Histeria (and the virbrator), ice pick lobotomies, electro shock therapy, Quaalude, Benzodiazepines (valium) as mothers little helpers, MAOI's, SRRI's (PSSD), Benzodiazepines again (Xanax, klonipin). <<< (Hint all of these things turned out to be DEEPLY fucked up)
And for good measure a few variations of adrenal Ritalin and other methamphetamines.
Maybe, just maybe, and hear me out on this, we have more people with mental health issues because "self diagnosis" and "self identifications" can get you a prescription. Maybe, just maybe more people have mental health issues because there is a whole fucking industry designed to profit off of problems that have a "diagnostic criteria" and not a "test". Maybe just maybe we should remember that the "reproducibility crisis" has some of its worst offenders in psychiatry and psychology.
Or you know blame social media, like we did for books, radio, tv, Elvis and rock, rap and metal, video games, 4chan and now....
electro shock therapy: were still doing this, there isnt good research to support it at all.
Quaalude addictive, banned in USA since 1984
Benzodiazepines, Valium, Xanax, Kolinapin: Addictive, withdrawal from these are brutal: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=benzodiazepines+suicide
MAOI: so well studied that we let them out in the public and then realized that taking them and eating leftovers could kill you.
SRRI: This is an entire class of drugs that is getting ripped apart by current research. There are studies that show they dont have greater benefit than placebo with therapy. There is new research that says they may be damaging in their own right and have massive withdrawal symptoms.
The term "replication crisis" started with psychology. And, though it has shown its face across much of academia, psychology on the whole looks particularly blighted. Modern research is having no problem turning over much of the last 30 or so years of drugs and research.
It. Is. Damming.
>> Many, if not all, of the medications you listed have been a net benefit for the individual and the world.
The only medication I mentioned with a leg left to stand on anywhere is the SSRI group:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jul/no-evidence-depression-c...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3130402/
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0... (hey better that we figure this out AFTER it has been on the market for 30 years right?)
To summarize all those links: A study that says serotonin isn't involved in depression. Another that is a meta analysis of SSRI research that says "no better than placebo" and the last one that says SSRI's have some gnarly withdrawal and you should taper off them (a multi month process).
So no I did not have a tirade against a broad spectrum of drugs. I had a tirade against the "treatments" that have, or are, turning out to be worse than the diseases they were treating.
Most (like 90%) businesses don’t have a website or when they have, it’s a static website. All the news are on social medias behind nag screens.
Children don't need social media, just as they don't need tobacco or alcohol. As long as all your friends are off social media, you'll be fine. It's when there's a choice that you get the FOMO situation that makes it more or less impossible for parents to dissuade their children from using social media.
I kind of feel like Elon was actually right that Twitter has become the "public square", but I disagree violently that he should be the one to control and steward it. We need a non-government controlled, non-corporate/profit-driven Twitter. The fediverse is okay but the UX needs to be completely frictionless so everyone can use it (also my mum).
Luckily with Elon doing crazy things to X, NYC has divorced a bunch of public services from it.
But not enough
I for one deleted all of those platforms and my life is definitely better (I'm way less distracted for once, but the list is longer).
What do I care what others do?
When I was in high school, Facebook was just opening up access to everyone. I remember literally everyone getting on it, and swapping between messages in MSN, and some posts on FB. We had whole school wide conversations, planning and etc. on social media, and on days when I didn’t get in front of the computer to check things, I remember feeling left out. It’s just so much worse now, because every kid expects every other kid to be on the loop of things 24/7. I think that’s where we screwed up. Having just casual access without mobile phones was the sweet spot, in my opinion.
Social media can be really bad, and maybe it's actually mostly bad, but it does facilitate real life interactions and good things.
Imagine your child going to school but not being allowed to play with other kids in recess. Lots of bullying and physical violence can happen during recess, after all. Would you use that as an opportunity to teach them the dangers of FOMO, and to just read a book?
