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Comment by Xen9 | Hacker News Reader

Aside replying to the eroteme:

I believe one can observe the targeting by only observing the children. I ALSO believe this applies to all children in a social network where X between 1 out of 100 000 & 9 out of 10 have access to sites that are the works of the corporate.

The entirely new mechanics seems to be that most humans' will run on metaphorical stimulants & steroids on the metaphorical Wheel of Status. Humane behaviour (e.g. honor, respect, sincere curiosity) will become subject of learned helplessness. Before the child realizes that their toys are not the real things and the real things may be much more interesting; or before the child realizes they don't need to use the toys to satisfy X desires, they will have learned that status, EG pretty videos of using the toys, gets them what they want EG toys & attention from companies, parents & peers alike.

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I'd be very grateful if you could elaborate or link to a relevant source as this is rather interesting.

Second this! Quite interesting. @Xen9 please follow up!

My mind would be the source. This is actually one of my least confident comments; I was almost not going to post it. I consider putting a text together later.

Regardless—I've observed, to one example, a young girl I know wanting to buy horse toys to make YouTube horse videos with play & interest in horses being a side motive. The adults are proud of her basically being an instrument of marketing. On one hand, making your own video's at young age is of course something to be proud of and encouragement for children sounds healthy.

Yet this behaviour also has no principles outside "status games." Even knowing that girls of young age are particularly prone to socialization & conformity, one can compare this to "cool new toy everyone has" trope to notice that this dark evolution would be closer to "being a popular advertisement like everyone else" which partly the South Park movie Cred portrays aptly.

Re: confidence

> My mind would be the source.

In the coming flood of AI slop and faked "scientific" studies I'd say there is no better source. Real science always starts with anecdata of n=1, so trust what you see. And I'll just add; regardless of the truth of your observation, regardless of any supporting work, these kind of observations are worthwhile as discussion in themselves so do investigate more and write about it, please.

FWIW my interest was piqued by your claim that "learned helplessness" eclipses humane interpersonal behaviours.

That sounds hard to evaluate, especially in children, but I think you may be on to something and that ubiquitous AV technology is the cause of a reward "short circuit". Once kids get AI servants that simulate their achievements for them I think child mental health will implode. (which of course is Jonathan Haidt's thesis)

I noticed many years ago, if someone is 25 then, they'd have grown up with social media, and its trappings of social validation through likes and comments. Facebook was opened to everyone from 13 years old in 2006. Instagram went big in 2012. If you were a teen in late 00's/early 10's, you were probably on these networks, and didn't experience any time growing up without them...

In the same vine, people "doing it for the 'Gram": you go to a fancy vacation or restaurant not to enjoy the experience, but to enjoy the validation from the thumbs up, hearts, comments of your friends social media...

I wonder if that's a valid craving after all, a craving for social contact, sadly a craving being answered not by real life interaction, but by a mobile client hitting some API endpoint called something like /post/{$ID}/reaction/heart , ending on your phone pinging with the notification "$friend liked your post"...

> but to enjoy the validation

Absolutely. It makes me think about the things in life that don't need "validation".

Maybe it's a cliche but my dad would say about Korea and other wars "no pics, no words, you had to be there". So that was a teenage trope in the 80s and 90s too for my generation, if you were trying to be cool just say "you had to be there". It draws a circle around a personal or group experience that explicitly does not or cannot be shared. I think maybe it somehow earns more respect and interest than a photo, and I think with ubiquitous AI image manipulation the currency of "pics or it didn't happen" and "for the Gram" is going to vanish in a puff of incredulity. Now you can just text-prompt for a picture of you and some celebrity you "randomly met" in front of Buckingham Palace or the Taj Mahal! You can probably rent some bots to "auto-like" you on social media, right? So who is fooling who now?

> Maybe it's a cliche but my dad would say about Korea and other wars "no pics, no words, you had to be there". So that was a teenage trope in the 80s and 90s too for my generation, if you were trying to be cool just say "you had to be there".

sounds like a partial retroactive justification to me. sure, you wouldn't get the full experience via a photo or verbal anecdote, but it's not like camera smartphones were ubiquitous in the 80s either.

> retroactive justification

Oh I'm not "justifying" it, because I don't need to. This isn't that conversation. I'm just remarking on a difference of culture over time for those who are interested. As you say, there were no cellphones back then, so a quite different world.

It's always so easy to spot these people at restaurants.

Thanks for your answer!

Very interesting mindset. Thanks for sharing.

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