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Comment by wilg | Hacker News Reader

> Adolescents are spending less time gathering in shopping malls, movie theaters and rec rooms, and more time connecting on Instagram, TikTok and Discord.

On this point, I’d say the problem lies with the former becoming irrelevant. This is why I’m really interested in creating new types of IRL social spaces and shared experiences. There’s just not a lot of options really, and for The Kids, bars are out.

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The whole concept of Third Places[1] is kind of dying out. Like you said, bars don't work for kids, and other common places are either dwindling or just don't allow loitering - which is basically what teens are doing when they go hang out somewhere.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

Hadn't heard of this concept, super interesting, thank you so much!

The cost of rent is so high that providing space to linger is non economical

Yeah, one of the fundamental tenants of behavioral economics is that economic structures drive how people interact in society. So rising rent prices create a less livable world

It would be interesting if libraries could be used for this purpose. Most close early so they could be used in the evenings for social gatherings, etc.

They are in lots of places, my suburban library is teeming with kids from the end of school till 8 when it closes.

Bars (and cafes) have also learned to absolutely blast music to stop people talking and make them drink up.

So not only can you not afford to drink at many bars as a teen, you can't talk to your friends there either.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1530-0277.2008...

About the only place to hang out that doesn't demand money is a library, assuming you can find one, and that's not exactly the right place for chattering and larking about.

Library, park, church, (after) school, friends' houses, your house. I don't think this is actually that huge of a delta from the historical norm.

In the context of "third places" (which excludes work/schools and homes), there's a pretty seismic shift in churches from the historical norm of virtually 100% attendance.

Malls took up some slack for a few decades but they're on the way out in many places too.

Good riddance. Teens don't need to be told how born defective they are and for the low, low cost of 10% of all future income they too can be made right with imaginary sky daddy.

Also, let's be honest - we older generations set this scene. It's us who began this pattern of behaviour, starting with the home computing boom in the 1980s. Game consoles. Handhelds. It's us who truly began to normalise the behaviour of spending significant amounts of time in leisure at the desk or couch. It's us who were entirely enthralled and captured by the early years of the internet, and digital content. We're doing it right now, as we speak. I'm not sure we can talk of the younger generations as having coined a problem, when it's our very example (and the products we made and marketed) that they learned from.

I suggest we need to broaden our gaze - the recent decades of digital social revolution have greatly affected the behaviour of us all.

Pokemon Go had a unique approach to shared experience in augmented reality. Arcades are dead, movies are for the wealthy, but you can still make your own fun chasing invisible objects around the city.

Almost like it's a shared hallucination experienced by multiple users. (We could call the concept...a SHMU.)

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