[HN Gopher] Pausing "Instagram Kids" and building parental super...
___________________________________________________________________
Pausing "Instagram Kids" and building parental supervision tools
Author : decrypt
Score : 155 points
Date : 2021-09-27 12:31 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (about.instagram.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (about.instagram.com)
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >The reality is that kids are already online
|
| tbh once they are it's already over anyway, you're just holding
| back the tide at that point. Need strict supervision to protect
| them from online dangers and there is nothing you can do to
| prevent the dopamine addiction.
|
| It's no coincidence many of the people who create this
| hardware/software and networks don't let their own children
| anywhere near them.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| balls187 wrote:
| "Don't blame us, kids are already online."
|
| What a tone deaf response.
| bob229 wrote:
| Delete. Your. Social. Media.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Shouldn't their machine learning models be able to detect who
| looks like a kid and provide age appropriate content on Insta? If
| they are not doing that already, Insta is basically recommending
| adult content to kids.
| brettermeier wrote:
| Oh some people would have problems with that, not every adult
| looks like one and stuff.
| pj1115 wrote:
| As I get closer to thirty years old, the idea of a person or
| machine asking for a grown-up to verify my identity gives me
| feelings that are more mixed than I expected.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| its not very accurate, easy to fool and requires facebook to
| build an archive of pictures of children to build models
| against....
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| They do claim to know your age to target ads, so what gives?
| Either it doesnt work or they don't care
| sodality2 wrote:
| If my account got locked because Instagram thought I was a
| child (and I wasn't) I think I'd be pretty upset.
| jon-wood wrote:
| I'd take it as a complement, but I think that's a thing that
| comes with age.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| As someone who has a genetic condition where I look younger
| than I am I've come to believe they if someone has to
| explain that it's a compliment they should really do more
| second guessing
| retrac wrote:
| Young children, sure. But teenagers? I had a full beard by 16.
| The only reliable way we've ensured not to sell alcohol to kids
| is to verify ID. (And it's not terribly reliable anyway.)
| etxm wrote:
| > We believe building "Instagram Kids" is the right thing to do
|
| No it's fucking not, you morally corrupt sacks of garbage.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Here's why supervision is hard:
|
| All text books and school assignments are now done online. Some
| grading is even outsourced to the textbook companies.
|
| Kids are skilled at switching between apps (alt-tab). Parents
| don't have time to hover over the kid and laptop for 2 hours each
| night.
|
| And kids have internet access at school, or at a friend's house,
| or at the stores nearby. Phones and laptops are difficult for
| parents to lock down.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Telling that Facebooks solution is surveillance.
| xanaxagoras wrote:
| I say do nothing and let the chips fall where they may. There's
| no big tech solution to this insanity. People born today will
| fall into 1 of 2 categories:
|
| 1. Those whose parents gave them phones as children
|
| 2. Those whose parents did not give them phones as children
|
| The former group will become fragile, suicidal narcissists who
| can't cope with or navigate the external world. They'll have
| soon-to-be trite problems like gender dysphoria and agoraphobia
| and will mistakenly think this makes them interesting or
| constitutes a personality. The later group will grow up as
| ordinary people by objective standards, but against the backdrop
| of the first group they will seem like they have superpowers -
| the Joe Bauerses of tomorrow so to speak.
|
| The internet and social media ruin all minds, but especially the
| child's mind. Hopefully once these two groups are well
| articulated and obvious to all, parents will start to make better
| decisions.
| freeflight wrote:
| There are more than just these two categories, there are also
| parents who give their children phones and then heavily
| regulate usage with third-party tools.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Was expecting to disagree, but then read the whole post.
| (^insert something about subscribing to your newsletter.)
| kitsune_ wrote:
| I wonder what Bill Hicks' take on "Instagram for Kids" would have
| been.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Stop trying to be Joe Camel.
|
| Edit: downvote all you want, but show evidence that Instagram is
| in any way healthy or appropriate for children, sure looks like
| trying to hook the next generation on Instagram, no different
| than Joe Camel with cigarettes.
| twodave wrote:
| Instagram doesn't need to bother with this. Parents do.
|
| None of my kids will have access to this stuff unattended until
| they're mature enough to do other adult things on their own (like
| drive, get married, etc.).
|
| The Internet has never been a safe place for kids, and it never
| will be. I blame most of my adult issues on the fact that I had
| Internet access from a PC in my room from the age of 10. And that
| was more than 20 years ago when porn was harder to find and
| social media just consisted of yahoo chat rooms.
| fullshark wrote:
| Pretty clear FB thinks it's unfairly targeted every time it faces
| a PR crisis and it comes across in their messaging.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Can you imagine the shareholder reaction if they even hinted at
| feeling justifiably targeted by a PR outrage?
| fullshark wrote:
| Sure but PR is an artform for a reason. This one just seems
| too transparently "We stopped work on this thing but this is
| why you are all wrong for being mad at us."
| mateioprea wrote:
| I have this saved in my notes. Forgot from where I saved it from,
| but it's so accurate:
|
| "I work in the cyber security industry, and I can tell you over
| the years, I've seen kids - including my own - do things that
| first-world government teams and crack white hat groups could not
| have done any better. Give up now.
|
| There is no app, no operating system, no proxy, scanner or
| firewall, and no setting that will ever defeat a determined kid.
| Plus, they work in groups, and are able to coordinate even better
| than their adult counterparts to find and disseminate new hacks.
| It's an arms race that cannot be won with technology. You find a
| setting, they find a workaround. Apple updates, they find a new
| weakness.
|
| Take their phones. Put them in a box. Sit on the box and guard
| it. Maybe buy a Faraday bag or something. Watch them cry and talk
| about how they'll be social outcasts and their friends will mock
| them, or moan about how they need it for school to check the
| Facebook page their teacher posts assignments to. Turn a deaf
| ear. Know that you are helping them just like our parents were
| when they made us eat vegetables (which you know, are actually
| pretty darned good - thanks, Mom). "
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ineedasername wrote:
| _nothing will ever defeat a determined X from doing Y_
|
| I hate when this line of thinking is marched out in defense of
| an all/nothing approach-- The idea that you don't have a
| perfect solution, so you shouldn't even bother trying to
| implement something less than perfect.
|
| There's no reason not to do _something_ that discourages bad
| activity just because it won 't be perfect. With kids
| especially, they may find a way around a restriction, but that
| doesn't mean they will always avoid detection (though sometimes
| they will) And in those cases it also provides a good parenting
| opportunity to teach lessons on consequences for the decisions
| made.
|
| At a minimum, you can't simply fail to set reasonable limits
| just because they may not be followed. An understanding of such
| limits, if not a full appreciation of them, it pretty critical.
| And a total lock-down approach of "no X ever ever" is fairly
| likely to catalyze into a backlash much worse than trying to
| work with your kids on appropriate limits and then monitory
| things as they go.
| Kiro wrote:
| First two paragraphs - amazing. Gives me hope for future
| generations!
|
| Last paragraph - what? Why would I want to stifle this?
| boppo wrote:
| I'm 29 and struggle with attention, procrastination, brain
| fog, and depression. I have since I was 12. It's only lately
| that I'm realizing that it's almost certainly connected to my
| usage of internet forums/stimulation (SA, 4chan, Gamefaqs,
| stumbleupon, etc.) which started right around that same time.
|
| There's something wrong with me and there really are no other
| explanations than my compulsive internet usage.
| heartbreak wrote:
| I'm no internet psychologist, but the underlying issue is
| probably what drove you to those sites in the first place.
| Does your therapist agree with you?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Because kids are sometimes capable of getting themselves in
| more trouble than they realize, and this can have long-term
| consequences beyond childhood.
| [deleted]
| sharemywin wrote:
| don't forget threats of suicide.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Watch them cry and talk about how they 'll be social
| outcasts and their friends will mock them_
|
| I don't see how potentially making your child a social outcast
| is healthier than just fucking talking to them. It's strange
| how an entire generation that grew up on goatse, single click
| hardcore porn, and generally unadulterated internet access have
| become the very luddites they used to make fun of on phpBB
| forums.
|
| An incredible amount of socialization happens online today.
| Even if you believe that they will form "real" connections with
| "real" people, only the most determined of hormone raged boys
| will overcome the friction to include them. Secondly, the
| failure to actually communicate the problems of social media
| and resorting to lockdown is essentially sex education through
| abstinence. It demonstrably doesn't work.
|
| I imagine there's a middle ground between 16 hours of Roblox
| every day and 0 hours of any internet access. Apps, proxies and
| firewalls aren't an adequate replacement to communication.
| fsflover wrote:
| Can you kid hack Qubes OS?
| comeonseriously wrote:
| > Turn a deaf ear.
|
| Nope.
|
| Always keep that line of communication open. Always.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Absolutely, there's no other way to build your relationship
| and their trust in you as a parent.
|
| And that goes several ways - are you sure your decisions are
| correct and therefor should be trusted? Do you know with
| absolute certainty that your child understands your
| decisions? Have you heard them out on the matter? Is there
| room for a compromise, and are you showing your child a
| reasonable degree of trust in return?
|
| Without any of this, I don't see how it's a success. Your
| kids won't learn these strategies without seeing them. It
| leaves a lot of room for resentment. It seems very
| dysfunctional.
|
| My kids like when I talk to them about this stuff, even if
| they disagree. They like to hear my anecdotes about being a
| dumb kid. Knowing I'm human, that my parents made mistakes,
| that I made mistakes, I still do - they like knowing the
| lines are open and I'm not a brick wall.
| reayn wrote:
| While I agree with the sentiment that a determined kid would go
| to just about any length to get something, even if that
| something is bad for him, I will have to give a hard "no" to
| what you said afterwards. Pointlessly denying a child what he
| deems to be a necessity in his modern life without giving valid
| reasoning is a terrible idea and will just make the kid despise
| his parents.
|
| A much better tactic, and one that I see neglected far too
| often is to instill the reasoning into the kids from a young
| age, don't bar them from what's bad from them, teach them that
| why and how it's bad so they themselves keep a distance. My
| parents did his very effectively with me and my siblings, and
| we, despite our age and frequent exposure to such things,
| naturally gravitate away from obsession. And this isn't just a
| niche case, there are many people, even in my generation, who
| are waking up to the reality and behaving in a similar manner,
| although it's hard to get that fact out there with all the
| stigma surrounding basically any teenager nowadays.
