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Comment by danielovichdk | Hacker News Reader

Stop asking Gen Z for anything. Fuck me, I don't even know what a Gen Z is.

Sounds like a CPU for all I care. A cheap one too.

Instagram is dying ?

No, I am dying. Lend a helping hand. Buy me an ice-cream.

People are cognitive screwed from all this socalled social network bullshit that turns friends, family and idols into a circus of self-proclaimed everything.

Kylie Jenner ? Really ?

I can almost taste the sugary feeling in the mouth of teenagers when they fall over the same line of self-staging freaks.

Turn it off. Buy a small library. Read.

Pack a suitcase. Buy a train ticket. See the world.

Concentrate. Please.

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Pretty much every generation makes the same mistake you're making right now by writing off whatever the younger generation is focusing their time on. You can find quotes from 1000 years ago with the same exact sentiment as your comment.

Every single time they were wrong.

Were they wrong? Most civilizations enjoyed a period of growth and innovation followed buy a longer period of stagnation and decay. Historically, most complaints about the next generation were right.

I really think that a video of a girl dancing, her clothes changing every time she claps her hands, made for a platform that prizes sucking out teens's attention for the chance of showing them an ad and collecting data on them, will be written off in a few years.

Besides, everything is safe until it is not and research is increasingly pointing towards the toxicity of social media on the young mind.

Even doctors smoke a certain brand, remember?

Plenty of video games, movies, TV shows, graphic novels, books, plays, songs, have little to no staying power, entertainment value or cultural relevance of any kind.

Does the fact that ET the video game was produced, or Bram Stoker apparently wrote a book so bad were still dunking on it 100 years later invalidate either of their mediums? Does the fact that twerking exists and is labelled invalidate the cultural impaxt of dancing?

Yeah, scrolling photos of big butts, breasts and yachts plus a lot of ads it's really pushing forward society as a whole, is hard to believe the staggering similarity of when books became mainstream and old people worried the young would become dumber given they wouldn't have to memorize.

How about the TV and zapping?

It depends on what they are watching, are they watching "mythbusters" or "the Kardashians"? The problem start when the giant majority uses the medium to consume garbage, the drop in intelligence in the US and it's politicians is likely directly related to that.

There's plenty of nonsense books available too. People made the same argument about video games when I was a child. Over the last 100 years we've been worried about TV shows, movies, video games, and rock music being a negative influence. Just because you think something is dumb doesn't invalidate it for everyone else.

The popularity ratio of garbage books vs non-garbage is nowhere even close to the equivalent ratio on social media, where instantaneous feedback loops of dopamine shots are pushing the balance in favor of the worst kind of content, I admit TV already did some of that but social media platforms are on a whole new level.

And there has been a drop in the average IQ of the world in recent decades, and is directly related to TV and the other things you mentioned, so it's clear that it does have consequences and some of it is indeed a negative influence, source: https://www.swnewsmedia.com/article_8317aad9-876e-5c1e-804a-...

> The popularity ratio of garbage books vs non-garbage is nowhere even close to the equivalent ratio on social media,

The ratio of absolute nonsense and garbage books to decent literature is probably 99:1, if not higher. It's got to be the same for TV shows, and movies.

> where instantaneous feedback loops of dopamine shots are pushing the balance in favor of the worst kind of content, I admit TV already did some of that but social media platforms are on a whole new level.

We've been having this argument for decades - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/children-80s-never-fe... this is a great example of it. People were worried about that playing video games will turn you violent, or that novels will make it difficult to differentiate between reality and fantasy.

> And there has been a drop in the average IQ of the world in recent decades, and is directly related to TV and the other things you mentioned, so it's clear that it does have consequences and some of it is indeed a negative influence, source: https://www.swnewsmedia.com/article_8317aad9-876e-5c1e-804a-...