Teaching another person, even an eager one, how to change their behaviour and mental patterns concerning validation and FOMO is a really hard task. It's not knowledge like math or something that you can just pass onto them. It can take months or even years even for pros (psychitrists etc.) to do that. Combine that with the fact that teenagers brains are wired differently (their need to fit it is greater than that of an adult) and their "natural resistance" to adults' teaching and it becomes almost impossible task.
Ever tried teaching anything to teenagers where their peers and society in general promote the opposite? Good luck with that...
Like a strict parent whose kids end up doing drugs and partying as soon as they can leave the house, or even the opposite, some "hippie" all-too-liberal parent whose kind grow up and seek strictness and discipline, and e.g. turn religious or join a cult, or find some abusive partner who gives that to them.
So, yes you might try teaching your kid that they're not missing out that they can find more meaningful way to spend their time in the real offline world but, the fact is, they go to schools with kid who overwhelmingly are not taught that and who will dislike your kid for being different. Your kid doesn't live in isolation, he lives in society and, during school years is when social pressure to conform to the group norm is strongest.
I'm speaking from experience here, I've been bullied as a teen, I definitely would rather avoid my son going through a similar experience.
What you’re describing doesn’t sound like parenting to me, it’s giving in to peer pressure. From kids. And you’re supposed to be an adult who already knows what’s right and wrong. If your kid’s peers all gain a liking for drugs or gambling or some other vice and they bully your child for not partaking, are you going to tell your child to participate? No, what you should do is show them the right way and to what’s good for them in the long term, even if it’s difficult for them to see it now because of their youth.
I have been bullied by losers the whole school time, because of something as simple as my name and being smarter. I managed to develop a strong resistance to certain things and learned to go my own way, questioning the mainstream, including dealing with network effect and peer pressure to do things I do not want to participate in. For children in primary school it can be terrible.
However, I can easily imagine, what can happen, if a parent does not support their child as much as my parents did support me. I think except for exceptionally strong independent children, there needs to be a balance in children's lives. If almost everyone in their social circles is basically telling them, that they suck, because they are out of the loop, then it needs parents to support them and make them feel that they do not suck.
Parent, after an age, has very small influence in what kids do. Kids will be spending most of their time with peers, not with you.
Anyway, to respond to your points:
> What you’re describing doesn’t sound like parenting to me, it’s giving in to peer pressure.
What I'm describing is knowing how society works and planning around it. It doesn't mean that I would give unrestricted access to social medias, it also doesn't mean that I would not be there to guide my child about how to use them, what the dangers are etc...
I'm saying that straight up abstinence is not a good idea and doesn't work if your child lives in a society that doesn't abstain. There are also perverse effects whereby preventing your child from completely accessing social medias, you end up with a child who just hides it from you.
> If your kid’s peers all gain a liking for drugs or gambling or some other vice and they bully your child for not partaking, are you going to tell your child to participate?
I'd probably consider switching my child to a different school.
fwiw fighting is the only thing that mitigated bullying for me too
I was about to say teach your child self-defense and how to fight, and the last sentence of that same paragraph just proved my point.
Look, as a parent, your goal should not be to teach your child how to avoid bullying. That's not within your control, nor your child, and in the real world, even once your child is grown up, there's always some moron out there in the world who's going to bully you or want to beat you up, sometimes for no reason, sometimes for not being like them. That's not an excuse to teach your child to be like other children just for the sake of conformity because that is the wrong thing to teach. You teach them how to fight back when people beat them up for being the way that they are. None of your other points matter against that.
The thing too is that I'm also not convinced abstinence on something that's part of society and that your kid will have when they grow up is that useful anyway. Social media is unfortunately needed to function in society so learning to use it reasonably (and not in an addictive manner) has value too.
That said, yes I absolutely will teach my son to fight back, violence in some circumstances is a useful tool to have.
No, wrong again. It’s not necessary to function and there already are secure messaging apps through which kids and adults can communicate. You don’t have to have a Facebook page. You don’t need an IG profile of portraits where you pose like a model. You don’t need to make funny Tiktok videos.
This entire issue is being murkied by adults who are projecting their deep-seated bullying issues as value judgments on how to raise children when evidently they haven’t sorted themselves out and they are already having kids.