|
| And saying that this strategy "doesn't work" or is "too hard"
| is usually just cope for parents with poor skills in my
| experience.
|
| >Watch them cry and talk about how they'll be social outcasts
| and their friends will mock them, or moan about how they need
| it for school to check the Facebook page their teacher posts
| assignments to.
|
| I genuinely can't tell if this is some sort of meta-ironic take
| but no, just no. The vast majority of even elementary school
| childrens' lives are being moved online slowly but surely, and
| whether you like it or not they are going to have to pull out
| that laptop or phone for hours a day, can you sit and watch
| them for that entire time?
| minusf wrote:
| i was computer obsessed as a kid and my parents could do
| little about it, though hard they tried. i did all the chores
| they came up with in exchange for hours on front of a 286
| with a monochromo crt. but i had to leave it in the room, so
| i survived it.
|
| i shudder to think how my life would look like if there were
| smartphones back then.
|
| no reasoning is strong enough with this kind of brain candy.
|
| i also shudder how i will proceed when my kids are "phone
| age". this planet is doomed.
| bradford wrote:
| > "teach them that why and how it's bad so they themselves
| keep a distance. My parents did his very effectively with me
| and my siblings"
|
| Perhaps your situation is far from universal, and you are
| fallacious in assuming that it will work broadly?
|
| I remember being younger, before kids, and I thought "ah, if
| my children ever misbehave, I'll just logically explain why
| they should behave differently". It was naive of me then to
| assume this would work. I was biased by my own experiences.
|
| It didn't occur to me how irrational any individual might be,
| and the situation is worse now, with corporations better
| adept at exploiting that irrationality as part of their
| business model.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Do you have kids?
|
| Respectfully, I don't really put any weight on opinions on
| this topic from those who do not.
| croutonwagon wrote:
| even older...kids struggle to understand reasoning sometimes.
| It happens with our children and frankly, we provide them
| with a LOT less tech/crutches than most parents. We always
| limited TV/tech time and encouraged them to find other
| sources of entertainment.
|
| Take example this weekend. We went on a family trip to a
| theme park. Got home really late (for them) and they were
| exhausted. The younger we carried to bed.
|
| The next morning we didnt immediately make my youngest take a
| bath to wash off the residual sunscreen etc. Rather we did
| our morning routine. Morning got away from us and we see by
| about 9:30 hes playing in the play room (boy loves building
| things with blocks, legos, whatever he can ) but is itching
| like crazy. We see a splotches developing.
|
| "Hey son, lets go take a shower, then you can get back to
| playing"
|
| "No i want to play"
|
| "You are really itching (and whining about it), lets wash off
| everything from yesterday and you can get right back to it"
|
| "no i want to play"
|
| And a standoff ensued. In the end he complied and I had to
| put my foot down, and he cried most of the time. We tried to
| explain. Calmly tried to reason and get him to calm down.
|
| Eventually during the shower I had to raise my voice,
| threaten punishment to get him to snap out of his own
| feedback loop, collect himself and stop. There was no
| reasoning involved. It was, if you dont stop, punishment will
| be had.
|
| This also happens to a larger degree with our older (pre-
| teen) kid. Shes a little more reasonable (clearly she can see
| 5 minutes out) but a week, a month, years? Nope.
|
| Its always funny when people just say kids are smart and to
| reason with them. Its true to a degree. But making sacrifices
| in the short term for a better long term outcome is not
| natural, its a learned trait and there are many adults that
| cant manage that (just look at the CC debt rates in the US).
| Kids of any age tend to live in the short term, wanting short
| term rewards and not teaching them long term rewards does
| them a disservice into adult hood.
|
| Managing tech is a part of that. Very few are going to be
| "reasonable" about moderating their usage especially as many
| peers will have unfettered access to the same. Hell * _I*_
| sometimes struggle with it and I dont really have any social
| media (short of here and a waning use of reddit).
|
| And before you go there. My relationship with my kids is
| pretty solid. Moreso than most, we tend to keep lines of
| communcations open and they dont generally keep things from
| us because they know we will be judicious with what they tell
| us. But at the end of the day they are still kids and we are
| their parents, not their friends.
| [deleted]
| jtc331 wrote:
| It seems clear you must not believe social media is as
| harmful to kids as the commenter you're responding to does.
| If so, disallowing it (even when the kid desperately wants
| it) wouldn't seem excessive.
|
| By analogy I think it's fairly obvious as a parent you're
| right to withhold bottles of vodka from your kids even when
| they separately want to down them "and all of their friends
| are doing it".
| reayn wrote:
| Trust me as a teenager who has seen the effect of social
| media on dozens of his peers and even close friends I can
| assure you I know far more than both you and the parent
| comment how dangerous it is for us, but I'm also aware of
| the possibility of using it and the internet as a whole in
| a responsible manner as opposed to completely abstaining
| from it.
|
| >By analogy I think it's fairly obvious as a parent you're
| right to withhold bottles of vodka from your kids even when
| they separately want to down them "and all of their friends
| are doing it".
|
| ??
|
| Vodka, or any hard alchohol in general is far harder to get
| your hands on than social media and has immediate, physical
| consequences relatively soon after consumption, it's a
| terrible comparison in this case.
| sorenn111 wrote:
| Social media has immediate, physical (dopamine levels
| while presenting a mental phenomenon are also a physical
| reality) consequences immediately upon consumption. There
| are no great comparisons to social media because of its
| novelty, but social media cannot be shielded from
| comparisons to all vices.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| > I can assure you I know far more than both you and the
| parent comment how dangerous it is
|
| Where does the confidence to make such an assertion come
| from? Simply by virtue of being a teenager yourself?
| burnished wrote:
| Don't you remember being that age? Even without ascribing
| personal traits like arrogance, its just hard to have had
| enough experience to understand the potential depths of
| your ignorance.
| jtc331 wrote:
| Calling it a terrible comparison to avoid the obvious
| point by analogy is effectively just a way to avoid the
| discussion.
|
| If you want to engage seriously with it feel free to
| comment with that.
| midev wrote:
| They explained why they felt it was a bad comparison. Why
| did you ignore that part?
|
| If an analogy is bad, it's bad. The parent explained why
| they felt it was bad. If you want to "engage seriously",
| you should address why their points about the analogy are
| wrong.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| It may not be obvious, but some of the folks most
| negatively affected by social media are the older set.
| ars wrote:
| > A much better tactic, and one that I see neglected far too
| often is to instill the reasoning into the kids from a young
| age, don't bar them from what's bad from them, teach them
| that why and how it's bad so they themselves keep a distance.
|
| That can work - until they fall in with a bad friend, once
| that happens they lose their ability to self regulate (the
| bad friend does it for them instead), and the parent must do
| it for them.
|
| So as long as you are lucky enough that you kids never fall
| in with the wrong group you will have success.
| tzamora wrote:
| Over stimulation is the problem. You think you can drink one
| beer or two, but at the end you can't control the need to
| drink a third more. You know that you can only have one or
| two cigarrete a day but at the end you can't. Sometimes
| handling addiction is not about reasoning. And is even worse
| if you are a kid which don't have the maturity to understand
| addiction. I think the same about the parent post. Teach them
| about addiction, explain to them "you see this phone? You
| will be addicted by it, so until you are an adult I will
| protect you from this."
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I agree.
|
| It is interesting to speculate of what will be the end
| result in terms of learned behaviors. I was born without
| computers near me so I and I became obsessed with them as I
| was starting teenage years. Because of this, I can handle
| excessive boredom and I can find something amusing for
| myself without relying on someone force feeding me content
| they deem appropriate for me. I am not sure future adults
| will be able to sit still without a screen.
|
| To be fair, my parents were about as worried as I am today,
| but they still purchased Pentium 120, which I promptly
| OC'ed and let me and my siblings to go nuts for a while
| until we we overboard ( I forgot the details now, but dad
| took PC to his shop after that incident and they couldn't
| just password protect it, because by then we learned how to
| remove password in BIOS and rely on 'keys pressed marked'
| trick to guess it ). It is not that different now. The face
| of it changed though.
|
| Point is.. kids are kids. They don't understand addiction.
| Best you can do is to attempt to explain it. Even knowing
| that, I am still planning to severely limit phone use.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| "I genuinely can't tell if this is some sort of meta-ironic
| take but no, just no. The vast majority of even elementary
| school childrens' lives are being moved online slowly but
| surely, and whether you like it or not they are going to have
| to pull out that laptop or phone for hours a day, can you sit
| and watch them for that entire time? "
|
| I don't know about others and I can't speak for the parent
| post, but I am planning home schooling, which will be harder,
| but I think the removal of 'constantly online' feature will
| be well worth it.
| Prestoon wrote:
| I'm sure that works for a certain demographic, but on the
| other hand for a lot of kids after a certain point the advice
| provided by the parent falls on deaf ears. They have to make
| mistakes and suffer the consequences of them before they ever
| truly learn from them. You're not dealing with a rational
| adult, for many of them I'm sure it's more or less "there
| goes mom, lecturing me again." and at this period in their
| lives they're just about to begin their ascent into puberty,
| one of the most transformative periods that involves a lot of
| rebellion and a lot of risky behavior. Kids need to see that
| there's consequences to their actions and if their parents
| can provide that in a controlled environment, I don't think
| its poor skills.
|
| I think it's being ahead of the curve. Setting the
| expectation for not only what they might run into out there,
| but what to expect when they get home. If anything you should
| combine the two approaches.
| grvdrm wrote:
| >I think it's being ahead of the curve. Setting the
| expectation for not only what they might run into out
| there, but what to expect when they get home. If anything
| you should combine the two approaches.
|
| Wholeheartedly agree with this. Well said.
|
| I think you see this in kids of almost any age. Saying no
| can backfire. I do my best with my own kids to explain why
| I'm allowing or disallowing something, and find it works
| better than hard and fast restrictions. My hope is to
| translate this frequent conversation into the same
| conversation when they're older, opinionated, and
| rebellious. It will not work perfectly, but I think that a
| lifetime of deliver no answers won't work in my favor.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > They have to make mistakes and suffer the consequences of
| them before they ever truly learn from them.
