I'm no saint when it comes to addiction and being on my phone for more than I should be, but I have a sister who is in her mid 20s right now, and for the last couple of years she has slowly isolated herself from life and her family, she spends most of her time in her room on the phone and does weird things like get cosmetic surgeries, ordering cosmetics, etc. It's bizarre.
She does this and all the while never leaves the house, other than to go to work. She doesn't share her actual thoughts and gets angry when asked about it. You might be reading this and thinking that there's more to it, but sadly there isn't. It's her life so I leave her alone, not my place to tell her what to do, and the emotional upheaval from her isn't worth it either.
But it's crazy that a person can get this lost in life and become completely devoid of purpose and meaning. It's one thing to have an issue and work through it slowly, but it's something else to isolate yourself and live your life through others - while those "others" prosper from your own ignorance.
I'm sure her past experiences are playing a role in this behavior, but the whole cosmetics things - I know for a fact there are a lot of influencers who peddle this crap, and if you lack self-awareness then I can see how easy it is to get stuck in this cycle. I just wish there was an easy way out of it.
That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you.
> It's bizarre.
Is it, though? Once you've felt said social scorn enough you no longer see words as a way to make friends, so turning to beauty is the natural progression. People like to be around beautiful people – or at least so it appears to those looking from the outside in, right? If that doesn't work, then you can easily fall into a cycle of thinking "maybe this next surgery is the one that will make me beautiful enough!"
> The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility
I think the actual biggest problem with "Redditization" is not hostility, but instead the fact that there is really no dialogue. There's no back and forth discussion, at least not with the same actual individual. You post a comment and (maybe but usually not) get a reply, then if you reply to that reply, the next reply in thread will be from someone else. Very very rarely do you go back and forth with one person. And regardless, you'll never ever interact with that person again (except maybe if you're on a tiny sub).
It's such a odd and distorted version of conversation. I'm not talking to any specific "you" -- I'm submitting thoughts to a "mass-you" and hoping with fingers crossed that the mass-you will reply or at least nod in approval with a single upvote.
You certainly can just throw things out there, but if you are obsessed with making every single person satisfied with your thoughts, you are going to have a bad time. The world is full of people who disagree with you, but you need to learn more than ever to recognize and filter out what you don't care about. I don't even view replies to posts any longer, 98% of the time because I am not seeking validation sharing my opinion. I still change my mind sometimes based on others thoughts and opinions, so you can't say I am fostering avoidance too much, just very selective, as my time is valuable.
I have a good rule. I NEVER reply to someone who comments on my comment w/ hostile intent. For example: I made an innocent comment on a YouTube video, and someone completely misread the comment and posted a hostile reply. I wanted to explain to him that he misread my comment but I just let it go. You never need to defend yourself. If you want to post a comment, post it. If someone misunderstands or mocks you, let them.
This is touching on something very important but I feel there's a lot more to it. There's a lot of mystery around this for me. Like why is social media inspiring us to such hostile nit picking on behaviour and ideals?
It's infinitely sad that there's no place to just connect with people on the internet anymore. My post got 6 comments and a DM within the first minute, before the post got taken down. These people could have been new friends.
I've been through this cycle so many times I have long given up on trying to post on the internet. Logging on to find people and share thoughts only to be met with this massive wall of context and janitorial standards. I gave up like five years ago.
This is to say that the whole debate between "social media causes anxiety" and our landscape of social media causes anxiety makes this debate way too coarse. Getting on the internet between 2005-2012 felt happy, free, and was just a wellspring of community and connection. Post-2013 it's been a nightmarish hellscape on every platform.
People are broken. Perhaps they always were. Perhaps this latest, is the cost of prioritising work over family - it is now common to have both parents working, with child care outsourced to professionals, that may do everything right, but will not love the child. Love is underrated, intangible. I suspect there are very few whole individuals out there at all.
Once the child grows, why would it look to family to help? It has already been institutionalised - it believes that government agencies, psychiatrists etc will help - the 'brokenness' is normal. The grown child won't look to those that would normally step in (family) - they have their own issues. In all honesty, its hard to say whether looking to institutions for help that is a bad decision anyway - how much harm do families cause?
>The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility
Thankfully there are corners of cyberculture with a distinct anti-Reddit bent where hostility is almost a norm that you get desensitized to and you can see all manner of profound and stupid ideas and react with hostility in kind.
After spending time there, returning to Reddit feels like staring at pablum, and you start seeing gross inaccuracies get updooted, and the inconvenient truths get buried.
(you should imagine this was written by gigachad, and anyone who disagrees is a badly drawn wojak in some state of emotional distress)
> That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you.
I understand this fear when posting on reddit (or other social media) itself, but I am absolutely confused where this idea that this applies to reality comes from.
I'm more worried about the Linkednization. Where people share terrible views and nobody criticizes it because they don't want to be seen as someone that criticizes things.
> No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid
Obviously this is not the context you're talking about, but I find this issue with brainstorming type sessions these days as well these days. Not just work sessions either, as another example, I'm on the advisory board for a local club, and the first meeting was really barren for quite a while.
It's gotten to the point that I always make sure to voice my philosophy early on - "not all ideas are good, but many good ideas start out as bad ideas and become good through conversation" - and proceed to throw a few incredibly stupid ideas to the group to break the ice. It seems to help.
"These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you."
You just described HN perfectly. I can shrug it off because I remain anon here and don't care about my rating, but I see other people being traumatized by this dynamic in other social media platforms.
I'm not sure what switched but I remember being on Slashdot and having people go off on me or others, and it was just hilarious. These days it seems like people are genuinely being traumatized regularly by the engagements.
> These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you.
I would expect this to some extent when conversing with strangers IRL too. If it was a chat between friends, a rant here or there is OK because your friends know the real you and understand where you're coming from. Strangers won't be as charitable.
> You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility
I’ll add that people addicted to social media become insufferable to share novel (often silly) thoughts around because the focus becomes dropping a zinger versus meaningfully engaging with what was said.
Providing rationales for your beliefs is hard work, but it's worth it. I'm not saying you deserve to be bullied, but I have no trouble saying what I think online, and supporting my positions with evidence—admittedly, behind a pseudonym, but that is necessary when one targets violent men for critique, which is 90% of why I bother going online in the first place.
this definitely describes nearly 100% of interactions on the internet but i almost never encounter this in real life, i assume because the other person can't sit there googling and adjusting their argument any more than you can that there's no way to "win" anyway.
Edit: Now before commenting, I see there's an overarching theme of: sure, there is a bunch of unhealthy stuff about social media, but meanwhile there are some things you can do to make your interaction with it better.
> That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you.
I think that's an important point, that I think is partly due to culture of the spaces. For example, I almost never downvote anyone, and in particular not for them being wrong, unless it's something particularly harmful whose visibility would be damaging, or just a troll (quite rare usually). The downvote button seems important for those rare situations (maybe just a mod button would be enough?), but in general it should rarely be used.
Not only I've come to believe asking questions is important for beginners to learn, but also it's an important medium for everyone else (and in particular experts or more advanced learners) to exercise their knowledge by teaching stuff and learning to fill gaps in their knowledge.
I actually think reddit is pretty good in this regard, specially w.r.t. what we had before and other media like StackExchange. In SE, you're expected to search the site and often questions are met with arrogance. In oldschool forums, which I do like, there was (in almost every case I remember) an even greater air of elitism; although, on the other hand, it created a healthy eagerness to learn the norms and participate in a careful way. I tend to prefer the lower-stakes communication of HN-style boards though.
I think as with everything massification is a significant problem. I encourage everyone to participate in communities whose size feels 'just right'. Also, at least some of your interactions should be highly participative, and not just mindless consumption.
I think a final problem is that any activity of too narrow scope can be dangerous. If people are confined into extremely narrow interests and spend all their time on that, as opposed to learning everything about life, that can (and probably will in most cases) paint a distorted picture of reality and be very unhealthy. Broaden your curiosity :)
> These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you.
This is an immense impediment to writing for the academically-inclined, or merely one who still has some shred of epistemic integrity left, and a huge boon to the dogmatic mob of believers eager to strike down anyone who dares question their orthodoxy. For one, it takes time and substantial research to compose a thought that is both "true" and unique, buttressed by citations to other works or accepted facts; for the other, it is much easier to reply with a five-second thought in 280 characters with thought-terminating cliches branding the "other" as a deplorable undesirable whose ideas aren't worthy of an audience or a platform. That is, if you even get that far - these days it's more likely you will simply be downvoted into oblivion, your thoughts swiftly evicted into the memory hole, never to be seen again.
> Once you've felt said social scorn enough you no longer see words as a way to make friends, so turning to beauty is the natural progression.
Issues of "Redditization" and scorn aside, we are progressing into a post-literate society where the written word and other literary media are being eclipsed by audiovisual media such as YouTube or Instagram. While much of the western world is "literate," in that they understand how to read and write (basic) words and phrases, much of our life - especially online - takes place in a highly visual world of filtered photos and staged videos. It becomes increasingly difficult for one to represent themselves in a written, literary form, when the culture demands "pictures, or it didn't happen."
McLuhan in "Understanding Media" has written on how the preference of one sense over another (e.g. sight over sound) in differing societies has profound cultural impacts over the ways we think, act, and what we find permissible:
The printed form has quite different im-
plications in Moscow from what it has in Washington. So with the
telephone. The Russians' love of this instrument, so congenial to
their oral traditions, is owing to the rich nonvisual involvement it
affords. The Russian uses the telephone for the sort of effects we
associate with the eager conversation of the lapel-gripper whose
face is twelve inches away.
Both telephone and teleprinter as amplifications of the un-
conscious cultural bias of Moscow, on one hand, and of Washing-
ton, on the other, are invitations to monstrous misunderstandings.
The Russian bugs rooms and spies by ear, finding this quite natural.
He is outraged by our visual spying, however, finding this quite
unnatural.
My brother is essentially the male version of this, just swap the cosmetics for video game DLCs. He's early 20's, no job, no interest in work, no interest in getting out of the house, no interest on anything... talking to him is the most frustrating experience ever, nothing comes out of him, no emotion...
I talked so many times, tried to get an idea of what might drive him: travelling, learning, walking around in the mountain, making money, wasting money, drinking, smoking, drawing dicks on wall, anything! honestly, like "give me something to work with"...
He's been seeing a psychiatrist for a few years now... far as I can tell that is doing nothing...
He's a broken individual. I honestly do not know if there is a way back to reality for him (and so many others, these days)
This described my brother too. He killed himself four years ago, after about thirty years of just that kind of depression. And I was my little brother's keeper damn it, so it's my failure. Ever since I keep reliving it and wondering what I could have done. All I come up with are fantasy scenarios in which I somehow make us both wildly successful. But even that's a stretch given his outlook. I fantasize about some kind of extreme intervention, but that would probably have just alienated him from me along with everyone else.
Not that you shouldn't try. I hope you find a way.
Something I saw in my own family (I have a family member who is a recovering addict) and in literally every single episode of Intervention is that THE prerequisite to recovery is to stop enabling the addict. Many (most?) addictions are only possible because an enabler prevents the outside world from acting as a forcing function on the addict. So typically this would be a parent who provides food, shelter, money, etc. Once an addict has to provide those things for themselves, it starts a cycle that results in sobriety. Of course, this doesn't always work and the people who it doesn't work for are often the people you see living on the street. But this has been the process for every recovering addict I know and my addict-in-recovery family member says the same about every recovering addict they know (a lot).
It doesn't sound like your brother is exactly an addict (although maybe...), but this snippet sure sounds like he has an enabler in his life (emphasis mine):
> no job, no interest in work, no interest in getting out of the house
Was the psychiatrist his idea or the parents'? I assume the parents, but if it was his then that's something.
I heard something interesting on a podcast recently - Kara Swisher was interviewing her son who said that if you're Gen A, it's sort of hard not to be a nihilist. For me personally, I sort of look at how fast the world is heating up and do some basic math about life expectancy, and I'm sort of expecting to see some shit, but I can't imagine tacking on a decade or three to that.
Psychologically, what you're describing is anhedonia, but as someone with these tendencies myself, I sometimes wonder if I just lack whatever sorts of denial mechanisms most people have to get through the day.
I see it as my purpose as a parent to ensure my kids are able to take care of themselves since I will not always be here. To that end, a job is a requirement and school is a requirement. I had to push them to even get their driver's license, but they got one. My stance is, if you want to spend your free time lost in social media land, fine. Do what needs to be done first and then play. Interestingly, their social media usage in their limited free time seems to have declined in favor of interacting with friends and family.
Having wasted more than a decade doing pretty much nothing than playing pc...
a) The drive to change has to come from inside. I've seen quite a few people being sent to the online/gaming addiction group. Usually, they only come once.
b) Changing one self is hard generally. But here we got quite a bit of... idk, lets call it "damage". So many missing skills, confidence. So many bad, deeply ingrained habits. So many thoughts to avoid & distract from. And still no idea what will make me content.
c) I'm wondering quite often if not starting that journey would have been the better choice. If i could have found a way to stay happy. One motivator for me was the disdain for what i'd become, so no way back now. Now it'd be great to only disdain that past me ...
Can you be a human being and cut him off? Who is this sick person enabling this? Who is passing out the money? This is no different than buying heroin for someone. Say hey, "No money, get job, bye". Let them begin the human experience. The video games will go away fast. Show humanity, cut them off.
You just described one of his interests though. Video games and their DLC content.
Why is interest in video games not a valid interest, or somehow a worse interest than a few that you listed like wasting money, drinking, smoking, drawing dicks on wall?
Is there no chance of interest in video game modding or content creation?
Does he have any reason to believe that things will get better? If he already feels like giving up on life then telling him that he needs to work even harder will make him retreat and give up. If his life gets any worse he might kill himself. I know I would.
Not really in my culture but still necessary sometimes
I had to step in when my sister's post-natal drinking became too much. Everyone else turned a blind eye, but I couldn't stop thinking about my nephew and an emergency situation.
In a mini intervention, we snapped her out of it by saying you can't drive your baby to hospital in an emergency after 2-4 big glasses of wine (she was often on her own in the evenings); and if you did, child protective services would come down on you like hellfire. Plus a bit of "well prove us wrong that you don't need it to relax" etc.
I think it's a bit reductionist to say it's devoid of purpose and meaning. Have you asked her what she feels her purpose/meaning is? You can disagree with it (I would as well), but I wouldn't assume she doesn't find any purpose/meaning in it.
If she gets angry about it, then probably there is something deeper going on. Or, you're just asking the wrong way (if you come in assuming there's no meaning/purpose to her life, that could easily happen).
If there's something deeper going on, then social media just amplifies things. Specifically about cosmetics and the beauty industry - people have complained about the effects of supermodels on TV, movies, billboards, magazine ads etc. for more than 30 years, social media has just taken it to the next level.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but I do think it's important to add depth to the argument if we actually want to change the world for a better place.
When someone is obsessed or drugged to the point that you can't have a rational conversation and they're too angry or volatile to approach with any criticism, then it's not really your fault for coming at them the wrong way.
Sometimes caring about someone means showing them that what they think they want is garbage that's hurting them. That will probably hurt their feelings, and they might lash out at you for it, but the alternative is doing nothing or enabling them and watching them drown.
>I think it's a bit reductionist to say it's devoid of purpose and meaning
Probably he is old-fashioned and means the coventional old-style purpose and meaning, that old-timey thing that we'd call "actual purpose" nowadays.
Some backward people don't understand that "being isolated and doom scrolling all day" or "getting tons of destructive cosmetic surgeries" or "Amway" can also be a torally fine purpose in life.
I understand your frustration and -- perhaps -- a feeling of having no agency in the situation. But at the same time I find this sentence fascinating and scary:
> It's her life so I leave her alone, not my place to tell her what to do, and the emotional upheaval from her isn't worth it either.
Inverting the order of your explanations (to examine the weighting), we have:
estimated low return for investment/effort
avoidance of drama (the other's emotional upheaval)
relinquishment of participatory role in guiding the other
relinquishment of influence/interest in the other's life
If you were a parent talking about your child, people would certainly admonish you. Yet because she is a young adult and you are merely siblings, many more people might agree with your complete detachment.
Can a person who obviously needs guidance/intervention not be worth the time ? Even though the person is in one's family ?
The narcissocial media actively create an illusion that gratifies loneliness and isolation. Modern urban life had already become a reality of denaturing, competition, isolation, and indifference. The antipatterns run deep.
But then you add...
> But it's crazy that a person can get this lost in life and become completely devoid of purpose and meaning.
Your family member seems to be in need of help. It takes a family/village, as they say. We too often omit to remind ourselves that a person becomes a person through other people. [1]
I understand what you're saying, but that's not how life works. If a person has no anchor and they deliberately avoid establishing that anchor in their lives, then how do you expect them to stay stable when going gets tough? I have to respect her as a person first and foremost, and I cannot enforce my own thoughts/ideas because I think that is what's best for her.
She needs to find it for herself, and then establish that as her anchor. If it is cosmetics, then so be it. I have no gripe with that. What I do have a gripe with is reluctancy to be a functional human being and engaging with your family and friends.
As I said in another comment, I offered to help her to do stuff online on multiple occasions. But she can't even accept that, or come to terms with it. Hypothetically, that might also mean she knows that perhaps it's not what she truly wants for herself, as far as building a life (anchor) around it.
I'm not detached, and neither is anyone in my family.
>>But it's crazy that a person can get this lost in life and become completely devoid of purpose and meaning.
The thing is, I'm sure for her it doesn't feel that way. She probably feels a lot of purpose and meaning in following all these people online and participating in social activities around them. That's part of the addiction too - it can feel meaningful for a long time.
> That's part of the addiction too - it can feel meaningful for a long time.
That's obviously true of meth,etc. as well. The first step is always to realize you have a problem that's negatively impacting your life.
To me this reads less like a social media issue and more like she's depressed and something about the way you're asking her is off.
I saw a couple of years of similar reactions from my sisters after they went through some difficult times without any of us knowing (since they were studying abroad and this was before easy internet calling). They'd get mad when asked seemingly innocuous questions, which turned out to be because the way the questions were phrased came off as insulting or dismissive of their problems in some way. We didn't even know about these problems since they never told us, but that didn't really matter for them.
It took years of slowly rebuilding trust for them to open up again.
> To me thos reads less like a social media issue and more like she's depressed
With social media, it’s hard to gauge what’s the chicken and what’s the egg in this issue. Is she on social media because she is depressed and the brain is looking for quick dopamine? Or is being in social media making her more depressed?
Your sister sounds like my brother (minus the cosmetics— his focus is on other things). I can deeply relate to your experience.
I'd highly recommend the book "Hikikomori: Adolescence Without End" by Saito Tamaki, translated by Jeffrey Angles. First published in 1998 it describes the "hikikomori" social/psychological phenomenon, and ways treatment has been approached. Ultimately, Saito observes that nobody can "fix" the individual hikikomori directly— therapy must be multi-faceted, continuous, and ongoing, focused on reducing stigma and shame. And for all that, may ultimately not be effective.
She might have really bad social anxiety, ocd and or some other social disorder that's pretty common in your early to mid to even late 20s. I had it and withdrew too until I started talking about it with others my age only to find out they were all crazy / normal too. Thinking your the only one dealing with such and never talking about and or hearing others ur age or close in age deal with it too is the worst thing ...she needs to talk about it and know she is completely normal and many many others her age deal with the same too
I’m like this too except a man. It’s because I need to work on myself before I date or make new friends. I think it used to be easier to be happy as a loser before phones made us too self aware. It’s hard to be confident when I’m so aware of how much better things could be, and there’s really no excuse for failure when I can get a step by step guide on anything I want.
"Loser" is however you want to define it. If you legitimately want certain things (fitness, skills, whatever), then by all means go out and get them.
But don't forget some people are living in a hippie commune, or in a van, by choice. There's lots of these types that are completely broke and "losers" by some definition but they're fulfilled because they can spend more time hiking, painting, or whatever it is they want in life.
This is my long way of saying, don't let social media define what "success" is in your eyes :)
> I need to work on myself before I date or make new friends
Real friends/partners will see you at your worst and stick around. IMO if you think you need to do XYZ first you'll never take the leap to make these connections. The fact that you're working on yourself is what they'll see.. "it's the journey not the destination"
There are no step-by-step guides for living your life. If there were, the only person who could write them would be you 20 years in the future. If you were to follow them, the person who wrote them would not exist, because the wisdom of knowing what to do and what not to do is borne from error embodied. Work on yourself, but do not wait for some magical moment where you say "ah, so this is what it's like to be complete". The moment does not exist. Find people who will accept you as you are, and they will help you become the person you strive to be.
I don't pretend to know your sister's situation but one thing I've become convinced of through seeing the effects of the pandemic is we have an epidemic of undiagnosed mental health issues, particularly ADHD and ASD.
I bring this up for several reasons. First, such conditions are especially underdiagnosed and misdiagnosed in girls and women. Second, even now ADHD is still heavily misunderstood with people focusing on the "hyperactivitiy" part, which is really only one variant. Third, the combination of isolation and focusing on something that doesn't seem to fit that (ie cosmetics and cosmetic surgery) screams coping mechanism and nervous system dysregulation to me.
