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Grandparents are glued to their phones [video]
- Simulacra 7mo agoMaybe a solution is to spend more time with grandparents, so that they have something more than just technology to keep them company.
- chronic20001 7mo ago[flagged]
- behringer 7mo agoI said, "I'd like to see you if you don't mind"\ He said, "I'd love to, Dad, if I can find the time\ You see my new job's a hassle and the kids have the flu\ But it's sure nice talking to you, Dad\ It's been sure nice talking to you"\ And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me\ He'd grown up just like me\ My boy was just like me
- p2detar 7mo agoYes, but no. From personal experience, even around grandchildren, TikTok/FB have precedence. It’s getting sickening and we need to educate our parents about the harm that "the algorithm" causes. I just ask myself whether we are even in the position to do so. edit: typo
- joe_mamba 7mo agoI'd love to. The issue is grandparents are in a town with no jobs ruled by a corrupt government that only steals and embezzles money and provides no benefits to local taxpayers. There's a reason youth migrate away to live with roommates in overpriced big metro areas. That's where all the white collar jobs are created for college educated people. And everyone in the last 20+ years has been groomed to go to college and take white collar jobs, plus deindustrialization and offshoring of manufacturing jobs meaning there's not much in-between well paying white collar jobs and dead-end neo-slavery food delivery jobs. Maybe I'll be a plumber one day and move back to my grandparent place if Claude takes my job, who knows.
- analog8374 7mo agoI know a lot of old bored retired people. They need something physical and social. Like softball or something. But compatible with their decripitude. I hook them up with each other. There are parties. Still working on the softball part. Ideas are welcome
- rationalist 7mo ago> I hook them up with each other. There are parties. OnlyGrandparents.com? (I looked it up, the domain name was registered six days ago!)
- rrr_oh_man 7mo agoOnlyGrans.com is available for only $50k
- Wistar 7mo agoThat’s worth about $5
- alwa 7mo agoIf anybody wants to do something with instagran.org, I know somebody who would be willing to part with it for a good cause…
- rationalist 7mo agoSounds like it's worth a good Cease and Desist from Instagram.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- behringer 7mo agobulletball
- toomuchtodo 7mo agoIf someone would like to and is willing to make the time, that’s fine, but you don’t owe them this if they are not a good person or worth spending time with imho. Connection and community is earned, not a given. My lived experience is there are some good old people you strive to make time with, some who are fine but I wouldn’t go out of my way to make time for, and some who are just terrible people who are going to die alone because of who they are. Your life experience and decisioning process about how and with whom to spend precious, non renewable time may differ. Don’t set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm.
- serial_dev 7mo agoIt’s all fine, but in that case also do not worry about this hypothetical old person spending time the way they like to.
- toomuchtodo 7mo agoCertainly, how they spend their time is their choice, concepts of free will and all that.
- foobarchu 7mo agoDoesn't always help. My mother (of grandparent age but coincidentally had 5 kids who didn't want to procreate) stares at her phone 95% of the time when I visit. I'll be telling a story and she's on Facebook, doesn't even look up. She's even been called out in it by my sibling who lives with them, to no avail. Luckily she doesn't fall for right wing propaganda all over the Internet, but she sure does fall for every single piece of Trump rage bait out there.
- AngryData 7mo agoAs the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.
- eYrKEC2 7mo agoIn our household, the worst offenders of phones at the dinner tables are the grandparents. It's as gross as 2 knuckles deep in your nose.
- gedy 7mo agoSure, but I've seen since the 70s old folks just staring at TV all day, so it's not just a mobile phenomenon either.
- HerbManic 7mo agoVery true, phone addiction is that taken to a new level but the same underlaying issues remain.
