Teens 'rebelling against social media', say headteachers | Hacker News Reader

Teens 'rebelling against social media', say headteachers

bbc.co.uk

112 pointsk-mcgrady79 comments

At some point, the general population has to realize that the relationship with social media is pretty one-sided. It's an egregiously impersonal landscape with zero regards for personal well being. Plain and simple, social media companies exist to cash in on your personal data.

It's about time that a generation takes a stand.

But that's not what's going on here. It's not that anyone has taken a stand against business motives or impersonal exploitation of incidental intimacy, within the context of this particular story.

In these anecdotes, the people mentioned are rebelling for different reasons, in an effort to control choices relating to personal habits, as they modify what are perceived as necessary social obligations and compulsory public behavior, when interacting with modern technology and devices.

These are really two sides of the same coin. Commercial companies are getting people to behave in ways that are contrary to their own benefit. Now the people are starting to realize it, and are stopping. Soon the commercial companies will realize what is happening, and I guess go into some sort of panic.

It's not just the companies behind it that are a problem.

The concept of civil debate and discourse is, in large part a thing of the past. Issue any opinion, politely, well reasoned on facebook and you most likely be savaged.

In my experience there is plenty of civil debate and discourse going on, just that Facebook isn't where it's happening, except may be some closed groups.

Even in the small city I live in, population ~87,000, there are two regular philosophy meet ups and a skeptics group. The local state university hosts regular guest speakers. There is a tonne of podcasts and books produced from around the world with vastly differing opinions.

What % of your city's population attends philosophy meetups or skeptics groups? Would you say it's more than 0.1% ?

As for university talks, at least at my university they were attended by a tiny minority of students. Most students went only to the lectures they had to for class and did something else in their free time than go to more lectures. Outside of students and the occasional professor, it was rare for these talks to be attended by anyone else, unless someone really famous was talking -- even then, only a small minority of the people in the surrounding area would even hear of these events, much less bother to go.

The sad fact is that most people, in the US at least, aren't very interested in intellectual pursuits like this. They'd much rather go to a ballgame, party, watch TV, or hang out at the bar.

87 people. Probably far too high. But maybe over a year 87 different people fade in and out of a group.

But those 87 people know and talk to 100 other people each,that's 10% of the city.

Go two degrees of separation and it's the whole town.

Students in a town generally only know other students. Students are actually pretty secluded. But normal people? They know their families, they know their friends, they know their colleagues, the people they do their hobbies with, their local shop owners, the people in their local Baby groups, the other parents in their schools, the people who the volunteer with, etc.

It's about how ideas spread, not about how many people are in one group.

"But those 87 people know and talk to 100 other people each,that's 10% of the city. Go two degrees of separation and it's the whole town."

While it's true that each of the people at these tiny gatherings probably know and talk to at least 10 people each, and those people talk to another 10 people each, that doesn't mean that they're talking about philosophy or skepticism. Most people just don't want to hear about either of those subjects, or anything else intellectual.

>Even in the small city I live in, population ~87,000

My guess is things like this are a lot more likely to happen in a small city than a large one, or at least a much higher percentage of the population will be involved.

I agree with you.

Perhaps rather poorly, I was trying to point out that aggression and hostility are now normalized discourse for the masses. I expect stupidity on facebook, but naked hostility is now the norm in my opinion.

Better now than when civil discourse was considered “gentlemanly” pistol duels and the like?

Facebook flame wars seem rather tame by what used to be considered the civil way to resolve numerous types of disputes

Personally I quit social media and the world seems a lot kinder. Perhaps you need to just take a break

They actually sell your psychological well-being to advertisers after binning you based on personal data.

That's Facebook's business model (and what made them a useful stooge during the election).

It's about time that a generation takes a stand.

The monetisation is one aspect of course but a lot of the toxicity of social media comes from its hyper-politicisation and virtue signalling which coincided with the Millenials coming online. The quality of the discourse was then radically different from Usenet, IRC and other proto-social media like Livejournal.

> At some point, the general population has to realize that the relationship with social media is pretty one-sided.

