7 ms·

How is any app/website that 1) appeals to kids, 2) sells attention, 3) does A/B testing and/or has a self-learning distribution algorithm NOT guilty of this?

embedding-shape 7mo ago
I guess ultimately it depends on if the app/website authors do so "negligently" or not. > Jurors were charged with determining whether the companies acted negligently in designing their products and failed to warn her of the dangers. So if you do so while providing warnings and controls for people, that might make it OK in the eyes of the law?
sampullman 7mo ago
I think there's a little more nuance than that, but it seems roughly correct. Wouldn't it be better if apps/websites targeting kids didn't use A/B testing to be more addictive?
- steve-atx-7600 7mo ago
  For context, facebook is so dystopian when I login once every few years that I’m not sure I’ll ever use it again. And, I hate wading through the YouTube cesspool to find some educational content I like. But, I don’t think it makes sense to ban a/b testing or optimization in general. Some company could use it, for example, to figure out how to teach math to kids in a way that’s as engaging as possible. This would be “more addictive” technically.
  - sampullman 7mo ago
    That's a good point, I'm not 100% sure it's worth throwing away the potentially beneficial uses. There might not be a solution that's both feasible to implement and avoids banning useful things. In the end I usually come back to it being the parent's responsibility to monitor usage, limit screen time, etc., but it hasn't been working so well in practice.
- ramon156 7mo ago
  They'd find another method. Why are we allowing this in the first place? I don't have an answer to fix this whole mess, but it starts with our attitude towards addiction. We've built a system that rewards addiction in all sorts of places. Granted, every addiction is different, and I'm of the opinion that it's not (drug = bad), it's how you use it and react to it. We can control the latter, but we choose to ignore it because we're too busy with anything else. This is a tale as old as time...
  - aaomidi 7mo ago
    In the span of how long it takes for law to catch up to what’s going on, YouTube and Facebook has been around for a tiny amount of time.
    - bluefirebrand 7mo ago
      They have been around long enough to have done unknowable damage to entire generations of humans
      - aaomidi 7mo ago
        As usual unfortunately laws are reactive.
  - ToucanLoucan 7mo ago
    > Why are we allowing this in the first place? Exactly what I keep coming back to. For me, it feels like you could cut this problem down substantially by eliminating section 230 protection on any algorithmically elevated content. Everywhere. Full stop. If you write or have an algorithm created that pushes content to users, in ANY fashion, that is endorsement. You want that content to be seen, for whatever odd reason, and if it's harmful to your users, you should be held responsible for it. It's one thing if some random asshole messages me on Telegram trying to scam me; there's little Telegram can do (though a fucking "do not permit messages from people not in my contacts" setting would be nice) but there is nothing at all that "makes" Facebook shovel AI bullshit at people, apart from it juices engagement, either by genuine engagement or ironic/ragebaiting. And AI bullshit is just annoying, I've seen "Facebook help" groups that are clearly just trawling to get people's account info, I've seen scam pages and products, all kinds of shit, and either it pisses people off so Facebook passes it around, or they give Facebook money and Facebook shoves it into the feeds of everyone they can. It's fucking disgusting and there's no reason to permit it.
- schmidtleonard 7mo ago
  > more nuance Not enough to diffuse liability. 15 years ago when recommender algorithms were the new hotness, I saw every single group of students introduced to the idea immediately grasp the implication that the endgame would involve pandering to base instincts. If someone didn't understand this, it's because > It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair
- KaiserPro 7mo ago
  I think addiction is a redherring. Pokemon is addictive, computer games are addictive. Its whether they are knowingly causing harm, and or avoiding attempts to stop that harm.
  - Zigurd 7mo ago
    Addictive patterns in games and other online activity is a bit less innocent than you are portraying it: knowingly causing harm is too low a standard. A lot of the profitability of online games, prediction markets, etc. comes from the whales. The whales are probably addicted. If your business is a whale hunt you are possibly causing harm at least to the extent that addiction is dangerous.
guzfip 7mo ago
It probably helps when you suppress research that shows you’re harming children and allow human traffickers to fester on your platform with 17 warnings or whatever.
- which 7mo ago
