Hacker News Reader

Comment by futureshock | Hacker News Reader

It’s bit weird, but I feel like this conversation about screen time and digital addiction dropped out of the public consciousness during Covid, never to return. Apple released their screen time features in 2018, so this issue was just starting to hit critical mass right as Covid hit and dumped us all deep down the digital rabbit hole.

Now I notice even more social proof to keep going deeper into the digital life. Public shaming over green chat bubbles and genuine confusion if I tell someone I’m on not on a Meta owned social network.

I wonder if we’re all so addicted now that it’s no longer social acceptable to talk about our addiction. I wonder if we just started talking to each other less as well.

View on HN

It feels like I haven't logged onto it in ages... Chrome pushed an update that made me have to log in and do TFA each time I opened the browser, and that was a nail in the coffin.

The best content on YouTube is berried behind a wall of Mr Beast and Pewdie Pie style fluffery that I can't find any real value in most of the time. They dictate what is favorable, and that ruins the entire experience for me. The search has been flooded with SEO title spam, which makes finding specific content damn near impossible and/or very tedious.

I don't think you can be addicted to a hammer if it's a highly functional tool in getting work done. I don't think you can get addicted to a television if it's a tool used for relaxation or entertainment. I think we need to stop considering that apps become addictive, and really speak on if they manage to deliver on their promises and functional purposes.... Just my opinion.

Most apps become extremely annoying after years of being highly functional, and that represents corporate corruption more so than having an addictive product. It's not addicting if it does not fulfill a valid purpose when it begins to charge money for ad laced content or repeatedly waste people's time, apps cease to be useful after that point.

>The best content on YouTube is berried behind a wall of Mr Beast and Pewdie Pie style fluffery that I can't find any real value in most of the time. They dictate what is favorable, and that ruins the entire experience for me. The search has been flooded with SEO title spam, which makes finding specific content damn near impossible and/or very tedious.

This is not my experience at all. The recommendations engine is what keeps Youtube as my #1 entertainment platform. My Youtube Recommendations ebb and flow, sometimes are better than others, but my feed absolutely never devolves into lowest-common-denominator super popular content, and is mostly dominated by small-to-medium sized channels in the categories that interest me.

Yes, literally every time this comes up, people who never click "don't show this" keep posting "recommendations don't work", which does nothing more than reveal that they actually DO watch really basic videos.

Even if you would watch things like that, you can STILL just say "never show this channel". You should review your feed periodically, imagining you are at a trial, being asked "why didn't you eliminate this feed from your life? was it really helping you?" If not, just nuke it by banning that source. You won't regret it.

Shorts are another story - the org behind that does NOT care about letting you keep yourself clean from memetic trash, and has been given the right to pollute the YT feed. My policy there is "not even once; resist watching them and definitely never let a short automatically transition you to the next video; have some self-respect."

As someone who had that policy and broke it...you are on the right path. Stay there.

Seriously, those shorts are the closest thing to crack (which I've never had) I can imagine. One evening after work I clicked on one and before I knew it 3.5 hours had passed.

Shorts and the like should be regulated as a controlled substance.

You're better than that, I believe in you. Cultivate a deep sense of resistance which can wake you out of sensory takeovers. Shame is powerful, what have you shipped this week?

My experience is that I first search for content I'm interested in. Then YouTube keeps recommending things that are related (in the same domain, or on the same channel).

I haven't seen any PewDiePie recommendation in years (to the point I even forgot him).

I don't really know what's actually popular on YouTube. All recommendations seem very personalized.

I use the "don't recommend channel" a lot with youtube if i see stuff I don't like.

OP was watching YouTube 8 to 10 hours a day. That is not simple relaxation.

> but I feel like this conversation about screen time and digital addiction dropped out of the public consciousness during Covid, never to return.

Strange, I had the opposite experience: COVID brought screen time discussions front and center as everyone was getting desperate for things to do away from their screen or becoming cognizant of how much screen time was at the center of their lives now.

I've always done a lot of outdoor activities. There was huge upward trend in the number of people I saw on hikes, out walking, or biking during COVID. It felt like everyone was getting outside again.

But obviously there was another world where people retreated to their homes, got comfortable with screens, and never unplugged.

The casino scene in the Percy Jackson movie [1] (and book) have always seemed hauntingly accurate to me as far as describing much of modern life.

The thing we all have a finite amount of is time, and we’re increasingly distracted to where we waste more and more of it on unimportant, artificial digital worlds/life while the real world passes by. As I’m getting older, I’m seeing how precious youth, energy, and health are, but those who have the most of that (younger people) seem to be sucked in even more. We’re racing towards the dystopia shown in the movie Ready Player One.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p9-Fbl2QVJc

I am completely lost as to how that clip corresponds to anything mentioned thus far...