|
| This seems to be a good strategy for things with obvious
| and immediate consequences. Eat too much ice cream, feel
| sick, etc. It seems like social media seems to have a much
| more slow burning, pernicious impact on your quality of
| life. Adults struggle to accurately diagnose this,
| expecting a child to do so seems unwise.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Also, "the internet never forgets."
| reayn wrote:
| Yes, this, 100% agreed.
|
| Having the kids learn on their own and experience things
| (and their consequences) firsthand is the right way to do
| things, I didn't get that far in my comment but yours sums
| it up fantastically.
|
| The parent comments' take of just brainlessly shielding
| them from everything is the absolute worst thing you can do
| in such a scenario.
| analognoise wrote:
| "The vast majority of even elementary school childrens' lives
| are being moved online"
|
| I know we're big on the tech bubble, but this is not only not
| the case, but we as parents should make it actively not the
| case. There's grass - touch it.
|
| It turns out "online" is mostly a bunch of garbage - useless
| scrolling and dopamine hits from nothing. We need to turn it
| off. It's worse for us than smoking. I'd argue it was worse
| than leaded gasoline, and while we used it for a while, we
| finally got proper and banned it. Hopefully all "social
| media" gets that treatment, one day.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I believe you should give valid reasoning, and also deny the
| harmful obsession.
|
| Some stimulants are too addictive to trust a young child to
| mindfully avoid.
|
| The people working in the social media and entertainment
| industries are extremely skilled at their jobs of increasing
| user engagement, they have huge budgets with which to
| accomplish that goal and little regulatory oversight.
|
| People have a finite ability to resist obsession.
|
| Sugar is tasty, it gives a surge of dopamine when you consume
| it, and fruits use that property to get animals like us to
| eat them so they can reproduce. But even kids can resist that
| with a little education and maybe a stomachache after
| Halloween.
|
| Heroin is similarly addictive, in the way that a butter knife
| and similarly a hand grenade are dangerous to a small child.
|
| These products are meticulously engineered to be maximally
| addictive and obsessive. Human nature is not necessarily up
| to the task of resisting them.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > But even kids can resist that with a little education
|
| Actually--are we sure about that?
|
| It seems like an awful lot of _adults_ die each year
| basically because they couldn't stop themselves from eating
| too many sugary foods.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| No, I'm not. You're correct that fruit is not
| sufficiently addictive for adults to gorge themselves on
| it to fatal levels. At the very least, it has not
| historically been sufficiently available to cause people
| to succumb to heart disease or diabetes before, on
| average, they had >2 children per couple: Humanity has
| not yet gone extinct.
|
| Whether Nestle's next concoction will be able to do that,
| composed of eye-catching, almost fluorescent colored
| dyes, unimaginably sweet high-fructose corn syrup,
| surreptitiously enhanced by most of your daily
| recommended dose of salt, tempered by delightfully tangy
| citric acid, all carried in a smooth, bouncy xanthan/guar
| gum matrix, no one knows yet. I'm pessimistic regardless
| of the engineering behind the treat: it seems likely that
| a sufficient number of people will always be able to make
| it through childbearing age before succumbing to diet-
| based problems, if that ever ceases to be the case, then
| the dwindling population will soon be unable to keep the
| global industries its manufacturing requires in
| operation.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Fruit (and no sugar added juice) consumption can make a
| difference in someone's diet.
|
| I've seen people getting fat just by eating too much
| fruit because "fruit is healthy, it's not candy" and not
| having limits.
|
| It's a infinitesimally small problem compared to
| processed sugar, though, so I completely agree with your
| point.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _fruit is not sufficiently addictive for adults to gorge
| themselves_
|
| The problems isn't just which foods are addictive, it's
| the economics of food costs too:
|
| Fruits are expensive relative to much worse options.
| Fruits mostly are not very calorie dense, so you could
| gorge yourself completely on strawberries, eating an
| entire container in a sitting and paying (near me) $4 for
| it @ ~150 calories.
|
| Or you could pay $2.59 for a 3-pack of microwave "movie
| theatre butter" popcorn for an effective price of $0.86
| and consume around ~400 calories.
|
| Calorie-dense junk foods are simply much cheaper to begin
| with. If you're on a budget and love, equally,
| strawberries & popcorn and want a few snacks for the
| week, you can spend $12 for 3lb of strawberries or $2.59
| for the popcorn.
|
| Or compare the cost of a 3-liter bottle of soda (about
| $1.10, or 1 penny/ounce) to the cost of 100% pure apple
| juice, which is about 3x the price per ounce. Yes both
| are sugar heavy, but the carbohydrates in pure juice
| aren't as bad and juice at least has other nutrients, and
| is sometimes fortified with more. enact a course-
| correction, it is always more expensive to
|
| (There is at least one partial exception to the fruit
| issue: bananas. Compared to other fruits, they are
| massively cheaper on a price-per-calorie basis. But you
| can't live on bananas alone.)
| watwut wrote:
| Lol, no. First, many many many kids are very clueless about
| technology and computers. Some kids will figure these or will
| be shown them by older siblings. And some other kids in their
| network will learn about these. But generally, majority of kids
| by themselves cant figure these at all. To add to it, many kids
| dont really have access to computer and all they know are
| phones and tablets. Consequently, they struggle with very
| basics.
|
| Second, it is also not true that all the kids would be
| constantly trying to go out of bounds. There are many kids who
| are smart and actually don't want to break rules, fear breaking
| them or just simply wont go out of way to make adults angry.
| lindwhi wrote:
| Yes, determine kids will much likely find a way to find a
| workaround, especially if it is something that they want to do.
| elpakal wrote:
| 100% agree because I was once that kid. Now I have them
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Watch them cry and talk about how they'll be social outcasts
|
| Until they are. Parent always think that society is the same as
| it was when they were kids. They think kids can socialize the
| same way they did in the 80s/90s. That just isn't true anymore.
| Kids aren't allowed to hang out at malls. Kids don't go to
| parties. Kids don't listen to CDs with their friends nor get
| together to play video games in a friend's basement. They don't
| have cool part time jobs at pizza joints. Kids hang out online.
| They listen to music online. They work/live/play online. Trying
| to recreate some 80s nostalgia version of teenage social
| circles will end in failure every time. Those that don't learn
| how to exist online will be the ones a step behind their peers
| at every turn.
| honkdaddy wrote:
| Teens still hang out. Every single weekend night in the
| summer in my hometown, a hundred plus teens flock to the
| "pier", park their cars and bikes, and do what teens do best.
| Vape, drink, and loudly carry on. It really doesn't seem all
| that different from the teen hangouts of the 80s/90s lore,
| except juuls have replaced cigarettes I suppose.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Great recipe to "get ahead" at being a maladjusted-
| borderline-suicidal-anorexic with poor social and zero
| survival skills. Thanks helicopter parents!
| codingdave wrote:
| That may be too far the other direction. My teens do hang out
| at malls, just hang out with friends and listen to music.
| They do have parties, they have jobs. They do many of the
| things we did. They also do text between all those things,
| and coordinate which parents is driving which kids where and
| when in the process.
|
| It is different, yes. But today's teens are not just sitting
| in their rooms to be online together. Honestly, they seem
| fairly similar to how we were, but they have replaced phone
| calls with apps.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| > Those that don't learn how to exist online will be the ones
| a step behind their peers at every turn.
|
| Worse, they may end up with actual personalities and
| interests other than scrolling their phone!
| [deleted]
| el_nahual wrote:
| > Take their phones. Put them in a box. Sit on the box and
| guard it. Maybe buy a Faraday bag or something.
|
| A family member tried this. The kid's bicycle was stolen (no it
| wasn't, the kid traded it for a "secret" phone he used during
| no-phone hours).
|
| This reinforces the "Give up now" point. You won't control
| access for your kids, but you _can_ try to give them better
| emotional tools to cope with the world they live in.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Innovative thinking, I like it. What about internet access,
| which generally requires a credit card?
|
| Moreover, if the kid has many hours alone outside schoolwork,
| clubs, or sports, there is something wrong. There's a reason
| why after-school programs were invented over a century ago.
| oriki wrote:
| You can't socially outcast your kid like that. Seriously, any
| problems you thought they'd have because of Instagram are
| nothing in comparison to being a social outcast that never
| develops skills for making friends and forming relationships
| because their parents felt the need to kneecap that
| communication method which is so modern.
|
| Teach your kid about the dangers. Use the systems in place (ie
| Screen Time on iOS) to help shape the way they use the
| technology, and be open and honest about what worries you. If
| your strategy for helping the kid is predicated on "I told you
| so"s, I may have found the reason why they keep breaking
| security systems.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Wow, now not using Instagram is child abuse? That's a reach
| by anybody's standard.
|
| Not being in the 'in crowd' is not crippling. It will not
| result in stunted social skills.
| detaro wrote:
| The GP didn't advocate for "don't let your kids use
| instagram".
