Hacker News Reader

> feel the loneliness of endlessly peering into others life's from a small window on phone

At the point where everyone in his social circle is doing this, he will feel the loneliness of being the only one excluded from it. Perhaps he'll experience it peering in through someone else's phone.

>Perhaps he'll experience it peering in through someone else's phone.

And better yet, once the child is free of their parent's influence, they'll probably just get sucked in because they never developed the mental mechanisms to handle the tools properly (because their parent was too emotionally blinded and thus incapable of teaching risk management).

Just like that parent probably did when _they_ grew up and left home, for the same reasons. Cycles of emotional abuse are hard to break.

I’m not sure how your point relates to the shared experience of individual alienation, but is the child you speak of really free from their parent’s influence if they’re living their life via the same broken mechanism?

Emotional abuse?? That's quite a bit of a leap to make, from someone saying they won't let their kid on social media, don't you think?

The word "abuse" has been thrown around enough now to have lost almost all meaning. What OP described is called "being a parent".

This is like saying we should have our child experience gambling, alcohol, cigarettes, and other addictive activities to teach risk management because they're going to be exposed to it when they leave home, which is silly. Kids aren't born mature. Self-discipline and risk management are skills that need to be built up over time before we expose our kids to the most addictive aspects of life IMO.

That is actually a common argument with alcohol, that people who are exposed to it in moderation with supervision handle it better later on. Nobody argues that with cigarettes because it's rare to use them with any regularity and not get addicted.

Exactly! I think the OP talking about emotional abuse is confusing actual emotional abuse with the simple absence of a well-developed cognitive structure, and the problems that arise when parents lacking this structure try to raise kids of their own.

If a parent could give their kid an exact copy of their good/bad mapping for the world, the result wouldn't be a copy of a well-adjusted parent. The result would be a child who, at best, is able to function one step from their own reality without too much chaos. But I think it's more likely they would lose their footing somewhere around college and go off the rails, an increasingly necessary process it seems. Hopefully they have enough self-awareness left at that point to figure out how to exist in their world, finally in their own way.

>At the point where everyone in his social circle is doing this

Maybe 10 years from now using social networks isn't going to be ubiquitous anymore. Maybe people will wise up and see this isn't doing any good to anyone, except advertisers wanting to manipulate you into buying ever-increasing loads of crap. I can only hope.

I admire your optimism but, having witnessed the past ten years of evolution, I doubt it.

Why are you here?

Everyone in my social circle was doing this. Then I stopped doing it myself, and found that, all of a sudden, people were taking more time to get in touch with me directly. Not everyone, but enough people for me to be happy. Happier, even. I'm generally a quality-over-quantity person about everything else, so why not social connections, too?

"I have had a child. And I have already decided that the only social interaction he will have will be real-time or near real time. This means face to face, live video, real time chat (sms Hangouts is okay). This shows real interest and attention to the other party in real time and allows true connections to be formed."

Remember how physical letter-writing used to be hugely important?

We lost something there that wasn't real-time.

Emails are not real time either and they are not time sucking

Isn’t HN just another form of social media?

I’m sitting here commenting on someone else’s opinion on the internet, when I have far more productive things I could be doing.

Later on I’ll probably be narcissistic enough to check whether this comment got any upvotes.

I intentionally upvoted you so that you would get your dopamine hit.

Well having a discussion in comments can be productive if you’re learning new things. And there is a lot of good content here that many of us wouldn’t discover otherwise.

I imagine reading research or news posts on HN and commenting can be more productive than, say, reading reddit’s r/pics and commenting.

We can imagine lots of things but it doesn’t mean they’re true. You’re just moving the goalposts so that HN doesn’t fit into the “bad” category.

And yet probably 95%+ of the content will just be entertainment to us, not used productively.

Maybe for all of you fortunate to work in tech get professionally useful info here?

>And I have already decided that the only social interaction he will have will be real-time or near real time

Good luck with that. My dad only wanted me to listen to 8 tracks.

Seriously though, it’s hardline stances like this that create the very real chance of your kid resenting you. Do you really want your kid to be the weird one at school who can’t use social media? All the social interaction he’s going to get will be at home.

socnets are optimized interactions: you have more people that follow your interests but you may never get to know them in ways that physical proximity do to your mind.

also it's too easy to end up in cycles of small interaction hormone boosts (dopamine hits apparently) that makes it exciting but not in the right way.

Almost all social sites have a 13 years minimum age (from USA's COPPA, IIRC) it seems you've plenty of time to establish good social behaviour?

>"endless streams of gloating, selfies, and photos of what you have eaten." //

I use social media and don't get endless streams of anything, you choose that surely?

Sounds like complaining all food has poor nutrition.

Neither do I. At the top of my Twitter feed right now is Adafruit sharing a video about drones being used for agricultural research.

I find that people who don't like social media often seem to be unaware of the fact that you get to choose who you follow.

I wonder if there's a way to get all of the benefits without most of the downsides? What would that even look like?

and yet you're here with the rest of us

I assume if he has a child, he isn't one himself? The context of the discussion is the effect of social media on children. It's entirely plausible to me that one could think that children's development is susceptible to harms from social media that are less of a concern in adults. Or at least that adults are above the threshold where we'd consider them competent to cope with these things themselves.