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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

Are parents going to deny their kids access to social media? Among the parents I know, none of them do this even if they admit it's probably bad for their kids. The social pressure from the kids' peers is the number one reason they give: their kids will be left out, and social alienation is viewed as worse than social media. Perhaps a coordinated effort would make a difference, I don't know. I'm skeptical.

Despite saying lawmakers are "paying attention", there's no talk of regulation in this article, so presumably a voluntary effort on the part of parents is the only actionable plan they are ready to discuss. As the article notes, social products are not de facto designed to keep kids out, and have not done a good job of it so far, so I am also skeptical they will improve in the future without any legal pressure.

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I think so. We don’t buy our kids smartphones. We tell them that they can have one when they can buy it themselves. That tends to happen around 16-17. At home we block social media at the router level. They have Chromebooks from school, but social media is blocked on those by the school district. We’ve never had any of the kids complain about social alienation.

Ditto. My old got cellphone in 9th grade, and all usual ones are blocked via pihole at home.

Now in 12th, he does use Discord to communicate with a limited set of friends. But that’s it.

I’ve said it before, the difference is that we don’t use any of the social media ourselves, so kids are OK. If parents use them but ask kids to refrain, obviously it’s not going to work.

> I’ve said it before, the difference is that we don’t use any of the social media ourselves

You wouldn't classify HN as social media?

I'd say it's a subclass of social media. There's dopamine social media and non-dopamine social media.

I want to thank you for your socket guides etc. I learnt TCP/IP programming from those way back in the 90's! Presuming I am talking to the correct Beej here of course.

You're welcome! Always good to hear when the guides are used to good effect. :)

Touché!

But, I'm pretty sure the Surgeon General did not have HN in mind while making that comment. :)

HN is a social media, but it lacks certain capabilities that make it OK. First and foremost, there is no DM, then it's heavily moderated both by users as well as by DanG, and then it is text based. Also, based on my observation, the karma/like acquisition is not what drives people's comments here.

So, while you're correct that it's a social media, it's not the cesspool of poison that the usual ones, that come to mind when we use the term social media, are.

I wouldn’t. It’s not social without a social network. A social network implies that we are not all anonymous strangers. It implies we know people’s real names and other personal information about them. To the best of my knowledge, I have never interacted with the same person twice on HN (or Reddit). That’s basically the opposite of social or a network. When everyone is anonymous, and might even be a bot, it isn’t social media. Mostly because it is not social.

Hacker news is pseudonymous, not anonymous, although I would argue that it would be social media either way.

Just because you don’t know the real world identity of the other nodes doesn’t mean that a network doesn’t exist.

By that argument, Amazon is social media. Each item for sale is a post and the comments are the reviews and the questions/answers.

> Ditto. My old got cellphone in 9th grade, and all usual ones are blocked via pihole at home.

Can’t they get around this by turning off Wi-Fi?

Yes, he can, and maybe he did (I can’t say with 100% certainty that that is not the case) but I believe that is where parents not using these social media comes into play. And, remember, Discord is allowed which I believe meets some of the needs.

Also, any excessive data usage would show up in the family plan, which gives me confidence.

I have always vocally expressed my hate for FB so maybe that helped.

But all kids are different, and maybe what worked here won’t work for everyone.

Thanks, was just wondering. I have a 3 year old and the prospect of raising him in today's tech environment is daunting. I can't imagine I'll have to deal with him having a smartphone, etc. It's terrible.

I have a younger kid and we have set expectations that no cell phone before high school,

I’m sure there’d be push back in middle school but we’ll be able to refer to the older kid. Fingers crossed..

Also, I had used the family thing with the older kid, so app installations required patent approval. So that at least forces usage of web apps if the kid is trying to bypass some restrictions, which in itself reduces the damage caused by these social networks.

Discord is social media too, though I would put it somewhere between HN and Facebook/Twitter in terms of harmfulness.

I actually think Discord is even lower on the social media pole in terms of potential harm than HN. The things that seem to be the source of negative effects of social media seem to boil down to 1. dopamine-inducing like/point systems, 2. endless content feeds, and 3. the number of people interacting.

HN has elements of all 3, but to a lesser degree than Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit.

Discord has the potential to have some of those to an extent, but especially if the user is simply using a server for them and their friends, practically none of those apply. It’s much closer to a simple group chat.