Maybe there wasn’t enough context. The characters are on an important mission. They step into the casino for a short bit, only to emerge much, much (weeks? months?) later because they were entertained so thoroughly (and addicted to the flowers?). Social media, doom scrolling, etc are doing the same thing to people around me. One day they’ll wake up and find they wasted the best part of their life in front of a screen (and I’m not referring to tech work - we all gotta eat, but that’s only 8 hours of a day.

It’s a reference to the lotus eaters -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus-eaters

> I wonder if we just started talking to each other less as well.

We have. Sadly people aren't allowed to be bored long enough to decide that they should see what other people are up to.

It used to be common to call or even drop by unannounced to check on people. Doing these things is now seen as some great sin.

It's like we are all eating plain ramen every day, and aren't getting our vitamins. Sure we are full but we have deeper needs.

> It used to be common to call or even drop by unannounced to check on people.

This has been considered rude at least since my parents were kids in the 1950s.

I would imagine it was a lot more common before the telephone at home was widespread, but I've always found turning up unannounced to be rude.

Very regionally dependent, and very relationship dependent.

It was relatively common for me in the 80s but dropped out in the 90s.

No, this is just completely wrong and ridiculous.

People did this all the time until txting was common. Once txt was common there was no reason to just drop by someone's place randomly without giving them a heads up.

What makes your lived experience more correct than the lived experience of my grandparents and parents who lived in the time?

Once the telephone was popular in the US this was something that people in our circle just stopped doing. All it took was a 30 second phone call to say "hey, can if I head over if you're not busy?" (and the answer was almost always yes, I'll agree that is likely different than today) to make sure, so that was considered the polite thing to do in our working class semi-rural midwest circle.

If you're living truly in a rural area where you're sharing a party line with others and the nearest place is over a mile away then yes, I'll concede, that was probably much more normal.

It’s neat how there can be vast differences both regionally and within social circles. Here in Texas (I’ve been in central, west, and panhandle) dropping by was common through even the mid-2000s. While I don’t do this much anymore, for my parents and their friend groups it is still done.

Of course there are some unwritten rules and some people that you do call ahead, but for many it’s still an acceptable practice.

Very much dependent on culture, relationships and individuals, but I hate it myself as well. I even hate it when my phone rings unannounced.

Social media is no longer just some activity you do. For many, it has become a way of life. Their income and livelihood relies on it. Many children growing up today aspire to be popular on social media. What happens on social media has become part of their core identity.

It will only accelerate from here.

Social media has been the only open venue for young people for a while now, where the door to success is not closed and welded shut by old folks. Sure, all those likes and followers will not give them any monetary benefit to speak of, but neither does working or having a career.

If it was conceivable to raise in the ranks and get good compensation and respect by hard and diligent work, young people would be very interested. But that's not been the case for a long time. Young people will always flock to where they can succeed on their own merits, wether that was being a soldier, sailing in the merchant fleet, digging for gold, acting, business, technology, etc.

The average pay for a nurse in California is $133,000. A dentist is $172k. Physical therapist $100k. MDs $230k. Numerous other healthcare career paths where the doors to success are wide open to young people and where success is dictated by their "hard and diligent work".

If healthcare isn't their interest, Biglaw starting salaries for first year associates are $225k and go up rapidly. Other areas of law draw salaries from $150k to millions.

Obviously tech compensation is discussed here frequently, with high salaries possible for dev work as well as design, management, sales, support.

Finance and business consulting still pull in massive classes of entry level employees every year, with high starting salaries and higher comp for those who stay.

Fossil fuel extraction is full of high paid jobs, whether engineers and scientists designing equipment or field workers getting their hands dirty.

Social media is a tiny, tiny opportunity compared to other parts of the economy. For every influencer making $100k, there will be tens of thousands of people making six figures in a different domain.

I don't know anything about California, but if those salaries are true and achievable within reasonable effort, why wouldn't young people flock from the entire nation to work in healthcare? Maybe there's some limiting factor?

Biglaw and finance consulting I doubt is open for everybody to work in, unless your parents paid for a prestigious college. The door is pretty well welded shut, as far as I know. Social media is on the other hand free to start building your audience.

Tech is the outlier, I agree with you on that one. If you have the talent you can make it in tech still as a young person only on talent and hard work.

Social media is such a tiny opportunity monetarily that it doesn't even count. It's not the money making young people flock to social media – because there is almost no money there – it is the chance of being somebody, having people listening to you and getting some respect as a person. Rather than being treated as a piece of shit by your boss for no reason.

