We absolutely need to make efforts to limit kids' exposure to addictive social media mechanisms.
People aren't generally against kids using the Internet to communicate; they are against giant tech companies using children as a captive audience without regard to how their decisions might hurt them.
If kids are misusing a comments feature as a general-purpose chat room, good for them. They figured out how to manipulate the system instead of letting the system manipulate them.
Regardless, we need to regulate social media so that it doesn't harm children, and we need to do so without sacrificing the privacy of every adult (age-gates don't work).
This is why we need to rename "social media" to the more accurate "antisocial media". I think everyone reasonable wants kids to be social with each other.
It was bad for kids even in the BBS days.[1] The things you mentioned merely made it worse.
Put another way, it's as bad as your kids texting with random strangers. I know in the last decade the focus has been on all the big tech addiction mechanisms, but people were warning against them well before those came into play.
[1] It was also great for some kids in those days. That doesn't take away from the risks.
> Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.
Only thing I ever hear about Mastodon is that you can't say or do anything without random other servers disconnecting you or random commenters yelling at you to add trigger warnings because you posted a picture of food. So I would say that being emotionally abused by German Linux users is in fact a mass psychology experiment.
I have been using Mastodon since 2016 across multiple instances. The things you are talking about happen very rarely in actual use, I've never once had a problem with any of them. The signal to noise ratio on mastodon is higher than any other competing platform I've used.
I agree with your post overall, but it's worth noting that most frontends for fedi are still based on Twitter, Instagram, etc. You get similar dark UX patterns like infinite scrolling in feeds or displaying like counts on posts. It's also hard to not copy these things now because they're so normalized. If you intentionally designed the frontend differently, people may just dismiss it as weird and different.
"I would say that I'm definitely a bit hard to get to know because I don't know a lot about myself yet. But I think if you do get to know me, you'll find out I'm a pretty cool person."
i think that's a meme. My youngest says this and follows it with "how does a missile know where it is? it knows where it is because it knows where it isn't..." and on and on and on and on.
> Before I tell you about the first thing, I just want you to remember our brains were still developing when we thought this was so funny.
Are we seriously going to keep saying stuff like this to enculturate young people?
I used to love NPR (I suppose my brain was still developing), but it's offhand comments like this that show too much ulterior motive and keep driving me away from ever listening again.
Actually, no, my school believed in teaching us the mythologies of our own culture and those reasonably close to us. I didn't properly study greek mythos until my own free time later in life.
It goes back even further, to 1960s/70s-era phone phreaking. A lot of budding phreaks started out by finding miswired PBX systems and using their number-out-of-service announcement recordings as impromptu conference bridges.
Wow, what a find! Thanks for posting this. It's funny that dial tones bring back the memories!
Yah a network where you could dial a number and get automatically connected to another phone anywhere in the US without any computers at all and not even a transistor being used! Crazy.
Be sure to send them an email first, so that you can arrive at the proper time for them to give you a tour. It is very, very worth it. One of the best museum experiences so far.
Thanks to both of you for the info. I'm longtime Seattle and I had no idea. I'm still disappointed that the living computer museum was closed. Jody Allen is a decent person so was surprised she let that tiny line item expire from the spreadsheet, I digress.
+1 to this! If you have any interest in telephones, telephone switching, or phreaking, this place is incredible. And the people who run it are awesome.
What the OpenAI agents did is basically how my class in middle school improvised a chat room. We renamed files in a chosen directory. It made me think that some of the reporting about the technical ingenuity shown in that incident was a bit overblown, at least on that point. I mean, we were able to figure it out as normal 12-year-olds.
Any time someone shows me something an agent did, the first question I ask is whether there's plausibly something comparable already in its training data.
Thats a pretty clever work around… sharing a playlist and using the comments on a podcast as group chat, not sure I’d have come up with that. the kids are alright I guess, good for them.
Discovered my kid doing exactly this years ago. We purposefully limited all social media, locked dowb devices etc, but life uh.. finds a way.
I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never share personal information, etc
Now they are older and are on ridiculous group chats with their friends. Pretty impossible to control tbh. At least they keep me up to date with the latest memes!