30+ years ago such people would be forced out into the world. Some would be helped by this. Others would merely cope (ie masking). Some would be further traumatized by this and no one (including them) would recognize it. I've heard from many teachers who deal with ADHD/ASD students that it becomes pretty obvious that their parents are undiagnosed for these very same conditions.
Your sister might be described as a NEET in Western parlance but this isn't new or exclusive to the West. Japan has had hikikimoris from at least the 1990s.
It's worth adding that young people aren't stupid. Many of them recognize the hopelessness of their situation, economically speaking. Rents are crippling, home ownership looks increasingly impossibly to ever reach, student debt is potentially crippling and job prospects aren't great. We're crazy if we think young people don't recognize this so we have a hopelessness crisis on top of all of this.
So is social media allowing people to isolate and cope or is it the cause? Is ADHD/ASD more prevelant now? If so, why? Or was it just underdiagnosed and misdiagnosed until now? I don't know. To me it seems like it might exacerbate existing issues and it's only one facet of many of how our society is increasingly broken and failing young people.
This shows the real problem is more getting sucked into online social groups rather than having constant communication with real life friends.
The toxic part of social media is the online personas and interactions with strangers, who are perceived as friends.
There is a balance of letting kids have messenger and play games online with friends, than letting them have social media accounts, and burrow into cesspools of online activities that a lot of these social sites are.
I went through that phase but with World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. And I'm now still in that phase but with programming. So I'm essentially your sister but smarter and cooler in every way. My condolences.
If I felt this way, I'd try to get my sister to realize what's happening to her, get to the bottom of the issue together, and help her get out of it.
And be persistent to a degree, show her that you care and you are there for her (and actually be there for her, do something with her). Be understanding, some amount of video entertainment is okay. Be there for her, be patient, and know when to take a break about trying to change her bad habits.
I assume you also need to be prepared for the unfortunate possibility that she just won't budge and decides to spend her life in the matrix.
people are endlessly fascinating. I know nothing about your sister, or you, or anyone else on HN, yet here is a hive of tech oriented individuals trying to crack the nut of human nature. I guess it's something that resonates with many here, either by first hand experience or second like yourself.
What can be done? Does anything need to be done? Is she doing harm to herself and others, or is that just your perception? Maybe she doesn't share your values. Maybe she senses your judgement. Do you really have her best interest in mind, or are you projecting an idea of what a good sister should be? As in you can't be proud of who she is. But why not? And why do you want to be? To what extent are you responsible? Should you feel guilty if you fail to change her? Should you feel dread if she is unable to change? Does she owe it to you to change herself? But who knows what the next thing will be that you find disappointing about her. Must she walk the tight-rope of your approval? What is your true opinion anyway? Is it truly good, and should anyone truly care?
Everyone has an idea of how life is and how it should be. Oh the problem is so very clear. If only everything was exactly the way I imagine it, oh if only, then there would be peace, happiness, and harmony for all! right? And yet we're endlessly frustrated by the life that could be, the life that should be, perpetually occupying the space beyond our finger tips.
This sounds very much like classic addictive behavior. I recommend reading up on Al-Anon, so you can learn more about what you can and can't do, in terms of helping an addict.
i find this to be, unfortunately, the current western stance on responsibility towards anyone: irresponsibility. for some reason, leaving people to go their way, wherever it may lead them, has been interpreted to be the good and the moral duty of anyone who understands what freedom (for intelligent beings) means. with all due respect, that’s cowardice and a neglect of duty.
i explained to my sibling the other day that we cannot live our lives however we wanted because of our layers of responsibility: first to ourselves (as a human beings in this civilization), then to our family and friends (who expect to count on us at some point), to the society we inhabit (i am currently an immigrant), the human race, and lastly the environment. those are not easy responsibilities and they could crush anyone. but absconding isn’t a choice: we’re not here for selfish reasons.
i think you should intervene, at whatever cost to you. because no one else would, and depending on how persistent you are, she’d be grateful for the care and attention you showed. because that’s the sort of action that pure love motivates. good luck
I have tried being supportive on multiple occasions. I offered to help with building her a platform online since she spends so much time there. I offered to team up with her in case she wants to create an eCommerce site. The discussion always ends with, “I don’t know”.
I have tried various approaches, including being provocative, and that is why I said it is not worth it.
I am not abandoning her by any means and we talk. We are on good terms so to speak, but sadly those good terms only extend to lengths of her own comfort. She has a genuine problem with sharing who she is as a person and that is not easy to work with.
When every other thing you say gets interpreted as an “attack” or “you are crossing boundaries”, it makes no sense to push the person to end up where you started.
> i find this to be, unfortunately, the current western stance on responsibility towards anyone: irresponsibility.
The complete destruction of religions, then traditions and now families/education (lack of education, lack of authority, &c.) probably had something to do with it.
You can't replace god/families/education with an iphone 15 and expect society to continue on the same path. And I'm saying that as a complete atheist, people need a framework, goals, rules, models, outlooks, a moral compass, &c. if all we have left is complete relativism and consumerism it's much harder to find a personal meaning and straight up impossible to find a global one
I like that layers of responsibility theory, and applaud you if you live your life by it.
One thing I would amend for myself - I don't think I feel as though I have responsibility to the environment in and of itself. I am an environmentalist, but that follows from my duty to the human race. The earth will keep on earthing either way.
> how easy it is to get stuck in this cycle. I just wish there was an easy way out of it
What you described may be body dysmorphic disorder. Social media aggravates that, but it is not the cause: BDD is a variant of OCD. Like OCD, it can be effectively treated with a specific kind of therapy (exposure and response prevention). I know a lot of people have replied to your post, but I don’t think anyone has mentioned this possibility yet.
I try to avoid mainstream social media because it makes me uncomfortable. I started after putting on my tinfoil hat after Snowden's revelations and slowly drifted away from them, then was dragged back because most of my friends had Twitter, then I decided to finally get rid of my Twitter after Musk bought it.
I have instagram and almost never use it. It's addicting to me in a sense that when I have nothing to do I'll open up the app and endlessly scroll through the feed, check stories of people I follow. It made me uncomfortable because all of the stories of people I know looked fake somehow, everyone smiling, having a good time, making specific poses to look good on Instagram, but in reality their life is not full of roses. It made me uncomfortable when I had bad days, where I felt like I was never going to achieve the happiness people show on the social network. Luckily, wen this thought occurred, I was able to pinpoint it and say "well, this is NOT real, they are just faking it for likes and followers. you should feel good that you don't have this and you should value personal contact over likes on a website".
Since then I only use Instagram to browse for dog/pet videos.
But I have some acquaintances that they act like their life depends on instagram. Hell, I had a friend who spent all of her time watching stupid tiktok videos disseminating fake news and pseudoscience (and she was studying to become a psychologist), reading stupid things on facebook, and when she wasn't busy with this she would constantly complain to me how she self-evaluated that she had depression and anxiety, how her life is shitty. She was a pretty woman and all the time told me she wanted to change her appearance because of something she saw on facebook or tiktok, and I guess it wasn't enough for me to tell her she was perfect the way she is, even with her issues. She never listened and tried to convince me that the cosmetic changes she'd do weren't permanent.
> It's her life so I leave her alone, not my place to tell her what to do, and the emotional upheaval from her isn't worth it eithe
For someone not from US, this comes across as weird. She is your sister, so why is the emotional upheaval not worth it? Who is it worth for? Why is not your place to tell her she is going down? If not for family, who will you do it for?
It is, but when people bemoan lack of meaning/purpose they're just talking about feelings. It's a sensory thing, the rationalizations are just an attempt to explain and make sense of it.
We're bad at predicting what makes us happy and even worse at making sound judgements through negative emotions. Those in the middle of such an experience don't want to believe that their habits are exacerbating or responsible for their problems, because change is uncomfortable. They want to continue to feed addiction.
Both. It's a feedback loop keeping her in place. Like with many (all?) addictions, you get stuck in a situation where the same activity makes your situation worse and provides a short-term reprieve from immediate consequences. You take a hit to briefly fix the accumulated damage from all the previous hits.
She may not be aware that there is a problem. My understanding is that game / social media addiction is an attempt to not think about real life things, including acknowledging that so much time has been wasted staring into the black mirror.
My advice is to let her know that you think she has a media addiction, then at least she has some level of awareness.
As I'm trying to find a more charitable point of view on her lifestyle: if this is how she prefers to spend her free time and if it doesn't impair her ability to exist as a functioning adult, is it really that bad?
I mean I personally know people who rarely interact with others other than work, and do weird things like playing with electronics and games all day, mostly just for fun and not for profit. They are often happy as they are, I'm sure many of them are on this very website.
Your sister sounds a bit like the TikTok version of the weird nerd stereotype, replace the PCBs with cosmetics and games with celebrity gossip. Their influencers sell lipsticks instead of 3d printed desk toys and mechanical switches. For me it's difficult to recognize TikTok stuff as a legitimate interest and understand her devotion to it, but then many of the hacker stuff must seem the same to the people outside of these circles.
Not that I know her situation better than you do of course, this was more of a thought experiment on trying to understand a niche that I know very little about.
Are we talking about long lasting happiness or repeated short lasting pleasures ?
Are your short term pleasures in line with your long term goals ?
That's what supposedly differentiate us from most other animals, the capability to think about the future, and act accordingly. Regret is one of the worse feeling
We don’t live together. But we have a rocky past for sure. I was older and so I got a head start during my teens for all the bad vices during that age; drugs, alcohol, excessive partying.
By the time she got around to it, I had already wisened up and basically lost communication with her. I went on to do other things with my life and actually put in effort to experience new stuff.
She on the other hand did not. She found more excuses (dropped out of uni twice) than solutions.
> she has slowly isolated herself from life and her family, she spends most of her time in her room on the phone and does weird things like get cosmetic surgeries, ordering cosmetics, etc. It's bizarre.
this is not the average social media user. the problem is addiction, not doing surgery to yourself. if social media was banned or age gated you would have to ban wikipedia next as its also very easy to get addicted to doing a tree traversal of interesting articles starting at the single one article you intended to read. also stack exchange. pardon my tone deafness to your tragedy, but this is a political issue, and your post is being used for political purposes. this is also a waste of my tax money and proof that taxation is theft. if i was a parent i would just be a good parent like my parents and slap my kids if they get addicted to upvoting shit on social media just as i would slap them if they get addicted to watching tv, playing arcade games (since i would provide them with real games and not gacha shit, the former which still had the addiction problem and the exact same dumb discussions in the 90s)
Clearly it's not. It's the life of those she copies and is influenced by. I strongly doubt any of the people like your sister are actually making actual decisions about their lives.
You absolutely should try getting through to her, because that's in her best long-term interest. She's literally destroying her life.
In my family, helping a sister in this sort of dead end is exactly what a brother is expected to help with.
It's not about 'telling my sister what to do'. It's about helping someone sick (my conclusion from your superficial description, reality might be different?).
> But it's crazy that a person can get this lost in life and become completely devoid of purpose and meaning.
People have been warning about it since the birth of capitalism and consumerism, although even the most pessimistic ones didn't expect we'd get so far down the rabbit hole, the internet sped up the whole process a thousand times.
The loss of meaning will be the greatest thing we'll have to fight against in this century, we're just at the beginning.
> I just wish there was an easy way out of it.
I personally think it's lost for a few generations, people who fall into the rabbit hole while their brain is still developing will have absolutely no way out.
What makes the system thrive is the same thing that destroys individuals, the group goal is diametrically opposed to the individual needs
This is where you use your tech skills to break her addiction. Degrade her social media queries randomly. Mess up the dopamine rewards. Maybe a pihole add on or something like that?
I feel so bad for teenagers/kids who we essentially screwed over with this tech experience. That said, I don't feel great for the rest of us either! I feel like my phone has become a significant negative in my life. And in general, I'm quite scared because we have put things in place that we know are bad for mental health:
1. Even if we may not like it all the time, there is tons of data that show that personal interactions and relationships are good for mental health. With so much technology and so many things going remote (I'm not just talking jobs, but I'm talking about the fact that it's very easy, for example, to never need to walk into a store anymore. I recently went to a fast food restaurant and there were no customers inside at lunchtime, normally a busy time, and I ordered on a kiosk and everyone else just ordered at the drivethrough) it's harder and harder to just see random people and our friends without explicit planning.
2. As someone who recently got over a severe episode of depression, I strongly believe time spent in nature and just outside in general is really good for the mental health of humans. With so much tech it's easier and easier to basically never go outside unless you make it a point to do so.
One complaint I have is that it feels like I have to put in almost all the work to make plans with friends and family. Also, these plans must be well in advance. My immediate family and I might decide to go to a park and I’ll text a friend that lives nearby. “Hey, if you’re looking for an excuse to get out of the house we will be at <park>.” No one has ever taken us up on this kind of invitation even though they’ll later complain about being bored or needing to get out.
Depends on where you live and maybe for how long. For me for example, I live in the city in an apartment. I go out in the morning to buy bread. It is 50% likely I will meet someone from my neighborhood and chat for a minute or just say hi.
If I really want to chat a little, I will go to one of the other small shops next to me and buy a beer/coffee and talk with the owner or whoever is outside the store.
Because I work from home most of my friends are at work during the day. But come evening and you can hang out for at least an hour, with someone you know, every single day if you want. There is no planning, you just go to the places you know people hang out, and they will be there. And if you don't want to talk much, you can just listen.
I feel I am blessed to have this because I was an expat for some years and you don't know what you have until you don't have it anymore.
Your points here are worth more emphasis. As a chronically unemployed software dev who's burnt out and crashed at least 3 times, I've spent a hell of a lot of time reflecting, and try my best to communicate these ideas to people who have the opposite problem; lots of work, but no new friends since highschool, and desperately single.
People tend to rely far too heavily on the easiest way to convince themselves they're having valuable social interactions, whether it's social media or betting that their work friends will still be there when they get laid off. They'll rely on Tinder for sex and try to bridge that to something more meaningful out of thin air, or they'll buy a dog and hope that solves the problem. Some of these are uniquely millenial and onward, some others carry over from Gen X and boomer culture imo, whereby you isolate yourself from the rest of society in the suburbs or wherever and count on personal relationships you acquired for free.
Along with this, in many places we've let the catalysts for social growth get stripped away by commodity bullshit and simulated interaction. Costco is probably the closest thing many people have to bumping into someone, no shot are they going to do it at the adult version of the playground, because there often isn't one and they won't go. (obviously this is more true in some places and for some people than it is for people who've realized this or who innately direct their life this way).
My theory is that to meet a new person and have it be substantial, you basically need to spend a few hours, a few times per week, in the same space doing some arbitrarily interesting thing for a common reason, without being too eager but with a signaled sense of openness. You don't become a pro anything spending 30 min a week on it, and no valuable personal relationships come about that way either. That's how you met people in Uni, that's how you met people at work, you gotta branch off of those places and ya gotta keep it going gradually. If you don't live in a place that facilitates that, vote with your wallet and try to find a new one.
This goes for nature too, if you're only exposure is 2 days of hiking once a year when you travel, and the rest is spent in an office, it's not something you can remedy any other way.
If you drive to work 1 hour each way, and work 8 hours, you're probably doomed, unless you've already done all that and can keep your existing things going. It's just not enough margin, be real about what you're sacrificing and why.
>My theory is that to meet a new person and have it be substantial, you basically need to spend a few hours, a few times per week, in the same space doing some arbitrarily interesting thing for a common reason, without being too eager but with a signaled sense of openness. You don't become a pro anything spending 30 min a week on it, and no valuable personal relationships come about that way either. That's how you met people in Uni, that's how you met people at work, you gotta branch off of those places and ya gotta keep it going gradually. If you don't live in a place that facilitates that, vote with your wallet and try to find a new one.
This is why for many of us the last place we made meaningful relationships was university: lots of time in a same place physically + common objectives + relativeley same age and interests = friendship.
The formula is simple but today the first component is what is most difficulty. Along with #3 I'd say. Many people recommend taking "classes" such as theater, ceramic, etc. but after doing all the hard work of finding a place near you, that you can pay if you find the average age is +- 15 your age it gets really desmotivating. There is nothing bad of going to classes with seniors but reality is you can't make true friendships with someone your grandfathers' age.
I agree with all of your points and would add that the metrification of social interactions degrades social connections as it fosters a bias towards competitiveness. Furthermore, the people that are put off by that reduce their participation so it becomes a market for lemons.
As a solution to teenager anxiety I would propose a compromise solution wherein all school communications, school groups, and extracurricular activities must not use any social media platforms for communication.
In my experience, most people are adequate at making setting-specific friendships, like "gym friends", "work friends", etc. What they struggle at is progressing those relationships to not being setting specific. Which involves inviting people places, and eventually progresses to full-blown planning, both of which are skills only learned with practice.
Makes sense, I feel something not talked about enough is the last point, most people spend the bulk of their day at work or doing work related thing like preparing for it, commuting and even winding down for the stress of a long day of work. This leaves the average person with little to no time, and definitely no energy, to pursue other interests, passions, hobbies, etc. Even if you are well paid, the money doesn't buy you the time nor the energy.
> My theory is that to meet a new person and have it be substantial, you basically need to spend a few hours, a few times per week, in the same space doing some arbitrarily interesting thing for a common reason, without being too eager but with a signaled sense of openness.
I like this concept, and I feel like I've experienced this as well, but I'm having trouble picturing an example of what you're describing, practically speaking, for the average city-dweller. Care to elaborate on this?
re #2: Yup. My solution is volunteering, creating urban forests. Digging out invasives, planting natives. It's surprisingly social. And helps my mental health.
The author had it right in the first paragraph. In the 90s version of this hysteria, Congress passed a law that would have prevented access to education medical information, dirty curse words, and other filth from being published on the internet to protect the children. The federal government fought a case all the way to the Supreme Court to enforce it. If they had won that case, the internet would look very different today. But the Supreme Court got it right when they said it would squelch free speech.
You may not like FB, IG, TikTok, etc.. I certainly don't care for any of these products. But these are communications platforms. Restricting the right to free speech does have negative consequences... from the development of critical thinking skills; development of technical skills; and limiting of educational information. Being exposed to shit on the internet teaches you there's bullshit on the internet, and not to believe everything you see.
And just like the Supreme Court wrote 30 years ago, the answer is the same today: if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them. Restrict your children's access to these platforms.
I certainly dont believe anyone should be forced to use these platforms. I don't use any of these products, and havent since they launched. That's a freedom you and everyone else can take advantage of also. But those who advocate censorship aren't advocating for freedom... they're advocating for their personal parental decisions to the be decisions of the entire nation.
> if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them
It's really not that simple. The products have become so widespread and influential that they change the very culture of our society for the worse. It doesn't matter whether you abstain from using Instagram or not, some of your friends will still be more or less subtly influenced by its existence in your social interactions.
There's a nice quote from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, which IMO hasn't aged at all in 60 years: "Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the 'content' of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind... The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance."
And then there are also those companies/institutions/orgs/news/shops that make you left behind from otherwise useful information or services by not being on social media platforms.
except it is, because law is dumb, stupid, and slow-witted. if you ban facebook specifically, the next day it will think that means mailing lists should also be banned. btw ive witnessed lots of mailing list and then web forum addicted deadbeats before social media came out but whatever
the legal solution is nothing (i realize not all of you have asked for the legal solution yet but thats essentially the only point of this thread that is brought up routinely on places like HN)
teh fact that every techie and his mom seems to think the law will work out in his favor when it backfires each time (or they just ignores that downsides) is no different than how people keep thinking you can put a web server in every embedded device and they oh so surprisingly have the same RCE vulns as the 90s, every single time.
> It's really not that simple. The products have become so widespread and influential that they change the very culture of our society for the worse. It doesn't matter whether you abstain from using Instagram or not, some of your friends will still be more or less subtly influenced by its existence in your social interactions.
I suspect that a lot of the anxiety about how difficult it would be to quit is the mind's way of rationalizing a psychological addiction, like saying you can't stop smoking because things are just so crazy right now.
I quit social networks in 2008, it wasn't hard at the time and it's not been hard to stay away. Yes, there are consequences of being the one guy in the friend group who doesn't use whatever app everyone else is using, but to call those consequences meaningful is an overstatement. A minor annoyance, easy for everyone to adapt to.
You're right that other people are still influenced by social networks. Speaking from the outside, I wouldn't even use the word 'subtle' to describe its effects. But, I don't know that that really matters. You surround yourself with people you like, despite their flaws. You hope the good things about them grow, and that they work through their flaws. That's just having friends.
Teenagers are so judgy about the color of the text message bubbles they receive, imagine how judgy they would be if one didn't participate at all in some digital platform most of them use.
If TV turned everything into entertainment, including discourse, then social media has turned every discourse into being an influencer. I frequently see people at a coffeeshop set up cameras like they are filming a TV show to talk about their latte or muffin for Instagram. This happens everywhere in all walks of life. Any hobby, no matter how esoteric, will be molded into the shape of good for instagram.
