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Comment by StrangeATractor | Hacker News Reader

It's funny the lengths I've seen people go to on HN to make everyone and their kid suddenly given a smartphone not a big deal at all, which couldn't possibility have any ramifications for mental health or development.

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“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

How about the upside of, you know, accessing the riches of human knowledge, entertainment and communication?

We decided it’s better to present this in a curated program called education.

What if everybody else in the same edication programme has a smartphone?

What of people have, like, free time?

For me, education was the worst part of my life and the Internet perhaps one of greatest.

Internet of today has nothing to do with 1990/2000 internet in term of content and especially in term of things competing for your attention, and spread of misinformation

The problem isn't necessarily the device, but the content

Kids spend up to 10 hours per day on screen, most of it on smartphones [0], and they're not reading encyclopedias

Average tiktok user screen time is over 25 hours per months: https://wallaroomedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/tiktok-...

[0] https://i2.wp.com/www.surexpositionecrans.org/wp-content/upl...

I understand all that but you really want to keep that baby while throwing the water off.

For starters, the 1.5 hours ot TV may go.

I'd much rather put my 8 years old in front of some cartoon than god knows where on the internet. Content wise it's much less risky

smartphone != internet

Let's be serious. Between 3 to 7 years: smartphone == youtube.

... and not the good parts of it.

My kingdom for the ability to allow-list what my kids can watch on YouTube. I'd pay double what they charge for YouTube Premium just for that. Youtube-dl'ing the videos and putting them somewhere easily accessible is a giant pain. There's great stuff on there but YouTube makes it so damn hard to curate it.

Basically that. Quite difficult to leave them alone or they'll just watch bad stuff eventually because of the fantastic algorithms.

> My kingdom for the ability

Then, for your kingdom, you will be able to afford building an app that plays YT videos only if matching some regular expression based on your whitelist. You can apparently stream YT videos through the ExoPlayer library or other tricks, see e.g.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29607104/how-to-play-you...

Fuck Youtube. I fucking hate it.

My son can be interested in an animal, so he'll find some youtube videos of the animal to watch. This is ok because the videos he searches and clicks on are fine, usually some sort of documentary. But then the algo. within like 3 videos he's watching badly autogenerated X vs Y monsters fight bullshit videos and it just gets worse and worse.

I'm seriously tempted to set up some sort of network MITM proxy that blocks any YT URL where the HTTP Referrer is a previous YT Video, so that algorithmic suggestions can just fuck off. Searching for and watching a video would be fine.

Yep, noticed the same pattern. Starts with some really interesting and educational videos and then eventually degenerates to gunfights, loud yelling and needless violence videos for kids.

To clarify: If all smartphones were basically just an encyclopedia, instant messenging and music device I think they would be much better for people. Currently, most time on a smartphone is spent engaging with the attention economy, which I think is where most of the real poison lies.

I think even if you got rid of the attention economy though, smartphones would still have negative consequences. A smartphone will help you kill some time, even if you're just browsing wikipedia. I think sometimes it's good to be bored, it can spur you into doing something new. Now we don't get bored, we get placated.

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