are not somehow immune to the ills that children are susceptible to. Children are more malleable in every aspect, there is a reason why we call the "formative years" formative
  - tgv 4y ago
    Have you never seen an adult addict? Because social media is addiction, nothing else.
    - lm28469 4y ago
      Well yes, I tried weed in my 20s and I'm glad I didn't do that at 13 You're making my point
      - tgv 4y ago
        Not really. Weed isn't very addictive, and for every 20 year old that tries and quits weed, there are dozens that try alcohol, smoking, or coke and have a hard time quitting. Now, those can be expensive addictions, whereas a social media addiction is free, so it won't force you to rehab.
j45 4y ago
Unencumbered consuming is a big problem. Children seem to do better when creating instead of consuming on screens. Except they almost always like creating more in real life (painting, piano) vs the app.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  My take is that playing minecraft or such is fine. Instagram is not. Playing with blocks in real life is probably better (but I appreciate you can't build moats in real life so easily).
  - j45 4y ago
    Creating = building with blocks, interacting, using imagination, creating. Consuming = passive watching and input only. Watching someone play video games is consuming.
wooque 4y ago
More like alcohol, it's not for children and for adults it's nice if consumed sporadically and in small quantities.
WinstonSmith84 4y ago
"Smoking kills" is a proven scientific fact, known for a very long time (since the 1940s https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/sgr/2000/highlights/historical/index.htm#:~:text=Smoking%20was%20first%20linked%20to,cigarette%20smoking%20and%20lung%20cancer https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/sgr/2000/highlights/historical/i....) Smartphone doesn't kill (and no one is arguing about this) and actually it's arguable whether it has really more cons than pros... I can well understand that smartphones may cause some issues to children (and others), but that's never going to be seen as dangerous as smoking is
- Hnrobert42 4y ago
  The parents of children who have died of suicide due to cyber bullying would disagree. As would the parents of children suffering from eating disorders, self-harm, and numerous other mental conditions induced, at least in part, by social media. The link between physical health and phone use is less direct than to cigarette smoking, but is still present.
  - djaychela 4y ago
    I'm one of these (step) parents. I've long held that social media is a cancer and tried to model and promote responsible usage. I've failed totally, and two of my children have had horrible mental health,with suicide attempts and ongoing issues to this day. Another had long struggles with drugs and has a pretty fragile mental situation even though he is mostly out the other side of that now, and on a better path. I'm sure the anecdotal defense will be used, but I'm convinced that being exposed to all of the ills of the world via social media has been in part to blame for this, and this despite what I hoped were worthwhile attempts to demonstrate restraint in use of phones and social media, and educate my kids. Them smoking (without social media existing) would have been better, imo.
- hattmall 4y ago
  What about all the kids that get shot trying to steal food from a drive thru because it's a TikTok Prank?
- tomjen3 4y ago
gsatic 4y ago
Your basic Jurassic Park story where corporate robots will keep acting like they are in control of what they have built, till the very end.
xg15 4y ago
Or we might look back fondly at a time where we only had to deal with addictive social media sites and your kids' friend groups weren't 50% AI bots yet.
princevegeta89 4y ago
Especially teens. The most vulnerable target age group for anything that gets projected to them as being "cool". Unfortunately the responsibility to steer them in the right direction only lies in the hands of their parents. Apps like Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok do an incredible job of wooing kids into a void of delusion that would slowly deflect them away from things that matter (education, relationships, socializing etc.) to things that push them into continuous, useless loop of validation and security (think about all the underage suggestive content on those platforms, simply disgusting)
rixed 4y ago
I don't know... Are we looking back on allowing children access to TV or video games the way we look back at smoking ads targeted at children yet? We do not vilify smoking because we realized it kills but because smoking has been regulated out of society (because of its cost) and part of this regulation was to change the public perception of it. I don't see in the west a similar regulation targeting social media any more than I've seen one targeting stupid TV programs that were probably also damaging children mental health. Unfortunately.