  The argument that research was suppressed and this is somehow damning is absurd on its face. The most obvious reason being that they obviously didn't do a very good job of suppressing it given that we hear this claim every day. The second being that they could have just not done this research at all and then there would have been nothing to "suppress" (this terminology is also very odd... if 3M analyzes different sticky notes and concludes that their competitors sticky notes are better than theirs but does not release the results, is that suppression?). The third is that studies with the same results have come out probably every year since 2010 and have been routinely cited in the mainstream press. Lastly, it ignores that many platforms have actually responded to research about potential harms of social media by implementing safeguards on teen accounts. Look at the plaintiff in this case: it's a mentally unstable person who blames her life problems on social media. Never mind the fact that she had been diagnosed with mental illnesses as an early teen, or that an overwhelming majority of people who use social media don't develop eating disorders or other mental illnesses as a result of it (and in fact the incidence of say bulimia peaked 30 years ago in spite of almost universal social media adoption among young people). This is not at all like smoking where 15% of smokers will get lung cancer. And due to some absurd legal reasoning the plaintiff was allowed to pseudonymously extort $3 million out of tech companies. Worst of all I see people on a technology forum applauding this out of some sort of resentment towards large companies!
  - jf22 7mo ago
    The "overwhelming majority" standard for harm seems odd when you use 15% of smokers getting harmed as an example. 15% is not an overwhelming majority.
    - which 7mo ago
      Is there a widely used phrase which represents the 95-97% range? One did not come to my head.
steve-atx-7600 7mo ago
How’s this different than tv that a kid might see that has ads and programming targeting kids? I watched 80s horror movies when I was in elementary school and had nightmares for years. Should I sue now? How about parents be held responsible for how they care for their kids or not? Maybe a culture that judged parents more strongly for how they let their kids spend their time would be an improvement.
- jeffbee 7mo ago
  The difference is largely in the way that the legal caste perceives themselves to be aligned with media but opposed to tech.
- everdrive 7mo ago
  Being able to find some basis for comparison between two things does not render them equivalent, and this is an extremely frequent fallacy I see with regard to technology discussion on HN.
  - steve-atx-7600 7mo ago
    I understand what you’re saying, I personally don’t like or use social media, but I don’t agree that these companies are at fault after reading this article and others. I’d rather be wrong and learn something than think I’m right, so I welcome further criticism.
    - everdrive 7mo ago
      I agree with you that parents need to ultimately be responsible for keeping their kids off social media. I think there are a few problems here: - Social media is still somewhat new, and the broader public is only now discovering that it's a clear net negative both personally and for society. Because this is such a new realization, I think a LOT of people have not really figured out how this problem should be dealt with. (both personally, via social norms, but also with regard to laws and regulations. - No matter how awesome of a parent you are, 100% of your kids friends will have social media and they will introduce it to you kid. That may do less harm than if they have it themselves, but some harm will still be done. - There are network effects to consider. It's true that it's your personal fault if you use cocaine -- however we also understand that cocaine is so addictive that it really cannot be used safely. Social media is metaphorically the same. It's a personal failing if you're a social media addict, however broadly almost everyone is susceptible to it. In my mind, that is an argument for regulation. Now that said, I have zero faith that our government can actually build sensible regulation here.
everdrive 7mo ago
Correct, selling attention inevitably leads to harm.
- wffurr 7mo ago
  As a parent, the only solution is sticking to ad-free subscription services. PBS is a godsend here, but there's other good options out there too. Tragic that the public broadcasting funding was cut when there's clear harms in the free* commercial options. *Except for your time and mental health of course
  - everdrive 7mo ago
    Agreed. Libraries have books and DVDs, and you have things like the classical stations. You also have playgrounds and walks in the park, etc. (I'm also a parent of two young children. Always doing wholesome stuff with your kids is certainly not easy or trivial, but there is a cascading effect here. If your child does not expect to be able to just watch TV all the time it's easier to keep them interested in other things. Once that expectation is burned in you'll be fighting it for a while. And once that expectation is burned in, a small child will _never_ say "I've had enough youtube, I don't need any more." So I really don't want to be self-righteous about always doing wholesome stuff with your kids (we definitely do not succeed 100% of the time) -- but rather point out that letting them use addictive media has negative, cascading consequences that actually do make it harder for you as a parent. It's analogous to drinking to relax. You get relief now, and pay for it later. Not actually a good tradeoff much of the time.
    - nxor2 7mo ago
      The unfortunate reality is, the internet has more up to date info than books, dvd's, pbs, and even 'the classical channel.' I play the piano and have found immense amounts of rare but nice music online, and only online. I completely agree that the media is bad, just pointing out that it's necessary to a degree if learning is your aim.
  - criddell 7mo ago
SirFatty 7mo ago
algorithm would be the key word I think.
parpfish 7mo ago
A/B testing is one way to make things “addictive” but you can also make addictive products without it. A really good designer could make a highly engaging app or an editor can write clickbait headlines all with without testing.
- esafak 7mo ago
  These products maximize revenue through engagement with advertisements. The outcome is built into their business model.