It's baffling to me, that despite how famous McLuhan still is today, that people somehow do not follow the implications of his criticism (and that of Ellul, Debord, Kaczinsky ;), ...). Technology, in and of itself, the actual physical _thing_, shapes the world, our dispositions, our aspirations, in its own image, and does so in absence of our judgement.
First paragraph is at least (or even more) applicable to cable news and talk radio. The amount of brainrot in the geriatric electorate due to the 8+ hours of daily screentime(/screamtime) they get from "news" hosts has been a disaster for us democracy.
> It doesn't matter whether you abstain from using Instagram or not, some of your friends will still be more or less subtly influenced by its existence in your social interactions
You could say the same thing about the Bible, or Harry Potter, or any number of things too
It's funny .. earlier today there was a front page HN post about the federal government mandating safer circular saws. It seemed like the majority of users in the thread were in favor of the federal government mandating technology changes to prevent harm from being done to the population.
Now for this issue, there's harm being done to children, and the majority of users in the thread seem to be against government intervention; you say: "well if you don't like it, if you think it's negative, just don't use it, don't let your kids use it".
Kind of a random parallel to draw between the two stories, but it's funny the same logic doesn't seem to apply in both cases. Why wasn't for circular saws the response "if you think they're dangerous, don't use them" or "just keep your kids away from them"?
Because people don't think the government should always prioritize protection over freedom, nor do people think the government should always prioritize freedom over protection.
It's like asking, if people are okay with the government restricting the sale of bombs to private citizens, why aren't they okay with restricting steak knives? They're also dangerous weapons.
People judge the cost and benefit of each situation.
This is a silly comparison. The table saw was not designed to be addictive, turn its users into a highly lucrative commodity, or push algorithmically driven agendas. Social media was. The dangers being compared here are very different.
The reason I am against government intervention is the fact that governments seem to not be competent enough to solve problems like this and they would use content controls for their own purposes. It is vastly different and more complex than regulating saws. The comparison falls short by a huge margin and a false conclusion that any federal legislation would be desirable just because it is the case for saws.
Some suggest it would be the "hate" on the net that is causing the issues and we see legislation that penalizes some content already, but I heavily doubt it to be the source of any problem.
Might be something similar, perhaps the strong indignations some statements on the net seem to get to some people, although these can be as politely stated as any frivolous statement can be. And the resulting expectations on opinions you are allowed to harbor.
It was about table saws, not circular saws. There’s a big difference between the two. Table saw accidents often result in losing fingers and it’s not that difficult to mess up while using one.
There’s a well known, proven, easy solution to table saw accidents called SawStop. It’s basically as obvious to use as a seat belt is if you want to be safe. The only problem is those table saws are very expensive.
Social media doesn’t have an existing and obvious solution (besides not using it).
Regulating a physical product being sold within the country, like a circular saw, is obviously materially different from enforcing age restrictions or other regulations to a website probably owned by a multinational company.
Personally, I don't have much of an opinion around circular saws, but I don't want my government to build a framework where they can choose to hide certain parts of the Internet. I also think the issue isn't social media, per se, but algorithms that promote negative content, personal data harvesting, etc. Banning tiktok et al isn't going to solve those problems. They'll still exist because other types of sites are implementing them.
While both paternalism. Requiring safety features on a saw does not restrict free speech. It's more akin to seatbelt laws. It's also made to protect everyone who uses a table saw and not just children.
Imo, I do think social media needs to be reeled in by policy. But I can see why it makes people uncomfortable and why there is a difference with the saw.
Yeah funny as a one-legged rabbit hopping in neat little circles. If I were still on social media I wouldn't want to take a long look at the quality of my interactions or the costs associated with them either.
hes actually trying to say, "that's stupid". HN and reddit would be so much easier if negative posting were allowed.
your argument is dumb too, it doesn't even deserve acknowledgment, but we are little babies here and have to politely explain to everyone why they're wrong, to the point that the insane people just always win and get their dumb ideas into law because nobody cares anymore and are tired of explaining common sense over and over. having safety controls on hardware is not anything remotely equivalent to the hypothetical problem the article pitches. there is not any world where regulating social media makes sense, and i say this as someone who has never used social media in my life. the entire issue at hand here is like a bear shitting in the woods and someone happens to step on it once in a thousand years, almost none of these so called people who get addicted to social media would have any better off chance at life without it, they would just get addicted to one of the millions of other things one can get addicted to. the remaining one in a million people who actually had their life ruined by social media is like the bear shitting in the woods, its just life.
Because it is the parents responsibility to set boundaries for their children. It can be complicated at times, granted. But that doesn't make it less of their job. Heck, I got my first CD player with 14. Yes, I felt left out at school, but... guess what, I didn't die. Children need to learn that there are rules, and someone else dictates them. Throwing tantrums is a typical reaction that needs to be weeded out as a part of growing up.
Besides, the "somebody has to think about the children" meme is slowly but surely getting old and tiresome. Not somebody... Their PARENTS. If you dont feel like setting boundaries for your children, please, with sugar on top, dont have any.
Note that the reforms suggested by the author are primarily normative, not legislative:
"""
More specifically, we’d try to implement these four norms as widely as possible:
1. No smartphones before high school (as a norm, not a law; parents can just give younger kids flip phones, basic phones, or phone watches).
2. No social media before 16 (as a norm, but one that would be much more effective if supported by laws such as the proposed update to COPPA, the Kids Online Safety Act, state-level age-appropriate design codes, and new social media bills like the bipartisan Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, or like the state level bills passed in Utah last year and in Florida last month).
3. Phone-free schools (use phone lockers or Yondr pouches for the whole school day, so that students can pay attention to their teachers and to each other)
4. More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.
"""
Everyone has the ability to exercise personal accountability for how much they gamble, smoke, eat junk food, play video games, use social media etc. However, if these consumer products become so addictive, or are designed to be so engaging and as a result people are by and large struggling to exercise personal accountability and it is causing adverse health outcomes.
Then the government should step in, either should forceful action or through promoting healthier alternatives or shining a light on its damaging effects.
The simply binary of government or individual choice eliminates the middle ground where almost all change happens: the collective aggregate result of cultural change within the community. We don’t have to pick one extreme to change the world!
Except "struggle" is entirely subjective. In fact, outside of a few things that causes physical dependence (which vary in length except they all, eventually at least, end), the concept of addiction as used by the government does not necessarily match up to how those in the particular field of research would. Government makes laws and laws prefer bright line rules. Something like "did you, without authorization, use the credit card given to you by your company to make purchases unrelated to your work", for example, have concrete, definable, and answerable elements that are universal and more or less binary, provided that the statute has a definition section that makes sense. But "so addictive" or "designed to be so engaging and as a result people are by and large struggling to exercise personal accountability and it is causing adverse health outcomes" is pretty much the antithesis of that. The government would need to define "addictive", "designed" would need to have an intent element (one designs the software, sure, but you're asking for not what the software itself does but one step further - what its impact is on the population at large). How does the government prove that intent, especially since criminal law tends to define intent as intent to act which combined with the act itself, creates the crime. What counts as "so engaging" or even "engaging"? Does it require active engagement? Plenty of platforms do not require any active engagement to partake in the conventional sense, unless reading is engagement. How many people counts as "by large" (I assume that's what you mean, feel free to correct)? How would the government show that the product and any struggle is causatively linked and not merely correlative? How does one define struggle to exercise personal accountability? Where did the duty of exercising personal accountability even come from as to establish liability and would that criminalize those who are disabled or injured as to being unable to exercise such responsibility writ large? And what counts for adverse health outcomes? All these need to be worked out in legislation and likely argued over in court. Every single element needs to be worked on as to not to be overly inclusive or exclusive. And since it's the government, the consequences for violation is without question enormous, and therefore, anything that can be misconstrued can result in the ruin of a company or persons in a variety of ways, but do you really want to have the government determine who is an edge case that doesn't count? Because the government have done that based on assumptions of potential harm and it has caused what today would be considered horrific abuses of human rights and very little positives beyond enriching those whose income derives from the enforcement of the government's scheme.
Laws are lagging indicators but they also last a long time. the CFAA was passed before the advent of the WWW and it took until 2021 to even set a basic check on the part of the Supreme Court that effective set the ground rule that to access what amounts to a computer linked to some network beyond authorization, an authorization scheme needs to exist in the first place. Before that, one can easily be charged and even sent to prison or be assessed massive fines when there's no meaningful distinction between what is authorized and unauthorized space. These were not problems in the early to mid 80s but when problems did arise, it still took a quarter century to resolve. To have one future-proof goldilocks solution is already next to impossible, but you're asking for five or six stringed together in order to have a sensible law that is well tailored enough so that it is effective without being oppressive. Not to mention that unless the behavior is generally abandoned by users, it creates black markets that are simply illegible to the state. The government then effectively loses control over what it purports to control to those with means, leaving only those without subject to the full force of the legislation.
That of course all predicates on the premise that there can be commonly agreed and sensible ways to define all those, and it is in the best interest of the government to do so and passes Constitutional muster not just on speech grounds but a host of other potential issues, like, is this a purely civil matter or a purely criminal matter or both? The federal government can treat this explicitly, or kick it off to an agency as part of its mandate, but which one? Do we need a new one? Are there checks and balances that would provide some sort of agility that keeps up with the times? What if new research comes out that shows the lack of a link, but by legislating it, you've effectively frozen the relevant conclusion in time. Enforcement creates constituencies who do not care about science or potential upsides. The DEA is on the record in the federal register that patient access to legitimate medication is secondary and effectively an afterthought to enforcement of supply, because the agency's mandate presupposes that substances need controls and are presumed harmful and that enforcement, with the teeth provided for by the DOJ, will trump any study the FDA or our academic institutions can ever show. By the time that particular moral panic was given a name, the US government had been attempting repeatedly to use prohibition as a way of imposing a specific set of social mores that at first was a pretext to target specific racial minorities and when that became socially unacceptable (legally it was unacceptable under the 14th Amendment anyway, but they effectively smuggled the laws in through the Treasury Department and protectionist regimes by taxing the goods into oblivion, and avoiding the tax obviously is also a violation of the law).
In that sense, the government operates very much like a machine, whereas given a concrete goal to achieve and it can likely achieve it, but the manner by which it achieves it may create additional problems and convoluted interpretations that ripples through history in ways unimaginable. The loudest voices in the room, or those with existing financial resources or interests, can use the rent-seeking system known as lobbying to shape the laws to begin with. And where does the fines end up? Certainly in most cases they are not given back to the community, but end up enriching the enforcement agencies. Go to a police auction and see how much they're raising from the sale of "proceeds of crime", except not all of it are crimes that are proven in court, and much of it are crimes without specific victims and so, it becomes a regime of appropriation of private property to enrich a few in the public sector.
There's usually an annoying gap between concept and reality. In isolation you want a policy that can solve problems in a targeted and fair way. In reality it almost never happens.
While technically true, this is a gross misrepresentation. Calling these sites and apps "communications platforms" makes them sound like they're just a mail service or a telephone. This is akin to referring to a casino as "the town square".
> That's a freedom you and everyone else can take advantage of also.
This "can" is only true in a strict legal sense, of course.
They’re communication platforms in only a very roundabout sense: like a newspaper’s “Letters to the Editor” section, but quicker. You send your message to Facebook, it decides (algorithmically, not through human editors) whether or not to publish it and to whom, and then Facebook sends that message onward.
I see the "town square" analogy used a lot, but it's ignoring the actual purpose: it's an advertising platform, run by advertisers for advertisers. The presumed function of communication (something it certainly was started for) is purely for keeping the attention of users to sell to advertisers.
All you wrote doesn't address the elephant in the room: that social media is responsible for an epidemy of teen mental illness (which may or may not be true).
If that's true, the suggested measures: no phone before high-school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, ... do not seem crazy.
Kids cannot drink, cannot smoke, cannot have sex with adults, cannot buy firearms, etc.
There's a shitload of things kids cannot do: is it really an attack on free speech to have kids not have phones at school and wait until 16 before they can use these mediocre piece of shit social media platforms?
if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them. Restrict your children's access to these platforms.
If it was only this simple. It's similar to the green bubble problem. Disallowing your kids to use these platforms leads to social isolation. All the other kids are on these platforms and a lot of the talk is about what happened on these platforms (it's similar with games like Roblox for a certain age bracket). Excluding them is also going to teenage mental illness due to exclusion.
It's only going to work if all parents would restrict access to these platforms, but that's not going to happen. A lot of parents do not see the issue or do not want to be the first mover.
In general, I agree with you, and for the record, I'm in favor of general restrictions or limitations on social media for children. At the same, I want to add that I was not allowed to watch violent cartoons or play violent video games as a kid in the 90s. I felt left out on the playground when I didn't know how to play X-Men or Power Rangers or whatever. But in retrospect it was fine. I'm not sure the social isolation factor in particular is as dire as you claim.
Why stop there? Why not drop all laws prohibiting sales of tobacco and alcohol to minors? Why should these producers have their right to sell impinged upon by scared parents pushing a bunch of laws through congress?
After all, you're free to use or not to use tobacco and alcohol, right? So it should be every kid's choice.
In fact, why stop there? Why not allow fentanyl pills at the counter of every convenience store for anyone who wants them? You have the freedom to choose to use or not to use them, so there's no problem, right?
> if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them.
Relevant bit from the essay:
"But much of my book is about the collective action traps that entire communities of adolescents fall into when they move their social lives onto these platforms, such that it becomes costly to abstain. It is at that point that collective mental health declines most sharply, and the individuals who try to quit find that they are socially isolated. The skeptics do not consider the ways that these network or group-level effects may obscure individual-level effects, and may be much larger than the individual-level effects."
An excellent point. Abstention = social isolation, which for young people is far worse than exposure. Restricting your children's access is not an option (lets' be real, they'll find a way to circumvent your efforts anyway) and moving the burden of restriction from society to individuals is not fair.
So as a society do we let unrestrained exposure or do we take collective action? I lean on the second option, but I'm not sure what this action might be.
I'm on the internet ~30 years, I loved the total anarchy of the early web, the unrestrained access to all kinds of information - good, bad and evil. It's very hard for me to get behind heavy-handed regulation. But honestly, I feel oversaturated by the modern cataclysm of information. My bullshit filters are clogged, my defense mechanisms are failing to the point I let information flow through me without an ounce of critical thinking. I can't imagine what the effect is on young untrained minds.
> You may not like FB, IG, TikTok, etc.. I certainly don't care for any of these products. But these are communications platforms. Restricting the right to free speech does have negative consequences
You’re conflating these tech platforms with freedom of speech. It might be helpful to the debate to separate out the addictive algorithm and user base from people’s right to think and speak freely.
There is a major difference between banning curse words, medical info, porn etc, and banning social media. The former is banning a type of content, the latter is banning the presentation of content; and it is the presentation that is so harmful.
Banning social media optimised for “engagement” at the expense of childrens (and adults) mental health does not remove any content from the internet that could not be expressed in a less toxic way.
The finesse is in defining social media in a way more complex than “this list of companies”, and I agree that (likely) no government would choose a definition that does not either have ramifications for free speech or is inadequate.
This is a social problem, not a parental one. When you allow for-profit companies (or anyone) to create addictive products that intermediate the social experience of an entire generation, how is a parent supposed to stand against that?
It's how kids interact and it defines their entire social experience. Disallowing them access is like sending your kids to school and not allowing them to talk to anyone.
We don't allow our kids to have access to alcohol or cigarettes because it's bad for them. How is this any different, when we know it's doing harm at scale?
Because "it's speech"? That doesn't hold up. Pornography is also generally considered protected speech, but no one lobbies for unfettered access for kids.
Beyond that, restricting social media does not infringe on free speech. That assertion is so obviously wrong on so many levels that it feels silly and pedantic to start itemizing them.
You dont have kids, do you. Seeing them being pushed out of entire school community due to higher principles is heartbreaking to say at least, this is place from which teen suicides come from. Parents usually cave in the pressure.
I would go and even claim I would ban all current social media platforms below 18. Ther are simply not enough protections, consistently, its place ripe for abuse and tons abuse is happening every day as we speak. I know we will keep our own kids off this for as long as possible, but eventually harm from absence will be greater.
Parents shouldnt be choosing lesser evil like that, just that some meta employees can cash half a million and think what a great addition to mankind they are, when reality is closer to definition of cancer.
> You may not like FB, IG, TikTok, etc.. I certainly don't care for any of these products. But these are communications platforms.
Haidt argues these are a leading cause of an ongoing mental illness epidemic. Such a drastic claim deserves a thorough medical review and if true, these platforms must be regulated just like the Tobacco industry was.
> those who advocate censorship aren't advocating for freedom... they're advocating for their personal parental decisions to the be decisions of the entire nation.
Don't believe freedom of speech / freedom to information overrides the concern of Humanity collectively and progressively going ill, anymore than freedom to self-defense warrants the use of nuclear weapons for personal use.
That said, the burden of proof is on Haidt. It isn't uncommon for the older generation to be pessimistic or doomsdaying about the next one.
Nah. They're advocating for an obvious and well-documented societal harm vector be regulated into a less harmful configuration. This is similar in concept to regulating pollution or disease vectors.
Tobacco regulation is actually something I don't see people talked often. Some seem to have restricted it and succeed, or failed. Some seems to let it go and succeed, or failed. It's seemingly less sexy than either alcohol or marijuana, maybe because USA is one example where they just let cigarettes go and succeed anyway.
My country is an example where it failed anyway. Whether we are considered to have tried regulating it or not is a bit complicated.
> [...] if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them.
And have a severally impacted/constrained social life?
People with all kinds of hobbies use those platforms to organize group activities. You are either on there or you miss out.
I dance tango socially. The tango community, world wide, has settled on FB. Or rather: if you are a dancer, teacher, organizer or DJ, you better be on FB or else you won't know where and when to dance, how to find students, get people to attend your event or get booked.
I.e. even if you decided you didn't like FB, you have no choice but to join it and thus help cement their monopoly on how people with this hobby organize themselves.
you have many ways you can solve the issues without ristricting free speach.
you can ristrict how you can monitize a product - I think the problem would be much smaller if you have to pay a price congruent to the value you get. Only a few people would pay for Facebook.
you can make the platforms resposinsible for what is published on them and enforce that. they would never scale this much.
> And just like the Supreme Court wrote 30 years ago, the answer is the same today: if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them.
We have already collectively agreed that this is not an argument. That is why there are agencies like the FDA, etc.
If you think of them as communication platforms, you’re missing a big part of the picture.
These systems are the next step in the evolution of media. Media is a complex beast with tentacles into culture and politics and individual society. We’ve known this for a long time. What’s applicable here is Marshal McLuhan, media theory, and heck David Foster Wallace. A lot of this stuff was way ahead of its time, but that time has arrived.
“The medium is the message” was a genius insight. Extending it to algorithmic media has all sorts of (disquieting) implications.
> they're advocating for their personal parental decisions to the be decisions of the entire nation.
That sounds exactly wrong. I think they want their "personal parental" decisions to not be the decisions of the entire nation, but "personal" and private to themselves and to be free from judgement for wanting this thing.
> prevented access to education medical information ... you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them.
This is pretty important to me:
Abusive parents deny their children access to communication platforms.
I believe these problems cause problems for the child if the child is already lacking support, but they also represent a way to escape that abuse, so I feel strongly that controlling access to asking-for-help is not okay;
This should not be a personal decision good people can make for themselves in their homes for their own kids, because they should be able to understand that "bad" people are actually using laws and rules like this to hurt children.
> I don't use any of these products
I think you're using one right now: Hacker news is absolutely a communications platform.
They are mostly advertisement platforms coupled to recommendation engines. The "communication platform" is just side business at this point. And it's being used to wave around as "free speech" when anyone dares to question the detrimental effect of the big mass mind control machine it actually is.
Any corporately run platform needs to be financed. In this case it seems the advertising model works best. Many platforms have tried subscription options but people prefer to not pay and become the product.
I think of it as: in 50 years it will be obvious to everyone that these things fall in the category of "health problems", because they are, similar to junk food, and we'll have a way of societally regulating the danger that is aligned with our ethics.
But we're presently in the middle of the long transition in which not everyone has figured that out yet, and in which we don't have a widely-agreed-upon moral stance on the subject that reconciles the need to do something about it with our existing value systems.
We're going to have to find it one way or the other, so the question is "when", not "if".
No doubt in 2174 we will have a bunch of new issues that are at different places in the pipeline. We'll probably be debating the ethics of mind-control implants or something. But in the meantime this one will solved.
>You may not like FB, IG, TikTok, etc.. I certainly don't care for any of these products. But these are communications platforms.
That may have been true once upon a time (i.e. back in the day when your FB feed was chronological and random posts from unrelated/unwanted crazies would not show up on your device unless a friend forwarded it to you).
What are your feelings on production and propagation of "foods" rich in refined sugar?
To be clear, I find your thoughts interesting and worth understanding, but if you also believe that the government has zero business in public health decisions involving refined sugars, then we just fundamentally disagree about what good governance is. (nevermind the social media element, which is new and evolving and a higher-dimensional problem space)
And that's ok. I will likely vote and conspire against the interests of people like this (with that view of government) until I the day I die (or my mind is changed), and cultivate communities that openly resist building the world based on those assumptions.