- nanobuilds 7mo agoThe mobile is much than TV because of the enforcement loop and algorithm turning that attention into scams, ai generated slop, and harmful content that is more and more difficult to identify. With tv I suppose you can change the channel, with reels, the next 20 reels might continue to show you similar things or follow folks on other platforms as well.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- susam 7mo agoFortunately, I could never get used to the small screens of mobile phones as a serious computing or web browsing device. So my use of my mobile phone is limited to basic tasks like making calls, sending messages, and sometimes, reluctantly typing emails when I don't have a laptop handy. My primary computing and web browsing device remains my laptop, with Emacs and Firefox being my main tools. One thing that does manage to distract me sometimes is YouTube recommendations. As a result I have written a little userscript for myself to disable shorts and recommendations: https://github.com/susam/userscripts/blob/main/js/ytx.user.js https://github.com/susam/userscripts/blob/main/js/ytx.user.j... So far the userscript has been successful. As a side effect of disabling the recommendations sidebar, the video panel expands to occupy a larger part of the screen which I quite like. Here is a screenshot: https://susam.github.io/blob/img/userscripts/ytx.png https://susam.github.io/blob/img/userscripts/ytx.png Also, I still depend heavily on physical textbooks, a rollerball pen and a stack of plain A4 paper for most of my learning and exploration activities. This routine has helped me to stay away from modern attention media too.
- asib 7mo agoIf you press t key you will get a full width video player.
- nicbou 7mo agoTry Unhook (desktop) and Untrap (iOS). At this point, my YouTube experience is just the channels I subscribe to, and the video player. It reduced my usage to almost zero. I'm not exactly curing cancer, but my media consumption is more moderate and mindful now.
- nomel 7mo agoSame thing can be achieved (mostly) by disabling youtube watch and search history. It causes the home page to be blank, and all recommendations under any video are usually from your subscriptions, related your subscriptions, or directly related to the video.
- 7mo ago
- 50208 7mo agoSeniors are the most vulnerable people on the internet, the most likely to be fooled by disinformation, the most likely to vote, and are one of the biggest threats to civil society. Boomers are destroying what previous generations have built.
- rrr_oh_man 7mo ago> the most likely to vote Well... who's fault is that.
- HNisCIS 7mo agoIt's because election day is a weekday and the rest of us have to keep up with the grind. It's entirely because they don't have jobs
- ViktorRay 7mo agoEarly voting exists in many states. Even in these states you’ll find that younger folks hardly vote.
- SoftTalker 7mo agoIt's been this way for 100+ years (probably much longer) and people found a way to vote. It's easier than ever in most places today, with early voting, mail-in voting, whatever other options are available.
- dabinat 7mo agoIn some states it’s easier now; in some it’s much harder. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/chaos-and-voter-suppression-texas-primary https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/chao...
- k2enemy 7mo agoAnd also the most likely to fall victims to scams. An elderly family friend lost millions to a pig butchering scam.
- wortelefant 7mo agoTaking grandmas unpaid care work for granted - no longer possible. Outrage!
- gammalost 7mo agoMore: If you want to spend time with your grandkid please do not just sit besides him, phone in hand. If you do not want to then that's fine
- retrac98 7mo agoMy parents generation are the most screen addicted people I know. Absolute slaves to Facebook’s algorithm. It’s really disheartening to see.
- blakblakarak 7mo agoMy Dad’s got early stage dementia and Facebook is an absolute nightmare. The apps infested with AI slop and the algorithm seems to fill his feed with stuff designed to get him worked up (currently badly behaved cyclists even though he no longer drives).
- gzread 7mo agoMine got Israeli propaganda and kept texting me so often about Hamas and Muslims that I had to block him.
- dvh 7mo agoI have hoarded 61849 short videos (44 GB, filtered, no propaganda, spam or low quality stuff) from 9gag, with this you could build a "Fakebook" of your own and serve your parents whatever you want, I randomly picked 5 videos: - funny cat video - superfluid helium document from 60s - people jumping on a roof and falling through - abba sos song (in Swedish, or Esperanto, idk) - kid saving bus driver with stroke Analyze them with LLM, generate positive comments and you're good to go.
- Aurornis 7mo agoIt’s definitely not limited to Facebook. About half of the 50-70 year olds in my family and my wife’s family are screen addicted without Facebook. They live on questionable news websites, messenger apps, Nextdoor, and some others. It’s strange to hear a 60-something rant about how evil Facebook is and then go on to regurgitate countless conspiracy theories they picked up from whatever websites they’re reading this month. The parents who scroll Instagram and Facebook feel downright tame in comparison.
