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Comment by p1necone | Hacker News Reader

I do wonder sometimes how much of the supposed ills of social media are just social media making things that were already happening much more visible.

I and many others were bullied relentlessly at school through regular non technological means, and I'm sure it had a pretty negative psychological impact. I'm not really convinced it would be any worse if I was more active on Instagram/TikTok/whatever.

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Hospital admissions for self harm among girls ages 10-14 have almost tripled since 2010. Suicides among 10-14 year olds have doubled. There really is something different happening to teen mental health, it's not just existing problems becoming more visible [1].

[1] https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/the-teen-mental-illness...

Have you considered it might be their life's outlook? What do most of these girls have to look forward to after school? A well paying job? Most of them will have crap jobs barely scraping by, and most of them know it. A house? Most will pay absurd rates for an apartment and never build equity.

Our school system is pretty trash too, depending on state. I think social media might be a scapegoat, because it's easy to, "just do something," while the real issue goes against the political donor's wishes.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a capitalist, but business have done everything to push down wages and working conditions since Reagan. Would you want to be a kid today with our current outlook?

And then there's the news. Kids don't realize it's mostly fear mongering BS and they believe all the doomsayers' predictions. That's pretty hard for a 14 year old.

Social media probably has something to do with it, but we have to fix all the other stuff too if we want to actually make a difference, rather than just feeling like we made a difference.

Most girls today will make more than any other female generation in history. Your statement would hold true for boys. But the rates of mental illnesses and suicide are growing faster among the former. So it's probably more complicated that economic success.

> Most girls today will make more than any other female generation in history.

Which doesn't matter if actual prices inflated way past that point.

I mentioned more things than just economic success. It's a culmination of multiple things all bearing down on the upcoming generation. To simplify it as "it's social media," is, I believe, dismissive, as if your mind is made up. Trying to remove social media from the equation would probably make it worse by removing supportive groups found there, not to mention when you ban things and people still do it, now they can get a criminal record.

We've been doing this same stuff for decades. Something bad, ban it and throw people in jail for doing it. It doesn't work, it just makes things worse. Why don't we realize this yet? It's been generations.

There could even be a positive correlation there - more career stress, etc.

Did the bullying stop or slow down when you got home? Did you have to check online every 5 minutes to see what pictures of you were posted? Was embarrassing content being spread around to people you had never even interacted with on a regular basis.

Did Photoshopped images of you hanging from a ceiling fan with a Nike Swoosh and a caption saying "Just Do it" get 10,000 likes?

IMO bullying today is orders of magnitude worse than it was ~15 years ago.

> Did the bullying stop or slow down when you got home? Did you have to check online every 5 minutes to see what pictures of you were posted? Was embarrassing content being spread around to people you had never even interacted with on a regular basis.

Yes, it happened over AIM and before that it happened via phone calls between friends. I'm too young to have gone to school before phones.

> Did Photoshopped images of you hanging from a ceiling fan with a Nike Swoosh and a caption saying "Just Do it" get 10,000 likes?

People did horrible pranks like this all the time when I was in school. They didn't get likes, they were just passed out between periods in school or taped up on windows. Photoshop was released in 1990, I can guarantee you that 15 years ago kids were Photoshopping people too.

> Yes, it happened over AIM and before that it happened via phone calls between friends. I'm too young to have gone to school before phones.

You are comparing 2 people recounting to each other what happened to someobody posting a video of what happened so that it is immediately visible to the whole school...

> People did horrible pranks like this all the time when I was in school. They didn't get likes, they were just passed out between periods in school or taped up on windows. Photoshop was released in 1990, I can guarantee you that 15 years ago kids were Photoshopping people too.

GP wasn't saying that 15 years ago kids did not have access to photoshop but that the bullying is worse today than 15 years ago. The fact that photoshop existed 15 years ago in no way address that claim.

The engagement optimizing feeds amplifly some of the ills that are otherwise manageable in "private" groups of friends reading chronological communication. That's what really needs to go.

So, my anecdotal parental evidence suggests otherwise.

My oldest was upset that her friend didn’t acknowledge a message she had sent and apparently changed the topic. Apparently this friend always does that. My daughter was complaining that it is unlikely that this person didn’t see the message that my daughter had sent.

It is a complex world. I just live in it. I will never understand the subtle nuanced rules. I’ve made my peace with it. I just listen.

Well, yeah, that is just part of growing up... that kind of angst has existed since (at least) the invention of language and gossip.

As you ask, how many ills is it actually directly causing versus merely exposing.

As op asks, what even is social media? Does email count? An email based mailing list? A federated group chat protocol like Matrix?

Speaking of federated protocols. Email, Matrix, Activity Pub, many others are federated and self hostable. How is legislation supposed to account for that without causing more problems than it seeks to solve?

On that note, are the downstream negative effects of such legislation even being considered? If one of the outcomes is "provide copy of your passport to register a user account" would that not be a situation rife for abuse, both by governments and corporations alike? Is this a "cure" for which the combined side effects are worse than the original problem?

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