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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

HN folks without kids of a certain age may not realize just how deeply children today are into Youtube personalities/channels, Twitch streamers, etc.

That being said, I think it's generally a positive thing. Teen Boss isn't replacing kids reading the WSJ, it's replacing tweens swooning over boy band photos in Tiger Beat.

YT/Streaming isn't without its weirdness, but it's significantly more participatory and encouraging of people creating and making things as an alternative to purely consuming media.

I'd rather my daughter want to make YouTube videos and open an Etsy shop with her designs than mindlessly watch Hannah Montana (which I feel like is the equivalent from a decade ago).

As a peek into this world, check out Rosanna Pansino (Nerdy Nummies YT channel) and how successful she is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i2cebTn0nc

There are worse role models for kids.

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what stands out to me, is what appears to be the "get rich quick nature" of all the articles. call me old fashion, but at that age I'd rather be teaching kids the value of hard work, delayed gratification, research, skepticism, etc, etc.

In fact I'd rather kids would read the WSJ than this garbage, at least then they'd understand how hard it is to start and maintain a business. Otherwise you're setting this kids up to follow every MLM trap they got offered later on in life. HODL HODL HODL am i right?

As opposed to 'I generated $32k in 30 days selling a crypto USB stick' that is currently #3 on this forum? Or is that completely different?

You're saying that like spaceflunky's comment included an endorsement for that post, or that his posting a comment here means that he approves of every single post on the site.

I'm saying that there seems to be a disparity in the value judgements the HN hive-mind applies to itself, and the entrepreneurial activities of young women.

Go on the thread for yourself, there are lots of people picking apart the idea, but no one saying the creator is foolhardy for favoring an entrepreneurial career / calling him a scammer.

I think the "get rich quick" schemes here are just as bad, but I don't think it's a logical inconsistency to argue that it's one thing to target these kinds of articles to adults and quite another to target them to young children.

100% agree. And that's my point. There is a level of discernment and skepticism you should have as an adult.

While those skills are not common enough in adults, it's rare that ANY 10 year old anywhere would have the life experience to develop those skills.

Also making this business activity socially acceptable for kids opens the door to parents putting pressure on their kids to make money ("WHY ISN'T MY 12 A VIRAL BEAUTY GURU!?!?!" says some soccer mom). I'm also willing to bet most of these kids have parental involvement, so it opens the door to parents 'pimping out' their kids so they can market some shitty product with an edge of it being sold by a kid.

At that age, kids should be focused on developing fundamental skills instead of focusing on their brand or get rich. What's wrong with saying something is ok for adults but not for kids?

Many of the young people with channels on youtube are focusing on stuff they are already having fun with and in the process of creating videos and promotion are acquiring and learning valuable skills. I expect that most teens reading articles in Teen Boss are going to see through the bullshit pretty quickly. The flip-side is the pimping parent who is trying to brand their kids into a youtube star, those people need to be stopped. Luckily most of the young people active on youtube have parents that are not pressuring them...

I sort of agree with you that some kids are doing it for the love. But I think they are in the minority. No matter how much you love something posting 3 videos a week has got to zap the fun out of it especially for a kid.

Also I don’t believe at all that a 12 year is really passionate about building a line of “eco friendly” skin care products and the botanical mixtures (like one of the girls on the cover of teen bo$$).

Who is talking about ten and 12 year olds? The magazine is literally called Teen Boss.

according to the new yorker:

> The title is aimed at girls aged eight to fifteen, and it has a bright, pink-heavy, clamorously cheerful aesthetic to match.

Maybe we read different articles (or different comments) but my sense is that commenters here as a whole were earlier and are more consistent in their criticism and dismissal of "crypto" scams. I'd already been reading warnings here for a year or two by the time I started seeing this stuff mindlessly hocked in mainstream sources.

(Your broader point may be right, I just don't think the current crop of scams is a great example.)

there is no hive mind, there is no “it”. there are individuals, and all of us have our own minds.

your collectivism is a misapplied abstraction leaking reality at every seam

Communities are things. Just because they are made up of individuals does not mean they lack group properties and tendencies. Saying that would be like claiming a glass of water can't have surface tension because it's made up of individual atoms.