That is not really possible. In the US you are required to send your children into public education unless you can afford private education. That public education requires students to use the internet. So you can't just opt out
Social media is not the Internet, but I think you are raising an important point. Schools are run by uninformed people, who introduce absurd policies, when it comes to prerequisites of usage of online services. It is hard for parents to get to their right of not having to participate in these disservices.
I imagine in the US there could be cases, where parents with the required pocket change can sue the school or something, to get it done, but if I think about my own home country, I have my doubts, whether anything would be resolved, before the time of a child in that school is over and in addition to that, there is no accountability for abysmal tech decisions in institutions such as schools. No one is losing their job for forcing children to use social media, unfortunately, even though every adult, especially one to work with children, should know by now, that this cannot be conforming with data protection laws. We simply punish incapable reckless behavior way too rarely.
This assumes that humans are rational agents. I think that drug addiction, wars in Israel and Ukraine, conspiracy theorists, and free-climbers sufficiently prove that this is not the case.
If only life were so easy, we would not even need to have this discussion.
It's the country's role or more specifically, the role of education to equip citizens with skills that will help them navigate virtual, deceiving and fake internet space.
> Being exposed to shit on the internet teaches you there's bullshit on the internet, and not to believe everything you see
Maybe it taught you that, but there are plenty of people that grow up on the Internet who do not learn these lessons. Take a look at any conspiracy message board, group, etc.
Akin to saying something like, "let it happen, that'll teach 'em"
> if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them
Just don't smoke! Just don't drink alcohol! Just don't eat junk food! Just go to the gym!
> Restrict your children's access to these platforms
That's exactly what the article suggests should happen, plus some protections for children enshrined in law. You can find these suggestions at the end of the post, in the section "What now?"
> But these are communications platforms. Restricting the right to free speech does have negative consequences...
I take issue with the argument that promoting these social media platforms is tantamount to fostering free speech and denouncing them amounts to eroding this right. No one should expect technology assisted broad cast abilities as part of a doctrine of governments and the State not restricting speech.
Your argument is convincing if you ignore the studies cited by this author, or the fact these two phenomena (video games and social media) are entirely different and have social as well as individual impact.
I also disagree with the notion that limiting certain addictive communications tools from minors is an unconstitutional restriction on free speech.
This is naive. Not using any of these platforms means that for a great degree you are isolating yourself socially.
Big tech already plays a alrge part in how our society is shaped and defending them means they don't have to face their responsibilities. Boiling this down a mere question of "free speech" is a very amerocentric point of view.
I am into wildlife & nature in general. In my country, public institutions in charge with wildlife & nature have started for some time posting interesting videos, projects and images on facebook. They don't post them anywhere else, if you can believe it.
Here, everyone has facebook, from your grandma to your little cousin. My family is spread all over the country and you can keep in touch via text, phone but seeing what they are doing with pictures on facebook is very convenient and helpful.
Yes, the older/younger crowd do eat up conspiracies on facebook, sadly. They also don't read news sites, all the news is from facebook and TV maybe (older crowd).
Still, you are missing out a lot if you don't have it here. For example like meeting new people even. That "friends of friends" feature is immense. Kind of a social proof that you are normal/not a creep/have friends.
In the end it comes down to education. The first 7 years at home are ridiculously important. Then you have primary school for another 8 years, which is almost as important.
The social side of things is very difficult to work around.
Public institutions, however, should not be restricting information dispersal to third-party private companies who force even a casual viewer to agree to extensive legal contracts.
Is speech "free" if you're being manipulated? Someone goes on "social" media to look for political information on an upcoming election and finds themself drawn in to cult-level manipulation of facts all for engagement, is what they say after that truly "free" speech?
What we are missing in our society today is some essential negative
freedoms.
Most of us follow J.S. Mill's idea on restricting the influence of the
state. See the many comments in this thread decrying government
intervention to ban social media. That's a negative freedom, from
tyranny.
Mostly, we tend to emphasise positive freedoms, freedom to; run a
business, share speech, own technology. And that is good.
But there are negative freedoms, freedom from; coercion, the scourge
of drugs, poverty, censorship. Obviously many positive freedoms can be
expressed as negative ones, but how that logic is formulated in law
really matters.
Now the controversial bit:
What we are missing is laws that give people freedom from technology
The supposed "choice" to participate is not enough.
Like others here I've been a non participant in social media and
smartphones. I'm not a Luddite, I'm a computer scientist, but I
twigged this problem very early having dealt with addiction and
recognising how abuse is mediated by technology. I even wrote a book
about it [1].
The problem is, life is made very difficult for those who want to
exercise choice. Presently one must live as a second class citizen, in
what feels like racism and prejudice of technological snobbery. It is
utterly unnecessary.
Governments do not need to ban smartphones or social media for kids or
for anyone. Making this only about kids is a cop-out. It's
leveraging emotional messaging to side-step a bigger problem nobody
wants to face - that our whole society is under siege from technology
overuse. The more general problem is that we've entered a period of
technological over-reach. Kids don't just feel peer pressure to get a
smartphone and social media, they live in a society that wants to
mandate it.
Whether for kids or adults, we need to strongly protect the rights of
those who want a less technologically mediated (and encumbered - yes
it's not all "convenience") lifestyle. This needs us to maintain
plurality of access;
No services for government, schools, health available *only* on
proprietary and "smart" platforms. Requirement to maintain
traditional paper and interpersonal modes.
End the insanity of a "cashless society", and "smart societies"
that exclude basic human interaction and require and assume
smartphones with apps.
Strongly protect the rights of parents to choose how their kids use
technology, for example in schools, and the attitudes they are
raised with.
Governments can ensure negative freedoms without just banning stuff.
"The freedom from the scourge of drugs" is why I can't buy an asthma inhaler without paying out the nose to see a specialist that will prescribe it to me. As a result I don't have an asthma inhaler. I feel very free when breathing gets hard.
This is a snarky comment, but this is the consequence of this "negative freedom".
I do think that there's some merit to these ideas, but I think it would always leave the choice to the individual. But we also have to realize that some things you just can't opt out of, eg electromagnetic radiation from cell towers.
That’s why we allow children to purchase cigarettes and alcohol and if parents don’t want their kids partaking they can just restrict their access, right?
In my country, India, these platforms are used less for free speech and more for brainwashing and spreading hate and misinformation. Most of these posts are in Hindi, a major language around here, and call for all kinds of hate such as suppression of a specific religion, call for genocide, invading and acquiring neighboring countries etc.
I've tried reporting such posts multiple times but hate filled posts are neither removed, nor restricted. If a platform cannot provide adequate moderation, it should stop operating in my country and be held responsible for providing a platform for spreading hate pseudo-anonmously.
How is this example any different than what the parent has said? If people feel these platforms are negatively impacting them, they should stop using them. Or do you believe others or the government has a right to disallow what people want to watch via their own choices? You may call it brainwashing but others may disagree.
I have seen some of the same with Sri Lankan posts. Loathsome stuff in Sinhala. Not calling for genocide, but definitely encouraging persecution and bigotry. One group that was particularly poisonous was removed after a campaign by many people. One person complaining gets nowhere. I am sure there is more similar material elsewhere.
I think the underlying issue is that American companies view everything through the lens of American culture and if its not a problem in the US, then it is not offensive.
I once reported a racist comment on FB. Someone said that people of their race should not "interbreed" with people of another race because the latter are evil. FB said it did not violate their community standards.
IMO it was probably because it was a comment by a black person (probably American) about white people. That is not the major problem is the US so its fine.
> Restricting the right to free speech does have negative consequences... from the development of critical thinking skills; development of technical skills; and limiting of educational information.
That's not true. Those things are limited in bubbles like the one of the rationalists as well, so free speech has nothing to do with why people don't develop these things. It's a matter of character; and obedience to a system that establishes the rules that evaluate social, academic and economic status.
The Supreme Court was capable of distinguishing between free speech and moron speech but the Party was too convincing.
Most of the parents of these kids don't have the required flow of information to handle their kids consumption. And more importantly, their stress levels are too damn high already. Which is also the result of the Party's long term strategy.
And if all the other parents say it's normal and the same for their kids, even those parents where it is not the case, which are those that know that's why their kids will be better off while everything collapses (vs making sure their kids are better off while nothing collapses), then there is no way but super-rationality to identify a problem and then there's the willpower to go against the accusations and the time required for researching strategies to deal with the problem while the rest of the world, and school, and one's own life keep working as they always did.
If there's bait, the untrained puppy bites. Unless the untrained puppy was trained to bite and puke it out afterwards to find hints at who put the bait right in the path of all those innocent puppies.
> if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them. Restrict your children's access to these platforms.
That's not going to fix the echo chambers, divisive conspiracy groups, anti semitic posts and generally all the other terrible uses for online platforms that contribute to the destabilization of our society.
You can't make a social problem go away by telling individuals "if you don't like this problem please avoid it". Similarly, you can't expect to tell people "the effects of methamphetamine are negative for our entire society so please don't partake". For problems that become a state, country or even world problem, something else is needed.
> And just like the Supreme Court wrote 30 years ago, the answer is the same today: if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them. Restrict your children's access to these platforms.
100% my reply to any critic of teenage social media, but the parents' stance is always "but then my kid is going to FOMO and feel left out".
If parents really want to set a good example, they ought to also quit their smartphones and Social Media--or at least hide it better. Kids are really good at identifying hypocrisy. When they see their parents glued to their phones and scrolling Instagram all day, after being told "Oh, don't do that, it's not good for you" they know their parents are full of shit.
And, the trouble is: Most of these adults are addicted to their smartphones and social media, too. Everyone is. I go to birthday parties with my kid, and sporting events, indoors and outdoors, and other kid activities, and the kids are for the most part jumping around having a ball, while the adults are huddled up by themselves, bathed in smartphone light, scrolling through their feeds getting their fix. Don't think this doesn't leave an impression on kids--it does.
So much this. I notice it a lot since I only use a dumbphone, and haven't bothered setting up a new laptop since my old one died during the covid times. It means that in social situations, I'm actually on board to engage with real people, since I'm not carrying any other distractions.
I feel a distinct drain in the social energy when some of the people present have their eyes glued to their phones. It would actually be better if they weren't even there.
I think that feeling of draining comes from the fact that if you do want something from them, like asking what they're ordering for food, or if we should go to another venue, you have to put in more effort. They need to do a context switch in which they look at you blankly while you bring them up to speed on what is happening.
> When they see their parents glued to their phones and scrolling Instagram all day, after being told "Oh, don't do that, it's not good for you" they know their parents are full of shit.
Watching your parents turn into smartphone zombies should be a warning sign, maybe even something to rebel against.
Unfortunately children do tend to pick up their parents' behaviors, bad and good.
I'm not surprised that some children do becomes Luddite, just like some becomes teetotaler because of drunkard parents. Unfortunately most of them also become drunkards.
My kids watch a lot of YouTube/TikTok and playing computer games... Yet I don't. I sit in front of my PC all day for work and after work (after dinner) I also spend a ton of time in front of my PC doing things like learning how to make circuit boards, learning new programming languages, OpenSCAD (CAD) design work, and more.
I tell them they spend too much time watching videos and playing games and should "branch out" into new hobbies. Do they do this? No.
That is to say, I don't think hypocrisy has anything to do with it.
>I sit in front of my PC all day for work and after work (after dinner) I also spend a ton of time in front of my PC doing things like [...]
If they see you watching a YouTube video about circuitry or whatever, are they registering "that's an educational video about circuits" or are they just seeing the YouTube logo and thinking "Wow, $parent watches a lot of YouTube"?
Any kid is just going to register that you spend 10 (or whatever) hours a day on the computer, they aren't going to be categorizing your use into educational or not.
This is tearing me apart. On one hand I believe if we blocked all the bad stuff like YT, social media, games... they would certainly be bored more easily and get into more "wholesome" activities. On the other hand, I don't know if there are negative side effects of going full authoritarian that would outweigh the benefits. For now we walk the line, limiting social media but allowing some YT and games.
One unintended consequence I noticed already with time-limiting YT, is the kid is carefully planning her YT viewing usage and ends up not branching out to crafting/educational/etc. videos because she doesn't want to run out of time for the fun stuff. So this ends up unintentionally killing the desired content.
My gut feeling is that setting an example by doing (so like what you described) and occasionally recruiting the kid for assisting (but not forcing them to participate too much) is the right way forward. We'll see I guess...
I mean, it sounds like your kids are just following the example you set. They're watching you sit in front of a screen as a form of recreation and they're simply doing the same. I think it's also worth noting that your hobbies are solo activities, so even if your kids did want to connect with you in a non-screen hobby, you'd be unavailable anyways. Maybe you could make the first move and invite them to do something outside with you?
I partially understand sporting events if people does not know each other, but birthdays?
Which country is this and what kind of people do you meet in this events? I ask because here in Poland behaving like this still would be seen as major insult and such people would be marked as outsiders. And this label comes with social stigma that can be transferred to child (you can forget about ever being invited to other people homes for children meetups).
I'm going to address you because you sound like a parent as well and I want to seriously discuss the alternatives.
For three hours in the evening 5 days a week plus ~12 hours on weekends at least half of watching kids is almost as engaging as staring at a wall. Keeping them fed, entertained, alive, and healthy can be fun and engaging like rolling around or story time or singing songs, or if she wants help learning about a toy. But the rest of the time I'm just around while she plays semi-independently to make sure nothing dangerous happens and give her validation when she shows me something she did.
Are we just supposed to sit there and stare at the wall for 20 hours a week? When you try to go phone-free what do you... do?
Highly recommend the recent book How to Raise a Healthy Gamer: End Power Struggles, Break Bad Screen Habits, and Transform Your Relationship with Your Kids [0].
It goes over many of the issues adjacent to social media usage and how to resolve them, starting with how to understand them.
It's like the people who willingly pay $15/mo for World of Warcraft and wonder why the game doesn't get any better, play for one hour and then watch Asmongold for 8 hours (I love Asmon btw).
Maybe when you get home, smartphones go into a box by the door. Like how you take off shoes. Then you pick it up again to go out. Maybe leave the ring tone on loud in case anything urgent is needed.
This author is seriously suggesting that governments ban children's use of social media, and that can't really be done without completely destroying internet anonymity.
Any policy that actually achieved this, without being trivial to circumvent, would basically need to replicate the great firewall of China.
Doing this in a half-assed way is even worse than not doing anything at all. If you just require ID checks for all users to do age verification, you create a privacy nightmare for the adults. Meanwhile, children will circumvent the restrictions with VPNs, so you need to ban VPNs too. Foreign companies, who have no incentive to play by the rules, will surely capitalize on this, so you also need a comprehensive website blocking system. As they say, there's nothing more dangerous than a teenager with very little money and a lot of time on their hands, so a simple DNS-based block definitely won't suffice, you probably need Chinese-style deep packet inspection and such.
The only middle ground I see here is enforcing this through the App Stores, perhaps with an extra ban on sideloading without a developer certificate, guarded byID checks. Losing the ability to sideload would be a shame, but this is the "worst solution, except for all the others" kind of situation. Sure, this is trivial to circumvent by using the web, but the extra friction required due to web apps being worse than native might be a good enough deterrent.
Of course people think of solving this problem again by constraining the consumer, instead of the producer.
What we should do is make rules for social media platforms to disallow them to develop algorithms that make people addicted. You might think how do you define that, but the companies have already made a whole science out of it so it's not that abstract anymore. It would sure be an elaborate task and will surely result in a cat and mouse game, but at least the issue would be taken seriously and people will understand better that engaging with these platforms that try to push the edges is playing with fire.
> You might think how do you define that, but the companies have already made a whole science out of it so it's not that abstract anymore
Hardly. Addictiveness does not exist in binary. There are many people who obsessively check their email or refresh news websites. There is no doubt that social media companies choose the algorithms that maximize engagement and so most probably they also maximize addiction, but _any_ algorithm will cause addiction to some extent. What's the limit? How do we even measure this?
Something that is maybe a little more interesting is banning the practice of recommending "negative content" because it produces more engagement than "positive content". How this is defined is also somewhat squishy, but we can at least try to define it -- content that is likely to provoke negative emotions, like anger, fear, aggression, etc.
I think there's a much clearer through-line to argue that recommending negative content on social media produces a substantial negative externality, and that moves this into the category of things like environmental regulations.
Absolutely this. It’s not about banning content - to a certain extend parents are responsible for what their kid has access to. In many cases proper education allows kids to self regulate and consume “adult” content appropriately with no harm. Unfortunately that’s not possible everywhere as many countries lack the resources and/or mentality to achieve this.
Regardless, dangerous content and services (just like dangerous substances) should be hard to make and very visibly marked, leaving no doubt about what it is and how it works. I love the EU’s notion of “algorithmic transparency” [0]. I would go a step further for systems attempting to increase engagement by exploiting behavioural sensitivities to be marked and even opt-in (think cigarette packaging).
There are two avenues to deal with a hazard. You can try to manipulate the environment to eliminate the hazard, or you can try to strengthen people to make them immune to the hazard. I think we should prefer the latter over the former whenever possible.
For one thing, it's more robust. The environment is messy and control is often illusory at best. Control limits freedoms and introduces centralized points of failure that can be manipulated by bad actors. Making people strong and free creates more opportunity and innovation, even though it scares the people who long to be in charge of the centralized control.
What does it mean to strengthen people to make them immune to the harms caused by social media? I don't know exactly, but I bet we could find out.
I think we should start with removing the immunity that large platforms possess against relevant criminal prosecutions. So let's take for example suicide, in some jurisdictions driving another individual toward suicide is a criminal matter. If evidence can be put forward in a court that they used a lot of social media and that the algorithm contributed to that suicide, well maybe the publisher should be getting prosecuted.
Do I expect that some social media companies are really going to struggle to continue to operate at their current scale because of these changes? Yes I 100% expect it and I think it's great. It may lead to a smaller and more personal web. Your business model has no inherent right to exist if it harms people. Maybe, for example, you will need to hire more humans to handle moderation so that you stop killing people, and if humans don't scale, well, too bad, you're going to get smaller. We regulate gambling, tobacco etc. to limit the harm they do, I don't see any difference with social media.
To have the biggest impact without stifling innovation we can start by applying this rule to platforms which are above a certain revenue level. There is likely a combination of legislative and judicial action here in that there may already be crimes on the books which these platforms are committing, but the judiciary has not traditionally thought of a corporation being the person who committed that crime, certainly not at scale against thousands of victims. In other cases we may need to amend laws to make it clear that just because you used an algorithm to harm people at scale, doesn't make you immune to consequences from the harm you caused.
No, there's not. There's any number of ways to deal with a hazard. Your two avenues are not even distinct. Both require exerting control. Any scheme can be manipulated by bad actors. Scheming to not scheme is still scheming.
You cannot make people anything without limiting their freedom. How do you make people stronger? If you have an idea, there is a centralised point of control/failure. Bad actors will be more strong and free as well.
There's plenty of examples of successful measures to reduce harm by controlling the "environment" see: cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, being old enough to drive on public roads, being old enough to take on debt, child labour, etc.
It's weird to use the words "environment" and "hazard" on one hand and "people" on the other. The discussion is about hazards designed, created and maintained by people. The environment to manipulate is people, organisations, and law.
As a friend of mine said "If you can't kid-proof the farm, you have to farm-proof the kid". Watched said kid drink from farm puddles, and lick feed bowls. Seems to have worked: She's headed to tech school now.
I agree that we can't effectively manipulate the environment to eliminate the hazard, but I also worry that we can't effectively strengthen people to make them immune to the hazard either.
A common thread through all human history is people being misled on-mass. Before social media we were slaves to the tabloid headlines. Before widespread papers we were slaves to the pulpit. Etc.
For the last 10 years social media has been the tabloid but personalised. Outrage = engagement so the algorithms have pushed outrage, and personalized in the sense that they have searched for the thing that outrages each of us individually.
I fear that the next 10 years of social media is very basic generative stuff (LLMs don't need to get better; social media companies just have to apply what the current art), turning them into tabloid with intimacy. By turning into your friend in how they communicate with you, they get engagement x10.
The way to change someones mind is through intimacy.
And humans are suckers for it. We can't strengthen the masses against outrage, and we can't strengthen the individual against intimacy.
If the hazard is just me skulking about and punching you in the back of your head every time you let your guard down, you could strengthen yourself and make yourself immune by never going outside and always keeping your door locked and barring up your windows.
How is that inherently preferable to the addressing the harm itself? By what principle do you conclude that we should prefer one over the other whenever possible?
We spend enormous amounts of time and energy trying to pick up the pieces of the destruction being left in the wake by social media giants as they get absurdly rich. How about we instead simply make the giants liable for what gets posted on their platforms? Let the “move fast and break things” crowd that is so certain of their own genius spend their billions on figuring it out instead of on how to get you to click on another ad.
They will figure out a solution very quickly or they will simply cease to exist, and either way the problem will be solved.
> How about we instead simply make the giants liable for what gets posted on their platforms?
Because social media is a tool for global social influence and global intelligence that the powers that be do not want to give up. Because those same powers are often invested in social media companies or don’t want to get on their list of enemies. Because it might look bad politically if it proved unpopular. Because they are all social media addicts. Take your pick.
