Teens Who Say No to Social Media | Hacker News Reader

Teens Who Say No to Social Media

wsj.com

134 pointsprostoalex77 comments

While I don't think that article is really reviling anything new, there is a few good take a ways.

Firstly: Calling people is still a viable option. Short of meeting face to face, calling someone is still the fasted way of communication and avoiding misunderstandings.

Secondly: The idea that "everyone has Facebook" is invalid. You should always provide users with an alternative to Facebook, ideally just have a website.

The article does make it sound like teenagers are leaving social media behind, but it's only a minority. The interesting thing, to me is that those not using social media have retained the feeling that being busy with your phone and not the people around you, is rude. It makes you wonder if society will split into people who believe that the other group is rude and a group that thinks that the other "simply don't get it".

I was in school when msn and facebook were big. I lived in the same town as the school, which was a twenty minute drive from the village most of my friends lived in. They eventually forced me to use Facebook, and it changed my social life drastically.

The communication benefit group chats gave me was phenomenal.

Nowadays facebook lets me organise my climbing life, and makes a handy contact book for acquaintances.

I'm on snapchat. I follow Justin because its funny, but my primary usecase is showing my Mum random parts of my life and keeping in touch with my cousins. This is because my mother is seven hours drive away and my cousins are in the USA.

But in many ways I say 'no' to social media. My Facebook wall is empty, Twitter has no tweets, Instagram is foodless.

The great failing of social media is that it doesn't help you make friends. Its very much for Mrs Bucket

Who, may I humbly ask, and do please forgive the intrusion, but who is Mrs. Bucket?

It's a reference to an early 90s British sitcom (that I never thought I'd see on HN)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_Up_Appearances

I'd suspect the reference was at least partly prompted by the recently released prequel (it was broadcast 2 days ago):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Hyacinth

Keeping Up Appearances was better than Young Hyacinth IMO. Here's an intro to Mrs Bucket:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsZGHxb4caA

Nope. Never heard of it. Though quite cool.

The reference came from being about to write 'people keeping up appearances', then remembering the show.

Fair enough. The prequel timing was just a coincidence then.

A British sitcom called Keeping Up Appearances about a middle class woman from a working class family, and the many ways in which she tried to pretend she was something she wasn't.

I guess that's the reference, in that so many people on social media are pretending to lead exciting happy lives when in reality they are quite ordinary and boring.

"Instagram is foodless"

You deviant!

Also it's Bouquet dear! Really...

> The great failing of social media is that it doesn't help you make friends. Its very much for Mrs Bucket

Hmm. You'd be surprised...

You can't just leave us hanging!

[scrolls up, notices username isn't "mr_bucket" or similar]

OK, now I'm confused — I've seen plenty of Keeping Up Appearances episodes and I've made a few friends over things that look like social networks if you squint at them hard enough. What am I missing?

As a horse owner, I see teens who don't use phones very much. They all have smartphones, and some even have riding breeches (traditionally pocketless) with smartphone pockets on the thigh. They make and receive calls, and they text, but they don't use their phones much unless communicating. They talk to each other, the adults, and the horses. It's the total opposite of the nearby Starbucks near the high school, which is full of teens quietly looking at screens.

Some of this is situational awareness. Everyone who spends a lot of time around horses is very aware of what's moving around them. You have to be, with thousand pound animals capable of moving fast all around you. Giving all your attention to a small screen is dangerous. Horse kids don't do that.

Some of the inattention may be an overparenting thing. There are kids who seem to have no sense of self-preservation or threat awareness. They've never been in a situation where they had to look out for themselves. I've seen this at barns when non-horse kids visit. They don't even notice the huge animals moving around them and get in the way. That's just dangerous. Send your kids to a horse barn, or dance class, or martial arts, or a bad neighborhood, so they get some survival skills.

Or travel with them and show them the world, even if in short glimpses now and then. Not some 5-star resorts or similar bubble-sque places, but real countries, real people, like backpacking but with kids and relatively safely. Keep the experience physically and mentally at least a bit demanding.

and climbing for staying fit

Sounds more like underparenting, but at any rate I'm not sure you can expect noobs off the street to know how to conduct themselves in a horse barn, a learning curve you acknowledge with "everyone who spends a lot of time around horses is very aware."

As far as the disparity in phone usage goes, people with horses are doing an actual activity, improving their horse skills, and generally consuming their time with personal development. AKA "hobby," I guess! This is a luxury these days, especially if the regular horse people you see at the stables need rides to get there (99% of under-16s where I come from).

Lots of teens have parents who work too much, which puts horse activities on the "no chance" list. In this way, phones can be seen as a latch-key and support network for children and teens with (relatively) absentee parents. Now, not all of them are this way, but network effects work in IRL society too, not just on the internet.

