Hacker News Reader

Comment by phantasmish | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why a person would want to let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common, if it's at all possible to avoid it. I'm gonna continue to run with "no social media", which has worked so far. They can message people they actually know IRL, somewhere without a feed full of crap from people they don't know. That's plenty.

Like I can't think of any analogous place in physical space I'd let my kids hang out unsupervised, and the amount of time I intend to spend watching (supervising) them scrolling Insta or TikTok on anything like a regular basis is zero, and the likelihood of their choosing that as a thing they want to do if I'm otherwise available to do something fun with them is also probably somewhere around zero, which means... no social, since it ain't happening supervised.

Like I also wouldn't take them to a bad part of town and leave them there for hours. Why would I do the digital equivalent? Even if we talk about it afterward... why? Maybe occasionally as a "here's how to spot shit" lesson but not enough that they'd need an account or anything.

View on HN

> I'm not sure why a person would want to let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common,

A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud) are committed by family and friends of the victims. Should we not leave our children with our family alone?

The best move is to teach your children how to not be victimized. It is part of "being responsible for yourself". My parents taught me how to be safe in a bad neighborhood because sometimes you have to go there. They taught me how to pick good friends who wouldn't do bad things to me. They taught me how to spot the precursors to bad things. They let me hang out unsupervised. Because they taught me how to be responsible for myself. Why not teach your kids how to navigate the internet safely.

> A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud) are committed by family and friends of the victims. Should we not leave our children with our family alone?

But I'm pretty sure that like 50+% of interactions with family aren't crime.

> Why not teach your kids how to navigate the internet safely.

No reason to involve any serious amount of time browsing feeds of shit in that. I don't make them roll around in poison ivy, either. Absofuckinglutely not more than once. Exactly how much exposure to something of approaching-zero value and significant harm do they need? I'm going with "just enough to notice it's one of those so they can run the other way".

[EDIT] To put all my cards on the table, I think an extremely reasonable middle ground for Internet targeted ad networks and content-promoting algo-feed social networks would be to saddle them with an appropriate amount of liability for content they promote, which amount would surely be enough to put them all out of business. I see their feeds as the Internet equivalents of a crack house. I'm not gonna send my kids there—I'd rather see them gone, period. I will tell my kids what they are, and how and why such places might hurt them, in hopes they stay away. But I don't think some kind of "exposure therapy" or something is appropriate. The correct, moderate use of social media feeds is to avoid them entirely.

90% of all childhood sexual assaults are perpetrated by close family and friends[1].

If stranger danger is a motivating factor here, statistically, you should side-eye your close friends and family much, much more often and never leave them alone with your kids.

> But I'm pretty sure that like 50+% of interactions with family aren't crime.

You can say the same thing about social media interactions.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/child-abuse-neglect/about/about-child-se...

You've misunderstood this conversation and/or are applying statistics extremely poorly. This is not serving whatever point you're trying to make, and is a distraction from productive discourse.

I think you established too broad of a scope for discourse to be within the parameters you were hoping.

Immediately upon reading your comment, I thought about the general overprotection and over-supervision of kids which leads parents to drive their kids everywhere, prevent them from learning to use the subway on their own, or even live in cities. But what I think you were getting at is more about smaller hypothetical physically analogous places, but it's hard to think about what those places are in real life without relying on assumptions that may be more likely to occur online than in any significant concentration in the real world.

Imo, the most threatening place for kids to be in real life in terms of external factors, day to day, is around cars, bullies, bad actors within the family, and then maybe church/sports teams, but all of those are usually safe unless they're not, you can't realistically do anything productive about that without sacrificing their development as a human, except prepare them and guide them.

Online, it's just a whole different beast, and I'd think it would be games and social media, anywhere a gaurd would be let down, but imo the greater threat isn't criminality as much as it is nearly every other aspect except basic chats.

Not really. You asserted that unknown people are dangerous, while most of the replies to you are is pointing out that there are serious classes of crimes where people your child knows well are the most likely to commit them. I think sometimes perception is not reality, and the greatest danger to your child isn't society as a whole. It's a lot closer to home than anyone wants to think.