The largest social media platforms should be required to federate and open their data through powerful APIs.
Once they control a significant part of society's communications they own society something in return. Let society access our communications how we choose.
It’s ridiculous to suggest that you destroy all of internet anonymity by requiring ID for mass-scale ad-funded social media
It’s the commercial side of the equation that’s the problem. It’s what gives these social media companies perverse incentives when it comes to engagement. So any social media site that can’t effectively tap into the US ad market at a significant scale will not have as much of a problem. I don’t think the pre-Facebook forums was as much of a problem even though they might have had some ads here and there.
So VPNs and all that just isn’t a concern. You don’t need a great firewall. You just need to regulate commercial business, which is not at all a crazy proposition.
The other side of this is that the US really, really should implement an effective federal ID system with two factor authentication. This is becoming commonplace almost everywhere else in the world, and not having it creates very serious security and privacy risks.
Facebook already knows how old its users are with a great degree of accuracy. The block does not have to be perfect to be effective at a societal level. Some curious kids may circumvent it. But it would prevent the massive network effect whereby all teen social life is online on platforms that monetize them.
Some very large fines for social media companies found providing services to minors would make it impossible to advertise to teens there, and would make a huge difference.
Even if Facebook implements these controls, what guarantee do we have that another social app won't come along without these controls? Do we regulate TikTok, Youtube, Snapchat, GroupMe or whatever the latest flavor of the month is as well? There are probably thousands of startups that would jump at the chance to monetize teenagers even if FB were to step aside.
Social media != the Internet. It would make it harder to sign up for an account with the large social media services covered by the law. They would need to check ids, or outsource to someone who does.
It would be like creating a bank account.
You could do plenty of other things. Anything you don't need an account for isn't covered. Depending on how the law is implemented, perhaps many forums wouldn't be covered?
I think it would result in kids going to websites that their parents haven't heard of yet and don't check ids.
Technically true, but social interaction is the great draw of the internet. Even Zawinski's Law noticed that every program expands to include social features or is replaced by those that do.
A similar form of middle ground without touching the app/web level may be to enable device parental controls by default on new Phone and Tablet purchases and rationing its removal with some kind of privacy-preserving ID hashing protocol that's also rate-limited per ID. 90% of the problem is mobile device ease related, it doesn't need to extend to PCs. Still a ton of burdensome consequences.
But really, the best policy would be constant social and educational emphasis on device parental control feature awareness - similar to drunk driving campaigns. Get parents and guardians in the habit of taking 15 min to set up basic parental controls BEFORE handing devices to kids. Rather than the all-too-common mess of reacting to a problem by taking the kids phone or making them manually show everything after the damage is already done. Maybe also compel device manufacturers to incorporate a first-time-setup flow that has a specific soft ask of "Will this device be given to or borrowed by a child?" that then handholds the owner through setting up controls.
>elevate internet anonymity to a new fundamental principle for organizing society
You mean privacy? Internet anonymity is a downstream byproduct of our right to privacy, not some new concept devised in the internet age. We've had the fourth amendment for quite some time.
I would not feel safe painting a target on my back if I was required to attach my legal name to my comments, especially the ones advocating for queer rights.
Achieving 90% of not is simpler than you think: ban smartphones from schools during school bours. If the parents want the kid to have a phone, then the parents can get a flip phone.
I think we should go even further: ban all phones during school hours. There is absolutely no reason that kids need to have a phone in school. If the parent needs to reach them, then call the school office who can get your kid on the line. There is no emergency so dire that a few minutes' delay in talking to your child will make a meaningful difference.
Would this be a federal ban, a state-level ban managed by education boards, or something else?
And how is it enforced exactly? Are parents held responsible, or are state education funds impacted somehow based on smartphone use?
Would we need a federal mandate to require flip phone / feature phone support? The last time I tried to find a feature phone it wasn't easy, many depend on 2G/3G networks which are losing support and carriers have absolutely no incentive to carry feature phones when smartphones are all that sell.
> that can't really be done without completely destroying internet anonymity.
This is why I can’t take any calls for banning social media for kids on HN seriously: The moment anyone introduced any legislation to limit social media access by age, this creates a de facto requirement to verify ID. The people in this thread would be up in arms as soon as the government tried to force companies to collect their ID to use social media.
> government tried to force companies to collect their ID to use social media.
I'm strongly opposed to ID collection of any kind. But I think age bans are a good idea.
Why not sell age verification codes at physical stores? One code per account per website. It's good for 2 years and costs no more than $5. You can pay cash at the store and the sales clerk may only check your ID, as though they were selling you tobacco or alcohol. They cannot record anything.
There will still be straw purchases, just like booze and cigs. But it makes it easier to police the ban on minors joining social media without seriously compromising anonymity for adults. Few kids in my high school smoked or drank. Most couldn't access those things. And social media has network effects. If most kids can't join it, the rest probably won't bother.
With the rise of IA, identity verification on the internet is going to be inevitable on the internet anyway, to make sure people are actually humans. But it doesn't need to break anonymity, cryptography can be used to allow for a zero-knowledge humanity or age proof.
Fighting against regulations in the name of anonymity is the best way to actually harm anonymity. We can have both (while we currently have neither in practice …)
That will look real good, a parent decides certain reading and social activities are okay for their child, and now it's time for the government to punish everyone involved.
> there's nothing more dangerous than a teenager with very little money and a lot of time on their hands, so a simple DNS-based block definitely won't suffice, you probably need Chinese-style deep packet inspection and such
Or just give them some money and something to do? Why fight fire with fire, just makes bigger fire
You're going way too far in your reasoning, acting as if the state had to directly enforce it itself. But it doesn't have to: social networks are run by companies that makes profit doing so and that can be strong-armed into doing the control by themselves or be fined if they fail to comply (and we're talking about company whose entire business is about profiling their users to maximize their ads revenues, so they have zero difficulty recognizing teenagers, and more importantly content that is targeted at teenagers).
And even more importantly you're missing the point of why people go to social networks in the first place: because everybody they know is there! If it becomes cumbersome to access, most people won't go, and then there's no more appeal. It's not as if it was porn or stuff like that, that has a purpose on its own that makes people willing to circumvent the restrictions no matter what. Social networks are “networks” and if you break the network effect, you've broken the system. American people don't go on VK not because it's less good than Facebook, but because there's no point in doing so.
I have to say, I still just don't believe him. I think Nature's criticism is accurate. He's cherry-picking data that shows the rise in depression started in 1999 and only somewhat accelerated around 2010-11. And I think there is another obvious culprit and it's the rise of authoritarianism and particularly right-wing media. Something that has been a major trend since about 1999.
> and that can't really be done without completely destroying internet anonymity.
doesn't have to in the general case
maybe just have it at the OS level, have parents set up the phone, prompt on setup whether it's intended for use by a minor or not, use that flag to enable/disable access to social media
that's not really the same as banning social media for all minors and imo makes too much sense, more likely that congress will push something that fucks over anonymity more
Kids are given a phone and access to social media by their parents (who are also users most likely). I don't see parents saying oh please block this out of my kid's hands with deep packet inspection or ID checks. These people can just install Family Link or whatever and set limits, and be parents. But they just won't do it. Some don't even know it exists. Kids are clocking 5h+ of mobile use / day, with poor sleep patterns and digital hygiene. No limits. That's the real issue.
Stores that sell age restricted products already can also sell "adult passes".
Each adult pass costs less than $5, and contains a single use scratch off code that you can use to prove you are of age. When you want to sign up for social media or porn, you need a code. Mutiple companies can implement and sell them.
I don't think you have to destroy internet anonymity. Just fine parents like $25 or $50 bucks every time anyone can link their kid to social media use. Give people rewards for reporting it or something. Even as little as driving kids towards platforms that incentivize anonymous interaction over real name and face stuff is probably enough move the needle. That said, I think social media use has a very overlapping relationship with allowing kids unsupervised and/or frequent and lengthy use of tablets and phones from early ages, which I suspect is also destructive.
But then they will contest the claim, it will then have to be investigated, and that will cause huge amounts of pointless busywork that will amount to no clear evidence. Not worth it for such a small fine
In 2023, I would glue my self to the phone after reading book to our kid. But then our 5 year old would want to see what I am doing on my phone.
One day I was reading a reddit thread while she wanted to tell me something that happened in school. Someone told her her school lunch stinks because it is vegetarian and I brushed it aside.
That moment was a wake up call. I was addicted to a stupid reddit thread ignoring a real issue.
Now I don't use the phone around sleep time. We read books, talk about the day, get bored and tell imaginative stories but no phones.
The nice effect of that is I sleep earlier and have much better quality of sleep. Less baggy eyes.
Not using phone before sleep has increased quality of life significantly. I have longer attention spans during the day as well.
We really underestimate how negatively it's impacting our quality of life that we don't let ourselves get bored anymore.
My kids liked to listen to the radio while in the car. We stopped doing that - they fight it but we have conversations we otherwise wouldn't. Oh, and less Doja Cat in our lives isn't such a bad thing either.
I grew up in Sweden, where strong alcohol is only sold in a state owned company and the same for gambling, so this probably make me have another view of this than people from other countries. I do believe that there has to be some sort of laws around how social media, or really "endless scrolling of content" is done. It's seriously addictive, I feel it myself, and just letting people "be free and choose what to do" results in addicts in real life. If people and society is hurting because of this, it would be good to fix it.
I think that an easy start is to require every platform that has addictive endless scrolling, or endless suggestions for what to watch next, to have a soft limit. After some regular time, information is shown that "you are on an addictive platform and taking breaks from it is good for your mental health". "Algorithms are made to keep your attention, often by making you angry and upset. Remember that this is easily fixed by stepping off this platform". It is basically a version of "smoking kills", or "don't drink and drive", but for the digital age. I think it is an easy thing to legislate (as easy as those things get), still allows people to be "free", and that could actually have a positive effect on the world.
> I grew up in Sweden, where strong alcohol is only sold in a state owned company
It worked so well, that alcoholism rates in Sweden are higher than in some countries where the sales of strong alcohol are not a state monopoly. A closer look shows that even the neighboring Scandinavian countries are doing better..
Your comment makes zero sense. Are you implying that the sales restrictions are causing the high alcoholism rates?
If so: that's an absurd contention.
If not: perhaps the regulation is a response to the levels of alcoholism? Or is entirely independent of them? You present no evidence that the monopoly is either harmful or ineffective.
Yeah, but you have to remember that people answer questions such as "are you an alcoholic" a bit different in different countries. Go to any polish person drinking beer every day and they will say they are of course not an alcoholic (real example).
I will attempt to at least inject some hope into this discussion.
My formative years from ages 15-25 were spent in the 80's and 90's. It was the apex of the mall experience. We saw the mall as a place to get away from our parents, hang out with our buds, run into other classmates and feel some sense of freedom while running amok playing video games in the arcade and chowing down tacos in the food court.
Then smartphones and the internet came and all the malls started closing up, dying off and there was an entire generation that just ignored or forgot about them. Most of the malls around where I live have all but closed.
There are still a few open and now? They're thriving. My family now goes together on the weekends and its amazing. All the teenagers are in the food court, in their groups, talking, eating and socializing. You see groups of teens wondering in and out of the stores. I see a very similar cultural revolution happening and its really refreshing. The mall is truly a phoenix rising from its once former ashes. The major anchor stores are constantly busy no matter what night you go there. The movie theater is busy almost every night and its packed on the weekends. Its like an entire generation has re-discovered the mall again and its refreshing to see.
Sometimes I feel like I'm in a dream because so many other malls just north or south of us have either died and been leveled, or are in various forms of trying to reinvent themselves as something else before its too late.
Either way, what I saw in my experiences at our local mall gave me hope that the Zoomers are in some ways, taking a break from their phones and going out and having a different experience and returning to socializing with their friends and creating a new way of connecting with people they're close to. My son said he still uses his phone when he's at the mall, but just to make plans to meet his other buddies and coordinate where they're all going to meet up. For the most part, once they meet up, they all stop using their phones.
> Its like an entire generation has re-discovered the mall again and its refreshing to see... Sometimes I feel like I'm in a dream
I am really really sorry to go off-topic here, but as an European this is... So strange and slightly hilarious to me. We went to a park. Or local river/lake.
"As a European", no we didn't. Europe is far too big to generalize so casually like that. In many northern parts of Europe it is frequently raining. In the 80s and 90s me and my friends spent our time indoors because when it was either cold, or cold and wet. You might get a month or two in summer when the weather was better - if you were lucky. So we spent our time indoors, doing homework or on computers, or round each other's houses (playing video games with each other).
A mall would have been a useful place to hang out because it's under a roof and there are things to do, but there were very few good malls in that part of the UK and anyway to get to them you'd have to be able to drive. But there's no culture of young driving there. In the USA in some states you can drive at 14! In the UK you can't even start learning until 16 and in most of Europe the minimum driving age is 18.
So did I, as an American. Locale, culture, and parents' values probably have more influence on this than continent.
That said, I don't think there's anything particularly strange/hilarious about people congregating in spaces built for congregation or feeling nostalgia for those spaces and experiences as they've begun to fade away. Memories can be made anywhere, and not everyone has access to the green spaces that you and I did as children.
Interesting point you bring up. With e-commerce, I am surprised that malls can work at all.
There is a brand new, massive and beautifully designed mall in The Netherlands called Westfield Mall of the Netherlands.
I went there once to quickly grab something and I got hopelessly lost, even while my phone navigation actually was able to display and navigate the layout of the mall, due to the sheer size I underestimated the navigational challenge my little trip would pose.
The mall really blew me away with its beauty and I am still completely flabbergasted how this can work financially, I perhaps incorrectly assumedthat everybody is like me, ordering everything online.
Although hard to believe, your argument may actually have a lot of thruth in it.
Malls provide a few benefits and attract some key shoppers in my opinion. Many malls near me open at 5am to "walkers". Basically seniors looking for a place to walk indoors. They often populate the food court once it starts to open. When I'm in a mall, many shoppers are older adults (remember, they didn't grow up with same day shipping and one click checkout). Lastly, as a parent with kids, there's huge benefit to holding up a pair of pants to my 3 year to see if they will fit. A 3T size from X clothing company is very different from a 3T from Y clothing company. We pretty much buy 100% of our kids clothes from a mall. These are just 3 examples of heavy mall users, I'm sure there are many more.
Westfield's basically the only company left making money on malls, because they made a crucial observation: The anchor store is dead. Sears, Macy's, etc., they're in direct competition with Amazon, and they're losing their shirts. Most malls had made huge concessions to these anchor stores, operating under the assumption that they were why anybody goes to the mall, but Westfield pushed the opposite: People go to the mall when they want attainable luxury. People going to the mall in the 21st century aren't going there because they need something specific. People go to the mall to see a wide assortment of luxuries, recreational activities, and food options, so that they can treat themselves a little. Board game shops, brand-specific retailers like Doc Martin or Abercombie, Lego stores, jewelers.
And it works. Walking around Valley Fair (Westfield's flagship location in San Jose) is fun. You can wander the place for a good long time, being presented with a seemingly never ending array of frivolous luxuries, and even if you don't end up buying any clothes or jewels or whatever, you can swing by the food vendors for some fancy ice cream at Salt 'N Straw.
> Total retail floor area 117,000 m2 (1,260,000 sq ft)
> Parking 4,000
That retail floor area is enormous!
And, LOL: If this was US, parking would be 10x!
FYI: Westfield is a huge global mall developer. Before 9/11, they ran the mall under NYC World Trade Center. It was one of the highest grossing retail spaces in the world. They must have done a lot of market analysis before they built that mall in the Netherlands.
Not only malls, in Europe and Scandinavia, many small towns and cities that has seen greater days are working hard to make it more livable for people of all ages, incentivizing small shops of all kinds and prioritizing bikes and pedestrians while the cars have to stay on the outskirts of the town center.
It takes time though, but I see a trend and a hunger among people to reclaime physical spaces and to spend more time amongst each other, making room for chance encounters etc.
Readit News
She does this and all the while never leaves the house, other than to go to work. She doesn't share her actual thoughts and gets angry when asked about it. You might be reading this and thinking that there's more to it, but sadly there isn't. It's her life so I leave her alone, not my place to tell her what to do, and the emotional upheaval from her isn't worth it either.
But it's crazy that a person can get this lost in life and become completely devoid of purpose and meaning. It's one thing to have an issue and work through it slowly, but it's something else to isolate yourself and live your life through others - while those "others" prosper from your own ignorance.
I'm sure her past experiences are playing a role in this behavior, but the whole cosmetics things - I know for a fact there are a lot of influencers who peddle this crap, and if you lack self-awareness then I can see how easy it is to get stuck in this cycle. I just wish there was an easy way out of it.
That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you.
> It's bizarre.
Is it, though? Once you've felt said social scorn enough you no longer see words as a way to make friends, so turning to beauty is the natural progression. People like to be around beautiful people – or at least so it appears to those looking from the outside in, right? If that doesn't work, then you can easily fall into a cycle of thinking "maybe this next surgery is the one that will make me beautiful enough!"
I think the actual biggest problem with "Redditization" is not hostility, but instead the fact that there is really no dialogue. There's no back and forth discussion, at least not with the same actual individual. You post a comment and (maybe but usually not) get a reply, then if you reply to that reply, the next reply in thread will be from someone else. Very very rarely do you go back and forth with one person. And regardless, you'll never ever interact with that person again (except maybe if you're on a tiny sub).
It's such a odd and distorted version of conversation. I'm not talking to any specific "you" -- I'm submitting thoughts to a "mass-you" and hoping with fingers crossed that the mass-you will reply or at least nod in approval with a single upvote.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/1c0nuy6/it_is_impos...
It's infinitely sad that there's no place to just connect with people on the internet anymore. My post got 6 comments and a DM within the first minute, before the post got taken down. These people could have been new friends.
I've been through this cycle so many times I have long given up on trying to post on the internet. Logging on to find people and share thoughts only to be met with this massive wall of context and janitorial standards. I gave up like five years ago.
This is to say that the whole debate between "social media causes anxiety" and our landscape of social media causes anxiety makes this debate way too coarse. Getting on the internet between 2005-2012 felt happy, free, and was just a wellspring of community and connection. Post-2013 it's been a nightmarish hellscape on every platform.
Once the child grows, why would it look to family to help? It has already been institutionalised - it believes that government agencies, psychiatrists etc will help - the 'brokenness' is normal. The grown child won't look to those that would normally step in (family) - they have their own issues. In all honesty, its hard to say whether looking to institutions for help that is a bad decision anyway - how much harm do families cause?
Thankfully there are corners of cyberculture with a distinct anti-Reddit bent where hostility is almost a norm that you get desensitized to and you can see all manner of profound and stupid ideas and react with hostility in kind.
After spending time there, returning to Reddit feels like staring at pablum, and you start seeing gross inaccuracies get updooted, and the inconvenient truths get buried.
(you should imagine this was written by gigachad, and anyone who disagrees is a badly drawn wojak in some state of emotional distress)
I understand this fear when posting on reddit (or other social media) itself, but I am absolutely confused where this idea that this applies to reality comes from.
I'm more worried about the Linkednization. Where people share terrible views and nobody criticizes it because they don't want to be seen as someone that criticizes things.
Back in real world, I could never do it. If you could, that just means you lived in a bubble of like minded people.
Obviously this is not the context you're talking about, but I find this issue with brainstorming type sessions these days as well these days. Not just work sessions either, as another example, I'm on the advisory board for a local club, and the first meeting was really barren for quite a while.
It's gotten to the point that I always make sure to voice my philosophy early on - "not all ideas are good, but many good ideas start out as bad ideas and become good through conversation" - and proceed to throw a few incredibly stupid ideas to the group to break the ice. It seems to help.
You just described HN perfectly. I can shrug it off because I remain anon here and don't care about my rating, but I see other people being traumatized by this dynamic in other social media platforms.
I'm not sure what switched but I remember being on Slashdot and having people go off on me or others, and it was just hilarious. These days it seems like people are genuinely being traumatized regularly by the engagements.
Actually for me it's quite difficult sometimes to write thoughts on topics here. I'm just being afraid not to be understanded
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I would expect this to some extent when conversing with strangers IRL too. If it was a chat between friends, a rant here or there is OK because your friends know the real you and understand where you're coming from. Strangers won't be as charitable.
I’ll add that people addicted to social media become insufferable to share novel (often silly) thoughts around because the focus becomes dropping a zinger versus meaningfully engaging with what was said.
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> That's where social media has been most damaging. You can't share your thoughts anymore. The 'Redditization' of the world means that sharing thoughts is met with hostility. No longer can you just throw something out there, no matter how stupid. These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you.
I think that's an important point, that I think is partly due to culture of the spaces. For example, I almost never downvote anyone, and in particular not for them being wrong, unless it's something particularly harmful whose visibility would be damaging, or just a troll (quite rare usually). The downvote button seems important for those rare situations (maybe just a mod button would be enough?), but in general it should rarely be used.
Not only I've come to believe asking questions is important for beginners to learn, but also it's an important medium for everyone else (and in particular experts or more advanced learners) to exercise their knowledge by teaching stuff and learning to fill gaps in their knowledge.