Are you a parent yourself? Just wondering.
It's at the heart of socialization itself, which is an important part of growing up healthy.
The analogies with drugs and gambling are also misplaced, because these things are illegal and/or generally frowned upon by parents, the legal system, and society as a whole. In other words, the exact opposite of what's happening here.
And, those things are illegal/ frowned-upon for reasons you respect enough to use them as examples. That should actually help you see the point?
If your child just tells you “yeah I don’t care about others’ opinions”, then I’ll have a hard time to believe as well. As we age, and grow up, sure those things matter less. But come on, we’ve all been children, we’ve all wanted to be a part of some group. Some of us got bullied, some of us got ostracized, but we always wanted to belong.
This usually means "my close friends and peers have same opinions as I do and nobody else matter to us".
This is more prominent among people who grew up with social media everywhere compared to ones who did not.
That's unnecessarily reductionist. Calling is less convenient and takes longer.
No, I don't think so. The time for me to ring you, tell you this in voice would be far quicker than typing.
Calling conveys so much more than text ever can.
A call can take seconds, "hey mate, want to go to the cinema tomorrow? Ill text you the time" "yeah cool, see ya".
Voice expresses emotion, you can pick up the mood of your buddy if they're up, down, need cheering up.
Its real, you hear a voice and you know it's your mate. Text, you assume. Text leaves you on edge waiting for confirmation.
The only inconvenience is that you could be interrupting something and even if so, then send a text.
The post you I was responding to was talking about "group chat". How long would it take for you to call 6 people? How long would it take for you to text 6 people?
I'm all for calls from one person to another person, if you know that person doesn't mind voice calls. Text and group chats are great for coordination of groups.
Now, every conversation, whether it's by phone or zoom, feels like a struggle of who's going to take up the air time, trying not to talk over one another, dealing with delay, etc... It doesn't feel natural at all and there's little to no presence. Having smart phones makes it so much easier to tune out on a call and scroll reddit, check headlines or play a game. I agree that it's less convenient and takes too long for most things. I'd rather check in once a day with someone via text than have one longer phone conversation once a week.
I would however imagine you have some relationships of some kind that you care about. Can you imagine your relationships changing if these others you cared about changed their behaviours? Then extend this imaginary possibility to the relationships of these others. It's a network we are in we are not operating entirely alone.
Care of the other is wanting what is good for the other.
Sometimes this care is not forcing the other to change, sometimes it's encouraging them to change to benefit them as it benefited you.
While a perfectly fine rule of thumb in general, I think you might find the sticking to "I don't care what other people do" as an overriding principle doesn't hold water in a substantial number of edge cases. One such case is where someone is willfully influencing others to act against their best interests, or against the best interest of society as a whole. That's when one needs to make a judgement call on a case by case basis. Is this such a case? Not sure. I just wanted to point out that "I don't care what other people do" can't be your guiding light, always.
I "don't care" what others do in the strict sense that I don't let it influence me.
But I can tell you that me quitting socials did impact relatives and friends to quit those too, and thus I absolutely do not relate with his statement:
> It doesn't matter whether you abstain from using Instagram or not
example from real life:
My local musicians community decided to use only FB to communicate their gigs dates. I refuse to use FB. I no longer know when or where is the gig. I don't see my fellows anymore.
I even admin and moderate FB groups.
In my case it is home education in the UK. It is what everyone else uses, so its where you can discuss things or ask questions. I just asked about parking at the exam centre where my daughter is doing her GCSEs (UK exams typically taken at 16). It is where I found a GCSE classical civilisation tutor for her. It is where I can use my experience to help others. It is where I can find out about local events and activities.It is where people find resources and courses and can discuss them with others. It is where discussion of approaches and how to do things happens.
not using FB would mean giving up all that.
There are some small, insular scenes where everybody knows everybody and word gets around, but those are getting fewer every day.
This seems so weird to me. I help organize some local groups centered around hobbies and games, and none of them use Facebook because we know not everyone will be there, and we don’t want to exclude people. Sorry, but that musician group seems pretty poorly run.