Sure, but most people use social media to maintain their relationships with people. Kids on Instagram aren't talking to Instagram - they're talking to their peers, friends, family.

As a teenager (probably a bit younger than the average HN reader) there's definitely been a change in how we approach social media. Most kids now take advantage of privacy settings to moderate who can see what messages, often creating private or "fake" accounts that only a few friends can see that contrast with their "public" accounts. Ironically the "fake" accounts are more "real" due to the more honest and realistic posts that they only allow their friends to see. Even in public settings, people are moving away from only showing "perfect" images instead favoring a more realistic image.

As an older millennial, that feels more like a (beneficial) return to the past, where "On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog."

IMO the real issue isn't privacy controls per se, but the ability to keep disconnected identities. For example, I might not really care if a photo is visible to everybody, as long as it has no clues (location metadata, facial recognition, etc.) that allow someone to link it to my public persona.

This is an obvious effect of Mark Zuckerburg refusing to believe in privacy contexts. Users have routed around the problem by using different accounts themselves for the different privacy contexts.

With so many people wanting to abuse our social media profiles, it only makes sense to use fake accounts.

That way our "real" one looks OK to our employers, parents, acquaintances, etc. Our fake profiles can have all of what we actually think.

> often creating private or "fake" accounts that only a few friends can see that contrast with their "public" accounts

The younger sister of a family friend called this a "sin-stagram", but some people also call them by the more family-friendly "fun-stagrams" or "funstas". Kind of a hilarious concept, creating multiple social media accounts for multiple sides of your personality.

Coincidentally I was reading an article today about a YouTuber who was doing this same sort of thing. A famous, promoted, well-followed channel with his regular content (music reviews), and secondary accounts for alt-right meme commentary (which was shut down recently).

I guess it makes sense... but for some weird reason I find it weirdly grotesque*. It's like containerization for your life: stream my optimism to my family, stream my partying to my friends, stream my depression to strangers... keep them all separated and you have can maintain (and in the above YouTuber's case, monetize?) multiple digital lives.

Another interesting tidbit was a friend of mine who just graduated med school and started their residency. This person changed the names/handles on all their social media accounts, because patients have a habit of trying to search for their doctors on Facebook and Instagram. Apparently this causes issues from time to time in the doctor/patient relationship, so it's common practice among many in the medical field.

———

0. https://www.thefader.com/2017/10/03/needle-drop-deleted-yout...

Another common term is "finsta", as in "fake Instagram". In principle I don't see anything wrong with compartmentalization and maintaining different online identities, although it can be misused to hide some really ugly behavior.

> patients have a habit of trying to search for their doctors on Facebook and Instagram. Apparently this causes issues from time to time in the doctor/patient relationship, so it's common practice among many in the medical field.

Also very true for teachers, whose students will inevitably look them up. I have several teacher friends that either don't use social media at all, or have changed their names to make it harder for them to be found on there.

I keep in touch with them via a private group text, which I'm much more active on than social media.

You also have people who don't know whether or not their relatives finding out about a tattoo, a joint smoked once, a non-objectively-default religious belief, alternative sex/gender preferences/orientations, a non-ear peircing, a non-traditional gender role, etc. will result in being screamed at daily at home, conversion camps, homelessness, bullying, ruin the next 30 thanksgivings, and/or likely other forms of child abuse.

So I think it's grotesque that there is legitimate danger in being yourself.

As a thatistheplan subscriber and frequent watcher. I will say that while some of Anthony Fantano's political opinions could be considered in alignment with the alt-right, I definitely don't think he is a member (and in fact was likely a Bernie Sanders supporter). You can check some of his other commentary on channels such as fantano and theneedledrop and it's pretty clear his politics is much more nuanced than just being a member of the alt-right.

Wouldn't all of the private groups and secret messages make it worse? School for me was cliquey enough as it was, without the assistance of technology. It seems this would blow that up by an order of magnitude..

The captive social environment of school interacts with the captive social environment of social networks to extend the active hours during which Fear-of-Missing-Out and interpersonal conflicts can occur.