I actually think reddit is pretty good in this regard, specially w.r.t. what we had before and other media like StackExchange. In SE, you're expected to search the site and often questions are met with arrogance. In oldschool forums, which I do like, there was (in almost every case I remember) an even greater air of elitism; although, on the other hand, it created a healthy eagerness to learn the norms and participate in a careful way. I tend to prefer the lower-stakes communication of HN-style boards though.
I think as with everything massification is a significant problem. I encourage everyone to participate in communities whose size feels 'just right'. Also, at least some of your interactions should be highly participative, and not just mindless consumption.
I think a final problem is that any activity of too narrow scope can be dangerous. If people are confined into extremely narrow interests and spend all their time on that, as opposed to learning everything about life, that can (and probably will in most cases) paint a distorted picture of reality and be very unhealthy. Broaden your curiosity :)
This is an immense impediment to writing for the academically-inclined, or merely one who still has some shred of epistemic integrity left, and a huge boon to the dogmatic mob of believers eager to strike down anyone who dares question their orthodoxy. For one, it takes time and substantial research to compose a thought that is both "true" and unique, buttressed by citations to other works or accepted facts; for the other, it is much easier to reply with a five-second thought in 280 characters with thought-terminating cliches branding the "other" as a deplorable undesirable whose ideas aren't worthy of an audience or a platform. That is, if you even get that far - these days it's more likely you will simply be downvoted into oblivion, your thoughts swiftly evicted into the memory hole, never to be seen again.
> Once you've felt said social scorn enough you no longer see words as a way to make friends, so turning to beauty is the natural progression.
Issues of "Redditization" and scorn aside, we are progressing into a post-literate society where the written word and other literary media are being eclipsed by audiovisual media such as YouTube or Instagram. While much of the western world is "literate," in that they understand how to read and write (basic) words and phrases, much of our life - especially online - takes place in a highly visual world of filtered photos and staged videos. It becomes increasingly difficult for one to represent themselves in a written, literary form, when the culture demands "pictures, or it didn't happen."
McLuhan in "Understanding Media" has written on how the preference of one sense over another (e.g. sight over sound) in differing societies has profound cultural impacts over the ways we think, act, and what we find permissible:
I talked so many times, tried to get an idea of what might drive him: travelling, learning, walking around in the mountain, making money, wasting money, drinking, smoking, drawing dicks on wall, anything! honestly, like "give me something to work with"...
He's been seeing a psychiatrist for a few years now... far as I can tell that is doing nothing...
He's a broken individual. I honestly do not know if there is a way back to reality for him (and so many others, these days)
Not that you shouldn't try. I hope you find a way.
It doesn't sound like your brother is exactly an addict (although maybe...), but this snippet sure sounds like he has an enabler in his life (emphasis mine):
> no job, no interest in work, no interest in getting out of the house
I heard something interesting on a podcast recently - Kara Swisher was interviewing her son who said that if you're Gen A, it's sort of hard not to be a nihilist. For me personally, I sort of look at how fast the world is heating up and do some basic math about life expectancy, and I'm sort of expecting to see some shit, but I can't imagine tacking on a decade or three to that.
Psychologically, what you're describing is anhedonia, but as someone with these tendencies myself, I sometimes wonder if I just lack whatever sorts of denial mechanisms most people have to get through the day.
a) The drive to change has to come from inside. I've seen quite a few people being sent to the online/gaming addiction group. Usually, they only come once.
b) Changing one self is hard generally. But here we got quite a bit of... idk, lets call it "damage". So many missing skills, confidence. So many bad, deeply ingrained habits. So many thoughts to avoid & distract from. And still no idea what will make me content.
c) I'm wondering quite often if not starting that journey would have been the better choice. If i could have found a way to stay happy. One motivator for me was the disdain for what i'd become, so no way back now. Now it'd be great to only disdain that past me ...
Why is interest in video games not a valid interest, or somehow a worse interest than a few that you listed like wasting money, drinking, smoking, drawing dicks on wall?
Is there no chance of interest in video game modding or content creation?
In my culture this is exactly what family should do.
"Soft doctors make stinking wounds".
If you loved your sister, you should do something, if direct confrontation isnt working, take another route.
> In my culture this is exactly what family should do.
I assume you mean "family should intervene here", because if you don't who would ?
I had to step in when my sister's post-natal drinking became too much. Everyone else turned a blind eye, but I couldn't stop thinking about my nephew and an emergency situation.
In a mini intervention, we snapped her out of it by saying you can't drive your baby to hospital in an emergency after 2-4 big glasses of wine (she was often on her own in the evenings); and if you did, child protective services would come down on you like hellfire. Plus a bit of "well prove us wrong that you don't need it to relax" etc.
It worked, quickly, luckily
If she gets angry about it, then probably there is something deeper going on. Or, you're just asking the wrong way (if you come in assuming there's no meaning/purpose to her life, that could easily happen).
If there's something deeper going on, then social media just amplifies things. Specifically about cosmetics and the beauty industry - people have complained about the effects of supermodels on TV, movies, billboards, magazine ads etc. for more than 30 years, social media has just taken it to the next level.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but I do think it's important to add depth to the argument if we actually want to change the world for a better place.
Sometimes caring about someone means showing them that what they think they want is garbage that's hurting them. That will probably hurt their feelings, and they might lash out at you for it, but the alternative is doing nothing or enabling them and watching them drown.
Probably he is old-fashioned and means the coventional old-style purpose and meaning, that old-timey thing that we'd call "actual purpose" nowadays.
Some backward people don't understand that "being isolated and doom scrolling all day" or "getting tons of destructive cosmetic surgeries" or "Amway" can also be a torally fine purpose in life.
> It's her life so I leave her alone, not my place to tell her what to do, and the emotional upheaval from her isn't worth it either.
Inverting the order of your explanations (to examine the weighting), we have:
If you were a parent talking about your child, people would certainly admonish you. Yet because she is a young adult and you are merely siblings, many more people might agree with your complete detachment.Can a person who obviously needs guidance/intervention not be worth the time ? Even though the person is in one's family ?
The narcissocial media actively create an illusion that gratifies loneliness and isolation. Modern urban life had already become a reality of denaturing, competition, isolation, and indifference. The antipatterns run deep.
But then you add...
> But it's crazy that a person can get this lost in life and become completely devoid of purpose and meaning.
Your family member seems to be in need of help. It takes a family/village, as they say. We too often omit to remind ourselves that a person becomes a person through other people. [1]
[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_philosophy
She needs to find it for herself, and then establish that as her anchor. If it is cosmetics, then so be it. I have no gripe with that. What I do have a gripe with is reluctancy to be a functional human being and engaging with your family and friends.
As I said in another comment, I offered to help her to do stuff online on multiple occasions. But she can't even accept that, or come to terms with it. Hypothetically, that might also mean she knows that perhaps it's not what she truly wants for herself, as far as building a life (anchor) around it.
I'm not detached, and neither is anyone in my family.
The thing is, I'm sure for her it doesn't feel that way. She probably feels a lot of purpose and meaning in following all these people online and participating in social activities around them. That's part of the addiction too - it can feel meaningful for a long time.
I saw a couple of years of similar reactions from my sisters after they went through some difficult times without any of us knowing (since they were studying abroad and this was before easy internet calling). They'd get mad when asked seemingly innocuous questions, which turned out to be because the way the questions were phrased came off as insulting or dismissive of their problems in some way. We didn't even know about these problems since they never told us, but that didn't really matter for them.
It took years of slowly rebuilding trust for them to open up again.
With social media, it’s hard to gauge what’s the chicken and what’s the egg in this issue. Is she on social media because she is depressed and the brain is looking for quick dopamine? Or is being in social media making her more depressed?
No (wo)man is an island, entire unto itself.
I'd highly recommend the book "Hikikomori: Adolescence Without End" by Saito Tamaki, translated by Jeffrey Angles. First published in 1998 it describes the "hikikomori" social/psychological phenomenon, and ways treatment has been approached. Ultimately, Saito observes that nobody can "fix" the individual hikikomori directly— therapy must be multi-faceted, continuous, and ongoing, focused on reducing stigma and shame. And for all that, may ultimately not be effective.
"Loser" is however you want to define it. If you legitimately want certain things (fitness, skills, whatever), then by all means go out and get them.
But don't forget some people are living in a hippie commune, or in a van, by choice. There's lots of these types that are completely broke and "losers" by some definition but they're fulfilled because they can spend more time hiking, painting, or whatever it is they want in life.
This is my long way of saying, don't let social media define what "success" is in your eyes :)
> I need to work on myself before I date or make new friends
Real friends/partners will see you at your worst and stick around. IMO if you think you need to do XYZ first you'll never take the leap to make these connections. The fact that you're working on yourself is what they'll see.. "it's the journey not the destination"
I bring this up for several reasons. First, such conditions are especially underdiagnosed and misdiagnosed in girls and women. Second, even now ADHD is still heavily misunderstood with people focusing on the "hyperactivitiy" part, which is really only one variant. Third, the combination of isolation and focusing on something that doesn't seem to fit that (ie cosmetics and cosmetic surgery) screams coping mechanism and nervous system dysregulation to me.
30+ years ago such people would be forced out into the world. Some would be helped by this. Others would merely cope (ie masking). Some would be further traumatized by this and no one (including them) would recognize it. I've heard from many teachers who deal with ADHD/ASD students that it becomes pretty obvious that their parents are undiagnosed for these very same conditions.
Your sister might be described as a NEET in Western parlance but this isn't new or exclusive to the West. Japan has had hikikimoris from at least the 1990s.
It's worth adding that young people aren't stupid. Many of them recognize the hopelessness of their situation, economically speaking. Rents are crippling, home ownership looks increasingly impossibly to ever reach, student debt is potentially crippling and job prospects aren't great. We're crazy if we think young people don't recognize this so we have a hopelessness crisis on top of all of this.
So is social media allowing people to isolate and cope or is it the cause? Is ADHD/ASD more prevelant now? If so, why? Or was it just underdiagnosed and misdiagnosed until now? I don't know. To me it seems like it might exacerbate existing issues and it's only one facet of many of how our society is increasingly broken and failing young people.
The toxic part of social media is the online personas and interactions with strangers, who are perceived as friends.
There is a balance of letting kids have messenger and play games online with friends, than letting them have social media accounts, and burrow into cesspools of online activities that a lot of these social sites are.
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Is it that she does not go out with friends?
I think her situation is not at all bizarre – I actually think it is overly normal.
Going out with friends: Fair enough, you sit at the same bar talk about the same things, etc.
I think we are in a crisis of communities. Even if your sister wanted to engage there are no good places to do it.
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But after deleting addicting games/apps for my own good I now realize that reality is not only very complex, but also just as simple as niven's idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)
also: https://news.ycombinator.com :)
And be persistent to a degree, show her that you care and you are there for her (and actually be there for her, do something with her). Be understanding, some amount of video entertainment is okay. Be there for her, be patient, and know when to take a break about trying to change her bad habits.
I assume you also need to be prepared for the unfortunate possibility that she just won't budge and decides to spend her life in the matrix.
What can be done? Does anything need to be done? Is she doing harm to herself and others, or is that just your perception? Maybe she doesn't share your values. Maybe she senses your judgement. Do you really have her best interest in mind, or are you projecting an idea of what a good sister should be? As in you can't be proud of who she is. But why not? And why do you want to be? To what extent are you responsible? Should you feel guilty if you fail to change her? Should you feel dread if she is unable to change? Does she owe it to you to change herself? But who knows what the next thing will be that you find disappointing about her. Must she walk the tight-rope of your approval? What is your true opinion anyway? Is it truly good, and should anyone truly care?
Everyone has an idea of how life is and how it should be. Oh the problem is so very clear. If only everything was exactly the way I imagine it, oh if only, then there would be peace, happiness, and harmony for all! right? And yet we're endlessly frustrated by the life that could be, the life that should be, perpetually occupying the space beyond our finger tips.
i explained to my sibling the other day that we cannot live our lives however we wanted because of our layers of responsibility: first to ourselves (as a human beings in this civilization), then to our family and friends (who expect to count on us at some point), to the society we inhabit (i am currently an immigrant), the human race, and lastly the environment. those are not easy responsibilities and they could crush anyone. but absconding isn’t a choice: we’re not here for selfish reasons.
i think you should intervene, at whatever cost to you. because no one else would, and depending on how persistent you are, she’d be grateful for the care and attention you showed. because that’s the sort of action that pure love motivates. good luck
I have tried various approaches, including being provocative, and that is why I said it is not worth it.
I am not abandoning her by any means and we talk. We are on good terms so to speak, but sadly those good terms only extend to lengths of her own comfort. She has a genuine problem with sharing who she is as a person and that is not easy to work with.
When every other thing you say gets interpreted as an “attack” or “you are crossing boundaries”, it makes no sense to push the person to end up where you started.
The complete destruction of religions, then traditions and now families/education (lack of education, lack of authority, &c.) probably had something to do with it.
You can't replace god/families/education with an iphone 15 and expect society to continue on the same path. And I'm saying that as a complete atheist, people need a framework, goals, rules, models, outlooks, a moral compass, &c. if all we have left is complete relativism and consumerism it's much harder to find a personal meaning and straight up impossible to find a global one
One thing I would amend for myself - I don't think I feel as though I have responsibility to the environment in and of itself. I am an environmentalist, but that follows from my duty to the human race. The earth will keep on earthing either way.
What you described may be body dysmorphic disorder. Social media aggravates that, but it is not the cause: BDD is a variant of OCD. Like OCD, it can be effectively treated with a specific kind of therapy (exposure and response prevention). I know a lot of people have replied to your post, but I don’t think anyone has mentioned this possibility yet.
I have instagram and almost never use it. It's addicting to me in a sense that when I have nothing to do I'll open up the app and endlessly scroll through the feed, check stories of people I follow. It made me uncomfortable because all of the stories of people I know looked fake somehow, everyone smiling, having a good time, making specific poses to look good on Instagram, but in reality their life is not full of roses. It made me uncomfortable when I had bad days, where I felt like I was never going to achieve the happiness people show on the social network. Luckily, wen this thought occurred, I was able to pinpoint it and say "well, this is NOT real, they are just faking it for likes and followers. you should feel good that you don't have this and you should value personal contact over likes on a website".
Since then I only use Instagram to browse for dog/pet videos.
But I have some acquaintances that they act like their life depends on instagram. Hell, I had a friend who spent all of her time watching stupid tiktok videos disseminating fake news and pseudoscience (and she was studying to become a psychologist), reading stupid things on facebook, and when she wasn't busy with this she would constantly complain to me how she self-evaluated that she had depression and anxiety, how her life is shitty. She was a pretty woman and all the time told me she wanted to change her appearance because of something she saw on facebook or tiktok, and I guess it wasn't enough for me to tell her she was perfect the way she is, even with her issues. She never listened and tried to convince me that the cosmetic changes she'd do weren't permanent.
We're bad at predicting what makes us happy and even worse at making sound judgements through negative emotions. Those in the middle of such an experience don't want to believe that their habits are exacerbating or responsible for their problems, because change is uncomfortable. They want to continue to feed addiction.
Is she terminally online because she's ill or is she I'll because she's terminally online
My advice is to let her know that you think she has a media addiction, then at least she has some level of awareness.
I think that's typically true but I also would try anyway.
this statement is foundational to secular ethics, and it is arguably part of the problem. Sometimes love requires helping when it hurts.
I mean I personally know people who rarely interact with others other than work, and do weird things like playing with electronics and games all day, mostly just for fun and not for profit. They are often happy as they are, I'm sure many of them are on this very website.
Your sister sounds a bit like the TikTok version of the weird nerd stereotype, replace the PCBs with cosmetics and games with celebrity gossip. Their influencers sell lipsticks instead of 3d printed desk toys and mechanical switches. For me it's difficult to recognize TikTok stuff as a legitimate interest and understand her devotion to it, but then many of the hacker stuff must seem the same to the people outside of these circles.
Not that I know her situation better than you do of course, this was more of a thought experiment on trying to understand a niche that I know very little about.
Are your short term pleasures in line with your long term goals ?
That's what supposedly differentiate us from most other animals, the capability to think about the future, and act accordingly. Regret is one of the worse feeling
By the time she got around to it, I had already wisened up and basically lost communication with her. I went on to do other things with my life and actually put in effort to experience new stuff.
She on the other hand did not. She found more excuses (dropped out of uni twice) than solutions.
They said the same thing about TV for most of my childhood.
this is not the average social media user. the problem is addiction, not doing surgery to yourself. if social media was banned or age gated you would have to ban wikipedia next as its also very easy to get addicted to doing a tree traversal of interesting articles starting at the single one article you intended to read. also stack exchange. pardon my tone deafness to your tragedy, but this is a political issue, and your post is being used for political purposes. this is also a waste of my tax money and proof that taxation is theft. if i was a parent i would just be a good parent like my parents and slap my kids if they get addicted to upvoting shit on social media just as i would slap them if they get addicted to watching tv, playing arcade games (since i would provide them with real games and not gacha shit, the former which still had the addiction problem and the exact same dumb discussions in the 90s)
Clearly it's not. It's the life of those she copies and is influenced by. I strongly doubt any of the people like your sister are actually making actual decisions about their lives.
You absolutely should try getting through to her, because that's in her best long-term interest. She's literally destroying her life.
It's not about 'telling my sister what to do'. It's about helping someone sick (my conclusion from your superficial description, reality might be different?).
People have been warning about it since the birth of capitalism and consumerism, although even the most pessimistic ones didn't expect we'd get so far down the rabbit hole, the internet sped up the whole process a thousand times.
The loss of meaning will be the greatest thing we'll have to fight against in this century, we're just at the beginning.
> I just wish there was an easy way out of it.
I personally think it's lost for a few generations, people who fall into the rabbit hole while their brain is still developing will have absolutely no way out.
What makes the system thrive is the same thing that destroys individuals, the group goal is diametrically opposed to the individual needs
You are a part of the problem.
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1. Even if we may not like it all the time, there is tons of data that show that personal interactions and relationships are good for mental health. With so much technology and so many things going remote (I'm not just talking jobs, but I'm talking about the fact that it's very easy, for example, to never need to walk into a store anymore. I recently went to a fast food restaurant and there were no customers inside at lunchtime, normally a busy time, and I ordered on a kiosk and everyone else just ordered at the drivethrough) it's harder and harder to just see random people and our friends without explicit planning.
2. As someone who recently got over a severe episode of depression, I strongly believe time spent in nature and just outside in general is really good for the mental health of humans. With so much tech it's easier and easier to basically never go outside unless you make it a point to do so.
The average american adult went from socializing with friends and family 12+ hours a week few decades ago to less than 4.
If I really want to chat a little, I will go to one of the other small shops next to me and buy a beer/coffee and talk with the owner or whoever is outside the store.
Because I work from home most of my friends are at work during the day. But come evening and you can hang out for at least an hour, with someone you know, every single day if you want. There is no planning, you just go to the places you know people hang out, and they will be there. And if you don't want to talk much, you can just listen.
I feel I am blessed to have this because I was an expat for some years and you don't know what you have until you don't have it anymore.
People tend to rely far too heavily on the easiest way to convince themselves they're having valuable social interactions, whether it's social media or betting that their work friends will still be there when they get laid off. They'll rely on Tinder for sex and try to bridge that to something more meaningful out of thin air, or they'll buy a dog and hope that solves the problem. Some of these are uniquely millenial and onward, some others carry over from Gen X and boomer culture imo, whereby you isolate yourself from the rest of society in the suburbs or wherever and count on personal relationships you acquired for free.
Along with this, in many places we've let the catalysts for social growth get stripped away by commodity bullshit and simulated interaction. Costco is probably the closest thing many people have to bumping into someone, no shot are they going to do it at the adult version of the playground, because there often isn't one and they won't go. (obviously this is more true in some places and for some people than it is for people who've realized this or who innately direct their life this way).
My theory is that to meet a new person and have it be substantial, you basically need to spend a few hours, a few times per week, in the same space doing some arbitrarily interesting thing for a common reason, without being too eager but with a signaled sense of openness. You don't become a pro anything spending 30 min a week on it, and no valuable personal relationships come about that way either. That's how you met people in Uni, that's how you met people at work, you gotta branch off of those places and ya gotta keep it going gradually. If you don't live in a place that facilitates that, vote with your wallet and try to find a new one.
This goes for nature too, if you're only exposure is 2 days of hiking once a year when you travel, and the rest is spent in an office, it's not something you can remedy any other way.
If you drive to work 1 hour each way, and work 8 hours, you're probably doomed, unless you've already done all that and can keep your existing things going. It's just not enough margin, be real about what you're sacrificing and why.
This is why for many of us the last place we made meaningful relationships was university: lots of time in a same place physically + common objectives + relativeley same age and interests = friendship.
The formula is simple but today the first component is what is most difficulty. Along with #3 I'd say. Many people recommend taking "classes" such as theater, ceramic, etc. but after doing all the hard work of finding a place near you, that you can pay if you find the average age is +- 15 your age it gets really desmotivating. There is nothing bad of going to classes with seniors but reality is you can't make true friendships with someone your grandfathers' age.
