[HN Gopher] Heavy social media use associated with lower mental ...
___________________________________________________________________
Heavy social media use associated with lower mental health in
adolescents
Author : alexrustic
Score : 701 points
Date : 2021-01-27 13:59 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| hiimtroymclure wrote:
| I left all social media just after xmas after I couldn't take the
| constant flood of politics. I miss the memes but overall i've
| loved my decision. Ill never go back
| hollerith wrote:
| "Constant flood of politics" also describes HN between late Dec
| and now IME. Have you considered leaving HN over it? (I have.)
| hiimtroymclure wrote:
| I have not. I get a lot of value out of HN as it relates to
| my interests. I really don't get any value over what someone
| I went to college with who I no longer speak to anymore is
| doing with their lives. But I understand your frustrations.
| Its hard to find any place that escapes it all
| antattack wrote:
| Manufacturers add fat or sugar to their product to make them more
| palatable or attractive. Flashy packaging or celebrity
| endorsement also helps. Social media is similar in many ways.
| Games, daily challenges, rewards, sense of belonging etc. In both
| instances you have to recognize what is beneficial to you and at
| what point is a waste of time or unhealthy.
|
| It's hard to do it for adults and it's hard or impossible to do
| for children and teenagers.
|
| Also, as with everything, everyone's experience will be
| different. In food example, some people can manage their calories
| better than other. Some are easily addicted or depressed. It's
| the same with social media or internet content in general.
| elric wrote:
| An anecdote, at the risk of sounding old:
|
| Back when I was a kid, if we had internet access at all, we
| mostly used it for the community aspect. A fan of some book?
| Search for it on Altavista and you likely found some kind of fan
| site which had a little bulletin board community organized around
| it. Or maybe a usenet group. A few minutes down the road you were
| talking to strangers on the other side of the planet about
| something you were all actively interested in. Hell, even radio
| stations had their own chat rooms and forums. Many free software
| tools had dedicated IRC channels. Mailing lists and usenet groups
| abound.
|
| These communities were all _interest based_ , and there were
| sooooo many of them. Because they were interest based, they
| mostly attracted people who at least had something in common with
| you, which made it easy to relate to them. And because people are
| not onedimensional, they were often part of many different
| communities. Which, aside from being fun, was also a great way to
| learn how to interact with people all over the world.
|
| Sure, flame wars were a thing, and I'm sure people were bullied
| and whatnot. Community moderation worked pretty well, though (as
| someone who administered a 10k+ members forum) it could be a lot
| of work. But no one ever damaged their mental health by
| frequenting a knitting forum.
|
| Facebook pretty much destroyed all of these (or at least
| decimated them). Perhaps these groups are still around, but it's
| now actively hard to find them. FB does not foster a sense of
| community. It's not a platform where you will learn anything
| about any topic. It's not an environment that's conducive to
| improving personal interactions. It attempted to centralize those
| things, and it failed. Instead of paying attention to things that
| interest us, we now have FB and its ilk begging us to please pay
| attention to their garbage. I miss actual communities, warts and
| all, and I think that young people's mental health would be
| better off if they made a return.
|
| Final note: yes, there are exceptions, I know it's not all quite
| as bad as I'm dramatizing here.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| > I miss actual communities
|
| I have found that Discord has become the closest contemporary
| thing to the old communities you talk about.
|
| Many niche interests now have small Discord servers with like
| minded people, and if you hang around long enough you will
| become integrated with one of these niche communities.
|
| I have been a part of several Discord servers for 5 years and I
| feel like they truly are communities: there is a deep history
| of the active members; people who met on Discord have visited
| each other in real life; members have gotten married; members
| have shared in grief as other members committed suicide; over
| time people have come and gone, but they have always had the
| Discord community to come back to when a relationship falls
| through, or they just need companionship in a tough time.
| ptudan wrote:
| Facebook groups is one of the shining features that brings
| people to the platform. While I also prefer the PHPBB days of
| old, FB groups are indeed interest based places that foster
| communities.
| f430 wrote:
| What I found shocking about the latest trend in video consumption
| on social media is that they are _10 seconds long or less_. This
| is only one of the many ways to keep a person locked to the
| screen (ex. youtube)
|
| It's not hard to imagine what this sort of exposure does to a
| young person's brain and attention span. You are essentially
| creating addicts and social media users all show withdrawl
| symptoms of any prolonged psychotropic drug use:
|
| - irritability
|
| - depression
|
| - physical restlessness
|
| - overwhelming need for redose
|
| - tolerance build up
|
| Something has to be done. We cannot rely on the generosity or
| moral guidelines of the companies that produce these apps well
| aware of the link between serotonin and screen time.
|
| I'm all for small government but this is a matter of public
| health. We needed regulation, and we need regulation, and will
| need regulation.
| 908087 wrote:
| It also damages adults' mental health, and a large portion of my
| friends, family members and acquaintances are living proof of
| that.
|
| The past year in particular has severely damaged not only their
| mental health, but their grasp on reality itself. I don't really
| know where we go from here, but the path we're on isn't
| sustainable.
| JSavageOne wrote:
| It's sad the extent to which these problems exacerbated by COVID
| restrictions are neglected. It would almost seem like the boomers
| are sacrificing the youth for their own benefit since the virus
| is only statistically deadly to older people.
| samrmay wrote:
| The article mentions a myriad of factors that correlate with
| mental health issues going into adolescence. It's interesting
| that the headline targets social media, as the body of the
| article doesn't seem to highlight it as an especially strong
| correlation.
|
| As a side note, the differing trends of boys and girls after
| adolescence is really interesting.
|
| > However, it recognised that girls' self-esteem and wellbeing
| stabilises as they move into their late teens, whereas it
| continues to drop for boys
|
| Will have to read the source material to see if they propose any
| causes for that
| learnstats2 wrote:
| The article also quotes the researcher explicitly denying the
| BBC's headline suggesting causation.
|
| I downvoted all the popular comments here which were ready to
| agree with the causation despite the research making no comment
| on that at all: the complete lack of critical thinking is why
| this gets to be the chosen headline. Pure clickbait.
| samrmay wrote:
| "Social media bad" is much more palpable than grappling with
| the fact that mental illness is a complicated problem with
| many contributing factors. Very frustrating because the
| researchers suggest increasing mental health resources and
| exercise, whereas the headline suggests social media as the
| much easier scapegoat.
| DevKoala wrote:
| I deleted all my social media accounts years ago because social
| media made me anxious.
|
| I can't imagine the pain kids must be since they feel forced to
| participate in order to "socially" exist.
| OneGuy123 wrote:
| Lets not pretend that the current news media is any different.
| There is no objective fact reporting, only fear mongering.
| jansan wrote:
| The "news" aspect is probably the most harmless part about
| social media.
| tgv wrote:
| What motivates you to reply that, when you know it isn't true?
| There's been news media for more than a century now, and it is
| not known to cause addiction and depression in teenagers.
| OneGuy123 wrote:
| "When you know it isn't true".
|
| Really?
|
| Teenagers are addicted to social media and adults get
| addicted to news media.
|
| Both are based on fear mongering and the fear of missing out.
| Do you not see that underneath the problem is the same?
| jp555 wrote:
| doesn't that headline essentially say "teenagers damage
| teenagers' mental health"?
|
| Don't most teenagers spend most of their time socializing with
| other teenagers?
|
| My pre-internet teenage "social networking" was full of traumatic
| times. Has that not been the case of teenagers forever?
|
| I guess this study is reporting an measurable increase above the
| "normal" amount? That seems like it would be very hard to
| measure.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Indeed. I always find it strange when people are shocked by
| bullying in schools or teenagers being jerks to each other.
| Didn't everyone witness that? Every single person at my high
| school could tell you who was bullied.
| jp555 wrote:
| At least with us geezers there's no trace of it ... now
| nothing gets deleted. That's a new stress for sure.
| vulcan01 wrote:
| I don't think people my age (high school) fully understand
|
| > nothing gets deleted
|
| Mean people say and do equivalent things on social media as
| in person. Although, I must say, this lockdown is probably
| a blessing to those who are consistently bullied at school,
| as now they're able to at least physically avoid them.
| mtippett wrote:
| No they don't.
|
| The toxic communities that exist have a mixture of no-clue 11
| year olds with minimal parental supervision (or parental
| supervision that's failing) through to young adults who found a
| community that can reflect their feelings back.
|
| Eg: the proana/edtwt communities are clearly children just
| working things out to young adults getting followings and
| interaction with a community. It sickens me to see a post from
| a 23 yr old spouting how to hide ED from your parents by doing
| the following... Or using subliminals to change the shape of
| your nose.
| kodah wrote:
| For all the folks talking about pro's and con's of social media
| companies, the government (and investing world) are working on a
| solution to make these kinds of findings empirical. It's called
| Economic, Social, and Governance metrics
| (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/environmental-social-an...)
|
| Biden is already poised to encourage the DOL to adopt these more
| directly: https://www.jwnenergy.com/article/2021/1/27/biden-may-
| have-t...
| henearkr wrote:
| The damage probably extends to all age categories, too.
| jameslk wrote:
| These studies seem to keep contradicting each other:
|
| http://www.nautil.us/blog/studies-shoot-down-techs-harmful-e...
|
| > A new study in Nature Human Behaviour, which looked at data
| from more than 350,000 adolescents, also found that digital tech
| use mattered little to kids' well-being. The authors, Amy Orben
| and Przybylski, argue that prior research, which examined the
| impact of social media on teens and tweens, was based on weak
| correlations and insufficiently comprehensive methods, and
| therefore drew false conclusions.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| Yes, it's just like all high level studies trying to make broad
| statements about human behavior or any other complex human
| system, like nutrition or economics. The reason there is so
| much contradiction is that we can't deal with the complex
| relationships between variables or the unknown unknowns. The
| only reason medicine is able to do decent studies is because
| they can tightly control things in RCTs.
| Correlational/observational studies are almost never good
| enough to make strong statements about anything.
| TeaDrunk wrote:
| It might make more sense to say that social media usage is just
| one large aspect of a child- like the presence or lack of
| presence of supportive adult figures, the presence or lack of
| presence of food security, good education, physical safety,
| etc.
|
| I'm sure a teenager who runs exclusively in cutting or pro-
| anorexia social circles online is a much different teenager to
| one who primarily uses the internet to keep up to date on horse
| shows.
| mtippett wrote:
| You got one too eh? tw sh / tw ed?
| TeaDrunk wrote:
| I don't know what this means; I don't have children if
| that's what you're asking.
| opendysphoria wrote:
| I believe they're tracking related symptoms and disagreeing
| about the root cause.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| There are entire subreddits dedicated to mocking this point, like
| /r/PhonesAreBad, and /r/InsaneParents. I doubt half the
| screenshots they post of text message conversations are even real
| -- but the point gets across. Phones are the most wonderful thing
| that keep us connected to each other, and only crude luddites
| living in the dark ages who don't understand the benefit they
| provide would take them away from a kid down spiraling into
| depression.
|
| It's almost like there's this gravitational well of depressed
| anxious people, and they don't want anyone to escape.
| itronitron wrote:
| I recall reading a book review on Amazon recently in which the
| reviewer referenced CDC fatality information to show that
| middle-aged adults were more likely to die in stupid ways than
| teenagers despite the popular pseudo-science wisdom that 'the
| teenage brain' is more prone to risk-taking because it hasn't
| 'fully developed.'
| tgv wrote:
| It's an addiction. People leaving the circle are directly
| taking away the addict's stimulus.
| superkuh wrote:
| Please don't use words that have a real medical meaning in
| such an inaccurate and casual way. Calling things addictive
| has real consequences in terms of legislators taking these
| confused public sentiments as fact and then trying to use
| force against the groups that are "addicted". Addiction has
| _never_ been proven in this context.
|
| Addiction is a a real, serious problem with drugs that effect
| the brains reward system (opioids) or prediction of reward
| (amphetamines). It is not a real problem associated with
| using online forums using a computer.
| tgv wrote:
| If it was just opioids or ampthetamines, alcohol or
| nocotine wouldn't be addictive, would it? Please don't use
| incomplete or irrelevant factoids when you contradict.
|
| But prediction of reward might very well be a concise
| description of the drive behind social media use.
| superkuh wrote:
| >If it was just opioids or ampthetamines,
|
| Obviously it's not. I gave examples of two drugs and
| their _direct_ mechanisms of action.
|
| >But prediction of reward might very well be a concise
| description of the drive behind social media use.
|
| No, that's a description of a living mammal brain.
| Addiction is when that system is hijacked _directly_ ,
| not when it is doing it's normal thing in response to
| stimuli.
| tgv wrote:
| Then why did you write up that precise phrase? You're
| upset about what I wrote, that much is obvious.
| superkuh wrote:
| I get you're concentrating on me not listing every
| mechanism of directly effecting the biochemistry of the
| reward and reward prediction substrates in the brain. But
| that doesn't matter.
|
| The distinction I'm trying to get across here is that
| normal stimuli that are just perceptions are not
| intrinsically addictive and when you claim one is there
| is a need for evidence of the claim.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| There's a subreddit about how phones are bad that most people
| probably access on their phones? I think my head just exploded.
| tgv wrote:
| The name of the subreddit should be read as "look at all
| these idiots saying that phones are bad". Or perhaps
| r/PhonesAreBadMKay
| pmlnr wrote:
| Is anyone even questioning this any more in 2021?
| onenightnine wrote:
| they said the same about video games, violent movies and music
| oblio wrote:
| And guess what, all those are now regulated (to an increasing
| degree).
| anarchogeek wrote:
| just look at how it's been damaging to queer teens... oh wait...
| not they aren't killing themselves like before... neverind.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Heck. It damages _adult_ brains.
|
| I have learned to avoid Facebook, and barely ever look at
| Twitter.
|
| It has resulted in a drastic improvement in my general mood.
| [deleted]
| username90 wrote:
| Doesn't it damage everyone's mental health?
| OmniiTyler wrote:
| It is heartsickening that this is the result of current social
| media implementation. As others have mentioned, it is largely
| caused by this attention economy (as I've heard Tristan Harris of
| https://www.humanetech.com/ call it) - where the apps most used
| today are made to be addictive and consume our attention as much
| as possible.
|
| I have been working on a more intimate, less addictive, social
| media and messaging application that I hope can be part of a
| trend of new apps that help solve this problem. I believe one of
| the features in current apps that makes them so addictive, for
| teens especially, is the endless stream of content they have
| access to - they can view hours and hours of videos from
| celebrities they don't personally know, content creators they
| have never met, brands, etc. If we can scale back the endless
| stream of content (which leads to doom-scrolling), that might be
| one approach to helping limit screen time without sacrificing the
| meaningful connection to friends and family that social media
| enables.
| bserge wrote:
| I'd be interested to see what you're working on. How would you
| reduce the amount of content? Would people still be able to
| find it by search? Or is this more of a Facebook/Whatsapp
| without the extra bs?
|
| I've been trying to block social media and have finally managed
| to do it (DoH was a pain in the ass to block). Although I can
| still access websites on mobile, working on that.
|
| I quit Imgur after years and I don't understand why I was even
| going there. Now everything looks dumb and uninteresting. Truly
| like a drug addiction.
| dfmooreqqq wrote:
| I wish there was more on the different types/uses of social
| media. Twitter != Facebook != Goodreads != HN and so on. Even
| within different social media there is varying uses - using FB
| groups to find affinity groups like Woodworkers or a shared hobby
| and more is very different than just doom scrolling the news
| feed. I didn't get through to the actual report (just the linked
| article), so maybe there is more there.
| grillvogel wrote:
| i unironically believe social media should be banned and is
| responsible for most of the negative aspects of society in the
| past 10 years
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| People should really read the research [1] and not this article
| as the article doesn't actually capture the scope and real impact
| of the research.
|
| The executive summary highlights:
|
| * Personal wellbeing drops, on average, as children move from
| primary into secondary school, and continues to drop as children
| move through secondary school.