> I don't make them roll around in poison ivy, either.

My parents taught me what poison ivy looks like so I did not roll in it.

Likewise teaching your kids what a skinner loop is and how scrolling a feed is putting yourself in a skinner loop is really surprisingly effective. Kids like having agency, when you show them that tiktok does things to take your control away they listen.

That sounds great in principle, but many parents are either not interested or present enough to do so, or themselves lack the skills for it.

And that's the root cause of many, many issues.

It's a pity so many of these issues get simply patched up through other means instead of properly addressing the real root cause.

If you have kids it is your responsibility. If you have kids and are not interested or present enough, this is literally the problem.

Again, you being right doesn’t change anything. This is the world we live in, and that means we need to work with what we have. Which includes inattentive parents.

So... what's the point. Outlawing being an inattentive parent doesn't fix that problem. I'm not sure human beings have found a fix for that that has optimal outcomes for the kids.

Well. A possible solution might be to limit the exposition to social media children have by creating a law, which is the topic of this thread?

This is wildly unpopular, for good reasons, but if I want to get a third dog I need to apply for and get a license from the council - they’ll come round, inspect my property and ensure that it’s adequate for a number of dogs, that it’s secure and my current pets are well treated before issuing it.

The disconnect between this and children seems wild to me. Why don’t we display the same amount of concern for children?

>"The best move is to teach your children how to not be victimized."

Your GP advocated world-building a child's physical environment to avoid digital - which is simply unrealistic for their later years as it is, and coddling them so nothing that could even potentially victimize them in the digital world would be able to reach them. So, genuinely: What's it gonna be?

Are you going to teach a child the real-world application and use cases for being responsible for themselves, not becoming victimized and carrying themselves well, and learning to act appropriate in an increasingly-digital world; or not?

Otherwise; saying you'll teach your kids real-world application for being responsible for themselves and not being victimized, and then not giving them a space to see the importance of those practices out of fear that they'll succumb to it, is having your cake and eating it, too.

Teaching your kid being street smart is only a band aid or cope as the younglings say these days.

Because the issue is:

- your street smartness is an outdated smartness

- there are multiple different types of assholes waiting to victimize someone that you don't know about

When the police, court, positive socioeconomic factors work only then do you for sure minimize the risk of your child being victimized.

The internet has open the floodgates to be a piece of shit and made it hard to do something about it.

Because if you live in the wild west it's a matter of when not if.

FYI “cope” is closer to “delusion used to help you cope with reality” rather than “superficial fix”

Also, I think that some strategies, such as “comfort asking a parent for help navigating a situation” are timeless defenses against strategies like blackmail. There are probably some street smarts that change and some that stay the same.

Well yes, street smart is both.

It's a temporary solution based on the delusion that you can't work on a systemic level to reduce criminal or thuggish behavior.

Ultimately I do think some form of self defense is good to know, but you can't expect it to be effective than situational.

What I’m seeing in Australia is most parents know it’s bad, and want their kids off social media. But it’s a Herculean task when the social media companies have such a grip on their kids and when all the other kids have it.

It’s the same story with banning phones in schools. Everyone knows it’s the right thing to do but individual parents or teachers don’t have the power to do it alone.

> the social media companies have such a grip on their kids

We are talking about US companies in particular. Everything that was being done to try to mitigate the vileness and toxicity has been forcefully rescinded in the name of US profiteering.

There is only one viable option, and that it for countries that reject poisonous US social media to choose/identify/build a better platform that is safe for children, safe for news and information, and safe for society and for Democracy itself.

I know few countries that reject poisonous US social media in favor of better platform that is safe for children, safe for news and information, and safe for society and for Democracy itself: the peoples democracy of North Korea, the democratic republic of Iran, the not authoritarian society of Russia, etc

I see tremendous correlation between restriction of access to some websites and straight up dictatorship that pretend to protect it's population from the evils of foreign influences.

Perhaps you have the causality reversed, friendo?