Well, it's not like group chat cannot have issues of its own (toxic admins, bullying... maybe not so much among friends, though as a teenager there's quite more risk to be paired with """friends"""), but you are right, I should perhaps (?) have left my concerns with Discord being a platform (closed, privately owned, for profit motive) that is US-based at the door in this specific discussion.

I put my own work around in for that. Wireguard VPN on the phone, that connects back to home. Tasker profiles to enable the Wireguard VPN connection anytime the wifi is not connect to the home network. Pihole blocking still active via that method.

Not if it has a VPN, like circle (which is what we use), installed.

I would probably try out Discord for yourself if you never have, you can find anything Pihole is likely blocking indirectly via Discord, just saying.

Ah thank you. Yes, I have never used Discord and don’t know its capacities. I definitely should educate myself :)

But the kid is now in senior year of high school so in worst case I did protect them for as long as I could. I won’t have much control from next year anyway..

Fair, I use it all the time, there's probably millions of different communities on it, think of reddit but with the capacity to share files, images, voice chat, video call, screenshare and so on. Now remember how insane reddit can get without all of that.

Just wanted to post this in case someone else has no idea and they let their kids on that platform. Chances are high most people on Discord are fine, but bad can be found anywhere online.

And if they did complain, what then?

Are you worried about the social lives they might be missing out on? About the friendships they might have had if they had a phone with Snapchat on it? A lot of social life for kids happens online.

That’s the point. you want them to miss out. Missing out means they don’t have to be depressed and have their attention spans attacked. This online social life is unhealthy and bad for them and they will grow up retarded socially if you don’t protect them from it.

Socially stunting your children in order to "save them" is the height of helicopter parental abuse.

Saving them from TikTok crack is hardly helicopter child abuse. It's responsible parenting. But it's also more than that. Simply not giving them a smartphone when they're 10 isn't enough. Parents have to also embody what they preach.

There is a range here, I'm not talking about 10 year olds or 5 year olds. The article discusses young teenagers, and by that point many of their friends will be on social media, and keeping them off it will stunt their social growth and make them outcasts.

I would strongly contest the idea that depriving a child of social media is “socially stunting” them. It isn’t as if children today are more socially adept after social media than children were for all of the millennia prior to social media, and if anything, there is evidence to the contrary. All of the options for socialization from pre-social media still widely available and applicable.

Then nothing. I am not worried about these things at all. We have a 25 year old, a 23 year old, and a 21 year old and their social lives were never impacted. And the 25 year old has thanked us for keeping her off of social media until she was older and more mature.

> their social lives were never impacted.

This is hard to believe to the point of me thinking your kids were in a plato's cave. It was not possible to have a normal social life without social media as a teenager over the last 10 years. Full stop. You will miss out on events because you can not be invited the normal way. Whether that's a big deal or not is certainly debatable, but claiming that it doesn't exist is ostrich behavior.

Perhaps you are the one in Plato’s cave, unable to imagine that a life without social media can be viable and normal?

Well, that has not been our experience. Sorry to burst your bubble.

The people in the cave weren't experiencing reality either.

> About the friendships they might have had if they had a phone with Snapchat on it? A lot of social life for kids happens online.

A lot of things are said (and done) - often in haste - online, which one would simply never experience in a face-to-face interaction.

We support our kids participating in lots of team sports, not because they're amazingly talented (although they're all better than I was when I was that age!), but because we believe it's good for them, physically and socially.

> We support our kids participating in lots of team sports, not because they're amazingly talented (although they're all better than I was when I was that age!), but because we believe it's good for them, physically and socially.

This is the way to do it. People forget that while some teenage social life occurs online, not all of it does, and the part that can be done in-person is a lot healthier than what's online. In real life, are people going to be comparing themselves to Instagram posts? Unlikely, but even then, there will be a lot more nuance of something like, say, going on an international trip, where a friend can tell you the good and bad rather than showing only the good on an IG photo and making the viewer feel bad because they didn't go on such a trip.

Real life interaction simply has less ability to lack nuance, which I think is a good thing.

What about the social lives they might be missing out on by being obsessed with Snapchat?

It depends really whether you as a kid can have a social life at all without being on social media. If your school is one of those no-digital-devices places where tech workers send their kids to, then you'll manage. But most schools aren't like that. Instead, there, children heavily rely on online services to communicate. I'm a late millenial, so I didn't have 100% the same experience as a kid growing up now has, but even for me, I felt it on my own skin. A lot of social interaction was inaccessible to me due to me not being on Facebook by choice. When some event was planned, I didn't immediately know about it.

