4 ms·

Or perhaps we should watch what happens in Australia and draw lessons from it? I have a hard time telling a teenager that they cannot socialize with people just

by bahmboo 9mo ago

Or perhaps we should watch what happens in Australia and draw lessons from it? I have a hard time telling a teenager that they cannot socialize with people just because it is via electronic means. I also do not like teenagers identities manipulated for commercial ends. Though we have done this since the 1950s. Also shouldn't we ban MTV and rock and roll music in general? It's destroying the youth!

barbazoo 9mo ago
> I have a hard time telling a teenager that they cannot socialize with people just because it is via electronic means There are still other means to chat with other individuals or groups that don't involve social media.
- johnisgood 9mo ago
  Not according to many people on here. They consider WhatsApp "social media" for example because of group chat.
  - barbazoo 9mo ago
    True, they're just not social media in the context of this "social media ban".
sejje 9mo ago
It's the social media, not the digital communication. AIM/ICQ didn't rot our brains or attention spans.
- bahmboo 9mo ago
  That's a good point. The problem for me is where the line is drawn. Is a car enthusiast forum social media? How about youtube comments? I think society is generally improved when the teenage generation is at least part of discussions. We need to protect the young people but excluding them and suppressing them leads to unintended consequences. I am not a tiktok apologist. Hey Facebook used to be enemy number 1 and now it's an afterthought for many people.
  - vladms 9mo ago
    I would draw a line at user customized wall of content. All content on sites should be organized in a similar way for everybody (by date, by category, etc.). I think this would reduce a lot the problems that we see currently. If you want to be bold and imaginative, although doubt this would ever pass, any platform that focuses or allows user content, should not be allowed to show advertisements. Then the incentive to have people stay more to watch more ads would disappear.
  - sejje 9mo ago
    I think mostly you know it when you see it. Infinite scrolling, algorithm based (not timestamp-based), "stories" (short videos), public (non-friend) accounts make up most of the feed, ads selling views and therefore companies trying to capture attention. A car enthusiast forum is not doing this. phpBB sites get a pass. YouTube is, though. I think YouTube is part of the brain rot, although not the comments section. FB, Instagram, X, tiktok, YouTube, Snapchat, etc.
    - NickC25 9mo ago
      Anything that promotes short-form video should be looked at. Youtube promoting shorts is bad. A youtube long-form video about, say, car repair, or quantum physics, or a history of eastern asian languages doesn't contribute to brain rot. The Chinese, take it for what it's worth, knew how to control TikTok. They simply banned non educational content on the platform. You want to watch a 5 minute video explaining the basics of a math theorem, or explaining a chess opening? Sure, that's cool. Stupid 30 second clips of dances, memes, reactions, etc? Nah, that's dumb.
      - sejje 9mo ago
        That's better imo, but creates a new problem. As we can see anywhere and everywhere, moderation teams have to use their power, even when nothing is in violation of the rules. They'll start policing more content, and pretty soon they'll be arresting people.
        9mo ago
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- Aerroon 9mo ago
  Can someone link me something that shows that attention spans are decreasing? I looked into it briefly and the following two is what I found. The rest seemed to just be repeating or debunking these two claims. 1. An infographic that claims we went from 15 second attention spans to 8 seconds attention spans (as opposed to a goldfish having a 9 second attention span (how was this measured?)). This seems BS. 2. A study that measured how long knowledge workers spent on a single screen. This dropped from 250 seconds in the early 2000s to 72 seconds in 2012 and 47 seconds more recently. This data shows something, but I think connecting this to attention spans 1:1 doesn't seem quite right. It could just as well be that people work differently now. Eg they're more likely to pull information from another screen or document than they used to be.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 9mo ago
    > I looked into it briefly Your attention span is quite short.
gregbot 9mo ago
> I also do not like teenagers identities manipulated for commercial ends. This. If western “liberal” “democracies” are concerned about children’s privacy then we should push back on surveillance capitalism, not force people to submit government id in order to express their opinion online.
- jamespo 9mo ago
  Ah yes, the limitless benefits of anonymous posting.
Quarrelsome 9mo ago
it makes sense in terms of grooming. Most parents want to deny their children agency until they're no longer minors and giving them the internet massively undermines that idea. You're plugging your child into a stream of information that is mostly a sewer of misinformation.
- logicchains 9mo ago
  The school system is a sewer of bias with 90%+ of teachers leaning left. Decentralised media is the only chance many kids have of hearing both sides of the story.
  - marcosdumay 9mo ago
    > 90%+ of teachers leaning left Is this a US thing? Maybe it's because your Overton window is flying miles beyond the right-end of the spectrum and you lost touch to what "left" even means?
    - platevoltage 9mo ago
      It's so stupid. These days, making a statement like "we shouldn't teach Genesis as fact in public school" means that you "lean left".
  - Quarrelsome 9mo ago
    > The school system is a sewer of bias with 90%+ of teachers leaning left. Good thing people give a shit about teachers and pay them properly so everyone is eager to become a teacher in order to address that bias. Instead of idk, leaving it entirely as it is and just whining in a partisan fashion about how education has some sort of bias. I mean education has a lot of women who are teachers and the GOP don't appeal to a lot of women because they want to ban abortion and shit like that. So that'd probably explain it simply enough. In terms of priorities what if the massive funding went into teaching instead of recruiting for ICE? Shows to me what's important to people. Tbh, I don't think minors need to be angry about misinformation about migrants (which is what I got in like 5m last time I created a fresh twitter account), they can wait until they're old enough to vote. They'll still fall for that shit all the same, so there's no need to be upset about it. Might as well ground our kids for their first 16/18 years before unleashing the Nick Fuentes community on them.
Barrin92 9mo ago
>they cannot socialize with people they can socialize online perfectly fine. Excluded from the ban in Australia are among others, WhatsApp, Discord, Steam and Facebook Messenger. TikTok, Twitter or Instagram are not and never have been platforms in which people form social communities with their peers. >Also shouldn't we ban MTV and rock and roll music in general? No, because there was never any evidence that rock has harmed the youth. Jonathan Haidt, author of this piece, has conducted extensive research to show that social media does.
- bahmboo 9mo ago
  > Twitter or Instagram are not and never have been platforms in which people form social communities with their peers. By peers do you mean people they know in person or demographic peers? I'm not going to anecdata [edit: then I do] but on platforms like Facebook I only have friends that I know personally (or at least when I used to use it). Twitter was the opposite. Oddly the most online abuse I've had is during in game chats and providing open source software but I digress... The "rock and roll" thing is because "think of the kids" is a perennial siren call. Only sometimes is it valid. I can't speak for everyone but there seems to be a consensus that "social media" can be deeply harmful for some young people and we should not ignore it. That this one guy made a study and it happened to support his hypothesis isn't enough for this one voter to want to ban online networks of pesky teenagers calling each other names and buying stupid crap.