I'm sure teens would happily detox from school as well, if they were given the chance. Of course, social networks are always on your phone, even in the middle of the night. But chances are, if for some reason, someone were to have an entirely different stock of people on their Instagram than their school peers, the amount of social pressure experienced would be lessened. In fact, I'd posit that this can be seen with social networks like Tumblr, Twitch, and YouTube, where one is far more likely to cultivate interest-based friends than a mere combination of schoolmates and a few choice super-popular accounts.

Took the plunge and deactivated my Facebook and Twitter accounts over a month ago.

I haven't missed them.

Welcome to the club. I did this years ago.

That was sincere. I found it is hard to talk about it without being treated like a smug asshole. It's like everyone who hears you talk about it, even other people doing it, interpret you as a zealot extremist or something. For instance, if I didn't include this paragraph, I would be flag killed.

I made a goal to not sign into facebook for the summer of 2017 (I defined summer as all of June, July, and August). In September I signed back in and poked around a bit, only to feel like it was a waste of time and that I didn't have a compelling reason to stay.

Maybe I should try the same experiment with Hacker News and other online forums that I frequent.

HN is a bit different scenario, most of us are here to discuss business and learn. Being text only also removes the fear of missing out, anxiety shit you get from people showing all the best moments of their lives.

Although I agree with you, I think the grandparent's point has merit. I've had to consciously curb my HN usage recently, and found it to be a struggle. I do think we get real and tangible benefits out of HN, but I guess the same could be said for more traditional social media as well.

I've been looking a bit more at "top of the week" on alt websites, and a bit less at the HN homepage. I think you can get most of it like this; maybe you could try. (e.g. http://www.hntoplinks.com/week or https://news.ycombinator.com/best)

This works well if you are mainly a lurker, but not if you're looking to engage in a conversation while it's hot. For me, the article is often just an excuse for discourse around its themes, which I find much more stimulating.

My personal angle for solving this problem of spending too much time sifting through news/comments is an auto-tagging and summarization platform built in Python with rss feeds as both input and output, sending the output to a self-hosted TTRSS instance. I plan to also store the output in a database with robust query support.

Interesting. I use ttrss as well, do you have a blog-post or anything about how you are doing that?

I'm still in the prototyping phase, and juggling it between work and another side project. I have a decent understanding of the stack I will need. I have feed parsing and HTML/XML stripping in place, currently I'm comparing auto-tagging libraries and seeing if any of them meets all of my needs.

If you're interested in bouncing around ideas and possibly contributing at some point (I plan to open source after the research and legwork is done), let me know.

Nah, I wish I could but I don't have time |:(

I was hoping for something more drop-in ready, but if you do open-source it, I'd be interested. It sounds cool

This is for HN only?

No, the scope will be a few aggregators, news websites, blogs, twitter, and a few others.

> most of us are here to discuss business and learn

HN stopped being about business quite a while ago. It's a general-interest board now. For example, I literally can't recall the last time I saw an article on A/B testing on the front page, nor an article about how best to deal with employee issues from the employer's side. Or an article about how to increase your product's market reach.

Worth doing, I think. Which ones do you miss after a week or three?

I've been doing some cutting back - deleted Twitter off my phone, unsubscribed from several subreddits (some of which I just never clicked on posts from, others which I spent a decent amount of time answering questions on) - and it's been pretty nice.

Try asking other people not to put your photo on Facebook. More people are becoming understanding about that, but there's still a range of responses like incredulity, contempt, or the inevitable person who wants to turn it into some kind of debate of abstract principles.

I can see how that would be a problem. I'm pretty fortunate in that I have no real friends. I don't need to worry about people wanting to take pictures of/with me, much less post them on their facebooks.

I must say, this last addition to the thread makes you sound like less a content and healthy escapee of the social media vortex, and more of an isolated depressive. Quite a less inspiring model.

I was depressed when I thought I had friends, but they didn't treat me like one. I'm much happier in my current state.

So we're labeling people as mentally ill with a view towards criticizing them and their opinions now?

We are a whole society unravelling, because we did the Icarus and flew to high.