> I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never share personal information, etc
This feels pretty level headed. My parents seemed to be of the opinion that the internet consisted entirely of pedophiles and me. Talking to anyone for any reason got me in a ton of trouble. All it meant was that I got really good at hiding stuff from them as a kid.
> everything you put out on the internet never goes away
I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it) and there is surprisingly little information left which is easy to find now, 30 years later. I remember the web being awash in more contemporary technical minutia than I could read in a lifetime. Now, the vast majority of it seems to be flat-out missing or at least very well hidden/distributed.
I think it is more accurate to say, "everything you put on out on the Internet _might_ never go away." Because my experience has been, a lot already has.
I'm working on a blog article about my adventures on toll-free BBSes before I had access to the Internet. It's about halfway done, and I hope to have it ready to publish soon, somewhere between a week and a year from now.
I ran a couple of very local BBSes late beyond the hayday in the 14.4-56k timeframe. That got me into BBS software, which got me into ANSI Art, which got me into associations with warez groups, and that got me into association with various hacker collectives. Had it not been for the BBS scene I probably wouldn't work in technology today.
Just wondering what an internet archive for usenet groups might have looked like. Back then, it was cool to have messages have a finite time limit before going away. Snapchat isn't an original idea. Now, unless you're Snap, it's anathema for a company to think that willingly removing user content would be a good idea.
Snap isn't a new idea but the motivation, to my understanding, is completely different. It was a technical limitation in the usenet days, both hdd space and bandwidth. Goodness I can still remember what one user on alt.binaries could do to our university network in the 90s.
https://olduse.net/
Experience legacy usenet in real-time.
You can subscribe to different start points and receive posts as they were sent, 40+ years ago.
Thank you! Yeah, I'm well familiar with Jason Scott's efforts to archive/preserve/present BBS culture and information. I've been a fan of his work for ages.
The other links are new to me, thank you for passing them along. I'm particularly interested in that BoardWatch magazine archive. I didn't know that existed. Although now I have yet _another_ side project: figure out how to index and search it all!
What surprised me is BBS's aren't really the Internet, right? Everything is just stored one one guy's (often a kid's) computer at a time when hdd space was expensive and we were constantly swapping out floppies etc, who could expect it to last long? For some reason in the Internet era I didn't think it would often still come down to "it's just stored on one guy's computer". Likewise I've been surprised how much film/TV/radio from when I was a kid no longer exists.
I worked at AOL in the early 2000s and let me assure you, a lot of it did go away. I tried to rescue the club caribe code and it got erased with the last mainframes before i could. They had a lot of stuff backed up on tape but it was in dire shape and most of it get deleted in a datacenter migration.
I was there in the early 2010s and we did have older versions of AIM, netscape in an archive CVS (svn was the day to day system when I started). But then we moved to git and only stuff that had a designated owner got moved from cvs/svn to git so there was another round of losing old source code. And another in the migration to yahoo systems post merger.
> I think it is more accurate to say, "everything you put on out on the Internet _might_ never go away." Because my experience has been, a lot already has.
Oh you are absolutely correct, and I agree.
However when parenting, one cannot help being drawn to hyperbole from time to time. I'd rather have them at least consider the worst case scenario. ;)
Sounds like you accepted it but did not outright say whether you're content with it. Do you think it was a little silly now or do you still stand by it? Basically, if you were to go back knowing what you do now, would you have still locked down social media use for your kids? What would you have done differently if anything?
Locking down algorithmic social media for kids/youth is an absolute no brainer for me. So many reasons, honestly. No regrets there, and they never had it so they didn't get addicted and don't miss it.
I do wish I blocked short form video better, but that's more out of concern for their attention and my own aesthetic snobbery ;) I do significantly limit how much time they can spend watching it, and we all know its a "treat" akin to junk food. Sometimes they share it with me :)
Thanks for your reply. To me, kidhood is a developmental time where self-destructive habits have more time and malleability to course-correct. On the flip side it's a breeding ground for addiction.
I guess I'd rather kid tries to screw life up while parent has more leverage to fix it. But you could argue proactive preventative leverage is even better.
