Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them. The content must either be addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the content doesn't matter at all. Connecting people to do stuff outside of the virtual world would actually hurt their business model. People turn off their devices and go outside, instead of watching ads.
So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine. Probably even Reddit - which does have an algorithm to show specific content - is not as bad.
I don't care if I sound old and salty when I say this: I miss phpBB and Invision forums. Even those are being bought up by marketing companies to sell ads and transformed with social media features... Xenforo (which everybody uses now) allows liking posts and supports Instagram-style content feeds.
As someone who's paid for an Invision Power Board licence before: I remember when they screwed all existing "lifetime/perpetual" licence holders with v3, and once again with v4.
Moderators are part of the problem really, there are a handful of moderators holding the reins over all the popular subreddits, and "smaller" (even big ones) subreddits suffer from the same problem.
As an example, r/MistralAI, r/LocalLLaMA, r/ChatGPT, r/OpenAI and r/grok are all run by the same person.
The only survivable places on reddit left are the subreddits with small amount of contributors that aren't trying to gain something by participating and organizing. But they're so few.
Reddit's principal problem is that the first person to take r/foo is often a BDFL for foo for life, and no other subreddit about foo will ever be quite as recognizable. If we instead had subreddits with a numeric ID and a non-unique display name, that problem would be solved.
Payments would also solve the spam problem, but many users who have $1 can't easily get that $1 to Reddit, so that's not really an option either.
Given how many subreddits there, I have to ask if you have statistics to back up this claim.
My intuition is that people have problems with a bunch of popular subreddits, but the vast majority of subreddits are just fine. I have no statistics to back up this intuition.
Do you?
Maybe all of these fall into your last paragraph and I simply don't frequent the type of subreddit you describe. The thing is, it is hard to tell if it is you or me who have a representative sample here, or if we are both off. Two samples is not statistically significant.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E36G9QOolxk [video][12 mins]
Bots and AI spam can be annoying but mods that lock you out of discussions are much worse.
[1] - https://www.somethingawful.com/cliff-yablonski/i-hate-you-01...
On spacebattles you get infracted for chan-like (or instagram-like) behaviour. It's all about how strict moderation is. They do allow likes (but there's no algo)
People's habits changed.
I do agree that things got worse in the last ~16 years or so.
The code was rife with vulnerabilities, so the boards needed constant patching (which was a non-trivial that sometimes killed the database). If you didn't patch on time, a script inevitably dropped by, exploited the software, dumped all credentials, and nuked the database.
Those old forums were not built with the adversarial nature of the 2010s internet in mind. Boards were dropping like flies a few years there. Most simply never recovered.
It did change a lot but the biggest changes were the ToS/AuP of server/VM providers. What was not even taboo in the early 00's was becoming a problem keeping an account active on clear-web sites. Across the board many providers starting using the vague word "lewd" a word I had never heard of even after running porn sites for a long time.
Many of us moved to .onion despite being incredibly slow at the time. We would keep an unpublished clear-web sub-domain active for the old time users so they had a fast connection. Eventually that was even problematic so many forum operators stopped accepting new users and made their forums private or semi-private. Some still exist and some got married, had kids and real life took too much time and energy to also run such sites.
It's a place that originally was a link-sharing platform, where you literally can't share a link to your own website on any subreddit. At least not if you are honest about it. It's okay if you pretend you aren't associated to it.
Reddit has become essentially watermarked videos posted by people pretending they aren't the creator of the video, twitter screenshots with 10 likes posted by people pretending they aren't the user who tweeted the tweet, and links to news websites posted by users whose only activity on reddit seems to be posting the same link to 5 different subreddits as if it was their job, because it probably is.
"I hate my rights. I hate the town square. There is litter in the common square. There is a child outdoors. Take away my pubic square."
Even back in the early 2010s I've been trying to consume social media mindfully. I made sure to follow pages with meaningful content (e.g., The Dalai Lama, The Long Now Foundation, Aeon Magazine, tech-related pages, SpaceX, Elon Musk, indie creators). I don't just add or follow blindly.
Back then I could justify why my selection was "good" but even then, they were drowned out by the tedium of vacations, new restaurants, felt-cute-might-delete-later selfies. Slop/engagement bait is quicker to produce than meaningful thought-provoking content.
I am also pretty sure Facebook's negative signals (unfollow, don't show me this type of content) did not work back then, at least not deterministically. If something I did not like had enough traction, it will still pop up in my feed.
