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Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

> You need to talk to your cousin. No one else is going to.

This is absolutely true.

> being educated / intelligent means you have likely picked up some neuroscience knowledge and it has stuck for you over the years.

People in Russia and China have almost 30 percentage points more tertiary education levels than Americans do. Nonetheless social media is even more pervasive and popular in China than anywhere else in the world. Like with the panic about video game fixation, harmful time wasters are almost certainly an effect, not a cause, of something else.

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>People in Russia and China have almost 30 percentage points more tertiary education levels than Americans do. Nonetheless social media is even more pervasive and popular in China than anywhere else in the world. Like with the panic about video game fixation, harmful time wasters are almost certainly an effect, not a cause, of something else.

I don't know about Russia but China social media is no where close to American Social Media. There is generally time limits, content restrictions and other things that make the two not similar.

When people go "Social media is a problem", they are generally referring to western social media where it's profitability over any external harm they are doing.

It used to be a meme to point that American TikTok was all (pre-AI) slop while Chinese TikTok was delivering children math and physics lessons.

But can anyone from China or who has been there confirm this meme? I don't doubt, but given the diverse milieu in here, there's a good chance somebody with first hand experience can say something.

I'm currently teaching Chinese high school students, and I don't buy it. There is certain content that's blocked here, but most of what's on the local tiktok is pretty trash either way because t's not the subjects, it's the format. You can try to surface more wholesome five-second videos but even if you succeed, they'll still be five-second videos.

I recall China having instituted limits on gaming for children. I believe there are limits for social media as well.

yes, if you buy into the 200% opposite philosophy as mine, then the words you are saying make it sound like i am wrong and you are right haha. i guess my point is: it doesn't really matter if they institute limits on gaming for children. the fact that kids want to play games all day - the fact that they need to create limits is a SYMPTOM of the problem. are you getting it now?

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