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Then watch them go behind your back and use the internet with
| their friends.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| As long as it isn't 8 hours a day, and someone else is
| bearing the brunt of the surveillance. That's not as big a
| problem.
| balls187 wrote:
| > Know that you are helping them just like our parents were
| when they made us eat vegetables (which you know, are actually
| pretty darned good - thanks, Mom). "
|
| "Eat your vegetables" is hardly the right analogous situation
| to cellphone use.
|
| I can't imagine what my life would be like if my parents
| instead decided not to buy a PC (circa 1994), nor have the
| internet because of all the bad things that a child could be
| exposed to via the internet.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Social media surveillance != PC literacy.
|
| http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-
| comput...
| balls187 wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Prohibiting access to smart phones to prevent social media
| surveillance is like prohibiting access to computers to
| prevent accessing pornography.
| spansoa wrote:
| Agreed. Leave a kid with a locked device, and with enough
| poking around, it will be unlocked. They will exhaust every
| possible route, and seek the most optimal solution to any
| restrictions.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Modern security is pretty good. If the kid can leverage CVEs,
| well, I'm less worried.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > I've seen kids - including my own - do things that >
| first-world government teams and crack white hat > groups
| could not have done any better.
|
| My highest-voted Stack Exchange Group answer is an anecdote
| about kids solving a tech problem that I was unable to solve:
| https://superuser.com/a/1063708/93684
| andrew_ wrote:
| "Pausing." Permanently shelving would have been the move. This is
| almost certainly smokescreen to shift the PR, hoping to sneak
| "Instagram Kids" back in when there's less heat.
| tzm wrote:
| 'You're Enough' by Laurence Fuller https://vimeo.com/537977184
| spoonjim wrote:
| I'd like to see an Instagram where you can't post a picture of a
| person. So the competition becomes who can take the coolest
| photo. Of course that rewards kids with the resources to get to
| interesting places, but I think it's less toxic to be compared
| for your means than it is to be compared for your appearance,
| especially for girls.
| prpl wrote:
| I want to take a "trust, but verify" model with my kids, but all
| the different apps, capabilities, websites make it exceptionally
| difficult. Apple+ screen time is okay in centralizing some things
| , but I wish apps could expose some controls or logging to that
| or some other centralized service.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Adopted a teenage daughter. Gave her a phone. We had a 5 year
| cycle of deep depression on phone. Take away phone for x months.
| Teen becomes happy and full of life. Couple days after getting
| phone back she was super depressed again. Every single time. No
| variation. Phone == depression no phone == happy teen. Not
| perfect without phone by any stretch, but general mood was
| involved with family and cheerful.
|
| This went on until she was old enough to move out so we would
| stop taking her phone away. A couple years later she finally
| realized what social media was doing to her and she turned it off
| herself. Started getting her life together.
|
| Other daughters are pissed because they can't have a phone. When
| I query about the friends. It's the same pattern. Every friend
| with a phone is obsessed with it. The ones without are much more
| fun to hang out with.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Maybe, just maybe, in the battle between a billion dollar
| marketing and addiction machine staffed by world brightest
| minds vs a teenage brain, teenage brain looses. Probably adult
| brain looses too.
|
| We dont expect everyday joe to fight a heavyweight chamption,
| or defend himself in court.
|
| Some changes are needed.
| floren wrote:
| I was really happy to read that she voluntarily cut herself off
| from the phone when she moved out. I was afraid the punchline
| was going to be "so now she's constantly miserable". Good for
| her!
| treeman79 wrote:
| She was utterly miserable for two years after moving out. She
| got to know her "real" family. After dragging her bio dad out
| of literal ditch in 2 occasions. Well she decided she wanted
| to get herself together. Was a wake up call.
|
| I'll be waking her down the aisle soon. She is marrying a
| very nice guy.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Parental supervision only works if the parent cares enough to
| even monitor digital usage. Instagram kids is quite possibly the
| worst idea for society I've seen in a while. The correlation
| between social media use and mental health issues, dropping
| grades, etc, in kids that are getting younger and younger, is
| stunning in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience. I hope this is
| legislated against, heavily.
|
| Seriously, I'm seeing kids that are as young as 12 years old,
| spending hours on TikTok or the Instagram explore page, IN CLASS.
| It's just a terrible, terrible thing to see.
| sufficer wrote:
| It's kind of sad just seeing people glued to smartphones 24/7.
| I guess I started noticing it when going out again after
| lockdown restrictions were lifted where I live.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Yes, there needs to be a larger conversation about the level
| of addiction exhibited by adults. Kids are also an issue, but
| it doesn't help when adults are setting the expectation that
| phone addiction is okay.
| asdff wrote:
| At least my generation of adults has had smartphones since
| middle school now. People have neck problems from craning
| over. The minute there is a lull in the conversation the
| addicted and hungry brain seeks to fill the void with
| dopamine, and a phone appears open to some infinite
| scrolling app before the user can understand what even just
| happened. Oh and people rip juuls like there is no tomorrow
| either, so there are physical addictions among my
| generation. You have older millenials now in their mid
| thirties who are hiding in the bathroom stalls at their
| workplaces to hit their juul. All that effort getting
| generation X off of cigarettes and the work is undone
| within a few short years with a single company from san
| fransisco.
|
| Unbelievable that we always foolishly go after the vice of
| the day (when I was a kid it was flavored cigarettes, look
| at all the good banning that did) instead of outlawing
| using the science of addiction for profit in the first
| place and nipping all of these dark patterns in the bud in
| one fell swoop.
| supercanuck wrote:
| Parental supervision only works if the parent *IS CAPABALE*
| enough to even monitor digital usage.
| hwers wrote:
| I mean both need to be true
| supercanuck wrote:
| You can "care" and be incapable.
| sharemywin wrote:
| wow you figured it out parents don't care about their kids.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| If they're doing that in class it sounds like a failing of the
| school itself. They can confiscate phones if they're being
| distracting or disruptive.
|
| Whatever happened to rules in class?
| anarticle wrote:
| In a case near me, I know a middle school teacher who has to
| negotiate with students for lectures: "We'll do 20 minutes
| and then you can do 5 minutes for a phone break." Without
| this, the classroom cannot be controlled. She says without
| knowing when the next phone break is makes them very nervous,
| and very difficult to retain their attention. This is a
| classroom in a "good school" area, extremely high funding,
| all kids claim learning disability to get advantages, and
| parents come down on the teachers. The school bureaucracy is
| deeply anti-teacher, and allows parents to treat them this
| way. I definitely agree that it is a failing of the school
| itself.
|
| I have another friend who is a science teacher, but he
| doesn't have exciting stories like this.
| watwut wrote:
| I have to agree here. It is no different then any other
| distraction, toy or whatever in class. If the teacher is
| unable to get control over those, there is larger issues in
| there - either with teacher or with the school not empowering
| teacher.
| tmp_anon_22 wrote:
| Teachers have large class sizes and limited ability to give
| each student individual attention. A student can whip his
| phone out for the 5 minutes the teacher is on the other side
| of the room, and even if they do catch phone usage it becomes
| a liability to physically take and store the device even with
| the support of administrators.
| handrous wrote:
| Parents freak. The. Fuck. Out. If you touch their kids'
| phone, these days. You can maybe keep it to the end of the
| day (and some parents will still complain, "what if I needed
| to reach them?" Gee, I dunno, maybe call the office, just
| like _all of history since schools got office phones_ ) but
| past that, phew boy. No.
|
| I'm shocked that schools allow phones at all, and that
| they're not harsher on kids when they find one, but I gather
| messing with phones is a _really_ good way to have pissed-off
| parents up your ass, and schools all really hate that, so
| they give in. Result: constant phone shenanigans.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > "what if I needed to reach them?"
|
| What parent would call a child in the middle of class,
| rudely interrupting the entire class? And what would they
| possibly have to ask their child that so important that
| warrants interrupting their child's class?
| handrous wrote:
| It has been known to happen. And not for anything
| actually urgent. Yes, really. And not a one-off, but one
| of those "oh yeah, time or two a year that happens" sorts
| of things.
|
| Apparently taking kids out of school to get their nails
| done or whatever is also A Thing for some folks. I'd
| never have imagined it, but some parents treat school
| _very_ differently than the parents I (fortunately) had.
| Loughla wrote:
| My spouse has taught for over two decades, I taught for
| 10 or so years before transitioning to _gasp_
| administration.
|
| Kids miss school more often today than when we started;
| our original attendance books prove that, at least for
| our classrooms. Reasons now range from spa days, to the
| kid didn't feel like getting up, to, and this is
| p.e.r.v.a.s.i.v.e., 7-10 day long vacations in September
| and October.
|
| This year, my spouse has not had a full classroom any
| single day due to family vacations. Pre-covid, it was not
| better, either.
|
| I'm afraid that I come across as a grumpy old man, but
| this is a problem that did not exist in the past.
| Education is seen as a burden, and a box to be checked
| anymore. Take from that sentence whatever you want.
| handrous wrote:
| Interesting--my spouse has only been in a little over a
| decade, and has switched districts enough times that we
| hadn't put together any kind of pattern of changes over
| the years. I just know that the frequency with which kids
| are out for a week to visit family in another state (not
| even around a holiday!) or out for spa days / nails /
| haircuts et c., seems totally alien to me. I was only out
| for, like, funerals, or if I had a fever or was vomiting
| or was in the hospital. I think there _might_ have been
| one or two times, in my 13 years of school, when we cut
| out _one_ day before a break to get a jump on a long
| drive, but that is the entire extent of "optional" days
| off I had, for all those years. One or two days, total,
| in 13 years, and I'm not entirely sure we actually did
| that ever, or maybe my parents just discussed it but
| ended up not doing it. I grew up thinking that was the
| overwhelming norm for attitudes toward schooling. It
| blows my mind that quite a few parents think nothing of
| pulling their kid out for a whole day, or taking them out
| early, just to go hang out! Often several times _every
| year_!
|
| > This year, my spouse has not had a full classroom any
| single day due to family vacations. Pre-covid, it was not
| better, either.
|
| I've got some friends saying their schools are hovering
| around 80% daily attendance this year, between the usual
| stuff and COVID. And I think some of the more lax parents
| are using COVID excuses for their usual BS, making things
| even worse. Plus the too-frequent days when they can't
| find enough substitutes and just have to stick 3+ classes
| in the cafeteria or gym for babysitting. Educational
| outcomes for this ~2.5 years (once this school year's
| over, it'll have been about that much) are gonna be
| really bad. Online, in-person, barely matters, it's all
| bad. :-(
| Loughla wrote:
| >Educational outcomes for this ~2.5 years (once this
| school year's over, it'll have been about that much) are
| gonna be really bad.
|
| And depending on what grade the student is, that 2.5
| years could have repercussions for anywhere from 6 months
| for the older students trying to be competitive in
| college, to the rest of their lives. I really, really,
| really am afraid for students who are just learning the
| fundamentals and are missing so much
| social/emotional/educational development.
|
| My money says this is going to have repercussions for
| decades.
| MisterTea wrote:
| I also hear technology is destroying what is left of
| their actual class time. Kids are now given laptops so
| they have plenty of opportunity to tune out class work
| and do whatever they want and the teachers just have to
| deal with it. When I was in school tech gadgets were
| confiscated be it a beeper, gameboy, calculator or
| walkman, and later on, cellular phones.
|
| Just last night I was talking about this with my brother
| who told me about his co worker who is a former NYC
| school teacher. He said he spent half of his teaching
| time telling kids to stop playing fortnight or browsing
| social media. After talking to my brother I called a
| friend who is a 4th grade teacher and said he also deals
| with social media browsing and gaming in class.