|
| * We find a graded relationship between family income and all
| three outcomes through adolescence: young people's mental and
| emotional health scores are worse the lower down their family is
| on the income scale
|
| *Engaging in physical activity was found to be more important for
| boys' mental and emotional health in early adolescence than
| girls', with a graded relationship between frequency of exercise
| and scores on all three outcomes for 14-year-old boys; at age 17,
| we find a graded relationship with frequency of exercise in both
| girls and boys. Heavy social media use is associated with worse
| scores on all outcomes in girls age 14 and 17, but only worse
| well being for boys at age 14.
|
| Etc...
|
| [1]https://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/EPI-
| PT_Young-p...
| vulcan01 wrote:
| As a high school guy, I have to wonder if
|
| > Engaging in physical activity was found to be more important
| for boys' mental and emotional health
|
| is because (personal anecdata warning!) guys tend to prefer
| friends who are physically fit. This is just something I've
| noticed by observing my school; the stronger guys tend to have
| a larger social circle.
|
| However, this causation could be flawed, maybe physically
| active people have better emotional health and that's why
| people are attracted (friendship-wise) to them.
| mlac wrote:
| Your guess makes some sense, but I'd say it could also be
| that people who work out more often are typically involved in
| organized sports and have to work out x number of times per
| week. Organized sports often have a built in social circle.
| [deleted]
| mrfusion wrote:
| Wait till you see what it does to adults!
|
| (Sorry for the short comment but I'm trying out saying a lot with
| a little)
| OOPMan wrote:
| Not just teenagers...
| akulbe wrote:
| I'm not a doctor/scientist... but I feel like it's easily just as
| bad for mature adults.
|
| The constant stream of news _and_ social media... it doesn 't
| have a calming effect. People, in general, seem more angry too.
| cortexio wrote:
| It's not "social media", it's just "media". I dont expect the
| media to tell they are the problem, they are hypocrites anyway.
| samsquire wrote:
| Life is hard enough without social media.
|
| You will be harshly judged on social media and treated with
| contempt.
| astura wrote:
| What the fuck kind of social media are you guys talking about?
| Reddit and 4Chan?
|
| I use Facebook, everyone (that's people I know in person) is
| extremely nice to me on there, never got any contempt at all.
| We share pictures and funny memes and plan events on there. I
| used Facebook to reconnect with a childhood friend who I lost
| touch with and now we talk all the time. My husband did the
| exact same thing with Myspace a decade before.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| This may be the most disjointed think I've ever read.
|
| A depressing number of people here don't seem to have read it.
| But then neither it seems has the person who wrote it and added
| the headline.
| 12xo wrote:
| Social media is just like fast food. Its cheap, tasty, filling
| and easy. Eat it too often and you'll grow fat, get sick and
| cause irreparable bodily harm.
| bnralt wrote:
| I'm starting to wonder if mass media in general is bad for our
| mental health, and if we'd be better off unplugging as much as we
| can from everything - social media, TV, radio, Hacker News, etc.
| and spending more time with our community. I suppose the problem
| is, most communities are completely addicted to this stuff, so
| we're left in a situation where it's hard for most people to
| unplug for any long period of time without isolating themselves.
| gilbetron wrote:
| As a personal anecdote through the pandemic and election, I've
| found out several things: 1. Twitter, for me, is incredibly
| detrimental to my mental health. I felt the need to check it
| until the inauguration, but took several breaks and was shocked
| how much better I felt. Now I think I might just stay away from
| it almost entirely. 2. Facebook, on the other hand, has been
| generally good for me, since I got rid of toxic people and just
| kept lightly in touch with a small set (maybe 20) of people
| that I enjoy interacting with. My enjoyment of it has improved,
| although I'd still rather have a different way of doing it.
| Plus, it is only 15 minutes per day or so, so it's benefit to
| my life is minimal. 3. Reddit. Generally still like it,
| although much less so since there has been a drop in quality
| contributors, an increase in politics, and generally less fun
| overall. But as long as I stay away from contentious
| subreddits, I like reading it. It is more of a time sink than a
| mental health drain (although that's related, too) 4. Hacker
| News: I've grown to greatly appreciate the strict moderation
| and find it is a great example of a "good" social site. It adds
| value, but it isn't a time sink.
|
| As for mass media, it is far too driven by reaction, and I
| mostly avoid all of it. In-depth general media, and focused
| media are more interesting. The Economist is generally great,
| for instance, because most everything is in depth. I've
| recently taken to reading a shipping news site, and that is
| interesting because I can hear more pertinent information
| about, say covid, because they aren't reporting about covid,
| but reporting the effects of covid.
|
| Mostly I think we need more education and training for our
| population on handling media. Too many people seem to take
| whatever the read as truth and insert it directly into their
| brain without an skepticism or critical thought. I hate that.
| Everyone should have a "news vestibule" in their brain where
| new information must sit and be verified before they allow it
| into their mind as a whole.
|
| Lastly, I'm now much more inclined to pay for content than I
| was 5 years ago.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I cannot help but be deeply unsettled by the proposal. Isn't
| that considering willfull ignorance of the world at large
| considered good mental health then? That is effectively an
| implication of saying we should reject all mass media.
|
| Really mental health should be considered to have at least two
| components - 'morale' related to functioning and happiness and
| 'attunement to reality' based upon perceiving the world as
| close to as it is as possible essentially. That approach sounds
| like something which would boost the first at the cost of the
| second.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| This is my experience. I disconnected from social media, and my
| social life immediately died. Friends only communicate with
| each other through Facebook, so I'm really only staying in
| regular contact with my very closest friends anymore. Most of
| it I don't miss, because social media has also reduced the
| quality of communication to the level of gossip, but what I do
| miss out on is any sort of invitations to social gatherings.
|
| It also eliminates opportunities to make new friends. It's
| surprisingly difficult to find a knitting group in my area that
| doesn't organize using Facebook Groups, for example.
|
| It frankly worries me. In the past, we worried about monopolies
| on things like oil and diamonds. I'm not sure our culture has
| the tools to cope with a monopoly on participation in society.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| I deleted my social media almost ten years ago and I feel
| like I have a stronger social network now than I had before.
| The key thing I think I may have done differently is that I
| got involved in things that provided opportunities to be
| engaged with people.
|
| For example; I joined my local Masonic lodge and started
| doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Between those two things alone I
| find I have regular enough interactions with a variety of
| different people that I naturally find out about, and am
| invited to events and activities that more than make up for
| the loss of social media.
|
| I'm not suggesting everyone join a Masonic lodge (obviously)
| or take up Jiu-Jitsu. There are a great number of things
| everyone can do that gets them around other people in a way
| that is natural and fulfilling.
|
| Also--and this, I find, is critical--all my old friends are
| still friends and they call or email or text me and I them.
| Anyone who claimed to be my friend but couldn't be bothered
| to get in touch with me after I dropped social media was
| never a very good friend to begin with.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| So, it's not that opportunities to socialize don't exist.
| It's that an ever increasing number of them are being
| mediated through social media. Which means that the list of
| non-social-media options in one's community likely caters
| to an ever decreasing variety of interests.
| offtop5 wrote:
| You can use social media, without using social media. Let
| me explain.
|
| For example I tangentally consider meetup groups to be
| social media, but the entire point is that you actually
| meet people in real life. That led to me meeting one of
| my partners in 2019
|
| I also do keep a Facebook around so when I meet people
| traveling I can just add them easily, I almost never ever
| use anything aside from Facebook messenger, and to maybe
| view a few events that my friends are organizing.
|
| I think the key way to think about Facebook is that it's
| original purpose, keep talking to your college friends,
| wasn't bad. It's just it's mutated purpose of trying to
| spread mis information, spreading gossip, and bullying
| are absolutely disgusting.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| Everybody at my Jiu-Jitsu academy knows I don't have
| social media. Until COVID that was never really a
| problem.
|
| After the first shutdown lifted somewhat, the health
| department mandates requires us to be part of small
| "pods" to help contain any spread (as an aside, that has
| worked surprisingly well considering how close in contact
| people are) We're also restricted to a limited number
| days we can train so pod members have to coordinate with
| each other the classes we're planning to attend so that
| we don't show up and be the only guy or gal in our pod
| that night.
|
| You know how we invariably coordinate? Email or text.
| Primarily email in fact. It wasn't planned or dictated by
| anyone. It just worked out that way.
| ryandrake wrote:
| My view is if people stop contacting you just because you
| dropped off of some social media platform, they weren't
| really _friends_ to begin with. When I ditched Facebook
| about 10 years ago, I lost contact with a whole bunch of
| people who weren 't really part of my life anyway, they
| were simply "names I recognized." On the other hand, it had
| no effect on my actual friendships or family connections.
| We all know how to contact each other and we do. My social
| life is probably better after dropping social media simply
| because I'm spending less time scrolling in front of a
| screen.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I can echo this. I'm social media lite. I have very few
| social media platforms and that ones I have are limited or
| automated so I don't interact with them often.
|
| I had to be deliberate about telling people I'm not going
| to see their post about xyz so they would have to text or
| call me if they want to invite me. Sure I probably miss
| some events but the ones I go to I know I'm wanted at.
|
| Socializing passively at a gym or Jiu-Jitsu or some type of
| class is the main way I've built friend groups over the
| years.
| gabereiser wrote:
| I'd like to echo the socializing part. Granted it's hard
| right now because of covid restrictions, but if you've
| deleted your social media you have to get yourself out
| there and socialize the analog way. Don't be shy to say
| hi to people. Ask them what they are doing. Socialize at
| your regular routine stops. Reach out to that person you
| only kinda know from that thing one time and see if they
| want to come to something you're doing.
|
| You'll find people are very willing to discuss things if
| you initiate. This is how we did it before social media
| and it's by far the more pleasant way. Just don't be a
| jerk, you'll be fine.
|
| MeetUp is a great resource too. I've even asked randoms
| on NextDoor if they want to meet up at the pub. There are
| ways to be social without the big social media platforms.
| medhir wrote:
| I definitely struggled with something similar when I first
| deleted Facebook. It's definitely harder in terms of
| "discoverability" to connect with people you enjoy spending
| time with.
|
| But over time that difficulty lessened. I found the
| connections I made outside of Facebook were longer lasting
| and more meaningful, because there was actually some onus on
| me to try and stay engaged. And people do respond well when
| you demonstrate you care to engage in a deeper fashion. It
| feels like relationship building / maintenance in today's age
| is something of a lost art, because it's become so easy to
| superficially connect without putting in a bunch of work.
|
| The big social platforms make you want to believe there's a
| monopoly on societal participation. Pushing back against that
| energy is such a powerful thing, even if it's somewhat
| isolating in the short-term.
| grumple wrote:
| After leaving facebook a few years ago, I noticed at first
| that it was difficult to find out about social events. And I
| felt more disconnected.
|
| After a while, though, it just sort of filtered the events
| down to those I cared more about. My good friends still reach
| out directly and vice versa. I think it took a while for that
| to start happening though.
|
| I've lost touch with many acquaintances, but if I'm being
| honest it's probably better that I don't expend energy on
| those people. I'm certainly not isolated from society,
| though. I just engage on my own terms.
| ppf wrote:
| I'm on day 3 of exactly that (deleted reddit, Facebook, reddit,
| Whatsapp, and Signal, and switched to a dumb phone). No idea
| how this will pan out, but personally I feel so much better
| already. I am also significantly more focussed and productive,
| and am already able to enjoy tasks that previously seemed
| boring in comparison to endlessly refreshing reddit and the
| like. I'm also in a country that is not so steeped in
| technology, and thus not as far down the path of general life
| becoming dependnet on it.
|
| Just think about that - you denpend on big tech for the very
| media through which you perform the majority of interactions
| with your "friends".
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| The problem with totally unplugging is that you effectively put
| your head in the sand. You're less informed about what is going
| on around you. Sure you can read books, but you're increasing
| your risk of exposure to bias or falsehoods when you limit your
| selection like that. We may be getting pummeled with "fake
| news" right now, but at least we have the ability to discuss
| the matter and see more than one side.
|
| The early 20th century may have seemed hunky-dory to a lot of
| people, but there was a lot of bad stuff going on that just
| never had the chance to see the light of day. I don't want to
| go back to that.
|
| Take it to a further extreme, the Amish. I'm sure many of them
| think life is great out there on the farm. But they aren't
| going to be much help for solving problems on a national or
| global scale. Heck even their votes (do they vote?) are
| probably based on some community consensus or shared local
| interest. As you narrow your gaze you limit your ability to
| participate in the world.
| tester756 wrote:
| > You're less informed about what is going on around you.
|
| majority of things from the news has no impact on me at all
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| Let's take one big example: climate change. Without the
| news, things would be different. It might never have
| achieved the level of funding and attention it has so far
| if it weren't for general public awareness.
| anthk wrote:
| He, you just couldn't do worse, right?
|
| I have a Gopher site for that, from a really insteresting
| guy:
|
| gopher.club/1/users/mmeta4/
|
| No ads, no likes, no bullshit. Just pure text, some
| images and PDF's readable even under a Linux framebuffer.
| kps wrote:
| Some will, but probably not the ones that grab attention.
| For 99% of humanity's existence, if you even _heard_ of ten
| people dying at once it meant that _you_ were in extreme
| danger. (Or occasionally, had just finished putting the
| neighbouring tribe in extreme danger.)
| anthk wrote:
| >. You're less informed about what is going on around you.
|
| https://lite.cnn.io
|
| https://text.npr.org
|
| https://efe.com
|
| I use them thru Lynx and a framebuffer image viewer.
|
| Everything else is bullshit.
|
| I'm probably 90% better informed than half of the mooks being
| idiotized at the social media.
| mightybyte wrote:
| Until six months ago, I consumed very little mainstream media
| or social media. I started following the news leading up to the
| presidential election because it seemed like this one would be
| more consequential than most. I can definitely say that I've
| been meaningfully less happy / more anxious / etc as a result.
| I definitely intend to scale back my news / media consumption
| to the level it was before in the near future.
| Bakary wrote:
| I have an opposite version of this where I find myself
| frustrated that I can't discuss certain topics offline with my
| social circle. I'm happy to have an outlet for this, even if it
| might have other negative consequences. It depends on your
| personality profile I suppose. I find intense arguments
| relaxing.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| It's not "social" and it's not "media". I see those as online
| platforms which encourage you to build a curated, time-trackable
| version of your identity, where hyper-expression and outward
| individualism is the tool. Eventually, what happens is a clash of
| values between these shallow identities, which is as social as
| military conflict can be.
| turing_complete wrote:
| We should make it a beat practice to link to the primary source
| directly instead of news sites.
| jayant123 wrote:
| Here's an excerpt from the article -
|
| Heavy social media use was linked to negative wellbeing and self-
| esteem, regardless of a young person's mental state, with more
| girls experiencing feelings of depression and hopelessness.
|
| "Those who feel worse may turn to social media for solace or
| community," Dr Amy Orben, research fellow at Emmanuel College,
| University of Cambridge, said of the research.
|
| "It's not a vacuum, it works both ways."
|
| Contrast that with the title of this post, which tries to
| establish a clear causal link from social media use to poor
| mental health.
| grumple wrote:
| It damages my mental health and I'm an adult.
|
| I watch it damage everyone I know as well.
| nineplay wrote:
| If they are specific about what "social media" they are talking
| about, I didn't see it. I feel like without naming names, the
| report and conclusion are frustratingly vague. All social media
| is not the same. YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and reddit
| are very different platforms with, I'm guessing, very different
| effects on teenage ( and adult ) psyches.
| mikece wrote:
| If you have not seen it, the documentary "The Social Dilemma"
| (currently only available on Netflix) goes over this in detail,
| with first-hand accounts from the people who created the
| "addiction algorithms"... as well as references to research on
| how self-harm and suicide attempts in teens and pre-teens has
| skyrocketed since the advent of social media.
| kyrra wrote:
| There were parts of that documentary that were good, but it was
| also way over the top. And funny enough Netflix was never
| mentioned in it, because it was produced by them (Even though
| binge watching is a thing). It also felt like it dived into
| conspiracy theories without a lot of backing.
