Hacker News Reader

Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't have a problem with social media per se for my kids. It's the sheer size of the population that concerns me.

In most "normal" situations, parents can identify their children's contacts quickly and they can observe the black sheep closely and in the worst case try to prevent any further contact.

In social media, the weirdest and worst people are just a click away and you won't even notice it. Right now, there probably is a new trend or group out there that is extremely dangerous, or outright criminal and I don't even recognize it.

View on HN

> I wouldn't have a problem with social media per se for my kids.

The thing is that the people/kids dying because of dumb challenges or the occasional illegal/gore/murder videos &c... aren't even the problem

These things are built to steal your attention and use every trick in the book to make you a brainless scroll monkey. There is a reason why not a single SV executive will let their kids anywhere close to social medias. These things destroy people's brains, and especially the brains of kids which are still developing and are extremely malleable to this type of conditioning. tiktok/snapchat/instragram &co bring absolutely nothing good to a kid's life, they're pure distraction devices

> parents can identify their children's contacts quickly and they can observe the black sheep closely and in the worst case try to prevent any further contact

Unless you monitor your kids 24/7: no, and again, these tools, even when used "safely" are still engineered to artificially trigger and reinforce the most basic reward pathways of your brain and this won't bring anything good to your kid's life

You can very well make the analogy with weed or alcohol. What might be fine for an healthy adult (able to set his own boundaries and conscious of the potential risks) would destroy a 10 years old kid very quickly

>The thing is that the people/kids dying because of dumb challenges or the occasional illegal/gore/murder videos &c... aren't even the problem

They are maybe a little bit of the problem

Ok, so you aren’t fine with social media, given that this isn’t something you can control. It sounds like “I’m fine with it, just not any of it’s bad sides.”

The problem is "social media" casts a wide net. Social media use to be friends & friends of friends. It's evolved to recommended content feeds

But it’s not that anymore so you’re not fine with it, right?

So if one is not 100% fine with everything that follows that means they must reject it? Weird world view.

So I have to reject cars because of their negative effect in dense urban areas?

I have to reject alcohol at all or be fine with alcoholism?

The issue is that you said what bothers you about social media is "the sheer size of the population", but I would say the size of the population is what makes it social media. It's akin to saying I like cars except for the fact they move faster than a person. You could technically have something called social media that has low populations, but it would be so functionally different from the actual thing that using the same name becomes questionable.

> You could technically have something called social media that has low populations, but it would be so functionally different from the actual thing that using the same name becomes questionable.

It would basically be OG Facebook, which was a pivotal point in the development of social media. Facebook pivoted to focus on massive populations where everyone interacted with everyone, instead of the small subset of people you actually know.

Perhaps I'm alone in this experience, but social media in 2021 is vastly different in both form and function to social media in 2011. I'm not making a value judgement on which is better, but the two things barely resemble each other to me.

>So I have to reject cars because of their negative effect in dense urban areas?

Yes, sounds good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com