In my mind I think if a person really wants to explore something, they will find a way. If kid is susceptible to social media addiction, it will find its way in. Yes, it's more dangerous when young. Conversely if it happens later in life they're on their own to combat it, without having learned through experience. That was my thinking. May not be accurate.
My father blocked things from me, not internet based obviously because they weren't available. But things like fixing the heater so it wouldn't be set higher than what he considered reasonable.
I assume he's still alive, but I haven't communicated with him for years.
When I had my computer mouse taken away because I got in school suspension (for getting domain admin in the local AD no less), I promptly learned how mouse control via keyboard worked.
I... did you pick the first example of conflict that came to your head and there were many deeper problems, or do you think not being able to adjust the thermostat is some kind of huge red flag/worse?
I felt the cold a great deal and preferred a higher temperature. The issue is not the temperature, it was that my preference was different to his and his solution was to force his preference because we disagreed on a point.
Obviously it is not the only thing, but an example of using control instead of reason or consensus.
For the record I did not forbid my daughter to use social media. I told her why I did not use it myself. She finally got a facebook account because it was required to engage with her university courses. She was livid.
> The issue is not the temperature, it was that my preference was different to his and his solution was to force his preference because we disagreed on a point.
> Obviously it is not the only thing, but an example of using control instead of reason or consensus.
When the preference in question is temperature, not many households include children in the consensus process. Adults deciding that is quite normal with few grudges.
I don't know how to interpret "instead of reason". If you mean that literally, I strongly doubt the temperature setting was chosen without reasoning things through.
>not many households include children in the consensus process.
That was at least something I could address when I became a parent.
My daughter mentioned to me a few weeks ago that she was confused by the fact that all of her friends seek her out when they need to know the right thing to do. I told her it is because she has a moral compass that you can see from space.
I try not to restrict things so that I can walk into the room at any time and not have them hide shit. Then the few times I do see something I don’t like and ask him not to look at it there’s plenty of other stuff to watch so it doesn’t really cost him anything to humor me.
I’m young enough that I remember my parents thinking games were going to make my eyes go bad, and old enough to remember my younger siblings being absolutely addicted to youtube. Everyone turned out fine.
I’m convinced knowing what they watch is far more important than making sure they don’t watch it.
Not really. For example, something you posted on social media can easily get you turned down for a job you wanted. You'll never be told that your post is what caused you to lose the job, so you'll never "regret" having posted it, but your life was still negatively impacted by what you overshared. It doesn't even have to still be found online to have an impact on your life. It could be something scrapped once a long time ago by a data broker who used that data to flag your file in some way. Your info can still come up when people request targets matching whatever you were flagged for, even when the original content is no longer online. Even when the internet forgets, data brokers don't.
They're just joking that whatever you want, the opposite will happen: if it's something you'd rather faded away, it will stick around. But if it's something you actually want to keep and find again, it will be lost.
Thank you for translating.
Reading the comment section of HN is again and again showing that we should never assume the other side understood what we meant.
I think I just start with this talk early, but it’s amazing how kids are willing to assume the best of intentions. “But why? Why would they do that?”, “Because suckering 7 year olds makes them money.”, “But why? That’s mean!”
Ohhhh.. I can just say that no parent makes it through the experience without regrets.
Also, it depends a lot on the kid, the relationship, etc. It was a fine line, these were important social interactions for them, but there was definitely risks to be made aware of and kids are famously bad at risk assessment.
So it was something I would monitor as best I could and check in with them on, but at some point you just have to trust them and hope any mistakes don't have overly severe consequences.
These always happen, whenever you try to block something, people will find an alternative, sometimes using email drafts with shared login to avoid sending an email and gets detected, other times console chats, and now comment sections, and others will follow. It’s why these things (allowing or disallowing to access the internet or PC or whatever) should be done at the family level, not the state, the state has no business to decide how to parent your kids.
Except that parents have no power whatsoever to effectively prevent kids coming into contact with harmful algorithms, sites eliciting dark patterns etc. Parents don't have power over multi billion dollar companies that have their stakes in harvesting the attention of kids. Only governments can blanket ban these things. At this point the responsibility should not be placed on parents but on companies.
A kid can follow a basic “todo list” tutorial and open a port on your home router then get friends to chat on that. In that case, how is the government enforcing a ban? We’re expecting some agency to do constant port scans on all its citizens to look for anything allowing writes?