As a solution to teenager anxiety I would propose a compromise solution wherein all school communications, school groups, and extracurricular activities must not use any social media platforms for communication.
I like this concept, and I feel like I've experienced this as well, but I'm having trouble picturing an example of what you're describing, practically speaking, for the average city-dweller. Care to elaborate on this?
You may not like FB, IG, TikTok, etc.. I certainly don't care for any of these products. But these are communications platforms. Restricting the right to free speech does have negative consequences... from the development of critical thinking skills; development of technical skills; and limiting of educational information. Being exposed to shit on the internet teaches you there's bullshit on the internet, and not to believe everything you see.
And just like the Supreme Court wrote 30 years ago, the answer is the same today: if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them. Restrict your children's access to these platforms.
I certainly dont believe anyone should be forced to use these platforms. I don't use any of these products, and havent since they launched. That's a freedom you and everyone else can take advantage of also. But those who advocate censorship aren't advocating for freedom... they're advocating for their personal parental decisions to the be decisions of the entire nation.
It's really not that simple. The products have become so widespread and influential that they change the very culture of our society for the worse. It doesn't matter whether you abstain from using Instagram or not, some of your friends will still be more or less subtly influenced by its existence in your social interactions.
There's a nice quote from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, which IMO hasn't aged at all in 60 years: "Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the 'content' of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind... The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance."
Yep. The other problem is that not having social media and mobile devices can be alienating and ostracizing, especially for teenagers.
Avoiding the problems of social media requires skills and restraint that even most adults don’t have.
It is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
except it is, because law is dumb, stupid, and slow-witted. if you ban facebook specifically, the next day it will think that means mailing lists should also be banned. btw ive witnessed lots of mailing list and then web forum addicted deadbeats before social media came out but whatever
the legal solution is nothing (i realize not all of you have asked for the legal solution yet but thats essentially the only point of this thread that is brought up routinely on places like HN)
teh fact that every techie and his mom seems to think the law will work out in his favor when it backfires each time (or they just ignores that downsides) is no different than how people keep thinking you can put a web server in every embedded device and they oh so surprisingly have the same RCE vulns as the 90s, every single time.
I suspect that a lot of the anxiety about how difficult it would be to quit is the mind's way of rationalizing a psychological addiction, like saying you can't stop smoking because things are just so crazy right now.
I quit social networks in 2008, it wasn't hard at the time and it's not been hard to stay away. Yes, there are consequences of being the one guy in the friend group who doesn't use whatever app everyone else is using, but to call those consequences meaningful is an overstatement. A minor annoyance, easy for everyone to adapt to.
You're right that other people are still influenced by social networks. Speaking from the outside, I wouldn't even use the word 'subtle' to describe its effects. But, I don't know that that really matters. You surround yourself with people you like, despite their flaws. You hope the good things about them grow, and that they work through their flaws. That's just having friends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-medium-is-the-massage-revis...
I wonder if they still do. Ironically, this was in Florida - probably be considered too woke by Desantis.
I for one deleted all of those platforms and my life is definitely better (I'm way less distracted for once, but the list is longer).
What do I care what others do?
You could say the same thing about the Bible, or Harry Potter, or any number of things too
Now for this issue, there's harm being done to children, and the majority of users in the thread seem to be against government intervention; you say: "well if you don't like it, if you think it's negative, just don't use it, don't let your kids use it".
Kind of a random parallel to draw between the two stories, but it's funny the same logic doesn't seem to apply in both cases. Why wasn't for circular saws the response "if you think they're dangerous, don't use them" or "just keep your kids away from them"?
It's like asking, if people are okay with the government restricting the sale of bombs to private citizens, why aren't they okay with restricting steak knives? They're also dangerous weapons.
People judge the cost and benefit of each situation.
Some suggest it would be the "hate" on the net that is causing the issues and we see legislation that penalizes some content already, but I heavily doubt it to be the source of any problem.
Might be something similar, perhaps the strong indignations some statements on the net seem to get to some people, although these can be as politely stated as any frivolous statement can be. And the resulting expectations on opinions you are allowed to harbor.
There’s a well known, proven, easy solution to table saw accidents called SawStop. It’s basically as obvious to use as a seat belt is if you want to be safe. The only problem is those table saws are very expensive.
Social media doesn’t have an existing and obvious solution (besides not using it).
Personally, I don't have much of an opinion around circular saws, but I don't want my government to build a framework where they can choose to hide certain parts of the Internet. I also think the issue isn't social media, per se, but algorithms that promote negative content, personal data harvesting, etc. Banning tiktok et al isn't going to solve those problems. They'll still exist because other types of sites are implementing them.
Imo, I do think social media needs to be reeled in by policy. But I can see why it makes people uncomfortable and why there is a difference with the saw.
your argument is dumb too, it doesn't even deserve acknowledgment, but we are little babies here and have to politely explain to everyone why they're wrong, to the point that the insane people just always win and get their dumb ideas into law because nobody cares anymore and are tired of explaining common sense over and over. having safety controls on hardware is not anything remotely equivalent to the hypothetical problem the article pitches. there is not any world where regulating social media makes sense, and i say this as someone who has never used social media in my life. the entire issue at hand here is like a bear shitting in the woods and someone happens to step on it once in a thousand years, almost none of these so called people who get addicted to social media would have any better off chance at life without it, they would just get addicted to one of the millions of other things one can get addicted to. the remaining one in a million people who actually had their life ruined by social media is like the bear shitting in the woods, its just life.
Besides, the "somebody has to think about the children" meme is slowly but surely getting old and tiresome. Not somebody... Their PARENTS. If you dont feel like setting boundaries for your children, please, with sugar on top, dont have any.
""" More specifically, we’d try to implement these four norms as widely as possible:
1. No smartphones before high school (as a norm, not a law; parents can just give younger kids flip phones, basic phones, or phone watches).
2. No social media before 16 (as a norm, but one that would be much more effective if supported by laws such as the proposed update to COPPA, the Kids Online Safety Act, state-level age-appropriate design codes, and new social media bills like the bipartisan Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, or like the state level bills passed in Utah last year and in Florida last month).
3. Phone-free schools (use phone lockers or Yondr pouches for the whole school day, so that students can pay attention to their teachers and to each other)
4. More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. """
https://www.afterbabel.com/i/143412349/what-now
Then the government should step in, either should forceful action or through promoting healthier alternatives or shining a light on its damaging effects.
My explanation is that they are fighting against a team of PhDs optimizing everything to make them addicted.
Luckily they all do a lot of sport and have this way disconnected time everyday.
Laws are lagging indicators but they also last a long time. the CFAA was passed before the advent of the WWW and it took until 2021 to even set a basic check on the part of the Supreme Court that effective set the ground rule that to access what amounts to a computer linked to some network beyond authorization, an authorization scheme needs to exist in the first place. Before that, one can easily be charged and even sent to prison or be assessed massive fines when there's no meaningful distinction between what is authorized and unauthorized space. These were not problems in the early to mid 80s but when problems did arise, it still took a quarter century to resolve. To have one future-proof goldilocks solution is already next to impossible, but you're asking for five or six stringed together in order to have a sensible law that is well tailored enough so that it is effective without being oppressive. Not to mention that unless the behavior is generally abandoned by users, it creates black markets that are simply illegible to the state. The government then effectively loses control over what it purports to control to those with means, leaving only those without subject to the full force of the legislation.
That of course all predicates on the premise that there can be commonly agreed and sensible ways to define all those, and it is in the best interest of the government to do so and passes Constitutional muster not just on speech grounds but a host of other potential issues, like, is this a purely civil matter or a purely criminal matter or both? The federal government can treat this explicitly, or kick it off to an agency as part of its mandate, but which one? Do we need a new one? Are there checks and balances that would provide some sort of agility that keeps up with the times? What if new research comes out that shows the lack of a link, but by legislating it, you've effectively frozen the relevant conclusion in time. Enforcement creates constituencies who do not care about science or potential upsides. The DEA is on the record in the federal register that patient access to legitimate medication is secondary and effectively an afterthought to enforcement of supply, because the agency's mandate presupposes that substances need controls and are presumed harmful and that enforcement, with the teeth provided for by the DOJ, will trump any study the FDA or our academic institutions can ever show. By the time that particular moral panic was given a name, the US government had been attempting repeatedly to use prohibition as a way of imposing a specific set of social mores that at first was a pretext to target specific racial minorities and when that became socially unacceptable (legally it was unacceptable under the 14th Amendment anyway, but they effectively smuggled the laws in through the Treasury Department and protectionist regimes by taxing the goods into oblivion, and avoiding the tax obviously is also a violation of the law).
In that sense, the government operates very much like a machine, whereas given a concrete goal to achieve and it can likely achieve it, but the manner by which it achieves it may create additional problems and convoluted interpretations that ripples through history in ways unimaginable. The loudest voices in the room, or those with existing financial resources or interests, can use the rent-seeking system known as lobbying to shape the laws to begin with. And where does the fines end up? Certainly in most cases they are not given back to the community, but end up enriching the enforcement agencies. Go to a police auction and see how much they're raising from the sale of "proceeds of crime", except not all of it are crimes that are proven in court, and much of it are crimes without specific victims and so, it becomes a regime of appropriation of private property to enrich a few in the public sector.
There's usually an annoying gap between concept and reality. In isolation you want a policy that can solve problems in a targeted and fair way. In reality it almost never happens.
While technically true, this is a gross misrepresentation. Calling these sites and apps "communications platforms" makes them sound like they're just a mail service or a telephone. This is akin to referring to a casino as "the town square".
> That's a freedom you and everyone else can take advantage of also.
This "can" is only true in a strict legal sense, of course.
As a town square, it's more akin to Times Square.
If that's true, the suggested measures: no phone before high-school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, ... do not seem crazy.
Kids cannot drink, cannot smoke, cannot have sex with adults, cannot buy firearms, etc.
There's a shitload of things kids cannot do: is it really an attack on free speech to have kids not have phones at school and wait until 16 before they can use these mediocre piece of shit social media platforms?
If it was only this simple. It's similar to the green bubble problem. Disallowing your kids to use these platforms leads to social isolation. All the other kids are on these platforms and a lot of the talk is about what happened on these platforms (it's similar with games like Roblox for a certain age bracket). Excluding them is also going to teenage mental illness due to exclusion.
It's only going to work if all parents would restrict access to these platforms, but that's not going to happen. A lot of parents do not see the issue or do not want to be the first mover.
After all, you're free to use or not to use tobacco and alcohol, right? So it should be every kid's choice.
In fact, why stop there? Why not allow fentanyl pills at the counter of every convenience store for anyone who wants them? You have the freedom to choose to use or not to use them, so there's no problem, right?
Relevant bit from the essay:
"But much of my book is about the collective action traps that entire communities of adolescents fall into when they move their social lives onto these platforms, such that it becomes costly to abstain. It is at that point that collective mental health declines most sharply, and the individuals who try to quit find that they are socially isolated. The skeptics do not consider the ways that these network or group-level effects may obscure individual-level effects, and may be much larger than the individual-level effects."
So as a society do we let unrestrained exposure or do we take collective action? I lean on the second option, but I'm not sure what this action might be.
I'm on the internet ~30 years, I loved the total anarchy of the early web, the unrestrained access to all kinds of information - good, bad and evil. It's very hard for me to get behind heavy-handed regulation. But honestly, I feel oversaturated by the modern cataclysm of information. My bullshit filters are clogged, my defense mechanisms are failing to the point I let information flow through me without an ounce of critical thinking. I can't imagine what the effect is on young untrained minds.
You’re conflating these tech platforms with freedom of speech. It might be helpful to the debate to separate out the addictive algorithm and user base from people’s right to think and speak freely.
Banning social media optimised for “engagement” at the expense of childrens (and adults) mental health does not remove any content from the internet that could not be expressed in a less toxic way.
The finesse is in defining social media in a way more complex than “this list of companies”, and I agree that (likely) no government would choose a definition that does not either have ramifications for free speech or is inadequate.
This is a social problem, not a parental one. When you allow for-profit companies (or anyone) to create addictive products that intermediate the social experience of an entire generation, how is a parent supposed to stand against that?
It's how kids interact and it defines their entire social experience. Disallowing them access is like sending your kids to school and not allowing them to talk to anyone.
We don't allow our kids to have access to alcohol or cigarettes because it's bad for them. How is this any different, when we know it's doing harm at scale?
Because "it's speech"? That doesn't hold up. Pornography is also generally considered protected speech, but no one lobbies for unfettered access for kids.
Beyond that, restricting social media does not infringe on free speech. That assertion is so obviously wrong on so many levels that it feels silly and pedantic to start itemizing them.
I would go and even claim I would ban all current social media platforms below 18. Ther are simply not enough protections, consistently, its place ripe for abuse and tons abuse is happening every day as we speak. I know we will keep our own kids off this for as long as possible, but eventually harm from absence will be greater.
Parents shouldnt be choosing lesser evil like that, just that some meta employees can cash half a million and think what a great addition to mankind they are, when reality is closer to definition of cancer.
Just like porn? Do you think kids would find a way around it?
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Haidt argues these are a leading cause of an ongoing mental illness epidemic. Such a drastic claim deserves a thorough medical review and if true, these platforms must be regulated just like the Tobacco industry was.
> those who advocate censorship aren't advocating for freedom... they're advocating for their personal parental decisions to the be decisions of the entire nation.
Don't believe freedom of speech / freedom to information overrides the concern of Humanity collectively and progressively going ill, anymore than freedom to self-defense warrants the use of nuclear weapons for personal use.
That said, the burden of proof is on Haidt. It isn't uncommon for the older generation to be pessimistic or doomsdaying about the next one.
US companies have a qualified right to free speech https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1/freedom-of-speec...
How about AI? If it is an algorithm that is talking to you, does it have the right to do all the things that are protected by 'free speech'?
And does it matter if the AI is commercial, or a home hobby project effort?
This somebody is using his right to free speech, AI is just a tool.
There doesn't even seem to be much speech of the companies running the platforms on their own platforms. All they do is quote their users.
My country is an example where it failed anyway. Whether we are considered to have tried regulating it or not is a bit complicated.
And have a severally impacted/constrained social life?
People with all kinds of hobbies use those platforms to organize group activities. You are either on there or you miss out.
I dance tango socially. The tango community, world wide, has settled on FB. Or rather: if you are a dancer, teacher, organizer or DJ, you better be on FB or else you won't know where and when to dance, how to find students, get people to attend your event or get booked. I.e. even if you decided you didn't like FB, you have no choice but to join it and thus help cement their monopoly on how people with this hobby organize themselves.
you can ristrict how you can monitize a product - I think the problem would be much smaller if you have to pay a price congruent to the value you get. Only a few people would pay for Facebook.
you can make the platforms resposinsible for what is published on them and enforce that. they would never scale this much.
> And just like the Supreme Court wrote 30 years ago, the answer is the same today: if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them.
We have already collectively agreed that this is not an argument. That is why there are agencies like the FDA, etc.
These systems are the next step in the evolution of media. Media is a complex beast with tentacles into culture and politics and individual society. We’ve known this for a long time. What’s applicable here is Marshal McLuhan, media theory, and heck David Foster Wallace. A lot of this stuff was way ahead of its time, but that time has arrived.
“The medium is the message” was a genius insight. Extending it to algorithmic media has all sorts of (disquieting) implications.
That sounds exactly wrong. I think they want their "personal parental" decisions to not be the decisions of the entire nation, but "personal" and private to themselves and to be free from judgement for wanting this thing.
> prevented access to education medical information ... you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them.
This is pretty important to me:
Abusive parents deny their children access to communication platforms.
I believe these problems cause problems for the child if the child is already lacking support, but they also represent a way to escape that abuse, so I feel strongly that controlling access to asking-for-help is not okay;
This should not be a personal decision good people can make for themselves in their homes for their own kids, because they should be able to understand that "bad" people are actually using laws and rules like this to hurt children.
> I don't use any of these products
I think you're using one right now: Hacker news is absolutely a communications platform.
sure, but not everywhere is America and some places seem to manage without slippery-sloping to eternal damnation.
They are mostly advertisement platforms coupled to recommendation engines. The "communication platform" is just side business at this point. And it's being used to wave around as "free speech" when anyone dares to question the detrimental effect of the big mass mind control machine it actually is.
But we're presently in the middle of the long transition in which not everyone has figured that out yet, and in which we don't have a widely-agreed-upon moral stance on the subject that reconciles the need to do something about it with our existing value systems.
We're going to have to find it one way or the other, so the question is "when", not "if".
No doubt in 2174 we will have a bunch of new issues that are at different places in the pipeline. We'll probably be debating the ethics of mind-control implants or something. But in the meantime this one will solved.
What's the secret to doing that? No really. How do I unsubscribe from the tracking that these platforms do on the web and in my apps?
That's the rub! I can't not use (or be used) by these platforms -- no one can!
That may have been true once upon a time (i.e. back in the day when your FB feed was chronological and random posts from unrelated/unwanted crazies would not show up on your device unless a friend forwarded it to you).
Now they are psychological manipulators (remember https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every... ?) in a quest for advertising dollars at the expense of everything else.
To be clear, I find your thoughts interesting and worth understanding, but if you also believe that the government has zero business in public health decisions involving refined sugars, then we just fundamentally disagree about what good governance is. (nevermind the social media element, which is new and evolving and a higher-dimensional problem space)
And that's ok. I will likely vote and conspire against the interests of people like this (with that view of government) until I the day I die (or my mind is changed), and cultivate communities that openly resist building the world based on those assumptions.
I imagine in the US there could be cases, where parents with the required pocket change can sue the school or something, to get it done, but if I think about my own home country, I have my doubts, whether anything would be resolved, before the time of a child in that school is over and in addition to that, there is no accountability for abysmal tech decisions in institutions such as schools. No one is losing their job for forcing children to use social media, unfortunately, even though every adult, especially one to work with children, should know by now, that this cannot be conforming with data protection laws. We simply punish incapable reckless behavior way too rarely.
This assumes that humans are rational agents. I think that drug addiction, wars in Israel and Ukraine, conspiracy theorists, and free-climbers sufficiently prove that this is not the case.
If only life were so easy, we would not even need to have this discussion.
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Maybe it taught you that, but there are plenty of people that grow up on the Internet who do not learn these lessons. Take a look at any conspiracy message board, group, etc.
Akin to saying something like, "let it happen, that'll teach 'em"
Unfortunately, not everything works itself out.
Just don't smoke! Just don't drink alcohol! Just don't eat junk food! Just go to the gym!
> Restrict your children's access to these platforms
That's exactly what the article suggests should happen, plus some protections for children enshrined in law. You can find these suggestions at the end of the post, in the section "What now?"
I take issue with the argument that promoting these social media platforms is tantamount to fostering free speech and denouncing them amounts to eroding this right. No one should expect technology assisted broad cast abilities as part of a doctrine of governments and the State not restricting speech.
I also disagree with the notion that limiting certain addictive communications tools from minors is an unconstitutional restriction on free speech.
Big tech already plays a alrge part in how our society is shaped and defending them means they don't have to face their responsibilities. Boiling this down a mere question of "free speech" is a very amerocentric point of view.
Here, everyone has facebook, from your grandma to your little cousin. My family is spread all over the country and you can keep in touch via text, phone but seeing what they are doing with pictures on facebook is very convenient and helpful.
Yes, the older/younger crowd do eat up conspiracies on facebook, sadly. They also don't read news sites, all the news is from facebook and TV maybe (older crowd).
Still, you are missing out a lot if you don't have it here. For example like meeting new people even. That "friends of friends" feature is immense. Kind of a social proof that you are normal/not a creep/have friends.
In the end it comes down to education. The first 7 years at home are ridiculously important. Then you have primary school for another 8 years, which is almost as important.
Public institutions, however, should not be restricting information dispersal to third-party private companies who force even a casual viewer to agree to extensive legal contracts.
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You don't have kids do you?
What we are missing in our society today is some essential negative freedoms.
Most of us follow J.S. Mill's idea on restricting the influence of the state. See the many comments in this thread decrying government intervention to ban social media. That's a negative freedom, from tyranny.
Mostly, we tend to emphasise positive freedoms, freedom to; run a business, share speech, own technology. And that is good.
But there are negative freedoms, freedom from; coercion, the scourge of drugs, poverty, censorship. Obviously many positive freedoms can be expressed as negative ones, but how that logic is formulated in law really matters.
Now the controversial bit:
What we are missing is laws that give people freedom from technology The supposed "choice" to participate is not enough.
Like others here I've been a non participant in social media and smartphones. I'm not a Luddite, I'm a computer scientist, but I twigged this problem very early having dealt with addiction and recognising how abuse is mediated by technology. I even wrote a book about it [1].
The problem is, life is made very difficult for those who want to exercise choice. Presently one must live as a second class citizen, in what feels like racism and prejudice of technological snobbery. It is utterly unnecessary.
Governments do not need to ban smartphones or social media for kids or for anyone. Making this only about kids is a cop-out. It's leveraging emotional messaging to side-step a bigger problem nobody wants to face - that our whole society is under siege from technology overuse. The more general problem is that we've entered a period of technological over-reach. Kids don't just feel peer pressure to get a smartphone and social media, they live in a society that wants to mandate it.
