Pausing “Instagram Kids” and building parental supervision tools
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"I work in the cyber security industry, and I can tell you over the years, I've seen kids - including my own - do things that first-world government teams and crack white hat groups could not have done any better. Give up now.
There is no app, no operating system, no proxy, scanner or firewall, and no setting that will ever defeat a determined kid. Plus, they work in groups, and are able to coordinate even better than their adult counterparts to find and disseminate new hacks. It's an arms race that cannot be won with technology. You find a setting, they find a workaround. Apple updates, they find a new weakness.
Take their phones. Put them in a box. Sit on the box and guard it. Maybe buy a Faraday bag or something. Watch them cry and talk about how they'll be social outcasts and their friends will mock them, or moan about how they need it for school to check the Facebook page their teacher posts assignments to. Turn a deaf ear. Know that you are helping them just like our parents were when they made us eat vegetables (which you know, are actually pretty darned good - thanks, Mom). "
A much better tactic, and one that I see neglected far too often is to instill the reasoning into the kids from a young age, don't bar them from what's bad from them, teach them that why and how it's bad so they themselves keep a distance. My parents did his very effectively with me and my siblings, and we, despite our age and frequent exposure to such things, naturally gravitate away from obsession. And this isn't just a niche case, there are many people, even in my generation, who are waking up to the reality and behaving in a similar manner, although it's hard to get that fact out there with all the stigma surrounding basically any teenager nowadays.
And saying that this strategy "doesn't work" or is "too hard" is usually just cope for parents with poor skills in my experience.
>Watch them cry and talk about how they'll be social outcasts and their friends will mock them, or moan about how they need it for school to check the Facebook page their teacher posts assignments to.
I genuinely can't tell if this is some sort of meta-ironic take but no, just no. The vast majority of even elementary school childrens' lives are being moved online slowly but surely, and whether you like it or not they are going to have to pull out that laptop or phone for hours a day, can you sit and watch them for that entire time?
I think it's being ahead of the curve. Setting the expectation for not only what they might run into out there, but what to expect when they get home. If anything you should combine the two approaches.
Having the kids learn on their own and experience things (and their consequences) firsthand is the right way to do things, I didn't get that far in my comment but yours sums it up fantastically.
The parent comments' take of just brainlessly shielding them from everything is the absolute worst thing you can do in such a scenario.
Wholeheartedly agree with this. Well said.
I think you see this in kids of almost any age. Saying no can backfire. I do my best with my own kids to explain why I'm allowing or disallowing something, and find it works better than hard and fast restrictions. My hope is to translate this frequent conversation into the same conversation when they're older, opinionated, and rebellious. It will not work perfectly, but I think that a lifetime of deliver no answers won't work in my favor.
This seems to be a good strategy for things with obvious and immediate consequences. Eat too much ice cream, feel sick, etc. It seems like social media seems to have a much more slow burning, pernicious impact on your quality of life. Adults struggle to accurately diagnose this, expecting a child to do so seems unwise.
By analogy I think it’s fairly obvious as a parent you’re right to withhold bottles of vodka from your kids even when they separately want to down them “and all of their friends are doing it”.
>By analogy I think it’s fairly obvious as a parent you’re right to withhold bottles of vodka from your kids even when they separately want to down them “and all of their friends are doing it”.
??
Vodka, or any hard alchohol in general is far harder to get your hands on than social media and has immediate, physical consequences relatively soon after consumption, it's a terrible comparison in this case.
If you want to engage seriously with it feel free to comment with that.
If an analogy is bad, it's bad. The parent explained why they felt it was bad. If you want to "engage seriously", you should address why their points about the analogy are wrong.
Where does the confidence to make such an assertion come from? Simply by virtue of being a teenager yourself?
"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."
Take example this weekend. We went on a family trip to a theme park. Got home really late (for them) and they were exhausted. The younger we carried to bed.
The next morning we didnt immediately make my youngest take a bath to wash off the residual sunscreen etc. Rather we did our morning routine. Morning got away from us and we see by about 9:30 hes playing in the play room (boy loves building things with blocks, legos, whatever he can ) but is itching like crazy. We see a splotches developing.
"Hey son, lets go take a shower, then you can get back to playing"
"No i want to play"
"You are really itching (and whining about it), lets wash off everything from yesterday and you can get right back to it"
"no i want to play"
And a standoff ensued. In the end he complied and I had to put my foot down, and he cried most of the time. We tried to explain. Calmly tried to reason and get him to calm down.
Eventually during the shower I had to raise my voice, threaten punishment to get him to snap out of his own feedback loop, collect himself and stop. There was no reasoning involved. It was, if you dont stop, punishment will be had.
This also happens to a larger degree with our older (pre-teen) kid. Shes a little more reasonable (clearly she can see 5 minutes out) but a week, a month, years? Nope.
