4 ms·

When I see all these "phone ban" experiments, I always wonder, is the phone that's the issue, or is it the apps/websites tailored for engagement (a.k.a addictio

When I see all these "phone ban" experiments, I always wonder, is the phone that's the issue, or is it the apps/websites tailored for engagement (a.k.a addiction)? Maybe instead of banning kids from using phones, they should consider banning companies from making their apps addictive on purpose.

beeflet 2y ago
so they can still make their apps addictive accidentally?
d4rti 2y ago
Banning phones is the practical policy. Schools could not police the myriad of apps and websites.
ChrisLTD 2y ago
To what end? Why do school kids need a smartphone?
- pmg101 2y ago
  "Love and belonging" is the third in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. It's difficult to feel a sense of belonging if all your peers have access to something you don't, even worse if that something is your social space itself. (Full disclosure: I am rampantly anti smartphone. But I understand kids' need to have it.)
  - mlinhares 2y ago
    That’s why we need blanket bans where no one has a smartphone at school.
    - ChrisLTD 2y ago
      Bingo.
- sebgan 2y ago
  We got phones for our kids primarily to keep in touch when they are away, especially when they have after school sports, at work (yes, even at 14 they can have gainful employment opportunities like reffing soccer). It would be great if the "smart" phone had a true "dumb" mode where the phone basically becomes a Nokia Blue vintage talk / text device. Not an app you have to install, but something that is part of the OS which I, as the parent, can control.
  - Vegenoid 2y ago
    Does iOS not have pretty robust parental controls and locks? I ask this seriously, to see if any parents have experience locking down iPhones against a motivated adversary (their child) within the last few years.
    - dmart 2y ago
      No. Screen Time (their parental controls implementation) is easily circumventable, includes a “One More Minute” feature that can’t be disabled, doesn’t sync properly, manages to crash Safari in mysterious ways… I could go on. It’s disastrous, like an intern-level project that was shipped and never improved upon. And these are the only parental controls APIs available, so competing apps aren’t even possible, they ultimately just serve as alternate frontends for Screen Time.
  - sensanaty 2y ago
    You can just buy them a dumb phone? No reason they need a smartphone just for messages and calls
    - sebgan 2y ago
      True, and we considered that. But there are benefits to a smart phone that we also wanted them to have, just not all the time, and it should be easier to make a smart phone dumb than the other way around.
    - AngryData 2y ago
      You can kind of get away with it, but even with just SMS you are losing a significant amount of flexibility that effects how much and what people are messaging you and is the exact reason why I stopped using a dumb phone. People sending pictures or emojis or to ask a question pointing to a link. People get tired of you asking what the hell they just sent you, whether it was a picture, or just a reaction with an emoji, because often both will fail to display right or at all.
- eitally 2y ago
  There are a lot of things schools themselves have done that end up essentially requiring it. Here's a short list from my kids' district: * Use an LMS called Infinite Canvas. Among other things, the kids have to submit homework online -- which can be done on the web app -- which often requires them to take a photo of handwritten work to upload. Have you ever tried taking a photo of a piece of paper using a $200 Chromebook? * Use Teamsnap for sports team management: scheduling, roster management, messaging, etc. * Use Instagram for school-official communications, including things like social events, counseling services, college visits, and sports team news. ... There are more, but the point is that phone apps make certain things easy and schools are taking advantage of that fact, even if they're simultaneously banning them during school hours.
  - ChrisLTD 2y ago
    None of those things sound essential or without analog or laptop workarounds.
  - ryukafalz 2y ago
    > which often requires them to take a photo of handwritten work to upload. Have you ever tried taking a photo of a piece of paper using a $200 Chromebook? No, but I've used a scanner before. Surely that's still an option? Maybe it's unusual that we've kept them, but both my ancient inkjet and my wife's ancient laser printer both have flatbed scanners on top.
    - nottorp 2y ago
      Having a printer is unusual too :)
Lalabadie 2y ago
Sure, the difference is that one solution is immediately accessible to a school, and the other will be lobbied against by billionaires for a decade before meaningful change has a chance to happen.
pixelfarmer 2y ago
Yeah, it is down to the apps, not the phone as a device as such. Engagement driven software exists on consoles and PCs / laptops as well, and I'm not even talking about "social media" stuff, but pretty much all live service games and beyond. In return, I've stumbled over people that cannot even imagine why someone would take a smartphone into a far off-grid area, because for them the phone is synonymous with "always on" and all these stupid apps. Problem is, the regulations regarding all that will take much much longer because the very fact all this engagement driven software is actual poison for the brain hasn't reached the stage where you can just hammer down facts and drown everyone who still thinks this is a good idea. They should show how all that affects overall productivity and all the billions and trillions they throw out of the window, how it pours oil into the fire of more and more people being overly stressed (which is not just work causing this) etc.
jrtageh 2y ago
For increased happiness it is the ban of addictive websites. Likes, dislikes and most importantly, flagging, censoring and cancelling, externalizes your locus of control and makes you think that you live in a dystopian world. The Internet wasn't this bad when people were on Usenet and no one would censor your thoughts. For cognitive abilities it is the phone ban itself.
- qwjd 2y ago
  Naturally, this comment is flagged. Naturally, without explanation, as is the practice of dystopian wankers.
- docmars 2y ago
  I think you make a really great point: Living with the social (organic) consequences of sharing unpopular opinions is much better than being silenced and digitally imprisoned, because the latter takes away one's dignity to think or build community around ideas which disagree with the status quo.
- baconmania 2y ago
  This is an enormously disingenuous take. When Usenet was the only game in town, children were not stumbling into hyperoptimized addictive experiences tailored to every flick of their eyes. You don’t think that thousands of engineers building TikTok or Instagram to hijack your child’s literal capacity for attention and healthy social development “externalizes your locus of control”? Reducing the algorithmic targeting of children (by taking away phones or otherwise) is no more censorship than telling someone to stop standing in front of you and shouting in your face.