Whether for kids or adults, we need to strongly protect the rights of those who want a less technologically mediated (and encumbered - yes it's not all "convenience") lifestyle. This needs us to maintain plurality of access;
Governments can ensure negative freedoms without just banning stuff.[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative...
[1] https://digitalvegan.net/
> No services for government, schools, health available only on proprietary and "smart" platforms
I wish this were a movement, I feel very strongly about this.
This is a snarky comment, but this is the consequence of this "negative freedom".
I do think that there's some merit to these ideas, but I think it would always leave the choice to the individual. But we also have to realize that some things you just can't opt out of, eg electromagnetic radiation from cell towers.
I don’t think this is a stupid comparison, as I believe these platforms can be very harmful to children.
I've tried reporting such posts multiple times but hate filled posts are neither removed, nor restricted. If a platform cannot provide adequate moderation, it should stop operating in my country and be held responsible for providing a platform for spreading hate pseudo-anonmously.
I think the underlying issue is that American companies view everything through the lens of American culture and if its not a problem in the US, then it is not offensive.
I once reported a racist comment on FB. Someone said that people of their race should not "interbreed" with people of another race because the latter are evil. FB said it did not violate their community standards.
IMO it was probably because it was a comment by a black person (probably American) about white people. That is not the major problem is the US so its fine.
That's not true. Those things are limited in bubbles like the one of the rationalists as well, so free speech has nothing to do with why people don't develop these things. It's a matter of character; and obedience to a system that establishes the rules that evaluate social, academic and economic status.
The Supreme Court was capable of distinguishing between free speech and moron speech but the Party was too convincing.
Most of the parents of these kids don't have the required flow of information to handle their kids consumption. And more importantly, their stress levels are too damn high already. Which is also the result of the Party's long term strategy.
And if all the other parents say it's normal and the same for their kids, even those parents where it is not the case, which are those that know that's why their kids will be better off while everything collapses (vs making sure their kids are better off while nothing collapses), then there is no way but super-rationality to identify a problem and then there's the willpower to go against the accusations and the time required for researching strategies to deal with the problem while the rest of the world, and school, and one's own life keep working as they always did.
If there's bait, the untrained puppy bites. Unless the untrained puppy was trained to bite and puke it out afterwards to find hints at who put the bait right in the path of all those innocent puppies.
That's not going to fix the echo chambers, divisive conspiracy groups, anti semitic posts and generally all the other terrible uses for online platforms that contribute to the destabilization of our society.
You can't make a social problem go away by telling individuals "if you don't like this problem please avoid it". Similarly, you can't expect to tell people "the effects of methamphetamine are negative for our entire society so please don't partake". For problems that become a state, country or even world problem, something else is needed.
There's a very clear causal relationship between IG and mental health that goes beyond a moral choice and ideals of free speech
You either play the sisyphean game of personally blocking a billion dollar company from including you. Or you reach for the long arm of the law.
We all know FAANG gave us no choice but to use government ruling.
100% my reply to any critic of teenage social media, but the parents' stance is always "but then my kid is going to FOMO and feel left out".
And, the trouble is: Most of these adults are addicted to their smartphones and social media, too. Everyone is. I go to birthday parties with my kid, and sporting events, indoors and outdoors, and other kid activities, and the kids are for the most part jumping around having a ball, while the adults are huddled up by themselves, bathed in smartphone light, scrolling through their feeds getting their fix. Don't think this doesn't leave an impression on kids--it does.
I feel a distinct drain in the social energy when some of the people present have their eyes glued to their phones. It would actually be better if they weren't even there.
I think that feeling of draining comes from the fact that if you do want something from them, like asking what they're ordering for food, or if we should go to another venue, you have to put in more effort. They need to do a context switch in which they look at you blankly while you bring them up to speed on what is happening.
Watching your parents turn into smartphone zombies should be a warning sign, maybe even something to rebel against.
Unfortunately children do tend to pick up their parents' behaviors, bad and good.
I tell them they spend too much time watching videos and playing games and should "branch out" into new hobbies. Do they do this? No.
That is to say, I don't think hypocrisy has anything to do with it.
If they see you watching a YouTube video about circuitry or whatever, are they registering "that's an educational video about circuits" or are they just seeing the YouTube logo and thinking "Wow, $parent watches a lot of YouTube"?
Any kid is just going to register that you spend 10 (or whatever) hours a day on the computer, they aren't going to be categorizing your use into educational or not.
One unintended consequence I noticed already with time-limiting YT, is the kid is carefully planning her YT viewing usage and ends up not branching out to crafting/educational/etc. videos because she doesn't want to run out of time for the fun stuff. So this ends up unintentionally killing the desired content.
My gut feeling is that setting an example by doing (so like what you described) and occasionally recruiting the kid for assisting (but not forcing them to participate too much) is the right way forward. We'll see I guess...
In case it isn't, you're spending all your time on screens and not being present with your kids.
You're parenting by example that screen time is more important than family time.
Why would they listen to you when, to them, it probably seems like you're telling them to do what you won't?
For three hours in the evening 5 days a week plus ~12 hours on weekends at least half of watching kids is almost as engaging as staring at a wall. Keeping them fed, entertained, alive, and healthy can be fun and engaging like rolling around or story time or singing songs, or if she wants help learning about a toy. But the rest of the time I'm just around while she plays semi-independently to make sure nothing dangerous happens and give her validation when she shows me something she did.
Are we just supposed to sit there and stare at the wall for 20 hours a week? When you try to go phone-free what do you... do?
It goes over many of the issues adjacent to social media usage and how to resolve them, starting with how to understand them.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/How-Raise-Healthy-Gamer-Relationship/...
It's like the people who willingly pay $15/mo for World of Warcraft and wonder why the game doesn't get any better, play for one hour and then watch Asmongold for 8 hours (I love Asmon btw).
Stop doing the things that hurt you.
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Media critics: the biggest hypocrites.
Any policy that actually achieved this, without being trivial to circumvent, would basically need to replicate the great firewall of China.
Doing this in a half-assed way is even worse than not doing anything at all. If you just require ID checks for all users to do age verification, you create a privacy nightmare for the adults. Meanwhile, children will circumvent the restrictions with VPNs, so you need to ban VPNs too. Foreign companies, who have no incentive to play by the rules, will surely capitalize on this, so you also need a comprehensive website blocking system. As they say, there's nothing more dangerous than a teenager with very little money and a lot of time on their hands, so a simple DNS-based block definitely won't suffice, you probably need Chinese-style deep packet inspection and such.
The only middle ground I see here is enforcing this through the App Stores, perhaps with an extra ban on sideloading without a developer certificate, guarded byID checks. Losing the ability to sideload would be a shame, but this is the "worst solution, except for all the others" kind of situation. Sure, this is trivial to circumvent by using the web, but the extra friction required due to web apps being worse than native might be a good enough deterrent.
What we should do is make rules for social media platforms to disallow them to develop algorithms that make people addicted. You might think how do you define that, but the companies have already made a whole science out of it so it's not that abstract anymore. It would sure be an elaborate task and will surely result in a cat and mouse game, but at least the issue would be taken seriously and people will understand better that engaging with these platforms that try to push the edges is playing with fire.
Hardly. Addictiveness does not exist in binary. There are many people who obsessively check their email or refresh news websites. There is no doubt that social media companies choose the algorithms that maximize engagement and so most probably they also maximize addiction, but _any_ algorithm will cause addiction to some extent. What's the limit? How do we even measure this?
Something that is maybe a little more interesting is banning the practice of recommending "negative content" because it produces more engagement than "positive content". How this is defined is also somewhat squishy, but we can at least try to define it -- content that is likely to provoke negative emotions, like anger, fear, aggression, etc.
I think there's a much clearer through-line to argue that recommending negative content on social media produces a substantial negative externality, and that moves this into the category of things like environmental regulations.
Regardless, dangerous content and services (just like dangerous substances) should be hard to make and very visibly marked, leaving no doubt about what it is and how it works. I love the EU’s notion of “algorithmic transparency” [0]. I would go a step further for systems attempting to increase engagement by exploiting behavioural sensitivities to be marked and even opt-in (think cigarette packaging).
[0] https://algorithmic-transparency.ec.europa.eu/index_en
For one thing, it's more robust. The environment is messy and control is often illusory at best. Control limits freedoms and introduces centralized points of failure that can be manipulated by bad actors. Making people strong and free creates more opportunity and innovation, even though it scares the people who long to be in charge of the centralized control.
What does it mean to strengthen people to make them immune to the harms caused by social media? I don't know exactly, but I bet we could find out.
There's a reason almost every country in the world regulates and restricts gambling.
Do I expect that some social media companies are really going to struggle to continue to operate at their current scale because of these changes? Yes I 100% expect it and I think it's great. It may lead to a smaller and more personal web. Your business model has no inherent right to exist if it harms people. Maybe, for example, you will need to hire more humans to handle moderation so that you stop killing people, and if humans don't scale, well, too bad, you're going to get smaller. We regulate gambling, tobacco etc. to limit the harm they do, I don't see any difference with social media.
To have the biggest impact without stifling innovation we can start by applying this rule to platforms which are above a certain revenue level. There is likely a combination of legislative and judicial action here in that there may already be crimes on the books which these platforms are committing, but the judiciary has not traditionally thought of a corporation being the person who committed that crime, certainly not at scale against thousands of victims. In other cases we may need to amend laws to make it clear that just because you used an algorithm to harm people at scale, doesn't make you immune to consequences from the harm you caused.
You cannot make people anything without limiting their freedom. How do you make people stronger? If you have an idea, there is a centralised point of control/failure. Bad actors will be more strong and free as well.
There's plenty of examples of successful measures to reduce harm by controlling the "environment" see: cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, being old enough to drive on public roads, being old enough to take on debt, child labour, etc.
It's weird to use the words "environment" and "hazard" on one hand and "people" on the other. The discussion is about hazards designed, created and maintained by people. The environment to manipulate is people, organisations, and law.
A common thread through all human history is people being misled on-mass. Before social media we were slaves to the tabloid headlines. Before widespread papers we were slaves to the pulpit. Etc.
For the last 10 years social media has been the tabloid but personalised. Outrage = engagement so the algorithms have pushed outrage, and personalized in the sense that they have searched for the thing that outrages each of us individually.
I fear that the next 10 years of social media is very basic generative stuff (LLMs don't need to get better; social media companies just have to apply what the current art), turning them into tabloid with intimacy. By turning into your friend in how they communicate with you, they get engagement x10.
The way to change someones mind is through intimacy.
And humans are suckers for it. We can't strengthen the masses against outrage, and we can't strengthen the individual against intimacy.
Sorry for being so pessimistic.
How is that inherently preferable to the addressing the harm itself? By what principle do you conclude that we should prefer one over the other whenever possible?
They will figure out a solution very quickly or they will simply cease to exist, and either way the problem will be solved.
Because social media is a tool for global social influence and global intelligence that the powers that be do not want to give up. Because those same powers are often invested in social media companies or don’t want to get on their list of enemies. Because it might look bad politically if it proved unpopular. Because they are all social media addicts. Take your pick.
Once they control a significant part of society's communications they own society something in return. Let society access our communications how we choose.
It’s the commercial side of the equation that’s the problem. It’s what gives these social media companies perverse incentives when it comes to engagement. So any social media site that can’t effectively tap into the US ad market at a significant scale will not have as much of a problem. I don’t think the pre-Facebook forums was as much of a problem even though they might have had some ads here and there.
So VPNs and all that just isn’t a concern. You don’t need a great firewall. You just need to regulate commercial business, which is not at all a crazy proposition.
The other side of this is that the US really, really should implement an effective federal ID system with two factor authentication. This is becoming commonplace almost everywhere else in the world, and not having it creates very serious security and privacy risks.
It would be like creating a bank account.
You could do plenty of other things. Anything you don't need an account for isn't covered. Depending on how the law is implemented, perhaps many forums wouldn't be covered?
I think it would result in kids going to websites that their parents haven't heard of yet and don't check ids.
Technically true, but social interaction is the great draw of the internet. Even Zawinski's Law noticed that every program expands to include social features or is replaced by those that do.
But really, the best policy would be constant social and educational emphasis on device parental control feature awareness - similar to drunk driving campaigns. Get parents and guardians in the habit of taking 15 min to set up basic parental controls BEFORE handing devices to kids. Rather than the all-too-common mess of reacting to a problem by taking the kids phone or making them manually show everything after the damage is already done. Maybe also compel device manufacturers to incorporate a first-time-setup flow that has a specific soft ask of "Will this device be given to or borrowed by a child?" that then handholds the owner through setting up controls.
I am skeptical of this push to elevate internet anonymity to a new fundamental principle for organizing society.
You mean privacy? Internet anonymity is a downstream byproduct of our right to privacy, not some new concept devised in the internet age. We've had the fourth amendment for quite some time.
Where did it do that?
And how is it enforced exactly? Are parents held responsible, or are state education funds impacted somehow based on smartphone use?
Would we need a federal mandate to require flip phone / feature phone support? The last time I tried to find a feature phone it wasn't easy, many depend on 2G/3G networks which are losing support and carriers have absolutely no incentive to carry feature phones when smartphones are all that sell.
This is why I can’t take any calls for banning social media for kids on HN seriously: The moment anyone introduced any legislation to limit social media access by age, this creates a de facto requirement to verify ID. The people in this thread would be up in arms as soon as the government tried to force companies to collect their ID to use social media.
I'm strongly opposed to ID collection of any kind. But I think age bans are a good idea.
Why not sell age verification codes at physical stores? One code per account per website. It's good for 2 years and costs no more than $5. You can pay cash at the store and the sales clerk may only check your ID, as though they were selling you tobacco or alcohol. They cannot record anything.
There will still be straw purchases, just like booze and cigs. But it makes it easier to police the ban on minors joining social media without seriously compromising anonymity for adults. Few kids in my high school smoked or drank. Most couldn't access those things. And social media has network effects. If most kids can't join it, the rest probably won't bother.
Fighting against regulations in the name of anonymity is the best way to actually harm anonymity. We can have both (while we currently have neither in practice …)
This should be enough for the risk averse to take open devices away from children and bolster parents.
It’s not important to stop every possible access, simply that adults have the authority to say no and be supported by society instead of undermined.
You’re describing a ban.
Or just give them some money and something to do? Why fight fire with fire, just makes bigger fire
And even more importantly you're missing the point of why people go to social networks in the first place: because everybody they know is there! If it becomes cumbersome to access, most people won't go, and then there's no more appeal. It's not as if it was porn or stuff like that, that has a purpose on its own that makes people willing to circumvent the restrictions no matter what. Social networks are “networks” and if you break the network effect, you've broken the system. American people don't go on VK not because it's less good than Facebook, but because there's no point in doing so.
doesn't have to in the general case
maybe just have it at the OS level, have parents set up the phone, prompt on setup whether it's intended for use by a minor or not, use that flag to enable/disable access to social media
that's not really the same as banning social media for all minors and imo makes too much sense, more likely that congress will push something that fucks over anonymity more
Kids are given a phone and access to social media by their parents (who are also users most likely). I don't see parents saying oh please block this out of my kid's hands with deep packet inspection or ID checks. These people can just install Family Link or whatever and set limits, and be parents. But they just won't do it. Some don't even know it exists. Kids are clocking 5h+ of mobile use / day, with poor sleep patterns and digital hygiene. No limits. That's the real issue.
Stores that sell age restricted products already can also sell "adult passes".
Each adult pass costs less than $5, and contains a single use scratch off code that you can use to prove you are of age. When you want to sign up for social media or porn, you need a code. Mutiple companies can implement and sell them.
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You can't force people to not hurt themselves.
One day I was reading a reddit thread while she wanted to tell me something that happened in school. Someone told her her school lunch stinks because it is vegetarian and I brushed it aside.
That moment was a wake up call. I was addicted to a stupid reddit thread ignoring a real issue.
Now I don't use the phone around sleep time. We read books, talk about the day, get bored and tell imaginative stories but no phones.
The nice effect of that is I sleep earlier and have much better quality of sleep. Less baggy eyes.
Not using phone before sleep has increased quality of life significantly. I have longer attention spans during the day as well.
Infinite scroll is the new sugar addiction.
We really underestimate how negatively it's impacting our quality of life that we don't let ourselves get bored anymore.
My kids liked to listen to the radio while in the car. We stopped doing that - they fight it but we have conversations we otherwise wouldn't. Oh, and less Doja Cat in our lives isn't such a bad thing either.
I think that an easy start is to require every platform that has addictive endless scrolling, or endless suggestions for what to watch next, to have a soft limit. After some regular time, information is shown that "you are on an addictive platform and taking breaks from it is good for your mental health". "Algorithms are made to keep your attention, often by making you angry and upset. Remember that this is easily fixed by stepping off this platform". It is basically a version of "smoking kills", or "don't drink and drive", but for the digital age. I think it is an easy thing to legislate (as easy as those things get), still allows people to be "free", and that could actually have a positive effect on the world.
It worked so well, that alcoholism rates in Sweden are higher than in some countries where the sales of strong alcohol are not a state monopoly. A closer look shows that even the neighboring Scandinavian countries are doing better..
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/alcoholis...
a country with no problems with alcohol consumption won't have any need to create strong regulations.
the implication that deregulating alcohol in sweden would decrease consumption seems bizarre.
If so: that's an absurd contention.
If not: perhaps the regulation is a response to the levels of alcoholism? Or is entirely independent of them? You present no evidence that the monopoly is either harmful or ineffective.
On the page you linked there's another link to just alcohol consumption: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/alcohol-c...
It paints a different picture. Also good to know is that Norway and Finland has similar setup, with Vinmonopolet and Alko.
My formative years from ages 15-25 were spent in the 80's and 90's. It was the apex of the mall experience. We saw the mall as a place to get away from our parents, hang out with our buds, run into other classmates and feel some sense of freedom while running amok playing video games in the arcade and chowing down tacos in the food court.
Then smartphones and the internet came and all the malls started closing up, dying off and there was an entire generation that just ignored or forgot about them. Most of the malls around where I live have all but closed.
There are still a few open and now? They're thriving. My family now goes together on the weekends and its amazing. All the teenagers are in the food court, in their groups, talking, eating and socializing. You see groups of teens wondering in and out of the stores. I see a very similar cultural revolution happening and its really refreshing. The mall is truly a phoenix rising from its once former ashes. The major anchor stores are constantly busy no matter what night you go there. The movie theater is busy almost every night and its packed on the weekends. Its like an entire generation has re-discovered the mall again and its refreshing to see.
Sometimes I feel like I'm in a dream because so many other malls just north or south of us have either died and been leveled, or are in various forms of trying to reinvent themselves as something else before its too late.
Either way, what I saw in my experiences at our local mall gave me hope that the Zoomers are in some ways, taking a break from their phones and going out and having a different experience and returning to socializing with their friends and creating a new way of connecting with people they're close to. My son said he still uses his phone when he's at the mall, but just to make plans to meet his other buddies and coordinate where they're all going to meet up. For the most part, once they meet up, they all stop using their phones.
So yes, there is hope yet.
I am really really sorry to go off-topic here, but as an European this is... So strange and slightly hilarious to me. We went to a park. Or local river/lake.
A mall would have been a useful place to hang out because it's under a roof and there are things to do, but there were very few good malls in that part of the UK and anyway to get to them you'd have to be able to drive. But there's no culture of young driving there. In the USA in some states you can drive at 14! In the UK you can't even start learning until 16 and in most of Europe the minimum driving age is 18.
That said, I don't think there's anything particularly strange/hilarious about people congregating in spaces built for congregation or feeling nostalgia for those spaces and experiences as they've begun to fade away. Memories can be made anywhere, and not everyone has access to the green spaces that you and I did as children.
There is a brand new, massive and beautifully designed mall in The Netherlands called Westfield Mall of the Netherlands.
I went there once to quickly grab something and I got hopelessly lost, even while my phone navigation actually was able to display and navigate the layout of the mall, due to the sheer size I underestimated the navigational challenge my little trip would pose.
The mall really blew me away with its beauty and I am still completely flabbergasted how this can work financially, I perhaps incorrectly assumedthat everybody is like me, ordering everything online.
Although hard to believe, your argument may actually have a lot of thruth in it.
And it works. Walking around Valley Fair (Westfield's flagship location in San Jose) is fun. You can wander the place for a good long time, being presented with a seemingly never ending array of frivolous luxuries, and even if you don't end up buying any clothes or jewels or whatever, you can swing by the food vendors for some fancy ice cream at Salt 'N Straw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westfield_Mall_of_the_Netherla...
That retail floor area is enormous!And, LOL: If this was US, parking would be 10x!
FYI: Westfield is a huge global mall developer. Before 9/11, they ran the mall under NYC World Trade Center. It was one of the highest grossing retail spaces in the world. They must have done a lot of market analysis before they built that mall in the Netherlands.
It takes time though, but I see a trend and a hunger among people to reclaime physical spaces and to spend more time amongst each other, making room for chance encounters etc.