Its always funny when people just say kids are smart and to reason with them. Its true to a degree. But making sacrifices in the short term for a better long term outcome is not natural, its a learned trait and there are many adults that cant manage that (just look at the CC debt rates in the US). Kids of any age tend to live in the short term, wanting short term rewards and not teaching them long term rewards does them a disservice into adult hood.
Managing tech is a part of that. Very few are going to be "reasonable" about moderating their usage especially as many peers will have unfettered access to the same. Hell *I* sometimes struggle with it and I dont really have any social media (short of here and a waning use of reddit).
And before you go there. My relationship with my kids is pretty solid. Moreso than most, we tend to keep lines of communcations open and they dont generally keep things from us because they know we will be judicious with what they tell us. But at the end of the day they are still kids and we are their parents, not their friends.
Some stimulants are too addictive to trust a young child to mindfully avoid.
The people working in the social media and entertainment industries are extremely skilled at their jobs of increasing user engagement, they have huge budgets with which to accomplish that goal and little regulatory oversight.
People have a finite ability to resist obsession.
Sugar is tasty, it gives a surge of dopamine when you consume it, and fruits use that property to get animals like us to eat them so they can reproduce. But even kids can resist that with a little education and maybe a stomachache after Halloween.
Heroin is similarly addictive, in the way that a butter knife and similarly a hand grenade are dangerous to a small child.
These products are meticulously engineered to be maximally addictive and obsessive. Human nature is not necessarily up to the task of resisting them.
Actually—are we sure about that?
It seems like an awful lot of adults die each year basically because they couldn’t stop themselves from eating too many sugary foods.
Whether Nestle's next concoction will be able to do that, composed of eye-catching, almost fluorescent colored dyes, unimaginably sweet high-fructose corn syrup, surreptitiously enhanced by most of your daily recommended dose of salt, tempered by delightfully tangy citric acid, all carried in a smooth, bouncy xanthan/guar gum matrix, no one knows yet. I'm pessimistic regardless of the engineering behind the treat: it seems likely that a sufficient number of people will always be able to make it through childbearing age before succumbing to diet-based problems, if that ever ceases to be the case, then the dwindling population will soon be unable to keep the global industries its manufacturing requires in operation.
The problems isn't just which foods are addictive, it's the economics of food costs too:
Fruits are expensive relative to much worse options. Fruits mostly are not very calorie dense, so you could gorge yourself completely on strawberries, eating an entire container in a sitting and paying (near me) $4 for it @ ~150 calories.
Or you could pay $2.59 for a 3-pack of microwave "movie theatre butter" popcorn for an effective price of $0.86 and consume around ~400 calories.
Calorie-dense junk foods are simply much cheaper to begin with. If you're on a budget and love, equally, strawberries & popcorn and want a few snacks for the week, you can spend $12 for 3lb of strawberries or $2.59 for the popcorn.
Or compare the cost of a 3-liter bottle of soda (about $1.10, or 1 penny/ounce) to the cost of 100% pure apple juice, which is about 3x the price per ounce. Yes both are sugar heavy, but the carbohydrates in pure juice aren't as bad and juice at least has other nutrients, and is sometimes fortified with more. enact a course-correction, it is always more expensive to
(There is at least one partial exception to the fruit issue: bananas. Compared to other fruits, they are massively cheaper on a price-per-calorie basis. But you can't live on bananas alone.)
I've seen people getting fat just by eating too much fruit because "fruit is healthy, it's not candy" and not having limits.
It's a infinitesimally small problem compared to processed sugar, though, so I completely agree with your point.
Respectfully, I don't really put any weight on opinions on this topic from those who do not.
Perhaps your situation is far from universal, and you are fallacious in assuming that it will work broadly?
I remember being younger, before kids, and I thought "ah, if my children ever misbehave, I'll just logically explain why they should behave differently". It was naïve of me then to assume this would work. I was biased by my own experiences.
It didn't occur to me how irrational any individual might be, and the situation is worse now, with corporations better adept at exploiting that irrationality as part of their business model.
It is interesting to speculate of what will be the end result in terms of learned behaviors. I was born without computers near me so I and I became obsessed with them as I was starting teenage years. Because of this, I can handle excessive boredom and I can find something amusing for myself without relying on someone force feeding me content they deem appropriate for me. I am not sure future adults will be able to sit still without a screen.
To be fair, my parents were about as worried as I am today, but they still purchased Pentium 120, which I promptly OC'ed and let me and my siblings to go nuts for a while until we we overboard ( I forgot the details now, but dad took PC to his shop after that incident and they couldn't just password protect it, because by then we learned how to remove password in BIOS and rely on 'keys pressed marked' trick to guess it ). It is not that different now. The face of it changed though.
Point is.. kids are kids. They don't understand addiction. Best you can do is to attempt to explain it. Even knowing that, I am still planning to severely limit phone use.
That can work - until they fall in with a bad friend, once that happens they lose their ability to self regulate (the bad friend does it for them instead), and the parent must do it for them.
