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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

The reason social media bans miss yhe point is because they will be replaced by other addictive/predatory technology, such as gaming. It's wack-a-mole - ban one thing and another pops up. Parental involvement and school education about addiction in all its forms is the best (not perfect) solution. The goal is to allow adolescents to grow into knowledge and responsible adults. Infantilizing them and delaying their exposure to the world only delays that development. And most age verification tech just undermines privacy.

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It’s easy to say, but do you want a teenage mind to compete against an army of thousands of marketers and engineers, with billions of dollars on the line, to see who wins that battle? It’s not a level playing field.

This. To be fair, adults should not be subject to this dynamic either. The lawmakers have failed to legislate around social media, and this is a weak fallback option.

I think the difference about the social media moral panic if you want to call it that is it’s about form not content.

I think there are plenty of adults who think maybe there are certain types of social media patterns that should be banned outright.

It’s not whack a mole - I _want_ my kid to engage with a replacement technology like gaming. I’m not worried about my kid playing GTA vi all day. I’m not worried about content. I’m not even really worried about Andrew Tate. I’m worried about the specific way mindless algorithmic applications mimic cigarettes more than “satanic heavy metal rock concerts”

My kid needs more satan in his life! And less growth hacker.

It's not about content. Modern games have similar addictive traits, and they even admit it. Stuff like loot crates, custom skins, pay to unlock stuff early, etc. Even things like "seasons" and rank resets because without them "engagement was dropping".

Not even that. Play Forza Horizon and you'll notice how you get ADHD-inducing pings and pongs all over your screen for literally just doing basic actions in the game.

Facebook measured "sentiment" and then shown weight loss influencers bullshit ads to teenagers deemed "more insecure about their looks".

Yes it feeds directly into anorexia. And yes, it had that effect.

Education wont counteract these effects, not when the company can put staggering amount of money into A/B testing for maximal impact.

What education will do is show that to the world. Then we might legislate privacy mechanisms that would make this sort of abuse illegal and less likely to occur for all people.

Gaming is much healthier than social media.

Sure, Jan.

> The goal is to allow adolescents to grow into knowledge and responsible adults. Infantilizing them and delaying their exposure to the world only delays that development.

Epstein et al. had similar beliefs about banging them

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