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Comment by yumraj | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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