So as long as you are lucky enough that you kids never fall in with the wrong group you will have success.
i shudder to think how my life would look like if there were smartphones back then.
no reasoning is strong enough with this kind of brain candy.
i also shudder how i will proceed when my kids are "phone age". this planet is doomed.
I don't know about others and I can't speak for the parent post, but I am planning home schooling, which will be harder, but I think the removal of 'constantly online' feature will be well worth it.
I know we're big on the tech bubble, but this is not only not the case, but we as parents should make it actively not the case. There's grass - touch it.
It turns out "online" is mostly a bunch of garbage - useless scrolling and dopamine hits from nothing. We need to turn it off. It's worse for us than smoking. I'd argue it was worse than leaded gasoline, and while we used it for a while, we finally got proper and banned it. Hopefully all "social media" gets that treatment, one day.
They are by their own admission and indeed nature, optimizing addiction.
The headline passed this week, Is this Facebook's Big Tobacco moment?, and it's a good one to take seriously.
Social media, particularly Facebook and its ecosystem, pursues "engagement" as the only ultimate KPM.
Let's say the ugly part outloud: "engagement" is the word we use in shareholder reports for "addiction."
What does that mean?
It means that a $billion company has Sauron-like focus of will on ensuring that its user base grow and are as addicted to its services as possible.
Setting aside the societal costs of the surveillance panopticon that results for another rant,
the personal consequences are that we have 21st c. data-mined constantly-tuned machinery with one purpose only: bypass and circumventing any cognitive or behavioral or social or regulatory/legal constraints,
on intensifying that addiction.
This is exactly the playbook of Big Tobacco.
We need to take seriously as a society that what Facebook et al are selling (to the consumer... who they aren't "charging"... again, a rant for another day...),
is digital nicotine.
The presumption that individual kids can "make good choices" or that activist engaged non-exhausted tech-savvy parents can "educate" their kids out addiction,
is preposterous on the face of it.
Abstinence education does not work.
There is no "just the tip" for Instagram.
Instagram is digital fentanyl.
We need to start talking about, reasoning about, and regulating it as such.
It's not enough to break up the company. Social media based on engagement would best be reasoned about as a threat to individual and societal help on par with say biological weapons.
If you think that's hyperbolic, review the WSJ Facebook files again, and the endless whistle-blowing, and look at where we are a culture wrt consensus reality around the pandemic and fair elections.
We are close to civil war, and it's a predictable outcome of the KPM Facebook uses.
This only works for those kids who were not already exposed to social media addiction on their brain. So for everyone else, they do need to deal with the tantrums from removing their addiction.
> I genuinely can't tell if this is some sort of meta-ironic take but no, just no. The vast majority of even elementary school childrens' lives are being moved online slowly but surely, and whether you like it or not they are going to have to pull out that laptop or phone for hours a day, can you sit and watch them for that entire time?
Which is a really bad thing, they will be missing out on social development from interacting with their peers in real life.
Last paragraph - what? Why would I want to stifle this?
There's something wrong with me and there really are no other explanations than my compulsive internet usage.
Until they are. Parent always think that society is the same as it was when they were kids. They think kids can socialize the same way they did in the 80s/90s. That just isn't true anymore. Kids aren't allowed to hang out at malls. Kids don't go to parties. Kids don't listen to CDs with their friends nor get together to play video games in a friend's basement. They don't have cool part time jobs at pizza joints. Kids hang out online. They listen to music online. They work/live/play online. Trying to recreate some 80s nostalgia version of teenage social circles will end in failure every time. Those that don't learn how to exist online will be the ones a step behind their peers at every turn.
Worse, they may end up with actual personalities and interests other than scrolling their phone!
It is different, yes. But today's teens are not just sitting in their rooms to be online together. Honestly, they seem fairly similar to how we were, but they have replaced phone calls with apps.
> I've seen kids - including my own - do things that
> first-world government teams and crack white hat
> groups could not have done any better.
Nope.
Always keep that line of communication open. Always.
And that goes several ways - are you sure your decisions are correct and therefor should be trusted? Do you know with absolute certainty that your child understands your decisions? Have you heard them out on the matter? Is there room for a compromise, and are you showing your child a reasonable degree of trust in return?
Without any of this, I don't see how it's a success. Your kids won't learn these strategies without seeing them. It leaves a lot of room for resentment. It seems very dysfunctional.
My kids like when I talk to them about this stuff, even if they disagree. They like to hear my anecdotes about being a dumb kid. Knowing I'm human, that my parents made mistakes, that I made mistakes, I still do - they like knowing the lines are open and I'm not a brick wall.
Second, it is also not true that all the kids would be constantly trying to go out of bounds. There are many kids who are smart and actually don't want to break rules, fear breaking them or just simply wont go out of way to make adults angry.
A family member tried this. The kid's bicycle was stolen (no it wasn't, the kid traded it for a "secret" phone he used during no-phone hours).
This reinforces the "Give up now" point. You won't control access for your kids, but you can try to give them better emotional tools to cope with the world they live in.
