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Comment by Vagantem | Hacker News Reader

Interesting how 12th-graders are as lonely as they where in the 70s & 80s (almost no difference). What happened in 2006 that made loneliness drop so much?

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You can download the data for the chart. It's actually 2007 if you don't eyeball it. I think we're probably seeing Maslow's hierarchy of needs here. The great recession made loneliness less important to them or less apparent to them. Pretty cool actually. This kind of thing is probably unaccounted for in many similar studies.

That’s still a year before any of us really felt the Great Recession. I was in my first year of college back then..

I doubt that the start of the recession impacted teens this much. I think it's more likely the rise/fall of certain social media (yahoo/AIM/FB/idk) than relating to them missing physiological needs, especially given most teens are not fending for themselves.

I was graduating high school around then. It definitely did impact teens that much. Net job growth was negative by 300K+ for over a year. More than 800K jobs were lost in November 2008 alone. Lots of stress at home, and you're more than old enough to notice. So you start reading the news, where you find lots of people were speculating about if not a great depression at least a lost generation.

Graduating into GFC was terrifying.

I'm sure some were sheltered from it or blissfully unaware, but many were very aware.

> So you start reading the news

not most teens.

Even with 1 year of economic stress, that's not going to suddenly make kids take a mature emotional perspective and feel less lonely.

This seems very strange to me. The idea that a dramatic macro economic downturn is less likely to to effect personal beliefs than early Facebook? I know most teens aren’t paying for food and rent but if your parents lose their job or their house that feels like it’s going to hit hard.

I imagine this was it. I was starting high school in 2008, and I hadn't felt so connected with my friends than that first year or so that Facebook became popular. Previously, I would go home after school, and typically wouldn't see most of them until the next school day. That fall, everyone I knew signed up for Facebook, and we would all be online, chatting and posting dumb things on each other's walls.

Probably advent of instant messengers made them feel less lonely, culminating around 2006-2008 when modern social networks really took off, but peaking in today's result of every post on fb/twitch/instagram engendering social anxiety and thus 'loneliness'.

I reckon you're right. This was peak Yahoo Instant Messenger time, and it launched in 1998, just before the graph starts moving downwards.

Really? I feel like peak instant messenger time was around 2001 or so... I wonder if it has to do with how old we are?

Peak for you was likely when you were a teen.

But overall? In 2001 computers weren't ubiquitous nor portable. Middle-class kids were on IM on their desktops and maybe laptops for max a few hours per day.

Now kids have phones for IM all day and night.

The grandparent comment was saying that 2006-2008 was peak instant messenger, and people using messengers on phones were certainly not common during those years.

It is a shame YIM is gone now; I lost contact with a lot of people where that was our main form of communication.

True - I can still hear that MSN "new message" sound echoing in my head..

This time was indeed marked by the high popularity and increasing interop between classic IM networks, and the rise new networks. Some choice dates:

- 2005-09: Meebo launches offering web access to AIM, WLM, Yahoo

- 2006-02-07: Google Talk integration inside Gmail goes live

- 2006-03: Nielsen/Netratings survey for active users: AIM 53M, WLM 27M, Yahoo 22M

- 2006-07-12: seamless interop starts between Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger

- 2006-09-26: Facebook opens up to everyone (not just colleges)

- 2007-02-14: Gmail opens up to everyone (not just invite-only)

- 2008-04-06: Facebook chat goes live

- 2008-04-19: Facebook overtakes Myspace in Alexa ranking

- 2008-07-11: iOS App Store launches, AIM for iOS released

- 2008-08-26: Facebook hits 100 million active users

- 2008-09-23: Android 1.0 launches

More (and sources) in my earlier posts [1][2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114518

Hmm... Facebook was opened to the public near the end of 2006. No idea if there's a correlation or if it's even possible to find one.

FB+iPhone?

> iPhone

I doubt it. How many high school seniors would have owned one soon after its release? Too much of an early-adopter luxury item.

I'd be curious to know when smartphones actually started became ubiquitous among older teenagers.

I graduated HS in 2007. I think I had 2 friends with iPhones, in an affluent town in Connecticut. My first smartphone was an iPhone 4 in 2010. It was still probably another year before smartphones were ubiquitous amongst my friend group.

The 3GS came out in 2009 and that's more or less the model that made it clear the iPhone mold of smartphone was the future. (I got a Treo in 2006 but that was still very much in the carrier walled garden on phones.) However, as others have said, feature phone texting was pretty widespread in the second half of the 2000s, IM was widespread, and social media was really starting to take off.

You can quibble about exact dates but it's pretty reasonable to take somewhere around 2008 as the year for online communications hitting some sort of collective inflection point.

I would agree that online communications hit AN inflection point around that time, and I don't think I said anything to refute that. I do think there was a more important one soon thereafter, because IM isn't what made me feel like my social life had moved primarily into the virtual space. It was several years after this, more like when Instagram took off. It was not until then that it became common for someone, or a couple, to be looking at their phone throughout dinner (I worked in food service throughout college), or for an entire group of people sitting around in the same room all interacting through their phones. Facebook, and other social platforms around 2008 set the stage for this but I think it's not until the smartphone got great cameras, fast internet, etc. that it became more convenient for us to interact through them. I think it's an important distinction. I was not quibbling, just providing an anecdote. I used AIM/MSN from a feature phone in 2007 and used SMS heavily prior to that.

Oh I don't disagree with any of that. For doubtless a variety of reasons (if only that habits don't change overnight), it took a few years after at least many of the pieces were arguably in place, before widespread behavioral change took place.

Dumbphone texting was ubiquitious, though.

Remember the teens with leet T9 keyboarding skills?

I graduated HS in 2014. By the time the 4s came out they were pretty ubiquitous. Carrier subsidy existed to make one or two year old iPhones pretty cheap (I vaguely remember iPhone 4 being 'free' from verizon for a while). I didn't get one until after many of my peers (iPhone 5 era), but I had an iPod touch and a phone with a full keyboard which was a common combo among the people I knew who were later adopters of smartphones.

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