- ellyagg 7mo agoMy aunt is 80 and thank goodness she has an iPhone. She’s bedridden and spends all day on it. She has no children but I lived with her for a while when I moved out of my parent’s, and we text often.
- colechristensen 7mo agoThe concern is what you're doing when you're getting older but still able. The decline is accelerated by muscle weakness which is accelerated by sitting around all day looking at screens.
- borski 7mo agoSomeone bedridden is not the focus of the article or conversation; once you are no longer capable of being active, it is obviously true that you’ll partake in more sedentary activities.
- exo762 7mo agoAmazing opportunity! One more demographic to save via age verification laws, with a side dish of reliable personalized advertisement profiles.
- alansaber 7mo agoReminds me of Chade and The Skill from the Robin Hobb books
- impure 7mo agoI was reading up on some RCTs on social media and mental health recently and one of the surprising findings is that social media is actually worse for older people.
- krackers 7mo agoThat makes sense, they haven't "built immunity".
- tietjens 7mo agoCan you share some things you were reading?
- impure 7mo agoThis is the one I read: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666560325000714 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266656032... which says how older participants benefit more from restricting social media use.
- alwa 7mo agoNot OP, and I’ve been looking at more meta-analyses than RCTs, but: * Lei et al 2024 metaanalysis, generally positive associations but no causal evidence for psychosocial effects, especially when the social media use is family-directed - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-psychogeriatrics/article/relationship-between-social-media-use-and-psychosocial-outcomes-in-older-adults-a-systematic-review/489FE4D4C9D8E0A482D58B5EA0F48BFA https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-psycho... * Balki et al 2022, metaanalysis, same thing: good for reinforcing existing real-human social connections, overcoming barriers to/increasing regularity and frequency of contact, acquiring access to resources; isolating to use outside that context; regular and frequent contact much more effective than occasional or episodic: https://aging.jmir.org/2022/4/e40125/ https://aging.jmir.org/2022/4/e40125/ My overall impression seems to be what common sense tells us: to the extent it lets you overcome aging-related obstacles to interacting with real people, great; to the extent it’s brain rot, it’s isolating.
- xnx 7mo agoI really wish iPhone/Android had better parental controls so I could monitor my dad's screen time and the type of content he was allowed to see on YouTube.
- Cpoll 7mo agoThe recontextualisation of "parental" is very amusing.
- tromp 7mo agoAs nicely illustrated in this Young Sheldon episode fragment: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Nd90rFPYVnc https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Nd90rFPYVnc
- fhdkweig 7mo agoI would have gone with South Park's murder porn episode in which the kids accidentally got the parents interested in Minecraft.
- 1718627440 7mo agoAre you aware that every YT Short can also be viewed with the normal player? If you do, do you prefer the Shorts interface and thus posted that URL rather then https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd90rFPYVnc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd90rFPYVnc ?
- gcanyon 7mo agoTime to sign off HN, I guess :-) On a serious note YT shorts are on my radar for "things I spend too much time on that deliver minimal value."
- hsuduebc2 7mo agoIn my opinion it's best from short content feed out there but it's still useless. Too much AI slop in there. Needles to say I did get some interesting creators in there but I believe people I'm searching for are using YouTube as long videos platform and do not properly use the short term format.
- al_borland 7mo agoI have a rule that I don’t swipe through shorts. If they show up on my recommendations, I treat them like normal videos to avoid getting stuck in the slot machine.
- kevin061 7mo agoBefore smartphones and TikTok it was casino TV at 3AM, TV infomercial shopping, and the like.
- nolist_policy 7mo agoWait till you see the grandparents glued to the TV.
- everdrive 7mo agoThis feels similar to how you'll see rows and rows of elderly people mindlessly pushing the slot machine buttons in casinos. It makes me wonder if impulse control starts breaking down for that crowd. Of course, I also wonder if non-digital natives also just have less of a thick skin for this sort of thing.
- Induane 7mo agoI think it might be that if you don't grow up with something that hijacks you as a kid you don't have the mental equivalent to antibodies. Old people get captured by new dopamine hits moreso than their younger counterparts.