by bahmboo 9mo ago

barbazoo 9mo ago

> I have a hard time telling a teenager that they cannot socialize with people just because it is via electronic means There are still other means to chat with other individuals or groups that don't involve social media.

johnisgood 9mo ago
Not according to many people on here. They consider WhatsApp "social media" for example because of group chat.
- barbazoo 9mo ago
  True, they're just not social media in the context of this "social media ban".

sejje 9mo ago

It's the social media, not the digital communication. AIM/ICQ didn't rot our brains or attention spans.

bahmboo 9mo ago
That's a good point. The problem for me is where the line is drawn. Is a car enthusiast forum social media? How about youtube comments? I think society is generally improved when the teenage generation is at least part of discussions. We need to protect the young people but excluding them and suppressing them leads to unintended consequences. I am not a tiktok apologist. Hey Facebook used to be enemy number 1 and now it's an afterthought for many people.
- vladms 9mo ago
  I would draw a line at user customized wall of content. All content on sites should be organized in a similar way for everybody (by date, by category, etc.). I think this would reduce a lot the problems that we see currently. If you want to be bold and imaginative, although doubt this would ever pass, any platform that focuses or allows user content, should not be allowed to show advertisements. Then the incentive to have people stay more to watch more ads would disappear.
- sejje 9mo ago
  I think mostly you know it when you see it. Infinite scrolling, algorithm based (not timestamp-based), "stories" (short videos), public (non-friend) accounts make up most of the feed, ads selling views and therefore companies trying to capture attention. A car enthusiast forum is not doing this. phpBB sites get a pass. YouTube is, though. I think YouTube is part of the brain rot, although not the comments section. FB, Instagram, X, tiktok, YouTube, Snapchat, etc.
  - NickC25 9mo ago
    Anything that promotes short-form video should be looked at. Youtube promoting shorts is bad. A youtube long-form video about, say, car repair, or quantum physics, or a history of eastern asian languages doesn't contribute to brain rot. The Chinese, take it for what it's worth, knew how to control TikTok. They simply banned non educational content on the platform. You want to watch a 5 minute video explaining the basics of a math theorem, or explaining a chess opening? Sure, that's cool. Stupid 30 second clips of dances, memes, reactions, etc? Nah, that's dumb.
    - sejje 9mo ago
      That's better imo, but creates a new problem. As we can see anywhere and everywhere, moderation teams have to use their power, even when nothing is in violation of the rules. They'll start policing more content, and pretty soon they'll be arresting people.
      - 9mo ago
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
Aerroon 9mo ago
Can someone link me something that shows that attention spans are decreasing? I looked into it briefly and the following two is what I found. The rest seemed to just be repeating or debunking these two claims. 1. An infographic that claims we went from 15 second attention spans to 8 seconds attention spans (as opposed to a goldfish having a 9 second attention span (how was this measured?)). This seems BS. 2. A study that measured how long knowledge workers spent on a single screen. This dropped from 250 seconds in the early 2000s to 72 seconds in 2012 and 47 seconds more recently. This data shows something, but I think connecting this to attention spans 1:1 doesn't seem quite right. It could just as well be that people work differently now. Eg they're more likely to pull information from another screen or document than they used to be.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 9mo ago
  > I looked into it briefly Your attention span is quite short.