And of course, goes without saying that a lot of my choices aged like milk. Elon Musk turned out to be, well, Elon Musk. Some of the tech pages started shilling out crypto (and nowadays doubtless AI). The indie creators either stopped posting or fell out of favor with the algorithm which meant exodus from the platform. All that goes on top of my pre-existing grievances against my feed recommendations.
However, I don’t think Reddit is an exception. Popular is often filled with content that is driven by the feelings of fear and hate. Not something I’d like to continually expose kids or teens to.
That's what I've lost on Facebook. It forces me to see things its algorithm thinks I like, but more often than not, it's things that make me want to argue. I don't have that on Reddit. Long may it last.
Same account, same behaviour, but the new site is really pushing "gross" stuff at me.
I had to abandon my last few hobby subreddits because there were a few chronically online people who had to control the conversation in every single post with their opinions. If anyone didn't agree, their comments would mysteriously go to -3 or below within 30 minutes of posting.
It's all little fiefdoms for chronically online people now.
If I may ask, what are the hobbies that you are talking about?
I was hopeful when I found out about it...
The trouble I think, going forward, is that no matter how good the technology of a new forum might be, everyone is primed and ready to flock to it. How could anything be good if the same 500,000 redditors that turned it into shit show up the first week? Worse, even if they don't, there are all sorts of crackpots who try to preempt by colonizing new ones early hoping that they can sway the thing once it gets big (Lemmy and the commies).
This is Eternal September.
> there are all sorts of crackpots who try to preempt by colonizing new ones early hoping that they can sway the thing once it gets big
I do wonder if software can be used to prevent this tho. I mean Hackernews came after reddit and its community doesn't have crackpots (well ahem, maybe sometimes but definitely fewer than reddit maybe)
I do think about hackernews from time to time and think about how the ethos around it is Curiosity >> everything. I mean sometimes small comments/low value comments can be rewarded but usually its the well thought out comments which get value. (Well, this explains why my comments don't get +1 haha, self roasts are fun!)
I do think that in HN this intentional change plus the fact that pg spearheaded the project personally as a personal project for the first few years set the mood around it here to be like this (which is usually civil, even in disagreements)
I think that even in HN guidelines or in some important place, there is this thing called HN is not reddit and such comparison. I find it funny right now but I think that they wrote this to specifically prevent some aspects of what you are talking about right now.
I do wonder if this can be replicated with the communities that you mention tho. It would be interesting to hear what dang comments about it maybe if dang's here about such moderation.
Also out of curiosity but when you mention shit show, do you mean the discussing turning into something (un-civil?) or lacking etiquettes as in say, the community turning into gifs posting as such or similar with low quality comments?
Or what exactly would you classify as "shit show"?
Of course 4chan isn’t a great system for meaningful discussions, the system skews conversations towards outrage and shock. But reddits short, quippy, in-group signaling post style that is encouraged by their voting system seems to be absolute worst way to interact with other people. HN also has this problem to an extent, but it’s properly modded and most people here seem to be not be living through their phones so it isn’t nearly as extreme as reddit (or twitter, I never use twitter but people seem miserable in a similar way to reddit users).
The worst part is the conspiracy theories are increasingly being confirmed in the Epstein releases which is mind blowing, eg. https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/mlt7v/a_big_congrat... into https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29884486 and https://thepostmillennial.com/former-reddit-ceo-says-she-kne...
I've been aggressively downvoted before for pointing out facts that people don't want to be true. (And these were not even political discussions!) I don't even bother with putting my opinions online at any rate, both because they don't actually matter to anyone but me, and because I don't get any joy out of defending them against internet randos.
Edit: It depends on the size of the sub as well. I'm a member of a few subs that I can stand because the moderators are good at moderating, and there are enough regular users coming through to counter a small number of very active cranks.
That is true here too. And Twitter is the least transparent, with people regularly reporting that posts critical of musk or trump have reduced reach compared to their other posts.
Ah, no, the HN commentorship is quite highly biased toward a particular demographic and set of political beliefs, which is a thing that needs to be acknowledged. "Considering both sides" is not something I've ever seen as common practice in any organic online community I've been a part of, full stop.
HN's redeeming quality over much of the rest of the web is that low-effort hot-takes and aggressive content are actively discouraged by the mods and community. (These are things that other communities devolve towards, because they tend to drive engagement faster and easier than quality.)