firesteelrain 2y ago
It’s the phones. There has to be outright bans or restrictions put on them and the apps. But the schools also are app-enabled these days. My 7th grader has to respond to email from the teacher on assignments. But back to the apps and social media, when we put restrictions on use and got back to the real focus on family and school, then the healing started. It was instant. I encourage everyone to have phone timeouts.
Levitating 2y ago
Obviously it's the apps. If you would give all kids phones that could only call and play snake they wouldn't be so engaged with it all the time. Most modern social media apps are now redesigned to allow for endless doomscrolling. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram all allow to scroll through content fed to you by an algorithm without even being able to preview the next video. It just slams it in your face. It's extremely addictive and imo harmful. It ruins attention spans, it ruins social development and it causes insecurities. I am in favor of banning smartphones in schools. I have seen what these apps do to people only a few years younger than me and it's just depressing.
- warner25 2y ago
  Well, I think it's the combination of the apps as you described with the devices to connect to them always being within arms reach. Take away either one (or take away the unlimited, always-on network access, like I have a 500 MB per month data plan) and I think we're having a very different conversation. > seen what these apps do to people only a few years younger than me and it's just depressing I'll make the obligatory point that the situation seems not much better for older people (Millennials, Boomers, etc.) who are also consuming a shocking amount of video on their phones throughout the day, to the point of it being anti-social.
  - Levitating 2y ago
    > Well, I think it's the combination of the apps as you described with the devices to connect to them always being within arms reach. I wholly agree. As for the personal experience, I am only 21 so I left high school (in europe) around 3 years ago. TikTok started to boom around 4 years ago. What I've noticed is that my peers who are just a few years younger than me use these apps much more. To the point where it's just unbearable to watch a movie with them because they open their phone up every minute just to get fed some random content. My sister who is 4 years younger than me is insecure to the point of having developed an eating disorder, and I know that social media played a big part in that. Both the insecurity and specifically the pressure to eat healthy. The algorithms in these apps really play into your faults. If you engage with videos about healthy eating because you are insecure about your weight you will only get fed more of the same. And the creators on these platforms can make extremely toxic and harmful content. I myself have tried to get TikTok to only feed me conspiracy theories and managed to do it in minutes. Some of my friends have succeeded in getting it to show self-harm content in a few minutes as well. I really find these platforms that give you absolutely no control over the content you're fed dangerous. > the situation seems not much better for older people I personally don't know many older people that really consume much phone content. My parents sure don't, neither does my older sister or my colleagues. For the most part anyway. So at least in my social circles the situation does seem better. I even know a lot of people of my age that actively try to fight it. For instance by disabling video suggestions on YouTube.
amalcon 2y ago
One of these things is in the power of the school district, as long as they can convince local parents that it's a good idea (not easy, but studies help). The other is in the power of... who? Possibly nobody. Possibly the American federal government -- but it's not even clear that they have the power to do this. Either way, the same "they" does not have agency over both things. It makes sense to consider the thing you can actually do.
tootie 2y ago
Sorry for posting this more than once, but it's not anything: https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time-is-negative-for-childrens-cognitive-development-and-well-being-oxford-study/ https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time... The York study was a tiny set of kids and the only change was sleep pattern. There have been numerous studies done on larger groups and they results coalesce around screens not being a problem.
rcMgD2BwE72F 2y ago
All because of the pervasive ad-based business model. Ban ads and things will change. Some says "ad are easy because payments are too costly" but the day we ban ads, payment processors will change their own model to make sure they capture all the market previously owned by ads. And freemium works for platforms that pretend their users can't pay.
bdcravens 2y ago
How do you police what's addictive on purpose vs what's addictive by use? Who polices the difference between addictive additives versus standard driving of engagement? After all, I think sites/apps Youtube or even Hacker News would be guilty depending on how you draw the lines.
- agile-gift0262 2y ago
  For starters, forbid behaviour and engagement surveillance. Without that data it would be impossible to fine tune the apps to be addictive for each individual. Just with that, it'd probably tackle most of the "device addiction". Then if you want to go the extra mile, consider forbidding things like personalised recommendations, infinite scrolling, auto-play-next, loots and even notifications on by default.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - bdcravens 2y ago
    Might as well just make session and cookie variables illegal, since persisting any kind of state may be able to be misused.
- rapind 2y ago
  Easy. Just make it illegal (with massive fines) to advertise to and track kids. Kill the business model and solve the problem. It's such an easy sell too. Hey parents, any objections if we prevent companies advertising to your kids? How about stopping them from tracking everything your kids do?
tclancy 2y ago
Think of it more like banning them in movie theaters. It’s not necessarily what one kid is doing, it’s the effect on the whole.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
Both. It's tailored for addiction in a portable device that's never turned off.
NoPicklez 2y ago
I agree with the apps are bad argument because they are just so addictive I think its very challenging to come up with a solution of what part of it makes it addictive and how they can not do that. Taking that logic we would need to remove almost all video games, social media and even online videos. They are all marketed to keep people engaging with them. Almost everything we create has been developed so that people engage with it, that's why we have marketing companies.