DavidMcLaughlin 7mo ago
A/B testing is very, very different to handing over control of your content to a reward function that optimizes for time spent over any other criteria. We had 10 years+ plus of having products like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, hell even LinkedIn with a basic content model of "you build your own graph of people who you pull content from" and their job was to show it to you and puts ads in there to fund the whole enterprise. If I decided to follow harmful content? That was a pact between me and the content creator, and YouTube was nothing more than a pipe the content flowed through. They were able to build multi-billion dollar businesses off of this. That's really important, this was enormously profitable. But then the problem happened that people's graphs weren't interesting enough, and sometimes they'd go on the thing and there were no new posts from people they followed, and this was leaving money on the table. So they took care of that problem by handing over control of the feed to the reward function. More accurately, especially for Meta products: they completely took control away from you. You didn't even have the option to retain the old, chronological social graph feed anymore. And it was ludicrously profitable. So now the laws of capitalism dictate that everyone else has to follow suit. I now have extensions on my browser for Instagram and YouTube to disable content from anything I don't follow - because I still find these apps useful for that one original purpose they had when they blew up and became mainstream. Why are these browser extensions? Why can't I choose to not see this stuff in their apps? That's the major regulation hole that led to this lawsuit, imo. It's the same thing you see with people blaming smartphones for brainrot. We've had 15 to 20 years of smartphones with more or less the same capabilities as they have today and for the vast majority of that time my phone didn't make books less interesting or make me struggle to do chores or manage my time. For a full decade or more I saw my phone as a net positive in my life, was proud to work for Twitter and generally saw technology like the Louis CK bit about the miracle of using a smartphone connected to WiFI on an airplane. But in the last five years or so, things have noticeably and increasingly gone to shit. Brainrot is a thing. All my real life friends who are the opposite of terminally online or technical are talking about it. I don't use TikTok but it seems like that is absolutely annihilating attention spans. The topic of conversation over drinks is how we've collectively self-diagnosed with ADHD and struggle with all kinds of executive function.. but also are old enough to remember a time when none of this existed. Complete normies are reading Dopamine Nation and listening to Andrew Huberman trying to free themselves. I don't know what the exact solution is, but there's at least a simpler time we can point to when we all had smartphones and we were all connected via platforms and we all posted and consumed stupid pictures of each other and it wasn't.... _this_.
KaiserPro 7mo ago
I think there is a fourth portion that is probably more important: Actively ignoring harm caused by your product. TV/radio has sold attention, but there were pretty strict rules on what you can/can't broadcast, and to whom. (ignoring cable for the moment) Its the same for services, things that knowingly encourage damaging behaviours are liable for prosecution.
- Longlius 7mo ago
  Except cable is the more apt comparison here - broadcast rules exist because airwaves are an extremely finite resource and so we can argue that the government has a vested interest in what kind of speech can happen on them. No such scarcity exists with web services.
SecretDreams 7mo ago
Because most are just no where near as good and effective at ruining a kid's mind as meta. If others were as good as meta at destroying whole generations of cognitive development, they'd probably also be liable.
guywithahat 7mo ago
It sounds like an adult was awarded $6 million because she watched a lot of youtube/instagram as a kid. Literally any social media site would be guilty of this; I hate to say it but we need better corporate protections if cases like this are allowed to enter court. At least legal experts are critical of the decision: '“I don’t think it should have ever gotten to a jury trial,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law'
ChimpWithHat 7mo ago
Probably not much other than scale. Facebook is large enough that they can hire behavioral researchers to make this stuff more addicting while looking the other way and raking in the money. I think Roblox is just as bad (maybe worse) regarding addiction for kids. I’ve played hundreds of hours with my sister’s kids and the way all these low quality slop games handle grinding, progression, and pay gating is honestly disgusting. But then again, I manage to get myself addicted to a video game usually once a winter for a few weeks, and don’t play games for the rest of the year. There’s really no solution to this, but I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is hopelessly addicted to shallow digital experiences.
SquibblesRedux 7mo ago
I would argue that no app/website should be selling itself to kids. No corporation should be trying to tether its ARR to children's attention.
- xahrepap 7mo ago
  When my kids were young, we canceled our Disney Channel / etc cable subscription and showed them more PBS and similar. It was really annoying turning on a show for 30 minutes then for the next week hearing about that new toy they just have to get. It was exhausting.