I was an early Reddit user. It felt like there was a distinct shift when the site went from programming and news topics to being meme-heavy. Then again recently when they started recommending niche subreddits into everyone's feeds so that even the small subreddits couldn't count on being islands of quality.
Now it's just a doomerism factory. The young Redditors I've known feel like they've had their hope about the future hollowed out and crushed. They open the site and consuming a stream of content telling them that everything is awful and will continue to be awful, and anyone who disagrees is shouted down and downvoted. It's a real crabs-in-a-bucket website now.
Yeah there definitely was a change in reddit, probably more than once. It changed indeed. To the worse, too.
In some of the hobby subreddits where I had good discussions in the past it's now just one big echo chamber of people parroting the same information around, whether it's true or not. If you want to participate you either need to toe the line of the accepted brands/methods/techniques or keep your mouth shut. Most of us just get tired and give up
Indeed. I no longer call them social media. They have all become attention media platforms. I recently expressed my thoughts about this on my blog at <https://susam.net/attention-media-is-not-social-media.html>.
These days I typically resolve the domain names of these attention media platforms to 127.0.0.1 in my /etc/hosts file, so that I do not inadvertently end up visiting them by following a link somewhere else. I think there are very few true social media platforms remaining today, among which I visit only HN and Mastodon.
Social media is the correct name for what they are now, they're channels that push curated content out to their users.
The thing they used to be is social networking.
https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/updates-youtube-supervi...
"YouTube has introduced enhanced parental controls allowing parents to manage or block YouTube Shorts for teen accounts. Parents can set daily time limits for Shorts ranging from zero to two hours, configure custom bedtimes, and set "take a break" reminders" (AI summary)
If you want to block Shorts. I recommend you to try out revanced which gives you youtube without any ads and a lot of other customizations.
To be honest, I find it funny that paid youtube customers might shift to revanced which is technically piracy jsut to remove shorts.
I was this close to rooting the phones but she had just bought a new phone.
But if pricing wasn't the concern for me (which right now it is but I don't think for many HN users it might be), here's what I suggest.
Go buy a phone which can be easily rooted and also use an somewhat secure os (just short of graphene)
Patch revanced (I have even made a nix flake or some nix file [i don't use nix that much but I was curious and ended up using LLMs to generate the file] whose purpose was to take android file and patch it when I was in nix, but I don't have it with me right nwo as I may haev lost it)
Have in the options the short block option.
Newpipe is great as well but it doesn't really allow having comment support.
Also given that HN is a very techie and well hacking with software community. If anyone's interested to take an challenge within Java/Kotlin (Unfortunately, they scare me) then I have got an idea for you guys:
"But the option of turning shorts back on can still be toggled. I wish if anybody whose an expert in java/kotlin can take a look at how revanced works and maybe how to have a revanced patch which can block shorts by default (additionally with ads preferably too with the download option patch as well & the sponsorblock) while atleast in the revanced specific settings option blocking just the option/toggle switch to turn shorts back on."
Also I am a teenager. I would consider the fact that I am on this website partially because of a loop of youtubers that I started following [ Fireship the goat before he turned VC -> Primagen the legend -> Theo t3 (I do feel like he's not the best guy following but he covered so much about YC that I ended up opening news.ycombinator.com and reading it and not watching him read it and ended up making account)
oh yeah before Fireship, I used to follow Code with harry when I was around ~13 yo. I learnt python from him many years ago before it was introduced to us in school so much so that I ended up picking the finance subject out of curiosity and I enjoyed both finance and tech.
One of the funniest stories from this whole is when Code with harry loved one of my comments on youtube loooong time ago and I was around 14 or osmething and then my mum saw it and she didn't know what loving a comment in YT mean and she got suspicious about it and questioned me and then I had to describe hearting a comment to her xD.
Oh yeah. I started learning about python itself around this time because one of my cousins whom I deeply respect who works in aerospace but back when in his university started mentioning how he worked on a ~2-3k loc and he mentioned python and I was like hmm what's python.
