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Comment by memracom | Hacker News Reader

I also have an 8 year-old daughter who not only spends endless hours at scratch.mit.edu coding apps, she also gets here friends (here in Canada) to do the same.

And if you have a look at the site you will see that not only are they learning coding and development skills, but they are also learning the ins and outs of social media.

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And if you have a look at the site you will see that not only are they learning coding and development skills, but they are also learning the ins and outs of social media.

Why did you have to ruin this for me? I know you didn't mean to, but still.

Scratch's community is very different from other kinds of social media: it's strictly regulated by the MIT folks, so content is always friendly, welcoming, and age-appropriate. As a result of this, people tend to be encouraged to work together: you would be surprised what 10-year-old kids have produced together. A large part of Scratch culture is "collaborations" and "companies" which can produce large pieces of software with really incredible co-operation--better than a lot of adults I deal with :-)

I guess Scratch as a social network tries very hard to de-emphasize numbers: there isn't a "karma" and "likes" don't bring you much (interestingly, the number of "remixes", or derivative works of your project, is emphasized much more).

I can point you to some of the LLK's published papers on this if you're interested.

(Source: Scratch community member for >5 years.)

That doesn't really sound like "social media".

I can point you to some of the LLK's published papers on this if you're interested.

I'd appreciate that.

> That doesn't really sound like "social media".

It's "social" in the sense that it's a large community where people share things they create, make friends and have discussions. What would you say "social media" needs beyond that?