- al_borland 7mo agoI believe this to be true, and I even think you need to be old. On several occasions during college I ran into kids that weren’t allowed to play video games as kids. The first time they got their hands on a game, it was all over. They were hooked and it was a problem. They’d skip classes, meals… and just play. If someone tried to intervene, they would throw a tantrum. It was the weirdest thing, but I saw it enough that it seemed like a pattern. Others of the same age who had games as a kid seemed more able to put it down and not get so emotionally reactive if something came between them and the game.
- reactordev 7mo agoSocial media is a cancer and more people need to realize this. No amount of platforming will fix this. It’s designed to extract behavioral traits about you. It’s designed to spy on your shopping and browsing habits. It’s designed to build a model of you. Everyone fell right in.
- visarga 7mo ago> No amount of platforming will fix this. The problem with social media is precisely the platform, it ranks what keeps people addicted, seeing more ads. Creators conform to the Algorithm and produce slop to capture some of that scarce attention. Nobody cares about users. Same shit happens on Google Search, YouTube, Amazon Search, Google Store, App Store... all platforms produce shitty feeds and search results. And before them we had TV and newspapers as slop making platforms.
- reactordev 7mo agoAhh yes, the “It’s always been this way” argument. I was wondering if it was going to show its ugly head. The difference now is ANYONE can become a TV station. A newspaper. A radio talk show. While I’m all for allowing anyone to do anything, I’m also a fan of curation and quality over quantity. Social media has no value. Because it values nothing.
- thin_carapace 7mo agoi dont see whats cancerous about social media conceptually. sharing photos online with a local network of contacts, setting up digital event flyers, instant messaging, etc ... yes these tools were used for subjectively nefarious purposes like cyberbullying, but on the whole they probably added more benefit than was subtracted from the community. social media that has been gamified into an infinite scroll loop with the express intent to destroy attention spans and rebuild them around an advertising/behavioural structure of mark zuckerberg's ("they trust me ... dumb fucks") choosing? now yes that is cancer. but thats not really social media. theres nothing social about it. i like the way someone put it here a few weeks back. we used to call these things social networks. then they became social media. so in that sense i do agree with you on a literal basis, although im not sure that was your intended point.
- WastedCucumber 7mo agoThe article in question: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/12/do-your-parents-have-screen-time-problem/685424/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/12/do-your-paren...
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- SoftTalker 7mo agoBefore smartphones they sat at home and watched game shows and TV evangelists, and listened to Rush on the radio. Which is worse?
- Nux 7mo agoSmartphones.
- paulryanrogers 7mo agoRush on the radio was poison for my impressionable brain. Thankfully the Internet came along and exposed me to outside perspectives.
- al_borland 7mo agoRadio shows end at some point.
- pcblues 7mo ago"But is this shift actually worth worrying about? Or are younger people just projecting their own anxieties about screen time onto their parents and grandparents?" False dichotomies can either be the worst thing that happened to humankind or a pathway to a new way of understanding each other.
- pndy 7mo agoOver 3 years ago I was in the hospital - they put me on shared room with other men of various ages. The oldest ones liked to talk for hours, doing all sorts "memberberries", elaborated expertises on current state of European, world affairs. Because what the hell else you can do when you have vertigo or tampons in your nose and you need to lie down. Anyway, the oldest over 80-something man was given some older Samsung phone by his great-grandson with instruction to launch tiktok whenever he feels bored. And bloody hell, that thing looped so much content with every launch but this man still tried hard to find something remotely interesting. I wouldn't say he was glued but that's a random guy who liked to attend his orchard and bees, going fishing etc. - he had something to do in the real world. I'm witnessing more elderly people around me actually struggling using touch-capable devices - it's like they're smacking fingers in frustration that there's no tactile sensation. They were told that there are buttons to press/tap but there's no feedback they'd expect. For them smartphone screen is no different than tv.
- tossandthrow 7mo agoIt is well known that smartphones can be difficult to use with dry skin - like most elderly have
- wao0uuno 7mo agoTouchscreens work worse for older people. Their skin is not as conductive and because of that they often seem to struggle with swiping and gestures.
- HackerThemAll 7mo agoOld people are wonderful relays from paid trolls and propaganda to their peers, unwittingly spreading and amplifying lies and political agenda in social media. They're often retired, having entire days at their disposal, wasting them on forwarding sh*t back and forth.