gregbot 9mo ago

> I also do not like teenagers identities manipulated for commercial ends. This. If western “liberal” “democracies” are concerned about children’s privacy then we should push back on surveillance capitalism, not force people to submit government id in order to express their opinion online.

jamespo 9mo ago
Ah yes, the limitless benefits of anonymous posting.

Quarrelsome 9mo ago

it makes sense in terms of grooming. Most parents want to deny their children agency until they're no longer minors and giving them the internet massively undermines that idea. You're plugging your child into a stream of information that is mostly a sewer of misinformation.

logicchains 9mo ago
The school system is a sewer of bias with 90%+ of teachers leaning left. Decentralised media is the only chance many kids have of hearing both sides of the story.
- marcosdumay 9mo ago
  > 90%+ of teachers leaning left Is this a US thing? Maybe it's because your Overton window is flying miles beyond the right-end of the spectrum and you lost touch to what "left" even means?
  - platevoltage 9mo ago
    It's so stupid. These days, making a statement like "we shouldn't teach Genesis as fact in public school" means that you "lean left".
- Quarrelsome 9mo ago
  > The school system is a sewer of bias with 90%+ of teachers leaning left. Good thing people give a shit about teachers and pay them properly so everyone is eager to become a teacher in order to address that bias. Instead of idk, leaving it entirely as it is and just whining in a partisan fashion about how education has some sort of bias. I mean education has a lot of women who are teachers and the GOP don't appeal to a lot of women because they want to ban abortion and shit like that. So that'd probably explain it simply enough. In terms of priorities what if the massive funding went into teaching instead of recruiting for ICE? Shows to me what's important to people. Tbh, I don't think minors need to be angry about misinformation about migrants (which is what I got in like 5m last time I created a fresh twitter account), they can wait until they're old enough to vote. They'll still fall for that shit all the same, so there's no need to be upset about it. Might as well ground our kids for their first 16/18 years before unleashing the Nick Fuentes community on them.

Barrin92 9mo ago

>they cannot socialize with people they can socialize online perfectly fine. Excluded from the ban in Australia are among others, WhatsApp, Discord, Steam and Facebook Messenger. TikTok, Twitter or Instagram are not and never have been platforms in which people form social communities with their peers. >Also shouldn't we ban MTV and rock and roll music in general? No, because there was never any evidence that rock has harmed the youth. Jonathan Haidt, author of this piece, has conducted extensive research to show that social media does.

bahmboo 9mo ago
> Twitter or Instagram are not and never have been platforms in which people form social communities with their peers. By peers do you mean people they know in person or demographic peers? I'm not going to anecdata [edit: then I do] but on platforms like Facebook I only have friends that I know personally (or at least when I used to use it). Twitter was the opposite. Oddly the most online abuse I've had is during in game chats and providing open source software but I digress... The "rock and roll" thing is because "think of the kids" is a perennial siren call. Only sometimes is it valid. I can't speak for everyone but there seems to be a consensus that "social media" can be deeply harmful for some young people and we should not ignore it. That this one guy made a study and it happened to support his hypothesis isn't enough for this one voter to want to ban online networks of pesky teenagers calling each other names and buying stupid crap.