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  In some spaces - yes. We are looking back in a similar manner. Limited TV screen time is strongly encouraged in basically all the literature for new parents (under 2 hours). Gaming is seeing a strong push against some of the most egregious abuses targeted at children (micro-transactions and loot box gambling).
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >Are we looking back on allowing children access to TV or video games the way we look back at smoking ads targeted at children yet? TV and games "back in my days" had no personalized tracking and targeting. They could only try to target the wider audience, not you specifically by mining all your private info and use dark patterns to manipulate you. Modern social media apps know everything about you and will not hesitate to weaponize it against you for ads if it makes them money. Also, "back then", parents could look at the TV shows or your video games and see the kind of stuff you were exposed to and limit it or complain to the authorities to ban it. Now, you have no idea what ads or manipulative dark patterns your kids/teens are getting on their phone. Big, big, difference between then and now.
  - barefeg 4y ago
    > Now, you have no idea what ads or manipulative dark patterns your kids/teens are getting on their phone. I’m not sure about teens. But I’m present when my kid plays games and he despises ads and micro transactions as much as I do. He’s also not allowed to buy anything so he’s more selective about what games to play (a few ones that we have subscriptions for)
salemh 4y ago
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TheMode 4y ago
Possibly, but I do not believe that it only impact children. Is there a benefit aspect of smoking ads targeted at adults?
dmje 4y ago
100% agree. Have an upvote.
monological 4y ago
It's not even only children, it's literally everyone. Who thought it would be a good idea to put a screen in everyone's hand with infinite content that's engineered to be highly addictive. It's a fucking no-brainer.
cwoolfe 4y ago
Whoa! I've been saying the same thing for the past couple years. Glad I'm not alone.
quattrofan 4y ago
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comfypotato 4y ago
Cigarettes are so very bad for you that I don’t think this will ever be the case. I remember working on the administration side of cancer treatments, and half of all of the insurance codes were variants of lung cancer from smoking. There’s a point at which you smoke so much that it’s more likely than anything else to kill you. Your point is valid that today’s smart-phone-social-media is as young as cigarettes were in the 1920’s, but the general problems have been around forever. Young folks comparing themselves to Instagram models is very analogous to air-brushed magazine models in the early 2000’s to cite a recent example. They’ve just been magnified. Smoking introduced a new problem.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  It's pretty bad to compare social media to smoking, or call it "the new smoking" because... teen tobacco usage is far from a solved problem. Teens today vape and it will have long term consequences both for them and society at large. Honestly the panic around "screens" remind me of the moral panics around Dungeons and Dragon back in the 80s [0] and video games in the 90s and 00s. The media hysteria did try to blame many acts of violence on DOOM. Some researchers have now spent 30 years trying to prove a link between violence and video games, without any success. To put things in perspective, during the same time period neural networks were completely abandoned by AI researchers, before coming back and giving us the deep learning revolution and the leaps in self-driving and language models. > Young folks comparing themselves to Instagram models is very analogous to air-brushed magazine models in the early 2000’s to cite a recent example. In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [1] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [2]. I have to wonder if it's related. A lot of teenagers are bombarded with images of perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror. The solution? Ban mirrors. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-set-off-a-moral-panic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-... [1] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html [2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obesity_child_15_16.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...
  - 4y ago
FooBarBizBazz 4y ago
We won't, because we will be the children who grew up on social media, and our thoughts will be controlled by the people in charge of the straw from which we sucked. "Meta? How could Meta be bad? Meta is our friend!"

