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Comment by knaik94 | Hacker News Reader

Social media is an important way for kids to communicate to a group of people outside of their immediate friends. Kids born before broadband did not have the option to communicate in the same way, and trying to live that way now will do more harm than good. It's similar to trying to using a dumb phone that is not capable of group messaging as your only form of communication. Mental health issues are very complex and social media is only a communication platform at its core.

YouTube is not social media because there's no real network of friends. You have creators making content for users to consume. There are comments under videos, but there's no friends feature or direct messaging. Anyone can't post anything. The rest of the world is going to continue to use social media, limiting access won't change that. My perspective mostly agrees with this Unicef report.

https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/done-right-internet-us...

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Respectfully, do you have kids and if so how old are they? At what age did you give them social media? Social media is absolutely just a communication platform but it allows anyone to communicate their biases and view points to your kids. It's very much not important. Kids can grow up to be well rounded and happy people without it.

I am giving you perspective from someone that had social media limited. Not having a social media presence caused other kids to leave me out of things. I missed a lot of context on drama that happened online, and was always late in learning about things.

I don't have kids but I have been tutoring kids for the last 14 years, since I was basically a kid. I do individual tutoring for mostly high school, and occasionally middle school kids. Some of the have been with me from 7th through 12th grade, and a couple have even asked me to help them prep for finals even after starting college. They end up trusting me with things they wouldn't tell their parents, because I'm still someone they see as an authority figure. Because of cultural reasons, the kids I've tutor think of me and address me as an older brother. I've noticed covid catalyzed the shift to using digital platforms to keep in touch.

I don't have children, but empathize with the feeling of wanting to be protective. It took a lot of effort to make sure some of kids I tutored weren't taken advantage of by people like Andrew Tate. Telling them not to watch didn't help, pointing out the problems with Tate's message and taking time to dissect it did. Doing that also helped them learn how to identify similar manipulation tactics from other creators. It's important to separate the platform from the users.

I think we disagree on the importance of teaching kids how to use these tools. It feels sort similar to countries banning people from accessing AI tools like ChatGPT. The ban won't slow down AI development, those banned countries are simply left behind.

That's the thing, social media is full of people like Tate pushing all sorts of views. All the things you missed out on with social media that you rightly describe as drama were not important. I don't even have that much of an issue with Tate, he's just obviously trying to get people to pay for his membership. Some of the ideas he pushes are far less dangerous than the other stuff being pushed out there. I do disagree strongly with you taking positions and counseling kids that you are simply supposed to be tutoring. Ask your parents is a perfectly acceptable answer. You were essentially using your position of authority to push your viewpoint on impressionable minds. You may think you were doing right but in reality it was not your job and you were undermining parental roles. If I discovered my kids tutors were doing this I would react poorly.

Their parents trust me to talk to their kids about things they didn't feel comfortable about. Their parents ask me to look out for their kids and implicitly understand that I'm told things that they aren't. I think it's a cultural difference in the role of education between Asian cultures and others. I was even occasionally asked by parents to take a bigger role than I was sometimes comfortable with, for certain things. I was not undermining the parent's roles. I understand your reservations, but they're misguided at best. The parents were who encouraged their kids to call me big brother and have shared their appreciation to me privately.

>Not having a social media presence caused other kids to leave me out of things. I missed a lot of context on drama that happened online, and was always late in learning about things.

and?

Social exclusion is harmful to the development and mental health of teenagers too.

So if hanging out smoking cigarettes was the only way to socialize you would...?

The only people I follow on youtube are my friends.

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