Comment by benrhodesuk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benrhodesuk | Hacker News Reader

While I don't doubt that social media can have a negative impact on teens... my own experience as the parent of a teen is slightly different and doesn't point to social media as being a driver. At least in my case.

I have a teenager that struggles with anxiety, low self-esteem and depression. He's incredibly smart and is an honors student in high school. BUT he also thinks he's terrible and he's incapable of accepting a compliment or congratulations on a good grade or work which he immediately deflects and says he was lucky or he's not really smart or something negative.

What does this have to do with the article as far as my experience? He's not on social media. While he might consume some social media (ex. TikTok) he doesn't have his own social media accounts. He doesn't have a Facebook account, Instagram account, etc. Which might sound hard to believe and you are likely thinking "I bet he has burner accounts..." but actually he doesn't.

He didn't have a smartphone until he was 13. And while he used an iPad before that it was primarily for playing games and watching Youtube.

What he is into is online gaming and Youtube. I guess you could count Youtube as a form of social media but even with that he's a consumer of the content and not a creator or commenter. So he's not posting videos on Youtube or getting into arguments with people in the Youtube comments, etc. He simply watches content.

So I'm only a sample size of one but I deal with a teen who struggles with a lot of what is described in this article... yet it isn't being driven by social media.

I think there are far more factors at play than simply smartphones and social media. And those factors could be different depending on the individual. Although some of the factors are obviously going to be shared. And I have no doubt social media can have a tremendous negative impact on mental health. But I think there is much more going on than just that.

I struggled similarly when I was in school.

As an adult I realized my attitude came from simply not having any example or basis for what I was doing. All I had were long term goals that always seemed just beyond the horizon.

In that situation almost any expectations will seem lofty and it's just as easy to feel either pride or shame regardless of what is actually accomplished.

This is not easy to deal with, but it is possible. As they say, you should surround yourself with people you can look up to. That's how you grow.

Consuming is the worst. The Internet is a toxic cesspool, for the most part. Having an account and interacting with friends would be one of the few exceptions, and maybe learning some stuff now and then.

Yea. I agree there is a lot of bad things to consume.

In general what he consumes tends to lean towards the toxic end of things. A lot of learning, science and educational content. And then gaming-related content (Minecraft, etc.).

Obviously, some of the gaming content can get toxic. But he's always been pretty good about staying away from more toxic gaming content. And while he will watching gaming content on Youtube he's not really into watching live streamers (on Youtube or Twitch) which is where a lot of toxicity can be on full display (both on the stream and in the chat).

So overall the majority of what he consumes tends to not be swimming around in the toxic cesspool end of things.

I think you're the first here in this topic that talked about Twitch and streamers.

I know a few streamers and we're aware of people that spend sometimes up to 5 hours a day on every single stream they do. Some of those donating hundreds of dollars a month to a single streamer. The stream chat is their hobby and the majority of their social interaction. The streamers are also burned out.

I'm all for people finding a community, and that's sort of what we do at HN. But that's a bit extreme for me.

IMO things are only going to get worse from here.

Streamers who aren't big enough to be financially successful (which is 99.999%) but have dreams of high viewer counts and big advertising checks (they work hard at growing their channels) are like an underfed child army of influence. The desperation to be popular online fuels a tremendous aggregate effort with little return for the streamers, but which is very effective at drawing their peers and adjacent peer groups into this unhealthy viewership, all in the service of showing ads.

The whole culture around twitch, TikTok, and social media influence generally is very exploitative of teens and younger people with more time and energy than wisdom.

I don't think it's the technology itself that is harmful to kids, not even slightly. It's the environment created online by adults who act to make a profit that drives the pathological use of technology. It's exploiting people's psychology, their need for attention or belonging, and constantly driving engagement that makes the impact of tech on society so ugly. The biggest danger to our youth online is arguably unfettered capitalism, not child predators.

Capitalism can and does work synergistically without the kind of pathological, societal self-harm that's so broadly accepted. Modern technology has just enabled perverse new ways to chew up and spit out the young and disadvantaged en masse while essentially looking the other way, just seeing the participants as rows in a DB table. From most parents' point of view, the threats posed by the profiteering actors in tech are hard to detect and reason about, and hard to protect from in ways that aren't net harmful & draconian, so many young people are left very vulnerable.

Further, for many tech workers, or for those that use the tech to generate business, it's hard to steer away from "evil technology" that is so effective in paying the bills.

How much gaming does he do, and what kind of games, if you don't mind?

That's also within the norm for teenagerdom historically.

Also try sports. Team sports.

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