notch898a 4y ago

And the adults' access to the phone. It's made it incredibly easy and low-effort to snitch out any kids actually independently outside no matter where they are. People would shit bricks to see the freedom I had as a kid, to roam the countryside alone with a rifle shooting rabbits. Or going miles out from age 7 up snake infested creeks. The average fat American is way too lazy to walk all the way home to snitch a kid out, but with a cell phone they can call the cops immediately.

StrangeATractor 4y ago

It's funny the lengths I've seen people go to on HN to make everyone and their kid suddenly given a smartphone not a big deal at all, which couldn't possibility have any ramifications for mental health or development.

thriftwy 4y ago
How about the upside of, you know, accessing the riches of human knowledge, entertainment and communication?
- edejong 4y ago
  We decided it’s better to present this in a curated program called education.
  - thriftwy 4y ago
    What if everybody else in the same edication programme has a smartphone? What of people have, like, free time? For me, education was the worst part of my life and the Internet perhaps one of greatest.
    - lm28469 4y ago
      Internet of today has nothing to do with 1990/2000 internet in term of content and especially in term of things competing for your attention, and spread of misinformation The problem isn't necessarily the device, but the content Kids spend up to 10 hours per day on screen, most of it on smartphones [0], and they're not reading encyclopedias Average tiktok user screen time is over 25 hours per months: https://wallaroomedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/tiktok-screentime.jpeg https://wallaroomedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/tiktok-... [0] https://i2.wp.com/www.surexpositionecrans.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/temps-decran-unaf-2022-semaine.jpg?resize=640%2C448 https://i2.wp.com/www.surexpositionecrans.org/wp-content/upl...
      - thriftwy 4y ago
        I understand all that but you really want to keep that baby while throwing the water off. For starters, the 1.5 hours ot TV may go.
        lm28469 4y ago
        I'd much rather put my 8 years old in front of some cartoon than god knows where on the internet. Content wise it's much less risky
- lm28469 4y ago
  smartphone != internet
  - nunobrito 4y ago
    Let's be serious. Between 3 to 7 years: smartphone == youtube.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      ... and not the good parts of it. My kingdom for the ability to allow-list what my kids can watch on YouTube. I'd pay double what they charge for YouTube Premium just for that. Youtube-dl'ing the videos and putting them somewhere easily accessible is a giant pain. There's great stuff on there but YouTube makes it so damn hard to curate it.
      - nunobrito 4y ago
        Basically that. Quite difficult to leave them alone or they'll just watch bad stuff eventually because of the fantastic algorithms.
      - mdp2021 4y ago
        > My kingdom for the ability Then, for your kingdom, you will be able to afford building an app that plays YT videos only if matching some regular expression based on your whitelist. You can apparently stream YT videos through the ExoPlayer library or other tricks, see e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29607104/how-to-play-youtube-video-in-exoplayer-in-android https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29607104/how-to-play-you...
      - Andaith 4y ago
        Fuck Youtube. I fucking hate it. My son can be interested in an animal, so he'll find some youtube videos of the animal to watch. This is ok because the videos he searches and clicks on are fine, usually some sort of documentary. But then the algo. within like 3 videos he's watching badly autogenerated X vs Y monsters fight bullshit videos and it just gets worse and worse. I'm seriously tempted to set up some sort of network MITM proxy that blocks any YT URL where the HTTP Referrer is a previous YT Video, so that algorithmic suggestions can just fuck off. Searching for and watching a video would be fine.
- StrangeATractor 4y ago
  To clarify: If all smartphones were basically just an encyclopedia, instant messenging and music device I think they would be much better for people. Currently, most time on a smartphone is spent engaging with the attention economy, which I think is where most of the real poison lies. I think even if you got rid of the attention economy though, smartphones would still have negative consequences. A smartphone will help you kill some time, even if you're just browsing wikipedia. I think sometimes it's good to be bored, it can spur you into doing something new. Now we don't get bored, we get placated.
gnu8 4y ago
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

nixpulvis 4y ago

I'm pretty down on social media. But, you can easily argue that "my child should never smoke". You cannot easily argue that "my child should never use social media". Part of raising a child in the modern era needs to be teaching how to manage and handle the use of these things. Hell, online games are a great example of a social platform where kids are often in the majority.

