None of which is possible on iPhones and iPads these kids are growing up with. Even if they did escape the attention algorithm long enough to get bored and explore there is nothing to discover it's a locked black box.
iSH, code learning apps, Codecademy via the iPad browser, iBooks, Library Genesis for getting any book in existence for free, Duolingo, cloud coding. I could go on...
There's many, many ways of learning through these devices.
You can artificially lock down the device and expose only such things, but default mode is YouTube and Roblox type stuff.
Not sure what your point is here.
Still a locked down black box designed around attention algorithms and I'm getting tired of pretending it's not.
Who cares? Just because you and many others on HN learned some stuff from fiddling with some computers doesn't mean that learning a language is lesser.
"Ah, you aren't doing things that I did as a kid that lead to my high income! You're trash, kid! Git gud!"
kids have access to magic these days, while algorithmic abuse is rampant, thats not an iPad's core proposition.
Wasm and WebGL certainly are.
It has a generally standards-compliant browser, so while you may not be able to use assembly language and pascal, you can probably connect to something that lets you write and run programs through the browser (whether they actually run in the browser or remotely).
The UI isn't ideal for it, but neither was the membrane keyboard on my Timex/Sinclair 1000.
Err.... Wasm? WebGL?
Not all screen time is created equal, and there are any number of ways for a child to be creative and learn and socialise in the digital world as suppose to the physical one.
The social networks are a bit different. What value is a child getting from them that they wouldn't get from a WhatsApp group? As other commenters have pointed out, these big platforms are engineered to the last detail to 'increase engagement'. To put it another way - they are purposefully addictive and I don't see the value that might make that worthwhile.
Your comment made me think of that book, and I certainly found it very useful in overcoming some of the lingering consequences of my odd upbringing. My mother was not abusive, but was alternately neglectful and controlling, and I only recently found out that she was continuing patterns from her own childhood. I highly recommend the book if your situation is at all similar.
My stepfather refused to let me take piano lessons, because those would turn you into a "sissy" (e.g., Liberace).
Yeah, I'm still angry about it.
Give it a shot!
I think in general these aspirations shouldn't be shat on, but young adults with these aspirations should probably be gently guided in more realistic directions.
I've noticed that many of these girls are college students and the money from their admirers is useful to buy clothes, gadgets and to take their boyfriends to fancy vacations.
So as long as you are aware this is a bubble you will be doing fine.
With Tiktok, Youtube and the like, the comparison gets even worse when you compare the abyss of money making vs. value produced..
Definitely wouldn't let my kids anywhere near it.
If, in the chat app, you create literature, you're creating literature. Some people are, most people aren't. If, on tiktok, you create interesting short films, you're creating interesting short films. Some people are, most people aren't.
To sum up, I agree with you that "doing tiktok" is like using a chat app, and agree with you that it's not necessarily educational. I disagree that it's necessarily not educational.
I’m afraid it is not so with an iPhone. Our phones take without giving. Now excuse me I should probably log off and do something useful.
This idea that things like iPhones, or video games, or any other piece of technology cannot possibly be productive or profitable in the future, it's got to die.
When I was young, my passion for computers meant I wouldn't become the lawyer people suggested I should be, but now I make more than most of my lawyer friends. Things change, and "using an iPhone" may end up being the key to future happiness, career opportunities, or who knows what?
For every one of those, there are hundreds of streamers who quit their jobs to focus on streaming but ended up broke, and thousands of streamers who spend every free moment outside of their day job trying to build a following but never get there.
The old dream of rock stardom, well, you get a guitar and figure out that it's actually hard and maybe you shelve that. Streaming... anybody can play Minecraft, so you can keep the dream alive a lot longer.
It seem unproductive to deal with bizarre flights of fancy on the part of HN commenters, so I'll get back to my phone or something else productive now.
You know exactly what I was trying to say. ONE counter example to a statistic doesn't invalidate the statistic and you were trying to say that just because very very very rarely someone makes productive use of their phone (one out of millions), that therefore there's no problem with how people use phones. Even you have to see how that argument misses the mark.
This thread exists on a post where someone laments that their child, upon turning 10, stopped making arts and crafts, and started maintaining social media accounts and spending a lot of time on her phone.
This thread itself started with someone pushing back against the assumptions in that article, pointing out that many of us of a certain age dealt with what sound like similar argument, spending all of our time on a newfangled computer, indoors, when "normal" kids were outside doing outside things. Or in this particular case, spending time on the computer instead of studying. I relate to this, because while my parent were more supportive, I too spent my childhood on a series of entry-level computers: a Timex Sinclair TS-1000, a Commodore VIC-20, and so on.
That comment, and therefore this thread, specifically says, "who am I to say that Minecraft, Youtube, or some variant of it won't be the future operating system of society." So true!
Then another user, seemingly not able to understand how computers seemed like an incredible dead-end waste of time in the early 1980s, suggests that phones are completely different, because "your interests in computing would lead to job opportunities."
That's the context in which I posted. Remembering that what seemed like a completely dead-end waste of time turned out to be one of the best careers in the world, and seeing how dismissive the most recent comment was.
So I tried to give an example, just one example, to show how the parent commenter's assumptions resulted in an unfair blanket statement. On a thread about a little girl who doesn't color now that she found Instagram. Within the context of "lead[ing] to job opportunities."