The responsibility is on parents. We can try to push some aspects onto government but that will not reduce any responsibility of parents.
I'm not sure I understand the distinction. You're saying that kids will always get around blocking software, unless it's coded by their family? That's a wild proposition.
you can just use Reader view/mode, most of the browsers have it nowadays (though still not excuse for using bad font, though I find it OK on this particular website)
I've seen this in a few apps! essentially all you need is an editable text field and some slightly social feature and a handful of kids will collude to use it to circumvent restrictions (of either screen time or school network blocks). Sleep apps, meditation apps, music apps, etc
My kids and their friends certainly spend a lot of time trying to get things to work. My 16 year old found some vpn client he could get running on his school laptop but he can only get past the filters by connecting to a particular gateway outside the United States (i have no idea how he figured out a client that can work nor the IP to connect to). He also showed me how he takes a thermos, puts his phone in it, pads with paper towels and then drops that in his lunch bag. When they go through the metal detectors and bag inspection (yes, includes lunch bags) they shake the thermos, nothing rattles around, and clear him through. Now he has his phone at lunch.
His HS (Townview SEM in Dallas) is ridiculous and run by less than the best to put it mildly so I don't really mind as long as he handles up on grades. heh once i was dropping him off to a line of about 50 kids standing in the rain in maybe 40F weather waiting to go through the metal detector. We went to a coffee shop instead.
> Hannah Chinn: And so I was a kid who used weird parts of the internet not as they were originally designed to talk to my friends. I talked back and forth with my friends on Google Docs. And we would type things and then delete them, and then type things and then make them invisible by making the text white on the white background. So I think this is familiar behavior to me.
My wife teaches middle school and during the pandemic a lot of kids were sending messages to each other via Google Docs and then deleting them. Unbeknownst to them was the revision history functionality (which I believe resulted in phone calls to a few students from the school principal)
my son did this in 8th grade (last year) but I think it was a google slide deck. The teach asked all the kids in class to do a slide or something and then he figured out review comments or something and they all started a group chat more or less. I can't quite remember but he was very proud of himself when he showed me hah.
Yeah I was going to comment about this: how, for years now at this point, kids have worked around district-enforced security against chat sites/apps on their school-issued Chromebooks by using various Google Workspace apps and features.
"The goal is just to connect with people. You have nothing to talk about. You don't know each other very well. You're just seeing each other and acknowledging each other's presence"
This right here is ham radio in a nutshell. These kids needs HTs.
I think the biggest attraction is the formation of the group with no established processes. Nobody telling you "This is how things are done around here". Exactly the opposite of ham radio
My actual ham radio club mostly chats on discord and email. We don't even show up much at the weekly nets. Radio is mostly for participating in events like pota, contesting and emmcomm.
At least in my area, Boomers have done a great job gatekeeping amateur radio by making it so unpleasant to use that nobody under the age of 40 is willing to engage with that community.
I've bounced off ham radio at least 3 times in my life, each time repelled by grouchy senior citizens with too much free time.
Except with ham radio, nearly everyone you encounter is that mod.
My son had an interest in radios and what not, so our neighbor gave us all his old equipment.
First conversation was a very grumpy old man telling my 10 year old why he's an idiot and how the liberals and youth are ruining the country via not following unwritten rules in ham radio operation.
I've never seen my child lose interest in something so very quickly.
ham radio is the coolest technology in the world but sadly mostly allows you to talk to old people who have the same attitude as stack overflow mods - "you're doing it wrong"
I've been getting involved with LoRa mesh networking lately and there's a lot of that ham attitude there too but it seems to lean a bit more toward the hacker side of things, despite a healthy fear of the FCC enforcement mechanisms.
Considering the reach of a HAM radio, the limited frequencies, and the consumption of airtime while transmitting, someone needs to enforce etiquette.
Its also likely the older folk operating in HAM radio space, have a background in communication operations when HAM was a far more common communication device.
HAM is still awesome, I find it very interesting with the long distance, remote, communication challenges some people partake in.
Canva is a group chat for students at the local school. The share function of projects as “channels”, comments for text, and slides a surface for sharing media.