colpabar 4y ago
> But, you can easily argue that "my child should never smoke". You cannot easily argue that "my child should never use social media". That might be true now, but it could always change. Don't forget that we all used to think smoking was perfectly healthy. I'm hoping that movies/shows in the future show how we currently use social media and it shocks people the same way media made now does with cigarettes because we realized how unhealthy it is.
- notch898a 4y ago
  I would argue the effect of smoking was also a lot longer to see the effect. I've been to countries where kids smoke (middle east) and there's no apparent effect on the smoking kids. You'd probably have to wait until their 30s to really see the damage. Watching a kid watch TV there is almost an immediate feeling of unhealthiness that isn't as apparent from watching a kid smoke. The smoking kid will keep on playing soccer, the kid on the TV is sucked into the sedentary low-thought activity like they're in a trance.
- nixpulvis 4y ago
  No, it will not change. Humans are social animals. We depend heavily on each other. Perhaps, we will rebrand social media... but the underlying fundamental issues will persist. Even if the next wave of tech is called Group Links, people will still need to learn how to navigate the noise. I suppose I could be wrong. If we abandon the internet, disband the newspapers and the post, and generally give up on democracy entirely. But I don't like the sounds of that either. Smoking is simply a bad comparison, though it's true, both are currently harmful. One however needs to be addressed in a way that promotes healthy use, the other pretty much falls under the umbrella of adults can choose to make their own choices. Now before I go off down the "but think of the children" path too much further... I'll reiterate; this all falls primarily on better education, not stricter laws and enforcement. Censorship is a double edge sword and implementing it above the scale of the household is very dubious. There's a reason minors are admitted to rated R movies with their parents, for example. Even drinking ages are sometimes flexible. Anyways, I feel like I could rant about this topic forever right now, but I'm just stop here.

13years 4y ago

We might even look at all social media by all participants the same way we now look at smoking. It is isn't healthy for the adults either.

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
The problem is that smoking is pretty much 100% bad (excluding a brief period of being more alert) - social media has some good sides in that it allows you to keep in touch with family and friends who may be far away. It was fun and exciting to catch up with people I'd moved away from. And then it became a vile sludge of toxic positivity mixed with outrage.
- InfamousRece 4y ago
  Smoking reduces your chances of getting Parkinson’s disease so it is probably less than 100% bad.
  - notch898a 4y ago
    Yeah the problem with smoking is mostly self control. It's clearly not a good habit but you can probably smoke a cigar a month for social or even personal enjoyment reasons and get more good than bad out of it.
    - burnished 4y ago
      Oof, that is not true and frankly terrible advice. Most people who quit smoking try the 'just sometimes' approach and it leads back to the original smoking habit. Framing it as self control problems is also a non starter. That shit is skillfully made addictive - if your outcomes are a high chance of chronic use and related illness or a low chance of occasional use and questionable benefits then the overall expected value is still deeply negative.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]

barrysteve 4y ago

It is worth pointing out that pre-2010, the internet and social media was a nice place to be. Even if myspace was kind of ugly, social media did not drive negative mental health outcomes until upvotes/downvotes and dark pattern engagements were applied to everyone.

PuppyTailWags 4y ago
I think we had different places. I remember the first teenager who was driven to suicide from social media way before 2010. Just googling showed me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Megan_Meier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Megan_Meier who died in 2006 from cyberbullying.
newman8r 4y ago
That's also around the time when smartphones started to see huge adoption. It became something you'd never be able to get away from.
rcarr 4y ago
Disagree with this. Even myspace sowed a bit of discontent with it's "top friends" feature, with some people getting into arguments about being left out of the "top 8" or where they had been placed in the ordering. When Facebook came around people had already cottoned on to trying to shape their presence a bit better but then shit really hit the fan when Instagram came around and everyone started curating a completely fake presentation of what their life was like. Before Instagram there were no influencers. There were influential bloggers like Tim Ferris but 'influencer' and 'content creators' weren't job titles. To this day, I'm wary of anyone who isn't a photographer that says that Instagram is/was their favourite social media platform.