|
| The funniest part for the entire thing is that they spent a lot
| of time of how do we solve this problem of social media. There
| was a lot of just weird things brought up in the documentary
| itself. But the real answer was actually in the interviews in
| the credit, which is where it just says to get off of social
| media.
|
| It did not feel like we're trying to be honest, rather they
| wanted to be controversial.
| twiss wrote:
| Loneliness damages peoples' mental health, too. Is there some
| chance that, for mental health, the ordering goes "in-person
| interaction > social media interaction > no interaction at all"?
|
| Then of course if you compare social media interaction with in-
| person interaction you may conclude that social media = bad, but
| the causality may (in part) be the other way around, as the
| article says:
|
| > "Those who feel worse may turn to social media for solace or
| community," Dr Amy Orben, research fellow at Emmanuel College,
| University of Cambridge, said of the research.
| croes wrote:
| You can't order it by the type of interaction. "I used to think
| that the worst thing in life was to end up alone. It's not. The
| worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel
| all alone." What makes social media so bad is that hundreds,
| thousands and more from all over the world can attack you. In-
| person thats seldom the case. On the other hand, you can more
| easily ignore online comments than real life comments.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| Where did that quote come from? Excellent point.
|
| Someone once commented on how we can't go for a drive in the
| car without having some music on to distract us from
| thinking. I wonder if we don't want to be alone with our
| thoughts.
| croes wrote:
| The quote is often attributed to Robin Williams but it's
| from his role as Lance in the 2009 film "World's Greatest
| Dad" written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait.
| NalNezumi wrote:
| >ou can more easily ignore online comments than real life
| comments.
|
| Not always the case I don't think(your over all point still
| stands though). An anectodtal example, I've been thrown some
| racial & very insensitive slurs at sports bar/convenience
| store late night, but seeing the person/the state the person
| throwing the slur is in (intoxicated) can make it way easier
| to just brush it off. Being thrown an insult in say,
| StackOverflow by someone that have provable trackrecord of
| excellence can be quite more demoralizing.
|
| The absence/existence of additional information about the
| person throwing the slur can make the whole difference, and
| that can exist/not exist on both internet and real life.
| paganel wrote:
| > On the other hand, you can more easily ignore online
| comments than real life comments.
|
| Not sure if I'm the only doing that but in many, many cases I
| just ignore the reddit red envelope (I open it in new tab and
| close that tab instantly with Cmd+W), I choose to which
| comments of mine to answer directly (if the case) by going
| straight to them, so to speak, and see if there's anything in
| there.
|
| Granted, I'm not strong enough to do that all the time, but
| it helps, nonetheless.
| watwut wrote:
| > Loneliness damages peoples' mental health, too. Is there some
| chance that, for mental health, the ordering goes "in-person
| interaction > social media interaction > no interaction at
| all"?
|
| In my experience, yes. When I was real life social isolated,
| stopping the online interactions was destructive each time I
| tried. (I tried couple of time till I realized that yes, it
| does count as interaction that I need.)
| ajarmst wrote:
| Based on a single cohort study (all subjects born within a year
| or so of each other), UK only. Primary evaluation is
| questionnaire. No focused investigation or hypothesis testing.
| Correlational study only, no control group. no peer review. At
| best, this study supports only two conclusions: (1) 20 year-old
| Britons who report higher use of social media also have a
| tendency to answer leading questions in a way that could be
| interpreted as reflecting somewhat higher levels of anxiety and
| depression: and (2) Prince's Trust-funded research is a good gig
| if you can get it.
| titzer wrote:
| Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young
| brains than drugs.
|
| If you came up with a substance that caused young people by the
| millions to become totally addicted, cost them multiple hours per
| day, pushed them into depression and suicide, and contributed to
| inactivity, obesity, loss of attention span, and overall ennui,
| it would be banned almost immediately.
|
| Heck, if you proposed a tracking system that kept track of kids'
| whereabouts, social connections, and required them to post
| identifying information and photos, as well as gather their
| interests and political leanings, it'd be illegal.
|
| The fact that we allowed companies to do these _two things
| together_ while making money off it is absolutely astounding to
| me.
| haolez wrote:
| Add to that recent games like FIFA or NBA that have casino-like
| mechanics with real money.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Watch out, they'll outlaw Robinhood
| pietrovismara wrote:
| But these companies provide great value to the shareholders!
| Apparently that's enough to trump any other concern.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| This problem has been said again and again for almost a decade.
| Are we still "studying" it? I guess it's more obvious than
| studying criminal thinking. Not more complicated than
| Mindhunter sort of thing, yet there's no feasible action?
| _pmf_ wrote:
| > Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young
| brains than drugs.
|
| So, it will destroy the youth like books, radio, rock music,
| rap music, Michael Jackson, TV and masturbation?
| Bakary wrote:
| I recently saw a tweet that for once seemed insightful: "the
| internet did to boomers what boomers thought it would do to
| us", presumably posted by someone under the age of 25.
|
| Young people are vulnerable to social media, and your point
| still stands, but I am also under the impression that it has
| impacted previous generations to a far greater extent, breaking
| their link to reality altogether.
| vlunkr wrote:
| I have a theory that older generations are much worse at
| identifying fake information on the internet. I clicked a few
| bogus banner ads (punch the monkey and win 100$) and got my
| fair share of malware from limewire, so I learned that you
| should treat everything on the internet with skepticism.
| Older people grew up with media that wasn't always accurate,
| but at least wasn't directly lying or trolling you.
|
| Now the internet has been delivered right into their pockets
| and they aren't prepared for it. They see a video about
| ballet boxes being stuffed, and of course they believe it.
| Their friend Gladys shared it on facebook, of course it's
| real!
| titzer wrote:
| I'm 40, and grew up programming in my early teens, so I've
| seen the Web's entire arc. This social media stuff was fun
| for a time but it turned very dark, almost exactly in
| proportion to the money involved, like everything else on the
| Web, IMHO.
|
| Also, the gamification of many things. Even HN karma. The
| thrill of watching the upvotes roll in! (even now...)
| Bakary wrote:
| Is it the money, or just society in general moving into the
| space? Darkness is an inherent part of human life, and the
| internet is now the agora. For a social animal, any aspect
| of existence will have been gamified from the start...
| bluetomcat wrote:
| Social media provokes behaviours which are unnatural or even
| impossible in an ordinary "social" setting. On one hand, it is
| the instant ability to have others react on whatever you may
| say or post, regardless of the context of what is being
| expressed. In an ordinary social gathering with people talking,
| there is a collective subject discourse and you cannot just
| express your preference for cats in the middle of the
| conversation. Second, the format is designed to encourage
| hyper-expression and hyper-reactivity. Personalised likes,
| notifications, a time-trackable identity linked to your
| emotional preferences like movies, sports, lifestyle etc.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| I generally dislike banning things because a few individuals
| can't handle it. Punishing those people that have self control
| seems ridiculous and I hate sin taxes for that reason. However,
| I think putting restrictions on stuff for younger people that
| don't have fully developed brains seems perfectly reasonable.
| If you're under 18 (21 in some cases) you cannot drink, smoke
| etc. Social Media should be treated the same way.
|
| Unfortunately, laws can only do so much with out invading the
| privacy of citizens so it's really going to take a large
| campaign similar to anti-smoking ads in the 90s to get the
| message out about the cons and parents will HAVE to put their
| foot down. Although, it seems like a certain portion of our
| society thinks children should be allowed to make decisions
| themselves nowadays so I expect backlash at the thought of
| parents actually stopping their kids from harming themselves.
| executive wrote:
| Wisconsin does not have a minimum drinking age.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| Ok? so? I don't see what that has to do with the main point
| of my comment. Also the law is that you have to be
| accompanied by an adult if you're under 21 in Wisconsin so
| you're being a bit disingenuous.
| T-A wrote:
| https://bigthink.com/mind-brain/adult-brain
| CountDrewku wrote:
| Ok what's your point? Legally the adult age is 18 in most
| states. If you want to argue changing what legal age is
| that's fine but it doesn't really have anything to do with
| the main point of my comment. Additionally, this study
| specifically shows it harms adolescents.
|
| If you're going to apply laws that strip rights away from
| people you have to have a cutoff somewhere. Unless you're
| suggesting a blanket ban on social media for everyone.....
| yters wrote:
| Many of those problems apply to any form of entertainment:
| movies, games, music, etc. I say we ban all forms of fun.
| serial_dev wrote:
| > Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young
| brains than drugs.
|
| I don't think you need _young_ in that sentence. I see social
| media 's negative effects on all age groups.
|
| I see it in my own life (I'm 30): somehow, I feel compelled to
| keep track of politics, and I watch political shows way too
| much. I don't learn anything from it 98% of the time. After I
| watch/read about that topic, I can't concentrate on anything
| for long, _I want to know more_. The moment I wake up, I reach
| to the mobile to read the news. Then, I visit some meme sites,
| then I go to Hacker News. When I don 't want to wake up yet, I
| repeat.
|
| As a defense mechanism, I deactivated Facebook, I only post
| programming content on Twitter and I aggressively mute anyone
| who brings political tweets in my feed. I disabled
| notifications from most apps. I set up content blocker
| extensions so I don't accidentally wander to sites I don't want
| to visit. When I visit YouTube, I intentionally focus on the
| task at hand and try to not let the algorithm distract me
| (which is hard, because their recommendations almost always
| resonate with me). It works "okay", but I still didn't break
| the habit and I need strong self-control.
|
| I see it also with my mother and sister, they are approx 60 and
| 35. They never get bored of scrolling through their feeds, they
| can't focus on anything else. They also often feel bad because
| their lives don't match what they see on the web. They make up
| a persona online that don't match their reality (which I see).
|
| I'm not advocating for banning these things for adults, but I'd
| raise this issue to the people who read my comment: most adults
| behave very similarly to children, so observe your behavior and
| adapt.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I feel similar, especially durring this covid stuff my
| internet habits have gotten pretty bad. I turned off my
| Twitter, Facebook got a bit. Reddit was hard but I think
| keeping it read only (I gave my gf my account passwords) at
| least keeps me from interacting.
|
| It's hard, there's no immediate downside to checking your
| phone or app.
|
| I kind of think stuff like infinite scroll, gamification of
| social media needs some kind of regulation. I don't think we
| have the power to fight for our selves against these
| companies
| [deleted]
| antattack wrote:
| We become the product. Social media needs us in order to make a
| buck and they will do everything in their power that we need
| them. Some of it is to our benefit but many times it's a waste
| of time and trying to create a need where there was none. TL;DR
| yes, social media are drug dealers :)
| linuxftw wrote:
| It's called "parenting" which is not in vogue right now.
| Currently, people treat children like adults, expecting them to
| navigate the world as an adult would, and that's dumb.
|
| Reject a failed society. It's okay to be an individual, you
| don't need to be part of the collective.
| meowster wrote:
| I think we have different definitions of treating children
| like adults. It seems to me like they are barely treated as
| people.
|
| Yes, parenting is not in vogue, and that's the problem.
| People do not know how to parent. It almost seems like many
| people are treating them like pets.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| They treat them like adults if the adults are prisoners
| essentially.
| lovecg wrote:
| Do they? I keep hearing how college age students are
| "coddled" and the whole helicopter parenting thing. Your
| comment is the first time I saw the opposite view expressed
| in a while.
| [deleted]
| vonwoodson wrote:
| This is called victim blaming.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > Social media (and the attention economy) are worse for young
| brains than drugs.
|
| I hear what you're saying but I'm pretty sure drugs (like meth)
| are much worse, we just manage to keep kids away from them,
| whereas Internet is given to them.
| [deleted]
| LatteLazy wrote:
| I think you're a little over confident in your points if you
| don't mind me saying.
|
| For paragraph 2, Sugar, TV, organised religion, the Boy/Girl
| Scouts and comic books all satisfy at least some of your
| criteria. None has been banned yet.
|
| Similarly, many American parents would rush to sign up to a
| service that let them do those things. Plenty pay for Life360
| and similar just for some of those "features". Far from being
| illegal, many jurisdictions encourage it.
|
| I don't think social media is a force for good. But let's not
| pretend we really care about the kids or privacy or mental
| health.
|
| I actually think that many parents (sadly) prefer a kid that
| sits at home on the computer and is monitorable and docile (a
| side effect of depression). The alternative is to actually take
| them places or to let them go unattended, neither of which
| parents seem happy to swallow.
| simias wrote:
| I've always been a bit extreme on this but I more than ever
| believe that it's insane that we consider that leaving
| teenagers with unsupervised internet access is reasonable.
|
| Maybe I'm prude or naive but I remember vividly when I first
| saw a pornographic movie at like around 17. It really shook me
| at the time. I wasn't traumatized or anything but it made a
| strong impact on me.
|
| These days I expect that most teens experience this at like
| 12yo on their smartphones. Last week I was linked a reddit
| video of some guy dying in absolutely gruesome circumstance due
| to an industrial accident. And then there's the constant influx
| of disinformation. Did you know that Hydroxychloroquine cures
| HIV? I saw a Youtube video claiming just that yesterday.
|
| Leaving a kid on the internet is like living them on a shaddy
| part of town for hours at a time. I'm old enough that I only
| had internet at home when I turned 18, in hindsight I feel like
| I dodged a bullet.
| issamehh wrote:
| There's definitely some bad things I saw too soon on the
| internet but if I'd not had access at a young age to it and
| my own computer I absolutely would not be where I am
| currently. There are many bad influences, but in my case I'd
| take all of them for the things I learned in my journey. I'd
| prefer of course to find ways to minimize them but not by way
| of abstinence
| bccdee wrote:
| Eh. Responsible consumption of media isn't something we're
| magically endowed with when we turn 18. It's a skill like any
| other. Obviously there's a point at which children are too
| underdeveloped to be responsible about media consumption, but
| teenagers aren't idiots. If a youtube video is feeding them
| bullshit, they'll usually be able to tell. Not all teenagers
| are that savvy, mind you, but we've learned in recent years
| that not all adults are either.
| xxpor wrote:
| Just wondering, how old are you?
|
| I'm 30, so myspace and Facebook showed up only once I was in
| high school, but everything you describe was still available
| on the web before social media. Shock sites were huge
| (goatse, tubgirl, etc), and I remember watching a beheading
| with a chainsaw by a Mexican cartel. And of course porn was
| around too.
|
| The difference with social media is the "keeping up with the
| Joneses" except now it's your entire life, not just your
| literal neighbor. Way more damaging long term, since you
| actually know these people and can relate to them. Yeah the
| beheading was shocking, but I'm not hanging out with cartels
| regularly. Just a completely different thing.
| redisman wrote:
| Yeah its funny I feel like the "meme" internet for
| teenagers was way worse if shocking content is worse when I
| was young. There were so many NSFL websites too like
| stileproject, rotten, ogrish, etc. that everyone knew about
| and so much weird stuff on the pirating websites and gif
| sites back then that you don't really see anymore outside
| of the dark web.
|
| I'm pretty convinced that just a "dumb" web 1.0 site of
| shocking content is way better for your mental health than
| a handful of giant corporations honing in on your psyche
| and exploiting the weaknesses of the human mind.
| [deleted]
| sosuke wrote:
| I have distinct memories of a website Defvac or Defecation
| Vacation. Morgue photos and other terrible content. This
| was between 1995 and 1998 I think?
| simias wrote:
| I'm only a couple of years older than you are. Some of my
| friends had internet at home well before me during high
| school, but I only got it when I moved after High School
| (my parents weren't so much anti-tech are completely
| outside of it).
|
| So while I very well remember goatse, tubgirl and
| rotten.com, I only discovered those as an adult.
|
| Also note that I wasn't singling out social media here.
| It's the web as a whole that seems very unsuited for a
| teenager without supervision, IMO.
| antihero wrote:
| I swear that beheading video is a form of generational
| anchor in the same way that the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2
| soundtrack is something a certain group (early
| millenial/late genx) is.
| II2II wrote:
| Another big difference is constant availability. A decade
| ago, the moment you walked away from your computer the
| shock sites were memories. Twenty years ago, the moment you
| walked away from your phone most of the social drama were
| memories. The most that most of us do now is stuff it into
| our pockets.