Them being platforms is most of the issue. Protocols (like Mastodon or PeerTube), not platforms.

Of course individual parents have the power to do something. Take the phone when they go to school. Problem solved.

Ok that's been tried and didn't work. So clearly something new needs to be tried.

How does it not work? The phone is in your pocket and not your kids during the school day.

It hasn't worked because basically every kid today is on social media despite a decade of information about it's harms. Getting over a million kids off tiktok is going to take coordination between the government, tech companies, and parents. Not just berating parents for not winning the war against big tech.

Interesting mental gymnastics here - under no circumstances should kids have no phones, and of course we talk about full smart phones. Everybody should do their best to make it as child-friendly as possible (which goes against primary incentives of every involved corporation giving you that free software to use) because... it would be nice? It would be appropriate?

In ideal world those are all good expectations. In actual ugly world out there, seemingly getting uglier each day, its dangerously naive. We talk about children dammit, its first and foremost responsibility of parents to keep them safe from all serious harm. You want to have contact? Give them dumb Nokia and they can never use an excuse it ran out of battery, and if lost it will be cheap to replace.

Or whatever else, but don't give them full access to whole internet and then be surprised when they go straight to its ugliest and most addiction-forming parts. They face peer-pressure? Tough one, but having some mental resiliency already during teens is great for rest of life, and maybe the shallowest and most pathetic of peers aren't the best crowd to hang with anyway. And its not like any actual popularity is gained, just blending in a faceless crowd.

I agree but this sounds harder than it is. Not every parent is an expert in arguing against these actors that have very deep pockets.

You don’t need to argue to anyone you can do what you want and lay down whatever law you want.

I know HN users often fantasize about being the hardass parent who puts their foot down, but this obviously isn't something that scales to solve a population wide issue. Coordination between the government, tech companies, and parents is going to solve this a million times better than just telling individual parents to deal with it.

Here is the thing: It seems there are many people out there, who are so much influenced, that they worry about something like: "But how will I reach my child via phone, when they are at school! My kids need their phones!" Not realizing, that not too long ago, no parent had to reach their kid at school via phone, and if they did, they would call the school itself and have a message delivered or get the kid on the phone. This happened so rarely, that it was not common over the whole amount of students.

This assumes there is no added benefit to being able to reach your kids/be reached by your kids easier than it was historically. While I agree it's probably not as critical as many parents might make it seem, there are tangible benefits. Off the top of my head:

- Before cell phones, we were also in an age of far less mass violence in American schools. I completely empathize with parents wanting their kids to have an emergency contact device, given the relative increase in violence at schools.

- There is a long history of kids being abused, sexually or otherwise, by authority figures in their school. Having a lifeline like a quick text to a parent can easily be the escape hatch from a predator convincing a kid to do something unsafe.

Having a cell phone isn't going to help even a little bit if there's an active shooter at a school. The only thing a kid should be doing in that situation is hiding, or escaping if it's safe to do so. Likely it'll make things worse... some kid will get a loud notification on their phone, which will give away their location to the shooter.

The predator example sounds pretty flimsy and unlikely to me as well.

Honestly, your reaction to this just seems to follow the fear-based rationales that people put forth for a lot of things, when the fears are overblown or the risks are low.

> - Before cell phones, we were also in an age of far less mass violence in American schools. I completely empathize with parents wanting their kids to have an emergency contact device, given the relative increase in violence at schools.

A very US-centric problem that requires a very US-centric solution. No need to drag rest of the world into that sh*thole.

Anxieties of parents who can't manage their insecurities and other issues shouldn't propagate into how kids are raised in general, especially on families which can handle their emotions better. Some freedom, some unknown and yes some form of risk is part of it. I love my kids just like the next person but this emotional need to helicopter parent them is pretty toxic to their personality further down the line.

The stuff about abuse is so typical about any such topic - a slippery slope when there is no end on how many additional restriction on society should be applied just to prevent some potential next situation. If you live in properly dangerous place, then move and don't just follow money at all costs life is too short for that, much smarter and easy to solve than enveloping your kids in ever-increasing surveillance and security.