endisneigh 4y ago

they say on social media, lol. also, adults are not somehow immune to the ills that children are susceptible to.

lm28469 4y ago
> they say on social media, lol hn hasn't much in common with tiktok &co > adults are not somehow immune to the ills that children are susceptible to. Children are more malleable in every aspect, there is a reason why we call the "formative years" formative
- tgv 4y ago
  Have you never seen an adult addict? Because social media is addiction, nothing else.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    Well yes, I tried weed in my 20s and I'm glad I didn't do that at 13 You're making my point
    - tgv 4y ago
      Not really. Weed isn't very addictive, and for every 20 year old that tries and quits weed, there are dozens that try alcohol, smoking, or coke and have a hard time quitting. Now, those can be expensive addictions, whereas a social media addiction is free, so it won't force you to rehab.

j45 4y ago

Unencumbered consuming is a big problem. Children seem to do better when creating instead of consuming on screens. Except they almost always like creating more in real life (painting, piano) vs the app.

vorpalhex 4y ago
My take is that playing minecraft or such is fine. Instagram is not. Playing with blocks in real life is probably better (but I appreciate you can't build moats in real life so easily).
- j45 4y ago
  Creating = building with blocks, interacting, using imagination, creating. Consuming = passive watching and input only. Watching someone play video games is consuming.

wooque 4y ago

More like alcohol, it's not for children and for adults it's nice if consumed sporadically and in small quantities.

WinstonSmith84 4y ago

"Smoking kills" is a proven scientific fact, known for a very long time (since the 1940s https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/sgr/2000/highlights/historical/index.htm#:~:text=Smoking%20was%20first%20linked%20to,cigarette%20smoking%20and%20lung%20cancer https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/sgr/2000/highlights/historical/i....) Smartphone doesn't kill (and no one is arguing about this) and actually it's arguable whether it has really more cons than pros... I can well understand that smartphones may cause some issues to children (and others), but that's never going to be seen as dangerous as smoking is

Hnrobert42 4y ago
The parents of children who have died of suicide due to cyber bullying would disagree. As would the parents of children suffering from eating disorders, self-harm, and numerous other mental conditions induced, at least in part, by social media. The link between physical health and phone use is less direct than to cigarette smoking, but is still present.
- djaychela 4y ago
  I'm one of these (step) parents. I've long held that social media is a cancer and tried to model and promote responsible usage. I've failed totally, and two of my children have had horrible mental health,with suicide attempts and ongoing issues to this day. Another had long struggles with drugs and has a pretty fragile mental situation even though he is mostly out the other side of that now, and on a better path. I'm sure the anecdotal defense will be used, but I'm convinced that being exposed to all of the ills of the world via social media has been in part to blame for this, and this despite what I hoped were worthwhile attempts to demonstrate restraint in use of phones and social media, and educate my kids. Them smoking (without social media existing) would have been better, imo.
hattmall 4y ago
What about all the kids that get shot trying to steal food from a drive thru because it's a TikTok Prank?
tomjen3 4y ago

gsatic 4y ago

Your basic Jurassic Park story where corporate robots will keep acting like they are in control of what they have built, till the very end.

xg15 4y ago

Or we might look back fondly at a time where we only had to deal with addictive social media sites and your kids' friend groups weren't 50% AI bots yet.

princevegeta89 4y ago

Especially teens. The most vulnerable target age group for anything that gets projected to them as being "cool". Unfortunately the responsibility to steer them in the right direction only lies in the hands of their parents. Apps like Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok do an incredible job of wooing kids into a void of delusion that would slowly deflect them away from things that matter (education, relationships, socializing etc.) to things that push them into continuous, useless loop of validation and security (think about all the underage suggestive content on those platforms, simply disgusting)

rixed 4y ago

I don't know... Are we looking back on allowing children access to TV or video games the way we look back at smoking ads targeted at children yet? We do not vilify smoking because we realized it kills but because smoking has been regulated out of society (because of its cost) and part of this regulation was to change the public perception of it. I don't see in the west a similar regulation targeting social media any more than I've seen one targeting stupid TV programs that were probably also damaging children mental health. Unfortunately.