|
| Aside from the psychological differences with teens, we
| also have to consider that they aren't being exposed to
| this environment "in moderation". They don't really have
| the opportunity to think about their responses to it.
| cpach wrote:
| This, I believe, is the largest difference between today
| and twenty years ago.
|
| That, and the pervasiveness of social media. Myspace, for
| example, was huge. But unlike today's social media, maybe
| 25% of your AFK circles would hang out there, not 95%
| like today.
| xxpor wrote:
| This is true. We didn't even have wifi in school until my
| last year there (2007-2008). If you wanted to use a
| computer you had to go to the library or be in a
| classroom that had a few in the back.
| Semaphor wrote:
| A random thought: What if the filter back then (I'm 34)
| helped? Most of the people spending significant time online
| back then were some degree of nerd (I hope that
| classification doesn't offend anyone). Nowadays, it's
| everyone.
|
| During the early years of the German equivalent of high
| school, most of my classmates would spend days without
| being online once.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| There's a difference between something being available
| somewhere on the Internet (when Internet access was 56K
| from a desktop computer featuring prominently in your
| family room) and having it shared with you specifically to
| your smartphone.
| [deleted]
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| I never get anything gore shared to me, but I think it's
| also because I wouldn't stay friends with anyone who
| sends me that. I think it's weird that, as a society,
| we're more OK with violence than sex.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Consider how many people saw the shooting of the Trump
| supporter storming the capitol or the killing of George
| Floyd. I can't imagine that level of exposure in 2005 or
| earlier. And this is just gore; we're not talking about
| sex (also, we don't have to choose between the two, so I
| don't understand the dichotomous argument).
| megaman821 wrote:
| You think more people saw the shooting of the Trump
| supporter or George Floyd than saw images from Desert
| Storm, 9-11, or school shootings? They are all horrible,
| but I have seen a lot worse stuff pre-2005 than after.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| No, I'm not arguing that more people saw footage of those
| two incidents versus the universe of gore preceding 2005;
| rather, I'm arguing that gore is far more prevalent and
| accessible after 2005 than before. The images that we saw
| before were generally censored of gore--we saw night-
| vision imagery of bombs raining down on Baghdad, but we
| didn't see the actual death. Similarly, we saw the towers
| fall, but most of the actual death was censored (the
| worst I can recall were people falling from the towers
| from such a great distance that they appeared to be
| specs).
| NalNezumi wrote:
| This. Im 29 and share the same experience.
|
| And we can even go further back; have people checked, old
| black & white cartoon? Some of them are so blatantly
| propaganda/politica/visual horrific that they wouldn't even
| be aired for 15 y.o today. If you take a closer look, even
| Tom & Jerry is quite violent, and most Japanese animation
| that air on kids TV-channel back then also, very sexual.
|
| And these things were airing on TV, broadcasting at a
| specific time and all you had to do as a kid was to push a
| couple of buttons to access it.
| simias wrote:
| Of course there was always violence and sexual content on
| TV and elsewhere, but comparing Japanese anime and Tom
| and Jerry to stuff like
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DeadorVegetable/ (NSFL) or the
| hardcore porn you can find basically everywhere online is
| disingenuous. I don't think I'm very squeamish but
| there's stuff online that still profoundly disturbs me in
| my mid thirties. Meanwhile, and at the risk of bragging a
| little, I can watch any Tom and Jerry easily even late at
| night and still sleep soundly. Hardcore, I know.
|
| You couldn't see the surveillance footage a guy being
| dismembered by a lathe or weird Japanese rape porn in
| 1080p by "pushing a couple of buttons" before the
| internet. Well, at least not where I grew up...
| Person5478 wrote:
| No one is comparing it, the other poster suggested
| completely restricting access to the internet because
| this content exists.
| anthk wrote:
| Well, in Spain I could see Bulma's breasts on manga an
| Shizuka one's as a dark joke in Doraemon. No one gave a
| shit, we have far worse real life problems in the 90's.
| volkl48 wrote:
| As far as I can tell, the group that seems to be the most
| influenced by the sea of disinformation is the people who
| grew up when that wasn't how the world worked. I see far more
| of the middle aged/elderly crowd getting sucked into
| conspiracy nonsense than younger.
|
| I think among people who grew up with the internet, there's
| less assumption that things are true just because someone
| said or wrote them. People can and do lie constantly on the
| internet and without evidence it's not necessarily worth
| believing.
|
| That there's some "news" outlet just blatantly lying and
| making things up, even if it looks to be made
| "professionally" is not surprising to a younger person.
|
| -----------
|
| For personal anectdata:
|
| I'm late 20s and had virtually unsupervised internet access
| and my own personal computer from about age 8 or so, as my
| father brought home old parts from work and let me
| tinker/assemble something, and they didn't watch me too
| closely. (early DSL adoption meant I wasn't limited for long
| by speeds, either).
|
| I pirated and played all the violent games, I downloaded lots
| of porn, and while I was never into "shock"/watching real
| death/gore, the nature of the internet was such that you were
| going to run across plenty of it if you spent enough time
| browsing, I certainly saw a lot.
|
| I turned out to be a fine, reasonably well-adjusted adult, as
| did most of the friends I know who grew up similarly.
|
| I don't know all the details of their sex lives, but I'm not
| aware of any winding up with unrealistic expectations from
| porn. Always seemed like an action movie. Exciting, but not
| "real".
|
| Most of the shock stuff felt like it just made me more
| cautious. "That guy got one whack in the head and he died!"
| was a better argument against getting in a fight than the
| threat of parental/school punishment is. Same regarding a lot
| of other potential teenage risk-taking behavior, like
| reckless driving or getting exceptionally drunk. Watch enough
| people die or ruin their lives at something and you're a lot
| more cautious about it.
|
| -----------
|
| To be clear, I'm not suggesting that it's a net positive for
| kids to view those things at a young age. I'm just not sure
| that the harm is as large or uniform as people making moral
| panic claims often make, either.
|
| Also, something like a third of people lose their virginity
| before 16 (although it's declining) and the median age is ~17
| in the US. A lot of your peers were having real-life sex when
| you ran across porn for the first time. Worrying about them
| watching porn when plenty of them are having sex.....I don't
| know it makes much sense at that point.
|
| -----------
|
| Looking back on that time, I'm primarily concerned with how
| easily I was talking with random strangers in great depth
| than the content I was watching. While there are some
| internet friends from old forums and chatrooms I've kept in
| touch with for 15-20 years now, that I could get to know
| random strangers like that as a preteen obviously had
| potential risks. Worked out well for me and I found great
| communities and interests, but still.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >Leaving a kid on the internet is like living them on a
| shaddy part of town for hours at a time. I'm old enough that
| I only had internet at home when I turned 18, in hindsight I
| feel like I dodged a bullet.
|
| I grew up with uneducated parents who are susceptible to
| believing bullshit peddled by cult leaders. I lived in their
| business, without access to other people since we lived in a
| business area with no other residents.
|
| Access to the internet was the only way I was able to
| interact with educated adults, and I attribute it to as the
| main reason for my economic and social success as an adult.
|
| There was also lots of gore/pornography/other explicit stuff,
| although social media was more limited to instant messengers
| and photo/video content of yourself was not a thing yet. But
| the upside was almost limitless with the access to all the
| information, experts, and ability to interact with someone
| you can learn something from.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Any advice on reasonable alternatives these days?
| prepend wrote:
| It's funny I went online in the 80s and had no supervision
| whatsoever. And it was pretty wild back then. I remember
| adults chatting with me when I was 10 and printing out and
| mailing me game manuals. Chat rooms with every kind of
| pornography and drug and explosive recipes. My parents would
| have been horrified and stopped it.
|
| I survived, so maybe there are missing stories from people
| who didn't. I learned lots of skills used every day for work
| and never did anything I'm ashamed or or criminal.
|
| But with my own kids, I protect them more than I protected
| myself. I wonder about the paradox of whether I would have
| changed anything in my chaotic youth and whether I'm stunting
| my kids by sheltering them. But there's YouTube videos of
| behedding that I don't want to risk my kids' mental health.
|
| I feel like the paradise I envisioned after reading Heilein
| and Dickson and Stephenson is here now and I hate it. Now
| spend my time in the digital Galt's Gulch.
| radium3d wrote:
| I was 12, I self learned how to google properly, write html,
| css and photoshop, how to avoid online scams and
| advertisements, eventually this self learning grew into
| teaching myself PHP, SQL, how to build computers, setup arch
| linux into a LAMP server on my own VPS. Unsupervised internet
| was not all bad. I probably would have avoided internet time
| if I was being watched by my parents. Lol
| kibwen wrote:
| Agreed. It's one thing to say that you don't want to shelter
| your child; totally reasonable, kids _should_ be exposed to a
| wide variety of experiences. But by definition kids lack
| experience, and if you expose them to a distorted image of
| reality, then unless you make an effort to point out that
| distortion, then they will rightfully conflate the distorted
| reality with reality.
|
| To use your example as an analogy, most porn with any
| production value at all will show a drastically distorted
| depiction of what sex is actually like. To be raised on a
| diet of unrealistic porn will not leave you merely ill-
| prepared for an actual sexual relationship, but will actively
| disillusion you when reality fails to match your
| expectations.
|
| If you let your kids use social media, then you need to take
| steps to emphasize the hyperprocessed fiction that it
| represents.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| On the flipside, there's increasingly more and more amateur
| porn. On pornhub, there are many couples making videos of
| themselves and getting millions of views, making a living
| off of this. What these people make is obviously still
| probably setting high expectations (good lighting, edited
| to cut out the awkward parts, etc), but IMO, there is a lot
| more amateur and realistic content out there, and it's what
| many people want to see. I think in the 70s, 80s and 90s
| porn used to be a lot more studio, and now the general
| trend is for more natural, less processed.
|
| I first got access to porn when I was 12, but I heard the
| disclaimer, everyone told me it wasn't realistic, and I
| don't think it skewed my expectations too much. IMO humans
| learn and adapt. I don't think that porn is a threat, but I
| do wish there was more sex education, and maybe
| relationship coaching for teenagers... Teenagers need to be
| taught early to have realistic relationship expectations in
| general, how to approach someone respectfully and accept
| "no" for an answer, consent, etc.
| darepublic wrote:
| Screens are a legit drug, and unfortunately I'm a user. It's
| worse for kids growing up into this, at least when I was a
| child screen time was limited by the kid show time slots, ofc
| its available 24/7, several firehoses worth at all times. Not
| a lot of available resources to combat this, except
| individual efforts Im afraid.
| Person5478 wrote:
| I had certainly viewed my first dirty magazine long before
| the age of 17, as well as seen my share of violent movies and
| video games. When does this end? When cursing around anyone
| under the age of 18 becomes illegal?
|
| The issue with the internet as is currently is more about
| societal pressure. Every device for the last umpteen years
| has come with parental controls that include filtering out
| NSFW-esque material. If your position is that platforms such
| as FB should also include these sorts of parental controls I
| agree, but if your position is that we should restrict kids
| access to the internet as a whole because they might see a
| boob, then I wholeheartedly disagree.
| conradev wrote:
| It is this weird balance because I owe literally everything I
| know about programming to unsupervised internet access:
| asking questions in IRC rooms, finding random programs on
| random websites, posting on obscure forums, etc.
|
| I was able to find some wonderful communities, like the
| iPhone jailbreaking community on IRC, which completely
| changed my life and put me on the path I am on now. I was
| also on Twitter in the early days, too, which was the primary
| way that the iOS development community communicated. Facebook
| allowed me to connect with my high school robotics community,
| as well.
|
| Communities like this existed before my time with Flash
| games, Neopets, MySpace, etc. and continue to this day, with
| the Minecraft modding community, Roblox game building
| community, etc.
|
| But at the same time I also agree that social media has
| become incredibly toxic and addictive, and we don't give
| anyone any tools to navigate it. I ultimately quit social
| media entirely, but my younger sister spends 3.5 hours a day
| on social media. I think this is a relatively new beast, and
| not inherent to the internet itself.
| whatshisface wrote:
| To strongman the OP, would your parents have stopped you
| from talking about programming on IRC if they had observed
| it? Would you stop your kids, if you observed them?
| Watching your kid's internet use doesn't mean not letting
| them use the internet, it means applying your developed
| adult discernment to judge between healthy and unhealthy
| uses.
| JCharante wrote:
| Not OP but I was in a similar situation. They certainly
| wouldn't have encouraged or would have stopped me from
| talking to strangers online. I understand why, you have
| to precautions against things like grooming, but on the
| internet and especially behind text no one knows if
| you're a 12 year old or a 22 year old with poor writing
| skills.
| Descensus wrote:
| I'm not OP, but it's not entirely about the content being
| viewed. A lot of unsupervised online access takes the
| form of large swathes of time.
|
| Not every parent would necessarily want their child
| online for 3 - 5+ hours, especially doing things like
| participating in communities.
| Jestar342 wrote:
| Before the internet we were passing video tapes/films,
| magazines, and prints around with porn and gore. Pre-teen me
| saw a lot of the kind of things you mention before the
| internet was a thing. The students at my school had pseudo-
| competitions for who could get the best porn/gore, earning
| kudos for the bloodiest gore or "hottest" porn. Often the
| lines would blur whens someone found scat or snuff but that's
| a different matter.
|
| Later on in life, I think everyone knew "a guy" at work that
| had all kinds of taboo material. The Weird Eddies or Creepy
| Colins of the world had a black-market snatched from them
| when the internet got popular.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Quick note: It's not the kids that are fooled about
| Hydroxychloroquine, it's the adults. If you're taking away
| juniors Internet, you need to take away your parents'
| connections too...
| emidln wrote:
| > I've always been a bit extreme on this but I more than ever
| believe that it's insane that we consider that leaving
| teenagers with unsupervised internet access is reasonable.
|
| I grew up on the internet. I first connected with I was 11. I
| was first online by myself soon thereafter. I practiced
| writing on the internet while hanging out on the internet. I
| made friends on the internet. I made mistakes on the
| internet. I lost friends on the internet. I learned about
| Linux and programming on the internet. I got a job on the
| internet. All of this happened before I was 16. There is an
| old joke, one that I took to heart as a child, "On the
| internet, nobody knows you're a dog". On the internet, nobody
| knew (or at least cared) that I wasn't an adult. People
| accepted my patches, took my advice, flamed my half-baked
| ideas, and overall treated me as an equal.
|
| As a young adult I started internet companies over the
| internet with business partners I met on the internet. I met
| love interests on the internet. I found new music leading to
| concerts, festivals, and road trips on the internet. I
| learned about Magic: the Gathering strategy, met a lot of
| friends, and coordinated cross-continent travel over the
| internet with people I had only interacted with via IRC.
|
| > Maybe I'm prude or naive but I remember vividly when I
| first saw a pornographic movie at like around 17. It really
| shook me at the time. I wasn't traumatized or anything but it
| made a strong impact on me.
|
| People are different. Maybe I'm a degenerate. I grew up
| watching The Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead. In middle
| school, friends would trade porno mags. A friend had the
| premium cable channels with "Skin-a-max" (Cinemax) playing
| late nights. When I first got online (at 11 years old), I had
| two priorities: porn and learning how to hack like I saw in
| some movies (Wargames, Ferris Bueler's Day Off).
|
| Finding porn was easy since the "filters" were mostly someone
| who largely didn't care configuring a default search engine
| or maybe a DNS blacklist. Once I knew "search engine",
| finding more search engines that weren't filtered was easy. A
| couple queries about how filtering works and I knew enough to
| configure a different DNS resolver. It's not like I went
| looking for Pokemon tips and found hardcore XXX action.
|
| In trying to learn about hacking, I stumbled onto ESR's
| "Hacker Howto". I took it to heart, printed it out, and
| pasted sections on my bedroom wall. "The world is full of
| fascinating problems waiting to be solved. No problem should
| ever have to be solved twice. Boredom and drudgery are evil.