Luckily, I have other hobbies that are less prone to this, mostly because they don't involve much event promotion if any at all and don't need any audience to exist. Example: my local shooting range uses a mailing list for communication and you can always hang with fellows at the club-house.
No one has "bizarre insistence" on use of social media, they're just there and it's the easiest option for all parties. People like you and me are the ones who are perceived as the ones bizarrely insistent on not being on social media. This doesn't make it wrong, and it's luckily slowly becoming more and more accepted, but it is important to keep in mind.
You are right that ideally groups like these should cater to all audiences but that's a lot of effort, and many organizers do it on a voluntary basis, not as a job. In my case, I know that 98% of people are included in the media that I use for my audience, and catering to the last 2% would double my workload. Not happening.
As far as workload goes, we have not found anything lighter weight and less maintenance than an E-mail list.
I’ve done the same, but it’s not without cost:
- Two hobbies I’m involved with have large local communities on Facebook. I’m not in the loop, and sometimes miss out on events and catchups.
- I’m not on Twitter, and there’s a massive amount of chat about my field (realtime collaborative editing & local first software) that takes place there. I miss out on what’s going on, and I’m reliant on other people to promote my work for me.
Im happier. But it’s you really are cut off from a lot of society - especially in the tech world - if you aren’t on social media.
Also worth noting that it sounds like meta thinks like they already have all earth population in their products because new accounts are really easily banned for no reason. Any temporary account I made to access some information have been blocked minutes or hours after creation.
Before Twitter, you had to go to the coffee shop and listen to people ramble on with their inane political rants and conspiracy theories just to get at the occasional tidbit of useful field-related information. That was depressing.
I left Twitter after it started showing me posts from people I don’t follow that I found annoying and in one case just straight up racist. I replied and he was as surprise as I was. He asked “why are you in my replies?”. I didn’t know why I was there either. I deleted the app and haven’t been back.
Of course, we know enough about these algorithms to know that they are based on your action, not what you claim. Pretending that you find something annoying, but then contradictorily dedicating your attention to it is going to tell the algorithm to give you more of the same. If you don't want to learn the truth about yourself, I can see why you'd want to steer clear.
Wow, um - I don’t know how to say this politely. I know the truth about myself. I know I’m drawn towards stupid stuff like that. That xkcd “I can’t come to bed yet honey, someone is wrong on the internet!” - that’s talking about me.
It’s like an addiction. Just because I’m addicted to stupid drama online doesn’t mean I want an algorithm to feed it to me. I want technology to support the better angels of my nature. Not inflame my worst parts.
The problem with algorithmic news feeds is they’re too compelling for me. I don’t want to live in a constant state of battle, where I need to exert self control to make my attention my own. I want technology to support my life choices. Not to constantly tempt me to doom scroll. Just because I do it, doesn’t mean I enjoy it or that I choose it.
It’s much easier for someone who’s a problem drinker to just not have alcohol around the house. Me? I just can’t use algorithmic news feeds in a healthy way. I think a large portion of society has the same problem, and just doesn’t know how to quit. If it were up to me, I’d ban algorithmic news feeds entirely. They’re bad for us.
Then say it inpolitely? Software doesn't care if you are polite or not.
> Just because I’m addicted to stupid drama online doesn’t mean I want an algorithm to feed it to me.
Understandable, but that which annoys you will not produce addict behaviour. You are drawn to the stupid drama because it does the opposite of annoy you.
Emotions aren't an either/or sort of thing. You can love and hate someone at the same time. I love and hate exercising, and junk food. Just like I love and hate algorithmic news feeds. I find social media both annoying and compelling, all at the same time.
The fact I'm compelled to doom scroll doesn't make it good for me, or mean I want twitter in my life. Twitter and FB's news feeds annoy me. I know they're bad for me. But that doesn't magically stop them from also being psychologically compelling. Maybe yours do, but my neurons don't cancel out like that.
> Software doesn't care if you are polite or not.
But we aren't software.
Sure, but if they annoy you, truly, that's it.
> But we aren't software.
