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Comment by maxehmookau | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely think there's a difference between young people having access to the internet, and young people having access to social media (Facebook, Instagram, etc.)

Social media is designed to be addictive. Much of the internet is not. I'm increasingly in favor of banning Facebook and Instagram to under 18s.

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There just isn’t much of the internet left outside of social media as far as I can tell

sounds like you’ve been captured and are now projecting that onto kids

That's just not true though, however much it may seem like it.

under 18s arent on facebook, and barely on instagram. that might work for 25-40 year olds though

Replace with TikTok or Snapchat or whatever they are using. Because they are definitely using social media. Maybe you’re playing gotcha at a poor millenial’s out of date examples but the point stands.

Source: parent of high schooler.

+ discord. 90%+ of my sons social media use is private discord servers.

The little familiarity I have with discord makes me think maybe it’s not quite as bad? More like IRC with a more modern interface, and not as much designed to be a total time and attention sink? Would be curious about others’ takes.

I get kids may still spend a lot of time talking to people in there but how different is that from when my sister spent all her free time talking to friends on the phone as a teenager…

Well. That depends on who are on a given server. Having multiple friends spamming with calls can be disruptive, and convincing them it's ok to turn off notifications is hard because many of them seem to worry they'll be excluded from the group etc. if they're not involved, and sometimes they do egg each other on with respect to misbehavior.

I'm not generally all that negative to social media as long as they know how to deal with it, and Discord is probably towards the better end, especially if your kid has some self-discipline about which servers they join, but it can be nearly as bad.

Put another way: If your kid hangs out with the "good" kids, it's probably fine, ranging to good. E.g. my son started spontaneously cleaning his room today because one of his friends had ribbed him about needing it. But if your kid hangs out with the "bad" kids, Discord provides an easy way for them to do that without it being obviously visible to you, so it needs you to keep an eye out.

I think the fact that it's so easy for it to fly under the radar is the biggest problem.

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