| Freedom is good. Attitude is no substitute for competence." I
| kept this as a mantra. I took the "Basic Hacking Skills"
| section as a formula. Python, C, Lisp, Perl, Java. Check.
| Check. Check. Check. Check. Learn to use a *nix? Done. I
| never was especially good at red team offensive security, but
| "how to hack" put into a search bar changed my life for the
| better.
|
| > These days I expect that most teens experience this at like
| 12yo on their smartphones. Last week I was linked a reddit
| video of some guy dying in absolutely gruesome circumstance
| due to an industrial accident. And then there's the constant
| influx of disinformation. Did you know that
| Hydroxychloroquine cures HIV? I saw a Youtube video claiming
| just that yesterday.
|
| At least in my day, we learned skepticism early on the
| internet. Everyone can be an asshole and most accounts would
| troll you. Getting razzed for your naivete in a chat room or
| message board was a rite of passage. Bullshit comes in a lot
| of flavors, and some people needed to taste the rainbow and
| while others were quicker on the pickup.
|
| I could never deny others the chance to gain what I have
| gained by restricting their ability to access the internet.
| ramphastidae wrote:
| I agree that kids shouldn't use the internet unsupervised,
| but what is the alternative? We were all 15 once. It is 100%
| impossible to stop kids from using the internet if they want
| to. So what's the alternative?
| kibwen wrote:
| Active and available parenting, ideally starting long
| before the teen years where they no longer want to take
| advice from their parents.
|
| Saying that it's 100% impossible to stop kids from using
| the internet is as true as saying that it's 100% impossible
| to stop kids from trying alcohol. But there's a difference
| between a kid getting drunk once at a party and a kid being
| a habitual, daily alcoholic.
|
| As a parent you want to guide them towards healthy ways to
| engage with things that could otherwise destroy them in
| excess. Social media in moderation is fine. Social media in
| excess isn't, and that's where a lot of parents have left
| their kids (because even _they_ don 't know how to use it
| in moderation; society hasn't caught up yet).
| darkwater wrote:
| > Active and available parenting, ideally starting long
| before the teen years where they no longer want to take
| advice from their parents.
|
| This, 1000 times this. Also, leaving kids completely
| without supervision or using screen time/smartphones to
| babysit them it's easy but it's just like tech-debt and
| really any other form of debt. You will pay the
| consequences 10x during their teen years.
| meowkit wrote:
| I've been saying that the internet was designed by engineers,
| for engineers. I don't mean this literally, but in the sense
| that methodical, reasonable adults built out these systems
| without thinking about how the average _person_ , let alone
| teenager, would be using it.
|
| And at this point even a lot of engineers I know fall into
| the traps of addiction and echo chambers quite readily. I
| find of Tristan Harris's "pointing supercharged AI at our
| brains" line to be accurate.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| There's another side to this, though. Letting kids roam the
| internet can give ones who might otherwise be doomed to
| become misfits an opportunity to find community. Being a
| queer kid pre-Internet, for example, _sucked_ , and the Web
| rolling out to households changed a lot of kids' lives. And
| we have a poor cultural memory of what that experience used
| to be like, because, before the rise of online communities, a
| big part of being queer - especially being a queer kid - was
| being subjected to systematic erasure.
|
| I'm not sure how you balance those two things. My sense,
| though, is that the balance was better 20, 25 years ago, when
| the Internet had more small, individualized communities. Most
| of them have since been squashed by the rise of the social
| media oligopoly.
| xen0 wrote:
| I don't think it's reasonable to compare the scales of the
| impact of social media and drugs, simply because far more
| people engage in one over the other.
| csallen wrote:
| Amusingly, you could analyze anything this way if you ignore
| the benefits and only look at the costs.
|
| "Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system that
| required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of
| dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and subjected
| them to invasive scans and searches of their personal
| materials."
|
| "How are schools allowed! They literally imprison our kids for
| upwards of 7 hours a day, feed them substandard food, and
| subject them to Orwellian surveillance, exorbitant record-
| keeping, cruel social hierarchies, and a stress-inducing
| grading system akin to a dystopian social credit system."
|
| I'm not saying the downsides aren't in fact downsides. They
| are. But you can't accurately assess the whole picture without
| taking the upsides into account, too.
| kibwen wrote:
| Rather than alluding to vague upsides, can you list what
| upsides you want to assert that social media provides, so
| that we can do as you say and perform a cost/benefit
| analysis? As both an early adopter and former user of both
| Facebook and Twitter, my eventual conclusion was that
| whatever benefits they offered were vastly outweighed by the
| mental toll they took on me.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| I just finished writing a paper on this. Here are some
| upsides:
|
| Studies have shown that disclosing information about
| oneself is an intrinsically rewarding experience [0].
| Social media offerings provide a platform for sharing
| information easily with a large audience, which activates
| reward mechanisms in the brain. People use social media
| because it makes them feel good, which is probably the
| reason for their explosive growth over the last decades.
|
| Social media offers a way to stay connected with people, or
| at least feel connected, without having to put in much
| effort. When you open the Facebook or Instagram
| application, it is immediately filled with recent pictures
| and status updates of friends and relatives. Not only does
| this provide you with information, it might also motivate
| you to contact those people again, which will then
| reinforce the feeling of friendship. It has been shown that
| having an active social circle is predictive of lower
| stress, increased happiness, positive attitude, and self-
| assessed health [1].
|
| Patients suffering from serious mental illnesses can self-
| organize into peer-to-peer support groups on social media
| platforms. Reported benefits include greater social
| connectedness, feelings of belonging, and being able to
| share personal stories and coping mechanisms. Through this
| empowerment, patients can challenge the stigma associated
| with their condition; and potentially even improve their
| situation by learning from peers, and gaining insight into
| important health decisions and possible remedies. If peer
| support proves insufficient, patients can motivate each
| other to seek professional help. [2]
|
| Social media platforms are one of the most accessible forms
| of long-distance communication. Among the reasons for this,
| is that they are free of charge, an account is set up in a
| matter of minutes, and communication is not limited
| geographically. Furthermore, social media enables certain
| groups of disabled people to communicate with individuals
| they are normally unable to reach. For example, deaf people
| usually communicate through sign language or written text.
| Since the number of sign language ``speakers" is low,
| written text is the most accessible way to communicate with
| others. For them, social media offers an accessible and
| efficient way to stay in touch with friends and relatives
| that are geographically far away. Christine Forsberg showed
| that social media use among the deaf and hard hearing
| increased their feeling of empowerment, when empowerment is
| measured in self-efficacy, self-esteem, and self-
| determination [3].
|
| Happiness, positive attitude, satisfaction, connectedness,
| and increased (mental) health can be assumed to provide
| positive utility, and thus promoting them is ethical from a
| utilitarian viewpoint. It is worth noting however, that
| there is a flipside to most of the effects covered above
| (see section \ref{sec:negative_effects}), and it is unclear
| whether the cumulative utility of all positive and negative
| consquences is positive or not.
|
| [0]: Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell. "Disclosing
| information about the self is intrinsically rewarding". In:
| Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
| United States of America109 (May 2012), pp. 8038-43. doi:
| 10.1073/pnas.1202129109.
|
| [1]: Suwen Lin et al. "Social network structure is
| predictive of health and wellness". In: PLOS ONE 14.6 (June
| 2019), pp. 1-17. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0217264. url:
| https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217264.
|
| [2]: J. A. Naslund et al. "The future of mental health
| care: peer-to-peer support and social media". In
| Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences 25.2 (2016), pp.
| 113-122. doi: 10.1017/S2045796015001067.
|
| [3]: Christine Forsberg. "The Empowerment of Deaf Cochlear
| Implant Users Through Social Media in the UK, the
| Netherlands, and Croatia". MA thesis. July 2020. url:
| http://arno.uvt.nl/show.cgi?fid=152367.
|
| Also, social media has been used to organize riots in the
| Arab spring, Hong Kong, etc.
| skratlo wrote:
| > Social media platforms are one of the most accessible
| forms of long-distance communication
|
| E-mail? Have you heard of it? Signal? Other IM platforms.
| And you continue on selling social media as means of
| friendly communication which is not true. There's
| gazillion alternatives but those were all eaten up by the
| giants. All those use cases and people that you mentioned
| used mailing lists before and were doing just fine.
| cherishorperish wrote:
| Very interesting
|
| > or at least feel connected, without having to put in
| much effort.
|
| I have experienced the other side of this, so to speak,
| having someone think that they have made a connection
| with me or contacted me etc. just because they made a
| post or sent a tweet/text assuming that I'd see it. I
| don't always see these things or spend my time logged
| into these sites.
|
| There are some people (including family members) that
| simply no longer 'talk' to me but think that they are
| 'always telling me' things. I've been caught out with
| things like phone number changes, address changes because
| someone has moved home and think they have 'told me'
| because they did some random tweet to 'everyone' some
| time back.
|
| There are two sides to 'staying connected', social media
| (generally speaking) has made these connections rather
| one-sided. Staying connected should be more like a gentle
| came of catch-and-throw but instead it's more akin to
| beig stood in front of one of those machines that fling
| balls at you relentlessly regardless if you are ready or
| not.
|
| I hate it.
| spoonjim wrote:
| One upside for me is that I only like interacting with
| people about my interests, not about personal stuff. I
| don't want to hear or talk about weather/kids/sports.
| Social media allows me to discuss woodworking with someone
| in Galway instead of whatever little common ground I can
| find with my next door neighbor.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| To quote @mumblemumble:
|
| """
|
| There's another side to this, though. Letting kids roam the
| internet can give ones who might otherwise be doomed to
| become misfits an opportunity to find community. Being a
| queer kid pre-Internet, for example, sucked, and the Web
| rolling out to households changed a lot of kids' lives. And
| we have a poor cultural memory of what that experience used
| to be like, because, before the rise of online communities,
| a big part of being queer - especially being a queer kid -
| was being subjected to systematic erasure.
|
| I'm not sure how you balance those two things. My sense,
| though, is that the balance was better 20, 25 years ago,
| when the Internet had more small, individualized
| communities. Most of them have since been squashed by the
| rise of the social media oligopoly.
|
| """
|
| I don't know if the downsides are worse for Facebook or
| Twitter (engineered for eyeballs and ad clicks), than
| forums, or where Discord lies on the spectrum.
| deeeeplearning wrote:
| >I don't know if the downsides are worse for Facebook or
| Twitter (engineered for eyeballs and ad clicks), than
| forums, or where Discord lies on the spectrum.
|
| They're clearly worse. Forums don't have algorithms
| constantly running trying to hijack your brain stem to
| keep you scrolling and clicking links...
| lovecg wrote:
| Neither does HN, but I personally find it as addictive as
| anything else on the Internet.
| kibwen wrote:
| There are options in your HN profile to help with this.
|
| _" Like email, social news sites can be dangerously
| addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a
| feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are
| three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit,
| and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on
| your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If
| you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be
| allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time,
| with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are
| 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20
| minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3
| hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which
| case your visit clock starts over at zero."_
| pietrovismara wrote:
| Social media are not the internet. If Facebook, Instagram
| and tiktok disappeared tomorrow, the internet would keep
| existing. In my opinion we would all be better, queer
| kids included.
| causalmodels wrote:
| Do you think the online queer community is better or
| worse after Tumblr's self destruction?
| anarchogeek wrote:
| doubt it.
| macNchz wrote:
| Yes I think this is an important distinction. In my view
| the most salient divider between modern social media and
| other social things that use the internet is the presence
| of activity feeds. The model of pushing everything you do
| to everyone you're connected with was a huge shift.
|
| I was on the internet communicating with friends and
| strangers on forums/message boards, IRC, AIM, and pre-
| feed Facebook well before the news feed was the default
| model. The "stalker feed", as it was known in 2006(?)
| when it was first launched, totally changed things, both
| in terms of the volume and ease of scrolling through
| content and the kinds of "news" that would be brought to
| your attention.
|
| Something that sticks out in my memory of when Facebook's
| feed launched (I was in college at the time) was the
| additional pressure surrounding the "relationship status"
| field. Suddenly it wasn't just people who actively looked
| up your profile who might notice that you were "In a
| relationship with X", instead the act of updating it was
| broadcast to hundreds of people. Low stakes for adults,
| perhaps, but genuinely stressful for teenagers!
| raunakdag wrote:
| I agree - I feel like one really important misconception
| to set aside is lumping "communication" in with "social
| media".
|
| From a teenager's perspective, Instagram and TikTok are a
| lot worse for your mental health than say, Snapchat and
| iMessage.
|
| In addition, for the queer community example - I'd say
| the perfect parallel for today would be Discord. Anyone
| can find a community and make friends on Discord, but
| it's probably not 5% as damaging to mental health because
| it's a communication based platform
| Bodell wrote:
| This is all personal anecdotal, and not intended to be a
| real argument either way.
|
| I have and have had internet in my house since I was
| 5-10. And I'd have to say: I'm still a misfit, social
| pariah, currently with no friends. Ironically the most
| respect (I mean this in the most basic sense of respect)
| I get from other humans is on here. But things were
| better when I was younger and worse now that I am 31. I'm
| not misremembering having more friends when I had places
| to go and do things in person, I definitely did. And
| these days I find it increasingly difficult to talk to
| people who have ever shrinking attention spans. Why is
| meme speak becoming pervasive in spoken language? Even
| when I call my mother she can't put down her Facebook or
| emails for a few minutes to talk. We used to be close.
| She says she has no time for anything. She's a book
| publisher and doesn't have time to read the one or two
| articles I send her every 6 months or so. Even when they
| are strictly about her field of work. She reads the first
| paragraph and says she got the "gist", which means we
| can't talk about it because she has no idea what the
| other 20 pages said, nor does she care because... well
| "haven't you seen the top reddit post today. I can't
| believe (random person) said (random comment) to (random
| other person)"
|
| To me so many people have just become very boring. I mean
| what's worth saying/reading that takes 3-5 seconds,
| really? It's not that I think the internet or online
| social communication is all bad, or course it's not, but
| in my experience the bad does outweigh the good. And with
| suicide and depression rates rising beyond a standard
| deviation in gen z girls it's hard to feel as if it were
| worse from them in the past.
| danenania wrote:
| "Even when I call my mother she can't put down her
| Facebook or emails for a few minutes to talk."
|
| Anecdotally, it seems like the older generations are some
| of the worst offenders when it comes to this stuff. The
| stereotype is of two millennials sitting at a restaurant
| and both spending the entire meal staring at their
| phones. While that does happen, I think it's actually a
| lot more common now for older people to behave like this,
| maybe because they've had less time to develop any form
| of social or psychological resistance.
|
| I think we need an evolution of social etiquette to
| account for this brave new world of self-absorption and
| rudeness. Pulling out your phone while in the middle of a
| conversation is incredibly rude, but people do it
| constantly, without a second thought, in both personal
| and professional contexts. It should be acceptable to
| kindly but firmly shame people for this kind of anti-
| social behavior, just like we'd shame people (perhaps not
| so kindly) if they started spitting in everyone's drinks
| or being blatantly cruel to others. I'm not trying to
| claim moral superiority, as I'm as guilty as anyone of
| doing it on occasion, but I'd honestly be _happy_ if the
| person I 'm with would say "put that thing away and pay
| attention to what I'm saying you dick!".
| fingerlocks wrote:
| Older people stare at their phones when they're in
| restaurants because they are often with their spouse, and
| they already spend 100% of their time with each other.
| Their lives are encumbered with child rearing, house
| maintenance, and other time-consuming adulthood chores.
| So when you see them at a restaurant, they're both
| thinking _Thank god we can finally sit down and
| peacefully stare at our phones in peace_.
| danenania wrote:
| I don't really care if two people would both rather do
| that (except that it's kind of sad for them). But similar
| to the GP, I have some older relatives and acquaintances
| who do this constantly no matter who they're with. They
| seemingly just don't think there's anything wrong with
| it.
| oblio wrote:
| I'd say things are worse. Forums were a more personal
| experience. Fewer people, shared interests, avatars.
