Says the person with 120k fake points on a social media site.
Seriously, though, I was connecting to dial-up Bulletin Board Systems as a teenager, don't regret it at all, and would hate to deprive younger generations of the opportunity to go online. I ended up meeting a lot of older strangers, which overprotective helicopter parents would consider "dangerous" nowadays, but it was awesome, and I made a lot of friends.
Let's be real about the risks: statistically speaking, the most dangerous adults to a child are not strangers, they're the child's own parents.
> Says the person with 120k fake points on a social media site.
Wouldn’t that make GP even better qualified to comment on the harms of social media use? :p
I certainly wouldn’t say that a pack-a-day smoker with lung cancer isn’t qualified to speak on the dangers of teen smoking. Quite the opposite in fact.
I'm not advocating for or against social media age restrictions or whatever, but you cannot seriously believe that BBSs in the 90s had the same potential social impact as the big social media platforms of today. The amount of reach that a post on X or TikTok is so many orders of magnitude higher than any post on any BBS ever was or could be. That very fact means that someone with an agenda--good or bad--will be tempted to use X, TikTok, etc to manipulate ("influence") people. Those same actors would never waste their time posting on a BBS to accomplish said goal.
HN is a message board. I was on Slashdot back as a teenager, and I think that was fine. Completely different than Facebook and Instagram for one thing based entirely on text and communication rather than pictures and materialism.
> Let's be real about the risks: statistically speaking, the most dangerous adults to a child are not strangers, they're the child's own parents
Some commenters here appear to be using "harm" in the psychological sense, with the implication being that spending time on social media is damaging to a child's mental health. If we accept the premise that spending time on social media is bad, then a modern algorithmic feed is probably more-bad than a boomer board.
To be fair, the article itself opens by citing both the mental health allegations as well as "exploitation and abuse". Given we're dealing with an emotionally charged political hot button issue, it's safe to say these are intentionally muddy waters.
The inequality partly driven by these mega tech corps essentially forces both parents to work. Good luck with 'more involved parents' becoming the norm.
Seriously, though, I was connecting to dial-up Bulletin Board Systems as a teenager, don't regret it at all, and would hate to deprive younger generations of the opportunity to go online. I ended up meeting a lot of older strangers, which overprotective helicopter parents would consider "dangerous" nowadays, but it was awesome, and I made a lot of friends.
Let's be real about the risks: statistically speaking, the most dangerous adults to a child are not strangers, they're the child's own parents.