Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents • Hacker News Board

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#171

Post by simias » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

xxpor wrote: post #83

simias wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always been a bit extreme on this but I more than ever believe that it's insane that we consider that leaving teenagers with unsupervised internet access is reasonable. Maybe I'm prude or naive but I remember vividly when I first saw a pornographic movie at like around 17. It really shook me at the time. I wasn't traumatized or anything but it made a strong impact on me. These days I expect that most teens exper…

Just wondering, how old are you? I'm 30, so myspace and Facebook showed up only once I was in high school, but everything you describe was still available on the web before social media. Shock sites were huge (goatse, tubgirl, etc), and I remember watching a beheading with a chainsaw by a Mexican cartel. And of course porn was around too. The difference with social media is the "keeping up with the Joneses" except no…

I'm only a couple of years older than you are. Some of my friends had internet at home well before me during high school, but I only got it when I moved after High School (my parents weren't so much anti-tech are completely outside of it).

So while I very well remember goatse, tubgirl and rotten.com, I only discovered those as an adult.

Also note that I wasn't singling out social media here. It's the web as a whole that seems very unsuited for a teenager without supervision, IMO.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#172

Post by radium3d » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #65

titzer wrote: post #24

Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs. If you came up with a substance that caused young people by the millions to become totally addicted, cost them multiple hours per day, pushed them into depression and suicide, and contributed to inactivity, obesity, loss of attention span, and overall ennui, it would be banned almost immediately. Heck, if you proposed a tracking system th…

I've always been a bit extreme on this but I more than ever believe that it's insane that we consider that leaving teenagers with unsupervised internet access is reasonable. Maybe I'm prude or naive but I remember vividly when I first saw a pornographic movie at like around 17. It really shook me at the time. I wasn't traumatized or anything but it made a strong impact on me. These days I expect that most teens exper…

I was 12, I self learned how to google properly, write html, css and photoshop, how to avoid online scams and advertisements, eventually this self learning grew into teaching myself PHP, SQL, how to build computers, setup arch linux into a LAMP server on my own VPS. Unsupervised internet was not all bad. I probably would have avoided internet time if I was being watched by my parents. Lol

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#173

Post by tgv » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

superkuh wrote: post #150

tgv wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an addiction. People leaving the circle are directly taking away the addict's stimulus.

Please don't use words that have a real medical meaning in such an inaccurate and casual way. Calling things addictive has real consequences in terms of legislators taking these confused public sentiments as fact and then trying to use force against the groups that are "addicted". Addiction has never been proven in this context. Addiction is a a real, serious problem with drugs that effect the brains reward system (o…

If it was just opioids or ampthetamines, alcohol or nocotine wouldn't be addictive, would it? Please don't use incomplete or irrelevant factoids when you contradict.

But prediction of reward might very well be a concise description of the drive behind social media use.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#174

Post by simias » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

NalNezumi wrote: post #101

xxpor wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wondering, how old are you? I'm 30, so myspace and Facebook showed up only once I was in high school, but everything you describe was still available on the web before social media. Shock sites were huge (goatse, tubgirl, etc), and I remember watching a beheading with a chainsaw by a Mexican cartel. And of course porn was around too. The difference with social media is the "keeping up with the Joneses" except no…

This. Im 29 and share the same experience. And we can even go further back; have people checked, old black & white cartoon? Some of them are so blatantly propaganda/politica/visual horrific that they wouldn't even be aired for 15 y.o today. If you take a closer look, even Tom & Jerry is quite violent, and most Japanese animation that air on kids TV-channel back then also, very sexual. And these things were airing on…

Of course there was always violence and sexual content on TV and elsewhere, but comparing Japanese anime and Tom and Jerry to stuff like https://www.reddit.com/r/DeadorVegetable/ (NSFL) or the hardcore porn you can find basically everywhere online is disingenuous. I don't think I'm very squeamish but there's stuff online that still profoundly disturbs me in my mid thirties. Meanwhile, and at the risk of bragging a little, I can watch any Tom and Jerry easily even late at night and still sleep soundly. Hardcore, I know.

You couldn't see the surveillance footage a guy being dismembered by a lathe or weird Japanese rape porn in 1080p by "pushing a couple of buttons" before the internet. Well, at least not where I grew up...