|
| Look at HN - how many commenters do you personally
| recognize, except for the ones that are popular because
| they're part of YC (so for things outside of this
| discussion forum) or because they also submit articles
| they're written (so again for things outside of this
| forum)?
|
| I probably recognize maybe 10 people, and with the way
| this discussion forum is designed, I recognize them
| despite the software, not because of it.
| [deleted]
| FalconSensei wrote:
| > Look at HN - how many commenters do you personally
| recognize
|
| It would be 0 for me.
|
| Twitter is better for me in that way, but because is only
| short interactions, it's not like I'm close to them.
|
| With forums it was way better, for me at least. It felt
| like family, and in 1 forum I was, we actually had like a
| 'newbie adoption' thing. With many people there, we
| actually ended up being internet friends, while on
| Twitter we might be more like acquaintances.
| SamBam wrote:
| Yup. I really felt like I "knew" people on forums. I
| recognized their names. Our inside jokes were ones _we_
| had created.
|
| These days I never recognize a single username on any
| forum (HN and Reddit, mostly), even tiny sub-reddits. The
| culture there is created by the masses, so there are
| plenty of in-jokes only because tens of thousands of
| people repeat them every week.
|
| Twitter is the closest I have to a site where I recognize
| a stranger's voice and opinions. But that's typically
| one-sided -- even in small hobbiest groups, it tends to
| be the well-known producers talking to everyone else.
| fossuser wrote:
| I grew up in a suburb and pretty isolated intellectual
| vacuum where it was hard to learn anything.
|
| I got internet access I could use regularly when I was
| around 12.
|
| Things were less developed then ~2002 and I didn't have
| FB until 2007 so maybe it's not directly comparable to
| the modern web, but the information access was amazing.
|
| There was so much available to read and learn and most
| importantly, it helped with unknown unknowns.
|
| When you're isolated like that and you don't live in a
| community of people that can introduce you to new things
| it's really hard to find where to even look on the map of
| interesting ideas. You don't know what exists. I wouldn't
| have been able to learn about computers, wouldn't have
| eventually been able to come out to the bay area as early
| as I did. I think people don't realize how the internet
| frees people that don't otherwise have a personal
| connection to someone who knows things.
|
| My case isn't even that exceptional (my dad is an MD and
| smart, he was just the first in his family to really
| succeed so didn't know how to navigate a lot of the
| social class stuff) - someone who truly grew up in
| poverty would have even less access to things via their
| personal network.
|
| At least for me, there is way more good with the web than
| bad.
|
| The web and internet access may drive most of humanity to
| tribal motivated reasoning and echo chambers, but for
| others it leads to better critical thinking, learning new
| ideas and arguments and changing your mind/becoming a
| _better_ thinker.
|
| The upside potential is still there and huge - it's
| easier to learn than ever.
|
| It just didn't fix the fact that the average person is
| not well suited to take advantage of it.
| devlopr wrote:
| There are upsides. From providing self estem from a
| different source from the local.
|
| It has raised awareness like never before.
|
| It has provided an income for some.
|
| It allows new peer groups not available locally
|
| It provides a safer space to interact with strangers.
|
| Where we got it wrong was connecting these profiles to real
| life names. That has ruined people's lives.
| scook wrote:
| To put a finer point on one of yours, social media made
| very obvious the existence of violence against racial and
| ethnic minorities by law enforcement, among other social
| ills.
|
| It's hard and slow work to gain populist support for
| socially progressive policy. We wouldn't be talking about
| this stuff were it not for the truths presented to us by
| the people it affects most profoundly.
| prepend wrote:
| > From providing self estem from a different source from
| the local.
|
| The article explicitly covers this and shows a net
| negative. So saying there are positive effects isn't very
| helpful as any gains are more than offset by negatives.
|
| I think your argument is better through quantification.
| As I don't think anyone is making the case that social
| media doesn't have any benefits at all, the argument is
| that the negatives outweigh the benefits.
|
| Of course, I think it's easier to quantify the negatives
| than positives. How do I quantify the positive effect
| that offsets the probably correlated increase in preteen
| girl hospitalizations? [0]
|
| [0] sorry trying to find the easiest citation for the
| graph in Lukiakoff and Haidt's book Coddling of America's
| Youth [1]
| https://livingonparr.wixsite.com/livingonparr/single-
| post/20...
|
| [1] https://www.thecoddling.com/
| thisisnico wrote:
| And for many, the ego had increased exponentially with
| the attention gathered.
| reaperducer wrote:
| None of the things you list are unique to social media.
| They all existed before the rise of the socials. Many of
| them existed before the internet.
| scndalousarbite wrote:
| Nonsense. Social media and the sensational, vain culture
| it has inculcated it is entirely damaging and without
| value. It is _only_ revolutionary and disparages any
| prior merit and censure without reason. It is a denial of
| service on reason and experience claiming precedence and
| priority without any historical context.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I think you have the causation exactly backwards - the
| vain culture is what gave rise to social media. Japanese
| "social media" including forums and image boards are
| biased towards being nonentity as possible. Famous cat
| owners make efforts to be non-entity as possible compared
| to US ones often involving owner presence even if just
| dangling a toy and talking to the cat.
|
| Japan sure as hell isn't perfect socially but they
| demonstrate that the source of social problems may be
| found in the mirror collectively and not in new
| technology.
| everdrive wrote:
| This is like saying the written word existed before the
| printing press. It certainly did, but technology has
| fundamentally changed its impact.
| tux1968 wrote:
| Yes, but the increased availability of such things around
| the globe and across social strata is unparalleled.
| scook wrote:
| Availability and immediacy, too. What does it mean when
| information becomes available to a broad swath of the
| population immediately after it comes into existence? For
| instance, we're already witnessing the effects of speedy
| dissemination of dis- and misinformation.
| notahacker wrote:
| Connecting those profiles to real life names has the
| upside of enabling those teenagers to stay in touch with
| old friends when everyone moves around as adults
|
| (and I wouldn't say the social networks where profiles
| don't need to be connected to real names are necessarily
| any better)
| stretchcat wrote:
| I don't see what real life names have to do with keeping
| in touch. I've kept in touch with people for 15+ years
| using IRC nicknames. In a few cases I don't know the
| other person's real name at all.
|
| Sure people can change their nicknames, but people change
| their real names too. I've gone by three different 'real'
| names throughout my life. That may not be super common,
| but people getting married and changing their name at
| least once is certainly not rare. The way I see it, a
| 'real' name is only more real than the others insofar as
| it's the name the government uses for you. But that sort
| of realness isn't relevant for social purposes. For
| social purposes, the 'realest' name is the name people
| call you.
| notahacker wrote:
| I mean "here's all the people you went to school with"
| was literally Facebook's raison d'etre. If I was relying
| on stored phone numbers or email addresses I'd be a lot
| less likely to be in touch with some of them (including
| those whose numbers I still have!)
|
| Sure, it's possible to stay in touch with a long list of
| monikers and sometimes even not much more difficult, but
| (going back to the OP I responded to) it's possible and
| often no more difficult to ruin people's lives across
| pseudonymous services too. Lack of real name is probably
| more of an impediment to the casually interested old
| friend than the concerted hate campaign.
| devlopr wrote:
| It's a valid point and I have found value in looking up
| past friends on facebook.
|
| I'm not sure a teenager has the same value. Anyone under
| 18 shouldn't have real identifying names them.
|
| When facebook came out you had people isolated into
| networks of schools. Those structures provided better
| protections and freedom. The transition to fully public
| with forced real names made facebook into something not
| for kids but great for older folks.
| claudiawerner wrote:
| Your analysis of schools doesn't seem so far-off for me, and
| it's not unreasonable to say that _not_ every aspect of
| social life should be measured by a calculus of upsides to
| badsides. The utilitarian 'weighing' mode of thinking is not
| appropriate for every situation, and I think you
| (inadvertently) made a good case for why, at least with
| schools. The fact that schools also educate can be worked
| into an analysis even of the 'bad sides' as not contingent,
| but a part of the same system that creates the 'bad sides'.
|
| The very _fact_ that we consider weighing the 'upsides' of
| something is if we give it, or part of it, legitimacy in the
| first place - legitimacy that may not be deserved. I'm silent
| on the topic of social media, but we wouldn't even begin to
| consider the 'upside' of murder or rape or defamation, for
| instance - and that's not because people in the past have
| done that analysis for us, it's because collective experience
| has shown the analysis isn't worth doing - that the
| utilitarian analysis is the wrong method to apply to the
| question, just as there are good and bad methods in science
| or philosophy.
| titzer wrote:
| > But you can't accurately assess the whole picture without
| taking the upsides into account, too.
|
| Trust me, with trillion dollar corporations pushing their
| propaganda nonstop and self-important, self-appointed lords
| of industry convincing themselves every little tweak to their
| website is world-changing, the "upsides" need no signal boost
| from me.
|
| Sorry to be a bit of a downer, but we absolutely should be
| talking about the downsides instead of listening to over-
| powerful CEOs tell us how great their crack is.
|
| Also, you forgot that planes emit CO2, which is not just a
| subjective judgment, but is objectively bad for our planet in
| large quantities. ;)
| op03 wrote:
| This is not about upsides and downsides. The truth is execs
| in Twitter, Facebook and Youtube had no clue what upsides and
| downside would be produced by the system they created.
|
| The happily took credit for the upsides and for the longest
| time, like almost a decade, laughed out of the room anyone
| talking about the downsides.
|
| Such people are still in charge of these fucking companies.
| deeeeplearning wrote:
| There's a reason these people will come out and say they
| don't let their kids use the apps they work on...
| Nasrudith wrote:
| That luddite standard of "expected to know all upsides and
| downsides of something novel" bugs the royal crap out of
| me. It not only demands omniscience but implicitly assumes
| perfection of the status quo by not holding it to the same
| standards. To call forums for speech reckless is a very
| novel standard that back in the 90s and 00s would get you
| mocked as sounding like a third world dictator.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| > But you can't accurately assess the whole picture without
| taking the upsides into account, too.
|
| apologies but it sounds like PR from the tobacco industry
| before they got regulated. wonder how we'll look at this in
| 10-15 years time. the "let's listen to both sides" argument
| has no place on something this evil and damaging (not just to
| children) imo.
| grahamburger wrote:
| On the other hand, 'Social media damages teenagers mental
| health' sounds a lot like puritan arguments against rock
| music, weed, and video games from decades past. All of
| those things had legit studies done on them that showed
| harm, too. Honestly I think the kids are gonna be alright.
| johnfn wrote:
| Well, sometimes they get things right, like (only
| stretching slightly) alcohol, which is not great in
| excess. You have to consider these things individually
| rather than trying to draw generalizations like "all
| puritan backlash is wrong."
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| These days I think the Puritans were right about some of
| that stuff.
|
| Weed is pretty addicting. It's nowhere near as bad for
| you as it's been made out to be, but it's still bad for
| you.
|
| Music is the worst in my opinion. Most of the most
| popular music is full of terrible lyrics which only
| promote bad things and rarely ever promote good things.
| Constant misogyny, hypersexuality, etc. A large part of
| pop music is selling "sexy" older boy bands to preteen
| girls (which is super creepy).
|
| And kids are addicted to this stuff like crazy. I've seen
| 8 year old kids throw tantrums because someone told them
| they can't listen to this garbage pop music while doing
| homework.
|
| It's not good for small kids to be exposed to sexuality
| the way pop music does it. And that's super obvious. If
| thinking that makes me a Puritan, then so be it.
| everdrive wrote:
| >"Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system
| that required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of
| dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and
| subjected them to invasive scans and searches of their
| personal materials."
|
| I feel like you're dead on for air travel. I absolutely hate
| it, and wish it were drastically reduced.
| antihero wrote:
| I mean if you want to factor in the benefits of drugs, be my
| guest, because spoiler alert: They are fucking awesome.
| [deleted]
| dav43 wrote:
| I must concur. There is a reason taking drugs has been
| around for 1000's of years - within reason.
| enkid wrote:
| Lots of things have been around for 1000's of years.
| Rape, murder, clothes, but that doesn't mean they are a
| good thing.
| LocalH wrote:
| Being around for thousands of years has zero bearing on
| whether something is good or bad. It can speak to
| relative safety. In all the thousands of years, there has
| yet to be a single death that can be attributed directly
| to cannabis (and I don't count "marijuana-related visits"
| to hospitals where regardless of which ailment a person
| has, if they test positive for cannabis it becomes a
| "marijuana-related visit", nor do I count deaths where a
| person just happened to have smoked beforehand).
| enkid wrote:
| Good point!
| mhh__ wrote:
| Or at least they should be if we both detach the stigma and
| stop lumping in things like Cannabis in with Crack
| hhh wrote:
| Absolutely, cannabis is leaps and bounds worse than
| crack.
| LocalH wrote:
| Nice troll
| oblio wrote:
| There is a difference.
|
| Planes and schools are by design positive things.
|
| Social media by design is at best neutral.
|
| Social media is designed to benefit its owners and its
| customers (ad sellers). At best social media is designed to
| entertain its users, but the big caveat is that it does it
| through whatever means necessary. And that's a big caveat.
| Because at the end of the day, it's an online casino. And we
| regulate casinos to hell and back.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Worse than drugs? That is downright hyperbollic and hysterical
| especially given that many drugs can cause permanent brain
| damage.
|
| I find it impossible to take the arguments for a ban seriously
| when they were recycled from D&D, heavy metal, video games, and
| goth and emo music.
| bengale wrote:
| It seems to damage most people's mental health. It's crazy the
| sort of radicalisation going on with older people.
| pedro1976 wrote:
| Social media should be forbidden until the age of 18. Just
| consider beeing mobbed, you will be exposed 24/7.
| SunlightEdge wrote:
| I think a problem with teenagers and social media is that they
| are often not mature enough to handle toxic elements on social
| media such as: 1. Trolling 2. Heated political discussions 3.
| Stalkers 4. Obsession with likes and doing negative behaviours to
| get likes 5. In general not knowing how to handle people
|
| Social media should probably be banned for under 18
| waynesonfire wrote:
| Is this similar to the damage done by video games? I suspect this
| is full of shit.
| mraza007 wrote:
| I hundred percent agree with this report as social is basically a
| modern day drug. It has played so well with our brain mechanism
| and made us addicted to it.
|
| If you want to leave social especially as a teenager you have you
| try really hard as you fall into something called fomo(fearing of
| missing out)
| confidantlake wrote:
| I think it is the same for adults and I think news sites are also
| up there with social media. Just a constant barrage of NEGATIVE
| THING HAPPENED!!! that you have no control of and can't do
| anything about.
| eli wrote:
| It's remarkable how similar this is to the previous panic over
| children watching television. And before that, reading comic
| books. And before that listening to the radio...
| sillyquiet wrote:
| Social media as it exists currently is like being surrounded 24/7
| by nattering, gossiping, scatterbrains playing an eternal game of
| brinksmanship and striving at one-upping each other.
|
| So yeah, I can intuitively believe this study.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| It jives with my perspective too, but I can't help also feeling
| like that's an "old man yells at cloud" viewpoint. The way kids
| use social media today is fundamentally different to my
| experience. Like the way my parents viewed IRC usage as an
| outlet for kidnapping or whatever. Kids grew up immersed in
| social media, and probably use it for rich and important social
| interactions that are alien to me. I view social media as a
| largely performative, toxic space and I've quit most of it. But
| newer generations might see a lot of value that I don't. (And
| that's not helped by constantly seeing articles about
| cyberbullying, depressive correlation articles like OP, etc.)
| Verdex wrote:
| This is really off topic, but I just wanted to highlight how
| important the simpsons are to communication. Like, "old man
| yells at cloud" causes me to almost immediately understand
| your point (at least I feel I understand your point). The
| rest of your comment is almost unnecessary (although it is
| appreciated because it helps confirm that I am getting you).
|
| Personally, the experience is a bit incredible.
| Bakary wrote:
| Before the Simpsons this was just "get off my lawn",
| possibly inspired by some other piece of media long
| forgotten
| lovecg wrote:
| Apparently made popular by David Letterman in the
| eighties so not much older than the Simpsons. It makes
| sense for it to not be very old, as most people didn't
| own lawns until mid twentieth century or so.
