Social media is both a tool and entertainment. It's not entertainment that's wrecking kids. It's being in a global and immutable social circle.

In the 90s, if you were a nerd in high-school, you get a chance to re-invent yourself in college, and another at your first job. Heck, you can re-invent yourself between different groups of friends. Now, we ask kids to define themselves completely, wholly, all at once, finally, in front of everyone. Got broken up with? It was pretty hard to tell someone in the 90s their lives weren't over, but it's impossible now. There is an (apparently) permanent record of all your failures and lack of successes.

Tons of kids grew up glued to their Nintendos. I played an _insane_ amount of Starcraft. Our generation did not have the same negative effects that the current generation is having with social media.

What we need is physical community based social media - ie: a facebook with only your high-school, which becomes inaccessible upon graduation.

> Now, we ask kids to define themselves completely, wholly, all at once, finally, in front of everyone. Got broken up with? It was pretty hard to tell someone in the 90s their lives weren't over, but it's impossible now. There is an (apparently) permanent record of all your failures and lack of successes.

For what it's worth, none of this has been my experience at all. I'm not even really sure what the first sentence means exactly.

I think what it meant is that, in the social networks today, you have to behave “consistently” all the time. If you wrote something today and then say the opposite tomorrow, people online would probably attack you for being untrustworthy or something like that, and refuse to accept your points. But in reality, nobody can be consistent all the time. We’re all different from minute to minute, and it’s perfectly natural to change your opinions however often you want.

That's Discord, Messenger groups, iMessage groups, ...

> What we need is physical community based social media - ie: a facebook with only your high-school, which becomes inaccessible upon graduation.

That’s a really interesting suggestion. It reminds me of haolez’s comment yesterday (abridged by me) [0]:

> I was a CTO and was a member of a group chat for CTOs. We had very insightful and rich discussions about topics that affected our roles, like vendor reputation, frameworks, team management, talent acquisition and so on.

> The group became popular and the admin […] merged all group chats into a single one of thousands of users. […] What ended up happening was that the discussions plummeted in quality, where a very noisy minority would take up most of the space in the discussions. There were some high profile CTOs that stopped engaging at that point.

> This left me wondering if there is enough demand for smaller social networks with very limited visibility that can foster rich and insightful discussions (although this sounds like forums from the nineties).

———

Both of you get at the same point - private and manageable (and moderatable) communities are probably a much better option to allow everyone freedom to interact without feeling insignificant (due to size), and with the right moderation, can be a place which allows healthy conflict, discovery and rule-bending, and the other things that we were able to get up to as kids without our parents knowing, while maybe being moderated by a third party who isn’t acting as an authority figure (people won’t get in trouble for reasonable rule-testing), maybe even some sort of private task-specific bot which looks only for egregious bullying, hate, and scheming?

I really like your suggestion and would love to see it fleshed out.

The one thing that I feel differentiates from current-day is that I would like to see automatic enrollment (or ability to enroll) for everyone from the target audience, e.g. not student-run and only one clique, but nothing wrong with it also allowing private sub-areas. There shouldn’t be a technological or social barrier to entry, it should be up to each person (child, in this example) to log in and participate. That would probably help a lot of the shy or socially awkward kids bridge the gap.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40673691

If you were in any sort of closed community (religious, political, niche industry, etc), the fear of not being able to reinvent yourself was always there. Now its everywhere is the difference.

Nerd dad here. This is hard. You can lead a horse to water but can't make them drink. Meta Quest is the only tech that's being used as a tool in my house. Everything else are used as toys. I've even tried to restrict games heavily and it still was tough. Basically, some kids will not seek out education things even if they are installed. This was not my upbringing. I would eventually bore of games and looked for educational things like Dangerous Creatures, Microsoft Bob, Encarta, etc. But I am not seeing the same in my kids.

It is hard, but don't forget that toys are learning tools too! You can learn a lot without overtly feeling like you're studying. An example is playing a "learn math" game vs playing Slay the Spire which innately includes a lot of math you have to grasp. Or Hue to understand color theory and color grading without it ever feeling like a "lesson". Kerbal Space Program for basic physics, Portal for momentum and logic (Portal 2 can be great for coop sessions where they figure out how to collaborate and communicate through tough problems that seem impossible).

A lot of the lack of curiosity is because so many kids are taught to view curiosity as boring, rather than fostering that curiosity as just another form of play.

There are even things like minecraft plugins/servers where text is translated to a language of your choice, and everyone is encouraged to use only that language to collaborate which can be such an exponentially fast way to learn languages without ever feeling like it's a chore.

So don't be afraid to seek out things that blur the lines between education and play! Foster that creativity and curiosity.

I've done most of those things but they don't take. For some reason, grind games, pointless games take. Some educational games took but not many. Not enough.

I have two boys 10 and 12. Same upbringing, same household culture, same screen time rules. The young one loves programming in Scratch, building levels in Roblox, creating music, exploring all kinds of creative projects. The older one has tried it all out, but prefers to just play games.

Yeah I only played games as well. They teach you how to solve problems. I am grateful for this.

I can already see this disparity forming between my two boys, 7 and 4. It's remarkable how different they are for kids brought up in identical conditions.

Crap time is fine. Not everything has to have educational value or they will get burned out. Variety is the problem.

Their comment implies that very little time is spent in educational content (all the time is “crap time”), which is the other extreme.

What do you mean by variety is the problem?

Well I should say lack of variety. Games are healthy, communications are healthy, education is healthy. Too much of any of those at the sacrifice of any other is not.

I think in order for parents to do this, they must themselves use their phones as tools and not entertainment.

Kids are great at spotting hypocrisy, and if parents are seen zombie-scrolling through Instagram for hours, and then they tell their kids not to zombie-scroll because it's bad for you, well the kids will know their parents are totally full of shit.

It's impossible for parents who are themselves addicted to smartphones to tell their kids not to be addicted to smartphones. The parents need to cure their own addiction first.

This is probably true, but doesn’t stop kids developing addiction on their own. It might encourage them to get started, but once hooked the inputs/outputs are the same.

100% agree with this on all points.