Moreover, if the kid has many hours alone outside schoolwork, clubs, or sports, there is something wrong. There's a reason why after-school programs were invented over a century ago.
"Eat your vegetables" is hardly the right analogous situation to cellphone use.
I can't imagine what my life would be like if my parents instead decided not to buy a PC (circa 1994), nor have the internet because of all the bad things that a child could be exposed to via the internet.
http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-comput...
Prohibiting access to smart phones to prevent social media surveillance is like prohibiting access to computers to prevent accessing pornography.
I don't see how potentially making your child a social outcast is healthier than just fucking talking to them. It's strange how an entire generation that grew up on goatse, single click hardcore porn, and generally unadulterated internet access have become the very luddites they used to make fun of on phpBB forums.
An incredible amount of socialization happens online today. Even if you believe that they will form "real" connections with "real" people, only the most determined of hormone raged boys will overcome the friction to include them. Secondly, the failure to actually communicate the problems of social media and resorting to lockdown is essentially sex education through abstinence. It demonstrably doesn't work.
I imagine there's a middle ground between 16 hours of Roblox every day and 0 hours of any internet access. Apps, proxies and firewalls aren't an adequate replacement to communication.
I hate when this line of thinking is marched out in defense of an all/nothing approach-- The idea that you don't have a perfect solution, so you shouldn't even bother trying to implement something less than perfect.
There's no reason not to do something that discourages bad activity just because it won't be perfect. With kids especially, they may find a way around a restriction, but that doesn't mean they will always avoid detection (though sometimes they will) And in those cases it also provides a good parenting opportunity to teach lessons on consequences for the decisions made.
At a minimum, you can't simply fail to set reasonable limits just because they may not be followed. An understanding of such limits, if not a full appreciation of them, it pretty critical. And a total lock-down approach of "no X ever ever" is fairly likely to catalyze into a backlash much worse than trying to work with your kids on appropriate limits and then monitory things as they go.
Teach your kid about the dangers. Use the systems in place (ie Screen Time on iOS) to help shape the way they use the technology, and be open and honest about what worries you. If your strategy for helping the kid is predicated on "I told you so"s, I may have found the reason why they keep breaking security systems.
Not being in the 'in crowd' is not crippling. It will not result in stunted social skills.
I hope you are at least sending them to a private school that's low tech as well. If not, then yeah, you're probably creating social pariah. They won't be bullied or mocked, just, left out... hopefully.
Seriously, I'm seeing kids that are as young as 12 years old, spending hours on TikTok or the Instagram explore page, IN CLASS. It's just a terrible, terrible thing to see.
People naturally would ask "where are his parents?" ...she's a single mom working two jobs, and he's at home with a teenage sister as his only supervision most of the time.
This isn't uncommon in the US. I was a latchkey kid myself, my babysitter was TV. People say that parents need to pay attention to their kids more, but parents don't need more or better software, they need money and time.
The subset of people I'm talking about almost certainly don't fit into this category. There are still millions of kids with struggling parents who don't have proper guidance (note, guidance isn't necessarily supervision).
In the case of parents who are spending more time than ever with their kids, the problem could certainly be more related to aptitude. We live in a society where our lawmakers don't fully understand the technology most people are spending hours a day being manipulated by, so it certainly seems likely most parents don't understand the impact either.
Either way, to say that these companies will solve it themselves with better software for parents doesn't seem like a solution to either issue. It's kind of like "the factories are safer for children now because they're wearing hard hats" — it's the wrong conversation driven by the wrong people.
Those selfies for facial verification would most likely be used for something unrelated and most people would be unhappy with if they knew. Think of the ways these could be misused.
Unbelievable that we always foolishly go after the vice of the day (when I was a kid it was flavored cigarettes, look at all the good banning that did) instead of outlawing using the science of addiction for profit in the first place and nipping all of these dark patterns in the bud in one fell swoop.
Whatever happened to rules in class?
I assume high school students would immediately invent The Key Eating Game or something, where you swallow the lockbox key for TikTok clout
I have another friend who is a science teacher, but he doesn't have exciting stories like this.
I'm shocked that schools allow phones at all, and that they're not harsher on kids when they find one, but I gather messing with phones is a really good way to have pissed-off parents up your ass, and schools all really hate that, so they give in. Result: constant phone shenanigans.
What parent would call a child in the middle of class, rudely interrupting the entire class? And what would they possibly have to ask their child that so important that warrants interrupting their child's class?
Apparently taking kids out of school to get their nails done or whatever is also A Thing for some folks. I'd never have imagined it, but some parents treat school very differently than the parents I (fortunately) had.
Kids miss school more often today than when we started; our original attendance books prove that, at least for our classrooms. Reasons now range from spa days, to the kid didn't feel like getting up, to, and this is p.e.r.v.a.s.i.v.e., 7-10 day long vacations in September and October.
This year, my spouse has not had a full classroom any single day due to family vacations. Pre-covid, it was not better, either.