|
| The lawn as a concept has a fascinating history on its
| own. It's a remnant of aristocratic signaling "look how
| much land I have that I can afford to put aside some of
| it over here for no reason".
| sillyquiet wrote:
| The 'old man yells at cloud' view point is an exaggeration of
| a valid mode of thinking. New and different !== bad
| inherently, but new and different !== good either. Outsiders
| have a valid perspective on things too.
| mtippett wrote:
| It cuts both ways.
|
| One child (reserved/shy) - has had probably more negative impact
| than anything else in her life. From the very first access to
| tech has continually found opportunity to find toxic, negative
| communities (hentai, r/teenagers, edtwt, sh, bdsm). Any attempt
| to reduce results in hiding and lying. The speed that a kid can
| change window or swipe away is ridiculous. Literally can't find a
| way that tech has benefitted her.
|
| Another child (shy too), enamored with anything that teaches her
| more (tik tok, youtube, etc).
|
| The big difference is that the second child isn't looking for
| community. The first child is looking for community but can only
| find community in echo chambers that reflect back teenage angst,
| and those echo chambers run deep.
|
| I can only hope that the first child grows into an well adjusted
| adult, and while not social media, toxic and negative online
| communities are just simply too easier to slide into.
| known wrote:
| Antidote https://archive.is/QaeAg
| jMyles wrote:
| Closed-source algorithms designed to manipulate behavior, sell
| shit, and make you envy your friends are antisocial media.
| [deleted]
| INTPenis wrote:
| Don't mean to sound deep and profound here but I think life in
| general damages your mental health. Social media just brings it
| to you in a superficial format.
|
| But I do also believe those little notifications can be
| addictive.
| wackro wrote:
| That's very cynical. It's possible to enjoy life more and more
| as time goes on. Read Triumphs of Experience. My dad is one of
| those lucky people.
|
| Besides, even if life itself /is/ damaging in general, that
| doesn't explain the teen suicide rate etc, or any of the
| findings from this report specifically pertaining to teens.
| Bakary wrote:
| It's more a case of happy people and unhappy people being
| largely unable to understand each other and then turning
| their general outlook into a theory of the world. Even a
| single person can have trouble remembering their own
| happiness when they sink into depression and their past pain
| when they are breathing life into their lungs.
| samsquire wrote:
| Modern life is indeed terrible. Being depressed sucks.
|
| I think there is a missing institution that should exist to
| protect people from market effects.
|
| The raw edge of the market is driving a wedge into people's
| lives. People need to be protected but they're just a few
| decisions away from loss.
|
| Society doesn't do enough for the losers of the world, it's a
| winner take all system.
| wackro wrote:
| I don't think markets and mental health are quite as
| intimately related. I think it's more to do with living in an
| individualistic society where we have less of a social net to
| fall back on. And I mean 'social' as in a close-knit
| community, nothing political.
| jjice wrote:
| I was addicted to Twitter in high school. I spent hours on it at
| night, getting no sleep. I spent so much time and mental
| bandwidth thinking of funny things to say or memes to make to get
| more likes. I was addicted to the likes and keeping up with
| everyone I knew.
|
| First semester of college, I stopped using Twitter. My sleep got
| better, I had more free time, and I was noticeably happier and
| freer. I no longer spent time in that dopamine cycle.
|
| I've been weening off of Reddit and HN the past few months as
| well. YouTube is my next beast to conquer, and that might be the
| biggest one for me right now. I'm trying to adapt to longer form
| content again, instead of only watching videos under a minute or
| reading 280 character tweets. I want to have an attention span
| again, I really do.
|
| Is social media an inherently evil thing? I don't think so, but I
| don't think I should use it. I also think that it can be toxic
| for teenagers in general. There are a variety of reasons, but the
| one that applied to me was the dopamine cycle caused by "likes".
| causalmodels wrote:
| This comes shockingly close to my experience growing up playing
| WoW.
| JCharante wrote:
| I went from playing 8 hours / day (well, per night
| truthfully) of Eve Online during high school to logging in
| every few months when I began college. The new environment of
| college made me too busy with "IRL" stuff.
|
| I wouldn't say that social media is inherently bad because it
| can be addicting, because games aren't seen as inherently bad
| because they can be addicting.
| anthk wrote:
| I use Twitter via Nitter.net and just a few Unix people.
|
| As if doesn't have infinite scroll, is less addicting.
| sibeliuss wrote:
| Getting off of Facebook and Twitter was the best thing I ever
| did - I can't believe how much more mental space I have now
| that I'm no longer stuck in conversation loops with strangers.
|
| Interestingly, it was a mushroom trip that did it. The mushroom
| spirit (or whatever you want to call it) lucidly explained how
| I was wasting my life on those websites. The next day I quit,
| and its been years now, though I def felt withdrawals for a few
| weeks being off of twitter. Now it's like I was never even
| there.
|
| I feel so bad for all of the young people who can't understand,
| due to peer pressure, just how bad it is for them. And shame on
| parents for not making more of an effort to ask questions.
| jtr1 wrote:
| Glad you're getting some space from them. I'm doing the same
| myself. Not sure how much I blame parents, though. These
| sites are designed like slot machines, which means there are
| a number of professionals and executives out there who
| consciously sought to addict people to their platforms. Shame
| on them.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Now do adults.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Well there is the attention economy, and then there is also
| social media which facilitates comparison to your actual peers
| not mere aspirational influencer types. No doubt both are bad
| more mental health, but I wonder what the breakdown is. For
| example, maybe less Instagram more TikTok might actually be
| marginally good for people's mental health.
| mrfusion wrote:
| I'm immune to most social media but for me the saddest thing is
| losing respect for 70% of the people I know. Just seeing the
| ignorance they post and comments they make.
| hannob wrote:
| Response from a person with actual expertise in the topic:
| https://twitter.com/OrbenAmy/status/1354397497750335488
|
| (tl;dr it's science by press release, has various methodological
| weaknesses and does not account for a likely bidirectional
| relationship of causation, i.e. a classic correlation/causation
| confusion)
| duxup wrote:
| I'm trying to teach my 10 year old son.
|
| He's not on social media, but does play games online with others.
|
| I'm working really hard to enforce a sort of "If it isn't
| positive, you don't feel good about it... time to not do it for a
| while / find another game / people to play with."
|
| I'm trying to teach him to evaluate and shape his own experiences
| online and make choices based on that.
| Minor49er wrote:
| Do you use any sort of parental control software/hardware to
| keep him off of social media? Or is it just a rule?
| duxup wrote:
| Anything with an internet connection requires some level of
| supervision. There's no free access to internet connected
| devices at this point, have to ask, use in spaces where we
| monitor, etc.
| Sindrome wrote:
| No shit?
| josh_carterPDX wrote:
| And in other news, water is wet.
| jl2718 wrote:
| Imagine you are the chairman of Phillip Morris in 1995. You
| control one of the biggest companies in the world, absolutely
| full of cash. You also know that your product is just bad all
| around for everybody whether they use it or not. One of your
| corporate lawyers tells you that you need to immediately break
| yourself up, sell off all the components to foreign buyers, cease
| all operations in the United States, and cash out the company to
| the shareholders. You pass; this will be no big deal. The next
| three years are living hell, morning to night sitting in a
| courthouse listening to your customers detail how you destroyed
| their lives. At the end you get a $200B settlement against you,
| your company is dead, everybody hates you, and you are no longer
| welcome in any of your social circles. Was it worth it? If a
| company is required to do the best thing for the shareholders,
| then shouldn't it require them to cash out at the zenith of their
| value? Otherwise if they are going to ride all the way down, how
| is the stock ever worth anything?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Phillip Morris didn't operate a sophisticated propaganda
| machine capable of steering national opinion in its own favor
| and indeed directing the course of democracy (if we are to
| believe that foreign actors can side-channel attack Twitter's
| algos to influence elections, then it naturally follows that
| Twitter can influence elections with direct control over its
| algorithms). I don't mean this in a contrarian sense (I agree
| with you), moreso just venting my pessimism that things will
| change.
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| > Phillip Morris didn't operate a sophisticated propaganda
| machine...
|
| What? Yes, it did, that's literally what it did do.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I wasn't using "machine" in the figurative sense of an
| advertising department, I meant "a literal machine", like
| Twitter's algorithms. I can't imagine Phillip Morris in its
| heyday having 1% of the influence that Twitter enjoys
| today.
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| I'm not sure why we have gone down this rabbit hole, but
| you're just mistaken.
|
| Phillip Morris used its propaganda to lie to people about
| health risks and "benefits" of smoking, sold an addictive
| product to addicts, and used its resulting people power
| to subvert democratic decisions.
|
| It didn't do this with transistor technology, sure. But
| cigarettes have hugely more Daily Active Users than
| Twitter, still today.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| You're insisting on fighting that straw man. Yes, Phillip
| Morris used propaganda and influenced a politician here
| or there. That's fundamentally different than Twitter,
| _whose very essence_ is a machine for influencing people
| at scale, including who they vote for. At a certain
| point, a difference of degree becomes a difference of
| kind.
|
| You could argue that "airplanes are no different than
| hot-air balloons" on the basis that they're both aerial
| modes of transportation, and you'd be right in the strict
| sense that you've framed the debate, but you'd be
| ignoring the original point and steering the debate away
| from anything that might be considered insightful.
| Frankly, I don't have any interest in engaging in that
| kind of discourse (and also it's generally against the
| spirit of this forum).
| ChrisRR wrote:
| Social media damages everyone's mental health it seems.
|
| For some reason it seems to bring out the worst in so many
| people, and people think it's now acceptable to post online the
| awful thoughts that they would've kept to themselves
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > Social media damages everyone's mental health it seems.
|
| Does it? I've been using social media extensively for almost 30
| years now (and now building social platforms for nearly a
| decade), and a lot of the biggest opportunities I've gotten in
| my life/career have come from social media. Whatever anxiety it
| can cause on a day-to-day basis, I feel like you more than make
| back in various benefits over the long term.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| You literally just said it, it causes anxiety on a day to day
| basis. Whether you're handling that anxiety well or not, it's
| not healthy to be managing anxiety on a daily basis.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Thing I noticed is that teens are responding to the thinking
| fads with a lot of intensity. They'll overthink their issues,
| their sexuality, their identity. Internet amplifies the already
| amplifying mind ..
| kreeben wrote:
| >> Social media damages everyone's mental health
|
| It may seem that way but don't believe it's 100% accurate.
|
| Mental pressure built up within yourself, whatever is their
| cause, get somewhat released after a good cry. Afterwards you
| feel a little bit refreshed. You feel a little bit less sad.
| The anger within you is not as prominent.
|
| Lashing out on people, starting flame wars in your favorite
| online forum, screaming, yelling and DEMANDING to be heard,
| shouldn't that also release some of the tensions we all carry
| around with us from time to time? Wouldn't that leave us a
| little less motivated to go out IRL and actually hurt someone
| physically, a little less motivated to sit down and furiously
| start on the next evil manifesto?
|
| My own brain, though, is not built for social media. I need to
| see the nervous twitch in your eye, your conniving smile or the
| loving wink of your eye in order to fully understand you and I
| think oftentimes when you misunderstand me it's because you
| didn't see my eye twitching or my mouth smiling. But I've heard
| other people being absolutely in love with it. It can't be all
| bad.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| I think about the times I've lashed out, screamed and yelled
| at someone and you know what? It felt pretty good. At first.
| Then I felt worse. WAY worse because I knew I had hurt the
| person I had yelled at.
|
| So I think you're right that while it is a release, it's an
| anti-productive one.
|
| One analogy I saw once likened it to having a balloon. You
| forgot to take out the trash this morning--the balloon got
| blown up a little. You got stuck in traffic--the balloon got
| blown up a little more. All those little things happening
| throughout the day and blowing up that balloon a little bit
| more each time and pretty soon that balloon is going to
| violently pop. We can choose things in our life that release
| that balloon periodically however, and in doing so it never
| gets so full that it pops.
|
| To me, there is no difference between lashing out online or
| in person and is more akin to that balloon popping (or, at
| the very least, adding air to it) than it is releasing air
| from it.
| kreeben wrote:
| I suppose you're right. Lashing out is not a slow release
| of the pressure within that will save you from popping your
| balloon, it's the pop itself.
|
| Not all people have set up a structure in their lives that
| allow them to slowly release that pressure. We do not all
| have people in our lives that we can talk to about our
| feelings. Social media might help these folks.
|
| If I were to lash out at you during lunch or while we're in
| meeting, people would probably ask me to calm down and say
| "hey dude, what's going on, you're acting irrational, where
| is this anger coming from?" and "can we help you in some
| way, so that you won't feel the need to be so aggressive?"
|
| Social media, however, has not only made flame wars easier
| to achieve, it has also made it much easier to ignore any
| concern we might have for the lasher-outers, the people who
| are clearly in need of some love and affection. In social
| media, we burn these people by stripping them of their
| karma.
|
| I find poorly designed karma systems, not social media, to
| be at fault.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| To take your analogy a little further: if we all started
| saying to someone who started lashing out online, "Hey
| dude, what's going on? You're acting irrational. Where's
| this anger coming from? What can I/we do to help?" would
| it subdue the flames and vitriol that exists on social
| media? Maybe. I don't know. It's worth a try.
|
| What I suspect would be better would be to pick up the
| phone and call that person and say those things. The
| release of venting verbally with a person who is
| understanding and prepared to accept the venting is
| likely significantly more productive and healthier than
| over text.
|
| Then again, 99% of the time, we don't even know that
| persons name, much less their phone number. Therein lies,
| I think in part, the crux of the problem: I'm a tribe
| member who is able to throw stones at a member of a
| different tribe without immediate or clear consequence.
| karmelapple wrote:
| I've seen it work before, but it's rare.
|
| The algorithms don't encourage reading of responses like
| that typically... and, alas, human nature doesn't really
| encourage people to "like" or "love" or otherwise
| strongly react to messages like that.
| kreeben wrote:
| @Zelphyr I feel refreshed by the way you humored me and
| my weird, half-baked ideas in this little sub thread.
| karmelapple wrote:
| The algorithms that all major social media sites are in
| large part to blame.
|
| If the algorithms didn't exist, the most recent would
| appear first.
|
| If the algorithms were tuned differently, NLP could be
| used to pick out the most thoughtful and caring messages
| to show people, rather than the most liked or most
| emotionally charged.
|
| I think any social media company using an algorithm
| should be responsible for what they show, since they have
| switched from publishing everything to picking winners
| and losers.
| waterhouse wrote:
| > It felt pretty good. At first. Then I felt worse. WAY
| worse because I knew I had hurt the person I had yelled at.
|
| > So I think you're right that while it is a release, it's
| an anti-productive one.
|
| That ... actually sounds like it had the result of making
| you not want to do it again in the future, and if that's
| the case, one could say it _was_ productive. And if lashing
| out online has less of a bad impact on the person on the
| other end than lashing out in person, then that seems like
| an improvement to me.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| The difference is, I had to physically be around that
| person afterwards. I had to see how my actions affected
| that person.
|
| I don't have to see that online. I get to lob bombs over
| the wire at someone I've never met and will likely never
| meet. I can make them feel bad and feel very little
| consequence for it but easily justify my actions to
| myself in no small part _because_ I don 't have to see
| how it affected them.
| calebm wrote:
| Controversy gets more attention on social media, and if we
| focus on controversy, we focus on where we disagree.
| Verdex wrote:
| I was about to say the same thing. At least social media gives
| me quite a bit of mental heart burn.
|
| Interestingly enough, HN and reddit have both been really
| useful for me. Both are much more focused AND the people there
| don't gain anything by attacking me personally, only by
| attacking my ideas. This has been really good because it's
| allowed me to get used to communicating ideas in a way that
| people will understand them and getting used to people being
| upset at me.
