Hacker News Reader

Comment by cwoolfe | Hacker News Reader

Ok, now let's see the study that shows it is beneficial to teen mental health.

I quit it and my mental health improved. Many others in a controlled study found the same effect.

Alcott and colleagues (2020) randomly assigned 2743 adults to either deactivate their Facebook accounts for one month or not. This study also found that deactivation significantly improved subjective well-being and that “80% of the treatment group agreed that deactivation was good for them.” The treatment group was also more likely to report using Facebook less and having uninstalled the app from their phones post-experiment.

Source: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...

Finally, this strikes me as the same playbook that big tobacco used in the 90s. "Doubt is our product," Michaels quotes a cigarette executive as saying, "since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public.

View on HN

Do teens even use social media? I am under the impression that they are all about what is effectively cable TV. That is what the hip-and-with it services provide, and what the boomer social media platforms are more and more clamouring to become.

Social media is for old people still trying to re-live what the internet was like 20 years ago. And, I expect, that is the tree you actually want to bark up. Does parental social media use impact their children negatively? That answer to that is probably yes.

Teens are using social media that adults usually use it less on average. Instagram and TikTok are the prominent examples. They will use less of "x" and facebook because for them is where old people hang out.

TikTok is not social media. It is cable TV.

Instagram, being quite old at this point, still has some vestiges of social media to keep the older people who started using it decades ago happy, but it too is moving towards the cable TV model as much as it can.

You have an old mental view about social media that teens would disagree with you. They will do communicate and engage in trends on tiktok. They don't engage in text as much as we did.

Some teenagers trying to become the next TV star is not the same as them using social media. Social media is not defined by text, but it is defined by community. TikTok, and increasingly Instagram (and even, more and more, Facebook), has no real semblance of community. These services would rather show you a beautiful stranger that has no relevance to your life than foster a neighbourhood, just like cable TV always has. Social media is from a bygone area and, let's face it, is mostly dead at this point, only marginally propped up by some old people still trying to live in the past.

I understand how it can be confusing, though. Many services that were built to foster community originally, and given the social media moniker at that time, are transitioning (if not fully transitioned already) into being cable TV providers to try and remain relevant with the slow death of social media, so it can be easy to forget that times are a changing and still think of them as being social media even when they are no longer. Indeed, people tend to be quite susceptible to getting an idea in their head and then holding onto that idea forevermore, not looking again to see if anything has changed.

Anything with a comment section is social media in my eyes, TikTok has a comment section. So does YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and all the other popular social media sites.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com