embedding-shape 7mo ago

I guess ultimately it depends on if the app/website authors do so "negligently" or not. > Jurors were charged with determining whether the companies acted negligently in designing their products and failed to warn her of the dangers. So if you do so while providing warnings and controls for people, that might make it OK in the eyes of the law?

sampullman 7mo ago

I think there's a little more nuance than that, but it seems roughly correct. Wouldn't it be better if apps/websites targeting kids didn't use A/B testing to be more addictive?

steve-atx-7600 7mo ago
For context, facebook is so dystopian when I login once every few years that I’m not sure I’ll ever use it again. And, I hate wading through the YouTube cesspool to find some educational content I like. But, I don’t think it makes sense to ban a/b testing or optimization in general. Some company could use it, for example, to figure out how to teach math to kids in a way that’s as engaging as possible. This would be “more addictive” technically.
- sampullman 7mo ago
  That's a good point, I'm not 100% sure it's worth throwing away the potentially beneficial uses. There might not be a solution that's both feasible to implement and avoids banning useful things. In the end I usually come back to it being the parent's responsibility to monitor usage, limit screen time, etc., but it hasn't been working so well in practice.
ramon156 7mo ago
They'd find another method. Why are we allowing this in the first place? I don't have an answer to fix this whole mess, but it starts with our attitude towards addiction. We've built a system that rewards addiction in all sorts of places. Granted, every addiction is different, and I'm of the opinion that it's not (drug = bad), it's how you use it and react to it. We can control the latter, but we choose to ignore it because we're too busy with anything else. This is a tale as old as time...
- aaomidi 7mo ago
  In the span of how long it takes for law to catch up to what’s going on, YouTube and Facebook has been around for a tiny amount of time.
  - bluefirebrand 7mo ago
    They have been around long enough to have done unknowable damage to entire generations of humans
    - aaomidi 7mo ago
      As usual unfortunately laws are reactive.
- ToucanLoucan 7mo ago
  > Why are we allowing this in the first place? Exactly what I keep coming back to. For me, it feels like you could cut this problem down substantially by eliminating section 230 protection on any algorithmically elevated content. Everywhere. Full stop. If you write or have an algorithm created that pushes content to users, in ANY fashion, that is endorsement. You want that content to be seen, for whatever odd reason, and if it's harmful to your users, you should be held responsible for it. It's one thing if some random asshole messages me on Telegram trying to scam me; there's little Telegram can do (though a fucking "do not permit messages from people not in my contacts" setting would be nice) but there is nothing at all that "makes" Facebook shovel AI bullshit at people, apart from it juices engagement, either by genuine engagement or ironic/ragebaiting. And AI bullshit is just annoying, I've seen "Facebook help" groups that are clearly just trawling to get people's account info, I've seen scam pages and products, all kinds of shit, and either it pisses people off so Facebook passes it around, or they give Facebook money and Facebook shoves it into the feeds of everyone they can. It's fucking disgusting and there's no reason to permit it.
schmidtleonard 7mo ago
> more nuance Not enough to diffuse liability. 15 years ago when recommender algorithms were the new hotness, I saw every single group of students introduced to the idea immediately grasp the implication that the endgame would involve pandering to base instincts. If someone didn't understand this, it's because > It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair
KaiserPro 7mo ago
I think addiction is a redherring. Pokemon is addictive, computer games are addictive. Its whether they are knowingly causing harm, and or avoiding attempts to stop that harm.
- Zigurd 7mo ago
  Addictive patterns in games and other online activity is a bit less innocent than you are portraying it: knowingly causing harm is too low a standard. A lot of the profitability of online games, prediction markets, etc. comes from the whales. The whales are probably addicted. If your business is a whale hunt you are possibly causing harm at least to the extent that addiction is dangerous.

guzfip 7mo ago

It probably helps when you suppress research that shows you’re harming children and allow human traffickers to fester on your platform with 17 warnings or whatever.