I don't know if a parent is interested to hear this but I feel like teenagers really replicate those they admire. A lot of my traits first started just being around that cousin & he actually taught me about assets/liabilities when I was in 5th grade and taught me chess which both became very obsessive points for me later down the life (My joy when I finally ended up beating him at chess fair and square)
I don't think that I do that well academically per se though, it really just depends on my mood so :/ yeah but I really ended up butchering some prestigious college's paper real hard and still tensed about it but honestly as a teen, I don't even know why I am typing this but my point is that your kid would have a personality and just nudge him in the right manners & let him think for himself to think that he reached at a particular conclusion. I do feel like that's generally how I approached and I was the youngest of my whole entire family tree so that made me more mature but I do feel like it came at a trade off of wishing to grow up fast asap when I was a child and now wishing to go back too seeing say not being able to cope up with massive study efforts or competition but that's another matter I guess.
Though parenting is definitely really really hard, kudos to every parent out there.
Did go a little tangent so sorry about that.
I don't quite remember, but I don't think it was a social network then, I think you posted the photos in other networks, and then they made it into a social network and something strange happened. People started posting pictures of food and just general daily life stuff and I thought this was a small group of people who were a extroverts and just wanted to show off idk, they ate beautiful food.
Then something strange happened. This behavior started getting normalized, all other insta like apps disappeared and shortly after, it became necessary to have an instagram account.
I remember at the time I thought something was off, to this day I think I have posted a total of 10 instagram images, they still have the old filters, and stayed off of it since.
But it's been interesting watching it morph into this hydra that simply cannot be put down, to the point where it's more powerful than governments.
I had gotten completely out of these apps, then ended up in a situation where I needed to use Snapchat daily if not hourly for messaging, and needed to use TikTok to be culturally literate. (i.e. I got into something romantic with someone younger).
It was a stunning experience. Seeing _everyone_ had normalized this "copy our competitor" strat, hill-climbing on duration of engagement.
YouTube Shorts is a crappy copy of TikTok with mostly TikTok reposts and no sense of community.
Snapchat has a poor clone of TikTok that I doubt anyone knows exists.
TikTok is the ur-engagement king. Pure dopamine, just keep swiping until something catches your attention, and swipe as soon as it stops. No meaningful 1:1 communicating aspect (there's messages, but AFAICT from light quizzing of Gen Zers, it's not used for actual communication)
Instagram specifically is hard for me to speak to, because Gen Zers seem to think its roughly as cool as Facebook, but my understanding is millennials my age or younger (I'm 37) use it more regularly, whereas Gen Z uses it more as like we'd think of Facebook, a generic safe place where grandma can see your graduation photos, as opposed to spontaneous thirst traps.
Addiction does not strike to me as a unique trait of the social media.
The echo chamber bubble on the other hand, seems quite unique.
I think the term addiction is way overused in this stuff. If a company makes a product you enjoy using that doesn't mean you can just describe it as addictive and get out of jail free. If there's some chemical in it that messes with your brain, fine, otherwise people need to take ownership of their own choices.
I think the disturbing reality is these countries are wanting to control social media to control the population politically. There was even a Labour MP in the UK who admitted it on television. If it weren't the case they'd just tell concerned parents to turn on the parental controls devices already have, problem solved. Instead they pass laws to end internet anonymity, but only on the big networks, which won't do anything for kids but is an excellent way to control political discontent.
The current alternative is that unaccountable private interests control this, so some regulation in this regard seems reasonable to me. However, swapping private control for public control is only barely better.
The best solution that I can think of is ending algorithmic feeds, and having subscription feeds, or maybe user curated feeds, only.
More specifically: using "engagement" as the metric to optimize.
Users' use of content is measured: how long do they watch it? Do they leave a comment? Do they give a "like"? Based on that, the algorithm finds similar content that will elicit an even stronger response.
Every action you take on modern social media is giving information to your drug dealer so they can make the next hit even better. But not better for you; better for the social media, who make money from ads.
The continuously adaptive nature of the input stream as a basis for keeping users' eyeballs leashed to ads is what separates FB, Tiktok, Instagram, and Youtube from the more benign, but still addictive alternatives (HN, Fortnite, WoW, NFL, Reddit).
Sure, but fwiw the HN echo chamber is organic. People choose to interact with people who have similar opinions, as they have since forever.
In contrast, the echo chamber on HN, Tiktok, FB, etc is architected specifically to drive engagement. You are shown more of the content that you react to, so that you won't leave.
1) people who want to ban kids from social media, and
2) people who want to ban everyone from social media.
See? HN captures the full range of legitimate perspectives on technology.