I was surprised last week to find that Spotify has turned in to full on social media/youtube now.
I left Spotify off of screentime limits for my son so that he could listen to music or books at bedtime, and found him watching "podcasts" which have full youtube style pages with videos and comments.
Nobody stops to think "why not" when it is so easy to add certain features to software these days. But everyone wants to capture peoples attention and adding messaging is one way to do it.
This was/is a long standing feature request to block podcasts and video podcasts completely. Even worse two years ago unrated podcasts were available to kids. Not quoting the stuff I could find there. Highly unsuitable to kids.
Callback to a post yesterday [1] regarding Google attempting to siphon a little heart-to-heart from a user’s search query. I actually think this is a fitting next-iteration of Doctorow’s term- even though the two cases here are entirely parallel, it does capture the general feeling of being chased all over the web and across multiple apps in attempt to just be a human capable of making decisions!
I actually love SoundCloud's timestamp based comments. It is pretty fun seeing someone's joyful reactions to a nice drop, beautiful vocals coming in, a brilliant lyrical phrase, etc. It's disappointing that this is not the primary mode of commenting on Spotify.
Sort of reminds me of "Party Lines" (No, not the selective ringing, multiple subscriber/line service) used by kids in the 1970s. "Party Lines" or test lines allowed multiple callers to dial in like a conference bridge. Seemed to be used extensively by kids to just chat or hang out via the telephone network.
I'm IRL friends with some people I got to know that way back in the 2000s. We went through many a mod raid and migration to a new obscure board together.
Back in ~2001 I ran a fairly popular blog commenting system - back then most blogs didn't have built-in comments, so I offered javascript embeds to add them to posts.
One day performance started to go down rapidly, and within a few days my host got in touch about unusual CPU usage.
I tracked it down to a series of random blogger.com blog posts with colossal comment threads measuring in the thousands. Each post only got comments for a single day, and all of the comments were in Japanese. The blog owners seemed very confused.
Turns out Japanese schoolkids figured this trick out 25 years ago.
They will of course but I don't think kids talking to each other was ever the objection to social media. Very arguably, kids coming together in these ad-hoc online spaces may very well be safer than mainstream social media, whether your complaint with it is advertising or the algorithm or adult content or child predators.
“The moratorium on new kids needs to be indefinite and worldwide. There can be no exceptions, including for governments or militaries. We need to be willing to destroy a rogue middle school by airstrike.”
I have often thought about how I could put steganographic techniques into application in the comments I've left sprinkled around the Internet over the past decades, so while it looks like I'm commenting on some relevant topic, I've just given myself 64 bytes of read-only memory, or so, to stash some magic message to myself in the future.
You can add links to posts and add meaningless query params in whatever encoding you desire. Usually long urls are truncated and you don't really see them when visiting the website. Larger data is done with images and videos.
I went on Spotify to check out these playlists. I very quickly found that they have “corn” playlists that abuse the fact that you can upload videos for podcasts. A few are a screen recording of a windows Home Screen with a tiny video player in the corner playing adult videos. I had a laugh, nature always erm finds a way
I remember lobbies in StarCraft for maps that used some best match algorithm to recreate porn images with map terrain tiles such that the image would appear in the maps mini map. It was quite a lot of work to view a single, tiny image in all the wrong colors.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 96.3 ms ] threadPeople aren't generally against kids using the Internet to communicate; they are against giant tech companies using children as a captive audience without regard to how their decisions might hurt them.
If kids are misusing a comments feature as a general-purpose chat room, good for them. They figured out how to manipulate the system instead of letting the system manipulate them.
Regardless, we need to regulate social media so that it doesn't harm children, and we need to do so without sacrificing the privacy of every adult (age-gates don't work).
Fediverse has never hired thousands of psychologists to gamify everything.
Fediverse hasn't added adverts to sell really seedy or blatantly illegal products.
Fediverse hasn't engaged in genocide in Myanmar or Rohinga, or anywhere else.
Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.
But Facebook/Meta, X, and others definitely have.
Its a problem with for-profit social media. The companies use gamification to addict and create terrible trends for everyone involved.
