Oddbean

I have mixed feelings about this. It's no secret that legacy social media is bad for children. Their algorithms led to a new clinical disease called Facebook depression. WTF?! Rage algos have hurt an entire generation. However, it's not the children's fault. It's the social media company's fault. (And maybe the parents for letting them use these applications at young ages for hours on end.) Companies should be held accountable, IMO. They won't be held accountable though. We know this. Apparently, it's up to us. We will fix it. We will obsolete them. We will fix social media. We'll make being social online healthier. nostr:nevent1qqsqmdr9skgn59gdeygm4zejesxvpajl0a2ta8e4vzh02pqntevmrggpzdmhxue69uhhwmm59e6hg7r09ehkuef0qgsfchgtzg8srd6jjtf290pjju4ljxxgmkyj064xx0flvtscrg5jkfcrqsqqqqqpnkwz9x

There's nothing wrong with being social online. The rage algos and ads have ruined it though. For example, I used IRC when I was under 16. It didn't fuck me up because there we no rage algorithms. We were just talking and being social.

Why isn't it? I posted status updates. I posted links to news articles. I posted links to pictures. I had direct message conversations and public conversations. I had a registered username. I had a biography. Social communication has just evolved over the years. From Usenet to IRC to Forums to Friendstr and MySpace, it's all social.

About a decade ago I was interviewed for a social media manager role and said the same thing. They did not approve my take and I knew they would be horrible to work with. Their concept was that all social media started with Facebook and Twitter (but even Myspace or friendster, let alone icq or forums and they didn't know what Usenet was). I said "the Internet IS inherently social media no matter the silo" and I guess that went over the head.

i used BBSes and fidonet, later usenet and IRC while under 16 that was not what fucked me up, it was more of an escape at the time but yeah things were very different, it was just socializing and sharing pirated stuff 🙂 not yet weaponized to spread hate and propaganda

It's age dependant. Kids use these apps to be social and without them they are left out and no longer part of the social crowd. There's a lot of pressure to be on Snapchat to communicate for example. I don't let my kids use certain apps though. And the ones that they do use, we have strict rules. If rules are broken apps get nuked. We're not perfect but it works.

Oh, believe me, I know my kids are 20 and 22 but my nieces are 10 8 and 5 I hate the idea of them being bullied on social media or something, and I don’t think that ever happened to my kids like there was never drama around it

Most of my friends are school administrators or teachers. I hear all sorts of stories from them. Kids today are fucking horrid. Cyber bulling and drama is wild. Instead of being bullied or part of drama for a few hours at school now it's 24/7.

You should not be supporting the ban. You are giving the power to the government to dictate to you what your children should use or how they should live their lives. The more power you give to the government the easier it is for them to take away your children. Let the parents make the decisions not government.

It’s parents fault #1 and then social media’s fault #2. Blaming big corporations simply leads to more government overreaching laws. My generation was addicted to video games before social media but there were never any laws about it. The govt doesn’t give a shit about our kids, we the parents need to more.

It's not like at 16, the maturity to not take online criticism seriously or tie your worth to social media popularity comes magically. It's only going to postpone whatever is currently happening. Since social media is here to stay, instead of complete ban, maybe have online safety as a part of curriculum for teens? The very fact that it's forbidden makes it more enticing 🤷🏻‍♀️

Online safety should be taught by parents, but then again a lot of parents struggle here. Maube part of a communication class in school? As for youe last point, absolutely. This ban won't change anything except increase adoption and usage.

Yeah, and its also just the wrong solution to the right problem. Social media and the extreme thought control and peer pressure it brings to teens is a huge problem. Thank God for Nostr. Where the only peer pressure you get is to spend all your Bitcoin in zaps and have steak, and you're happy to do it.

How one handles their online presence is directly influenced by their IRL influencers. Parents are one influence, as are educators/mentors, but "they're old and don't understand" (like the Will Smith song). They're immediate peers will have the biggest influence and provide the most temptation. Hopefully your child has a good group of peer influencers, akin to not smoking, drinking, stealing, skipping, etc. if they trash talk in real life, they're likely doing a lot more online. I've found that frank talk with my kids from an early age about algos and dopamine hits, real accomplishments with lasting benefits and critical analysis of situations as they are presented vs desired (ugh, that sounds so clinical but it really isn't except in a post like this), works well. But that's me. Sadly, most adults didn't even possess those skills (see all the attention seekers on Tiktok fake crying over the election for clicks). We also go over their feeds with them... To see who the algo thinks they are. We share ours with them as well. It's shockingky accurate to what we share with the app/algo (currently I'm a coffee maniac along with all the rest of my history, wife is really into dogs, son is into weightlifting with horror stories about steroids, and daughter is into nursing tutorials and makeup). Media (as with all things), in all forms, cannot be banned. It can only be made more difficult to access and thus desirable as forbidden fruit.

Hi! I think it’s the parents job to control their children’s behavior. I had to wait until my 15 bday to get acces to a phone. BASIC phone. I had Facebook years before. But my parents didn’t let me use the compute more than one hour a day. Limits at home, not at a state level.

I dare say, those of us GenX crew, now parents, who grew up with networks (LAN first and heck we used to troll each other on Unisys systems in the school library) and then the interNet non local systems on 4800baud, have a better handle on what social media actually is. Everything else has been a new veneer on passing notes in class... Until recently. Up until the past 10 years or so it was all human edited. Posts got attention or did not. Posts then got up voted (or Dugg, karma, liked) for more attention by mostly humans (bots were always an issue for commercial spam even in IRC days). A-B testing was human created and scored on KPI. What's changed is heatmaps and algos that are no longer in human control but purely focused on improving KPIs, especially stickiness, which generates more ad revenue and profitability while usefulness be damned. Children, these days, are becoming products of the machines we produced. The question you need to ask yourself, when it comes to restrictions, is where your responsibility as an adult in the child's life ends and where the state begins. Now, being that this post is on NOSTR I bet I know what you all think. And, yes, that is pandering to a silo of exceptionally bright individuals (more pandering, you're welcome) but unfortunately the world ain't like that for the most part. So you're job is to wake more people up, both children, and adults, to be situationally aware. If you don't, the state will continue to step in and restrict to their benefit.

nostr is not owned by a corporation -- profit is not the primary objective. Consequently, there's no incentive to push extreme or "rage-baiting" content to game engagement. No follower count or like count is accurate on Nostr (and in fact it's easy to do bot follows). So the focus is on the content instead of numbers attached to the content. Some problems associated with not getting enough "likes" doesn't hold true to a large extent.

I am not sure about the banning of things. Too much black and white thinking. It’s our responsibility to teach our kids how to use social media responsibly, same as driving, alcohol, money etc. Banning takes away the teaching of life skills.

Teaching requires time. Age is time. It is no good to say "you must be x years old to do y" unless by y years old you have been taught z. But if you will be taught z by x, a ban of y until then might make sense. Even if it is just a nudge to people to determine what is "right" and "wrong"

Not what I said. I said governments signal what is "right" and "wrong" to many people. People still need to do what they think is best. Parents still need to do what they think is best. I never proposed that parents shouldn't be allowed to make their own decisions or work around government rules if it makes sense, just that there are a lot of NPCs out there and if we care about THEIR kids, then we need to speak their language and signal through the government that kids shouldn't use social media until they have had a chance to have learned basic social and critical thinking skills.