[mary-ext]

I've noticed that there's a decent amount of people who had benefitted having access to computer and internet really early on that seemed to be pro on banning teen access to social media, is there a reason why? the social media of today don't seem all that much different from the internet forums of back in the day

if algorithmic amplification is the reason then I'm not sure why social media as a whole has to be banned over it.

[mungoman2]

Imo the difference is enormous between social media and forums.

Infinite feeds are designed to game you for attention, whereas the forums of yore were there to facilitate discussions.

I'm sure some forums would also have liked to game you if they could, but they didn't have the scale to always have something juicy to serve up.

To me it's super uncomfortable to expose my kids to a product designed by large teams with the goal of making it addictive.

[peyton]

The bodybuilding.com forums always had something juicy to serve up. Today’s social media really isn’t much different.

I find it uncomfortable for the government to yoink any citizen’s access to discussion platforms. I would be more comfortable with other means.

[ottah]

We grew up with 24 hour cable news. Same thing, different medium.

Remember how they manipulated us into believing in weapons of mass destruction? They would have done it with the genocide in Gaza, if it wasn't for the ability of people to share uncensored information through social media.

[mrexroad]

> the social media of today don't seem all that much different from the internet forums of back in the day

I’m not trying to be a jerk, but did you actually participate in “Internet forums back in the day?” I couldn’t think of anything more different than contemporary social media. Internet forums in late 90’s and early 00’s were something special. Hell, I had more “internet friends” from online forums attend my wedding than I did friends from high school or college… and for some it was the first time meeting in person.

[ottah]

You are definitely remembering the past with rose tented glasses, because it very much was not as wholesome and safe as your describing.

[Nursie]

Did they describe them as either wholesome or safe?

To me the difference is in the doom-scrolling, the shoving rage-bait in your face and the gaming for addictiveness.

Old-school forums, whether they were wholesome or not, didn't do that stuff. Hell, I used to be on Kuro5hin, which was incredibly toxic, but I have IRL friends from there and it just wasn't the same as doom-scrolling through algorithmically selected influencers while meta/tiktok shoved ads in my face.

[quotemstr]

4chan is old enough to drink. Something Awful is from the 20th century. Don't pretend that transgressive internet content is some novel challenge that today's youth must face for the first time.

[mrks_hy]

You are mistaken if you think it is about transgression. Old forums had no algo feeds to manipulate the content you saw and steer you. This is the issue, not so much the content itself.

[ottah]

No our algorithmic manipulation was done through corporate media. Same monsters, different medium. It was the church, then newspapers, cable news, and now social media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

[xboxnolifes]

4chan is a peaceful place compared to modern social media.

[Mordisquitos]

The people who benefited from having access to a computer and the internet early on had no access to social media. Also, nobody is banning under 15s from having access to a computer and the internet.

[quotemstr]

This site is social media. Should under 15s be prevented discussing developers in the tech industry?

No? On what grounds? HN uses opaque feed ranking algorithms. It's run by a for-profit US tech company. It uses dark patterns (e.g. shadowbans and unwired "flag" links) that prompt users to engage under false pretenses.

It even has advertisements. The horror!

Yet nobody serious says HN is harmful to the fledging minor technologist.

I've yet to see a logical rule allowing minors to access HN but prohibiting their scrolling Instagram. Every demarcation scheme I've seen is some variant of "big company bad", which is a ridiculous standard for a law intended to prevent the harms that the "structure* of a medium (as opposed to the identity of its owners) produces.

In a nation of laws, an act is allowed or prohibited based on the nature of the act itself. Actors don't get special privileges based on who they are.

[Nursie]

> This site is social media.

Is it?

If so then I would say the term "social media" has more or less lost all meaning.

To me HN is more like an old-school forum - it has a focus and it has a mod team to keep the rails on the discussion and keep the topics vaguely on topic.

[quotemstr]

My point is that it's hard to define social media in a way that excludes HN but includes the services that the activist sort thinks are disrespecting the gods of the city and corrupting the youth. Laws must be rooted in conduct, not identy.

[Nursie]

I'm not convinced it's that hard. I've pointed out a few ways that it differs significantly.

There are others major differences like the lack of infinite doomscrolling, or the personalised feed to optimise engagement.

To the wider point that maybe we should be preventing kids from accessing classes of things rather than particular services - yeah probably, but it's much easier to manage a blocklist starting with the worst offenders, and that might be a good enough start down the path of harm reduction.

[graykey31]

Start with classic conditioning that’s implemented in every large social media platform and go from there.

Or go in reverse, look at research into correlation between mental health issues and social media use and extrapolate contributing factors, from those extract the features

Should give a starting point for nailing down the definition.

[Mordisquitos]

Let us assume that:

    1. On average, it is a net negative for under 15s to participate in Instagram, TikTok, Xitter, YouTube, Snapchat, etc  
    2. On average, it is a net positive for under 15s to participate in HN, old-school forums, and the like.
    3. It is not possible to legally differentiate services referred to in points 1 & 2, so a ban must be all-or-nothing. 

Under those assumptions, the question becomes whether the overall net positive of allowing under-15s to participate in HN and old-school forums outweighs the overall net negative of allowing under-15s to participate in Instagram, TikTok, etc.

