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Comment by goalieca | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I don’t even think adults with phones are alright.

Yeah, age and maturity are two different things entirely. One of the bigger issues / trends right now is immature adults with power.

Maybe the problem is power

There's a few pensioners who go in my local pub, they're substantially more "addicted" to their phones than any tween, and manage to believe literally anything that comes across their screen. Even when thoroughly debunked by the rest of us...

Remove the phones and the problem will remain, which is people’s desire to consume detrimental content, or content in detrimental amounts.

Before phones/computers/internet, it was garbage on television channels. Propaganda on 24/7 “news” channels, “reality” tv shows, etc.

While that is true, the friction to access has been made far too easy. Adding in some inconvenience may actually be a good thing. It also helped that in the print/radio/television period, you couldn't hyper focus content at a specific individual. What was broadcast was free for all to see and critique.

I'm not advocating for a return to that, but that was one of the highlights of the era.

Oh the power may remain, but at least finally the buses and subways will be free of the constant noise of someone blasting short form content or games who doesn't have headphones. I'll take that.

So it's not propagandists that are the problem, but rather the people they target? That's an odd take.

Maybe we should've shown a little more spine when they asked us to build a medium for the strong would use to prey on the weak. Maybe we're the problem.

It's not that odd of a take to recognize that the people abusing their power and those eating it up are both part of the problem in their own ways.

That is a fair take. Yes the kids are particularly susceptible to these things but some equally concerning behavior comes from adults that one wished the knew better.

Unfortunately, a lot of people run teenage software on adult hardware and that is a wild combo.

I am not even sure kids are more susceptible. Plenty of addicted adults.

More just a case of, kids are still learning from the world and can have a little less of a critical eye on these things. But like you said, adults haven't exactly used that critical eye themselves either.

this. the problem with a lot of "think of the children" argument is that we often rule out the failure in whatever policing is needed for the general public.

the adults of today, albeit the younger ones, were kids growing up with post-IM world. the ones before that could speak with their friends from their homes instead of only meeting in person (due to telephones). we all are products of the environment we were raised in. but despite those learnings, it seems like we are not self-regulating as a society.

charity begins at home, and before bringing children in a conversation, we should think if we all are alright.

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