horsawlarway 4y ago
In some spaces - yes. We are looking back in a similar manner. Limited TV screen time is strongly encouraged in basically all the literature for new parents (under 2 hours). Gaming is seeing a strong push against some of the most egregious abuses targeted at children (micro-transactions and loot box gambling).
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>Are we looking back on allowing children access to TV or video games the way we look back at smoking ads targeted at children yet? TV and games "back in my days" had no personalized tracking and targeting. They could only try to target the wider audience, not you specifically by mining all your private info and use dark patterns to manipulate you. Modern social media apps know everything about you and will not hesitate to weaponize it against you for ads if it makes them money. Also, "back then", parents could look at the TV shows or your video games and see the kind of stuff you were exposed to and limit it or complain to the authorities to ban it. Now, you have no idea what ads or manipulative dark patterns your kids/teens are getting on their phone. Big, big, difference between then and now.
- barefeg 4y ago
  > Now, you have no idea what ads or manipulative dark patterns your kids/teens are getting on their phone. I’m not sure about teens. But I’m present when my kid plays games and he despises ads and micro transactions as much as I do. He’s also not allowed to buy anything so he’s more selective about what games to play (a few ones that we have subscriptions for)

salemh 4y ago

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TheMode 4y ago

Possibly, but I do not believe that it only impact children. Is there a benefit aspect of smoking ads targeted at adults?

dmje 4y ago

100% agree. Have an upvote.

monological 4y ago

It's not even only children, it's literally everyone. Who thought it would be a good idea to put a screen in everyone's hand with infinite content that's engineered to be highly addictive. It's a fucking no-brainer.

cwoolfe 4y ago

Whoa! I've been saying the same thing for the past couple years. Glad I'm not alone.

quattrofan 4y ago

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comfypotato 4y ago

Cigarettes are so very bad for you that I don’t think this will ever be the case. I remember working on the administration side of cancer treatments, and half of all of the insurance codes were variants of lung cancer from smoking. There’s a point at which you smoke so much that it’s more likely than anything else to kill you. Your point is valid that today’s smart-phone-social-media is as young as cigarettes were in the 1920’s, but the general problems have been around forever. Young folks comparing themselves to Instagram models is very analogous to air-brushed magazine models in the early 2000’s to cite a recent example. They’ve just been magnified. Smoking introduced a new problem.

908B64B197 4y ago
It's pretty bad to compare social media to smoking, or call it "the new smoking" because... teen tobacco usage is far from a solved problem. Teens today vape and it will have long term consequences both for them and society at large. Honestly the panic around "screens" remind me of the moral panics around Dungeons and Dragon back in the 80s [0] and video games in the 90s and 00s. The media hysteria did try to blame many acts of violence on DOOM. Some researchers have now spent 30 years trying to prove a link between violence and video games, without any success. To put things in perspective, during the same time period neural networks were completely abandoned by AI researchers, before coming back and giving us the deep learning revolution and the leaps in self-driving and language models. > Young folks comparing themselves to Instagram models is very analogous to air-brushed magazine models in the early 2000’s to cite a recent example. In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [1] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [2]. I have to wonder if it's related. A lot of teenagers are bombarded with images of perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror. The solution? Ban mirrors. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-set-off-a-moral-panic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/when-dungeons-dragons-... [1] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html [2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obesity_child_15_16.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity_child_15_16/obe...
- 4y ago

FooBarBizBazz 4y ago

We won't, because we will be the children who grew up on social media, and our thoughts will be controlled by the people in charge of the straw from which we sucked. "Meta? How could Meta be bad? Meta is our friend!"