Haha, or a bad neighborhood. I'm laughing at, "honey, we need to figure out if we're sending Jake to dance camp or a bad neighborhood this summer..." Of course he's going to dance camp but the idea of sending a kid to a bad neighborhood sounds kinda funny. Now, some of his friends on the other hand...

I recently did a bunch of user interviews for a project - the results surprised me.

No one I spoke to under 20 used Facebook or Twitter. Instagram and Snapchat ruled completely.

Their opinions of Facebook were that there were too many ads, it was too text heavy, and it showed what others were interested in - they weren't interested in that.

For everyone over 40, Facebook was basically the entire internet, both professionally and personally.

Small sample size I know, but it made me wonder whether Facebook will soon have a serious demographic problem - and made the WhatsApp and instagram purchases look smart.

I'm not a teen (22yo) and I've deleted all my social media presence years ago. Now, I only use text to schedule in person meetings. I am less stressed, more productive and healthier.

My son deleted all his accounts when he graduated from high school. Said he was sick of it all and wanted to start off college without it.

Did he create new or other ones after he arrived at college?

I did the same than him, and I had to recreate a facebook account. Reason n°1 were for group project : 90% of the people seems to have forgotten how email is working Reason n°2 were for the associations i am part of.

But I definitely missed last year (scholastically), and i feel that all the social network are addictive, so I am trying to avoid them (I only use Facebook through Messenger, I don't have Twitter, but it never took off in my country, Snapchat). I also don't use Youtube, because it is for me the television of the 21st century.

I am going back to college in 2 weeks, and I am slowly deleting all of my last online accounts.

> “There’s nothing really new or creative on it. In 10 years, the social-media craze will be pretty much gone. Everyone will find a different way to waste their time.”

Seeing how Facebook is constantly finding new ways to keep people online and how their development cycle makes them able to roll in features so fast, I very much doubt so.

Excellent point, but it is about Facebook the company, not social media.

I use social media, but it's certainly not facebook. It's all the traditional stuff, like forums, IRC channel and websites like this.

>They’re constantly being judged. Their self-worth is constantly measured by other people’s response to every single thing they put online

Freedom from something is no freedom at all. They are too young to define their lives by the things they ran away from.

Having trouble getting the article in its entirety but I don't allow my kids to use facebook or any other of the other social media services. I want them to have some level of privacy for as long as they can. They can txt, call or meet their friends. They don't need facebook to do that.

Some great info on the subject can be found in "Future Crimes" - Marc Goodman . Everyone should give it a read.

An excerpt from the book.

>Facebook is by far the largest social network in the world. It has succeeded by getting people to talk about themselves in ways never previously imagined. Sexual orientation, relationship status, schools attended, family tree, lists of friends, age, gender, e-mail addresses, place of birth, news interests, work history, catalogs of favorite things, religion, political affiliation, purchases, photographs, and videos—Facebook is a marketer’s dream. Advertisers know every last intimate detail about a Facebook user’s life and can thus market to him or her with extreme precision based upon the social graph Facebook has generated.

Moreover, Facebook created a variety of innovations that allow it to track users across the entirety of the Web, including via its omnipresent Like button. You’ve been trained to click on the cute little blue thumbs-up button to express your support for a particular idea, status update, or photograph; after all, it’s the polite thing to do. Your friends see that you support their message, but what neither of you see is what happens with the data generated with each and every Like—data that are captured, dissected, and sold to marketers and data brokers around the world. When you use Facebook’s ubiquitous log-in credentials to visit other sites on the Web, such as Spotify and Pandora, Facebook’s data-mining engine is crunching your preferences for Lady Gaga over Blake Shelton, just as it is tracking all the Web sites you visit with the Facebook icon on them (even if you don’t log in).

In case you aren’t sharing enough, Facebook is happy to create new rules and regulations to force you to share more, as it did in 2012 when it instituted its mandatory timeline “feature.” The change provided advertisers a dynamic, ever-updating window into your life’s interests at any moment in time and more fodder for Facebook to sell to advertisers.<

Facebook is building a new data center in Ft Worth, TX. If you saw the size of it you would be terrified. It makes a Walmart Distribution Center look small.

> Advertisers know every last intimate detail about a Facebook user’s life and can thus market to him or her with extreme precision based upon the social graph Facebook has generated.

> …

> Your friends see that you support their message, but what neither of you see is what happens with the data generated with each and every Like—data that are captured, dissected, and sold to marketers and data brokers around the world.