You might not be. But there is no one else. There is only the software you are talking to. What, exactly, do you think the impolite words floating around in your head are going to do to you if you write them down? They aren't going to do anything to the software, that is for certain.
Maybe anonymity has had a good run and is actually at the root of the issue in many contexts. After all, people don't (generally) walk around IRL wearing ski masks so they can say crazy shit or troll people without consequence. And we also get the courtesy of knowing who the people we're talking to actually are.
And if you say, "yeah but doxxing and death threats" or "my employer might fire me", etc then maybe these are the actual problems that need to be addressed.
And, yes, I realize that's coming from someone who's IRL neither Uncle Buck or Buc Nasty, as his handle might imply. But, obviously that's where we currently are, which is the point.
The internet flips this on its head because pseudonymous handles can be linked to reams of online activity that's retained effectively forever but can't be connected to a specific person. This is why "doxxing" is such a big deal online.
If online activity was like IRL activity and ephemeral, I might agree with you. But the internet never forgets.
Edit: By the way, this is not universally defined:
> say crazy shit
"Crazy shit" is very culturally and contextually dependent. If I condemn China's treatment of Uyghurs, that's fine in North America but considered "crazy shit" and can land you in jail in China. That's an extreme example, but there are plenty of other more banal differences in culture and what's acceptable globally.
Maybe this is true in some places. In big cities in Europe and the Americas this is definitely the case. It's done by law enforcement, commercial retail, and private security. It's more or less trivial nowadays to buy a cheap IP camera and collect an database of faces across your camera network.
My guess is that there's more of this going on, but I'm only listing stuff I have personal knowledge of.
The anonymity we're talking about here is WRT the latter.
With that in mind, my point is that it's a social problem that people have to worry about death threats for expressing political opinions. It's not solved by people becoming anonymous at scale to offer up their opinions. In fact, this adds to the problem, in that anonymity tends to lead to increasingly offensive forms of expression (absent the social governor that is present IRL). Anonymity changes the motivation for engaging and removes the constraints that have social value.
It also makes it easy for bad actors to do their work.
Put simply, if people don't feel comfortable offering an opinion in person, then maybe it's not a good thing to give them an opportunity to offer it anonymously at-scale.
>Crazy shit is very culturally and contextually dependent
No. I'm speaking WRT the context of our discussion. That is, saying things anonymously online that one would not say in-person for understood social (or legal) reasons. e.g. threatening people, being overtly snarky, trolling, etc.
So-called "edge lords" and people for whom provocativeness is their brand, perhaps.
But, I don't think that's true for the average person at all. I think we all know this intuitively / empirically, but there have also been studies that bear it out. [0]
>Internet hostility is more analogous to road rage.
No. Road rage is a function of losing one's temper and acting outside of one's self in the moment. Distinctly different from purposely shedding one's identity to engage socially.
Besides that, we're not just talking about hostility, but an overall disposition when one is acting without the social constraints of identity and accountability.
[0]https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/who-is-that-th...
I wasn't aware there was a sizable effort to this effect, and I'm not even sure that I'm proposing it. More just observing the impact of anonymity on society/civility and considering aloud that perhaps the price of anonymity is not worth its perceived benefits.
>Most of the negative effects and hostility of social media (youtube, twitter, facebook, etc.) come from named and publicly-identifiable individuals.
Citation? Because this seems counter to the accepted understanding, multiple studies (see my previous comment) and, anecdotally, my own observations.
But, even allowing that wouldn't preclude that a significant amount of toxicity is also coming from anonymous usage.
Because we live in a society?
Would you care if everyone around you was smoking crack, sociopathic or seriously mentally ill?
Perhaps I just have boring friends that we resort to sometimes talking about what is going on in our lives. I also wouldn't feel like less of a friend if they didn't tell me something, but important life events in their lives are usually important to them, which means that they ultimately end up talking about them in some way or another.
I think a lot of the complaints from people who "cannot stop" is just laziness. They need the government to construct an excuse so they won't have to man up and take control of their own lives.