I'm afraid that I come across as a grumpy old man, but this is a problem that did not exist in the past. Education is seen as a burden, and a box to be checked anymore. Take from that sentence whatever you want.
> This year, my spouse has not had a full classroom any single day due to family vacations. Pre-covid, it was not better, either.
I've got some friends saying their schools are hovering around 80% daily attendance this year, between the usual stuff and COVID. And I think some of the more lax parents are using COVID excuses for their usual BS, making things even worse. Plus the too-frequent days when they can't find enough substitutes and just have to stick 3+ classes in the cafeteria or gym for babysitting. Educational outcomes for this ~2.5 years (once this school year's over, it'll have been about that much) are gonna be really bad. Online, in-person, barely matters, it's all bad. :-(
And depending on what grade the student is, that 2.5 years could have repercussions for anywhere from 6 months for the older students trying to be competitive in college, to the rest of their lives. I really, really, really am afraid for students who are just learning the fundamentals and are missing so much social/emotional/educational development.
My money says this is going to have repercussions for decades.
In fact, the in-class tests were curved according to this formula: 10sqrt(x). A 10% is curved to a 31%, a 25% to a 50%, a 40% to a 63%, a 50% to a 70%, etc.
I spoke to an AP World teacher and he said less than a quarter of students got a 5/5 and less than half a 4/5 compared to pre-pandemic.
Any theory on why that happens so much nowadays?
My pet hypothesis is that travel got cheaper so more people do 1-2 weeks vacations abroad, and at most companies, summer months are overbooked for leaves, so people use September and October as backup vacation time.
The other poster is correct. In a vast majority of cases, k-12 education is just seen as babysitting, so missing a week or two isn't that big of a deal.
It has gotten so bad that my spouse's district now allows 9 unexcused absences before getting the truant officer (who is useless) involved, because they had too many referrals to the officer three years ago.
It's just ridiculous.
Just last night I was talking about this with my brother who told me about his co worker who is a former NYC school teacher. He said he spent half of his teaching time telling kids to stop playing fortnight or browsing social media. After talking to my brother I called a friend who is a 4th grade teacher and said he also deals with social media browsing and gaming in class.
Feels like we're actively working on building an actual Idiocracy.
But I think that puts me in old-man-yells-at-cloud territory, these days.
And it is concerning when you hear stories from teachers about how they spend half of the day telling students to stop playing fortnight or browsing social media in class.
Just because kids have access (which is mostly on Parents to blame), you want to add another app in the name of "it is kid friendly". I can only lol at this. Seriously, I don't criticize such harshly in general but as a parent of young kids, I would rather have Instagram be honest and say "We want to make more money and Kids under 13 are a great target nowadays".
I am very open with kids having access to things in a moderate way. We allow them to watch movies/TV or even Ipad etc but restricted. I believe that the more you stop kids, they more they want to do it. One exception we will make will be Social Media. What a cesspool it is and there is no way I am allowing my underage kids to do Instagram or FB or whatever. I will fight hard to keep them away from the toxicity of Social Media. Some things they won't understand and you need to protect them from it regardless. The good thing is both my wife and I hardly use Social Media if any. So that hopefully will be an example for kids but I know that may not be enough considering other kids in their school may be doing it and there will be peer pressure. Ah well, I am ready to fight that.
Many parents will keep raising theirs kids with undiscriminate access to smartphones. Just because you have it under control in your household, doesn't mean everyone does.
You're basically saying: "Not my kids, not my problem".... and that's the position many will take.
I'm not convinced IG for Kids is the right solution, but it is at least an intentional move towards fixing the foundation of the problem. It will take more than that, though. It's probably a problem that needs to be fixed by forcing big tech companies to cooperate, something that it's unlikely to happen in an era where those companies enjoy antagonizing each other.
Remember the days before forever scrolling on Reddit? When Facebook timelines were chronological? When bullshit clickbait links didn't show up as "recommended" after you meticulously pruned bullshit clickbait groups from your feed? When Youtube didn't just autoplay down into the deep dark depths of crazytown? How about social media that's actually social instead of just being the same national outrage "conversation" being replayed in a slightly different setting?
I'll listen to an anime music playlist and my entire recommended video / front page becomes full of anime stuff. An in-law joins Youtube to watch bible study videos and now they're an avowed freedom fighter against the globalist satanist cabal running the world. That sort of thing.
The problem when it just puts it all in a single recommendation feed is that that feed more-or-less presents itself as "here's what the world is talking about" rather than "here's a bunch of stuff that conforms to the biases and ideological filters of the stuff you've been watching lately." It creates a solipsistic worldview if you're not aware of what's going on.
And speaking of YouTube, the other annoyance is the extremely idiotic anti-feature of pausing the playback and displaying "Are you still watching?" popup after you go a couple of minutes without moving your mouse or tapping on the screen. No YouTube, I'm not watching, I'm only listening on my wireless headset. But you already know that. What you don't know is that I'm in the middle of some household cleaning and my hands are covered with caustic chemicals, so I frikkin do not appreciate having to press a stupid button you introduced to get more "engagement".