beeflet 2y ago

so they can still make their apps addictive accidentally?

d4rti 2y ago

Banning phones is the practical policy. Schools could not police the myriad of apps and websites.

ChrisLTD 2y ago

To what end? Why do school kids need a smartphone?

pmg101 2y ago
"Love and belonging" is the third in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. It's difficult to feel a sense of belonging if all your peers have access to something you don't, even worse if that something is your social space itself. (Full disclosure: I am rampantly anti smartphone. But I understand kids' need to have it.)
- mlinhares 2y ago
  That’s why we need blanket bans where no one has a smartphone at school.
  - ChrisLTD 2y ago
    Bingo.
sebgan 2y ago
We got phones for our kids primarily to keep in touch when they are away, especially when they have after school sports, at work (yes, even at 14 they can have gainful employment opportunities like reffing soccer). It would be great if the "smart" phone had a true "dumb" mode where the phone basically becomes a Nokia Blue vintage talk / text device. Not an app you have to install, but something that is part of the OS which I, as the parent, can control.
- Vegenoid 2y ago
  Does iOS not have pretty robust parental controls and locks? I ask this seriously, to see if any parents have experience locking down iPhones against a motivated adversary (their child) within the last few years.
  - dmart 2y ago
    No. Screen Time (their parental controls implementation) is easily circumventable, includes a “One More Minute” feature that can’t be disabled, doesn’t sync properly, manages to crash Safari in mysterious ways… I could go on. It’s disastrous, like an intern-level project that was shipped and never improved upon. And these are the only parental controls APIs available, so competing apps aren’t even possible, they ultimately just serve as alternate frontends for Screen Time.
- sensanaty 2y ago
  You can just buy them a dumb phone? No reason they need a smartphone just for messages and calls
  - sebgan 2y ago
    True, and we considered that. But there are benefits to a smart phone that we also wanted them to have, just not all the time, and it should be easier to make a smart phone dumb than the other way around.
  - AngryData 2y ago
    You can kind of get away with it, but even with just SMS you are losing a significant amount of flexibility that effects how much and what people are messaging you and is the exact reason why I stopped using a dumb phone. People sending pictures or emojis or to ask a question pointing to a link. People get tired of you asking what the hell they just sent you, whether it was a picture, or just a reaction with an emoji, because often both will fail to display right or at all.
eitally 2y ago
There are a lot of things schools themselves have done that end up essentially requiring it. Here's a short list from my kids' district: * Use an LMS called Infinite Canvas. Among other things, the kids have to submit homework online -- which can be done on the web app -- which often requires them to take a photo of handwritten work to upload. Have you ever tried taking a photo of a piece of paper using a $200 Chromebook? * Use Teamsnap for sports team management: scheduling, roster management, messaging, etc. * Use Instagram for school-official communications, including things like social events, counseling services, college visits, and sports team news. ... There are more, but the point is that phone apps make certain things easy and schools are taking advantage of that fact, even if they're simultaneously banning them during school hours.
- ChrisLTD 2y ago
  None of those things sound essential or without analog or laptop workarounds.
- ryukafalz 2y ago
  > which often requires them to take a photo of handwritten work to upload. Have you ever tried taking a photo of a piece of paper using a $200 Chromebook? No, but I've used a scanner before. Surely that's still an option? Maybe it's unusual that we've kept them, but both my ancient inkjet and my wife's ancient laser printer both have flatbed scanners on top.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    Having a printer is unusual too :)

