Indeed, some of those could desperately use a little polish to stop firing off the pain centers of our brains. :\
In this instance, the medium is not the message. Books, movies, etc. don't suddenly become more addictive just because they're on glowing rectangles. The glowing rectangles enable additional, potentially-addictive experiences that weren't possible without them—but you as a parent have complete ability to disable these experiences. A glowing rectangle that can "only" function as a library, encyclopedia, movie theatre, radio, and (if you like) chatroom, is still a useful possession, but likely not an addictive one.
If you're able to wrest control, you can have good experiences in sketchy apps. For example:
• Facebook with no Pages, just friends, sorted in chronological mode, and only subscribed to the particular friends that you actually want to know how they're doing.
• YouTube, but only for videos you find linked on some other place than YouTube; and then maybe subscribing to those videos' authors, and then directly checking your "latest updates" feed.
However, you can't really force kids to use these apps this way, and every step of these apps' workflows is trying to lead you out of this usage and back into their "idiomatic" recommendation-based one. So maybe better not to expose kids to the potential. (Or just give them an alternative interface without the drug-dealers-on-the-street-corners, e.g. YouTube videos discovered via an RSS reader, downloaded using youtube-dl, and loaded into Plex.)
I feel like dumping a kid into the deep end of linux box with access some so-so games installed and letting them figure out how to make things work is extremely valuable learning experience. It's the "passive" screen behaviors that are harmful IMO.
It will have connection but iptables will block everything. If they ever figure out how to disable that they are ready :) Man pages and other docs will be there for them to enjoy.
I will also buy some printed books for python, shell etc
They gona fucking hate me, but I am not feeding them equivalent of cocaine.
I agree that computer knowledge is a must, but I think time is spent more wisely if they are aware of the concepts and how mundane they actually are. (I.e., programming and scripts are not arcane stuff)
At the high level, I think we will see a more divergence / degeneralization of devices [0]. Your "phone" should be a separate item from your social media procrasturbation device. We all want some form of the latter, just not buzzing in our pocket.
In the middle? That's the (zero) million dollar question.
(I hope the next wave will be via repurposing older hardware with a Free and surveillance-resistant operating environment, but my fingers are crossed!)
The good screen is the one at a desk that you sit at to do work with conscious intention.
YouTube used to be a lot more dangerous with their sidebar recommendations years ago but they changed the algorithm at some point and ever since it’s become very rare that I click on anything there.
1. They are massively produced and have replaced many other programs. There is always new content available, you can spend your life watching 3 new episodes an evening.
2. They are in fact not series any more, but serials. Each episode of a series has an independent storyline and comes to a conclusion; episodes can mostly be watched in random order, you can miss a broadcast, it doesn't matter, you can watch a later episodes without any problem. Serials are a single long storyline split in episodes: you can't miss one, let alone two episodes, otherwise you're lost; and they can use cliffhangers! and of course they do. The hooking is much much bigger for serials than for series, you always end up begging for more.
Even when it starts as a series, they quickly inject enough serials elements to turn it into a serial in disguise.
So, making good content that happens to span multiple episodes? That's the kind of engagement I really don't have an issue with.
However—Netflix has autoplay next episode turned on by default, and if you find the setting to turn it off, each episode ends with a large screen prompting you to PLEASE click to play the next episode. As someone who really likes episodes to end cleanly and give me time to think, this REALLY annoys me.
No, it doesn't mean "good content" at all (it can accidentally be good content, but that's not usually the case). It means the ability to use tricks to get you hooked, to have you craving for more, and to trigger binge behaviour, no matter what the content is. There was no such binge consumption before, and there was no request for new content all the time, you could watch a random episode of a 10 or 20 years old series and you were fine with it.
On the contrary, with serials the writers/directors don't have to think about setting up a story that can start, develop and end in 42 minutes, which requires crafting.
They can patch whichever background story (love, treason, ...) that we have seen 800 times already, and activate it when they have no other idea on where the actual story should go. Even 'better', they activate it just 30 seconds before the end of the episode, so that, dammit! I wanted to stop there and go to sleep / do something else but I click on the next episode, and there we go, again, and again.
> However—Netflix has autoplay next episode turned on by default, and if you find the setting to turn it off, each episode ends with a large screen prompting you to PLEASE click to play the next episode. As someone who really likes episodes to end cleanly and give me time to think, this REALLY annoys me.
Well yeah, because the point of serials is to have people binge watch them, so the most common action is to watch an episode after another after another, and the publisher wants to facilitate this and makes you binge watch as much as possible.
He doesn't care if after watching 3 episodes you don't even remember the 1st one, he doesn't want to have clear ending, clear breaks that would give you the possibility to reflect and digest the episode, the point is to keep the flow going non-stop and occupy as much of your time as possible.
I think where I draw the line with Netflix compared to Facebook or Youtube is twofold:
1) Netflix does not have such a wealth of content that they micro-target my individual psyche†. When I watch Stranger Things, I don't feel like I'm being manipulated, and I feel satisfied with the time I spent when I'm done.