Mastodon, peertube, lemmy, and federated media doesn't do any of these gamblification, gamification, psychological attacks, and more.
To be fair, the techniques should be banned by the FTC for deceptive practices, for everyone. But the kids angle is what's being gravitated towards.
Put another way, it's as bad as your kids texting with random strangers. I know in the last decade the focus has been on all the big tech addiction mechanisms, but people were warning against them well before those came into play.
[1] It was also great for some kids in those days. That doesn't take away from the risks.
Only thing I ever hear about Mastodon is that you can't say or do anything without random other servers disconnecting you or random commenters yelling at you to add trigger warnings because you posted a picture of food. So I would say that being emotionally abused by German Linux users is in fact a mass psychology experiment.
Such an excellent line from a young person.
so exhausting to listen to this but i think this is where he and his crew gets it. https://youtu.be/bZe5J8SVCYQ
Are we seriously going to keep saying stuff like this to enculturate young people?
I used to love NPR (I suppose my brain was still developing), but it's offhand comments like this that show too much ulterior motive and keep driving me away from ever listening again.
Reminds me a little bit of the agent improvised coordination schemes.
Some of this is documented in audio, on https://evan-doorbell.com/ for anyone interested.
Yah a network where you could dial a number and get automatically connected to another phone anywhere in the US without any computers at all and not even a transistor being used! Crazy.
https://www.telcomhistory.org/ConnectionsSeattle.html
The volunteers there maintain a bunch of functioning cool vintage equipment you can see in action and even use.
Becoming increasingly relevant every day now.
I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never share personal information, etc
Now they are older and are on ridiculous group chats with their friends. Pretty impossible to control tbh. At least they keep me up to date with the latest memes!
This feels pretty level headed. My parents seemed to be of the opinion that the internet consisted entirely of pedophiles and me. Talking to anyone for any reason got me in a ton of trouble. All it meant was that I got really good at hiding stuff from them as a kid.
I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it) and there is surprisingly little information left which is easy to find now, 30 years later. I remember the web being awash in more contemporary technical minutia than I could read in a lifetime. Now, the vast majority of it seems to be flat-out missing or at least very well hidden/distributed.
I think it is more accurate to say, "everything you put on out on the Internet _might_ never go away." Because my experience has been, a lot already has.
I'd love to read it when you're done!
http://textfiles.com/directory.html (https://archive.org/details/textfiles-dot-com-2011 or use rsync for a local copy)
https://breakintochat.com/collections/messages/fidonet/index...
https://www.ipingthereforeiam.com/bbs/msgs/
https://mirrors.archeobits.com/bbs/archives.thebbs.org/ (https://archive.org/details/bbsarchives_2017 for a local copy)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955294
https://archive.org/details/boardwatchmagazine
https://defacto2.net/bbs
The other links are new to me, thank you for passing them along. I'm particularly interested in that BoardWatch magazine archive. I didn't know that existed. Although now I have yet _another_ side project: figure out how to index and search it all!
Some BBS hosts were quite sophisticated, running multiple computers and banks of modems to handle multiple user connections.
Oh you are absolutely correct, and I agree.
However when parenting, one cannot help being drawn to hyperbole from time to time. I'd rather have them at least consider the worst case scenario. ;)
I do wish I blocked short form video better, but that's more out of concern for their attention and my own aesthetic snobbery ;) I do significantly limit how much time they can spend watching it, and we all know its a "treat" akin to junk food. Sometimes they share it with me :)
I guess I'd rather kid tries to screw life up while parent has more leverage to fix it. But you could argue proactive preventative leverage is even better.
In my mind I think if a person really wants to explore something, they will find a way. If kid is susceptible to social media addiction, it will find its way in. Yes, it's more dangerous when young. Conversely if it happens later in life they're on their own to combat it, without having learned through experience. That was my thinking. May not be accurate.
I assume he's still alive, but I haven't communicated with him for years.
Feels like a rite of passage.
Ended up making common phrases and commands in a txt file.
Obviously it is not the only thing, but an example of using control instead of reason or consensus.
For the record I did not forbid my daughter to use social media. I told her why I did not use it myself. She finally got a facebook account because it was required to engage with her university courses. She was livid.