At least you can now choose your bubble and even listen to your own echo. That beats having the government beam their psychosis straight into everybody's brain by TV, radio and newspapers.
That makes the whole society an "echo chamber" of whatever the rulers have on their current agenda. And not just on your devices, but all the people you meet in real life.
[1]: https://one-sec.app/
Those were different times: Over 4 years, I've never received a d*ckpic or was target of stalking, harassment, abuse or scam. People were genuinely interested in each other, chat was not about building a personal brand and anonymity didn't make commenters psychos.
I'm not sure if ignorance was bliss, or times changed so much, but as an adult, I feel online communication has became a battlefield where I need to protect my sanity every time I interact with it. Rage bait, fake news, ads, bot farms, lies in a never ending flood. I wouldn't let my children to even try to live the same, uncontrolled online life I had.
They were not a downgrade, they just worked the other way. With classic chatrooms (or a random vBulletin forums, if you wish) you would meet somebody online, then you would become friends over time and then you meet them in real life. I did that too.
With early Facebook, you would meet somebody at a party, have fun together, and decide to become friends on Facebook, not much different from exchanging phone numbers, but somehow better.
And it was usually themed around a specific hobby or activity, which would naturally turn into offline, real-world activity. almost as if it was a conduit to connecting real people with real interests, who would seek out communities based around their interests, connect, and then eventually go and do those interests.
I was heavily into a few growing up, all of which revolved around real-world activities, which the forum members all actively participated in. One, in particular that really stuck with me for years, was tennis. The forum I was on had monthly meetups for my region (NYC metro area) and dozens of people would show up, engage, and enjoy each other's presence and participation. There was also a travel section, so if I was traveling to another country or part of the US, I'd be easily able to tap into that region's meetup and get a chance to hit some balls whenever I was on the road. Lovely.
What was nice is that genuine communities were formed, and people actually and actively policed their own communities not as a power trip (hey Spez!) but rather in earnest to ensure their communities were welcoming and that whoever was interested in that topic/activity could participate.
It feels like by including everything on one site, Reddit et al just end up as a bland "soup." But they're so useful by the sheer mass of population that they end up drowning out everything else.
Exactly.
Engagement is prioritized over quality on most mediums. I find user generated content on social media absolutely abhorrent.
Thank goodness for hacker news. I can read something, share my views and in some cases, my views may be based on some weak intuition and I learn from polite correctness.
I'm surprised Reddit gets a pass or borderline pass in social media discussions.
In my experience working with kids, Reddit was the worst of the social media platforms for mental health. By far. The kids who were into Reddit were always spouting off information they got from Reddit and had soul-crushing amounts of cynicism about the world. On top of that, they had a chip on their shoulder about it all, believing that Reddit was a superior source of truth about the world.
The whole experience caught me off guard because going into this I mostly heard about the stereotypical social media dangers that get talked about, like boys following Andrew Tate and such. Instead the biggest problem was Redditors on a fast path to doomerism.
It's a shame that HN's "don't talk about HN is turning into Reddit" guideline is there. It's preemptively used to shut people down when there are real issues with threads randomly devolving into uninteresting politically charged therapy sessions.
I wonder where tate got his ideas and influences from. And why he's free in the US.
Agreed but you have this on many websites such as youtube. Is youtube the next to get banned here? I mean you can write comments to so it is kind of a social mediua setup as well.
> So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine.
I don't know. It sounds quite arbitrary to me.
Not that I have anything against chopping down the big platforms. They truly abuse many people.
Even better might be to just destroy the big platforms by breaking them up.
Whats fascinating about thid is that we have managed to create a new class of drugs - that does not require physical substances to be added to our bodies...and works via visual stimulous only.
Those still exist... and this ban will probably outlaw them for the people who need it the most.
Heard the same thing about video games, TV shows, D&D, texting and even youth novels.
There are a lot of big feelings about social media, but little data.
If the goal is to make social media "less addictive", the article in the OP does nothing to stop that. The article claims that social media affects youth mental health, but does the data actually back that up?
From the Guardian[1]:
> Social media time does not increase teenagers’ mental health problems – study
> Research finds no evidence heavier social media use or more gaming increases symptoms of anxiety or depression
> Screen time spent gaming or on social media does not cause mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale study.