Companies like Facebook (and Google), prominent and huge in online advertising, do not help "Advertisers know every last intimate detail about a Facebook user’s life". These companies guard their users' data and keep it close to themselves so that they have the advantage of tracking, building profiles through other websites (with like buttons and commenting) and their own properties, and targeting the users with ads that the users are more likely to engage with (and thus make more money). They may share information with the ones paying to advertise on these platforms, but that's only in aggregate and does not include personal information of users. This may change in the future (more so with the changes in WhatsApp's policy).

Facebook has a help page titled "Common Myths About Facebook" [1] that states that advertisers do not have access to personal information (unless the user permits it) and that it does not sell users' information to anyone. Similar and longer explanations are on a note titled "Ad Targeting and Your Privacy: Keeping you informed on ad targeting updates" [2] and Facebook's Data Policy. [3] (In all these pages, do a 'find on page' or use Ctrl+F or Cmd+F to look for 'advertisers' to reach the relevant points quicker)

Either Facebook is blatantly lying (which is a possibility I would seriously consider) or the author of this book has misunderstood things…or it's a mix of these two.

I do not like online tracking and the collection of personal and behavioral information online (with the resulting targeted ads). I do not like companies that engage in these. However, for now, leave aside unethical behavior by their employees or the possibility of being hacked and having information stolen. With that context, can anyone with more knowledge clarify why people keep saying that personal information is shared with advertisers (or worse, sold to them) by these companies? I can understand that personal information may be shared with various governments or government organizations.

[1]: https://www.facebook.com/help/369078253152594/

[2]: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-and-privacy/ad-targe... (Dated February 27, 2013)

[3]: https://www.facebook.com/full_data_use_policy (Dated January 30, 2015)

All of that was what we fretted about years ago. It turned out Facebook has been exceedingly inept at targeted advertising, in spite of all that information. And everyone these days knows that clicking a 'like' button just means signing up for advertising from some company. Once again, global crisis averted.

As someone who's run a few forums aimed at younger audiences, I've seen quite a few teens and kids who don't seem to care very much about social services or what not. In fact, quite a few people on niche forums seem to outright despite sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc.

There's a similar group on more 'anonymous' social media services, like Reddit and Tumblr.

The distinction there is likely between people who prefer spending their time online talking to people they already know offline via social media, and those who spend more of time discussing specific subjects with people on the other side of the planet.

Is it just me, or does the "web" link trick here doesn't work anymore? All WSJ articles regardless of where I clicked from seem to be hidden behind the paywall.

Well then I have a different reason for not using social media, it is only that it is not free software.

Do you use GNU Social or Diaspora then?

Social media are tools, and a tool is as good/bad as the use we make of it, we should never forget.

Nope, tools also have a meaning by themselves.

We come to understand the meaning of tools only by the use other people make of them. Of course tools come with a priori, socially charged meanings, yet they are the results of the way we have historically used or interacted with them. There's no such a thing as intrinsic meaning, in this world.

What's the meaning of a knife, then?

To cut.

But with a butter knife you won't really cut humans. But there are combat knives for that... and yes, you can also use the latter for butter, but not so good.

To be pedantic, a butter knife is really for spreading, not cutting.

there are people obsessed with knives as such (collecting them, playing with them, carrying them all the time, imagining they save the world/themselves with knife). Knives have their power over them. And that's just knives, not even intellectual toys like products of multi-billion industry we're talking about.

Right, but that's not "meaning in themselves," it's "meaning in context."

I get your point, I think - a knife's "nature" if it has one, depends on its use. But a knife is an example of a simple tool with many purposes. What about a complicated, specialized tool built for only one or two purposes? Worse yet, what about a complicated tool serving multiple people's divergent and conflicting purposes?

Like a swiss knife? :)

Oh I see your point, and I also dislike certain tools that, despite their possible wide set of functionalities, still don't convince me. Facebook is definitely one of them.

However, my question was more generic because social media themselves are not bad. HN is also a social media, after all. Of course, when you give all your data to someone, well, you take some risks. I just don't like the idea that one tool is "just" bad. Facebook, more specifically, offers many features, and some of these are really interesting to me, less to somebody else, yet there are other "things" which don't convince me too much.

A tool -- a knife, say -- is merely a chunk of inert metal. It has no inherent meaning whatsoever.

It is meaningful only insofar as it is placed into a social context. Any meaning is in the observers' minds, not in the tool itself.

Social media is a honeypot meant to trick people into giving up their information.

Each piece on it's own may seem unimportant, but like in a game of Go, you won't see the full impact until it's too late.

Agreed. But I think it's safe to say that by using social media we implicitly accept the constant tension between using the tools and becoming a tool ourselves.

If that's the case, I have to wonder who "we" is for social media--advertisers, people communicating through it, share holders, or some combination thereof?