In 2019, Instagram only made around $11.98 per user annually.
Imagine if you could pay $12 a year and never see an ad, never be manipulated by an algorithm, never have to worry about any of that. All engineering would be focused on retaining you as a user, not as a market segment for advertisers. The incentive wouldn't be to addict you with an infinite scroll but to provide enough value for you to maintain the annual cost. Possibly even minimizing the attention it demands because the greatest profits is in justifying the subscription while encouraging the least amount of resource use.
Unfortunately, growth-hacking meant VC subsidized growth with free services and there was no way that subscriptions could compete.
The question is if anyone could ever sell low cost, user-centric subscription-based apps in a world where free (but not really) is taken for granted.
So now you need to charge significantly more than $12 to make up for that. The higher price makes the paid users even more valuable to advertisers. Eventually the service slips in a few ads because it’s just too much money to leave on the table.
Cable TV started as an ad free subscription service. I’m not saying it can’t work, but historically most subscription services don’t stay ad free forever.
This is true, for two reasons: Declining profit as markets mature and the need for investors to see greater returns YOY. Eventually, all companies turn to more intense methods of profit extraction.
This isn't specific to digital services of course, we're seeing the effects of this broadly across the economy.
One way to put off the inevitable (for potentially quite some time) would be to bootstrap instead of taking investment. Easier said than done, of course, but maybe not impossible since the hardest part may be breaking open the market in the first place and it might be a lot easier to build an alternative app in a mature space than it was to create Instagram in 2010.
What “negative externalities” are you referring to?
Dynamic pricing would probably offend both audiences - "what do you mean the algorithm thinks I'm worthless?" "what do you mean that I'm worth thousands of dollars to you?"
[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q2...
those will be the first users willing to pay to opt out of ads.
The service would have to be built from the ground-up to not have a free option, it would have to be equalized across all users. Again, this is where the difficulty lies in an economy that already offers so much for free.
IF someone could pull it off, they would benefit from the gym membership effect of people keeping the subscription while barely using the service (and it's resources).
There would also be considerable savings on the engineering and sales side if you cut all adtech out of the equation and provide a simple time-series feed.
“Wait that’s all my eyes are worth?!”
Well, yes, it does come down to this, and I'd say the answer is very clearly that this cannot be done, at least not at any scale remotely close to the scale of the big free social media networks.
In a normal market there would be competition and an equilibrium would be reached, but where network effects dominate, it takes something like Signal to make a dent in this regard. That said, there's no reason that a non-profit version of instagram couldn't eventually compete or dominate by charging users a pittance.
On the other hand, subscription models are fine for new entrants, even with VC hyper-growth expectations - there are still billions of users to capture even if per-user revenue is fixed! Then the game becomes delivering as much value to these customers as possible to attract more paying users.
Perhaps this is another malincentive that comes about from monopolies.
This is true, but only applies to the "tech unicorn" VC-funded model. There are other ways to build businesses and if the model we're used to always ends up with such terrible social results, maybe it's time we strongly considered them.
It was the second time that I realized the clip was from TikTok. Honestly, I appreciate it.
I certainly haven't. Other than maybe Nintendo suggesting go outside breaks or something.
A few other regular games do it too.
From bitter experience: people don't like being told they're done for the day. It wears you down having to explain it.
Add in the profit motive and it's easy to see why people cave to adding infiniscrolling
Yea it was awful. Pagination is an optimization for faster page load speeds that has nothing to do with user engagement. Sure some people can get caught in the doom scrolling, but for normal users, having to navigate between pages is an awful experience compared to just scrolling to the bottom to get the next "page"
I use old reddit redirect and without reddit enhancement suite that adds infinite scrolling, it's awful to use
1. What you’re currently looking at is not directly addressable (instead it’s “open this URL, within this time-window, and scroll exactly X-many pixels in exactly S-seconds to get to the exact same content as me”).
2. It makes it impossible to get to the real page footer, which often contains essential links like Contact Us, the About/Impressum page, and other important stuff.
For #2 that's useful for novice users but as a reddit user for who knows how many years I don't care about the footer
Looking at your last line I think it would be helpful to assess your addiction in brass tacks. Imagine if you said, "I only use cocaine intraveinously, insufflation is awful." Sometime its helpful to add some breaks to unhelpful habits than trying to min max them all the time. I still have a lot of problems with this myself and I am doing my best to introduce more friction to my internet usage, since you can't just flush it down the drain and walk away like a pack of cigarettes in this day and age when internet means work.
I don't believe it's the place of these companies to implement these kind of controls. Governments will create regulations that force these companies to implement controls, but I don't believe that addresses the root cause.
The root cause is, why can't you control your social media/gambling/alcohol use? It's a wide ranging cause from genetics to mental health problems to other external causes. I believe those should be the first level of addressing from the government, but it's easier to just regulate
God, I hate stories. This is probably the most antisocial "growth hack" these companies invented. A simple way to boost and exploit FOMO to ensure most users will be checking with your app at least once every single day.
