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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

Says the person with 120k fake points on a social media site.

Seriously, though, I was connecting to dial-up Bulletin Board Systems as a teenager, don't regret it at all, and would hate to deprive younger generations of the opportunity to go online. I ended up meeting a lot of older strangers, which overprotective helicopter parents would consider "dangerous" nowadays, but it was awesome, and I made a lot of friends.

Let's be real about the risks: statistically speaking, the most dangerous adults to a child are not strangers, they're the child's own parents.

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> Says the person with 120k fake points on a social media site.

Wouldn’t that make GP even better qualified to comment on the harms of social media use? :p

I certainly wouldn’t say that a pack-a-day smoker with lung cancer isn’t qualified to speak on the dangers of teen smoking. Quite the opposite in fact.

I'm not advocating for or against social media age restrictions or whatever, but you cannot seriously believe that BBSs in the 90s had the same potential social impact as the big social media platforms of today. The amount of reach that a post on X or TikTok is so many orders of magnitude higher than any post on any BBS ever was or could be. That very fact means that someone with an agenda--good or bad--will be tempted to use X, TikTok, etc to manipulate ("influence") people. Those same actors would never waste their time posting on a BBS to accomplish said goal.

When it comes to physically harming kids, local BBSes are actually a much better way to meet people in person than global social networks.

HN is a message board. I was on Slashdot back as a teenager, and I think that was fine. Completely different than Facebook and Instagram for one thing based entirely on text and communication rather than pictures and materialism.

> Let's be real about the risks: statistically speaking, the most dangerous adults to a child are not strangers, they're the child's own parents

Depends on what danger you’re talking about.

> I was on Slashdot back as a teenager, and I think that was fine

"Everything that happens before the age of thirty-five is normal. After that, everything is a symptom of aging."

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

– Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

It sounds like your experiences were before the existence of algorithmic feeds. It's a completely different landscape now than it was then.

> It sounds like your experiences were before the existence of algorithmic feeds.

What does that have to do with "children harmed online"?

Some commenters here appear to be using "harm" in the psychological sense, with the implication being that spending time on social media is damaging to a child's mental health. If we accept the premise that spending time on social media is bad, then a modern algorithmic feed is probably more-bad than a boomer board.

To be fair, the article itself opens by citing both the mental health allegations as well as "exploitation and abuse". Given we're dealing with an emotionally charged political hot button issue, it's safe to say these are intentionally muddy waters.

Exactly. We don’t need a nanny state, we need more involved parents.

The inequality partly driven by these mega tech corps essentially forces both parents to work. Good luck with 'more involved parents' becoming the norm.

Both parents can work and still be involved…this repeated excuse sounds lame

Sure, but how much 'more' is needed to beat PhD-designed malware?

The audience of the hearing was full of involved parents

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