Lmao

'Individuals' on HN (or 20-something CS guy from the U.S.) and their 'unique opinions' are so fucking similar and revolve around a couple of basic platitudes and ideologems

Pretty much anything that isn't a specific technical subject is totally boring and predictable on HN

Also your last sentence is painfully cringey to read

idk how you could not notice that any voting-based link aggregator or comment section has a hive mind effect.

It's different in that virtually all HN comments on that article are negative.

I don't follow. What's the connection?

How many failures came before that? Nobody sings praises about those, even though they are the most important part.

Do you have a link to that article?

When have kids ever read the WSJ? This is an alternative to passive media consumption.

Hell “how to build your brand by being you” is the gist of a ton of the articles you see in Forbes, etc, just with more glitter.

um, cough .... Alex Keaton ...

Oooh, a fellow NZ HNer :wave:

And also, what if they are lucky enough to get close to success? How should they handle it? When should they trust their own instincts, versus when should they defer to experience? I've written at length regarding what happened when a 22 year old was given $1.3 million dollars and the chance the run with a great startup idea. A very cutting edge idea that was full of potential. It should have become something great. But the mistakes made were of a type that might be expected from a lack of experience.

That is the flip side of it. Endlessly shouting "Express yourself and amazing things will happen!" is a bit of a trap. It doesn't prepare kids to handle the lucky breaks that some of them will undoubtedly get.

https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...

Earlier today I was reading an old AMA by PewDiePie on reddit. A recurring theme was asking him how he got so successful. He talked about how he was there at the right time, had a good niche, great fans, got lucky, etc. Someone replied to him, reminding him that he also uploaded videos three times a day for years.

I agree that instant gratification is a problem, but it doesn't strike me as bad that kids might think YouTube or social media or whatever is an easy way to make money, and then try their hand at it. I think they'll quickly find that success still takes effort and perseverance.

"hard work, delayed gratification, research, skepticism"

I feel like the best way to learn that is try it out yourself, which is what such magazines are encouraging no?

The good thing with being a kid is that you can fail. Better try a get rich quick scheme in these conditions and learn from your mistakes than when you need the money to survive.

Yeah, many of the gamer/maker youtubers provide a lot of insight into the work involved in creating a successful youtube channel. For every successful youtuber there are many aspiring ones, mostly kids, who are putting a lot of work into it on both the creation and marketing ends. They already know or learn quickly that it is not a get rich quick scheme, and young people, in comparison to adults, seem to have a better handle on social influence and how important it is for monetization as well as how tenuous and meaningless it is from an actual social viewpoint.

Most YouTubers never get to a point where they can make enough to make it their main job.

Which means most of them get to experience failure early on in their life. I think this is a good thing for them in the long term.

As someone who just followed through all the usual treadmill of doing well in school, going to top college, etc. just to find out later that there was this entirely different and more exciting world of entrepreneurship where I can decide my own destiny, I think it's good to experience failure as early as possible in your life.

A lot of people who are not cut out for unstable life will realize it's not for them and just go on to live a stable life without regret, and many others who can recover from the failure, will have learned some lesson which can be helpful in their future adventure.

Also "Garbage" is a subjective term, I personally see many mainstream journalism driven by ad revenue much more garbage than many Youtubers who create unique content that you won't get anywhere else. A lot of the successful ones actually start out doing Youtube because they're passionate about the topic they make videos on. It's the failures who jump in just for the money.

Kids will learn. Tween-aged kids have no conception for how difficult life can be and it doesn't matter how much you tell them so. The point with kids is to build up their confidence and sense of possibility, and help explain to them the specific consequences for the mistakes they inevitably make as they test out this possibility.