More like mind hacking. It's like these apps want to hook into the reward center of people's brains. Get them addicted to stupid bullshit so they spend hours scrolling through that stuff so they look at more and more advertising. Funny how advertising is always at the root of all this evil. Maybe we should get rid of it.
Only thing worse is video game design which does this explicitly and unashamedly. They wire the dopamine button to the player's credit card.
The reality of helping kids requires parents who are well enough informed and engaged here. This is something we don't have. I've talked with many people outside of tech circles and they are typically unaware of any consequences to kids. Sometimes they just don't believe it.
This isn't about helping kids. It's about shifting legal responsibility so they can keep doing what they do.
But like you said, most parents don't understand the risks. That's why social media should be forced to perform studies on the risks associated with their products and make those studies public. Then, when you use a device for the first time it should show you in plain language - like a new user signing into Windows ("Hi, we're getting everything ready for you...") - where to find that information.
When a single change of code can instantly impact millions of children (or anyone really) the stakes for the public are high enough that the public deserves transparency. If nothing else to ensure that Instagram is making decisions backed by due diligence.
Parents and corps aren't the only ones in this conversation. There is also governments.
Should we have let parents decide if kids smoking was ok or not? Some governments stepped in and required labels be placed on packages and set age limits.
I'm not saying that the way smoking was handled was right or wrong. I'm using it to illustrate that there are other angles and players.
> That's why social media should be forced to perform studies on the risks associated with their products and make those studies public.
One of the things I've found is that studies performed by an organization on their stuff tend to show it in a much better light than independent studies. When there is a financial interest people tend to contort things to improve on their financial interest.
I don't want to see studies from them. I want independent studies with researchers who are allowed to get enough data to perform them.
> Parents should be the final say in what is right for their kids.
What happens when you have uninformed parents? I'm reminded that these tech companies are using strategies meant to hide the knowledge of what they're doing from the people they're doing it to. How do you handle that part of the equation?
I think if we had enough transparency we would get less uninformed parents. We force slot machine manufacturers to put addiction warnings on their machines, and only a couple hundred people use one of those per day. Facebook has no warning labels and they use the same techniques. It is no secret today that gambling is dangerous and addicting.
It's not just a thing that involves parents, kids, and companies.
Facebook, et al is essentially pushing a casino / Skinner box at my kids that evolves every day. My change in thought happened when I found out that Facebook/YouTube was pushing pro-eating disorder material to a teenage relative and my 6 year old was getting pulled into weird videos that had a visible impact on his behavior. I don’t work for Facebook and frankly don’t have the energy to stay up on the latest innovations for stealing my kids attention at any cost.
The only responsible choice that I can make as a parent is to not use it, but that obviously creates a forbidden fruit situation where I have to balance what I believe against peer pressure and other factors to avoid a worse outcome. Avoidance also means that the great material on these platforms is walled off.
Running a cesspool is too profitable for self-reform, something needs to change the way this business works.
Minors are the legal responsibility of parents. However I get your point.
No, I don't think its actually that. I think its much worse than that. I think they thought it might be a good safe idea.
If I was being uncharitable I'd say they looked at tiktok hoovering up the next cohort of instagram users and thought, we can provide a safe way to do that and convert them onto our platform.
All the problems we've had with instagram, facebook and friends reunited are going to pop up on tiktok, but all at the same time and for a younger, less well equipped generation.
The end result will be T&Cs that few parents will read, and they will simply hit AGREE--> FINISH with default settings that don't restrict/monitor anything.
1. Those whose parents gave them phones as children
2. Those whose parents did not give them phones as children
The former group will become fragile, suicidal narcissists who can't cope with or navigate the external world. They'll have soon-to-be trite problems like gender dysphoria and agoraphobia and will mistakenly think this makes them interesting or constitutes a personality. The later group will grow up as ordinary people by objective standards, but against the backdrop of the first group they will seem like they have superpowers - the Joe Bauerses of tomorrow so to speak.
The internet and social media ruin all minds, but especially the child's mind. Hopefully once these two groups are well articulated and obvious to all, parents will start to make better decisions.
This went on until she was old enough to move out so we would stop taking her phone away. A couple years later she finally realized what social media was doing to her and she turned it off herself. Started getting her life together.
Other daughters are pissed because they can’t have a phone. When I query about the friends. It’s the same pattern. Every friend with a phone is obsessed with it. The ones without are much more fun to hang out with.
We dont expect everyday joe to fight a heavyweight chamption, or defend himself in court.
Some changes are needed.
I’ll be waking her down the aisle soon. She is marrying a very nice guy.
All text books and school assignments are now done online. Some grading is even outsourced to the textbook companies.
Kids are skilled at switching between apps (alt-tab). Parents don't have time to hover over the kid and laptop for 2 hours each night.