which 7mo ago
The argument that research was suppressed and this is somehow damning is absurd on its face. The most obvious reason being that they obviously didn't do a very good job of suppressing it given that we hear this claim every day. The second being that they could have just not done this research at all and then there would have been nothing to "suppress" (this terminology is also very odd... if 3M analyzes different sticky notes and concludes that their competitors sticky notes are better than theirs but does not release the results, is that suppression?). The third is that studies with the same results have come out probably every year since 2010 and have been routinely cited in the mainstream press. Lastly, it ignores that many platforms have actually responded to research about potential harms of social media by implementing safeguards on teen accounts. Look at the plaintiff in this case: it's a mentally unstable person who blames her life problems on social media. Never mind the fact that she had been diagnosed with mental illnesses as an early teen, or that an overwhelming majority of people who use social media don't develop eating disorders or other mental illnesses as a result of it (and in fact the incidence of say bulimia peaked 30 years ago in spite of almost universal social media adoption among young people). This is not at all like smoking where 15% of smokers will get lung cancer. And due to some absurd legal reasoning the plaintiff was allowed to pseudonymously extort $3 million out of tech companies. Worst of all I see people on a technology forum applauding this out of some sort of resentment towards large companies!
- jf22 7mo ago
  The "overwhelming majority" standard for harm seems odd when you use 15% of smokers getting harmed as an example. 15% is not an overwhelming majority.
  - which 7mo ago
    Is there a widely used phrase which represents the 95-97% range? One did not come to my head.

steve-atx-7600 7mo ago

How’s this different than tv that a kid might see that has ads and programming targeting kids? I watched 80s horror movies when I was in elementary school and had nightmares for years. Should I sue now? How about parents be held responsible for how they care for their kids or not? Maybe a culture that judged parents more strongly for how they let their kids spend their time would be an improvement.

jeffbee 7mo ago
The difference is largely in the way that the legal caste perceives themselves to be aligned with media but opposed to tech.
everdrive 7mo ago
Being able to find some basis for comparison between two things does not render them equivalent, and this is an extremely frequent fallacy I see with regard to technology discussion on HN.
- steve-atx-7600 7mo ago
  I understand what you’re saying, I personally don’t like or use social media, but I don’t agree that these companies are at fault after reading this article and others. I’d rather be wrong and learn something than think I’m right, so I welcome further criticism.
  - everdrive 7mo ago
    I agree with you that parents need to ultimately be responsible for keeping their kids off social media. I think there are a few problems here: - Social media is still somewhat new, and the broader public is only now discovering that it's a clear net negative both personally and for society. Because this is such a new realization, I think a LOT of people have not really figured out how this problem should be dealt with. (both personally, via social norms, but also with regard to laws and regulations. - No matter how awesome of a parent you are, 100% of your kids friends will have social media and they will introduce it to you kid. That may do less harm than if they have it themselves, but some harm will still be done. - There are network effects to consider. It's true that it's your personal fault if you use cocaine -- however we also understand that cocaine is so addictive that it really cannot be used safely. Social media is metaphorically the same. It's a personal failing if you're a social media addict, however broadly almost everyone is susceptible to it. In my mind, that is an argument for regulation. Now that said, I have zero faith that our government can actually build sensible regulation here.

everdrive 7mo ago

Correct, selling attention inevitably leads to harm.

wffurr 7mo ago
As a parent, the only solution is sticking to ad-free subscription services. PBS is a godsend here, but there's other good options out there too. Tragic that the public broadcasting funding was cut when there's clear harms in the free* commercial options. *Except for your time and mental health of course
- everdrive 7mo ago
  Agreed. Libraries have books and DVDs, and you have things like the classical stations. You also have playgrounds and walks in the park, etc. (I'm also a parent of two young children. Always doing wholesome stuff with your kids is certainly not easy or trivial, but there is a cascading effect here. If your child does not expect to be able to just watch TV all the time it's easier to keep them interested in other things. Once that expectation is burned in you'll be fighting it for a while. And once that expectation is burned in, a small child will _never_ say "I've had enough youtube, I don't need any more." So I really don't want to be self-righteous about always doing wholesome stuff with your kids (we definitely do not succeed 100% of the time) -- but rather point out that letting them use addictive media has negative, cascading consequences that actually do make it harder for you as a parent. It's analogous to drinking to relax. You get relief now, and pay for it later. Not actually a good tradeoff much of the time.
  - nxor2 7mo ago
    The unfortunate reality is, the internet has more up to date info than books, dvd's, pbs, and even 'the classical channel.' I play the piano and have found immense amounts of rare but nice music online, and only online. I completely agree that the media is bad, just pointing out that it's necessary to a degree if learning is your aim.
- criddell 7mo ago

SirFatty 7mo ago

algorithm would be the key word I think.

parpfish 7mo ago

A/B testing is one way to make things “addictive” but you can also make addictive products without it. A really good designer could make a highly engaging app or an editor can write clickbait headlines all with without testing.

esafak 7mo ago
These products maximize revenue through engagement with advertisements. The outcome is built into their business model.

