Comment by chromanoid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chromanoid | Hacker News Reader

I think China is on the right track here. https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/kid-mode-guidelines/ While I don't like the privacy implications, I like the screen time limits China establishes. Social media and internet must be treated with much care.

It's like a candy store open 24/7 - completely free and always within reach. Even adults have a hard time to resist TikTok and YT Shorts and the like.

The Internet has changed since I was a kid browsing through GeoCities webrings and the Yahoo Directory while searching with AltaVista. Generations of technology enthusiasts have to acknowledge that the internet of the past is no more and cannot be brought to our children as such.

The temptations we faced then were nothing compared to what children today have to resist.

Just as many countries regulate advertisements aimed at minors, we need to start regulating screen time for kids - before they get pulled into the vortex of influencers and endlessly accessible, mentally corrosive entertainment.

It turns out that industry regulation can actually be a good thing sometimes.

There’s nothing wrong with moderation in moderation.

Always not sometimes.

Lead in fuel

Normal product warranty

ingridient list

The industry has few selfregularly motivations to regulate itself. If they do, they do it after customer complains and others stealing there thunder but than i t would be too late for a few

> Always not sometimes.

always if objectively non lobby-corrupt thought throught

if regulation is to much captured by lobby-corruption or ignore facts because of ideology thinking(:1) it can be very bad, then you can for example easily end up with what I like to call "red hearing regulation". A regulation which doesn't fix the problem at all but if you are naive looks like it might and prevent any further regulations from being done because it's already there. Or you can end up with monopoly-like companies cutting of access to markets for competition.

---

(:1) to be clear I mean the innocent interpretation of that phrase, not the one a lot of right wing propaganda in many countries is using regular where it often means "take this out of context potentially outright lying statements and treat them as obvious facts while claiming all other facts are ideologist driven fake news and then complain why no one want to have fact based discussions with you anymore"

> sometimes

/s

// Even adults have a hard time to resist //

and here we all are.

The cratering Chinese birthrate is a pretty strong argument that what China's doing isn't working out well for young people. The only reason China limited screen time was so that kids would spend more time studying, because the government wants kids to focus on slaving their lives away in miserable jobs with 80-hour workweeks to keep the GDP growing.

The 80-hour workweek isn’t some grand anomaly; it’s simply the natural outcome of the fierce competition in China’s market. If you want a good job, you have to give it your all—because if you don’t, there will always be someone smarter, faster, and more determined waiting to take your place. It’s not personal; it’s just how the system works.

Yes, the government has made efforts to regulate this, but the root issue remains: if an economy can’t provide enough well-paid jobs, no amount of intervention will fundamentally change the situation. The pressure will persist—it’s a structural reality, not a moral failing.

As for the term "slave," it’s a dramatic and, frankly, amusing choice of words. It perfectly captures a certain U.S. perspective on China, one that’s often shaped by narrow assumptions and ideological filters. The lens of "communism" becomes a convenient, if overly simplistic, way to frame a complex society. It’s not wrong to critique, but sometimes the framing says more about the critic than the subject itself.

> The 80-hour workweek isn’t some grand anomaly; it’s simply the natural outcome of the fierce competition in China’s market. If you want a good job, you have to give it your all—because if you don’t, there will always be someone smarter, faster, and more determined waiting to take your place. It’s not personal; it’s just how the system works.

this is a very long way of saying "too many people"

> cratering Chinese birthrate is a pretty strong argument that what China's doing isn't working out well for young people.

yes but that is partially unrelated and has a lot to do with

- one child politics lead to abrupt fall of new young unemployed people

- so the reaming people have to work more

- and as they need to pay rent for the old people even more more more

I think they are on the right track in the sense that "the problem needs a regulatory fix", but not in the sense that "putting time limits on kid media consumption" is quite the right way to go.

There is quite a bit of analysis out there how to trigger addictive behavior for anything from news site to games. Mainly so that they can maximally abuse this.

I think the right way would be to regulate that, not so dissimilar to how we regulate drugs.

Which yes can, in a roundabout way, bring us back to age restricting some otherwise seemingly harmless games.

But its in generally a different approach as it also pulls in the adult, general public awareness both for childs and adult, tries to also reduce drug, eh dopamine fix, consumption in adults etc.

E.g. if auto scrolling short are classified as addictive similar to drugs (through not quite the same) you then can e.g. require YT to allow people to disable shorts, or "auto scrolling, swipe next" display of shorts. Or limit how they can be on search results etc. This probably will also help with addictive gamba games frequently bankrupting adults etc.

> Even adults have a hard time to resist TikTok and YT Shorts and the like.

I removed them from YT using ad block, through there isn't a way to do so on a phone/tablet without using 3rd party YT apps :/

>but not in the sense that "putting time limits on kid media consumption" is quite the right way to go.

Why not? Isn't this what sensible parents should be doing? Supervising and regulating how much time their children spend online, playing videogames, watching TV, doing homework, being sedentary, eating junk food, etc? Especially in this age of parental controls and surveillance-ware on all digital devices, it's easier than ever to monitor what your kids are up to.

Should entire societies grant the government unlimited power over online media, online speech, kids and families just because some dumb parents hand their kids a blank iPad and their credit card and let them sit around all day on it frying their brain? What about regulating just those parents instead for being that stupid? Truthfully, a lot of the people having kids are unfit to be parents.

I do believe that targeted online advertising needs to be regulated ASAP. Ad-tech is a plague on society.

> Isn't this what sensible parents should be doing?

yes _parents_, but we are speaking about state actions (which could require companies to give parents tools to help them handle this this (:1))

and that affects parents, and teachers, and what is tough, and how society in general treats such things, and which things get which age rating etc. We need to convince society that this dopamine cycles are similar bad as drugs, only forcing it down their throat is not going to end well

and I was also focusing a lot in the comment on from which angle states approach that actions

> targeted online advertising

while that is a problem, it isn't the core problem here

the core problem is dark patterns intentionally designed to make apps/sites maximally addictive

even if we didn't had any ads at all many apps(and co) would likely still do that, so that they can e.g. sell more micro transaction (like think 0.2ct per short watched, small enough to seem nothing but if you doom scroll for two+ hours every day adds up (~120$/€ a year). Heck even without micro transactions it still does make "statistics look good" some it probably still would be applied quite often.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com