And kids have internet access at school, or at a friend's house, or at the stores nearby. Phones and laptops are difficult for parents to lock down.
They are using apps and online social spaces in ways that adults can't imagine or comprehend. They're dealing with self-esteem issues, bullying, predators, extreme content and targeted advertising & algorithmic content to keep them engaged. Kids aren't dumb. They're certainly as - or more - susceptible to the negative effects of social media as the rest of us but they shouldn't be ignored here or relegated to a class to be protected because of some kind of diminished capacity. Instead, IG and the experts should be working with them, including their ideas and feedback.
Similar to the iOS feature that can scan the messages of people under 18 on a family account for nudes, features like will get LGBTQ kids who don't have supportive homes in trouble for exploring their sexuality & identity. It will get kids who are looking for support in abusive situations via actually helpful posts in trouble when their adults see what they've been looking at.
I remember what kind of issues I had at home before I learned how to clear my web browser history in the 90s - I can only imagine how much worse this could be in terms of surveillance of kids.
This is a minor point of yours, but I don't see any valid reasons for kids below 13 to ever send or receive nudes, and I would hope that most of them wouldn't even have a "sexual orientation" at that age. Opposing policies that are as close to "universally good" as you can get, is going to make it even harder to solve the problems of kids using technology.
I honestly think that kids won't use "X for Kids" when they have access to devices. They will just figure out ways to get around the block and do what they want.
For my children, I'm not giving them personal devices until an appropriate age and with an MDM to manage the device and set limits especially around how long they can spend on apps/device.
I didn't have internet access until age 10, and was only given a flipphone shortly after that. On the one hand, I was immature for my age and can imagine millions of ways in which things could have gone catastrophically wrong; and the way my parents did things feels pretty well thought out. But on the other hand, I'd have definitely preferred having local development tools, maybe a Raspberry Pi (didn't exist then), predownloaded PDF manuals, anything I could have tinkered with. Instead all I did before age 10 was play video games, since that (and typing documents) was all there was.
In a world where kids grow up with computers from a young age, some will entertain themselves all day, and some will learn from program all day, and obviously have access to very different opportunities. I'm tempted to say: "no electronics until 10, etc" like some strict parents I know, but it does feel like an outdated attitude that can hinder kids as much as it helps them.
Some of my friends at 13-15 played games all day, while some worked hard at school, had great extracurriculars, and still had access to the exact same tech.
I'm convinced the problem is not technological but emotional/psychological, and that one day we'll figure out how to raise kids in a a way that you can give them unrestricted tech, and they'll experience all the benefits and no downside, we just haven't reached that level of "parenting science" yet to make it reproducible.
tbh once they are it's already over anyway, you're just holding back the tide at that point. Need strict supervision to protect them from online dangers and there is nothing you can do to prevent the dopamine addiction.
It's no coincidence many of the people who create this hardware/software and networks don't let their own children anywhere near them.
None of my kids will have access to this stuff unattended until they're mature enough to do other adult things on their own (like drive, get married, etc.).
The Internet has never been a safe place for kids, and it never will be. I blame most of my adult issues on the fact that I had Internet access from a PC in my room from the age of 10. And that was more than 20 years ago when porn was harder to find and social media just consisted of yahoo chat rooms.
Also, the 'needing to be 12 years old' rule for many sites is a very handy one for parents as it gives you a solid reason for not giving permission for certain sites. It may be widely ignored but it's still very useful and enough parents do adhere to it, that you don't feel like you are making your children an outcast!
Just because I don't mind if I let my 12 year old watch PG-13 movies doesn't mean I want them to start watching softcore porn in Game of Thrones.
No it’s fucking not, you morally corrupt sacks of garbage.
Doing as you suggest is basically what the Chinese government just enacted.
If not, what sets one communication app from another?
Edit: downvote all you want, but show evidence that Instagram is in any way healthy or appropriate for children, sure looks like trying to hook the next generation on Instagram, no different than Joe Camel with cigarettes.
E.g. blocking Instagram/Facebook/TikTok URLs from passing through your network? May seem silly and/or not even worth it but I'm curious about the different ways people are practically addressing this problem - control over the phone via app blocks, network blocks, taking phones away?
What's working for you?
Through that lens, it's perfectly appropriate to shift your investments.
I guess the original plan was to just moderate all the content, until they realized how that wouldn't scale, so now the moderation will be outsourced to the parents: "Your kid found something nasty on Instagram kids? That's your fault because you didn't properly supervise it with the tools we gave you!"
Edit: I ask because Insta is still using the "your browser may have ways to block cookies" which I can't believe for a second is GDPR compliant.
What a tone deaf response.
However, for younger kids (say, 5-11) I think a separate environment is the best solution. Up to a certain point, parents have more influence on what their child does. For all its problems, most parents I know are comfortable with YouTube Kids because it's the lesser of two evils. I know that my child is going to participate in social media either way, so I want them to do it in a sandbox until the day I don't get a say.
Instagram and Facebook are a scourge.