2) As long as I maintain my subscription, Netflix makes the same amount of money regardless of how much or little time I spend on their service. So I feel as though my interests are generally aligned with theirs.
And, this may be neither here nor there, but I inherently like serials, and have since I was a child. I just spent nearly two years reading the Wheel of Time novels and becoming super immersed in that fantasy world. Longer and slower paced stories aren't necessarily paced poorly, although they certainly can be‡.
†They can do more subtle things like adjust a show's poster image, but at least that doesn't affect the content.
‡Wheel of Time specifically has massive pacing issues, and thus may not have been the best example here.
I have two adult sons. They were online as early as ages 2 and 5. I beg to differ and all that.
If kids are being ignored and not getting their needs adequately met, etc, then what happens online can have a huge adverse impact on them. But I don't think this is a problem we solve by trying to "fix software." This is a problem we solve by trying to fix social fabric.
Now we're dealing with websites/apps that have been explicitly designed to addict mature adults, playing people as pawns against one another. I'm familiar with the idea of "Rat Park" [0], but I think even if we can be absolutely sure kids' needs are being met it would be naive to rely on it.
I don't think FOSS is even necessary for what I'm talking about (although it seems to be sufficient). Non-networked binary distribution of yore was also (mostly) aligned with the interests of its users.
It's much more related to who is paying the bills. Technical concerns do make some difference, but are eclipsed by the money question.
Our current problem is that people mostly don't pay for software anymore. So we are left with FOSS and anti-user software.
I've long pondered if an economy around Free software could be better implemented. We take it as a forgone conclusion that wide source code availability precludes charging per-instance, but really that's just an assumption.
Of course the idea is likely moot in the light of network effects, which seem to be a major underlying factor of the current harsh dichotomy.
(b) can be done with a proposition in the State of California and a few million spent on a very convincing ad campaign ("Vote yes on Proposition 42 to take back total control of your computing devices! Don't let advertisers and data leeches control and dictate your life from behind the curtain!"). California because it's home to a big chunk of Big Tech, and because it's a market too big to simply ignore and not sell into.
The flip side is all of this device churn is all the actually devices left in the wake, available for cheap/free. If software is done right, even last-decade specs are perfectly capable devices good for another decade. Which is what we need, because convincing someone to pave over their current device or spend a lot on a new "weird" one isn't going to happen. Tablets got a foothold by being a new type of device, rather than an immediate replacement.
Oh my god, what hyperbole. This is like the cringey hyperbole equating rock 'n roll with devil music back in the 50s.
Things will be fine. Every older generation thinks the newer generation is "mad". It's not the end of the world.
Is hacker news mostly grandparents now? Just worried about every new technology? So many comments here feel like my grandparents talking.
It's so sad how old and scared HN has gotten. HN isn't supposed to be like it.
I don’t think all of HN is like this, it’s more about who was attracted to the headline.
I'm actually commenting based on my own experience and perception, not some abstract panic about "the children". I'm obviously typing this from a web browser, with both of us using this site that is not user hostile yet still creates a dopamine procrastination loop. HN specifically has had a noprocrast feature forever, for a quite real reason.
There certainly does appear to be a recent media panic, but unfortunately societal feedback suffers from heavy hysteresis. Is it sensible to dismiss the fallout from Snowden based on the prevailing wisdom of 2010 that most everybody is fine with surveillance? People who actually care say "about time" rather than "no news here".
As technologists, we see through the technicals rather than abstracting them as magic. There has been a very real social change in the past decade whereby computers aren't functioning as people's agents but rather remote agents of companies with their own diverging interests. Ignoring the implications and symptoms of this setup, especially as a trite "every generation has concerns", is just basic ignorance.
Go read a book or some studies about attention. It's not mindless fear-mongering.
I also remember what it was like to be a metalhead in the 80s.
This is still mostly mindless fear mongering. Sometimes it also is about parents who have had problems parenting kids that slipped into addictive behavior patterns, and blaming the thing rather than just engaging with human nature.
I have two kids, they use screens (with some reasonable limits), and they’re doing fine, but we need to be watchful and actively engaged in their screen use to ensure they know how to to put it down. Some kids needed extreme interventions, I get that. But addictive things aren’t bad things necessarily, they can be very good things in moderation. The world is a big place with more to do than screens. I don’t understand why thy extremes some rich SV families have had to implement is now some kind of “consensus”. The hell there is consensus.
The screen also offers a rich world of its own and ample opportunity for personal advancement. Children need to learn how to manage it for their own ends. Thankfully both of my kiddos seem to be able to put the screen down after a bit and go outside to play.
Social interaction will inherently set off more chemical rewards, but it is the tuning of the feedback loop (optimizing for micro-interactions) that keeps us glued.
Emacs/mutt/libreoffice/python/kodi have not been adversarily tuned to fire off the reward centers of our brains just enough to keep us returning for more. Whereas on the same exact screen, firefox/chromium are gateways to madness.