Hacker News Reader

Comment by toolz | Hacker News Reader

Why are TikTok and YouTube excluded from "kids being kids" activities?

If that's what all the kids are doing then it seems that's what a kids activity has become.

I used to play with neighborhood kids quite a bit when I was younger. Now my nephew plays Fortnite almost every day with 5ish different friends. He gets way more experience socializing than I ever did.

Ultimately (I think) kids need to learn to socialize with their peers. That means they need to participate with their peers doing what their peers are doing.

View on HN

> Why are TikTok and YouTube excluded from "kids being kids" activities?

Poeple in general are extremely bad at generalizing situations to match their own experiences. People get old, see younger people playing differently (new toy, new technology, new societal framework), and fail to notice that the new kind of play is still mostly the same module/class of play they had, just with a different coat of paint.

E.G. In the 80s' we used to play with k7 recorders, recording singing, pretend news casts and comedy shows. Now kids are doing youtube and tiktok, and that is exactly the same module of play, it is not some brand new thing.

Having said that, I'd like to point out that, although for the kid it is basically the same kind of play, the fact that is more public (k7 had a limited reach, just neighborhood friends, but the internet has unlimited reach) means bigger stakes, so parents should be more vigilant, it is even more crucial now that parents get involved in the kids activities to keep an eye out.

There’s a difference between socialising where you can say something dumb, and your friends will say “that was dumb haha” and everyone will move on with their lives, and socialising where you can say something dumb, someone posts it on social media, and the next day everyone at school is talking about what you did.

Ubiquitous socialising can be good but it cuts both ways, especially in an environment where you have no plausible deniability. In my opinion, people should be free to have their own thoughts, potentially get blasted for them, and move on with their lives the next day with minimal consequences. Certainly there should be no consequences coming from people that were not actually there, but just heard about it from some social media platform.

I don't know about TikTok well enough but as far as YouTube goes ... the race for eyeballs, views, even money and etc. produces some pretty skewed results / activity and carries a lot of negatives with the drive to just pump out continuous content, produce youtube drama, etc. And now all that content is out there with all the mistakes a kid will make, for the world to see, possibly forever.

Granted if a kid were to just upload fun videos... have comments off ... not interact with the community, then maybe they'd be ok? But I think all of that is not super likely as my son's friends want to be youtube stars.

>for the world to see, possibly forever.

When I was 10 or so, I uploaded some dumb little skits with my friends to YouTube. The videos accumulated about 2k views total, and are all gone now, and no one will ever recognize me from them.

I am very glad that I did not do all of what my peers were doing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com