You have to realize that this approach really harms them in subtle but powerful ways. Then ask yourself - is the extra safety I am gaining not actually outweighed by extra damage I am making on them? I don't claim I know the objective answer, but gut feeling tells me they may be +-equal at best and at the end everybody loses.

In the United States specifically, deaths from violent crime have mostly been trending down over the past few decades, with the exception of a year or so.

> let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common, if it's at all possible to avoid it.

You're talking about cutting kids from all online services, including multiplayer games and community wikis.

It also means your kid has no experience of online interactions with strangers, basically no SNS literacy, which also sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me.

> You're talking about cutting kids from

> all online services

Not even close? I don’t know how you got that.

> including multiplayer games

Nah. My kids play plenty of multiplayer games. Local’s fine, online with people they know is fine, online in games with no or extremely limited communication is fine (Nintendo consoles are good for those)

> community wikis

Are community game wikis hotbeds of scams, predation, and astroturf rage-bait influence campaigns? I’ve read them much of my life (if we also count Gamefaqs) and never noticed this.

> Nintendo

For online gaming, that's 5ish game lines ?

Then Splatoon communities are pretty active, with third party tournaments, discord channels especially during fest flourish. Private matches are a pretty core component of getting good at the game in team events, and Nintendo rightfully limits how much it wants to deal with that side of things.

As a result, if your kid gets into the game, they'll be looking at that from the sideline while other kids get a lot more support.

> game wikis

In general any wikis that allows for limited scope communication, like a discussion between two users in some obscure thread where only the two will be notified of updates, is ripe for abuse. Then game wikis are where kids will be found.

While moderation teams are usually doing a stellar job, it's a cat and mouse game with utterly motivated attackers and highly valuable targets. So stuff will happen.

That kind of stuff won't surface outside of very egregious incidents, but working in an adjacent field to gaming communities, it's definitely a thing.

"This is good for this" doesn't mean it's the only thing we use?

People are real eager to tear down a point that was simply "maybe don't let kids use algo-feed social media, because it's an actual garbage fire". The vast majority of the Internet does not have the same problems, to the same degree, as places like Instagram and TikTok. Some of it may have other problems and may be worth looking out for! But most of those other places also have, like, some redeeming features.

Am I also to let my kids wander in toxic waste dumps? I'm pretty surprised at the kind of push-back this is getting. I don't got time to supervise my kids on TikTok or whatever, so... no TikTok. I also don't have time to supervise them playing with boxes of rusty razor blades, so I try not to give them access to boxes of rusty razor blades, either [edit: I can predict the disingenuous replies to this part, so further suppose the blades are bubble-gum flavored and literal hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on packaging and presenting the box and blades to encourage kids to put them in their mouths; there, that's closer to algo feed social media, pretty much no reason to engage nor allow your kids near it, loooots of reason to keep it way the hell away].

This seems really straightforward and reasonable to me.

This comes down to how people raise their kids, so I don't expect we'll all agree.

> Am I also to let my kids wander in toxic waste dumps? [...] I don't got time to supervise my kids on TikTok or whatever, so... no TikTok.

Ideally I don't want to supervise my kid, in the sense that trying to watch over everything they do, every service they use and every possible interaction is a lost cause.

They can IRL go to toxic waste dumps, buy razor blades at the store and let them rust, there will be no way to foolproof even at that level, and I don't to have to watch over them every single time they go to the store in case they buy razor blades. Teaching them to not buy sharp stuff, avoid rusty things, and not listen to people advising them to do so has better time/effort ROI to me. Kids not allowed to go to the store without parental supervision also has to me a lot more negative impacts.

Arguably teaching kids what to avoid on Tiktok or Youtube is a lot trickier, and there will be craftful attempts at bypassing most parent advices, but I hope we have enough of a safety margin and communication occasions to detect when something's going wrong. And if it happens, I'd prefer it happens now when there's many eyes on the kid to detect the issue, than 5 or 10 years from now when they're alone in the ir dorm, can sign contracts, buy a lot of delicate stuff, get access to drugs, drive, get people pregnant etc.

