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Comment by mquander | Hacker News Reader

I spent a lot of the decade of the 90s having the best times of my life immersing myself in video games and the Internet, and looking back it seems to me like I'm the better for it. I think it should rightfully be heartbreaking to deny that to a kid who would have it.

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> I think it should rightfully be heartbreaking to deny that to a kid who would have it.

I'm going to assume you haven't seen the steaming piles that are today's kid's shows and apps. There's no way that crap is as mentally stimulating as content from the 90s (or before). It's optimized for addiction.

And I'm not saying to cut it off entirely. I'm just saying the new stuff is universally terrible.

There's something really sinister about watching a toddler utterly engrossed in someone unwrapping Kinder eggs, for hours. In the 90's, the internet involved more than just slapping your palm against a screen and not blinking for the rest of the afternoon, and TV was in limited supply. Today, you never have to take a break if someone isn't there to teach you how, or even that you should.

In the 90s we watched crap literally engineered to sell toys.

http://www.retrodomination.com/master-of-your-universe-the-s...

The difference I see is the addictiveness of on-demand. It's a constant drip of endorphins not unlike chain smoking or a morphine line.

When we were children we had to wait till weekends to watch those special weekend shows. We had to wake up early to watch all of them. Hell we even had to pee or make a snack in the 3 minutes of commercials lest we miss the next segment!

Nowadays you see kids watching all that crap all the time. Morning, noon, and night. Parents justify it as "educational content" or they just want some quiet time. But you have children literally sitting on the shitter for an hour watching an iPhone.

I'm not expert on raising kids and I'm not saying my generation was perfect (far from it!), but that can't be good.

In the 10s as well: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418279/

That's why when I read literature on how to hook users more, I always get very cynical by the usual footnote on ethics. Please don't pretend, the principle of addiction itself is an extremely grey area and for more vulnerable audiences such as children, it's plain unethical.

This is just nostalgia talking. Most of 80's and 90's kid programming was trash, too.

Speaking as someone who grew up without cable in the 90s, there was a ton of great content in that era and the quality took a huge hit in the 2000s and later.

We had shows like X-Men which tackled issues like racism and prejudice, Captain Planet which tackled pollution and environmental stewardship, shows like Gargoyles that introduced mythology and Shakespeare and treated kids like intelligent human beings, Animaniacs which introduced a generation to the Vaudeville tradition of humor, The Magic School Bus which taught children all sorts of facts about the world, etc.

I could honestly go on and on but there was just a ton of great content for kids in the 90s (on network television alone!).

And kids today have shows like Daniel Tiger, Wild Kratts, SciGirls, Octonauts, Sid the Science Kid, Dinosaur Train, new Sesame Street, Word Girl, and access to the entire catalog of many of the shows you mentioned. They also have far greater access to educational content about science etc via YouTube than most kids had in the 80's/90's.

Good content is still being made, the parents just have to choose to consume it!

To be fair, those are mostly (entirely?) PBS shows, and PBS has always been a haven for great educational content.

Good point. Octonauts is Disney but the rest are PBS.

That type of content has never been more accessible (the PBS kids app is great).

Reminder that at least Animaniacs and Magic Schoolbus are on Netflix (I watch them with my kids, in small doses). Haven't checked for the others.

I'm kind of sad that BtAS is not on Netflix, though.

Just with less sophisticated algorithms for maximizeing "engagement", whatever that's worth.

OTOH, with less sophisticated tools available for parental control f consumption, and less convenient access to what quality content exists than there is now. Net? I think it's different now, but not worse or better, overall.

I'm sorry but I can't let this one slide. Yes, children have been subjected to a slew of execrable sitcoms but at least in the realm of cartoons children's there is much that is of high quality. Adventure Time, Gravity Falls and Steven Universe roundly refute "universally terrible". Even the 2000s had Avatar, Samurai Jack, early Spongebob and Fairly Odd Parents. Other than nostalgia and smugness, I can't find any justification for claiming that none of it was as "mentally stimulating" as the 90s given how equally rife with garbage the 90s were.

I believe the focus of the ire is on todder-youtube entertainment designed for blatant stimulation (sometimes disturbingly so) and 'games' that reflect the similar emotional highs of gambling.

> There's no way that crap is as mentally stimulating as content from the 90s (or before). It's optimized for addiction.

Commercial children's content has been optimized to be an addictive tool to sell toys since well before the 1990s; OTOH, there's plenty of quality content now, too, it's just that, as an adult, you are more likely to seethe difficulty of separating he wheat from the chaff.

Plus, people have been decrying the moral decline of society compared to their own childhood for, based on historical evidence, as far back as we have historical evidence. And it's probably much older.

I have young relatives who could watch minecraft videos on YouTube all day and it makes me want to throw up. To me that's much worse than anything on TV, because it's meaningless and endless.

"Meaningless and endless" would be how I would've described cable TV ~20 years ago, ~10 years ago, ~5 years ago, and today. Go back further than that and it's just, "meaningless" because it wasn't as "endless" back then.

Youtube at least has some interesting/useful content and lets the creator and the viewer engage each other in various ways.

When I was 10 I watched hours upon hours of television and played NES games until I ran out of content. Now my 10 year old son gets about 2-4 hours of personal screen time each day (depending on the day) and in that time he plays loads of games, watches loads of game-specific videos, and a fair share of pointless videos (e.g. "top ten ugliest dogs", "most satisfying video", etc). Contrast, "top ten ugliest dogs" with say, 1990s Transformers cartoons and you'll probably come back realizing the the ugliest dog video is both more interesting and entertaining.

> 1990s Transformers cartoons and you'll probably come back realizing the the ugliest dog video is both more interesting and entertaining

I don't know about that. At least a bad cartoon is an original creative work. So many YouTube videos are just recycled low-effort garbage. Not that there isn't great content on YouTube, it just seems like their algorithm promotes some pretty bad stuff. If you visit it in an incognito window it looks like the front of a tabloid.

"Meaningless and endless" is a curious objection. Are you sure that this is what you find objectionable about it? Most of what we adults entertain ourselves with is pretty meaningless too.

Pbskids and nickjr have shows with good content. I've learned a lot of recent science about dinosaurs by watching Dinosaur Train. There are also a lot of great videos on you tube about wildlife and about making things. We've probably watched the lego great ball contraption video (e.g [1]) 100 times and now my 6 yr old is making conveyer belts and machines for moving marbles.

You just have to look for it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxMMtIxDrGk

I sympathize. The new kid-targeted stuff is strange and I would be pretty weirded out to see my kid obsessed with it, that's for sure.

I think geeks forgot how weirded out their parents were by their culture. People thought Dungeons and Dragons was satanic, for example. There were complaints about comic books and video games virtually every generation they existed.

One of the most annoying things is how quickly each generation forgets the past or looks at it uncritically.

I disagree here. Modern kids shows are much more sophisticated than the rubbish we watched in the 80's and 90's. Take something with a remake like voltron or thundercats to eliminate the nostalgia factor and watch them back to back, the difference is vast.

My anecdote from spending ages immersed in video games and the internet has precisely the opposite sentiment. I find it heartbreaking how many youths replace socialization with social media and endless digital distraction.

Same here. Unfortunately I think a lot of the applications and games that kids use these days aren't very enriching.

For 90s kids there was a lot more exploring and learning involved with computers/technology. Now it's just mindless tapping.

It'd be really cool to setup an old 486 at home for the kids and let them play with the same technology we used as kids. No internet, just stacks of disks, maybe even setup some sort of SSH tunnel to mock dialing up to BBSes.

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