|
| Feels like we're actively working on building an actual
| Idiocracy.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _and this is p.e.r.v.a.s.i.v.e., 7-10 day long
| vacations in September and October_
|
| Any theory on why that happens so much nowadays?
|
| My pet hypothesis is that travel got cheaper so more
| people do 1-2 weeks vacations abroad, and at most
| companies, summer months are overbooked for leaves, so
| people use September and October as backup vacation time.
| dorchadas wrote:
| It's not even vacations abroad. I worked at a poorer
| district, and it's really parents just not caring. They
| go when they can get off or get good deals and pull the
| kid with them. Sadly enough, they can often get it
| excused as a "learning excursion", even if the teachers
| don't sign off on it. There's no value being seen in
| education; it's seen simply as babysitting, and it shows
| in the students' attitudes as well.
| edgyquant wrote:
| While I agree phones shouldn't be allowed in school I can
| understand freaking out if the school takes a very
| expensive thing like a phone from a kid, especially like
| you said as it's a means to reach the kid.
| handrous wrote:
| Me, I'd be like, "huh, it sure was dumb of me to let my
| kid take an expensive electronic distraction to school. I
| probably shouldn't have done that."
|
| But I think that puts me in old-man-yells-at-cloud
| territory, these days.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Why do you need to reach your child while they are in
| class? Why can't you call the office?
| MisterTea wrote:
| Nowadays the kids are given laptops to perform their
| classwork on so there's no point taking the phones away when
| they have a more capable computer.
|
| And it is concerning when you hear stories from teachers
| about how they spend half of the day telling students to stop
| playing fortnight or browsing social media in class.
| asdff wrote:
| They should install mirrors in the cieling like CVS has so
| the clerk can monitor the entire store for shoplifters from
| the front
| tjpnz wrote:
| When I was going through High School in the early 2000s
| teachers had a box you had to put your phone into at the
| beginning of each class. Worked fine then, can't see why it
| wouldn't now.
| floren wrote:
| When I've worked in classified environments, they'd have an
| array of phone-sized lockboxes right outside the classified
| area. Put your phone in, take the key (which is on a
| springy lanyard to go around your wrist).
|
| I assume high school students would immediately invent The
| Key Eating Game or something, where you swallow the lockbox
| key for TikTok clout
| asdff wrote:
| When I was in highschool about a decade later we figured
| out we could just hand the teacher some ancient flip phone
| and keep our actual iphones in our pocket.
| asdff wrote:
| Growing up whenever a teacher thought they were clever and
| would confiscate phones, kids got even wiser and started
| bringing in their ancient phones to offer up as a sacrifice,
| and kept their smartphones hidden in hoodie pockets.
| [deleted]
| goda90 wrote:
| Maybe it needs a system where the account locks if there isn't
| occasional parental monitoring. Then the kids would be the ones
| encouraging their parents to check. Maybe the parent has to
| take a selfie for facial verification or something.
| pengstrom wrote:
| This is going to end in a social media monitoring SaaS. Get
| curated alerts for "problematic" behavior. Completely
| transparent. Inevitable customer pressure will make current
| LGBT discrimination look quaint. Wonderful.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Sometimes software isn't the answer. I think this is a good
| example. One of my child's friends plays Roblox nearly every
| waking hour outside of school. He's 5.
|
| People naturally would ask "where are his parents?" ...she's
| a single mom working two jobs, and he's at home with a
| teenage sister as his only supervision most of the time.
|
| This isn't uncommon in the US. I was a latchkey kid myself,
| my babysitter was TV. People say that parents need to pay
| attention to their kids more, but parents don't need more or
| better software, they need money and time.
| watwut wrote:
| This issue with this is that contemporary American parents
| are already spending more time with kids then used to be
| norm. Compared to past, even relaxed parents are helicopter
| parents. Maybe the expectation that parents will be
| constantly there, hovering over the young teenagers itself,
| micromanaging every aspect of their lifes on itself is
| unhealthy on itself.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I agree that this is a problem, albeit a different one.
|
| The subset of people I'm talking about almost certainly
| don't fit into this category. There are still millions of
| kids with struggling parents who don't have proper
| guidance (note, guidance isn't necessarily supervision).
|
| In the case of parents who are spending more time than
| ever with their kids, the problem could certainly be more
| related to aptitude. We live in a society where our
| lawmakers don't fully understand the technology most
| people are spending hours a day being manipulated by, so
| it certainly seems likely most parents don't understand
| the impact either.
|
| Either way, to say that these companies will solve it
| themselves with better software for parents doesn't seem
| like a solution to either issue. It's kind of like "the
| factories are safer for children now because they're
| wearing hard hats" -- it's the wrong conversation driven
| by the wrong people.
| mfer wrote:
| Most parents are unaware of the issues that are caused.
| Parent would often just be annoyed and press the approve
| button without thinking. Like the way no one reads the TOS.
|
| Those selfies for facial verification would most likely be
| used for something unrelated and most people would be unhappy
| with if they knew. Think of the ways these could be misused.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| Jesus, that's dystopian. Get the parents in the system by
| hooking the kids?
| foofoo4u wrote:
| Makes me wonder if its possible to install a faraday cage
| within the walls of the classroom in order to block signal.
| sodality2 wrote:
| In fact, a school I took my most recent SAT at did indeed
| have some sort of cell blocker. But they had in-school wifi,
| so I'm not quite sure what the reasoning is. (Apps like
| Snapchat and Spotify and Netflix are blocked, but Instagram
| and TikTok are not, so the firewall's not super well-made)
| freeflight wrote:
| So they were trying to build an "Instagram Kids" without any
| thought about parental supervision?
|
| I guess the original plan was to just moderate all the content,
| until they realized how that wouldn't scale, so now the
| moderation will be outsourced to the parents: _" Your kid found
| something nasty on Instagram kids? That's your fault because you
| didn't properly supervise it with the tools we gave you!"_
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| Social media just makes it easier for kids to be awful to each
| other, and extends that opportunity from school hours to 24/7.
| This is not a not-having-the-right tools problem. It's a human
| nature problem, and no software will ever change that.
| jdub wrote:
| It's mind-boggling* that a company can be entirely aware of their
| negative impact on teenagers and think, "We have to go deeper".
| damontal wrote:
| They don't care. Why is that hard to understand?
| gilbetron wrote:
| As a parent of an almost 13 year old, I have no fucking idea what
| to expect from the next 5 years trying to raise him in this
| world. And I mean that literally, sometimes I think it's going to
| be great sometimes I think it's going to be 100% awful, I'm
| assuming it will be somewhere in the middle. I don't know what to
| expect. It's truly terrifying. I'd love any help getting
| perspective and developing techniques to survive and help my son
| navigate this new world he is growing into.
| verytrivial wrote:
| Are they use "pause" in the "pile into a heap and set alight"
| sense?
|
| Edit: I ask because Insta is _still_ using the "your browser may
| have ways to block cookies" which I can't believe for a second is
| GDPR compliant.
| cmg wrote:
| Instagram says they'll be consulting with "parents, experts and
| policymakers" but this leaves out a very important part of the
| 'safe apps for kids' ecosystem - the children themselves.
|
| They are using apps and online social spaces in ways that adults
| can't imagine or comprehend. They're dealing with self-esteem
| issues, bullying, predators, extreme content and targeted
| advertising & algorithmic content to keep them engaged. Kids
| aren't dumb. They're certainly as - or more - susceptible to the
| negative effects of social media as the rest of us but they
| shouldn't be ignored here or relegated to a class to be protected
| because of some kind of diminished capacity. Instead, IG and the
| experts should be working with them, including their ideas and
| feedback.
|
| Similar to the iOS feature that can scan the messages of people
| under 18 on a family account for nudes, features like will get
| LGBTQ kids who don't have supportive homes in trouble for
| exploring their sexuality & identity. It will get kids who are
| looking for support in abusive situations via actually helpful
| posts in trouble when their adults see what they've been looking
| at.
|
| I remember what kind of issues I had at home before I learned how
| to clear my web browser history in the 90s - I can only imagine
| how much worse this could be in terms of surveillance of kids.
| detcader wrote:
| Counterpoint: children should relegated to a class to be
| protected
| cmg wrote:
| I probably wasn't clear enough - children should be protected
| for a variety of reasons, but they should also be consulted
| about the issues they face and how best to protect them.
| detcader wrote:
| There's nobody to consult. It's like making drone strike
| pilots more inclusive. Normalizing children posting
| pictures of themselves online is pure evil. Children's
| pictures shouldn't be posted publicly online, period. This
| goes for parents posting them too. Because they can't
| _consent_. We have never had anything like the internet
| before, where you can instantly put things into the global
| public record forever. I only hope people will to stop and
| think about this. History doesn 't make one optimistic
| though
| concinds wrote:
| > Similar to the iOS feature that can scan the messages of
| people under 18 on a family account for nudes, features like
| will get LGBTQ kids who don't have supportive homes in trouble
| for exploring their sexuality & identity. It will get kids who
| are looking for support in abusive situations via actually
| helpful posts in trouble when their adults see what they've
| been looking at.
|
| This is a minor point of yours, but I don't see any valid
| reasons for kids below 13 to ever send or receive nudes, and I
| would hope that most of them wouldn't even have a "sexual
| orientation" at that age. Opposing policies that are as close
| to "universally good" as you can get, is going to make it even
| harder to solve the problems of kids using technology.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > but I don't see any valid reasons for kids below 13 to ever
| send or receive nudes, and I would hope that most of them
| wouldn't even have a "sexual orientation" at that age.
|
| I think you're being extremely naive, if not badly
| misinformed, about how old people are when they start to
| develop their sexual/gender identity - these things happen
| before puberty.
| jvvw wrote:
| The problem I've found with kids' platforms - thinking mostly of
| YouTube Kids but others too - is that they are so tied down that
| your children can't get to things that they or indeed that you
| want them to - often quite educational things, so you end up just
| giving them access to the adult versions because you want to
| support their interests.
|
| Also, the 'needing to be 12 years old' rule for many sites is a
| very handy one for parents as it gives you a solid reason for not
| giving permission for certain sites. It may be widely ignored but
| it's still very useful and enough parents do adhere to it, that
| you don't feel like you are making your children an outcast!