Link didn't work for me (thanks GDPR), so archive link here: https://archive.ph/wnaFn - That' not a source, that's a column in a local newspaper with no citations and no research. The article (which is a two paragraph soapbox about people on the internet being stupid) doesn't mention TV, social media, or what the cause for his claim that IQ is dropping is.

> The ratio of absolute nonsense and garbage books to decent literature is probably 99:1, if not higher. It's got to be the same for TV shows, and movies.

The ratio of consumption the one that matters here, and in that context social media is the clear winner in the ratio of consumption of garbage content, just the other day I learned there are a few kids making millions of dollars from opening toys in gift packages, "unboxing" they call it, it's like crack cocaine for children watching, and there are thousands of other families/channels (with children) trying to do the same and reach the same audience; you try to compare things and say that all this has happened before but the similarities are next to none, specially when the entry barrier to become a content creator it's so low.

Videogames turning you violent is dumb because it involves turning a fantasy behavior into a real one, this has nothing to do with that because the problem TikTok and others pose is wasting time in proportions never seen before, a lot of factors play a role, including the ubiquity of smartphones, most people spend 100% of their time next to theirs, another one is the incentives to make you waste as much time as possible to show you as many ads as possible.

It's weird, the article has a lot more paragraphs when accessed from a different referrer, anyway, I found another source that quotes one of the studies that says that IQ is lowering, and it's clearly states that is due environmental factors, and yes, that includes media: https://www.google.com/amp/s/learningenglish.voanews.com/amp...

Every single time they were wrong.

[Evidence required]

People ask the young generation because they are the biggest indicator as to where things are heading. Consider how many people will read your answer. How much attention of HN-audience-type-people did you just send down the drain for the righteous feeling of ranting off-topic?

> the young generation ... are the biggest indicator as to where things are heading.

They sure can be. But young people around me in the early 2000s were into rap-metal, buying ringtones, and using ICQ or IM. These obviously were not great indicators of what would happen in the near future.

Hey, ICQ was great.

Those were great indicators! Rap-metal was the weird transition between rock/metal being ascendent in the 90s to the complete takeover by hip hop. Ringtones were people paying money to customize their mobile experience, they were early apps and appstore. ICQ and IM were telling us that text based instant messaging was take a lot of share from email and phone calls both.

Of course, this is easy in retrospect, I couldn't have forecast it correctly at the time!

I do wonder sometimes if social media is the games and rock music of our generation.

Mind you, there's lots of legitimate criticism to throw at social media and I wouldn't mind the whole apparatus burning down either, but it's also the one thing a lot of people born in the late 20th century agree to hate on.

I find it hard to perceive anything beside the most shallow human reflexes on social medias. It's cheap idols from far away. Even a mediocre singer has to take the stage and keep a crowd for a little while.

Maybe it’s the radio and cinema of our generation.

Both were used in their time to get totalitarian governments into power and many millions died.

What's the purpose of your comment, may I ask? Tried to read few times but still couldn't grasp the idea, sorry

I took the point to be that it's all worthless.

Instagram is dying? Nothing of value will be lost.

Asking Gen Z about something? Nothing of value will be procured.

Tiktok vs. Reels? Nothing of value are being compared.

Thank you!

Eh, previous generations were watching America's Funniest Home Videos and celebrity gossip on TV for 5 hours a day. It wasn't any better.

Delivering content to specific audiences is literally some of our jobs on here.

This article may not be relevant for you, but it's certainly relevant to a not-insignificant portion of the HN audience.

There's no reason to be insulting.

When I was a teenager we had to make up our own reality. There were distinct gangs. The metal listeners, the rap listeners, the disco people, and so on. We were forced to, for stimuli were scarce. One new record could be passed along dozens of people eager for the new. Now speak to any teenager, they are all the same. Bees of a single hive mind.

> Now speak to any teenager, they are all the same. Bees of a single hive mind.

I don't know what teenagers you're speaking to but at least my nieces and nephews are certainly not the same. If anything, what's changed is its now acceptable to be part of more of these groups than it was before.

100% agree

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