DavidMcLaughlin 7mo ago

A/B testing is very, very different to handing over control of your content to a reward function that optimizes for time spent over any other criteria. We had 10 years+ plus of having products like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, hell even LinkedIn with a basic content model of "you build your own graph of people who you pull content from" and their job was to show it to you and puts ads in there to fund the whole enterprise. If I decided to follow harmful content? That was a pact between me and the content creator, and YouTube was nothing more than a pipe the content flowed through. They were able to build multi-billion dollar businesses off of this. That's really important, this was enormously profitable. But then the problem happened that people's graphs weren't interesting enough, and sometimes they'd go on the thing and there were no new posts from people they followed, and this was leaving money on the table. So they took care of that problem by handing over control of the feed to the reward function. More accurately, especially for Meta products: they completely took control away from you. You didn't even have the option to retain the old, chronological social graph feed anymore. And it was ludicrously profitable. So now the laws of capitalism dictate that everyone else has to follow suit. I now have extensions on my browser for Instagram and YouTube to disable content from anything I don't follow - because I still find these apps useful for that one original purpose they had when they blew up and became mainstream. Why are these browser extensions? Why can't I choose to not see this stuff in their apps? That's the major regulation hole that led to this lawsuit, imo. It's the same thing you see with people blaming smartphones for brainrot. We've had 15 to 20 years of smartphones with more or less the same capabilities as they have today and for the vast majority of that time my phone didn't make books less interesting or make me struggle to do chores or manage my time. For a full decade or more I saw my phone as a net positive in my life, was proud to work for Twitter and generally saw technology like the Louis CK bit about the miracle of using a smartphone connected to WiFI on an airplane. But in the last five years or so, things have noticeably and increasingly gone to shit. Brainrot is a thing. All my real life friends who are the opposite of terminally online or technical are talking about it. I don't use TikTok but it seems like that is absolutely annihilating attention spans. The topic of conversation over drinks is how we've collectively self-diagnosed with ADHD and struggle with all kinds of executive function.. but also are old enough to remember a time when none of this existed. Complete normies are reading Dopamine Nation and listening to Andrew Huberman trying to free themselves. I don't know what the exact solution is, but there's at least a simpler time we can point to when we all had smartphones and we were all connected via platforms and we all posted and consumed stupid pictures of each other and it wasn't.... _this_.

KaiserPro 7mo ago

I think there is a fourth portion that is probably more important: Actively ignoring harm caused by your product. TV/radio has sold attention, but there were pretty strict rules on what you can/can't broadcast, and to whom. (ignoring cable for the moment) Its the same for services, things that knowingly encourage damaging behaviours are liable for prosecution.

Longlius 7mo ago
Except cable is the more apt comparison here - broadcast rules exist because airwaves are an extremely finite resource and so we can argue that the government has a vested interest in what kind of speech can happen on them. No such scarcity exists with web services.

SecretDreams 7mo ago

Because most are just no where near as good and effective at ruining a kid's mind as meta. If others were as good as meta at destroying whole generations of cognitive development, they'd probably also be liable.

guywithahat 7mo ago

It sounds like an adult was awarded $6 million because she watched a lot of youtube/instagram as a kid. Literally any social media site would be guilty of this; I hate to say it but we need better corporate protections if cases like this are allowed to enter court. At least legal experts are critical of the decision: '“I don’t think it should have ever gotten to a jury trial,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law'

ChimpWithHat 7mo ago

Probably not much other than scale. Facebook is large enough that they can hire behavioral researchers to make this stuff more addicting while looking the other way and raking in the money. I think Roblox is just as bad (maybe worse) regarding addiction for kids. I’ve played hundreds of hours with my sister’s kids and the way all these low quality slop games handle grinding, progression, and pay gating is honestly disgusting. But then again, I manage to get myself addicted to a video game usually once a winter for a few weeks, and don’t play games for the rest of the year. There’s really no solution to this, but I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is hopelessly addicted to shallow digital experiences.

SquibblesRedux 7mo ago

I would argue that no app/website should be selling itself to kids. No corporation should be trying to tether its ARR to children's attention.

xahrepap 7mo ago
When my kids were young, we canceled our Disney Channel / etc cable subscription and showed them more PBS and similar. It was really annoying turning on a show for 30 minutes then for the next week hearing about that new toy they just have to get. It was exhausting.