Does that make sense now? Obviously most people aren't going to derive their primary income from streaming in the future. I never made that claim.
It turns out 99.9% of people who color and make string art and fashion paper clothes for dolls also don't end up making a career out of that when they're adults. In fact, given a 10-year-old child, perhaps job opportunities shouldn't even be the primary concern.
So your most recent comment says I ignored your question, which is weird, because I didn't actually see a question mark:
You're taking one example and generalizing it. I'm sure someone did something productive with cocaine once too, but that's not generally its outcome. (just a random example that occurs to me, I do not agree with the "War on some drugs" btw it was just an example)
I still don't see what sort of question you were trying to ask there, or I'd try to answer it.
Now you're mentioning statistics, which is interesting to me. What exactly is the statistic on what's going to happen 15 years from now when this 10-year-old kid is entering the work force? How are these future statistics derived, anyway? Man, what I would have given for such a thing back when I was ten!
Given how people are, I'm guessing my attempt to remind you of the context in which these comments exist will fail. But hey, my parents insisted I spend time as a youngster writing, so it's good practice.
TL;DR: You don't know what the future holds for the current generation of young kids using phones, and neither do I. But the present hold many surprises for those in the past who never could have predicted that I would end up making a nice living with those weird computer things, or that people could possibly ever earning a living making YouTube videos or playing video games on twitch or doing whatever an instagram influencer does, and there are probably many, many, many more people involved in video editing and production today than one might have expected 15 or 20 years ago.
That's all. Don't be so quick to assume that smartphones--or any other technology--are 100% bad. That's it. That's the only thing I was saying.
P.S. Personally, I don't think the kid's problem is the phone, but the social media. TikTok and Instagram are a poison to humanity.
...this month, maybe this year, until the next fad hits the 'net and all those influency types need to adapt or exit.
Not everything has to be directly related to employment. It's nice to know how to cook a meal, even if you have absolutely no ambition to work in a restaurant.
Why are you so convinced this sentence isn't going to describe you in 20 years?
I missed so many experiences sitting in front of the computer all day, it didn’t really get me any further than if I had taken a more modest interest.
YouTube and Minecraft and these digital realities are fake realities. Whatever happiness they provide is temporary and short lived. It took me until my 30s to realize this and now I’m starting all over again.
Digital stuff is fine in moderation, but I will not let my children build a life around it like my parents allowed me to.
He plays Minecraft/KSP about 90 minutes each night.
But he'd always, always accept an offer to do something else with me or someone else in the family.
So I make sure, as his father, to make that offer sometimes. And I also feel fine if I'm feeling like a book or a movie or something else.
Not all kids become [insert teenager cliches] upon the onset of teenage-dom, for all the different reasons this can be true... but when I was his age, I definitely defaulted to getting on the computer instead of doing other things.
I do think it's interesting how little discussion there is in culling digital behaviors moreso during pandemic times. I personally don't have a lot of interest in any of the new iPhones because my iPhone mostly lives on my desk at home. It hardly ever gets out.
I want tech to augment their lives, not replace them (or destroy them).
I certainly don't.
Then I got a better PC and spent time trying to make website to earn money because everyone was doing it.
I failed. AdSense didn't pay me anything. I realized it was more profitable to make a blog on how to make money online than go try if yourself.
I built my first gaming rig. Played few games and got bored after a few months.
I ended up watching death note on YouTube through recommendations.
Finished 500+ anime within a year. It was the best past time after school.
Got bored of that. This time, I though of making money using software. Worked with WordPress, earned some cash fixing people's site and optimizing them by removing useless plugins, adding yoast SEO, improving cache and moving people from shared hosting on GoDaddy.
I started to tinker with PHP code and themes like Divi, adata. Then I wanted to build a CMS. Looked up stuff and it felt complicated so after trying for a few weeks, dropped the idea.
Now I got into novels and manga because I was running out of anime. Probably 700+ or so titles. Enjoyed that for a bit. Finished Chinese, russian, Japanese, etc light novels using Google translate. It was fun. I was addicted.
Now something clicked again and I purchased courses on udemy for 90% discount (yeah it is always discounted). Finally, I knew enough programming after few weeks to create a CMS. I did that but it turned pretty poor compared to WordPress.
Joined an online non-profit therapy group. Listened to people and gave advice...in retrospect, k shouldn't have done that.
Joined discord, spent time there and well learnt more about weird internet cultures and spheres.
Started to get worried about future. Spent time researching health insurance, FIRE, investment and saving strategies. Opened broker account on few online sites using my dad's identity. Landed on r/wsb. Spent few weeks researching and stalking people there. Concluded it was nothing more than gambling. I started buying equity. Built a decent portfolio. Then diversified with Forex and SIP index fund.
Roughly more or less how I spent my teenage years. There are lot of other small and things I did but will be too personal.
Moderation has always been necessary.
"playing games" was using assembly language and pascal with s3m libraries to program a game.
With my kids I've felt the rise of anger when they want to be autonomous and pursue their own interests. I mean, I was taught that parenthood is subjugation.
But just like my dad couldn't realise that there was a rising future in gaming as an industry or the internet, because it was so far removed from his traditional roots, who am I to say that Minecraft, Youtube, or some variant of it won't be the future operating system of society.