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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I see some pretty toxic stuff on Youtube that needs to be pushed back on.

My son recently got shunned by a close friend who came under the spell of a "blackpill" incel because my son is taller than him and thus "mogging" him.

The media only cares about inceldom when there is a mass shooting, but short of that there are people on Youtube (Wheat Waffles I'm talking about you) who are merchants of despair right out of Danganronpa. This is the new frontier for "cult deprogramming" even though it is not associated with economic exploitation like Scientology or organized violence like Islamist Terrorism.

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My experience in shifting political and sociological landscapes drastically is limited, like my experience with solving world hunger, but trying to solve this kind of problem by limiting its spread isn't a reliable solution.

The problem is that the modern kid is isolated and yet constantly taunted with the online presence of everyone around him/her. Every boy is a trillionaire crypto genius that drives an M4 and every girl looks like Angelina Jolie. Reality is genuinely slipping away for millions of kids and they are slowly delegated to only being able to make friends online.

I'm sure that the idealistic world that they live on on the internet doesn't help when it contrasts so strongly with their day-to-day lives when going to school. It's probably like a constant culture shock - being the bee's knees for eight hours a day, a kid in an institution that he/she never signed up to go to for another eight, and then trying to reason through the oil and water mixture of the two in the last eight.

Disagreed. Maybe with some people, particularly of a very suggestible type, but I know dozens of young people in my own family and those close to us who don't take the majority of the preening crap thrown at them by highly edited social media profiles, reddit posts, youtube channels and so forth nearly as seriously as you paint the situation.

Sure, it might cause some insecurities here and there, but mass media always did this to teenagers and adolescents. At least in the modern version they also get plenty of doses of normal reality and often pretty interesting DIY educational stuff from people in the digital sphere, because just as it shows doctored images and life stories, it also often lets slip through a great deal of crude realities that teen magazines and other such media in the pre-internet past never even let peek out.

I know that exaggerated hating on the power of social media is popular on HN (among people who often tacitly support this very industry with their work no less) but for the most part, the adolescents I do know live a life in which they do usually know how to use their brains to distinguish the toxic and falase from the more or less normal and rational.

I mean this naively - I am, by my nature, a person who often questions myself.

But what makes you think this is an accurate analysis? I find that I tell myself so many stories - generalizations extrapolated from a few dozen data points - that I raise a red flag when I say things like “the problem today…”

I am not asking you to convince me, but am asking what makes you feel so sure about your perspective here? I have similar thoughts but generally dismiss them as “maybe it’s true but it’s not insightful, causative, or useful”. I would like to have more confidence in my perspectives, but the real world surprises me time and time again.

The main point that voids the entire “dislike brigading is toxic/bad for creators’ mental health” argument is that the comment section is still open. Who’s to say brigading won’t just move there instead? I’m betting people get hurt more by negative comments compared to plain dislikes.

Seems like a strawman argument they’re using to cater better to brands/advertisers...

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