Lalabadie 2y ago

Sure, the difference is that one solution is immediately accessible to a school, and the other will be lobbied against by billionaires for a decade before meaningful change has a chance to happen.

pixelfarmer 2y ago

Yeah, it is down to the apps, not the phone as a device as such. Engagement driven software exists on consoles and PCs / laptops as well, and I'm not even talking about "social media" stuff, but pretty much all live service games and beyond. In return, I've stumbled over people that cannot even imagine why someone would take a smartphone into a far off-grid area, because for them the phone is synonymous with "always on" and all these stupid apps. Problem is, the regulations regarding all that will take much much longer because the very fact all this engagement driven software is actual poison for the brain hasn't reached the stage where you can just hammer down facts and drown everyone who still thinks this is a good idea. They should show how all that affects overall productivity and all the billions and trillions they throw out of the window, how it pours oil into the fire of more and more people being overly stressed (which is not just work causing this) etc.

jrtageh 2y ago

For increased happiness it is the ban of addictive websites. Likes, dislikes and most importantly, flagging, censoring and cancelling, externalizes your locus of control and makes you think that you live in a dystopian world. The Internet wasn't this bad when people were on Usenet and no one would censor your thoughts. For cognitive abilities it is the phone ban itself.

qwjd 2y ago
Naturally, this comment is flagged. Naturally, without explanation, as is the practice of dystopian wankers.
docmars 2y ago
I think you make a really great point: Living with the social (organic) consequences of sharing unpopular opinions is much better than being silenced and digitally imprisoned, because the latter takes away one's dignity to think or build community around ideas which disagree with the status quo.
baconmania 2y ago
This is an enormously disingenuous take. When Usenet was the only game in town, children were not stumbling into hyperoptimized addictive experiences tailored to every flick of their eyes. You don’t think that thousands of engineers building TikTok or Instagram to hijack your child’s literal capacity for attention and healthy social development “externalizes your locus of control”? Reducing the algorithmic targeting of children (by taking away phones or otherwise) is no more censorship than telling someone to stop standing in front of you and shouting in your face.

firesteelrain 2y ago

It’s the phones. There has to be outright bans or restrictions put on them and the apps. But the schools also are app-enabled these days. My 7th grader has to respond to email from the teacher on assignments. But back to the apps and social media, when we put restrictions on use and got back to the real focus on family and school, then the healing started. It was instant. I encourage everyone to have phone timeouts.