> While moderation teams are usually doing a stellar job,

This is an assumption, that I would argue, is more muddled in practice.

T&S teams largely want to do a good job, but they are a cost center, and currently they are being defunded or shifted into simple compliance.

The biggest weakness, and the current shift, is for the conversation to move towards talking about the benefits of moderation to community, rather than only reduction of harms.

That process has largely started since last year, and the defunding of teams is also underway.

All of that aside, we do not have any publicly available data, or independent third part assessment that gives us some estimated prevalence rate. (Not that prevalence is truly calculable)

> It also means your kid has no experience of online interactions with strangers, basically no SNS literacy, which also sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me.

I think it would be better to allow them to be exposed to all this in a later phase, once, for example, they have plenty of experience with offline interactions with strangers. Learn how to walk, then learn how to run.

I really don't think the opposite order would work.

You would get them used to the more intimate and private interactions first ?

While doing small talk at the bus stop, telling someone you go to the middle school over there is small talk. Doing the same online is asking for problems.

Online interaction require a completely different mindset for a kid, it's a big enough gap IMHO to be treated as a separate thing that can be learned in parallel of offline interactions.

You can learn to swim while learning to walk.

> They can message people they actually know IRL, somewhere without a feed full of crap from people they don't know.

Just how do you think they get introduced to TikTok? What do you think gets posted in the school class WhatsApp group chat?

My kids' WhatsApp group chats are mostly a torrent of sharing idiotic TikToks, YouTube Shorts, and celebrity Instagrams.

Which my kids can't watch… until they're savvy enough to bypass my restrictions. Until then, they'll watch it in school, on their friends' phones - little consolation there.

And when that pauses, they just have stupid sticker wars, and the kind of impolite banter (often misogynist/homophobic in nature, definitely not age appropriate) that may well have been par for the course when I was their age, but that I would never have committed to in writing, in essentially a public space. Not to mention the almost bullying.

The mere suggestion by my kid (on my advice) that a separate space was created to discuss actually important stuff, like forgotten homework assignments, test dates, etc, was met with incredulity and laughter by peers (the almost bullying).

Kids teach their peers how to act. Peers have way more influence than their parents. We need a majority of kids to understand TikTok/etc are bad for them.

Ah, the inevitable "meh, give up, it's hopeless" post, to go along with the "why don't parents do their fucking job and leave us alone?" posts. No thread on HN related to parenting and technology is complete without a healthy dose of both sorts of post.

Sorry, I'm trying to do my fucking job, as others demand.

I dont think that comment materially undermined your position, if anything it supported it?

Exactly.

My kid has a smartphone but no data plan; no social media; can't take it to school.

When I did that, I was the annoying one, who they fought every inch of the way.

When the school banned phones in the playground, I was suddenly one of the first to get it right, in their eyes.

I'm trying to do my job too. But we need certain rules to be consistent throughout our society. Even if they will be broken, it matters that the rules are there and we can agree to them.

To look past the "give up" post, it did have a good point about how children will get into contact with such feed monsters.

I think it will be a good idea to try and get other parents on board. Other parents of the kid's classmates. Maybe they are struggling with this too, but don't see the way forward. And you can show them the content of feeds and shit that kids consume. You can come up with some minimum age or other idea, which you suggest for children to have, before you as a group of parents allow them to access things. Or you can come up with a once a month special lesson or something, where you show what can go wrong to the kids, and cooperate with the school.

The issue is, that many people think social media like TikTok and FB and so on are good and that they are letting their children "participate in modern life" or something like that. They are utterly uninformed about these things, or so media brainwashed themselves, that they will fight you to the teeth standing up for things like FB.

I had that happening. I explained to someone, that FB is a criminal company, that's spying on everyone and everything they do, and just had that 5 billion sum to pay for mishandling personal data. But do you think that that person would come to their senses? Nope, ofc not. They argued on and on about how it is a force of good and whatnot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com