[insane_dreamer]

In theory that sounds right; but as a parent with two young teens I can tell you that in practice this is really really hard -- your teens can get around whatever restrictions you might set, bringing you down to either 1) taking away their phone altogether, 2) turning off the internet altogether (while at home), 3) trying some parental control app (none of which work that well or are inconvenient to use in practice). The only thing I've successfully managed to set up is a blocker on the router that shuts off access to their devices at night (so they go to sleep at a reasonable hour). During the day is just way too complicated.

So we talk about it and try to get them to manage it themselves. They're not unwilling, but the addiction of continuous scrolling is really hard to break. It's not even that the content is terrible, it's more just the mindless zombies -- like sitting all day on the couch watching TV. And they don't even have an IG or TT account (and won't be getting one for a long time) -- this is YouTube (which now has endless scrolling like TT) which I don't want to block altogether because there's other helpful resources on there.

I've always been an early adopter, and was on BBS and IRC and all that back in the day, love the fact that the Internet is a place you can easily set up your own blog and all that, but recently I've honestly come to f*ing hate the internet in general and social media in particular.