Men retreating back into electronice dreams of the purposes of the past. Woman, errecting warped social pagodas to enforce freedom and basic income contracts against the building backlash.

Beeing mentally ill, as in unable to adjust to this, is the new normal. The only people well adapted to our circumstances, are drug addicted, no life work-aholics and ironically they are the group to force its standards down humanitys throat.

I guess that never appeared in anyones singularity vision- that the species as a whole could step away from its invention, smash it all to bits and errect some codex hamurabi with just one rule:

"You shall not wrap thy fellow man in machinery."

The nail that sticks out will be hammered down.

I might sign in FB once every few months. We ask people not to put photos of our children on FB. That brought a surprising amount of tension with grandparents etc. It's all fine and understood now, but I remember it being touchy in the beginning.

If you're out in a reasonably public place then some people are going to take pictures and post them online. It's unreasonable to expect them to filter out pictures where you happen to appear in the frame somewhere. On Facebook though you can at least prevent others from tagging you, so those pictures won't show up when someone searches for you.

It's been surprisingly easy to avoid. Facebook doesn't know me, so random strangers uploading a photo with me in the background can never associate it with my identity. And people who know me don't post my photo.

The concern is not so much with people finding me, it's with the unknown data processing they could be performing.

I just wonder if those random photos where I make an appearance without being tagged are getting cataloged and a profile for this 'unknown individual' is being built so that it can be linked with my identity if there is a slip someday.

I don't quite have the nerve to ask relatives for photographs of people who died in the 20th century to put up as my own photo to confuse their sensors, though, so I suppose it will eventually be unavoidable to be correctly cataloged and tracked.

Can you explain why you don't want your photo on Facebook?

It's one thing to chose to abstain from social media, but it feels more invasive to ask others to change what they post.

If it's invasive to not post personal data of other people on the internet, then the definition has certainly shifted over the years..

Controlling might be a better word, in that I request respect for my belief that my personal data is my own, to share or not share with whatever corporation I decide.

This is usually forestalled from being much of an issue by being up-front about it. EG, when I see someone new is going to take a photo of me, I try to say something before they take the photo instead of afterwards, and offer to leave so they can get their photograph without me if they seem perturbed.

This way they can decide, "Do I still take this photo, and remember not to put it on Facebook? Or do I take it with the intent to share it despite his wishes? Or do I simply wait 3 seconds for him to move?"

Because Facebook will still run its face detection algorithms etc., thus allowing them to build a database of information to resell to advertisers even if you don’t have an explicitly created Facebook page.

I don’t see how asking friends to not post pictures of you online is invasive. However, posting pictures of someone online if they’ve asked you not to is extremely rude.

I ran into someone on the street who I haven't seen since high school (almost 10 years ago). She knew from Facebook that I had recently had a child. I don't use Facebook, but my wife does. The thing is that this old acquaintance doesn't follow my wife on fb.

Facebook is still profiling me. Its weird.

The idea that this demands explanation is somewhat outrageous. Everyone has had unflattering photographs taken of them, and most people know how it feels to be embarrassed by a bad photo. I'm sure you know what it feels like to have pictures of you laughed at.

Some pictures are seriously confidence sapping, and others are downright ruinous. Even pictures that don't seem terrible to the outsider, can seem just as bad to a person who lacks confidence to begin with, even if irrationally so.

A recent scenario. Kid gets their face painted and it seemed to take longer and look better than the few in the line ahead of us. When finished the person running the operation pulled out a camera and asked to take a photo “For my Facebook feed”.

That's not an explanation, and that's clearly someone trying to show off their work that happens to be on your kid (aka use them as an ad), not a friend trying to post a picture of the two of you at a party.

Why the need to talk about it? It's never occurred to me to go telling everyone I meet that I don't use FB. My friends already know that if they want to contact me, they can call or E-mail, so it generally never comes up in conversation.

The comment "Welcome to the club. I did this years ago." in isolation contributes nothing to the conversation. If you had posted it I probably would've downvoted it for that reason, not for the smugness.

I haven't completely disconnected but I HAVE turned off all notifications for anything except for direct messages.

