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The lumping of these together might help explain the gender imbalance in the mental health effect. It's pretty well documented that boys play more videogames, e

The lumping of these together might help explain the gender imbalance in the mental health effect. It's pretty well documented that boys play more videogames, especially going into the later teen years, and that's more conducive to smaller, tight-knit (today, likely discord) communities. If the time being spent on a discord call with your friends playing Minecraft are being counted as social media use the same way doomscrolling Instagram or TikTok is, then that's going to obscure the social media influence on mental health outcomes. It doesn't seem too hard to control for this, but I struggle to find any studies that meaningfully disambiguate the two.

max51 4y ago
>The lumping of these together might help explain the gender imbalance in the mental health effect. I never thought of it that way but it makes a lot of sense in retrospect. It would also explain why the only people I know who developed IT skills on their own were boys. Running videos games or trying to create them back in 2004 required you to learn a lot about how computers work and how to use them. There were no free-to-play easy-to-install AAA games like we have today. We didn't learn it because the process was fun, we did it because it was required if we wanted to play games. If all you do is browse the web, you don't need any IT skills. I'm sure there are many security specialists now who started their career by trying to remove the virus that came with a pirated game on their parent's computer in high school. It's crazy how fast kids learn on their own with the right motivation.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  In my perhaps anecdotal experience, the risk of getting a virus from a crack is and was hugely overblown. And we now know that copy protection came with malware too, most infamously with Sony's SecuROM (same group also seems to have made Denuvo).
  - max51 4y ago
    I got a few viruses myself. There were no free easy to use like we have today to sandbox an application or run a VM and it was well known that almost all cracks/keygen gave false positive. We just rolled the dice and hoped for the best. The viruses I have seen myself were really not that dangerous. Ransomware were not popular yet and our life not was tied to our computer as much. It was also easy to detect with task manager/services compared to today and it was possible to remove them yourself with your AV or manually. There were far less things running on your PC in the background and internet traffic was minimal.
  - revelio 4y ago
    Only if you define any driver as "malware". SecuROM didn't actually come with malware in the way normal people define it, it was just described that way by salty pirates.
    - nullfield 4y ago
      Eh. If it messed with the regular optical drive’s drivers, hooked privileged kernel functions, and generally (just like modern things like EAC) introduced holes the size a semi truck could drive through, it qualified as malware. No intent to pirate anything needed.
      - revelio 4y ago
        That's my point: that's not the definition used by anyone in the actual anti-malware space.

max51 4y ago

>The lumping of these together might help explain the gender imbalance in the mental health effect. I never thought of it that way but it makes a lot of sense in retrospect. It would also explain why the only people I know who developed IT skills on their own were boys. Running videos games or trying to create them back in 2004 required you to learn a lot about how computers work and how to use them. There were no free-to-play easy-to-install AAA games like we have today. We didn't learn it because the process was fun, we did it because it was required if we wanted to play games. If all you do is browse the web, you don't need any IT skills. I'm sure there are many security specialists now who started their career by trying to remove the virus that came with a pirated game on their parent's computer in high school. It's crazy how fast kids learn on their own with the right motivation.

BlueTemplar 4y ago
In my perhaps anecdotal experience, the risk of getting a virus from a crack is and was hugely overblown. And we now know that copy protection came with malware too, most infamously with Sony's SecuROM (same group also seems to have made Denuvo).
- max51 4y ago
  I got a few viruses myself. There were no free easy to use like we have today to sandbox an application or run a VM and it was well known that almost all cracks/keygen gave false positive. We just rolled the dice and hoped for the best. The viruses I have seen myself were really not that dangerous. Ransomware were not popular yet and our life not was tied to our computer as much. It was also easy to detect with task manager/services compared to today and it was possible to remove them yourself with your AV or manually. There were far less things running on your PC in the background and internet traffic was minimal.
- revelio 4y ago
  Only if you define any driver as "malware". SecuROM didn't actually come with malware in the way normal people define it, it was just described that way by salty pirates.
  - nullfield 4y ago
    Eh. If it messed with the regular optical drive’s drivers, hooked privileged kernel functions, and generally (just like modern things like EAC) introduced holes the size a semi truck could drive through, it qualified as malware. No intent to pirate anything needed.
    - revelio 4y ago
      That's my point: that's not the definition used by anyone in the actual anti-malware space.