| 83457 wrote:
| A service like Netflix should really have age groups. There is
| such a huge gap between kids and open access. Something like
| under 8, under 10, under 13, under 16 would be about it.
|
| Just because I don't mind if I let my 12 year old watch PG-13
| movies doesn't mean I want them to start watching softcore porn
| in Game of Thrones.
| helen___keller wrote:
| Forget "kids", I'm an adult and I'd love to have versions of all
| modern social media with the 'growth hacking' features axed.
|
| Remember the days before forever scrolling on Reddit? When
| Facebook timelines were chronological? When bullshit clickbait
| links didn't show up as "recommended" after you meticulously
| pruned bullshit clickbait groups from your feed? When Youtube
| didn't just autoplay down into the deep dark depths of crazytown?
| How about social media that's actually social instead of just
| being the same national outrage "conversation" being replayed in
| a slightly different setting?
| flatiron wrote:
| At least for YouTube you can disable auto play.
| cube00 wrote:
| ...and yet it still manages to turn itself back on whenever
| you sign in again, when you cast to a new device...and you
| can't tell me the company that knows everything about me
| can't remember my preference for not wanting auto play. Other
| services seem to remember it just fine, I set it once on
| Netflix and have never needed to set it ever again.
| helen___keller wrote:
| Actually, my issue with YouTube isn't really the autoplay per
| se, it's how the recommended videos (including autoplayed
| videos) go very aggressively into rabbit holes.
|
| I'll listen to an anime music playlist and my entire
| recommended video / front page becomes full of anime stuff.
| An in-law joins Youtube to watch bible study videos and now
| they're an avowed freedom fighter against the globalist
| satanist cabal running the world. That sort of thing.
| munk-a wrote:
| You can reject the recommended videos and purely exist
| either checking subscribed channels or using the search
| function for every video. I've found that their
| recommendations are usually pretty good but I use youtube
| on different devices for different "moods" so I've got my
| background lets-plays on one device - people talking about
| maps on another device - and my youtube-only music needs on
| a third device - this helps keep my stuff pretty siloed.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Curiously, I don't have that experience at all. I'll play
| Backyardigans videos to watch with the baby ~4 times per
| week and nothing of the sort ever shows up in my
| recommended feed. I can't understand the reports of sub-par
| recommendation experience on YouTube. Maybe my behavior is
| somewhat different -- I tap "watch this later" a lot (and
| rarely do).
| stolenmerch wrote:
| This is a feature and I love it. I don't want to subscribe
| to football channels, for example, but if I'm in the mood I
| watch a couple of them and then it shows me related videos
| for a few more hours and then it switches when I decide to
| search for cooking videos, of which I don't want to
| subscribe to either. Works great.
| naravara wrote:
| They could easily let you accomplish this by just giving
| you an option to actively seek out this content by giving
| you a "What else is like this?" button that takes you to
| a 'related videos' page.
|
| The problem when it just puts it all in a single
| recommendation feed is that that feed more-or-less
| presents itself as "here's what the world is talking
| about" rather than "here's a bunch of stuff that conforms
| to the biases and ideological filters of the stuff you've
| been watching lately." It creates a solipsistic worldview
| if you're not aware of what's going on.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| There needs to be a plugin to wipe cookies on every
| YouTube page load. The recommended videos list for a
| given video on your first visit? Excellent. Every
| subsequent page load where they give recommendations
| pertaining to a video from 30 minutes ago? Absolute
| garbage.
| [deleted]
| Cerium wrote:
| I wish you could disable the free trial offers.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Sorta, kinda. Except it tends to turn itself back on at
| random. Except there IIRC are _two_ auto-plays on YouTube:
| one for normal videos, one for playlists - and YouTube 's
| search has a nasty habit of returning results that happen to
| be smack in the middle of some random playlist.
|
| And speaking of YouTube, the other annoyance is the extremely
| idiotic anti-feature of pausing the playback and displaying
| "Are you still watching?" popup after you go a couple of
| minutes without moving your mouse or tapping on the screen.
| No YouTube, I'm not watching, I'm only listening on my
| wireless headset. But you already know that. What you don't
| know is that I'm in the middle of some household cleaning and
| my hands are covered with caustic chemicals, so I _frikkin_
| do not appreciate having to press a stupid button you
| introduced to get more "engagement".
| a1369209993 wrote:
| To be fair, you can disable autoplay by using youtube-
| dl[0], and it's (effectively) physically incapable of
| turning itself back on. Also fixes "Are you still
| watching?" and other engagement 'features'^Wdefects.
|
| 0: http://youtube-dl.org/
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > growth hacking
|
| More like mind hacking. It's like these apps want to hook into
| the reward center of people's brains. Get them addicted to
| stupid bullshit so they spend hours scrolling through that
| stuff so they look at more and more advertising. Funny how
| advertising is always at the root of all this evil. Maybe we
| should get rid of it.
|
| Only thing worse is video game design which does this
| _explicitly_ and unashamedly. They wire the dopamine button to
| the player 's credit card.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| I forgot they made a product just got kids, right when their
| teenager harm report was released.
| ativzzz wrote:
| > Remember the days before forever scrolling on Reddit?
|
| Yea it was awful. Pagination is an optimization for faster page
| load speeds that has nothing to do with user engagement. Sure
| some people can get caught in the doom scrolling, but for
| normal users, having to navigate between pages is an awful
| experience compared to just scrolling to the bottom to get the
| next "page"
|
| I use old reddit redirect and without reddit enhancement suite
| that adds infinite scrolling, it's awful to use
| asdff wrote:
| It's a good thing that its awful to use with pagination.
| Frequently I would find myself using RES and scrolling,
| scrolling, scrolling, the only thing stopping me from
| continuing scrolling was suddenly noticing that these posts
| had 12 upvotes and I was 600 posts off the front page at this
| point. Friction like pagination gives you pause. Sure, its
| annoying, but subconsciously that annoyance leads you to make
| a finite ending of saying "I'll stop after I get through this
| page," instead of time flying by scrolling and scrolling.
|
| Looking at your last line I think it would be helpful to
| assess your addiction in brass tacks. Imagine if you said, "I
| only use cocaine intraveinously, insufflation is awful."
| Sometime its helpful to add some breaks to unhelpful habits
| than trying to min max them all the time. I still have a lot
| of problems with this myself and I am doing my best to
| introduce more friction to my internet usage, since you can't
| just flush it down the drain and walk away like a pack of
| cigarettes in this day and age when internet means work.
| ativzzz wrote:
| Should it be up to social media companies to integrate
| controls for people who lack self-control into their
| products? Should alcohol companies include a BAC meter on
| each bottle to determine if you can drink from it? Should
| casinos allow you to only withdraw a certain amount when
| you enter and no more?
|
| I don't believe it's the place of these companies to
| implement these kind of controls. Governments will create
| regulations that force these companies to implement
| controls, but I don't believe that addresses the root
| cause.
|
| The root cause is, why can't you control your social
| media/gambling/alcohol use? It's a wide ranging cause from
| genetics to mental health problems to other external
| causes. I believe those should be the first level of
| addressing from the government, but it's easier to just
| regulate
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Infinite-scrolling is awful for 2 reasons:
|
| 1. What you're currently looking at is not directly
| addressable (instead it's "open this URL, within this time-
| window, and scroll exactly X-many pixels in exactly S-seconds
| to get to the exact same content as me").
|
| 2. It makes it impossible to get to the _real_ page footer,
| which often contains essential links like Contact Us, the
| About /Impressum page, and other important stuff.
| heartbreak wrote:
| The truly awful implementation is the paging of comments on
| this website.
| ativzzz wrote:
| For #1 it's the same because the content on each page is
| dependent on reddit's algorithm, which may change by the
| time you load up the next page (maybe reddit has some
| caching that prevents this), so if you link page 3 to
| someone, they will see something different depending on
| when they open the link
|
| For #2 that's useful for novice users but as a reddit user
| for who knows how many years I don't care about the footer
| frankfrank13 wrote:
| Agreed, funny that it takes "for Kids" for instagram to finally
| (pretend) to care about involving external stakeholders on the
| implications of their at-any-cost growth mechanics
| enahs-sf wrote:
| Now that most of them are the hyper growth stage, you'd think
| they could figure out which growth hacky things they could turn
| off and still retain users.
| gfodor wrote:
| Alternatively: delete your accounts, and stop using these
| services first, instead of maintaining them hoping a better
| thing comes along you can switch to.
| root_axis wrote:
| Indeed. It's akin to complaining that there's too much poison
| in cigarettes because of course it'd be inhumane to suggest
| people stop smoking.
| dropdeadaccount wrote:
| I personally use Telegram as my main social network. No
| algorithms, no "recommended", just channels and chats you want.
| It is not secure, sure, but I don't need it to be secure. A lot
| of Russian buisness and science-related media is only found
| there. That said I am Russian and AFAIK most English content
| there is far-right propaganda so it might not be useful to you.
| the_snooze wrote:
| These services are so fucking needy. It's like they were
| designed by broken people. How about some respectful technology
| that knows its place, and can say "hey, you've accomplished the
| task you wanted to do here, so go do something else."
| mehrzad wrote:
| The only popular social app that claims to do this is Hinge.
| dQw4w9WgXcQ wrote:
| Hinge has all sorts of dark patterns to keep you swiping on
| the app as long as possible. Recently they added some
| feature called Standouts that removes the "best" matches
| from your ability to match, so you have to wait until those
| matches drop from the exclusive-only bin. The idea behind
| limiting max likes is nice (10), but they also have some
| ranking algorithm that only starts showing your preferred
| matches near the end of your match limit, extremely subtle
| but I noticed it started making me feel like I was anxious
| about preserving my bin of likes. It's all a money game to
| these Match companies and pretty obvious why people are
| burning out on all the ghosting / terrible interactions
| etc.
| freewilly1040 wrote:
| You can still pay for unlimited likes, right? I would see
| the limit more as incentive to pay than to limit
| engagement for the user's sake.
| Cd00d wrote:
| There were two days last week where I got on TikTok around
| bedtime as a distraction from actually going to bed. After a
| while a clip came up on my FYP with someone saying "hey,
| maybe you wanna be done scrolling and go to bed", and I was
| like, "yeah, that's a very good idea, thanks".