- hsuduebc2 7mo agoI must admit. My parents we're right the whole time. Staring at the screen for a whole day is truly unhealthy and they should go to play outside instead. This whole thing is beyond ironic.
- CompoundEyes 7mo agoI see it a different way. Parents reach a period in life where their kids strike out on their own and want little to do with them beyond a safety net. That’s normal and natural and the parents move onto a new phase too. In fact they might just not be that into you anymore. It’s ok if visits upset their routine and holidays are somewhat irritating. Same for being not overly enthusiastic about taking on care giving roles for grandkids. They’re still individuals and it’s not like old age causes someone to lose their inner world. They’ve seen a lot and not as much is novel likely. They’re facing loss, mortality and decline. If they feel compelled to scroll let em scroll. I’m so glad assistive technologies and a11y will be there when I’m decrepit so I can have something more stimulating than TV. Maybe ask grandma to play some Lethal Enforcers the next time you visit you’d be surprised — mine did.
- wisty 7mo agoPhones are like alchohol or fentynal. I might dabble a bit but if I see a loved one constantly zonked out on the couch I worry.
- tossandthrow 7mo agoI think this misses the point. Excessive scrolling is like excessive eating, smoking, or snorting coke. It is not healthy and not indicative of a full filling life.
- rafaelmn 7mo ago> That’s normal and natural and the parents move onto a new phase too. Is it really ? I would say the "natural" way of things is older generation gets supported by children and they help take care of grandchildren while their children are working. The whole late retirement/both parents working situation we have these days is reliably leading to a population collapse.
- antonymoose 7mo agoReally couldn’t have put it better. When I was a child my grandmother retired and relocated 800 miles to help with my mother with childcare. Why? Because it’s why you do. It’s what all of her family did as far back as anyone could care to remember. This world where your boomer parents retire to a beach house to drink margaritas, smoke designer weed, and play pickleball and ignore their offspring is the real aberration here.
- d41dev 7mo agoThis is something ive started to notice, the older generation becoming victims to doomscrolling, my dad being one of them. What makes it worst is that unlike kids who group in the social media world, and therefore have some ability of discerning between whats real and fake, the older gen are so gullible when it comes to fake news, propaganda, and ai generated content. Not only that but they then go on to spread this false news among there whatsapp friends
- crims0n 7mo agoOlder generations have an implicit trust for what is on screen because they grew up in an era where getting something on screen was not easy, and thus had an implied credibility. Take advertising as an example. Before Google Ads and the so-called democratization of advertising, it was expensive, and you didn't get an ad on a TV program or a national publication without some level of quality and/or trust behind your product. Similarly, content was not easy to produce and certainly not cheap to get in front of eyeballs in the limited medium that was television. People were selective in what they watched so in order to be watched it needed to meet a minimum threshold for quality. These days however, the barrier to entry for advertising and content are so low that any implicit trust should be ridiculous. Unfortunately for our parents and grandparents however, that is what they know - and old habits die hard.
- Ritewut 7mo agoI've been saying this for a while. For all the talk about kids, seniors are the ones addicted to phones. Doomscrolling on Tiktok, Facebook, even locked into mobile games. Its very depressing.
- epolanski 7mo ago+1, I see so many 50 to 70 year old folks using the phone way more than Gen Zs.
- urbandw311er 7mo agoYes, this! We spent so long (and rightfully) worrying about what it was doing to our kids, we forgot that there was a whole other generation equally unprepared for this.
- al_borland 7mo agoI also see it as an issue because kids model what they see. A parent telling their kids not to be on a phone kind of falls flat when every adult in their life is glued to their phones. When I go to family gatherings I make it a point to keep my phone in my pocket and not scroll. I don’t want the kids to see that as an example of how to act when getting together with family. Meanwhile, my mom (their grandmother), is glued to Facebook the whole time. Beyond the bad example, it makes her frustrating to interact with. She’ll mention a news story that came up in her feed. Occasionally it’s one I’m familiar with and I engage, thinking we’re about to have a conversation about this topic… but no. As I’m replying, she mentions the next thing in her feed, she’s already moved on. Ironically, my dad is probably the most connected person in the family, yet doesn’t do any of that stuff when getting together with family. There are all sorts of loud notifications going off, because he never has anything on silent, but he glances at his watch and carries on with the conversation. But to a point in the video, he maintains a lot of in-person connections and has a really rich social life in his 70s, which I think is rare. So he isn’t looking to fill holes in his life with doomscrolling.
