There's another side to this, though. Letting kids roam the internet can give ones who might otherwise be doomed to become misfits an opportunity to find community. Being a queer kid pre-Internet, for example, sucked, and the Web rolling out to households changed a lot of kids' lives. And we have a poor cultural memory of what that experience used to be like, because, before the rise of online communities, a big part of being queer - especially being a queer kid - was being subjected to systematic erasure.
I'm not sure how you balance those two things. My sense, though, is that the balance was better 20, 25 years ago, when the Internet had more small, individualized communities. Most of them have since been squashed by the rise of the social media oligopoly.
"""
I don't know if the downsides are worse for Facebook or Twitter (engineered for eyeballs and ad clicks), than forums, or where Discord lies on the spectrum.
This is all personal anecdotal, and not intended to be a real argument either way.
I have and have had internet in my house since I was 5-10. And I'd have to say: I'm still a misfit, social pariah, currently with no friends. Ironically the most respect (I mean this in the most basic sense of respect) I get from other humans is on here. But things were better when I was younger and worse now that I am 31. I'm not misremembering having more friends when I had places to go and do things in person, I definitely did. And these days I find it increasingly difficult to talk to people who have ever shrinking attention spans. Why is meme speak becoming pervasive in spoken language? Even when I call my mother she can't put down her Facebook or emails for a few minutes to talk. We used to be close. She says she has no time for anything. She's a book publisher and doesn't have time to read the one or two articles I send her every 6 months or so. Even when they are strictly about her field of work. She reads the first paragraph and says she got the "gist", which means we can't talk about it because she has no idea what the other 20 pages said, nor does she care because... well "haven't you seen the top reddit post today. I can't believe (random person) said (random comment) to (random other person)"
To me so many people have just become very boring. I mean what's worth saying/reading that takes 3-5 seconds, really? It's not that I think the internet or online social communication is all bad, or course it's not, but in my experience the bad does outweigh the good. And with suicide and depression rates rising beyond a standard deviation in gen z girls it's hard to feel as if it were worse from them in the past.
I'd say things are worse. Forums were a more personal experience. Fewer people, shared interests, avatars.
Look at HN - how many commenters do you personally recognize, except for the ones that are popular because they're part of YC (so for things outside of this discussion forum) or because they also submit articles they're written (so again for things outside of this forum)?
I probably recognize maybe 10 people, and with the way this discussion forum is designed, I recognize them despite the software, not because of it.
Yup. I really felt like I "knew" people on forums. I recognized their names. Our inside jokes were ones we had created.
These days I never recognize a single username on any forum (HN and Reddit, mostly), even tiny sub-reddits. The culture there is created by the masses, so there are plenty of in-jokes only because tens of thousands of people repeat them every week.
Twitter is the closest I have to a site where I recognize a stranger's voice and opinions. But that's typically one-sided -- even in small hobbiest groups, it tends to be the well-known producers talking to everyone else.
> Look at HN - how many commenters do you personally recognize
It would be 0 for me.
Twitter is better for me in that way, but because is only short interactions, it's not like I'm close to them.
With forums it was way better, for me at least. It felt like family, and in 1 forum I was, we actually had like a 'newbie adoption' thing. With many people there, we actually ended up being internet friends, while on Twitter we might be more like acquaintances.
"Even when I call my mother she can't put down her Facebook or emails for a few minutes to talk."
Anecdotally, it seems like the older generations are some of the worst offenders when it comes to this stuff. The stereotype is of two millennials sitting at a restaurant and both spending the entire meal staring at their phones. While that does happen, I think it's actually a lot more common now for older people to behave like this, maybe because they've had less time to develop any form of social or psychological resistance.
I think we need an evolution of social etiquette to account for this brave new world of self-absorption and rudeness. Pulling out your phone while in the middle of a conversation is incredibly rude, but people do it constantly, without a second thought, in both personal and professional contexts. It should be acceptable to kindly but firmly shame people for this kind of anti-social behavior, just like we'd shame people (perhaps not so kindly) if they started spitting in everyone's drinks or being blatantly cruel to others. I'm not trying to claim moral superiority, as I'm as guilty as anyone of doing it on occasion, but I'd honestly be happy if the person I'm with would say "put that thing away and pay attention to what I'm saying you dick!".
Older people stare at their phones when they're in restaurants because they are often with their spouse, and they already spend 100% of their time with each other. Their lives are encumbered with child rearing, house maintenance, and other time-consuming adulthood chores. So when you see them at a restaurant, they're both thinking Thank god we can finally sit down and peacefully stare at our phones in peace.
I don't really care if two people would both rather do that (except that it's kind of sad for them). But similar to the GP, I have some older relatives and acquaintances who do this constantly no matter who they're with. They seemingly just don't think there's anything wrong with it.
Social media are not the internet. If Facebook, Instagram and tiktok disappeared tomorrow, the internet would keep existing. In my opinion we would all be better, queer kids included.
I agree - I feel like one really important misconception to set aside is lumping "communication" in with "social media".
From a teenager's perspective, Instagram and TikTok are a lot worse for your mental health than say, Snapchat and iMessage.
In addition, for the queer community example - I'd say the perfect parallel for today would be Discord. Anyone can find a community and make friends on Discord, but it's probably not 5% as damaging to mental health because it's a communication based platform
Yes I think this is an important distinction. In my view the most salient divider between modern social media and other social things that use the internet is the presence of activity feeds. The model of pushing everything you do to everyone you're connected with was a huge shift.
I was on the internet communicating with friends and strangers on forums/message boards, IRC, AIM, and pre-feed Facebook well before the news feed was the default model. The "stalker feed", as it was known in 2006(?) when it was first launched, totally changed things, both in terms of the volume and ease of scrolling through content and the kinds of "news" that would be brought to your attention.
Something that sticks out in my memory of when Facebook's feed launched (I was in college at the time) was the additional pressure surrounding the "relationship status" field. Suddenly it wasn't just people who actively looked up your profile who might notice that you were "In a relationship with X", instead the act of updating it was broadcast to hundreds of people. Low stakes for adults, perhaps, but genuinely stressful for teenagers!
I grew up in a suburb and pretty isolated intellectual vacuum where it was hard to learn anything.
I got internet access I could use regularly when I was around 12.
Things were less developed then ~2002 and I didn't have FB until 2007 so maybe it's not directly comparable to the modern web, but the information access was amazing.
There was so much available to read and learn and most importantly, it helped with unknown unknowns.
When you're isolated like that and you don't live in a community of people that can introduce you to new things it's really hard to find where to even look on the map of interesting ideas. You don't know what exists. I wouldn't have been able to learn about computers, wouldn't have eventually been able to come out to the bay area as early as I did. I think people don't realize how the internet frees people that don't otherwise have a personal connection to someone who knows things.
My case isn't even that exceptional (my dad is an MD and smart, he was just the first in his family to really succeed so didn't know how to navigate a lot of the social class stuff) - someone who truly grew up in poverty would have even less access to things via their personal network.
At least for me, there is way more good with the web than bad.
The web and internet access may drive most of humanity to tribal motivated reasoning and echo chambers, but for others it leads to better critical thinking, learning new ideas and arguments and changing your mind/becoming a better thinker.
The upside potential is still there and huge - it's easier to learn than ever.
It just didn't fix the fact that the average person is not well suited to take advantage of it.
>I don't know if the downsides are worse for Facebook or Twitter (engineered for eyeballs and ad clicks), than forums, or where Discord lies on the spectrum.
They're clearly worse. Forums don't have algorithms constantly running trying to hijack your brain stem to keep you scrolling and clicking links...
There are options in your HN profile to help with this.
"Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero."
"""
There's another side to this, though. Letting kids roam the internet can give ones who might otherwise be doomed to become misfits an opportunity to find community. Being a queer kid pre-Internet, for example, sucked, and the Web rolling out to households changed a lot of kids' lives. And we have a poor cultural memory of what that experience used to be like, because, before the rise of online communities, a big part of being queer - especially being a queer kid - was being subjected to systematic erasure.
I'm not sure how you balance those two things. My sense, though, is that the balance was better 20, 25 years ago, when the Internet had more small, individualized communities. Most of them have since been squashed by the rise of the social media oligopoly.
"""
I don't know if the downsides are worse for Facebook or Twitter (engineered for eyeballs and ad clicks), than forums, or where Discord lies on the spectrum.