Not in the US, but the (hard working) engineers and dentists that I personally know all needed financial help from parents to be able to afford their very humble dwellings. Every financially successful person I know either inherited real estate or bought real estate before most of humans were born. Some of them also work hard, but that doesn't influence their financials much.

I'd like to ask what is the average pay for a non-working homeowner in California? How much can they expect to earn tax free per year from their real estate increasing in value, as compared to the hard working and highly taxed nurse earning from labour?

Guess where your fatalism was learned? Social media.

It's absurd to claim that working or having a career delivers no monetary benefits.

No monetary benefit to speak of for most of today's youth. I'm not a fatalist and i believe every person creates her own destiny. But let's be real also, the cards are heavily stacked against the youth for the great disadvantage of all of us. The so called "economy" is loosing immeasurable amounts of productivity just because the people in charge (both on a macro and micro level) have decided that they need to hold back young people.

Just compare the level of taxation on labour with the taxes on real estate or imports/exports.

> Many children growing up today aspire to be popular on social media. What happens on social media has become part of their core identity.

They'll probably grow out of it. Half my high school class thought they were going to be major league baseball players or NFL players when they grew up. Now they're accountants and HVAC installers.

There is a brief window in time where one can possibly play professional football or baseball. If you haven't made it by 30, the dream is over.

Social media has no such limitations. Certain segments favor the young but there are plenty of middle aged and a few older Youtubers making bank. I could certainly see some people holding onto the dream for far too long hoping for a break. A very few might even get it.

> For many, it has become a way of life. Their income and livelihood relies on it

It would suprise me if one person in my 30k pop county lives of "social media". And I don't put the bar that high. Like atleast McDonalds pay.

Maybe one in 100 000 does? Concentrated to big cities. I have never seen any stats on this. Some quick searching just gave Forbes and other probably made up numbers.

You overstate how permanent one's "core identity" is.

The mentality that you mention, which really only applies to some small number of people, won't survive (1) a prolonged economic downturn that dries up ad revenue breaks the ad-supported business model, (2) a large war that summons young people away from their homes or impacts infrastructure, (3) a strong economic upswing that open promising new opportunities, (4) a legislative change in the accessibility of social media, etc.

At least some of those things that dramatically disrupt the current social media landscape will happen. It's just not that durable in its current form, and we already see that in its changing landscape, with more of the gardens becoming walled to keep balance sheets stable, more of the previously-leading service bleeding off users, more self-regulation actions meant to outmaneuver legislative hearings and lawsuits, etc

People can have social media as their "core identity" all they'd like, but they'll eventually discover that everyone's life ultimately involves a bunch of chapters where your "core identity" looks real darn different. Most don't get to keep a "core identity" just because it happens to be the one they adopted in their teens or twenties. In fact, most learn that they wouldn't even have wanted to anyway.

I've seen the opposite. I drastically reduced my smartphone and online time a couple years before Covid, but completely ditched my phone at the end of 2019. It took a few years before I met anyone with my level of dedication, but now I meet them every few months. Most are tech or ex-tech employees, but some are just closer to retirement.

I have to many two factor authentications that for some reason only use Google or Microsoft apps. Also there's bankid but I guess that still can use a key fob for the time being. Otherwise I would be happy to get rid of my phone.

Admittedly, several services that require 2fa phone authentication had to be ditched as well. It was a hard decision, and took months of fighting before I finally just said, "If you require a phone, I don't require you." The choice was hard, but long-term I have much better life.

FYI - Slowly I've seen keyfobs with 1 time code generators replace phones as a 2fa system. For instance, etrade and ebay use them now.

https://us.etrade.com/security-center/securityid#tab_1

You literally have no phone? Amazing. I'm full of questions, like how do you socialise with people who expect to be able to change plans at the last minute?

Socializing isn't high on my priority list, and most of it is planned a week ahead of time. I try to check my email once a day, but that's not always an option. If they don't show, I don't give them grief, and don't sweat it. My commitment to being phone free means I have to accept that some people just won't go to the extra effort it takes to keep in touch.

The folks that really burn my biscuits are the ones that are incredulous I'm not on Facebook. If after telling them exactly why they shouldn't be on Facebook (Cambridge Analytica and the Trump/Johnson psyops), if they still don't get it, I generally avoid them.

Age? Social group(s) you're in? I not only don't get confusion from telling anyone I have no social profiles or account on any web service, I can't even recall the last time anyone asked. I suspect the probability of this happening to you depends pretty heavily on the peer group you're interacting with, possibly the country you're in. I continue to meet and exchange contact info with new people every now and again. It's always phone numbers and nobody has asked for anything else.