|
| It was the second time that I realized the clip was _from_
| TikTok. Honestly, I appreciate it.
| zenmaster10665 wrote:
| right - cos tiktok is totally looking after you more than
| any of the other services /s
| Cd00d wrote:
| I mean, I don't get the sarcasm. Have you had another app
| steer you away from engagement for the sake of your
| mental/behavioral health in this way?
|
| I certainly haven't. Other than maybe Nintendo suggesting
| go outside breaks or something.
| idsout wrote:
| TikTok ran out of clips to recommend to you lol
| MisterTea wrote:
| Maybe figure out why it is you don't want to go to bed.
| It's usually because you don't like doing the thing you do
| after waking up.
| asdff wrote:
| Netflix asking me if I'm still alive after three hours does
| nothing to prevent mindless consumption on the whole
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Nintendo does this in some of its games, like Zelda Ocarina
| of Time 3D. Navi says, 'You've been playing for a while,
| maybe take a break?' I found it more annoying than anything,
| and I don't think it ever caused me to stop playing.
| tekromancr wrote:
| What you describe is antithetical to capitalism as it is
| currently implemented
| newswasboring wrote:
| Everyone knows these things are bad. Everyone knows they
| are causing harm to society. Everyone knows these services
| are actively doing this stuff despite knowing the risks.
| And yet we allow them to operate. I am with you on this.
| The current system has no real incentives to stop this.
| They are essentially developing a drug and we praise them
| for it.
| michaelchisari wrote:
| Subscription services (at very low cost) could achieve
| this.
|
| In 2019, Instagram only made around $11.98 per user
| annually.
|
| Imagine if you could pay $12 a _year_ and never see an ad,
| never be manipulated by an algorithm, never have to worry
| about any of that. All engineering would be focused on
| retaining you as a user, not as a market segment for
| advertisers. The incentive wouldn 't be to addict you with
| an infinite scroll but to provide enough value for you to
| maintain the annual cost. Possibly even minimizing the
| attention it demands because the greatest profits is in
| justifying the subscription while encouraging the least
| amount of resource use.
|
| Unfortunately, growth-hacking meant VC subsidized growth
| with free services and there was no way that subscriptions
| could compete.
|
| The question is if anyone could ever sell low cost, user-
| centric subscription-based apps in a world where free (but
| not really) is taken for granted.
| krrrh wrote:
| Before being acquired, WhatsApp served a half a billion
| users on a $1 per year subscription model (first year was
| free, and they were competing against comparatively high
| charges for sms), and apparently only a few dozen
| engineers. Signal manages a similar feat on a handful of
| (large) donations. It's possible to have a profitable
| business while charging users a small fee, but once a
| public company achieves network effects and a captured
| user base, there is a pressure to milk it for all it is
| worth.
|
| In a normal market there would be competition and an
| equilibrium would be reached, but where network effects
| dominate, it takes something like Signal to make a dent
| in this regard. That said, there's no reason that a non-
| profit version of instagram couldn't eventually compete
| or dominate by charging users a pittance.
| learc83 wrote:
| $12 a year is misleading. Paying users are much more
| valuable ad targets than free users once you start
| segmenting them.
|
| So now you need to charge significantly more than $12 to
| make up for that. The higher price makes the paid users
| even more valuable to advertisers. Eventually the service
| slips in a few ads because it's just too much money to
| leave on the table.
|
| Cable TV started as an ad free subscription service. I'm
| not saying it can't work, but historically most
| subscription services don't stay ad free forever.
| michaelchisari wrote:
| _most subscription services don't stay ad free forever._
|
| This is true, for two reasons: Declining profit as
| markets mature and the need for investors to see greater
| returns YOY. Eventually, all companies turn to more
| intense methods of profit extraction.
|
| This isn't specific to digital services of course, we're
| seeing the effects of this broadly across the economy.
|
| One way to put off the inevitable (for potentially quite
| some time) would be to bootstrap instead of taking
| investment. Easier said than done, of course, but maybe
| not impossible since the hardest part may be breaking
| open the market in the first place and it might be a lot
| easier to build an alternative app in a mature space than
| it was to create Instagram in 2010.
| SirSourdough wrote:
| This reminds me of the NYT banner ad prompting
| subscribers to allow ads on articles. $35/month and ads?
| Yeah, no.
| tshaddox wrote:
| This is extremely important, and something I think many
| people don't realize. Charging a fee might make it
| possible for a company to be profitable without needing
| ad revenue, but it likely won't change the underlying
| economics such that _also_ showing ads won 't be _even
| more_ profitable. The only ways around this that I can
| see are 1) a company steadfastly choosing to forgo the ad
| revenue, 2) a company maintaining a customer base that is
| willing to pay the subscription fee _and_ has a
| principled opposition to ads such that introducing ads
| wouldn 't be viable, or 3) somehow reorganizing the
| economy such that the negative externalities of
| advertising are greatly reduced.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > somehow reorganizing the economy such that the negative
| externalities of advertising are greatly reduced.
|
| What "negative externalities" are you referring to?
| tshaddox wrote:
| Some simple and direct ones to start with: bandwidth and
| CPU usage, blatant malware, annoyance.
| worker_thread wrote:
| I came here to say I am ready to pay for that service!
| criddell wrote:
| There's always Glass. $5 / month, no ads, no VC funding,
| no manipulative algorithm.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > The question is if anyone could ever sell low cost,
| user-centric subscription-based apps in a world where
| free (but not really) is taken for granted.
|
| Well, yes, it does come down to this, and I'd say the
| answer is very clearly that this cannot be done, at least
| not at any scale remotely close to the scale of the big
| free social media networks.
| [deleted]
| jacobajit wrote:
| Moving to a subscription fee model is dangerous for a
| service that's reached saturation point. They can no
| longer project infinite growth in value extracted from
| eyeballs going into the future, and are stuck with
| whatever they choose to charge (along with some limited
| increases in fees. Building a better service cannot be
| fully leveraged into higher fees, since there's only so
| much YoY increase in costs users will stomach.)
|
| On the other hand, subscription models are fine for new
| entrants, even with VC hyper-growth expectations - there
| are still billions of users to capture even if per-user
| revenue is fixed! Then the game becomes delivering as
| much value to these customers as possible to attract more
| paying users.
|
| Perhaps this is another malincentive that comes about
| from monopolies.
| michaelchisari wrote:
| _They can no longer project infinite growth_
|
| This is true, but only applies to the "tech unicorn" VC-
| funded model. There are other ways to build businesses
| and if the model we're used to always ends up with such
| terrible social results, maybe it's time we strongly
| considered them.
| htrp wrote:
| Lets be honest here, they'd just charge you the money as
| an added bonus on top of productizing you as a user
| marketingtech wrote:
| Last quarter, they made $10.12 per user[1, slide 4],
| however that's not evenly distributed. They made $53.01
| per user in US and Canada. But even that isn't evenly
| distributed. The users who are likely to pay for the
| subscription are also the most valuable to advertisers
| because they have disposable income. Some Instagram users
| see ads for luxury cars, real estate, and vacations,
| while other users see ads for dollar stores and
| dropshipped junk. FB earns much more in their auction
| from that first set of users, but those will be the first
| users willing to pay to opt out of ads.
|
| Dynamic pricing would probably offend both audiences -
| "what do you mean the algorithm thinks I'm worthless?"
| "what do you mean that I'm worth thousands of dollars to
| you?"
|
| [1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/
| 2021/q2...
| michaelchisari wrote:
| That's for Facebook broadly, which is a beast of a
| corporation that encompasses dozens of services and
| properties. I'm talking about instagram specifically.
|
| _those will be the first users willing to pay to opt out
| of ads._
|
| The service would have to be built from the ground-up to
| not have a free option, it would have to be equalized
| across all users. Again, this is where the difficulty
| lies in an economy that already offers so much for free.
|
| _IF_ someone could pull it off, they would benefit from
| the gym membership effect of people keeping the
| subscription while barely using the service (and it 's
| resources).
|
| There would also be considerable savings on the
| engineering and sales side if you cut all adtech out of
| the equation and provide a simple time-series feed.
| sharkweek wrote:
| I felt this way when Hulu gave me the option to opt out
| of ads for $4 a month extra...
|
| "Wait that's all my eyes are worth?!"
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| It'll be less than $4/mo: part of that $4 will have to
| pay for building-out the ad-free experience.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Then maybe we should implement capitalism differently.
| Hopefully by making the "surveillance" part of it illegal
| even if it kills these companies.
| david_allison wrote:
| > How about some respectful technology that knows its place,
| and can say "hey, you've accomplished the task you wanted to
| do here, so go do something else."
|
| From bitter experience: people don't like being told they're
| done for the day. It wears you down having to explain it.
|
| Add in the profit motive and it's easy to see why people cave
| to adding infiniscrolling
| mylons wrote:
| you're asking for them to remove the part that prints them
| money. the only reason they're going this route is the whistle
| blower leaking and hopes to appease regulators before
| regulation.
| [deleted]
| jeffbee wrote:
| None of that really describes Instagram today, though. The
| problem with IG today is literally everyone is trying to sell
| something. 100% of Instagram today is marketing and there is no
| longer any reason to use it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Unfortunately, there is: it's the few acquaintances you like
| that insist to post news about themselves as _stories_ on
| Instagram.
|
| God, I hate stories. This is probably _the_ most antisocial
| "growth hack" these companies invented. A simple way to boost
| and exploit FOMO to ensure most users will be checking with
| your app at least once every single day.
| [deleted]
| nkotov wrote:
| I had unfiltered internet access as a kid. When I was a preteen,
| I had a MySpace account by just simply lying about my age. A lot
| of my friends did the same. In middle school, we figured out ways
| to go around school district firewall/filter to access flash game
| sites.
|
| I honestly think that kids won't use "X for Kids" when they have
| access to devices. They will just figure out ways to get around
| the block and do what they want.
|
| For my children, I'm not giving them personal devices until an
| appropriate age and with an MDM to manage the device and set
| limits especially around how long they can spend on apps/device.
| concinds wrote:
| > For my children, I'm not giving them personal devices until
| an appropriate age and with an MDM to manage the device and set
| limits especially around how long they can spend on
| apps/device.