Also there is the practicality point. In the old days, kids could reach each other from their own volition, back when kids walking on the sidewalk alone wasn't a reason to call CPS. Back when said side walks existed in the first place.

> Also there is the practicality point. In the old days, kids could reach each other from their own volition

Our eldest travels into the nearest town by train, on his own, to get to his school. He's done this since he was 11.

Our youngest walks to her primary school, on her own, since the first week she started at primary school.

> [..] back when kids walking on the sidewalk alone wasn't a reason to call CPS.

Why any parent wouldn't trust their child to go for a walk unsupervised but would trust them to be on Snapchat unsupervised is completely beyond me.

It's not a matter of not trusting the child to go for a walk unsupervised -- it's not trusting CPS to consider it acceptable.

I was exaggerating a little, but the issue still exists. There has been a change in general societal mindset around deeming the outsides as dangerous for children, even during the day. This mindset might not exist everywhere, but where it is prevailing, it is forced onto parents who let their kids out in the sense that they are looked negatively upon.

I've lived in several places and never had this problem. My instinct is that this is just another moral panic - not any different than fearing of child abduction when letting your kid walk to school.

Yes, it happens, but its exceedingly rare.

Btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34625907

> A lot of social life for kids happens online.

I think that's a big part of the problem. I want to encourage more of that social life to happen in person. I would feel bad if I was causing them to miss out on IRL events.

I'm curious how your kids collaborate with other students for schoolwork if social media is disallowed. When I was in elementary and high school I regularly used MSN/Facebook/etc. for group projects and study sessions, and from what I know today's students mostly use Discord. Having a student's Facebook group for the class/school was also very common and people would discuss assignments and events. Obviously the kids do fool around on those services but they also use it for legitimate purposes like how corps today use MS Teams.

If a student did not have access to those services I would not want to work with them on say a group assignment because it would be very difficult to keep things organized. I would not want to go out of my way to go to their house/make phone calls to keep them in the loop.

Kids don't use facebook. There is still imessage and school email, schoology, gsuite etc. No one is doing schoolwork over the twitter or instatok that we know of.

We had an official school LMS/email back in the day too, but students didn't like using that for obvious reasons. Today (at least with the kids I know) they typically use Discord for assignments and the like. It's not as bad as Twitter and co. but I would still call it a social media platform.

They have school email, though, from what I have observed, they primarily collaborate through the google office suite.

they are going to be very inadapted when they end up in college or later. this is also restricting them from career opportunities, e.g. community & socials management etc. I know people who flat-out say that they wouldn't trust someone with no social media presence.

The people you’re describing are called morons. I don’t want my kids to work for morons.

Amen

> I know people who flat-out say that they wouldn't trust someone with no social media presence.

I've known people who say this. Trust me: They're not worth associating with. Most/all have unhealthy social problems. And none have worthwhile positives that you'd miss out on by not being part of their circle.

That hasn’t been my experience. We have a 25 year old, 23 year old, and 21 year old that had absolutely no problems adapting to college.

I have no social media presence and it has never affected me in the slightest.

inadapted to what? you dont learn life skills on social media.

You aren't blocking HN. Are you also blocking Reddit?

I am forever grateful that my parents raised me with no TV in the house.

It's true, we were sometimes out-of-the-loop with regards to pop culture, which is a somewhat isolating factor. I imagine it could be even more so with social media, since it's not just common discussion material but the actual means of communication.

From time to time, I'll look at TV these days (in a hotel, or so), and it's ... so off-putting. All the ads screaming at you, the pacing of things. I'm sure plenty of people don't even know another reality, but I'm so glad that I do.

I don't see it changing without a grassroots upwelling on a cultural level, where people want it to change. Maybe as quality of those experiences continues to degrade there will be an increased desire for it. A person can hope. Things generally need to get worse before they get better, it seems.

I will not deny it to them. Plus, it was their primary communication with peers during lockdowns, I am not going to put toothpaste back to tube. Social media are part of current world whether I like it or not. Teens are at the stage where you need to be releasing them gradually and they should become independent, get jobs or go to college soon.

I find the impulse to deny it all fascinating in combination with outrages over pre-teens and tees walking themselves or using public transport, expectation of without constant supervision till age of 18 and so on. There is knee jerk streak of "control everything as tightly as possible". Except that, they should be growing independent. And also fascinating contrast against how toxic online communities gets treated - I have yet to see the call to prevent boys from playing online games as strategy despite some of those peer groups being fairly toxic both in ideology and behavior.

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