Lo and behold my usage rates dropped right off a cliff. I can now use Facebook and Twitter like they are tools for keeping in touch or reading news instead of compulsively checking them for that little endorphin rush (or rage vibe in some useless flame war).

I haven't used facebook much for years now. Twitter might be next because while I like its ability to keep me up on many interests, the "lets take complicated issues and turn them into one liners" thing is souring me.

Same, Reddit was the big one. Facebook happened years ago. Twitter gone. LinkedIN is just garbage. All useless wastes of time. HN is the only community I actively participate in for personal. Instagram is business only.

Reddit is a community of communities. Certain subreddits are incredibly toxic. Others are not. /r/factorio is one of the best communities I've ever been a part of for example.

I guess the age-old rule applies. 90% of everything is crap.

Irrelevant. Reddit is not something I need in my life. Sure I'll use it as a reference, linked in from google searches. But that's my extent.

Ironic that a site that claims to be the frontpage of the Internet would have such a useless front page. I agree that individual communities are useful, but none of them are in the list of defaults that show up when you hit the front page when not logged in.

Yeh, the "front page of the internet" is basically just pop culture. All of the trash that appeals to the masses.

I agree. r/boardgames is awesome if you are into board games.

What reddit communities do you consider "toxic"?

Generally speaking, the political ones qualify. Moderators pick sides and nobody agrees on anything. The best you can do is troll people and become apathetic to other people's problems while you visit. Otherwise, you go crazy during your stay. Be it /r/pol, KotakuInAction, TheDonald, etc. etc. They're all toxic in my experience.

Some communities are only toxic if you say certain keywords. /r/hardware has good info for instance, but if you start a flamewar on AMD vs Intel or AMD vs NVidia, then the community immediately becomes toxic and its just not worth listening to.

In general, a lot of "discussions" end up like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJX4ytfqw6k

And that's simply not helpful to anybody.

any community that's part of the default (r/all)

I really started to like instagram.

Basically I realized at some point that:

1. Facebook was family, and I really don't care about their constant drama. 2. Twitter, for better or worse, is so political. I care, but I just can't handle being outraged 24 hours a day. 3. Linkedin is a cesspool of wannabe self-help gurus.

Turns out that the only thing that I'd like to share that other people might actually be interested in or understand is pictures of the pretty places I hike to, or my kitchen experiments, and Instagram is great for that.

Instagram is tolerable, and it makes me money. But the amount of bullshit bots needs to stop, immediately. All of the garbage "aggregator" accounts that do nothing but steal everyone's work need to stop.

I've found what I think is a good compromise. I don't ever post anything (and painfully deleted everything I've ever posted or liked) but I keep my account to stay in touch with some more distant friends via messenger (which can be used separately from facebook).

As for the notification feed, I've disciplined myself to hide permanently uninteresting content (e.g. friend showing off or too politically active). In the end, there's not much left besides annoying ads so I don't feel the urge to go there as often as I used too. Btw, is it me or there are a lot more ads compared to a year ago? I find them very intrusive.

Because twitter and Facebook are full of their parents and other angry adults throwing fits about politics that are carved in digital stone.

That's not cool.

In an age where digital permanence is common, being ephemeral and mysterious is unique and luxurious.

Now, cool is having FB be a highlight reel, while you conduct actual socializing in private, protected spaces.

That's pretty much how I'm approaching social media as well in my twenties.

I'm barely posting anything anymore on Facebook, but the Messenger groups I share with 10 or so of my closest friends are alive and well. I guess I just don't like the feeling of someone "butting in" into conversations meant for other people on Facebook posts. For the same reason I barely comment anything anymore on other people's posts, it just feels like walking on glass most of the time.

Not surprising. My 18 year old cousin only seems to use Snapchat. He only got FB right before going to college so he could participate in the groups.

I feel like this is more about teens not wanting their social circles to include their parents/teachers/etc... than it is about any business motivation.

A little off-topic but wonder why there is, what appears to be, a camera attached to the girl in the last photo in the article?

Hmm, a slight replenishment of my faith in humanity. That was unexpected.

Facebook and Twitter are evil, period. Good kids.

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