That is also sad, because it means those people will never grow up but will be constant children in the eyes of the state.
Then I would say there are the 0.01% who do have psychological problems and they need to see a doctor.
If you do live in a society, you do need to care, as "what others do" affects society in general, including you in the end. Affects how they behave, how they vote, what causes they support, their mental health, and tons of other things, all of which end up also affecting those who don't use those apps.
This is libertarian virtue signalling that simply does not stand up to reality.
Yep. The other problem is that not having social media and mobile devices can be alienating and ostracizing, especially for teenagers.
Avoiding the problems of social media requires skills and restraint that even most adults don’t have.
It is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
We grew up at a time where SMS was a thing when I became 16. I know that keeping up is cool, but social media is a disease. The amount of dumb and uneducated people that couldn't even listen to expert advice during a fucking pandemic is driving me up the wall.
I'm annoyed mainly because people around me make bad decisions that have an influence on my own life.
If you stay home and others don't, it doesn't affect you. If you're isolated and safe, why would you care if others go out and do what they want?
A commenter in a sibling thread asked why "people are so nitpicky" and "why people are so hostile to each other". This comment is why. It's exemplary even. You should look inward and figure out if you're part of the problem.
Meanwhile, it transpires that the outside world is full of people who I am sure are upstanding and willing to self-sacrifice for their fellow man in theory, but will point blank refuse to bear the mild inconvenience of a piece of cloth over their face in shared spaces for the comfort of those around them in practice.
I mean, it's not news; most humans have never cared much about the welfare of strangers; people doing what they want and ignoring the externalities happens all the time - smoking in public spaces, drink driving... the pandemic simply served to viscerally ram home just how self-centered we all are.
And thus we come full circle to the start of the thread. Hell is other people. The more we interact with other people, the more obvious this becomes. As our world becomes more connected, no room is left for illusions on the subject; it's little wonder teens end up holing up in their rooms avoiding everyone.
The core problem is the ostracization of opinion on social media. It also doesn't play very well when social isolation has had other consequences, such as the proliferation of viruses and the broad economic impact. Plus, COVID is now integrated in our society, thus giving more ammunition to those who thought that social isolation was pointless (even if it wasn't at the time).
We need to move on from the isolationism and vitriol of others with differing opinions.
To be clear, I'm not arguing whether the lockdowns were good or bad. I do think they were necessary. I'm more arguing that we shouldn't suppress and ostracize people who disagreed with them. It's okay for people to disagree.
For arguments sake, let’s call it - individual only scenarios vs collective scenarios.
Individual only: What thoughts you say at home in the privacy of your house.
Collective: The vote.
In collective scenarios, the median/average choice dominate.
Eg: The chemical expert knows that chemical X is going to kill humans and avoids it.
The collective votes Yes to elect a representative who advocates for chemical X to be added to all food packaging.
——-
This is a very common trick question where Free Speech argument proponents falter.
Free Speech is a principle for ordering the world. With the internet, this principle needs to be applied to people who would skew or influence collective decisions.
The best solution to this problem in general is social welfare. One such choice that countries did during the pandemic was to encourage or force work-from-home, and reducing the economical friction of sick leave. When the situation is so bad that people have to choose between externalities and major negative personal impact, society can help by stepping in by pushing the right choice while at the same time reducing that negative personal impact. It is a social solution to a social issue.
People as a group can be good and evil, just as an individual. Society can choose to ignore those logistical and financial problems while at the same time expect people to act altruistic. A major reason for that will ironically also be the logistical and financial situation of that country, so they may as an alternative choose an better than nothing solution to it. Sub-optimal as it is.
It does, because there are places I have to go to and I am at higher risk there.
Because they'll get sick and fill up the emergency room. If I have a heart attack or stroke at home, that's a problem for me now.
To answer this question:
Because almost nobody was isolated. Most people couldn't stay at home exclusively and indefinitely. You gotta get groceries, lots of people have to go to work, lots of people have partners and family members that can't work from home, you gotta receive parcels, you had to receive food deliveries, and some people had to be the ones delivering parcels and food, some people could get OTHER diseases. The list goes on.