> With ministers in the UK considering whether to follow Australia’s example by banning social media use for under-16s, the findings challenge concerns that long periods spent gaming or scrolling TikTok or Instagram are driving an increase in teenagers’ depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions.
> Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties to find out whether technology use genuinely predicted later mental health difficulties.
From Nature[2]:
> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health
From the Atlantic[3] with citations in the article:
> The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens, It may only make things worse.
> I am a developmental psychologist[], and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find[4] compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.
> Many other researchers have found the same[5]. In fact, a recent[6] study and a review of research[6] on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report[7] concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/candi...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-t...
[4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31929951/
[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7#:~:text=G...
[6] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32734903/
[7] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27396/Highlights_...
Social media deserving of the name is almost dead. It’s not that profitable and the sites are expensive to run.
The content is generated by users but the consumer of the content is served whatever user content drives engagement. People aren't really having conversations on these platforms.
The only places where you can really have a conversation are places where engagement is low enough that the odds off a set very high engagement comments can't shove everything else down the page.
In theory the law doesn’t require victim cooperation. In practice, I’ve found local prosecutors won’t touch a case with an uncooperative victim. And most victims don’t cooperate whether out of humiliation or rejection pf the very idea they can be scammed. Because to them all scams are obvious, and only morons are scammed. They consistently lack imagination for the sophistication and manipulation component of scams, thinking it’s all about obviousness.
I’m sure it’s not only a case of “save the children”. Saving grandma’s retirement accounts is also important. The internet is a cesspool.
1) The best large-scale work I’ve seen finds the average association between overall screen/social-media use and teen well-being is tiny. That doesn’t mean “no one is harmed”; it means the “it’s wrecking a generation” story doesn’t fit the data very well.
2) “Social media” lumps together very different things: - messaging friends, hobby groups, learning communities, identity-affirming support - infinite-scroll algorithmic feeds + targeted ads + push notifications + autoplay People in this thread are mostly describing the second category (“attention media”). If that’s the problem, regulate that layer.
3) Blanket bans are easy to route around and may push kids to smaller/shadier apps with weaker controls. If you want a lever that actually changes incentives, go after business model & design: - no targeted ads to minors - default chronological/subscription feeds for minors - disable autoplay/infinite scroll for minors by default - limits on notifications (especially at night) - transparency + researcher access to study effects - device/school-hour phone restrictions (where enforcement is actually feasible)
If you want to “end the experiment,” change the rules of the lab (platform incentives + design), not prohibit the existence of teens talking online.
The mob responds with a 1-sentence emotional meme. Classic moral panic 101.
It's impossible to fight feelings with logic unfortunately, which is why many western countries are going to fall into this trap and ultimately kill the idea of digital privacy and the open web forever.
This particular moral panic is reaching peak trendiness, and the baptists and the bootleggers are out in full force. Both parties are begging for hamfisted over-reaction from government (the bootleggers and politicians for more nefarious reasons of course).
it was one person.
im writing this comment 1 hour after yours, and still only a single person has responded and you’ve called one person, a mob. you’ve declared one person commenting to be a “moral panic.”
Some say it was a technical failure during migration when the company was trying to pivot to file hosting, but it's impossible to verify.
Perhaps these bans are a blessing in disguise and future generations will be happy to not have their most awkward stage of life available forever, to everyone, in detail.
My highschool band had tracks and videos of live performances in the school hall on there that is forever lost and I'm still bitter about it.
I was aware of the existence of MySpace at the time, but it never had mainstream adoption locally. We also had not one but two mainstream messaging apps and hardly anyone was using MSN.
Come to think of it, Facebook killed a lot of that homegrown tech.
That is until they opened the site to boomers and then advertisers chasing their money.
Showing my age when the first thing that came to mind was ' but ma.gnolia was more of a social bookmarking...'
Instead this should be attacked from the profit side, by banning any form of advertising which might target children. If there's no profit to be made in servicing said demographic and a law requesting at least end user 'agreement' that they are an adult, this should be sufficient.
Is it still advertising if an "influencer" takes money on the down low to sip a Pepsi not too obviously in the middle of a video?
Is it still advertising if an attractive and young person provides news that happens to be colored in a way that supports the narratives of a particular political faction?
Is it still advertising if you can't prove that a foreign power encouraged a popular yoga enthusiast or makeup artist to post some whispered ideas that weaken citizens' faith in your institutions? Does that foreign power ever care about profit?