Hell, as much as it may be a bad thing compared to a healthy information ecosystem and better balance of physical activity with passive video consumption, I'm not even sure an addiction to an algorithmic content feed is all that bad compared to many other alternatives. Consider many countries are still in the midst of epidemics of opioid addiction. I think my wife might be "addicted" to YouTube. She seems more interested in watching endless Bob Ross episodes than anything else in life right now, but ultimately it has her painting and that isn't terrible. She's also an alcoholic and that's an addiction that put her in the ICU for 5 days twice in the decade we've been married. My best friend from high school tried to quit cold turkey in 2016 and died at the age of 36 from physiological withdrawal symptoms because she detoxed at home and not in an ICU. I'd much rather have my wife sucked into algorithmic rabbit holes than finding those duffle bags of empty bottles this author talks about.

While I'm sure there are more productive ways to use your time, YouTube is at least not directly killing anyone, and if you're getting some useful information or entertainment value or both from it, that's a heck of a lot better than other things you could get addicted to.

Perhaps for self-serving reasons, I think of a Youtube addiction as being more like addiction to traditional TV than to things like twitter, instagram, or maybe even TikTok.

I say self-serving because my average daily phone use is <30 minutes, I'm not present on any social networks besides a reluctant LinkedIn account, but I do watch more Youtube than I should. I'd like to think it's unrelated to those things, because I only watch channels I'm already subscribed to, and am uninterested in being steered by recommendations.

Yes, it sounds like you use YouTube much like traditional TV. For others it is more like social media, like Twitch is.

Seen from here, in the last half year I've seen far more articles on "OK, we're all addicted now, how do we get out of this mess" than ever before.

It's not just the internet, and I'm increasingly finding the crap online and off to be insufferable. However, enshittification has been a great antidote to media addiction. No sense turning on the TV or going onto FaceTube if the experience is absolute crap.

I'd much rather actually do something that just veg out watching TV.

Covid and work-from-home normalized screen time.

The same thing has happened in the past (an old Wodehouse school-story has a kid being yelled at for reading "trash" (David Copperfield) during class instead of the Latin he was supposed to be working on.

I think that suggesting it's no different from people thinking that reading books was going to rot people's minds ignores the very real increases in teen depression, loneliness, and suicides over the past decade, as well as increases in adult depression and isolation, and the credible research that says that social media and screens are probably strongly contributing to it.

Also, maybe Dickens really is worse for the brain than Latin grammar?

That was basically my point but apparently I didn't make it clear enough - that we do and have had degradations, but they eventually become the new normal.

That may not be always bad, mind you, but it seems pretty obvious to me that it has occurred and is occurring.

I could rant much more about it, but suffice to say that just because we don't think something is a problem anymore doesn't mean it wasn't (and isn't) a problem.

Does that mean we should ignore teen depression, loneliness and suicides that happened in every 10 period before and pretend screentime is the cause.

Social isolation starts with kids not being allowed to play unsupervised. Don't hear too many cries to increase unsupervised time we hear the opposite. A screen might be the one thing to help that.

Jonathan Haidt has researched this topic extensively and concluded that it was both, or rather that it was the replacement of play-based childhood with screen-based childhood. Particularly social media's effect on young girls was very strong, but boys have been negatively impacted too.

Teen suicides went down when schools were closed at the beginning of the pandemic. They went back up when schools re-opened. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30795 I don't think teens were spending less time on "social media and screens" during this time.

But it’s kind of hard to kill yourself if you’re at home with your parents all day and so is everyone else.

And really, even the historical sweating over pulp novels or TV addiction wasn't entirely unfounded.

If people are invited to spend tens of hours a week in soaking in media, that time is being borrowed from somewhere and in the modern historical context that's the time being stolen from home care, crafts and extra labor, sports and physical activity, third place social time in the community, etc -- changes that can dramatically alter society if taken up by enough people and can impact personal wellness even just for one person.

Constant, widespread social media immersion is absolutely having an impact on social and personal wellness and we can actually look to those previously normalized shifts as our evidence that it does.

What we aren't justified do, even as some here try, is assume that this impact of social media immersion will be harmless or beneficial just because pulp novels and couch potato living haven't yet destroyed modern society.

As you note, innocuous/harmless doesn't seem to be where the evidence is pointing so far.

Yes, I do not follow that argument comparing modern tech to past changes. It feels like people are assuming a weird technological inevitability. The printing press was amazing, it had a huge effect on society, of course, leading down the line to some kid reading trash in class. But it is just marks on paper, while digital technology forms a "place", and a direct line of effect from tech companies to the daily habits of billions of people, overnight. I think it is completely different...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com