Take this study (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01009-0?error=coo...). How many people on HN will agree with the ranking of those interventions? Early restrictions on travel and preventing people from gathering are the most effective measure to prevent an pandemic, but what people want to form sides around are the discussion around masks. Shutting down airports and imposing general self isolation are not in alignment of what either smart and dumb people believes in.
I don't believe in completely forbidding access to everything when my son is older but there's a time to introducing things like this and it's not this young.
My nephews school allows basic 'dumb' phones but not smart phones which seems a fair compromise.
Dumb phones is definitely a smart compromise...
Elsagate videos got many tens (hundreds?) of millions of views at the time. If you know where to look you can see the cumulative engagement of babies in front of their tablets.
There's also this hypothesis I saw the other day, that the above is a misattribution: it's not the working-age women who somehow have time to play so much, but rather babies and kids playing on their mothers' devices.
I also wonder what the breakdown of Netflix streaming hours is. I suspect a huge chunk of it is just toddlers and pre-schoolers watching the same episodes of Cocomelon over and over again.
50M views with lovely comments such as "Ujhgjjgfgk", "ĤĎĎ hcl jdjdsewi10000000000", "nnnmkkk", etc.
This sort of shit gets billions of views...
Yes, expert opinions do change as new data comes in, and yes, public policy is as much influenced by politics as by science. But during the beginning of the pandemic, the OP is absolutely correct that a shocking number of people showed very poor judgment based on social media.
And this has not changed. Social media continues to be a cesspool of conspiracy theorists and deliberately provocative content that increases "engagement". Please don't dismiss this point by putting "expert advice" in quotes.
It is shameful that citizens had to sue for the release of the partial protocols in the first place, for sure, but the conclusions are more than hasty. Anyhow, you seem to have made up your mind, so I'm leaving you to it.
So, like smoking in restaurants?
The amount of dumb, educated people that blindly accepted everything that was fed to them during the fucking pandemic is driving me up the wall.
"Just two weeks to flatten the curve!"
Sorry, I see this a lot but: oh well? They'll get over it. Social media on the other hand gets its hooks in deep.
If every teenager were guzzling gallons of soda everyday and telling them to stop "alienated and ostracized" them, I'd still do it for the good of their health.
Alienation and ostracization is not something to be taken lightly.
We know that kids on social media are suffering depression and etc.
So… if you keep your kid off of that drug, you are saying they’re not going to be accepted by the addicts and peers that are suffering?
Ok? Good?
We know what conformity to the group of damaged friends can do to a kid.
I’ll be okay raising the social outcast if the society is this damaged.
We know it raises likelihood, that doesn't mean they're all depressed and anxious across the board, and those afflictions are on a gradient. Younger generations appear to be optimizing for it more effectively.
It doesn't make sense to cast society at large as "suffering and addicted". Downstream from that, the downsides of sheltering your children from society loom larger than their being socialized among peers who use social media.
> I’ll be okay raising the social outcast if the society is this damaged.
You do that.
> You do that.
You don't hear really about Amish kids killing themselves. Maybe there's something there.
Kids having problems because of social media sucks.
Kids having problems because they don't have social media and gets peer pressure because of it also sucks.
I'm just saying what happens when you force "individual responsibility" onto parents and children, without addressing the root societal problem.
I agree 100% that using social media is unhealthy.
The parent commenter propose that you can not escape the negative consequences of social media, even if you fully restrain yourself, as you have the second order effects from your friends using it.
The parent commenter says that this is not an individual problem and cannot be solved on an individual level. It is a macro issue.
Just like you stopping eating meat will not really make a dent on global warming.
I think that is very insightful.
Its easy to say, that's the parents responsibility and that is a correct statement but most families require 2 working parents these days, most of whom are not tech savvy enough to understand how to limit social media or access to questionable sites.
Social media is an addictive, mind altering poison by design. Through the pervasiveness of echo chambers and intentionally addictive features such as endless scrolling and recommendations it seeks to do nothing except turn its users into revenue by keeping them online and seeing / clicking ads.
