711–720 of 1001 posts
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…
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. 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…
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.
Social media has ruined society, indeed, but only because the exploitability was always there to begin with. Just look at everyone in this thread opting for letting their kids cave in to peer pressure and dodging responsibility for their upbringing because "past a certain point" you can't do shit about it, and God forbid they try to develop themselves into a worthwhile adult without using any of those time-sinking, m…
Sounds a lot like gambling. Perhaps we should regulate it the same way.
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…
> the constant comparison hellhole like Instagram that is causing mental illness. Anecdotally, Instagram ranks much lower than Reddit for causing problems among the young kids I’ve worked with. Reddit is an absolutely cesspool of misinformation, fake stories, propaganda, and rampant doomerism. Scrolling Instagram can’t hold a candle to the militant doomerism that seethes from sites like Reddit. I think it’s an uncomf…
The charts in this article are deceptive and cause me to not trust the author. Look at long term teen suicide rates and you will see that suicide rates were quite high around 1990, and then rates dropped until about 2005, and are now on the rise again but have not yet reached 1990 levels (I think). So, the author of this piece wants to make it look like suicides and self harm are on the rise because of social media ,…
On the one hand, I can see how starting the graph in 2005 feels misleading. On the other, past high rates don’t necessarily invalidate theories about the current spike. Another way to frame this is that whatever factors were leading to teen suicides in the early 90s improved. The question now is: are the same factors in play? The fact that rates were higher is not by itself a good reason to conclude that Haidt’s theo…
Haidt isn't looking into what actually happened during these periods, he's just throwing his hands in the airs preaching "I can’t see a causal path linking X with Y outside of social media".
A lot of things have been happening all around the globe that were also fundamentally different from the past, including sensitivity to corruption and awareness of global warning, which younger generation could arguably be more prone to take seriously.
A lack of clear link can't just be brushed off as a proof of irrelevance of the other probable causes.
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 differen…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> She doesn't share her actual thoughts 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 i…
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…
Don't you think it's worrisome that we can't agree on anything? And that includes things that are supposed to have objective answers. Why can't we find the truth? We now have instant global communication available almost 24/7, shouldn't it bring the period of unprecedented unity?
Does anyone have any ideas on how to cure human loneliness?
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's two major drivers here - scarcity of attention (1) and social distance (2). 1) Your attention on social media is monetized by others, which means there is always something tugging on it like so many street peddlers, in addition to all the 'organic' content made by other users. When there's a shortness of attention, you're always going to be more snippy and inclined to the short pithy retort, instead o…
I think you're on to very good points. One kind of obvious suggestion on how to fix it: We have to grow a culture of more deliberate attention. Just like how we chose to consume healthy food and avoid consuming too much alcohol we must be more deliberate in our choice of media. But this is not an easy solution. Every social media space is saturated with good content as well as bad. It might become easier if we grow s…
We can lay down the foundation for such a culture for the future but it might be too late for most of us to right the ship.