- lencastre 7mo agoSunday, passable weather but still sunny, wonderful river view, restaurant at 50% capacity, outside tables full. In comes grandma and grandpa with granddaughter on a stroller. They sit, he starts smoking, gives a tablet to the granddaughter who goes through the entire meal with that in front, and grandma spends every pause scrolling whatever on her phone. Grandpa switches smoking and feeding himself through the whole time they were there. Not a word spoken at that table. Unreal.
- anal_reactor 7mo agoI just don't like talking to my family so phone addiction becoming more and more acceptable is really helpful here because if I'm just playing on my Steam Deck that counts as family time.
- eudamoniac 7mo agoI saw a family of five at a nice restaurant with the ~11yo daughter wearing headphones and playing a Switch. The adults were talking normally. It was very weird. When I was that age I was expected to at least listen, and contributing to the conversation was encouraged.
- oliwarner 7mo agoMy Grandad lives alone and has in the past 12 months really gotten into YouTube. He's long used it to learn the latest practices in plumbing, electrics, gardening and woodwork (he's a seriously capable 86yo, always has been) and honestly our subscriptions are very similar... But he's addicted to shorts. Doomscrolls endlessly in his downtime. Doesn't question whether obvious GenAI is real or not, and having looked over his shoulder a few times, most of it is horribly fake. Loves showing my kids what he finds. I'd rather he have this than boredom, but also it does mean he doesn't need to socialise outside the family. If I worry about anything, it's not knowing and addressing any extreme or views he's lapping up. I know first hand how insular interests can be once you express one on YouTube and it can get pretty shitty pretty quick. As others have said, this is exactly the same worries we have for our children except I feel we have some control. No devices or screen time and content limits. It's all very easy. It's harder to address that with your parents' parents.
- svilen_dobrev 7mo agoto curb the doomscrolling (laptop is as bad as phone) , i gave my father a big old Lego box - a Volkswagen beetle (which stayed for years, assembled by my kids.. which don't play that anymore. So i disassembled it). He had never tried those. Took him a week to build it, rearranged the room, studied the book like plant-specs-long-time-ago.. Then i gave another one, of similar size ~1500 pieces. i have one more ready-to-give "set". And then i plan to give him the rest 40kg well-sorted-but-in crates Lego, and the heap of model-books ~100+ , and let him do whatever he wants.. hoping he'll start improvising one day. Though.. may need a new empty room :/
- ishtanbul 7mo agoI see a lot of elderly people watching AI content on youtube shorts, one after another. The monotonic voice is a dead giveaway. Their feeds have optimized around it because they cannot tell the difference. Its sad.
- al_borland 7mo agoMy mom was telling me about how Eminem did a song with some Christian singer she likes. That didn’t pass the smell test for me, I’m sure I would’ve heard about that, but didn’t contest it in the moment. A couple days later she sent me the video. It was obviously AI, but even said in the video description (if expanded) that it was AI. I keep thinking if I tell her enough stuff is AI she’ll start to get more skeptical about this stuff or be turned off the platform feeding her all of it, but it doesn’t seem like it.
- SoftTalker 7mo agoThere's an awful lot of ageism inadvertently on display in these comments.
- cal_dent 7mo agoWider society spends an awful long time talking about the effects of social media on young people. I personally think that is somewhat blinkered because its an everybody issue. What do old people and kids have in common, lots and lots of free time. That's it. Same with unemployed, under employed people, people with no real interest or hobbies. If there's a hole you need to fit and you do nothing with it, social media is the easy way out, and given that it does have addictive tendencies, we end up where we are.
- soopypoos 7mo agoit keeps them off the road
- bufio 7mo agoScroll all day, and that's just normal. Shoot heroin all day, and everyone loses their minds.
- CarrieKalman 7mo ago[dead]