Telling young girls they can "get rich quick" is not the best way to go about all this, but it mostly serves to show, in part, what is possible. Girls are not reading these flashy magazines for deep reading. It's not something they consciously mull over as they read-- the effect is subconscious. The more magazines consumed, the more the messages of what's possible become more concrete in the background, and she will start to pay attention to the Youtubers she loves from a different perspective-- one of gathering tips and watching for how they became successful. That is, if she wants to start a business anyways. Mostly moms pick up these magazines for their kids.

edit: I also want to say that becoming successful in an enterprise like Youtube while one is young is phenomenal for confidence. Even just starting to create is very good for confidence. The venture won't last forever, but the adult will always have the confidence they built in their younger years.

My daughter is super into JoJo Siwa, and YouTube videos of girls playing make believe with their toys. It’s kids creating content for kids. I don’t get the article’s angle at all. It’s way better than what I was into at that age—ninja turtles and power ranges, cartoons designed by adults primarily to sell toys.

Yea, this is so much better than the crap I was into as a kid. I’d be thrilled if my daughter took an early interest in business and making money, even if it’s superficial and simplified for kid audiences.

Why is that? Why don't you let your daughter have innocent, playful, silly, immature childhood that she is entitled to?

If your daughter wants to learn about successful business and making money, she will very soon look into characters like Trump, or Koch brothers, or even tycoon oils Rockefellers. There was nothing for a child to look into the souls of these characters; business is tough, its jungle, and you make extra buck when you didn't have to but took it away from someone anyways. I don't think I would want my children to be exposed to this kind of shit without their brains being properly wired already.

That's cherry picking the arguably worst examples in capitalism and claiming that they represent the whole. We have Gates, Buffett, Musk, Carnegie and many others who are/were making a huge difference either with their businesses or the wealth that those businesses earned them. You can't have the good without the bad. You cannot learn about the great rulers of history without also learning about the genocidal maniacs.

I know it's sexy for modern day champagne socialists to rant about this on /r/LateStageCapitalism and co. and signal through communism LARPing. I'm however confident the HN crowd is a little more educated than that.

Nothing stops you from learning about Gates, Buffett, Musk or Carnegie, my point is there should be time for that, not at the age when your brain is not yet 100% wired and things you learn about Buffet for example [1] could make you assume that "this is just the way to be successful in business", because, well - your brain doesn't know better yet.

https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/04/03/17024/warren-buff...

Maybe not Carnegie who built libraries after he made it big, but busted unions and did shady stuff to get rich in the first place.

Gates was a business asshole too, from my understanding. I think you can find warts about any of the greats if you dig deep enough. Just like you can find things to dislike about authors, artists, musicians etc.

I don't know if that should discredit what they accomplish and give back altogether, that's an interesting conversation.

> Why don't you let your daughter have innocent, playful, silly, immature childhood that she is entitled to?

Because that’s for chumps.

I doubt this would replace swooning over boy band photos though, that will happen in parallel. Just like a similar thing for boys wouldn't replace porn, right?

>That being said, I think it's generally a positive thing. Teen Boss isn't replacing kids reading the WSJ, it's replacing tweens swooning over boy band photos in Tiger Beat.

Being into boy bands is a perfectly harmless (and normal) use of a teenager's time. Being obsessed with emulating their YouTube idols on the path to riches, is insidious, demoralising when you realise most of it is luck, which you will not have, it's perverted and unhealthy.

> There are worse role models for kids.

until you see the instagram/snap feeds of these 'kids' once they become 18+..

the unnerving thing about this isn't what's on the surface - it's the preemptive/subliminal training towards 'monetizing their image' which is basically training to become defacto prostitutes in adulthood..

As opposed to us 80s kids, who were just taught to monetize our time and health.

I’m so happy my middle daughter idolizes an artist who streams herself drawing and gaming as opposed to Selena Gomez who her elder sister compared herself too.

Children have more choices for idols today and that’s good. Many children are thinking entrepreneurially and I’m happy they have role models. I don’t care if the magazine looks like Tiger Beat. I’m a small business owner and I want my kids to grow up understanding the hustle mindset as opposed to the employee mindset.

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