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Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

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Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get how phones became acceptable in schools. Imagine bringing a GameBoy into class in the 90s. It'd be taken away instantly.

As co-parents with different homes in nearby towns, being able to coordinate with each other and our multiple children at multiple schools in real time became indispensable. The kids also used their phones constructively, for assignments, tracking school progress, Youtube how-to videos, contact with cousins, etc. They had social media accounts but they never became a focus. At school they kept their phones on silent…

Flip phones are fine at communicating over SMS or phone calls. That's realtime enough for anything

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#92
post #14
post #5

It's electronics in general. I was in 7th grade at the inflection point, when the iPhone 3G first widely popularized having a pocket computer. Facebook went mainstream around the same time. Suddenly kids became a lot less social, and that never flipped back.

Hard disagree. It’s algorithmic “engagement maximizing” systems, specifically. (Engagement is code for addiction.) If those pocket PCs had useful and creative apps only and maybe some non-addiction-optimized games they’d be fine. The problem is the apps, not the hardware. With kids the absolute worst seem to be YouTube, TikTok, and Roblox. All three are banned in our house. The kids have their own devices (with monit…

My kids are 11 and 12. We have a YouTube time limit of 30 mins a day, and there are some videos that are just not allowed. Nothing with too much bad language, Nothing with people doing dangerous things to be funny, nothing with rich people buying stuff to break. I did spend some time in both my kids accounts blocking streamers I thought where just bad influences. It has given us a chance to talk about why some of the stuff on YouTube is stupid.

Nobody in our house has used or is interested in TikTok so I have not had to deal with that.

My kids know I hate Robox but they are allowed to play. (I'm a game developer). The kids are are not allowed to spend pocket money on Robucks, but they do get gift cards from friends and family on special occasions and because the Robucks are so rare they have become very precious. The kids agonize over every purchase. They carefully evaluate the value of things. They look for the scams, they avoid gambling and loot boxes, and instead look for things with more value.

We have also had the opportunity to discuss that when the servers go down, all this virtual stuff they seem to own will disappear. That they don't really own it.

As much as I like to hate Roblox, it has been good for my kids. There is a wide variety of free content and you can try before you buy. Its multiplayer by default so it's social in the good way, you are actually talking, thinking and playing with your friends. And both my kids use the editor creating new content and leaning programming.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#93
post #48
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube has a treasure trove of creative, stimulating, enlightening, entertaining, and didactic content. There is more interesting stuff there than you could watch in many lifetimes: science from Veritasium to lectures from Stanford on every topic imaginable, thousands of hours of high-quality content on every topic from WW2 to the most niche retro computer you can thing of, the best orchestras in the world playing a…

My child is not there yet, so I'm experimenting ahead of time with Jellyfin + downloading select content instead. The idea is to have sizeable content in there to explore in autonomy but no way out. Not particularly doing this happily WRT the content creators but I just can't get myself to trust platforms such as Youtube to not have unsuspected ways around.

You should also look into alternate video sites. A couple of creators I like(Practical Engineering, others I can't remember) have promoted Nebula as having curated high quality educational content.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get how phones became acceptable in schools. Imagine bringing a GameBoy into class in the 90s. It'd be taken away instantly.

As co-parents with different homes in nearby towns, being able to coordinate with each other and our multiple children at multiple schools in real time became indispensable. The kids also used their phones constructively, for assignments, tracking school progress, Youtube how-to videos, contact with cousins, etc. They had social media accounts but they never became a focus. At school they kept their phones on silent…

We used to have computers in schools, on which we did all the things you present as requiring a cell phone to do, only without the persistent Internet access. Somehow we survived.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#95
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.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#96
post #82

When we was teenagers we had unrestricted broadband access to the internet but what was missing was the constant comparison hellhole like Instagram that is causing mental illness. WaReZ, KaZaA, Ogrish, CD-Keys, drugs, weapon making tutorials, Mail-order-drugs. This was the wild west days of the internet. You could literally put up anything you could sell anything and everything. Classmates were downloading roms, porn…

What you're describing sounds more socially healthy than modern usage. It was kids exploring the world digitally. Now that's been captured by digital fiefdoms actively manipulating their users into unhealthy levels of engagement by any means necessary.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#97
post #8
post #5

It's electronics in general. I was in 7th grade at the inflection point, when the iPhone 3G first widely popularized having a pocket computer. Facebook went mainstream around the same time. Suddenly kids became a lot less social, and that never flipped back.

It's mobile devices, not electronics in general. Social networking was around before widespread mobile computing, e.g. MySpace, but it was a supplement to offline social interaction, not a replacement. Back then, you had to make a conscious decision to use the computer and log in. Having the device in your pocket at all times drastically changes how it's used.

100% and the people who created Facebook, Instagram all know exactly what they were doing. This is why many people hate Mark Zuckerberg and the Instagram founders and they need to be protected at all times by armed guards.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#98
post #37
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree. It’s algorithmic “engagement maximizing” systems, specifically. (Engagement is code for addiction.) If those pocket PCs had useful and creative apps only and maybe some non-addiction-optimized games they’d be fine. The problem is the apps, not the hardware. With kids the absolute worst seem to be YouTube, TikTok, and Roblox. All three are banned in our house. The kids have their own devices (with monit…

YouTube has a treasure trove of creative, stimulating, enlightening, entertaining, and didactic content. There is more interesting stuff there than you could watch in many lifetimes: science from Veritasium to lectures from Stanford on every topic imaginable, thousands of hours of high-quality content on every topic from WW2 to the most niche retro computer you can thing of, the best orchestras in the world playing a…

Just tried, and YouTube in incognito mode says "Try searching to get started" and shows 0 recommendations. That seems like a recent change. I remember it used to show junk.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#99

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…

>that can't really be done without completely destroying internet anonymity

I am skeptical of this push to elevate internet anonymity to a new fundamental principle for organizing society.

Re: Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness

#100

The solution is unironically just to do what China does. Create restrictions on how long kids can use the web and what they can use. It won't be perfect but it will be the biggest influence towards better habits and cultural norms.

Ah but you see the problem with West is that it fears and mistrusts any type of government interference but okay with covert surveillance (because im not a terrorist).

The truth is Asian merit based dictatorship has transformed farm lands to economic giants within a generation, stable, peaceful society. Singapore wouldn't be where it is without government intervention. South Korea would've never been able to create Samsung without military rule. Japan certainly would not have survived a full open democracy. Taiwan wouldn't have lived to see TSMC without Chiang Kai Shek.

But China's model is not based on merit but on lineage. This is why that society will never be stable, peaceful like its neighbours. It's actually a lot worse than Western democracy and should serve as a warning to those that wish to experiment with benevolent dictatorship without merit.

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