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Comment by paulluuk | Hacker News Reader

Twenty years ago my teachers were telling me not to use Wikipedia because you can't trust anything on the internet. You should never date someone you met through an app or website because they are 100% murderers. "The internet is for porn". Things have a way of improving over time, and people always overestimate societal risks of new tech in the beginning.

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>Twenty years ago my teachers were telling me not to use Wikipedia because you can't trust anything on the internet.

Still can't. "ChatGPT can make mistakes." People still trust it, doesn't mean they should. Wiki's not as bad of a tertiary source as it used to be, but it's still a tertiary source and you had a research assignment. Even official authoritative sources can be un/intentionally wrong.

> You should never date someone you met through an app or website because they are 100% murderers.

This remains sound advice that teachers should continue giving children. Even (or morso) now that online dating has been normalized in the meantime. Do I have to explain?

Young girls suicides, Brexit&Trump (post-truth politics, general democratic decline), demographic catastrophe, obesity crisis are often partially attributed to social media.

Not saying that tech is inherently evil, these could have been prevented, but to me it seems we have underestimated the social risks and failed to regulate accordingly.

For any new change we underestimate certain risk and overestimate others. This leads to a lot of focus and discussion on the things that don't matter much while the things that do matter become apparent. It's natural, guessing everything about the future correctly is never going to happen, but I don't really think that info tells you things are getting better or getting worse overall - it just tells you what things we focused on instead of should have focused on.

Demographic decay was already going on in the 90s in some countries (Italy, South Korea, Japan), and the obesity crisis in the US too. For Brexit & Trump it could have been a contributing factor, but Italy had Berlusconi in the 90s just with TV and France almost elected Le Pen (father).

That said, while I am generally skeptical of these effects, fake news are a real problem that social media has exacerbated.

you're also missing all of the positive healthcare outcomes the internet grants due to better access to information.

If the internet saves 1,000 lives per day, and hurts 1, then the roi is there.

> positive healthcare outcomes

Its seems to be hidden from view. Global health is getting worse, not better

Can you cite a source?

Covid pushed back the longevity gains, but there hasn't be a decline or flatten since the internet grew in popularity (2000 - 2019).

https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/mortality-and-globa...

https://www.metabolismjournal.com/article/S0026-0495(22)0009...

Obesity continues to increase everywhere, and is a leading indicator for poor health outcomes over time.

ok, but what does that have to do with the internet? Many countries have the internet and have not seen the huge weight gains that americans are facing.

Even in healthcare alone, I would question whether the impact was net positive. You have to balance the "access to information" with how people need to deal with false information, health charlatans, ads shoving then supplements they don't need, people's inability to discern what to do based on even true information that they get.

What are the positives? Before, you had to go to a doctor to do stuff, now you do too. Maybe people are more likely to get tested. Maybe scheduling appointments is a bit better. What am I missing?

debating this isn't particularly useful of either person's time.

There are plenty of documented cases of reddit posts encouraging deeper investigations or legally authorized tele-health providers (where you can communicate directly with a licensed medical professional).

The number of people using telehealth services is significantly less than the number of people that have bad health outcomes from internet usage. If it were otherwise, ChatGPT, Reddit, and telehealth companies would be managed very differently.

98point6 - 50k+ reviews

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/98point6-by-transcarent/id1157...

doctor on demand has millions of users

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/doctor-on-demand/id591981144

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