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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s not technology as a thing people are hooked to - it’s taken over social life. My 13 year old and his buddies socialize online, period. In person stuff is mostly organized. That is helped by school policy that got rid of the idea of a neighborhood school.

Additionally, the social activities that coalesced around things like alcohol are out of reach of many teens. I live in a city that had a very active college bar scene. It’s dead and gone. Crackdowns on underage serving and cost drives it away. Happy hour special at a place that other day was $12 for 4 coors lights in a bucket. In 1998, I’d pay $15 for a dozen wings and all you can drink swill for 3 hours.

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”My 13 year old and his buddies socialize online, period.”

Nothing new under the sun. Me and my friends were like that 30 something years ago.

It's a different beast, these days, though.

Back then, only "nerds" socialized online. Nowadays, everyone does it.

I'm of two minds about this.

On one hand, I'm really glad that kids aren't screwing up their formative years. Drug use during growing/development years can wreck someone's life.

The issue is that, if you are an addict (which is different from physical addiction. Many addicts never get physically addicted to anything), then you'll eventually have problems with drugs; even if they are "socially acceptable" ones, like pot or alcohol (pot being "socially acceptable" is kinda new, around here, but Things Have Changed).

It'll still destroy your life, but, at least, you'll hopefully have something like an education, and living skills, by then, which can help Recovery (and also hinder it).

It was maybe only nerds in 1994, but by 1998 everyone at school was asking their parents for the internet so they could talk on ICQ—not just the nerds!

ICQ was a way of texting friends so that you could go party. At least for me, and I'm a nerd. I remember even "normal" friends were using IRC as a way to hookup. Cell phones were not very common.

Looking at my non-nerd 17 year old, they meet maybe once a month, and it's to cook food together during the day. Nobody drinks. They just see it as a waste of money. Maybe not the most normal sample. They love biking and also go to circus school together (Montreal).

Love how you describe your kid as not a nerd and then mention he bikes and goes to circus school :)

Nah that's just normal quebecois stuff. Picture cirque du soliel or how much the french love bikes

That was still nerd behavior depending on the group you were in. A lot of folks knew AIM, but ICQ was different.

For sure, I remember that. I remember that even the most popular, non-techie kids got on ICQ, though it was probably more around 1999 by that point, but every kid that had a computer at home had an ICQ account (though how often they could actually go online and use it was another question, thanks to dialup lol)

Though, still, only the geeky kids like myself were spending numerous hours online and having a high % of socializing occuring online, even then. The non-computer-geek kids would come online for like, an hour or two. I had already been online for hours before them, and would still be for many hours afterward (it helped that we got ADSL in 1998, after so many years of 14.4/28.8 dialup)

My gut is that this will mostly break even at best.

Whatever "gains" you see in terms of less drug addiction, etc, you're going to see losses in terms of the negative effects of not being "in person."

I confess that it's probably to early to even strongly know what those negative effects are, but I don't think this picture is likely one of strong improvement.

I was addicted to, of all things, text MUDs, when I was younger. It's ditch weed compared to what you can get now.

My drug of choice was “Wyvern” by Steve Yegge, which was heavily influenced by MUDs despite being graphical: https://web.archive.org/web/20040102095422/http://www.caboch...

You could connect to it with just telnet, and while not realistically playable that way, it was great when just chatting.

Dark Castle here. DIKU based MUD. Ah the good stuff.

> if you are an addict [...] then you'll eventually have problems with drugs

Do I understand you correctly that you're saying that people addicted to smartphones in their youth will (more likely) become drug addicts in adulthood?

What makes you think that people don't just continue being addicted to phones as adults (instead of doing drugs)?

Nah, but addiction to smartphones might be an indication of future issues with other stuff (not just drugs). Long story, not really the kind most folks around here are interested in hearing.

I’m not sure which of you I agree with more, but I don’t think GP is crazy: self-control (i.e. delayed gratification) is a transferable skill.

> Nothing new under the sun. Me and my friends were like that 30 something years ago.

(1) When I was growing up, nobody had any online presence. I remember life without the internet.

(2) The fact that it is not new does not mean it has not changed in magnitude and addictiveness.

(3) The fact that it is not new does not mean that it is not a problem. It is a growing problem. Especially because societies these days do nothing about their problems except through more technology at them, which rarely solves the underlying issue.

Aside from BBSs from about the mid-80s, followed by some Usenet and related later, there was very little online presence until getting well into the mid-90s or so. Certainly my social friends who weren't part of the local BBS scene had no online presence until maybe the dot-coms really took off.

Mid-90s were 30 something years ago. Perhaps the US was a little slow to develop in this front compared to Europe.

Maybe, though that would surprise me a bit. My first personal webpage was probably around 1996 or 1997--and I assume that was fairly early for that sort of thing. As I said, I had been using BBSs for a while and also accessed usenet and FTP sites somewhat later. (I would have only had access from work to the Internet for quite a while.)

For most people, it probably wasn't until MySpace and the like and the popularization of blogging in maybe the early 2000s that an "online presence" was really a thing although people increasingly had access to email etc.

(My dates may be a bit off but not by a lot.)

AOL. In the late 90s, I was in the chat rooms, by the early 00s me and my friends would swap between AIM and text messaging depending when texts were free. Kids definitely had an online presence, but it wasn't like the mid-00s and after when social media rose up.

I wasn't in instant messaging until I was an analyst in the 2000s. Never had an AOL account outside of being IM I used for some subset of mostly journalists. So, yeah, didn't really communicate with social contacts with email/IM until the 2000s for the most part.

I guess it might be an age thing. My teens were the start of proto-social media. Forums and IMs were big. Neopets and livejournal was a core memory of my youth. These were social spaces even if they were be nothing like when Facebook rose up in the late 00s and changed everything

There were various sea changes over fairly short time horizons. When I went to grad school in the mid-80s, few people had their own PCs and mine wasn't a portable much less a laptop. At my job afterwards, we still used terminals and were ahead of the curve in that we made heavy use of internal-only email.

It wasn't the internet that was the problem exactly. 90s internet was still a haven for nerds because you had to choose to be there over somewhere else. You weren't carrying the net around.

2008ish was really probably the most massive change in this. About every cellphone turned into a web device at that point and social media started it's mega boom as a phone app.

Even when you were out in public everyone was on the net.

Maybe a couple years later. The iPhone came out in 2007 but it was probably around 2010 before it really exploded. I was doing email with an earlier smartphone before that but 2010 or so is when mobile web really exploded and everything associated with that.

And, yeah, the 90s weren't really a mobile era for most people overall. I got a laptop at work in the latter part of the decade because I sort of begged and pleaded but it was mostly unconnected. Even when I became an analyst in 1999, I had to buy my own laptop for travel as I was just given a PC. (And WiFi at conferences was still an adventure.)

Fair. But you didn’t have teams of MIT PhDs driving your engagement upward.

See https://www.addictioncenter.com/behavioral-addictions/

> I think it’s not technology as a thing people are hooked to - it’s taken over social life.

One cannot separate the tool from the use. Of course, you are right, though. Technology has done two things: it has eradicated communities by making communities less economically valuable, and it provides a superficial alternative.

But the end result is that people become effectively hooked on using the device. The device is nothing without what is happening on it, but it cannot be deconstructed and separated either into a social component and the technology itself because it is more than the sum of its parts.

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