|
| Social media where people know who I am in real life though,
| has been terrible. Like, the worst was a few different
| relatives who were getting "offending" at me because it gave
| them social capital with other relatives. I had nothing to do
| with anything, they just wanted to look good in front of
| someone else by trying to make me look bad. And I suppose
| that's a good lesson to learn, but it's not something I want to
| have to deal with from arbitrary many people.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Uninstalled all social media apps a couple months ago. Noticed
| an immediate improvement in my mental health. Haven't regretted
| it, don't miss it. I still log in occasionally via the web,
| just to see if there's anything I should know about with my
| friends.
|
| Still can't kick HN ;)
| daenz wrote:
| The communities are too big. We're not meant to socialize
| frequently with people with whom there are rarely repercussions
| for how we treat them.
| toshk wrote:
| I think part of the reason it's so stressful for teenagers is
| that there actual repercussions for their group position.
| Verdex wrote:
| This seems reasonable to me. Like, if you only have to get
| along with 120 people, it seems like a problem that an
| arbitrary person has a pretty good chance of solving. Then
| everyone else can be the "other".
|
| However, I wonder if the simplest strategy that works when
| you have to get along with _everyone_ is that you have to
| become an noisy asshole that overreacts to real "enemies"
| over imagined slights.
| offtop5 wrote:
| I've noticed this living in bigger cities as well, it was bad
| enough in one certain place I just left.
|
| Kind of estranged my family to do it, but as soon as I was in
| my new city I had a great girlfriend, and my cost of living
| was much lower, I was much happier.
|
| The old journey kind of took me on a personal discovery. You
| shouldn't worry about other people criticizing your choices
| because they aren't going to really affect them, and even if
| they are they're adults they can sort something else out.
|
| In this new city I would notice even though technically the
| population was large, the communities were very tight-knit.
| If you're rude to the local bartender her dad might have a
| word with you. Contrast it to the internet, I spoke to a girl
| who had to stop using dating apps because guys would just
| lead with calling her nasty and fat. In real life if you do
| that there can be immediate consequences to that behavior.
|
| Imagine if you will you were at a bar, and the Packers are
| playing the raiders or something, if you start yelling at
| random people that raiders fans are disgusting and horrible
| you can expect to be removed, and banned from returning to
| that bar. ( Or they might agree with you and buy you a beer
| who knows).
|
| On twitter, Reddit Facebook whatever that doesn't really
| exist. You can say ridiculously nasty mean things to everyone
| and nothing's going to happen to you. I had to stop using
| social media because I would become distraught over some of
| the stuff I read, almost all the bigotry I experienced was
| entirely online.
|
| Everyone has a right to spend their time in their energy the
| way they choose, but since I don't want to be called slurs I
| don't use social media. I've posted here a ton but back in
| 2019 I went completely offline and I had amazing partners,
| made tons of friends, traveled. I even increased my income by
| no small amount, I used that time I was spending making the
| Zuckerbergs of the world rich into improving myself.
|
| but if I've learned one thing in my life, it's that self-
| improvement is very hard, I'm the only person who can put
| down the second donut. it's a lot easier to go on Reddit and
| then complain about how societies out to get you, are to go
| on Twitter and just spread your own, really just self-hatred
| to other people hoping to dissipate it. Yet you can't,
| spreading hate doesn't take it out of you, if anything you're
| just going to get more hate back and then it builds up like a
| fuel.
|
| Most angry online folks, if you took away their social media
| and slowly reintroduced them to community, maybe a nice
| bowling league or something, within a year they'd be so much
| happier.
| defterGoose wrote:
| "With great power comes great responsibility"
|
| -Uncle Ben
| Xelbair wrote:
| The size is just the symptom.
|
| Those services match you, with other who share similar
| views/preferences - putting you inside a bubble.
|
| Before social media radical views\moronic opinions etc.
| wouldn't spread so far- because others would point out flaws
| in your reasoning or outright laugh at it.
|
| Now? you have permanent access to enabling group - group who
| share views, and support each other - entrenching it.
|
| Flatearthers would be ridiculed anywhere - but not they have
| a group that supports them.
|
| Not to mention that there are literally no consequences of
| holding an objectively wrong opinion(back to flatearthers) in
| online discourse.
|
| Don't get me wrong, those people with those view always
| existed - they just get exposed, via the worst invention of
| 2000s/2010s, to each other and that let them be more vocal
| about it.
| tzs wrote:
| The usual counterargument I see offered to that is that
| sure, it is great if we can impede the spread of some
| completely stupid belief like flat Earth, but sometimes
| those things that are crazy by conventional wisdom turn out
| to be true.
|
| At that point, they usually mention Galileo and maybe some
| others, and they ask how do we avoid squashing the next
| Galileo with our measures to limit the spread of flat Earth
| theories?
|
| The answer is that if flat Earth or whatever is actually
| _correct_ it will eventually prevail as did Galileo and all
| the others they cite (and they faced much more severe
| measures than merely being denied use of their society 's
| equivalent of mass media). It will just take longer as it
| will have to use slower more personal communication
| channels.
|
| That's a good thing. Let's say there are dozens of radical
| theories circulating, and suppose one of them really is the
| next Galileo type situation, and the rest really are just
| utterly insane.
|
| If they all have to spread by the slower more personal
| channels any given person will likely only be exposed to
| maybe two or three of them. They aren't overwhelmed by
| them, and that gives them a better chance of figuring out
| that the stupid ones are in fact stupid. It is usually much
| more work to refute a theory, even a stupid one, than to
| come up with it, and the slow spread gives time for the
| refutations to be developed and put out there.
|
| If they were all on the fast mass audience channels, people
| get exposed to so many of them that they don't have time to
| really figure out if they make sense, and (2) even if a
| good refutation is out it is easy to miss it in all the
| noise.
| jiggunjer wrote:
| in other words: the answer is that type 1 errors self-
| correct quickly, but type 2 errors self-correct slowly.
| karmelapple wrote:
| Speed of acceptance may indeed be related to the type of
| claim, but I think it's also highly related to the
| ability to confirm the evidence yourself.
|
| There are many ways to confirm major pieces of evidence
| for, say, the earth being round. It's easy enough to do,
| even without getting into a rocket and seeing the earth's
| curvature.
|
| There are many fewer ways to confirm a whole lot of other
| ideas, though, whether there's scientific rigor behind
| the idea's evidence or not.
|
| For example, I can't easily confirm the Higgs Boson
| evidence. But it also doesn't directly impact my life
| much, so it's ok for me to be a little unsure about it
| and not have first hand evidence.
|
| There are other topics that impact me much more directly
| than Higgs Boson, and thankfully those things are
| typically much easier for me to get evidence for. So I
| think the truth does indeed eventually come to
| fruition... but when we have vested moneyed interests
| pushing against the truth? Yikes, that makes things much
| more difficult.
| opendysphoria wrote:
| Chilling
| FpUser wrote:
| The world is fucked up in numerous ways. Modern means of
| communications including social media suddenly make all those
| depressing facts visible. I think we are confusing symptoms with
| the cause here.
| chadlavi wrote:
| Not a teen, but it's certainly damaged mine plenty. Granted, this
| is n=1 and I'm writing this ON a social media platform, of sorts.
| jefftk wrote:
| Here's the paper: https://epi.org.uk/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/01/EPI-PT_Young-p...
|
| It's all correlational (observing that people with higher social
| media use are worse off in various ways). This approach is not
| capable of detecting reverse causation (people use social media
| more because they are unhappy) or third causes (something else
| causes people to both use more social media and also be unhappy)
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| They do acknowledge in the article itself that it is
| correlation and that it could be reverse causation:
|
| > "Those who feel worse may turn to social media for solace or
| community," Dr Amy Orben, research fellow at Emmanuel College,
| University of Cambridge, said of the research.
|
| "It's not a vacuum, it works both ways."
|
| But the actual article headline is the typical clickbait
| interpretation of a scientific study.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I also wonder how they controlled for content vs. medium.
|
| The news of the world has been pretty bad all around, getting
| worse and worse over the past decade. I can't help but wonder
| if being online plugs someone more deeply into that news, and
| the actual cause of the damage to one's mental health is more
| exposure to multi-sourced narratives unfiltered by the
| editorial voice often employed by traditional news media.
|
| What if these young people are showing signs of mental trauma
| because mental trauma is a predictable reaction to being
| informed about the state of the world, and being more online
| leaves one more informed?
| ohduran wrote:
| that's what I thought when I read the article.
|
| > One in three girls was unhappy with their personal appearance
| by the age of 14, compared with one in seven at the end of
| primary school.
|
| That comparison doesn't support the hypothesis. It should have
| been compared to teenagers from 10 years ago. Otherwise, you
| can't rule out the effect of growing up on the mental health if
| these girls.
| watwut wrote:
| Anorexia was a thing before social media. So, yeah.
| handedness wrote:
| The fire was already there, but social media has added a
| significant amount of accelerant.
| nineplay wrote:
| I'm surprised its only one in three. In the 80s I would have
| guessed that at least half of 14 year old girls ( I was one )
| were unhappy with their appearance.
| astura wrote:
| I was a 14 year old girl in the 90s and I share your
| surprise its only one in three. I would guess the majority
| of my peers were unhappy with their appearance at that time
| based on my experience and observations.
|
| I was one too. I (objectively) looked just fine but I
| thought I was a disfigured ghoul.
| nineplay wrote:
| The irony was that my conviction that I looked ghastly
| only made it worse. I permed my hair and teased my bangs
| and piled on the makeup and held my breath while I pulled
| on jeans that were too small for me.
|
| If I'd really seen myself when I looked in the mirror I
| would have been better off. I didn't, I saw someone who
| was supposed to look like Cindy Crawford and was failing
| miserably.
| handedness wrote:
| As difficult as that era was, I worry that the present
| dynamic is somehow even worse than the decades-long ill
| of young women comparing themselves to airbrushed
| supermodels: young women comparing themselves to an
| endless stream of social media personalities who work
| tirelessly and deliberately to maintain a facade of
| contrived believability.
|
| And to whom anyone who isn't keeping up the same level of
| image consciousness, won't compare.
|
| "But she posted a video without makeup when that hash tag
| was trending, and I look nothing like that when I do the
| same," at the social media star's most flattering angle,
| filmed through a $5K lens attached to a $3K DSLR body,
| with ideal lighting, post-processed...
| watwut wrote:
| People who mock people in real life for not looking this
| is that way do a way more impact.
|
| It is not just about what ideals you see. It is also and
| maybe more about what is said about those who fail that
| standard. How they are treated and how you are treated.
| civilized wrote:
| It's funny how correlation proves causation the moment the
| science makes headlines.
| marcod wrote:
| FTFY: The moment the media makes a headline out of scientific
| research
|
| > Heavy social media use is associated with worse scores on
| all outcomes in girls age 14 and 17, but only worse wellbeing
| for boys at age 14. In a model controlling for pre-existing
| levels of self-esteem and wellbeing, we find that low levels
| of physical activity remain associated with lowself-esteem
| and wellbeing scores in girls and boys through adolescence,
| while heavy social media use contributes to low self-esteem
| and wellbeing in girls, and wellbeing in boys at age 14.In
| focus groups, young people highlighted the positive and
| negative aspects of social media. While girls tended to focus
| on the negative impact on body image, boys felt that the
| images they saw on social media platforms could be
| aspirational.
| mFixman wrote:
| The irony is that Hacker News, a prolific social media site,
| is publishing fake news about mental health in social media
| and making its users angrier.
| NalNezumi wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. The paper did seem a bit lacking on certain
| causal details.
| longtom wrote:
| And even if it _was_ causal, you 'd still need to investigate
| what it is on social media that causes misery, e.g.
| ideologies/misinformation, social comparison/envy, cyber-
| bullying, addiction, bad news/sensationalism or echo chambers.
| lailalessdad wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5OL8eIxtCo
| blitz_skull wrote:
| In other news, the sky is blue.
| thick wrote:
| "Social Media" seems to be a scapegoat for the underlying causes:
| children are in particular affected by this because they haven't
| had years/decades to build up mental disorders yet where they
| justify it to themselves that it's "okay", and the unfairness in
| the world through the lens of social media, taking the emotional
| toll head on. Children are very sensitive to their status in
| society, but we forget this because we grew out of that. Those of
| us on the successful side of things anyway.
|
| Social Media isn't the boogeyman. It's that no matter how hard
| you try, your life will never be as good as what is usually
| portrayed through these channels. You are swarmed with people who
| lead far better lives than you do, have way more fun than you do,
| and so on and so forth. Your only escapism at home, in a
| pandemic, is to go on the internet where you're spammed with
| these successful people (posers or not, doesn't matter) selling
| you things by showing off what they have.
|
| So no, it's not social media that damages teenagers mental
| health. It's worse than that. Ignorance is bliss? There's an
| argument to be made for that.
|
| It starts before they even hit teens. That YouTube channel of the
| kid unpacking toys and other things is the kind of early stage
| precursor to things to come. The kids watching this viscerally
| live through him for some years, until it dawns on them that hey,
| wait a minute, he has all those toys and I don't have anything.
|
| It's no wonder exercise makes things better - it's a great
| distraction from the illnesses of the world. Assuming that
| children are somehow not aware of it, or are not susceptible to
| it, is being naive at best.
| watwut wrote:
| > Children are very sensitive to their status in society, but
| we forget this because we grew out of that. Those of us on the
| successful side of things anyway.
|
| We don't outgrow that. Adults are very status conscious too.
| jancsika wrote:
| Somehow in your contrarian riff you end up agreeing with the
| research, at least in part.
|
| If social media does indeed lead to less exercise as research
| suggests-- which, as you explicitly agree would make things
| worse-- it _is_ a boogeyman.
| josho wrote:
| Social media is engineered to be addictive and creates media
| bubbles that prey on kids insecurities.
|
| Social media takes every challenge that kids face and amplifies
| it.
|
| My anecdotal experience is two daughters whose normal teenage
| challenges have been made worse through social media.
|
| Social media could have been a utopian technology bubbling up
| unique experiences to cultivate hobbies and interests in the
| young. Instead the algorithms cater to our base instincts and
| is amplifying the risk of turning the next generation into
| mindless addicts.
| shawnz wrote:
| > Social media takes every challenge that kids face and
| amplifies it.
|
| I don't see why any kind of urbanization or improved
| communication/infrastructural technology wouldn't have this
| effect. The more people you can reach, the more people you
| have to compete with.
| ktzar wrote:
| I wrote a novel that takes place in the near future (2035) and
| the main character is a 18 year old. I predict that using phones
| will be banned until you come off age and their technology
| interaction is restricted to smart watches.
|
| Social media is damaging to adults, I wonder why nobody has put a
| limit by law to younger people.
| herewegoagain2 wrote:
| I think China introduced a law recently, limiting usage to a
| certain amount time.
| himinlomax wrote:
| Does it damage it more than TV? is the question I always ask when
| I read that kind of headlines.
| tgv wrote:
| From my personal experience: yes. TV is less addictive, and its
| contents are better controlled.
| coreyrab wrote:
| A family friend explained it in a way that stuck with me,
| paraphrasing:
|
| "When you were in school, you only compared yourself to peers at
| your school and maybe one school over. Now me and my friends
| compare our looks, accomplishments, and follower counts to
| everyone within 10 years of us on Instagram"
| itronitron wrote:
| Social media use seems like a subset of 'caring what other people
| think' which I believe is very damaging to young minds.
| xmlblog wrote:
| Only teenagers?
| tqi wrote:
| It is interesting to me the way these research results are spun.
| A previous study[1] that paid users to quit Facebook found that
| they were happier, and were less up to date about news and
| politics. The headlines were all some variation of "quitting
| facebook will make you happier", as opposed to "keeping up to
| date on news / politics makes you unhappy".
|
| Similarly, the headline here says "Social media damages
| teenagers' mental health, report says" while the body of the
| article notes:
|
| "Those who feel worse may turn to social media for solace or
| community," Dr Amy Orben, research fellow at Emmanuel College,
| University of Cambridge, said of the research.
|
| "It's not a vacuum, it works both ways."
|
| [1] https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/quitting-facebook-
| research-...
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