I lost my sister to it as she became so wrapped in the political side of it that any belief besides hers and those she followed meant you were a borderline nazi.
if thats the case, then surely it would be reflected in the studies? (assuming that the studies are reproducible....)
If you run against convention too much, even when convention is wrong, you become the zealot guardian, which conjures a family situation with its own distinct pathologies.
You could say the same thing about the Bible, or Harry Potter, or any number of things too
The scale, extent and addictiveness of these two things are nothing compared to algorithmic social media though.
I guess I'm saying that it was worth it, dubious morals aside.
They all use Discord and/or Snapchat here in Australia. No one I've every asked about this cares about Android vs iPhone. No one.
No one apart from the Parents uses the built in messaging and SMS.
But then the Parent groups all use Facebook Messenger for most group comms.
The whole green / blue bubble thing is either over played by the Press or purley a US Phenomenon.
But given the marketshare of the iPhone with teenagers in the US, it seems it's possibly less of an issue its made out to be due to the fact that most people have iPhones anyway!
They wouldn't necessarily tell if they did though...
This is more like "I asked 100 men if they worry their D is small, and nobody said yes".
But not really IMHO, as it’s not a status thing.
They say they don’t care because the my don’t care. They just don’t use the built in message apps outside of texting a parent to be picked up LOL
But I understand the point well.
Discord and SnapChat are available for iOS and Android.
With Discord being available as good as everywhere.
So using Android does not exclude you socially in my experience, here in Australia.
Similarly in Europe and the UK, the What’s App was hugely popular and the default cross platform messenger.
I don’t entirely believe the rhetoric around Green and Blue bubbles that the press repeat without any real evidence. :-)
The fact is if everyone else uses it, this precludes them from many normal interactions that get replaced by social media. It's a cultural thing as much as it is a personal thing. You will feel excluded if you don't use it, so unless everyone changes, it's hard for you to change. That takes a determination even many adults lack.
The harmful effects of social media are not eliminated by choosing not to participate. They have a cultural impact (both benefit and harm) that expands beyond an individuals choice. We should reconsider how to handle teenagers on social media as a society. Not just tell them to preclude themselves if it's harming them.
I wonder if they still do. Ironically, this was in Florida - probably be considered too woke by Desantis.
except it is, because law is dumb, stupid, and slow-witted. if you ban facebook specifically, the next day it will think that means mailing lists should also be banned. btw ive witnessed lots of mailing list and then web forum addicted deadbeats before social media came out but whatever
the legal solution is nothing (i realize not all of you have asked for the legal solution yet but thats essentially the only point of this thread that is brought up routinely on places like HN)
teh fact that every techie and his mom seems to think the law will work out in his favor when it backfires each time (or they just ignores that downsides) is no different than how people keep thinking you can put a web server in every embedded device and they oh so surprisingly have the same RCE vulns as the 90s, every single time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-medium-is-the-massage-revis...
I suspect that a lot of the anxiety about how difficult it would be to quit is the mind's way of rationalizing a psychological addiction, like saying you can't stop smoking because things are just so crazy right now.
I quit social networks in 2008, it wasn't hard at the time and it's not been hard to stay away. Yes, there are consequences of being the one guy in the friend group who doesn't use whatever app everyone else is using, but to call those consequences meaningful is an overstatement. A minor annoyance, easy for everyone to adapt to.
You're right that other people are still influenced by social networks. Speaking from the outside, I wouldn't even use the word 'subtle' to describe its effects. But, I don't know that that really matters. You surround yourself with people you like, despite their flaws. You hope the good things about them grow, and that they work through their flaws. That's just having friends.
Your good friends and friendships will survive that, no doubt, but you do lose out on opportunities to make additional or deeper connections.
It's really not that simple. The products have become so widespread and influential that they change the very culture of our society for the worse. It doesn't matter whether you abstain from using Instagram or not, some of your friends will still be more or less subtly influenced by its existence in your social interactions.
There's a nice quote from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, which IMO hasn't aged at all in 60 years: "Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the 'content' of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind... The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance."