I'd like to see more tools on how to quit addictive behaviors. I read Power of Habit, so I can easily quit things, but not everyone was lucky to be gifted a 300 page book and read it. If that was taught as a class in high school, it might eliminate long-term drug addiction.
How many times are people subjecting themselves to social media they don't really want to view because they habitually unlock their phone and check their notifications?
These kind of things are fighting fire with a squirt gun. Telling people to 'use less' and 'monitor' are easy to beat with addictive platforms.
I fall into video game binges rather easily, and what's been helping me a lot is a practice of intentionality & timers. It's a combination of advice from my psychiatrist and therapist, and it's pretty straightforward.
Before doing a thing - particularly things I can easily lose myself in, like doom scrolling - I take a few moments and ask myself what I want out of that time, which naturally dovetails into how long I want to spend at it. Maybe it's ten minutes. Maybe it's three hours. Then I set a timer for that long, and when the timer goes off, (notionally) I halt, walk away from the thing for another few moments and re-evaluate. Maybe I go back. Maybe I don't. Maybe I go back after doing something else for a few minutes (say, loading a dishwasher).
One of the key bits it to not judge myself or my wants. If I want to binge Factorio for a day... like, alright. I'll do that, even if I know later-me won't like having done that. No judgment, no beating myself up about it.
Another key bit seems to be not not doing the thing. That's a hard fight. AFAICT it's one part awareness, one part wedging in some mental/emotional space to make choices inside the habit loop (stimulus -> response -> reward), and one part good old fashioned habit-loop interruption (AFAIK if you literally add breaths-worth of time to each step in the habit loop, it drastically diminishes the oomph of what's happening neurologically).
The magic seems to happen in two forms:
1. "Taking control of my time." - Even if I'm making the same choices, now, my experience is that I am making them, instead of "them" making me.
2. "Stopping before you're tired means you don't start the next thing exhausted". Previously I'd binge until I beyond exhausted my enjoyment of the thing. Now I have a way to do a thing while I'm enjoying it, and stop once I no longer am.
PS - I've also started wondering if this is whatever the hell people actually meant when they talked about "time management" when I was kid, but no-one actually ever explained.
> Another key bit seems to be not not doing the thing. That's a hard fight.
I was told to replace bad habits with other things. It didn't have to be some "good habit", but there had to be something else to fill the void left by the thing I wasn't doing. I had a list (I still have it somewhere) of healthy things that I enjoy, that I can do instead of falling into a porn binge (its been almost 5 years since I last willingly looked at porn) or a YouTube hole (that's been less than a week, small steps).
Having a list of other things to do, things I enjoy, made stopping unhealthy habits a lot easier. I didn't strap myself to "being more productive", rather I just replaced bad habits that produce dopamine hits with enjoyable things that produce dopamine hits.
>I was told to replace bad habits with other things. It didn't have to be some "good habit", but there had to be something else to fill the void left by the thing I wasn't doing
Ding ding. I'm precisely in the process of replacing my brainless reddit scrolling with old retro games on an emulator.
The point is precisely that I'm not about to replace an absolutely brainless activity with reading literature or learning category theory. I'm replacing the brainless way I use to wind down with a more constructive/"structured" way to wind down.
As devs we could create an app that sets a timer for social media use and then shocks you with a mild electric shock every time you exceed your set limit!
We'll call it the Zapchat or the Zapper and we guarantee it'll be SHOCKING how effective it is at keep us from looking at our screens every 5 min
Many, though not all, of the people here and in the YC ecosystem etc., work or have had worked or otherwise made their careers (and fortunes),
helping concerns whose business model is entirely, openly, founded on maximizing user growth and user engagement. So as to sell personal data in one direction and ads in the other.
This has been something like at trillion-dollar endeavor, and a lot of those dollars have gone into the science (formal and "field") of ensuring those two things.
I.e, to MANUFACTURE ADDICTION.
It's not a bug. It's not just a feature. It's THE feature.
What I tell my own kids, who are not allowed on TikTok, or any Meta property, at all, full stop,
is that against the evolved state of these properties, on our twinkly devices, we have no more defense against addiction than we do against the physiologically analogous fat and sugar.
It's not about discipline.
It's not about habit formation.
It's not about best practices in schools.
It's not about "downtime" and tepid screen time controls.
The problem is more fundamental, and much, much, much uglier, and much, much, much intractable, than most discourse about it admits.
The only solution today, literally, is not to play the game.
Footnote: AI is going to make things 1000x worse, which I would not have believed possible a few years ago.
Yup. Every time people talk about maximizing "engagement", they're talking about manufacturing addiction in users. The solution is the destruction of the business models that require addiction. Make technology to block ads or just straight up make them illegal. Make personal information a huge liability.
As I think quite the opposite (more—think that it's incontrovertible!) I welcome expansion on what you mean, we may be interpreting "defense" differently for example!
Possibly we're meaning different things! I was meaning we have brains to understand what we should avoid (over)eating and willpower to choose to act on that knowledge.
...no to the willpower part, or choice, though this might quickly become tangled in the semantics of those words.
Part of what I believe (and assert) is that understanding, belief, intention—all the self-conscious cognition and knowledge we have around e.g. fat and sugar, has on the whole moderate (or no) influence on our actual behavior,
because it is opposed by and undermined by the other part of our brain, the part that evolved in conditions within which sugar and far were extremely scarce.
The dilemma the developed world has today is that cheap calories are cheap and we live in a condition of abundance, with bodies (brains) evolved for a condition of scarcity.
It's not that any one person might not make a reasoned decision, or successfully inculcate habits that remove them from situations where their own instinctual selves short circuit those decisions...
...it's that on the whole, most people are not very successful at this. Modulo the conditions of upbringing and culture etc... which are relatively modest influences...
It's hyperbolic to say we have no defense, I concede... it might be better to say, it takes some happy mixture of conditions including habit-formation and cultural context, to aid the cognitive self in overcoming the animal self.
The main point though was, we have recapitulated a comparable dilemma with respect to methodically crafting social media (etc etc) to engage the animal self. For fun and profit. And the hidden and deferred costs of this are legion.
> I read Power of Habit, so I can easily quit things,
Most people can easily quit most things, that’s why addiction is treated as a pathological condition.
I suspect its more like “I read Power of Habit, so I am inclined to credit Power of Habit with my normal human ability to quit things” combined with “I exhibit the common human trait of mistaking my normal human ability to quit things with superiority to people who fall into addiction”.
> I read Power of Habit, so I can easily quit things
I mean no ill-intent, but this feels like an incredibly naive thing to say. The inference "I read X book, therefore I am immune to / protected from addiction".
I didn't think it needed spelling out that they were saying "I read this book, I understood its message and was able to incorporate it into my life with notable results, so I am better at quitting or avoiding addictive behavior"
Rather than respond to you directly, I'll quote more from OP (a sly maneuver, I know):
> If that [Power of Habit book] was taught as a class in high school, it might eliminate long-term drug addiction.
No.
The book "Power of Habit", while incredibly valuable and informative, will not have this effect. If you believe otherwise, you have no understanding of the root causes of long-term addiction.
Anecdotal: the app "One Sec" broke my twitter habit over the course of a few weeks.
Via iOS' automations feature the app allows you to configure a per-app waiting period during which you can decide you don't actually want to open whatever app you've tried to open.
Do you find yourself making better use of your time, or do you substitute one time waster with another? I can definitely see how this would help me be more productive during my work hours though...
That's usually where those things fail for me. Still, I don't really consider them worthless - the goal is not to prevent you from wasting your time, but to make you aware you're wasting your time and turning a muscle memory action into something you actually have to think about.
In my experience phisical separation is the best for when you don't want to use your phone (for example, when going to bed or if you want to focus on discussions when having lunch) but that is not always possible - then apps like one sec or other tricks like setting your phone to gray scale, moving icons around, focus mode, screen time... All serve to nudge your brain into thinking if you really want to waste time.
For making better use of your time... Eh. Everyone struggles differently of course, but I'm unlikely to go out and run, or do focus work, when I would waste 30 minutes scrolling through Instagram. But if you make sure to have better alternatives (reading a curated feed, listening to a audiobook/podcast) then they can nudge you that way. Finding a better alternative is entirely up to you. I do find that writing down things you want to do, no matter how silly it sounds ("of course I want to read more books!") helps, especially as you can always reference to that list later when you're bored.
Second data point. I love that app. Well worth all the money.
I've also customised the automations so I have added friction to opening, for example, Slack after 6PM or on weekends. However it opens immediately during working hours.
Can vouch that this has worked for me as well with Instagram. Just hope one day they would give you the option to remove the "Explore" page. Same with YouTube shorts.
Until the automatic techbro solution to everything ceases to be "well David should just fight Goliath a little harder" (while they quietly give Goliath an automatic rifle to counter David's slingshot), society will just continue to disintegrate.
I mean I think schools should be stricter on cell phone use. I just think it's a bit of a lost cause at this point.
If I had kids I would 100% send them to a school that banned smartphones with dumb phones for texting and calling the only thing allowed between classes.
Because, unfortunately, in the case of my kids' school (South NL) - they send their e-mail and notifications over digital channels (rather than the loudspeaker at the school).
So if a class gets cancelled, online is the only way to find out about it.
Turning off adblocking is a good step towards making the internet significantly less pleasant. Maybe somehow requiring people to see more annoying ads would help.
> I'd like to see more tools on how to quit addictive behaviors.
Make them. I'm serious.
I used to be addicted to a bunch of mobile games. What cured me was the decision to simply automate all that stuff. I reverse engineered the game and wrote a bot for it. All those habit forming daily tasks? Automated. I was free. That's when I realized how deep in that rabbit hole I was.
Yup. Stupid virtual currency awarded for stupid daily tasks. Utterly neaningless. They wanted 7 day login habits and used reward schedules to form that habit. I still remember that timer counting down to the next reward and feeling the need to be there at that exact time because it's a waste if it's not counting down to the next one. Not just me either, entire groups of people waking up at 3 AM because that's when the timer resets.
It's gotten to the point I find the presence of timers unacceptable in almost any context. Almost all other forms of rate limiting too.
I agree with you and support your decision. I won't expose my kids to this stuff either. The possibility of harm absolutely exists. Gambling addiction is a recognized medical diagnosis: ICD-10 F63.0. More recently, video game addiction was accepted as a diagnosis as well:
Adults are vulnerable to this, there's no reason to believe children aren't. It's often difficult to spot the signs, designers disguise them very well behind pretty visuals and indirection. Their livelihoods depend on it.
I'll post here what I know from my own experience just in case it helps anyone:
If you see a timer anywhere, it's a red flag. A common form of timer are the rate limiting resources found in many games, especially freemium ones. There'll be some kind of resource that gets used up as you play and it refreshes periodically. For example, there's games where playing costs "energy" which you get for free every day. These are periodic rewards which create a schedule for players, forming habits. There might be a literal timer counting down to the refresh right there on the user interface. You can pay to reset the timer, of course.
Timers include even seemingly innocent stuff like "this building will take X hours to complete". The mere existence of explicit timers betrays the fact there's no actual game in there and they're just simulating the work as an abstract task that takes some arbitrary amount time to complete. Extremely common in mobile games which don't have good controls or much room for complexity. The strategy is to rate limit player progression and let players pay to skip ahead. In multiplayer games, this implies the game is actually a spending competition in disguise: whoever spends the most money on the game progresses faster, gets ahead and wins.
Timers also take the form of "daily tasks". You get rewarded if you login every day and maintain some baseline activity. This is straight up designed to form habits, the whole point is to get players logging in 7 days a week. You can even find this in non-game apps. Duolingo for example has this obnoxious design. Streaks, daily tasks, monthly badges, you name it.
In more traditional games, the timers are more indirect. Progression in pretty much every RPG is a function of time. You can calculate values such as experience per hour, levels and skills per hour. There's a timer hidden in there. More benign since it's not literally designed to hijack people's brains for profit but it's still addictive. "Grinding" just means doing meaningless tasks over and over until some reward is obtained. There are people out there who spend truly pathological amounts of time doing this.
Gambling is also prevalent in video games. Lootboxes, gachas, collectibles, card games. Anything involving the chance to gain something. Plenty of documentation on the addictiveness of gambling and its effects on the brain.
I think a big issue is when you're forced to.
Say you can only text with someone on Instagram but you don't care about the rest of the app..
Well if you create an alternative client just for that purpose you might get a letter from a lawyer (see barinsta).
And no, convincing people to use something just for you on an individual basis is not a solution.
>How many times are people subjecting themselves to social media they don't really want to view because they habitually unlock their phone and check their notifications?
I must be a weird man because the first thing I do on any new phone/tablet is block notifs from everything including the kitchen sink.
If it's a notif, it's not worth my time as far as I'm concerned. If you want or need my attention, fucking call me instead; no guarantees I'll pick up, of course. You don't have my phone number? That's your answer.
> If that was taught as a class in high school, it might eliminate long-term drug addiction.
I appreciate the sentiment — reducing long-term drug addictions would be wonderful —- but saying “might” is only a starting point for such an analysis of how to achieve it.
Books provide one mechanism to bring a conscious appreciation of techniques for
habit formation and dissolution. Putting them into practice requires sustained effort by individuals and groups.
Have a high level summary? The whole place the gym bag in front of the door as success I feel is misplaced (yes) without a reward loop (unique to each person).
A large chunk of your daily behaviors are governed by habits. Habits are made up of cues followed by some sort of routine that you do which results in some sort of reward. If you want to change a habit then you need to focus on the cues that set off the routine. When a cue occurs, alter the routine and give yourself an alternate reward.
I used to have a drinking problem, say 1-2 bottles of wine a night every night. I cook almost every night in my house, so starting to cook dinner was a major cue for me to start drinking. Specifically, whenever I would put on my apron around 6pm I would get a strong urge to pour a glass of wine. I had a lot of difficulty resisting that urge even when I genuinely wanted to quit. It felt eerily automatic and involuntary. I didn't start having success until I focused on that cue and replaced the routine that followed it. For me, I decided I would put on my apron and immediately make myself a plate of fancy cheese and some crackers. I still had a routine and a reward after my cue, but the new routine was significantly less destructive.
So you're right with your exercise example that simply placing your gym bag by the door isn't going to be successful. You need some cue to go exercise, then exercise, then immediately reward yourself with some chocolate or your favorite candy or whatever.
I won't go so far as to say we can cure everyone's addiction with this one neat trick, but I have found it to be a useful framework on my life.
> If that was taught as a class in high school, it might eliminate long-term drug addiction.
How will reading a book help anyone with physiological dependency to quit a drug? Some drugs like alcohol can't be quit by going cold turkey. Unless you want to end up like that cold turkey (i.e. dead).
Let alone other factors like being environment, outlook on life, etc.
> How many times are people subjecting themselves to social media they don't really want to view because they habitually unlock their phone and check their notifications?
> Telling people to 'use less' and 'monitor' are [easily overwhelmed by] addictive platforms.
Yes! It is foolish to rely on individual willpower in the context of systems that were designed to be (or evolved to be) addictive.
We need some combination of:
- a broad cultural mindset shift whereby people recognize the current reality and realistic ways to improve it
- political will for policy changes that reduce the addictive dark patterns used by our online ecosystem so it can be a “fair fight” at least
- technology that serves humans core values, instead of preying on their weakness
- business models to adapt; they always do
Business models will adapt, even if some particular businesses do not.
So many so-called ‘business’ people tend to use their wealth and influence to sway politics and policy so they don’t have to do the hard work of adapting their business to the scenarios of the future.
It is selfishly preferable to make your own future, indeed. This is good work if you can get it. In other words, this is rational and expected behavior. So, public policy is wise to be a step ahead of business entanglements and entrenchment.
It makes one question the line between functioning in a market versus defining that market. Many business people conflate the two ideas, as evidenced by their actions and their mindsets.
Some make the claim that fiduciary responsibility demands such action by corporations. Perhaps in the short run.
But I would argue that fiduciary responsibility writ large demands a longer-term eye towards not “poisoning the well”.
By this I mean: if social media platforms act in ways that lead to public outrage and backlash, they would fail their shareholders very miserably. Defining the time horizon is key.
Additionally, it is possible for organizations to clarify their missions; namely, who they are serving. It does not have to be shareholders at the exclusion of everything else. Broader and more balanced charters can give more leeway for a chief executive to act in ways that play better with the ecosystem as a whole.
Have I got this right, more or less? Maybe. But there might be unintended consequences. In particular, “playing nice with the ecosystem” might be hard to distinguish from “anti-competitive behavior”. It sounds tricky, but we should give it a lot of thought and try out the best ideas.
I blocked facebook and instagram on my computer by updating the /etc/hosts file.
Now going to either site results in a 404, along with many other sites that are embedded in muscle memory.
Easy yes, but the number of steps to go through reduces the expected value of the return. It makes you pause for a second, which is enough for higher brain functions to kick in.
This changed my life. I'm unfamiliar with that app, I use Cold Turkey Blocker and iOS screen time. My wife keeps the passwords if I need to make changes or unlock things.
This looks great, except I have a lot of linux devices, which doesn't look supported. Currently I'm often avoiding my app/website blockers by switching devices or browsers.
Time-lock using pi-hole or another interceptor? Theoretically you could put this upstream of your devices on the network in your home. Then device doesn't matter (unless you switch to data on your phone).
Part of this is not having something else to do in place of doing the old habit. Part of this is not getting a reward for doing the something else. Maybe make a list of things you (used to) enjoy and keep it somewhere visible, revisit it frequently, especially when you are about to hit a cue that sends you into an activity you want to avoid.
I have a book I wrote that might help you. Feel free to send me an email and I'll send you a free copy (applies to anyone reading and can find my email on my website)
I don't think this is fair. Knowing what should be avoided is a prerequisite for figuring out how to avoid it. Communicating what should be avoided should be done even if the "how" isn't really understood/thought out.
My kids thankfully are not into (and we don't allow) "social media" -- no Instagram, TikTok, etc. So they're not posting selfies and waiting for the Like count to go up.
But they do spend a ton of time in online chats (Discord, Google Hangouts/Meet/whatever). Only in groups with friends, never in public rooms with strangers.
On the one hand, it is essential that they be allowed to participate in these chats, since that is how they kids are hanging out now. On the other hand, holy crap the new ways to bully and mean to each other!!
No, they’re definitely not chatting with strangers.
They spend a lot of hours on chat (teen/preteen), and some parents might cut them off at night -- but we don't. We can clearly hear that they're talking with friends. So we let them burn the hours in chat because it's how they socialize... and as a side effect it doesn't leave any time left over for random stranger forums.
It's conceivable that after spending hours every day hanging out in person after school and more hours in the evening on their (loud) group chats, that they secretly engage with randos on Discord. But it's not naive to believe that we've enabled a healthy social environment, warned about strangers/etc online, and (my wife) is incredibly communicative with them about their daily lives.
I'm sure there's lots of other pitfalls they'll fall into despite our best efforts. But rando chats is unlikely to be the one.
Hell, I wouldn't spend my own time arguing with strangers on HN if I had an active friend group like them!
> There is growing concern about the role of social media use in the documented increase of adolescent mental health difficulties. However, the current evidence remains complex and inconclusive. While increasing research on this area of work has allowed for notable progress, the impact of social media use within the complex systems of adolescent mental health and development is yet to be examined. The current study addresses this conceptual and methodological oversight by applying a panel network analysis to explore the role of social media on key interacting systems of mental health, wellbeing and social life of 12,041 UK adolescents. Here we find that, across time, estimated time spent interacting with social media predicts concentration problems in female participants. However, of the factors included in the current network, social media use is one of the least influential factors of adolescent mental health, with others (for example, bullying, lack of family support and school work dissatisfaction) exhibiting stronger associations. Our findings provide an important exploratory first step in mapping out complex relationships between social media use and key developmental systems and highlight the need for social policy initiatives that focus on the home and school environment to foster resilience.
An interesting nuance, but I don't think this should be used to dismiss the mental health effects of social media. Social media affects virtually ALL adolescents, while those other factors listed only affect some. Only a subset of adolescents lack family support or are bullied. The third factor, dissatisfaction with schoolwork, would be extremely hard to discern as a cause or effect of depression
Yeah, to add on to this, the article seems to imply a logical leap from
- "social media isn't as bad as bullying or having an unstable home"
to
- "social policy ought to focus on the home and school rather than social media"
But I don't think that follows at all. I don't think anyone disagrees that bullying is bad and stable homes are good. And I think that's always been a goal of child social policy. Social isolation caused by technology might have a weaker effect size, but it affects everyone, including adolescents in stable homes who aren't being bullied. It would be great if we had a lever to pull to get rid of bullying, but in the meantime if the goal is to increase child well-being we ought to act on social media.
I have no particular expertise on bullying but I am confident there are levers (I.e. policies, interventions, support mechanisms) to reduce many kinds of bullying, much of the time. Different types would need to be dealt with in different ways: physical, emotional, and online.
Of course, it is complicated. Bullying arguably is a manifestation of deeper, psychological and social issues. Some forms of bullying are very difficult to find,
much less prevent.
Unfortunately, many of these kid / young adult
practices persist well into adulthood.
Personally, I sometimes find it quite difficult to draw lines between a lot of negative behavior. As kids are figuring out their emotions, they act on them in many unconstructive ways. It seems to me the core elements of the worst bullying tend to have to do with (1) it being persistent; (2) targeted on those with less status or power; (3) the victim feels isolated.
Again, this isn’t researched, but I did put some thought into it.
There are lots of studies available via e.g. Google Scholar if you search for “anti bullying policies”. I’m reading some now. Reading and summarizing even a handful is a substantial effort. I would not put much stock in a ChatGPT summary because a metaanalysis is a rigorous process, partly algorithmic, partly “hacking” in a sense … you really have to dig into the details to size up the various methodologies.
Bullies need a certain amount of cover and crowds are fairly ideal for it.
I'd pull the lever that unwound our budget-friendly, densely populated, age-segmented schools in favor of much, much smaller community (eg:walkable) schools where courses were based on students' academic ability (instead of age) and where student-student support was a focus.
Your solution is to burn down the entire public school system and re-build it from scratch - that's a non-starter.
I also don't even think it would work in principle. You're talking about combining the older age groups with the younger, that's a recipe for bullying.
> What do studies show about bullying? In particular, I’m curious about bullying in the context of age segregated schools as compared to age-grouped schools.
Here is one output from ChatGPT 4 to consider:
> Bullying is a complex issue that affects individuals across various age groups and contexts, including schools. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution to address bullying, research provides some insights into the dynamics of bullying in different educational settings.
> In age-segregated schools, where students are grouped according to their age or grade, studies have shown that bullying is quite prevalent. Factors such as peer pressure, social hierarchies, and competition can contribute to the development of bullying behavior. Older or more dominant students may bully younger or less dominant students as a means of establishing social dominance.
> Age-grouped schools, also known as multi-age or mixed-age classrooms, involve grouping students of different ages together for learning. In this context, research has suggested that bullying may be less common, as the social dynamics are different from those in age-segregated settings. In age-grouped schools, students have more opportunities to interact with a diverse range of peers, fostering a sense of community and reducing the likelihood of bullying.
> However, it's important to note that no school setting is immune to bullying, and the effectiveness of any approach depends on multiple factors, such as the school's culture, values, and the implementation of anti-bullying policies and programs. Efforts to prevent and address bullying should be comprehensive and involve the entire school community, including students, teachers, and parents
As a former teacher, I would love to see our school system move in your direction, but smaller is always more expensive. It would take more than a reconsideration of size, pedagogy, and age-segregation.
It would be far more surprising to me to
find a social phenomena that was independent of all possible interventions. It often comes down to questions of cost vs benefit, efficacy, how targeted an intervention can be, and political will.
How are they defining social media use in their analysis?
Because I'm not sure "estimated time on social media" is really the best way to measure things.
The specific social media services used, and how they are used. Some services can be pretty bad if used in some common ways, but much better if used in a more carefully curated fashion.
Spending endless hours are a sensibly curated subset of reddit could easily be a whole less bad for ones mental health than just a few hours a week on some other services, especially if the user has not (or cannot) carefully curated their feeds on those other services.
> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health
But it's the one that's easy to assign blame to: it's the evil (sometimes foreign) big tech companies fault.
Increasingly poor economics prospects, environmental crisis and over-competitive society are much tougher issues to crack, and perhaps, in the case of housing for instance, certain demographics would prefer to blame the "evil screens" rather than their own generation's behavior over the years...
"Increasingly poor economic prospects" isn't true. The world is far wealthier and youth have far better economic prospects than they did in previous generations, when the world was poor and the rate of teen depression/suicide was low.
The two main arguments on mental health "it's the phones" and "the world actually sucks and the kids are right to be depressed." But in the actual data doomerism doesn't correlate with the crisis. Phone usage and decline in face-to-face interaction does.
3-4 typical incomes necessary to support a household
This makes no sense. It sounds like you are talking about California. No, it doesn't take 3-4 incomes to live a middle class life in California. Yes, it takes two.
California has huge differences in living expenses so saying it takes # of typical incomes to survive would only be sensical in certain places.
I live in FL. A bit over a generation ago, we could survive on one typical income but it was tight. It is now tight with 3 typical incomes and a home expense in the low-mid range.
although I believe the big tech companies are doing their very best to capture attention at all costs, it is a good question to ask why people are in a position to spend so much time on social media and are doing so in place of other activities. For example, the lack of public spaces where one can spend time without spending money, relatively recent parenting practices and legal obstacles to having unsupervised time outdoors, etc.
I can see it in myself and I suspect others feel similarly. And I suspect kids feel it even more strongly but that's just an assumption of mine. The way "big tech companies are doing their very best to capture attention at all costs" is by designing their apps such that it's physically addicting. Once you're addicted it's hard to do the other things you mentioned because they don't release the same chemicals in your brain.
Would it be abusive or advisable to adapt edtech offerings in light of social media and slot machines' UX user experience findings?
While they should never appease students, can't infotech and edtech learn how to keep their attention, too?
Perhaps prompt engineering can help to create engaging educational content with substantive progress metrics?
"Build a game in JS (like game category XYZ) to teach quantum entropy to beginners"
And then what prompt additions could help to social media-ify the game?
How should social media reinforce human communication behaviors with or without the stated age of the user? Should there be a "D- because that's harassment" panda video to reinforce? Which presidential role models' communication styles should AI emulate?
I find it sad to consider that the most impactful thing to do to improve children's lives would be to ban them from social media due to their age; though, for the record, e.g. Facebook did originally require a .edu email address at an approving institution.
Hopefully, Khanmigo and similar AI edtech offerings will be more engaging than preferentially reviewing unacceptable abuse online; but kids and people still need to learn to interact respectfully online in order to succeed.
I don't believe it's the tech companies fault necessarily - but social media definitely plays a big role in my view.
It is extremely easy to get sucked into groups that perpetuate racial/sexist-related hate, self-loathing and suicide, unhealthy self image/comparison to others, endless doom-saying and bad news, etc.
Those can have a huge impact on someone when they're young. (Frankly, they have a huge impact on everyone else, too)
Is it such a bad thing that they compare themselves to their peers?
In 2018 "obesity prevalence was [...] 21.2% among 12- to 19-year-olds." [1] according to the CDC. That's one out of 5 being obese, not just overweight. And it has more than tripled since the 70's [2]. I have to wonder if it's related. A lot of teenagers are bombarded with images of their peers' perfectly healthy bodies that, quite simply, won't match what they see in the mirror. The solution? Ban mirrors.
Of course obesity is a massive problem in the US. That's undeniable. There is, of course, the opposite side of this where some people become anorexic which is well-documented. (Less common, of course, but still important)
But there are other issues of self image too, like wealth and success, beauty, etc.
Spending all day seeing nothing but seemingly "perfect" individuals with "perfect" lives (even if a lot of it is fabricated) can do a lot of harm, in my view.
> This recent article suggests other factors might be more important to adolescent mental health.
The algorithm you are implying is: find the most important factor and concentrate on it to the exclusion of others. Not a good way to go with serious problems.
>As researchers have found with the internet more broadly, racism (i.e., often reflecting perspectives of those building technology) is built into social media platforms. For example, algorithms (i.e., a set of mathematical instructions that direct users’ everyday experiences down to the posts that they see) can often have centuries of racist policy and discrimination encoded.9
There's something ridiculous about this statement.
I think it can be summed up in the following ways:
1) Parenting takes effort, use that effort to do 2-4
2) Know what they are looking at, prioritize face-to-face interactions.
3) Know the parents of the kids they are hanging out with.
4) Make sure that the parents of friends have the same values as you when it comes to social media.
This is just for YouTube shorts, but I notice a huge swathe of right wing content being blasted at me whenever I foolishly stray onto that part of the app. I'll get anything from Tate to Rogan to obscure 'Woke-critical' content straight away.
Nothing about it suggests other sites do the same thing, but if right wing content is driving more engagement than left wing content through outrage alone it stands to reason that any reinforcement learning would prioritise it.
There’s zero chance this message was not shaped by social media companies. Any message like this, regarding any industry, would get that industry’s input.
That said, it sure seems like social media companies got this to be as neutral as they possibly could, considering the very strong evidence that social media is extremely bad for kids. We’re definitely soft rebooting the tobacco experience, this time with psychology instead of lungs.
It's interesting to see beauty, appearance, and eating disorders called out, along with racism and bullying, but little else. Those are absolutely problems, and rabbit holes to keep out of, but I'm not sure that calling some specifics out really encompasses the whole problems, or the higher level problems that exist above the topic of content.
At a higher level, short video content has become a super refined version of americas funniest home videos and mtv. There is no narrative between videos, and it just constantly presses the dopamine button.
Then you get the split videos where you have a sensory video playing alongside someone talking.
It also doesn't talk about faux excitement. Every other youtuber that isnt Miss Rachel is yelling or screaming, and basically producing entire videos of hysterical feigning of shock, mouth agasp. That transcends nearly any topic.
It also doesnt talk about learning to navigate youtube vs being fed youtube by youtube.
It also doesnt talk about advertising, especially the organicish kind. Teaching kids that the video about a guy making pancakes with Prime is a Prime ad.
It also doesnt talk about replacing friends with celebrities.
It might help the mental health of the parents, and increase interaction with their children, if they cut back on their social media use themselves. It would definitely serve as a good example. (I realize I'm saying this via a social media channel while being a father. I get that it's not easy. I am also aware I'm committing hypocrisy.)
My wife and I promised each other not to "share" much (and absolutely no photos) about our child on the Internet (even as the child, getting older, has started asking us to "share" things). I think not being able to use my child for sweet, sweet Internet points was useful in helping me disengage from the least rewarding, most mentally taxing social media (which, for me, was Facebook).
I caught myself replying HN comments during evening read aloud time. I decided to start using the dedicated e-reader, instead of my phone, so that it won't happen again.
A vital amount of social interaction that kids and young adults experience is online. For reclusive or socially anxious individuals it may even be the majority of interaction.
It isn't like how it was 20 or even 10 years ago, blanket banning will leave them significantly socially isolated and stunted. IME anyone over the age of 25 will not fully appreciate this unless they regularly interact with and (critically!) actively listen to what kids have to say.
Taking away heroin from addicted people will leave them feeling bad. That's not a reason to keep supplying it to them.
> blanket banning will leave them significantly socially isolated
If they get that much of their interaction online, they're already socially isolated. That it happens to be called social media doesn't mean it's actually social.
Unilaterally taking heroin away from individuals (especially without investing in the necessary support structures) is also a wrong and doomed strategy (I think everyone here is familiar with the abject disaster that was the War on Drugs), so that's not very encouraging.
Government does have a place here, but it's in the form of banning hyperoptimizing attention/advertising algorithms and other business models that rely on precision crafted human manipulation, not micromanaging as a parental stand-in.
It seems similar to 15ish years ago in some ways. I remember my parents insisting instant messaging would result in us disclosing all our personal information to online predators and being kidnapped, so while most other kids at school were building friendships outside over AIM, we were excluded. Other parents would admirably fawn over how effectively we were restricted from all electronic socialization, while us kids were completely exhausted by the experience and eventually just learned to circumvent NetNanny.
Telling kids today to stay completely off their phones seems even more futile. There's commenters mystified that kids "can't live without their phones"...Well, what do they learn when they are surrounded by adults who literally depend on their phones to live? How many of us are making plans with our own friends without one?
I had a similar experienced as a kid in the 2000s, though not quite as strict as yours.
My group of school friends would talk in person at school and then hop on a Call of Duty lobby when they got home, or chat on Facebook/SMS. Without internet or a cell phone, I was only present for a small portion of the their conversations and activities. Someone might post something funny or shocking on Facebook and everyone would be talking about it at school the next day. Sometimes people would continue a conversation that had started online the night before, and I had to either sit quietly or ask someone to fill me in (with mixed results). The result of all this is that I never quite formed bonds with that group, I was always on the periphery, the guy who hung out with them at school.
I assume all of that is more intense today than it was circa 2010.
The "keep your kids off social media" advice only works if a lot of other parents do the same, and if you live in an area where kids can easily visit each other in person.
Additional perspective. I was in the loop at school before tech took over. Despite being the type that keeps in touch I’ve mostly lost contact with everyone from high school. Once folks start families etc it’s game over.
Have some good memories but all in all that time could have been spent more productively in hindsight.
"For reclusive or socially anxious individuals it may even be the majority of interaction"
This is definitely true. But we ought to also consider the risk that tech is creating socially anxious individuals. Some of those kids, if they interacted more in-person and spent less time alone, would eventually find like-minded friends to hang out with.
Ok, so if the world has changed to the point where these kids cannot live satisfied lives without their phones… then we need to start progressively raising the voting age now so they never have any input into how the rest of us live.
We can make them leper colonies filled with screens with up-arrows to click on.
Do you utilize your phone to make plans and remain socially connected with your own friends? Or do you conduct your life completely over landline and computer e-mail?
I would assume that in 2023, phones are a key tool for most adults' satisfied lives too.
Haha, I think my radar for tongue in cheek vs genuinely absurd beliefs has been completely busted by my own lifetime with internet social media! Even on HN.
Culture has changed a lot since we were kids. Online communication is integral, disturbingly so since covid. They'll still hang out, but less than we did and they'll miss a lot since everyone except them was part of the online component.
Pre-social-media I grew up with no TV, only Christian music, limited movies and a whole host of other things that isolated me from my peers. It didn't do anything but build resentment towards my parents and make me thankful they have no say in my life anymore.
I don't now the best approach with kids these days since I don't have any. But I strongly doubt it's the "strict no" route.
What's the downside, kids miss out, might be excluded by their peers maybe even bullied? Would the parent/child relationship suffer? But would the compound effect be better or worse than exposing a young child to social media? I have no idea but my gut feeling is that people would be better off overall without social media. Just a gut feeling though and we shouldn't make policies based on gut feelings obviously.
You don't need to go to the extreme in either direction. Everything is fine in moderation. Kids are terrible at moderating (adults aren't great either), so use the screen time limits that Apple gives you.
I think they were probably just asked to be as accurate as they could, and no more. There's no clear and compelling reason for a blanket recommendation to avoid social media altogether.
But I'm largely with you. As a practical matter, it's easier just to avoid it entirely.
If a parent takes the intervening effort to limit time online, they can take the intervening effort to ensure their child takes part in social activities. The connection is not lost on them.
Social media is addicting in large part because kids are addicted to each other. It's often used as a substitute for hanging out. That barrier doesn't need to be there all the time. Adults get complacent with tech and will bias towards the convenience of staying at home versus going out-into-the-world to do things - if we want to lead by example, changing our own lifestyle helps, but simply accommodating a kid's extra-curriculars will get you out of the house too.
And really, if you prevent a kid from watching 3 hours of television, are they going to do "nothing" instead? No, they'll figure something out to keep entertained. By the same token, they'll want to satisfy their social needs.
One problem is that opting for online chat can be a defense mechanism against going out and being vulnerable in front of other people.
Pro do what you want. Personally I end up working from a coffee shop once a week, I'd be alright with flexible hybrid. I do get some social needs met from family, but I clearly benefit from getting out of the house. With kids, it's easier this way than having your own weekly extra-curriculars (though I try to set time for some). Friends in this city are few and weekends get repetitive.
That's true only if the majority of kids spend the majority of their time online. It's a circular argument. And while one might argue that that is indeed the case today, the question is SHOULD it be the case, tomorrow?
I think it's just an objective fact: given the way social media sites intentionally try to grab and hold onto our attention at any cost, the cons far outweigh the pros and we all (not just children) would be better off consuming less social media. Once the media companies restructure their business model and make their platforms more ethical and sustainable for society, then I have no problem with widespread adoption again.
I think the downsides outweight the upsides. If they're doing sports and clubs, the social isolation will be minimal, other children will have phone bans too, and they won't be at risk from a load of horrendous stuff online.
I’ve experienced a lot of exasperation recently as the sports and clubs that my kids are involved with only communicate the practice schedule and meeting times over WhatsApp.
That doesn't happen in a vacuum. Parents are responsible for enabling their childrens' social lives, it's part of their duties as parents.
Friends live far away? Organize with other parents to drive kids back and forth, or go home together from school. You live in SFZ suburbia? Well, that requires a more drastic change but it's doable.
No reason to let your child any media, unless you want them to be literate or sth.
And social media is less harmful than some traditional ones. It's just that you've been conditioned by the traditional ones to believe they are somehow normal.
This feels so weak and inappropriate. It's easy to say don't do X or don't do Y. But then what? What are they supposed to be doing instead?
God only knows how they'd feel if they instead watched the "news". Perma-war, climate change, constant political cluster fuckery, the latest fear-mongering narrative, stranger danger, etc., etc.
The APA should prescribe a mirror for every adult, and ask them to spend time thinking about the world we're creating for future generations (i.e., current adolescents).
What are they supposed to be doing instead of social media? Social media was invented like 10 minutes ago. And they certainly don't need to watch the news on a regular basis.
Play sports, build things, read books, create art (write, draw, paint, design, play music, etc etc), learn new things worth learning, and - God forbid - be BORED sometimes and have to come up with their own adventures and activities.
Parents need to be actively providing children with avenues for their own development and creativity. There are infinite options.
This is the same APA that in 2019 published guidance on toxic masculinity. While they're likely right on this topic as social media is a cancer, this is not a serious organization that should be paid attention to.
Seems like Big Tech hasn't been following the other Big $INDUSTRY playbook fully yet - you gotta buy your own competing medical studies. Newbie mistake.
I am sure they'll learn, they figured out how important buying politicians was in the mid 2000s.
> To minimize psychological harm, adolescents’ exposure to “cyberhate” including online discrimination, prejudice, hate, or cyberbullying especially directed toward a marginalized group (e.g., racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, religious, ability status),22 or toward an individual because of their identity or allyship with a marginalized group should be minimized.
Ok, there goes 95% of the most popular games out there.
Let’s put aside hate, Twitter can‘t even filter raw violence (people shooting eachother) nowadays. It‘s really disturbing and I press I‘m not interested every time but these viral videos still pop up every once in a while. Sure the number of regrettable minutes might be minimized as Elon wants it to be. But the magnitude of regret of the few regrettable minutes is just off the charts
True. What this advisory recommends doesn't really seem feasible without cutting off an adolescent entirely to the internet - which isn't necessarily a bad idea, I'm just not sure how feasible that is without destroying their peer relationships at the same time.
When I was a teen it was not unusual to see extremely graphic violence go viral in ways that made it much easier to find than it is nowadays (like beheading videos and stuff). I want to say I came out pretty unscathed, but I'm not sure.
The web page shows a photo of a mom sitting alongside her daughter while she’s using social media. I’m not in that situation, but that general approach seems awkward. (Maybe it shouldn’t?) The related text doesn’t offer much detail on how this could work. I’m open to ideas, but I’m not seeing them in the page. Perhaps the linked PDF has more? If so, some hyperlinks to details would help.
That the research here was mostly non-longitudinal really undermines how useful the results are.
Even though our society has this data, it’s just in Big Social’s data vault.
Would be nice if we could enforce them to let scienctists use this data for research.
So basically shepherding adolescent online life is impossible given current reality of Facebook, whatsapp and friends and if it was, it would be a full-time job? Or did I miss something?
How many times are people subjecting themselves to social media they don't really want to view because they habitually unlock their phone and check their notifications?
These kind of things are fighting fire with a squirt gun. Telling people to 'use less' and 'monitor' are easy to beat with addictive platforms.