Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

afterbabel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 142 posts

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#51

Post by ceejayoz »

itishappy wrote: post #49
ceejayoz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can always take the phone away. Kids are… resourceful. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teen-goes-viral-for-tweeting-fr... Last week, a 15-year-old girl named Dorothy looked at the smart fridge in her kitchen and decided to try and talk to it: "I do not know if this is going to tweet I am talking to my fridge what the heck my Mom confiscated all of my electronics again." Sure enough, it worked. The message Dorothy s…

I'd posit that social media restricted-solely-to-a-fridge is still significantly less harmful than social media literally-always-within-arms-reach.

This was the best they could come up with on short/no notice.

$50 (or a hand-me-down from a friend) will buy you an Android burner phone that can hop on the neighbor's wifi.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#52

Post by itishappy »

ceejayoz wrote: post #41
basisword wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely asking - is it impossible to just enforce a no phones until 16+ rule with your kids? The reasons against it I see are either “it’s too hard for the parents” or hypothetical (“they would have no social life”). There were tonnes of things I wanted to do as a teenager that my parents prevented me from doing. Including things my friends were allowed to do by their less strict parents. There was of course things…

Only if you're willing to ban them from ever going to friends' houses, where they'll use their friends' devices to do it.

A cell phone is available 168 hours a week. A friend's phone might be available, say, 10% of that?

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#53

Post by [deleted] »

ceejayoz wrote: post #41
basisword wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely asking - is it impossible to just enforce a no phones until 16+ rule with your kids? The reasons against it I see are either “it’s too hard for the parents” or hypothetical (“they would have no social life”). There were tonnes of things I wanted to do as a teenager that my parents prevented me from doing. Including things my friends were allowed to do by their less strict parents. There was of course things…

Only if you're willing to ban them from ever going to friends' houses, where they'll use their friends' devices to do it.

[deleted]

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#54

Post by cardanome »

basisword wrote: post #25
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a parent, I never failed to recognize it. I just failed to be able to do anything about it. You were a teenager once, I'm sure you can remember how little influence your parents actually had over how you actually spent your time. Or at least saw that in your friends. This is a society wide thing. Parents are pretty much powerless. So yes, regulation. But you'll see how discussion of any proposal for this goes down…

Genuinely asking - is it impossible to just enforce a no phones until 16+ rule with your kids? The reasons against it I see are either “it’s too hard for the parents” or hypothetical (“they would have no social life”). There were tonnes of things I wanted to do as a teenager that my parents prevented me from doing. Including things my friends were allowed to do by their less strict parents. There was of course things…

I would have strongly agreed with you if we were talking ten years ago but with everything using two-factor authentication these days it pretty much a requirement to have a phone. Even for children to do school work.

Like there are parental control systems and all that you could set up but that requires you to be pretty tech savy as a parent. I think you are already doing great if you keep your child away from phones and tablets until they are of school age but keeping teenagers away from smart phones seems very unrealistic if you don't live in a remote commune or something.

I really, really wish it weren't the case.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#55

Post by palmotea »

rollcat wrote: post #26
zonkerdonker wrote: post #8

Anyone remember YikYak? I was in university at the time, the explosive growth was wild. After the inevitable bullying, racism, threats, doxxing, that came with the anonymous platform, YikYak enabled geofencing to disable the app on middle and high school grounds. I think every social media platform with an "age limit" should be required to do this as well. And open it up, so that anyone can create their own disabling…

Technological solutions to societal problems just don't work. Some $EVIL technology being fashioned to harm individuals isn't to blame - the companies behind that technology are. You can pile up your geofencing rules, the real solution lies somewhere between you deleting the app and your government introducing better regulation.

> Technological solutions to societal problems just don't work.

Ehhh, that's just a poorly thought out slogan whose "truth" comes from endless repetition. Societal problems can have technical origins or technical enablers. In which case a technical solution might work to make things better.

So no, there's no technical solution to "people being mean to each other," but there is a technical solution to, say, "people being meaner to each other because they can cloak themselves with anonymization technology."

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#56

Post by neilv »

> We suggested to them some design changes that we believe would make the platform less addictive and less harmful: [...] 5. Stop deleting posts on Snap’s own servers.

Can someone say the original intent or de-facto use case of Snapchat, and how that's changed over time?

Around the time it started, I heard that it was for adult sexting, with people thinking they could use it to send private selfies that quickly self-destruct. So that (purportedly) the photos can't be retained or spread out of the real-time person-to-person context in which they were shared. (I guess the ghost logo was for "ephemeral".)

And then I vaguely recall hearing that Snapchat changed the feature, or got rid of it.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#57

Post by lotsofpulp »

nancyminusone wrote: post #40
zonkerdonker wrote: post #8

Anyone remember YikYak? I was in university at the time, the explosive growth was wild. After the inevitable bullying, racism, threats, doxxing, that came with the anonymous platform, YikYak enabled geofencing to disable the app on middle and high school grounds. I think every social media platform with an "age limit" should be required to do this as well. And open it up, so that anyone can create their own disabling…

At my college, someone got kicked out for yikyacking "gonna shoot all black people a smile tomorrow" and everyone quickly realized exactly how anonymous it really was after the guy was found a few hours later. Thing is, there was a comma between "people" and "a smile" which made his poorly thought out joke read a lot differently. Dumb way to throw away your education.

I don’t understand. The “joke” would be if there was no comma. Putting a comma seems like they wanted to cause panic, and feign ignorance later.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#58

Post by ViktorRay »

Does anyone remember the Hacker News thread last week about Black Mirror?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43648890

Many in the comments were criticizing Black Mirror for being unrealistic. Especially in Black Mirror’s assumption that negative technologies would be introduced into society and ruin people without folks realizing.

Well…Snapchat is basically a Black Mirror story. It was introduced and became widespread without much debate. The negative effects are happening. We know of them. Nothing happens. So the Black Mirror criticizers were wrong.

“You best start believing in Black Mirror stories Mrs Turner. You’re in one!”

And so are the rest of us. Look around you and tell me the world isn’t a Black Mirror episode.

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#59

Post by myko »

nancyminusone wrote: post #40
zonkerdonker wrote: post #8

Anyone remember YikYak? I was in university at the time, the explosive growth was wild. After the inevitable bullying, racism, threats, doxxing, that came with the anonymous platform, YikYak enabled geofencing to disable the app on middle and high school grounds. I think every social media platform with an "age limit" should be required to do this as well. And open it up, so that anyone can create their own disabling…

At my college, someone got kicked out for yikyacking "gonna shoot all black people a smile tomorrow" and everyone quickly realized exactly how anonymous it really was after the guy was found a few hours later. Thing is, there was a comma between "people" and "a smile" which made his poorly thought out joke read a lot differently. Dumb way to throw away your education.

I'm being obtuse but I don't see the comma thing making the "joke" come off differently, what am I missing?

Re: Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

#60

Post by spacechild1 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #41
basisword wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely asking - is it impossible to just enforce a no phones until 16+ rule with your kids? The reasons against it I see are either “it’s too hard for the parents” or hypothetical (“they would have no social life”). There were tonnes of things I wanted to do as a teenager that my parents prevented me from doing. Including things my friends were allowed to do by their less strict parents. There was of course things…

Only if you're willing to ban them from ever going to friends' houses, where they'll use their friends' devices to do it.

> where they'll use their friends' devices to do it.

That'd already be much, much better than using it at every possible moment.

Why do people just give up proactively? Yes, you can't prevent it 100%, but you can still try to restrict it as much as possible.

Post reply on HN