|
| I didn't have internet access until age 10, and was only given
| a flipphone shortly after that. On the one hand, I was immature
| for my age and can imagine millions of ways in which things
| could have gone catastrophically wrong; and the way my parents
| did things feels pretty well thought out. But on the other
| hand, I'd have definitely preferred having local development
| tools, maybe a Raspberry Pi (didn't exist then), predownloaded
| PDF manuals, _anything_ I could have tinkered with. Instead all
| I did before age 10 was play video games, since that (and
| typing documents) was all there was.
|
| In a world where kids grow up with computers from a young age,
| some will entertain themselves all day, and some will learn
| from program all day, and obviously have access to very
| different opportunities. I'm tempted to say: "no electronics
| until 10, etc" like some strict parents I know, but it does
| feel like an outdated attitude that can hinder kids as much as
| it helps them.
|
| Some of my friends at 13-15 played games all day, while some
| worked hard at school, had great extracurriculars, and still
| had access to the exact same tech.
|
| I'm convinced the problem is not technological but
| emotional/psychological, and that one day we'll figure out how
| to raise kids in a a way that you can give them unrestricted
| tech, and they'll experience all the benefits and no downside,
| we just haven't reached that level of "parenting science" yet
| to make it reproducible.
| klyrs wrote:
| Why do I get the feeling that these "Parental Supervision Tools"
| is a ploy to force parents to make Instagram accounts, with all
| of the data harvesting that goes along with that? The alternative
| is to not make an Instagram for kids -- this approach uses the
| social pressure felt by kids to leverage parents into the next
| billion users...
| megamix wrote:
| am I the only one with TLS error?
| 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote:
| Browsing at work and got hit by a social media content filter?
| ;)
| decrypt wrote:
| Loads okay at my end.
| bildung wrote:
| Parental supervision is just a means of externalizing the
| societal costs of the platform onto the parents. How about
| building a product that isn't a net negative to society in the
| first place?
| mfer wrote:
| This idea is about punting responsibility onto parents. This way
| FB can claim the responsibility is not on them but on parents.
| It's in many ways a legal maneuver.
|
| The reality of helping kids requires parents who are well enough
| informed and engaged here. This is something we don't have. I've
| talked with many people outside of tech circles and they are
| typically unaware of any consequences to kids. Sometimes they
| just don't believe it.
|
| This isn't about helping kids. It's about shifting legal
| responsibility so they can keep doing what they do.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > It's about shifting legal responsibility so they can keep
| doing what they do.
|
| Minors are the legal responsibility of parents. However I get
| your point.
|
| No, I don't think its actually that. I think its much worse
| than that. I think they thought it might be a good safe idea.
|
| If I was being uncharitable I'd say they looked at tiktok
| hoovering up the next cohort of instagram users and thought, we
| can provide a safe way to do that and convert them onto our
| platform.
|
| All the problems we've had with instagram, facebook and friends
| reunited are going to pop up on tiktok, but all at the same
| time and for a younger, less well equipped generation.
| zelon88 wrote:
| I think it should be the parents responsibility. If we let
| social media determine what is acceptable for all children it
| is guaranteed that the bar will be too low for many and too
| high for many others. Parents should be the final say in what
| is right for their kids. Kids develop at vastly varying rates.
| Not absolving themselves of liability implies that they are
| making decisions in a vacuum that parents should be making
| themselves.
|
| But like you said, most parents don't understand the risks.
| That's why social media should be forced to perform studies on
| the risks associated with their products and make those studies
| public. Then, when you use a device for the first time it
| should show you in plain language - like a new user signing
| into Windows ("Hi, we're getting everything ready for you...")
| - where to find that information.
|
| When a single change of code can instantly impact millions of
| children (or anyone really) the stakes for the public are high
| enough that the public deserves transparency. If nothing else
| to ensure that Instagram is making decisions backed by due
| diligence.
| mfer wrote:
| > I think it should be the parents responsibility.
|
| Parents and corps aren't the only ones in this conversation.
| There is also governments.
|
| Should we have let parents decide if kids smoking was ok or
| not? Some governments stepped in and required labels be
| placed on packages and set age limits.
|
| I'm not saying that the way smoking was handled was right or
| wrong. I'm using it to illustrate that there are other angles
| and players.
|
| > That's why social media should be forced to perform studies
| on the risks associated with their products and make those
| studies public.
|
| One of the things I've found is that studies performed by an
| organization on their stuff tend to show it in a much better
| light than independent studies. When there is a financial
| interest people tend to contort things to improve on their
| financial interest.
|
| I don't want to see studies from them. I want independent
| studies with researchers who are allowed to get enough data
| to perform them.
|
| > Parents should be the final say in what is right for their
| kids.
|
| What happens when you have uninformed parents? I'm reminded
| that these tech companies are using strategies meant to hide
| the knowledge of what they're doing from the people they're
| doing it to. How do you handle that part of the equation?
| zelon88 wrote:
| > What happens when you have uninformed parents? I'm
| reminded that these tech companies are using strategies
| meant to hide the knowledge of what they're doing from the
| people they're doing it to. How do you handle that part of
| the equation?
|
| I think if we had enough transparency we would get less
| uninformed parents. We force slot machine manufacturers to
| put addiction warnings on their machines, and only a couple
| hundred people use one of those per day. Facebook has no
| warning labels and they use the same techniques. It is no
| secret today that gambling is dangerous and addicting.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Tangent: incidentally, we _don 't_ force addiction
| warnings on games in the arcades, even though those
| machines use many of the same techniques and actively
| misrepresent themselves as games of skill, while being
| games of chance. This is one of those open secrets that
| pisses me off to no end.
| mfer wrote:
| To have warnings requires government intervention.
|
| It's not just a thing that involves parents, kids, and
| companies.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| Facebook, et al is essentially pushing a casino / Skinner box
| at my kids that evolves every day. My change in thought
| happened when I found out that Facebook/YouTube was pushing
| pro-eating disorder material to a teenage relative and my 6
| year old was getting pulled into weird videos that had a
| visible impact on his behavior. I don't work for Facebook and
| frankly don't have the energy to stay up on the latest
| innovations for stealing my kids attention at any cost.
|
| The only responsible choice that I can make as a parent is to
| not use it, but that obviously creates a forbidden fruit
| situation where I have to balance what I believe against peer
| pressure and other factors to avoid a worse outcome. Avoidance
| also means that the _great_ material on these platforms is
| walled off.
|
| Running a cesspool is too profitable for self-reform, something
| needs to change the way this business works.
| canada_dry wrote:
| > punting responsibility onto parents
|
| The end result will be T&Cs that few parents will read, and
| they will simply hit AGREE--> FINISH with default settings that
| don't restrict/monitor anything.
| madrox wrote:
| I have a hunch -- and it's no more than a hunch -- that this has
| nothing to do with anything except the Metaverse. I think
| Facebook believes children won't grow up socializing on
| Instagrams and Tiktoks...they'll socialize in something that
| looks more like a virtual world, whether it's Fortnite or
| Minecraft or whatever the equivalent is in 5-10 years.
|
| Through that lens, it's perfectly appropriate to shift your
| investments.
| etxm wrote:
| Kids need social networks, but they need them IRL.
|
| Instagram and Facebook are a scourge.
| codegeek wrote:
| "We started this project to address an important problem seen
| across our industry: kids are getting phones younger and younger,
| misrepresenting their age, and downloading apps that are meant
| for those 13 or older."
|
| Just because kids have access (which is mostly on Parents to
| blame), you want to add another app in the name of "it is kid
| friendly". I can only lol at this. Seriously, I don't criticize
| such harshly in general but as a parent of young kids, I would
| rather have Instagram be honest and say "We want to make more
| money and Kids under 13 are a great target nowadays".
|
| I am very open with kids having access to things in a moderate
| way. We allow them to watch movies/TV or even Ipad etc but
| restricted. I believe that the more you stop kids, they more they
| want to do it. One exception we will make will be Social Media.
| What a cesspool it is and there is no way I am allowing my
| underage kids to do Instagram or FB or whatever. I will fight
| hard to keep them away from the toxicity of Social Media. Some
| things they won't understand and you need to protect them from it
| regardless. The good thing is both my wife and I hardly use
| Social Media if any. So that hopefully will be an example for
| kids but I know that may not be enough considering other kids in
| their school may be doing it and there will be peer pressure. Ah
| well, I am ready to fight that.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| I don't disagree with you, but this is not a situation where
| you are going to find a solution in the problem cause.
|
| Many parents will keep raising theirs kids with undiscriminate
| access to smartphones. Just because you have it under control
| in your household, doesn't mean everyone does.
|
| You're basically saying: "Not my kids, not my problem".... and
| that's the position many will take.
|
| I'm not convinced IG for Kids is the right solution, but it is
| at least an intentional move towards fixing the foundation of
| the problem. It will take more than that, though. It's probably
| a problem that needs to be fixed by forcing big tech companies
| to cooperate, something that it's unlikely to happen in an era
| where those companies enjoy antagonizing each other.
| codegeek wrote:
| I think overall we don't really need Instagram for kids. We
| have plenty of apps that are used by kids already. I don't
| see a reason why a Kid needs Instagram.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| Kids won't use Instagram for kids.
| pj1115 wrote:
| I think this is the better question - will teens stop
| participating in grown-up spaces just because there's a 'safe'
| version just for them?
|
| However, for younger kids (say, 5-11) I think a separate
| environment is the best solution. Up to a certain point,
| parents have more influence on what their child does. For all
| its problems, most parents I know are comfortable with YouTube
| Kids because it's the lesser of two evils. I know that my child
| is going to participate in social media either way, so I want
| them to do it in a sandbox until the day I don't get a say.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Kids will, teens won't. Starting from about eleven or twelve-
| teen.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I think you are right, but it allows parents to say "you can
| get instagram for kids" as a way to compromise.
| gotsa wrote:
| I wonder how long will it take for society to ban all social
| media usage for people under 18 years old.
| gordon_freeman wrote:
| It all depends on how soon Congress can act.
| strulovich wrote:
| Does this include all multiplayer gaming (for example)?
|
| Doing as you suggest is basically what the Chinese government
| just enacted.
|
| If not, what sets one communication app from another?
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| It will come as soon as governments realize that's a great
| excuse for requiring an ID to connect to the internet. Think of
| the children, etc.
| [deleted]
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