[bmacho]

> This is such great news, we have seen mental health decline a lot this decade while social media among teens have become a commodity.

Yes, and simple solution could be (or: could've been) making parents control their kids social media usage. It's only harmful in excessive amounts, several hours a day. (Unlike drugs, or alcohol that only needs secons to be harmful.) Parents can control that, and absolutely would if government told them so.

There is absolutely no reason to ban kids from social media.

[coffeefirst]

An even simpler solution would be for the industry to not make their product more addictive and toxic at every opportunity to maximize engagement.

AIM and IRC did not get us to this point. I doubt the original Instagram that was purely about posting dumb photos with your friends would have either.

Given how concentrated the industry is, the buck stops with about four dudes who decided this was the course they wanted to set.

[hellojesus]

Users have a choice. They like the product and use it. The product makes money by users using it. This is totally expected. We don't need regulation; we need to let people maximize their utility curves!

[tstrimple]

We live in a society that explicitly rewards that behavior. If you don't change the reward systems, you cannot expect the system to just "become better". There is a reason AIM doesn't exist anymore and IRC is just a few grey hairs shouting at clouds. They lost. Capitalism won.

[Aeglaecia]

i dont know if you deleted your response or if it got censored. if you genuinely consider the 2005 internet as comparable to whatever the hell passes for the internet nowdays , then there is no way to bridge our viewpoints.

[PearlRiver]

Just last week I read about a child being groomed online to perform sex acts with siblings and a dog.

That was a "we are not in Kansas anymore" moment.

[Braxton1980]

>simple solution could be (or: could've been) making parents control their kids social media usage

How?

[bmacho]

Gather evidence that it is harmful. Put it on TV, radio, billboards and brochures that it is harmful, and parents should control the time their children spend on social media. Problem mostly solved.

[Aeglaecia]

sure, there would be absolutely no reason to ban kids from social media in a utopic society where people treated each other with respect , were all as educated as the average hacker news inhabitant , and behaved rationally. meanwhile in reality, modern social media have nothing to do with socialization and everything to do with abusing brains to maximise engagement. while this point is n=1, it really does not take more than a few minutes for short form content to crash my motivation, so i completely disagree with your 'several hours' figure.

fuck it, ban kids from having any form of smart phone or social media. give em all sony ericssons with pre paid sims that force them to put effort into their texts and actually socialize. maybe that will give imagination a fighting chance. what possible benefit could there be to let kids doom scroll? if you were a kid, why would you read or play or socialize when you could doom scroll? yes it is a parents responsibility to control their kids, and not one parent has any idea or education as to how modern social media affects a child - do you expect modern parents to spontaneously manifest this knowledge?

for what its worth , i once suggested to simply make it illegal for parents to let kids on facebook. but that doesn't offer much scope for multi national corporations to scrape PII (which is probably the real priority)