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#175

Post by tayo42 » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

serial_dev wrote: post #140

titzer wrote: post #24

Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs. If you came up with a substance that caused young people by the millions to become totally addicted, cost them multiple hours per day, pushed them into depression and suicide, and contributed to inactivity, obesity, loss of attention span, and overall ennui, it would be banned almost immediately. Heck, if you proposed a tracking system th…

> Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young brains than drugs. I don't think you need young in that sentence. I see social media's negative effects on all age groups. I see it in my own life (I'm 30): somehow, I feel compelled to keep track of politics, and I watch political shows way too much. I don't learn anything from it 98% of the time. After I watch/read about that topic, I can't concentrate…

I feel similar, especially durring this covid stuff my internet habits have gotten pretty bad. I turned off my Twitter, Facebook got a bit. Reddit was hard but I think keeping it read only (I gave my gf my account passwords) at least keeps me from interacting.

It's hard, there's no immediate downside to checking your phone or app.

I kind of think stuff like infinite scroll, gamification of social media needs some kind of regulation. I don't think we have the power to fight for our selves against these companies

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#176

Post by throwaway2245 » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #109

jl2718 wrote: post #98

Imagine you are the chairman of Phillip Morris in 1995. You control one of the biggest companies in the world, absolutely full of cash. You also know that your product is just bad all around for everybody whether they use it or not. One of your corporate lawyers tells you that you need to immediately break yourself up, sell off all the components to foreign buyers, cease all operations in the United States, and cash…

Phillip Morris didn't operate a sophisticated propaganda machine capable of steering national opinion in its own favor and indeed directing the course of democracy (if we are to believe that foreign actors can side-channel attack Twitter's algos to influence elections, then it naturally follows that Twitter can influence elections with direct control over its algorithms). I don't mean this in a contrarian sense (I ag…

> Phillip Morris didn't operate a sophisticated propaganda machine...

What? Yes, it did, that's literally what it did do.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#177

Post by thisisnico » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

devlopr wrote: post #130

kibwen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than alluding to vague upsides, can you list what upsides you want to assert that social media provides, so that we can do as you say and perform a cost/benefit analysis? As both an early adopter and former user of both Facebook and Twitter, my eventual conclusion was that whatever benefits they offered were vastly outweighed by the mental toll they took on me.

There are upsides. From providing self estem from a different source from the local. It has raised awareness like never before. It has provided an income for some. It allows new peer groups not available locally It provides a safer space to interact with strangers. Where we got it wrong was connecting these profiles to real life names. That has ruined people's lives.

And for many, the ego had increased exponentially with the attention gathered.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#178

Post by duxup » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

Minor49er wrote: post #170

duxup wrote: post #71

I'm trying to teach my 10 year old son. He's not on social media, but does play games online with others. I'm working really hard to enforce a sort of "If it isn't positive, you don't feel good about it... time to not do it for a while / find another game / people to play with." I'm trying to teach him to evaluate and shape his own experiences online and make choices based on that.

Do you use any sort of parental control software/hardware to keep him off of social media? Or is it just a rule?

Anything with an internet connection requires some level of supervision. There's no free access to internet connected devices at this point, have to ask, use in spaces where we monitor, etc.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#179

Post by lovecg » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

deeeeplearning wrote: post #134

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To quote @mumblemumble: """ There's another side to this, though. Letting kids roam the internet can give ones who might otherwise be doomed to become misfits an opportunity to find community. Being a queer kid pre-Internet, for example, sucked, and the Web rolling out to households changed a lot of kids' lives. And we have a poor cultural memory of what that experience used to be like, because, before the rise of on…

>I don't know if the downsides are worse for Facebook or Twitter (engineered for eyeballs and ad clicks), than forums, or where Discord lies on the spectrum. They're clearly worse. Forums don't have algorithms constantly running trying to hijack your brain stem to keep you scrolling and clicking links...

Neither does HN, but I personally find it as addictive as anything else on the Internet.

Re: Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in adolescents

#180

Post by notahacker » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

devlopr wrote: post #130

kibwen wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than alluding to vague upsides, can you list what upsides you want to assert that social media provides, so that we can do as you say and perform a cost/benefit analysis? As both an early adopter and former user of both Facebook and Twitter, my eventual conclusion was that whatever benefits they offered were vastly outweighed by the mental toll they took on me.

There are upsides. From providing self estem from a different source from the local. It has raised awareness like never before. It has provided an income for some. It allows new peer groups not available locally It provides a safer space to interact with strangers. Where we got it wrong was connecting these profiles to real life names. That has ruined people's lives.

Connecting those profiles to real life names has the upside of enabling those teenagers to stay in touch with old friends when everyone moves around as adults

(and I wouldn't say the social networks where profiles don't need to be connected to real names are necessarily any better)