Levitating 2y ago

Obviously it's the apps. If you would give all kids phones that could only call and play snake they wouldn't be so engaged with it all the time. Most modern social media apps are now redesigned to allow for endless doomscrolling. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram all allow to scroll through content fed to you by an algorithm without even being able to preview the next video. It just slams it in your face. It's extremely addictive and imo harmful. It ruins attention spans, it ruins social development and it causes insecurities. I am in favor of banning smartphones in schools. I have seen what these apps do to people only a few years younger than me and it's just depressing.

warner25 2y ago
Well, I think it's the combination of the apps as you described with the devices to connect to them always being within arms reach. Take away either one (or take away the unlimited, always-on network access, like I have a 500 MB per month data plan) and I think we're having a very different conversation. > seen what these apps do to people only a few years younger than me and it's just depressing I'll make the obligatory point that the situation seems not much better for older people (Millennials, Boomers, etc.) who are also consuming a shocking amount of video on their phones throughout the day, to the point of it being anti-social.
- Levitating 2y ago
  > Well, I think it's the combination of the apps as you described with the devices to connect to them always being within arms reach. I wholly agree. As for the personal experience, I am only 21 so I left high school (in europe) around 3 years ago. TikTok started to boom around 4 years ago. What I've noticed is that my peers who are just a few years younger than me use these apps much more. To the point where it's just unbearable to watch a movie with them because they open their phone up every minute just to get fed some random content. My sister who is 4 years younger than me is insecure to the point of having developed an eating disorder, and I know that social media played a big part in that. Both the insecurity and specifically the pressure to eat healthy. The algorithms in these apps really play into your faults. If you engage with videos about healthy eating because you are insecure about your weight you will only get fed more of the same. And the creators on these platforms can make extremely toxic and harmful content. I myself have tried to get TikTok to only feed me conspiracy theories and managed to do it in minutes. Some of my friends have succeeded in getting it to show self-harm content in a few minutes as well. I really find these platforms that give you absolutely no control over the content you're fed dangerous. > the situation seems not much better for older people I personally don't know many older people that really consume much phone content. My parents sure don't, neither does my older sister or my colleagues. For the most part anyway. So at least in my social circles the situation does seem better. I even know a lot of people of my age that actively try to fight it. For instance by disabling video suggestions on YouTube.

amalcon 2y ago

One of these things is in the power of the school district, as long as they can convince local parents that it's a good idea (not easy, but studies help). The other is in the power of... who? Possibly nobody. Possibly the American federal government -- but it's not even clear that they have the power to do this. Either way, the same "they" does not have agency over both things. It makes sense to consider the thing you can actually do.

tootie 2y ago

Sorry for posting this more than once, but it's not anything: https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time-is-negative-for-childrens-cognitive-development-and-well-being-oxford-study/ https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/no-evidence-screen-time... The York study was a tiny set of kids and the only change was sleep pattern. There have been numerous studies done on larger groups and they results coalesce around screens not being a problem.

rcMgD2BwE72F 2y ago

All because of the pervasive ad-based business model. Ban ads and things will change. Some says "ad are easy because payments are too costly" but the day we ban ads, payment processors will change their own model to make sure they capture all the market previously owned by ads. And freemium works for platforms that pretend their users can't pay.

bdcravens 2y ago

How do you police what's addictive on purpose vs what's addictive by use? Who polices the difference between addictive additives versus standard driving of engagement? After all, I think sites/apps Youtube or even Hacker News would be guilty depending on how you draw the lines.

agile-gift0262 2y ago
For starters, forbid behaviour and engagement surveillance. Without that data it would be impossible to fine tune the apps to be addictive for each individual. Just with that, it'd probably tackle most of the "device addiction". Then if you want to go the extra mile, consider forbidding things like personalised recommendations, infinite scrolling, auto-play-next, loots and even notifications on by default.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bdcravens 2y ago
  Might as well just make session and cookie variables illegal, since persisting any kind of state may be able to be misused.
rapind 2y ago
Easy. Just make it illegal (with massive fines) to advertise to and track kids. Kill the business model and solve the problem. It's such an easy sell too. Hey parents, any objections if we prevent companies advertising to your kids? How about stopping them from tracking everything your kids do?

tclancy 2y ago

Think of it more like banning them in movie theaters. It’s not necessarily what one kid is doing, it’s the effect on the whole.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

Both. It's tailored for addiction in a portable device that's never turned off.

NoPicklez 2y ago

I agree with the apps are bad argument because they are just so addictive I think its very challenging to come up with a solution of what part of it makes it addictive and how they can not do that. Taking that logic we would need to remove almost all video games, social media and even online videos. They are all marketed to keep people engaging with them. Almost everything we create has been developed so that people engage with it, that's why we have marketing companies.