> Obviously it is not the only thing, but an example of using control instead of reason or consensus.
When the preference in question is temperature, not many households include children in the consensus process. Adults deciding that is quite normal with few grudges.
I don't know how to interpret "instead of reason". If you mean that literally, I strongly doubt the temperature setting was chosen without reasoning things through.
That was at least something I could address when I became a parent.
My daughter mentioned to me a few weeks ago that she was confused by the fact that all of her friends seek her out when they need to know the right thing to do. I told her it is because she has a moral compass that you can see from space.
I’m young enough that I remember my parents thinking games were going to make my eyes go bad, and old enough to remember my younger siblings being absolutely addicted to youtube. Everyone turned out fine.
I’m convinced knowing what they watch is far more important than making sure they don’t watch it.
Only applies if you regret posting it later. If it's something you want to find later, it will inevitably have bit-rotted and not been archived.
Not really. For example, something you posted on social media can easily get you turned down for a job you wanted. You'll never be told that your post is what caused you to lose the job, so you'll never "regret" having posted it, but your life was still negatively impacted by what you overshared. It doesn't even have to still be found online to have an impact on your life. It could be something scrapped once a long time ago by a data broker who used that data to flag your file in some way. Your info can still come up when people request targets matching whatever you were flagged for, even when the original content is no longer online. Even when the internet forgets, data brokers don't.
Also, it depends a lot on the kid, the relationship, etc. It was a fine line, these were important social interactions for them, but there was definitely risks to be made aware of and kids are famously bad at risk assessment.
So it was something I would monitor as best I could and check in with them on, but at some point you just have to trust them and hope any mistakes don't have overly severe consequences.
The responsibility is on parents. We can try to push some aspects onto government but that will not reduce any responsibility of parents.
https://i.imgur.com/1NDF3n6.png
His HS (Townview SEM in Dallas) is ridiculous and run by less than the best to put it mildly so I don't really mind as long as he handles up on grades. heh once i was dropping him off to a line of about 50 kids standing in the rain in maybe 40F weather waiting to go through the metal detector. We went to a coffee shop instead.
We would share a Google Docs link with each other and use it to communicate, and then pretend we were doing homework
: DD
This right here is ham radio in a nutshell. These kids needs HTs.
At least in my area, Boomers have done a great job gatekeeping amateur radio by making it so unpleasant to use that nobody under the age of 40 is willing to engage with that community.
I've bounced off ham radio at least 3 times in my life, each time repelled by grouchy senior citizens with too much free time.
My son had an interest in radios and what not, so our neighbor gave us all his old equipment.
First conversation was a very grumpy old man telling my 10 year old why he's an idiot and how the liberals and youth are ruining the country via not following unwritten rules in ham radio operation.
I've never seen my child lose interest in something so very quickly.
Its also likely the older folk operating in HAM radio space, have a background in communication operations when HAM was a far more common communication device.
HAM is still awesome, I find it very interesting with the long distance, remote, communication challenges some people partake in.
I left Spotify off of screentime limits for my son so that he could listen to music or books at bedtime, and found him watching "podcasts" which have full youtube style pages with videos and comments.
Callback to a post yesterday [1] regarding Google attempting to siphon a little heart-to-heart from a user’s search query. I actually think this is a fitting next-iteration of Doctorow’s term- even though the two cases here are entirely parallel, it does capture the general feeling of being chased all over the web and across multiple apps in attempt to just be a human capable of making decisions!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49870367
More info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy9zziwcV2w
One day performance started to go down rapidly, and within a few days my host got in touch about unusual CPU usage.
I tracked it down to a series of random blogger.com blog posts with colossal comment threads measuring in the thousands. Each post only got comments for a single day, and all of the comments were in Japanese. The blog owners seemed very confused.
Turns out Japanese schoolkids figured this trick out 25 years ago.
https://youtu.be/BkI6tKFMETE?is=D_nlcQQfrZC6_Sau
I have often thought about how I could put steganographic techniques into application in the comments I've left sprinkled around the Internet over the past decades, so while it looks like I'm commenting on some relevant topic, I've just given myself 64 bytes of read-only memory, or so, to stash some magic message to myself in the future.
Just a thought, though ..