Hacker News Reader

Comment by lthornberry | Hacker News Reader

The social norm these days is really different. It's not about your friends suddenly starting a new, exclusive behavior; its about a slow migration of the people in your social world to a tech platform you don't have access to. And kids do get left out because of this--not for nefarious reasons, but because they're just not going to be in the loop for a significant part of the social interactions that are taking place.

View on HN

Thanks. I suppose maybe I'm just getting elderly and out of touch. Gotta be open to that possibility. I know kids can be cruel but wow. Even if not nefarious, it's callous. In my day you were excluded because you were weird, now it's because you aren't hooked to a particular corporate-mediated communication medium. Sometimes I think we deserve the mild dystopia we have built for ourselves!

This is kind-of a meta comment, but I expect that the platforms would actually benefit from this kind of defeatism in older generations, so I'd encourage you not to concede to it.

Yes, platforms can influence social interaction a lot - but ultimately, regardless of age, we're all still human.

I think most people learn to understand what's fair and unfair in terms of inclusivity, even if it takes longer in some situations. We'll figure out better solutions.

It's almost as if there's a pattern in the way that social networks grow, attract users (perhaps identifying people who are likely to draw other users on-board), and then atrophy after being seen as 'outdated' -- usually around the same time that a new platform happens to be appearing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com