Given the relative number of under-15s participating in each category of services, do you think that is the case?

[PetitPrince]

> the social media of today don't seem all that much different from the internet forums of back in the day

The message boards I participated when I was a young teenager were mostly focused on a specific topic (a specific videogame or series of videogame, or a specific genre), with some off-topics board on the side. They were contained communities; village-like if you will. If you don't like one you could hop on another website that had another set of members, customs, and rules.

(yes, you can sort-of see that small village feel with some Discord group or subreddit; but back then the media were controlled by an admin, not a centralized for-profit group)

Contrast this with today's infinite feed were everyone could potentially reach anyone, all curated by The Algorithm(tm) with a vague notion of "friend" or "subscriber".

[TheRoque]

There are various studies about social media having a negative impact on teenager's mental health.

I don't think internet forums are comparable to what social media are today, in the scale (it was a marginal activity 15 years ago) and the impact it has on your own life.

[fyredge]

The social media of today is very very much different from internet forums of old.

The old forums were populated by people with specific interests who sought out community. This is opposed to modern social media where everyone is on a single (or several) platforms where the community is recommended to you. This bypasses the first mental defense of actively sifting through content.

The second difference is the commodification of attention. Old forums have no intention of keeping you on them. You are free to join and leave as you please, so are others there. In contrast, modern social media have become a place where people need to be to network online (see Facebook and LinkedIn). In addition, the incentive of advertisements encourage social media to keep your attention as a source of revenue than to serve your interests as a user.

So if governments want to regulate social media, I'm all up for it. They regulated gambling and drugs for addiction, why not social media.

[gjadi]

It's like pot.

Back in the day, it was much less concentrated and less dangerous than what you can get today.

[voidfunc]

Social media is the rock amd roll of its time.

Every generation has to have a panic about the children.

[yieldcrv]

I consider it more like an opium crisis of the time

Where the whole population is addicted and governors risk their political career to ban the addiction, and then get their territory invaded by the corporations they kicked out who have returned with a foreign military and mercenary army, to push the addiction back on the populace

[DarkWiiPlayer]

Cyberpunk meets opium wars...

Actually sounds like a not so bad setting for a book/game/movie ngl; sure sounds like a garbage setting for a world to actually live in.

[heavyset_go]

All of the big "social media" companies support this type of legislation. No one is risking their political career doing exactly what tech companies want lol

[quotemstr]

There are supposedly studies linking social media to various negative consequences. For example, according to the Mayo Clinic, social media can:

- Distract from homework, exercise and family activities.

- Disrupt sleep.

- Lead to information that is biased or not correct.

... Ah, just like that public health menace, the public library.

I don't believe "social media" is actually injurious to youths. The studies saying it does, ISTM, are all confounded, of poor quality, and ride off publication bias. And yeah, it's remarkable that a lot of people on this very thread ago grew up on the Internet and gained lifelong technical skills want to pull the ladder up after them on the grounds of unproven and implausible harms.

In reality, the drive for social media age limits is the latest in a long line of moral panics. In the 80s, it was D&D corrupting innocent souls. Now, it's feed ranking? I don't believe any of it.

Looking for reason at the root of a moral panic usually leads only to despair. These things just have to be endured.

[enaaem]

Gambling doesn’t cause physical harm either, but it’s also banned for children. It’s similar to social media in that both are made to be as addictive as possible and they exploit human psychology.

I think it’s telling that many people here who work in tech don’t want social media for their kids, but there are no comic book readers who want to ban comics for their kids.

[logicchains]

>I've noticed that there's a decent amount of people who had benefitted having access to computer and internet really early on that seemed to be pro on banning teen access to social media

Most of the people on this platform are left-leaning, and social media has allowed right-wing ideas to spread among the youth, ideas which they'd never have been exposed to if their information was filtered through left-leaning teachers and media as it was in previous decades. They want to ban social media in an attempt to bring future youth back leftwards.

[enaaem]

I would normally consider myself to be center right, but I cannot identify myself at all with the current right wing populists.

[DarkWiiPlayer]

Same here; I'm all for a "ban" but it doesn't have to be all social media, just force them to use a simple rules-based algorithm for minors.

But meh, it's a broader issue anyway. Just look at the puritanical obsession some people have with pornography too.

Young people these days are getting infantilised way too much imho and that's just not healthy. There needs to be a safe environment to transition into adulthood with gradual exposure to all kinds of things, rather than turning 18 and suddenly being a different category of person entirely.

[grey-area]

Advertising, a push to incredibly short video content, dumb memes, AI slop, conspiracy theories, scams, algorithms that push more of all these bad things to generate ‘engagement’ and advertising revenue and punish real thoughtful ideas. The truth hasn’t even put its shoes in before misinformation is racing around the world on these platforms.

It’s hard to think of something genuinely positive about platforms like instagram YouTube and twitter nowadays.

Trying to share genuine joy in an activity is still possible but the platforms heavily push frequent users to think of themselves as ‘content creators’ and produce trivial yet popular video clips with all the negatives that brings.

[fyrn_]

... No offense, but have you ever actually _used_ Tiktok? This take is incredibly out of touch.

Tiktok is to early forums like meth is to black tea.