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Comment by tonetegeatinst | Hacker News Reader

Why are kids using social media to begin with?

I am on like 2 "social media" platforms at most. I use hacker news to find cool new stuff in tech and to look at what other people think on a topic, and find that the site is a great tool for finding cool niche topic discussions. And I use Snapchat because my friend moved across the country and his texting is spotty due to his provider. I check Snapchat less than once a week, and while I do frequent hacker news more often....I don't spend a lot of time on here.

YouTube I get. Its a great place to learn math or watch makers build things or experiment. But are people so into mindless consumption and digital interaction?

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Yes people and especially kids are a lot into into mindless consumption. Whenever I travel( I travel a lot) I see almost every child on train with a smartphone mindlessly scrolling through dumb reels with their parents too lazy to give them a good engagement which will actually develop them.

You're going around peeking at what children are doing on their personal devices enough to have a representative sample? I'm not sure it's the internet they need protecting from...

edit: removed the part that wasn't really the point at all and seemed to draw a lot of noise from people who love to snoop and aren't used to consequences.

One does't need to peek unless one is really dumb, especially when the kids are changing reels with full volume on

You're willing to support a broad censorship program that will affect everyone and harm marginalized people because you snooped on some kids on a train in a narrow, non-representative slice of their lives. You know nothing about them, but you act like you do.

I never snoop like I said. And yes I know about kids because I was a kid too! and have suffered the same. Only people living under a rock will act fully dumb when predators harm kids through online methods.

I was a kid, too. I could spot and avoid the predators because my parents made sure I understood it was a risk, knew how to spot them, and knew I could trust them with any questions I had.

In reality, I encountered more predators offline, but had the skills to deal with it.

You don't need to be aggressive. One can notice without being invasive, looking is still allowed as far as I know.

They were not aggressive.

I'm not sure how someone can see enough of what kids do on their phones to have such confidence in their view of it without being invasive. I have no idea what most people do on their phones while they're in view, and I have no way to know if it's representative of their overall usage.

You don’t need to see their screens, there are plenty of other signs such as the craned neck, periodic scrolling motion, or more obviously the cascade of grating music and voiceovers as many kids have lost the idea of decency in public. Source: am in the demographic of interest, guilty of constantly scrolling YouTube shorts, and have observed countless others in my demo captured by TikTok and Reels.

I would hope a law with such wide-reaching and destructive effect would have more rigor backing it than vibes and anecdotes like this, but I know that's wishful thinking.

I agree, it doesn’t. And the law should not be passed.

> If you did this to me I would smack you.

Violence in response to a legal, non-violent activity? In most free areas, one could use as much force as necessary to stop the threat and apprehend you for this activity.

Nice ninja:

> edit: removed the part that wasn't really the point at all and seemed to draw a lot of noise from people who love to snoop and aren't used to consequences.

You seem to be the one not used to consequences: hit people in public and you may wind up getting shot in most free areas that care about rule of law. End of story.

>> "You seem to be the one not used to consequences: hit people in public and you may wind up getting shot in most free areas that care about rule of law. End of story."

Vigilantism is the opposite of rule of law. Shooting someone because you got hit for acting like you want to steal their property is also not rule of law.

This is all very much beside the point, but if we can't even agree that murder is an excessive escalation then I don't see how we could agree on the boundaries of censorship. This entire conversation is a prime example of why none of us can be trusted to decide what each other is allowed to see online.

> you got hit for acting like you want to steal their property

Good luck arguing this one.

> we can't even agree that murder is an excessive escalation

We're not going to agree: you are not entitled to strike people in public for looking at your phone.

In my area, this makes you fair game to be apprehended for assault, using as much force as necessary to subdue you. Someone who is so unhinged as to hit people in public is not likely to submit to arrest peacefully - nobody said "murder."

This is why I took that part out. You're going off on this wild tangent based on a ridiculous misreading of something I took out because people were misreading it. I could have rewritten it better, but I took it out instead because it was off-topic and would still be off-topic if I made it more clear.

HN has a great guideline here:

>> "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

So you didn't mean you would murder someone for defending their property, because you didn't understand that's what I meant, and didn't know about the guideline. Okay. I accept that. I should have followed it too.

The thing about the guideline is there are two ways to go: your interpretation is correct and going off on a tangent is just going to be fruitless as we've seen here (because clearly I'm an unhinged freak who goes around hitting people over a glance), or you're wrong and making a mess of things over nothing (because I'm a rational human being who only uses violence as last resort).

It's about assuming the person you're talking to is the latter because there's no point talking to them if you're right and it's the former.

Let's move back to the actual topic.

This is painfully out of touch. Forbidding a kid from social media is a bulletproof strategy for them to be ostracized, bullied, and isolated.

Peer pressure isn't new, though. It's both something that happened before social media and a problem exacerbated by social media, like being picked on for not being on $athletic team. Resigning yourself to accommodate your oppressors isn't reasonable or healthy, unless you're doing it to build a strategy for dismantling or usurping them.

I do think an outright ban ignores that there are constructive platforms with a semblance of rules and culture that can provide value, and platforms rife with scammers whose job it is to give vulnerable people mental disorders so they remain addicted to their approval. It's pretty easy to tell which are the best and worst of which, and it's generally teachable.

Finding out other's opinions can be important, but they shouldn't be the first or only lens a child views the world through. The wrong subreddits or influencers or streamers know more about their audiences than their audiences know about them and use it to trap and indoctrinate them under the guise of being a "community". They even make it fun! But not participating also doesn't hurt anyone.

Maybe hearing two year olds all over Target perfectly reciting "hey y'all and welcome back to my youtube channel, remember to like and subscribe for more content" isn't cause for alarm, but I'm more inclined to worry about kids not being able to connect and engage normally to the world around them AFK because of social media than the opposite.

You could say the same about smoking half a century ago.

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