I'd say the latter one: we are all in this together, one way or another.

Social media are owned and run by someone else, so they are not agnostic tools the way a hammer is.

I almost implicitly read that as "users of social media are tools", which while a bit harsh, might actually have some truth to it...

Are they getting laid in comparable rates to teens who say yes to social media?

Probably more if they're getting out of the house.

Every action has a re-action. Once a development has reached an extreme it reverses in the opposite direction.

Makes sense.

Except there's no real re-action documented here, just cherry-picked anecdotes and vague FUD pandering.

When I was in school, mobile phones were new, and having one and texting (as opposed to calling a landline) was the constant, relentless (and deeply worrying, obviously) pursuit of social validation of the time. Today, apparently, limiting yourself to texting is the pinnacle of measured restraint and self-control.

This exact paragraph (substitute "text" for "like" and "tweet") could have been written about texting ca 1999 (and probably about landline telephones in the 1950s):

To these teens who opt out, the relentless pursuit of “likes” looks exhausting. “I think it takes too much time and kids get too absorbed,” says Annie Furman, 19, who grew up in the Dallas area and is about to start college in Iowa. “I’d rather see my friends in person than tweet at them. I don’t want to spend all my time on my phone. I want to spend it in the real world.”

Like writing? This is an over-generalisation. Social media in some form is here to stay, though its exact form will change.

The one you aren't going see in WSJ: teens who say no to Paywall

And the rest of us who say no too.

We're told not to post unsubstantive snark about the websites of submissions.

It's not substantive to say that I can't read the article at the link?

ETA: Someone made an archive of it! https://archive.fo/JdS1m

Not if its because of a paywall, because the answer is always going to be the same: Use your faculties to get around it, or your dollar to get over it, or simply move on.

Besides, the comments are often generalised moaning about the concept of a paywall.

I'm really starting to think sites with paywalls should be banned from HN. ATM, this is #11 and I can't read it.

I know you can do that google redirect thing that removes the paywall, but I'm really not that interested in reading the NYT anyways, even without having to jump through hoops.

-- Annoyed about not being able to read an article.

-- Have a straightforward way to read the article (that's even automated by HN's [web] link).

-- Decide can't be bothered to read the article after all.

-- Pipe up and moan to everyone in the virtual train carriage about the article's website.

ASSESSMENT: Waste of attention! Just another mutation of bikeshedding.

The web link doesn't always do the trick for me. It's a shame Google continues to index websites that it doesn't work for.

google should:

de-index pages that have paywalls

apply penalties to pages that have those annoying 'welcome' screens (forbes.com). The penalty wouln;'t be substantial, but instead would rank the page lower than similar content that does not have annoying welcome screen.

> -- Have a straightforward way to read the article (that's even automated by HN's [web] link).

That's not obvious. I had no idea what the "web" link did until you mentioned it.

You could have easily just pointed that out rather than berating me. You're not helping to build the community.

You said you already knew about the Google route. That's all that link is.

flag it

Flagging is not intended to be used for downvoting - if you do that, you'll eventually get your flagging privileges revoked by the moderators.

Flagging should be used for off-topic content, spam, duplicate submissions, etc. The moderators have repeatedly stated that posting paywalled articles that work with the "web" link is OK.

> I'm really not that interested in reading the NYT

Then don't. By its position at #11, many of us are, and are willing to fund journalism.

Does anyone have a link that bypasses the paywall? Even Google doesn't show the full article.

I have found an archived copy.

https://archive.is/vLs4w

Click on the little "web" link at the top of this page (it's on the same line that says "96 points by prostoalex"). Then open Google's link to the article in an incognito window.

That works every time for me.

Ah, the trick must be to use an incognito window.

Thanks.

- Add refcontrol[1] for Firefox, or some alternative for Chrome.

- RefControl > Options > Add Site

- Enter site as www.wsj.com and Action as https://www.google.com

You can also use this trick for ft.com and probably a few other sites.

1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/refcontrol/

Why are links to hidden/payed content allowed here?

Usually the 'web' link is sufficient, but the policy on Google allowing traffic may be changing.

Because the criteria for paywalls are publisher-dependent, and can involve reader's country, IP range, referral source, browser history or some quota of free articles available per month. Articles from sources with extremely restrictive paywalls (ft.com, nature.com) just don't get many upvotes, so the problem is self-correcting.

Alternative solution would be to link to a paywall-free blog post rehashing the contents of the article that includes a token link to the original (huffingtonpost.com or businessinsider.com), but HN's policy at this point expresses strong preference for the original.

So all the teens who live in the "No Coverage" areas on a cell carrier's map.

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