Advertising and propaganda love to explore the grey spaces around definitions, so your bans will end up being a whack-a-mole game. Cutting off kids with an ID check is much easier. Implementing age verification the Apple way would even protect privacy by simply registering whether Apple can attest that the user is over or under the age limit, without handing the ID over to third parties.
I’m not playing devil’s advocate, I’m curious what the SOTA is for ad moderation. I’m sure it’s relatively easy to tell a kid’s toy ad from adult ones like alcohol, but how do you differentiate toy ads targeting parents vs toy ads targeting kids?
Much simpler than that, you just ban all targeted ads full stop end of story. The ad-funded internet existed in the 90s before ad targeting was a thing.
You went on a car forum, you'd get ads about car parts. You went on a PC forum, you'd get ads about PC parts. Pretty simple stuff that didn't need to know your age, gender, political affiliation, ovulation status, etc so it's not like the web will go bust without ad targeting.
Targeted ads are exploitative and manipulative, and a crime against humanity, or at least on society.
(Remember how many kids bought car magazines before they even had drivers' licenses? Advertising has never been "oh, ads for things adults will buy will be completely boring to children.")
3 years after the nation of Fiji received its first television broadcasts in 1995, dieting and disordered eating went from unheard of to double digit percentages among teenage girls.
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/20/world/study-finds-tv-alte...
> Before 1995, Dr. Becker said, there was little talk of dieting in Fiji. ''The idea of calories was very foreign to them.'' But in the 1998 survey, 69 percent said that at some time they had been on a diet. In fact, preliminary data suggest more teen-age girls in Fiji diet than their American counterparts.
It boggles my mind to no end that today’s society collectively accepts literally being manipulated against their free will. See the post https://hackernoon.com/nobody-is-immune-to-ads-7142a4245c2c
If it wasn’t, you would have expected those rates to decline after the introduction of media informing people.
So basically, no ads on underage accounts at all should be the norm.
For example: after 15 minutes of short-form content, show an unskippable timer every third video, displaying today’s, this week’s, and total watch time. The same principle should apply to endless scrolling, make usage visible and interruptible.
Base it on actual screen time. This would protect teenagers and benefit adults.
But with minors it often goes a long way to just make the law. It’s a good instruction to parents who should be able to control this. Laws on bike helmets for minors are followed nearly 100% not because they are enforced by authorities but because the law gives parents guidance.
Anything with zero knowledge is never going to be considered robust enough by a government. Zero knowledge protocols really have no functional revocation mechanism.
What was that about no government would consider zero knowledge to be robust enough?
> Zero knowledge protocols really have no functional revocation mechanism.
None would be needed, you (sadly) only age in one direction, so valid proof would never become invalid proof.
Somebody can give their proof of age to another person.
In any case, it's a moot point: the correct amount of required identification is zero.
It's not about protecting the kids. It's about managing the public's information diet. The latter is not a legitimate function of any state.
This comes up in every ID thread on Hacker News, usually with suggestion that we do it via zero-knowledge cryptographic primitives
However, all of those proposals miss the point. These ID verification laws aren't simply designed to confirm that someone has access to an >= 18yo ID. They are identity verification to try to confirm that the person presenting the ID is the same person who is using the site.
This concept is obvious with in-person ID checks: You can't go to the liquor store and show them any random ID, they have to check that it's your ID.
For some reason when we talk about internet ID verification that part is forgotten and we get these proposals to use cryptographic primitives to anonymously check something without linking the person to the ID. It doesn't work, and doesn't satisfy the way these laws are usually written.
I'm also surprised that people of this website even think it might work in the first place. Did everyone forget what it's like to be a kid trying to out-maneuver rules to access something? How long do you think it would take before the first enterprising kid figures out that if they can get access to their mom or older brother's ID, they can charge their friends $5 to use it for this totally anonymous one-time cryptographic ID check for their social media accounts?
This makes no sense. This is exactly like asking someone older to buy you beer. Will there be rule breakers? Sure but they will be in the overwhelming minority.
No, the analogy would be a kid walking into the liquor store to order beer with their mom’s ID and the system allowing you to do it because the store operator isn’t allowed to look at their face or the name on the ID.
> Will there be rule breakers? Sure but they will be in the overwhelming minority.
Some of you have forgotten what it’s like to be a kid around technology.
Every time the topic of web filtering comes up there is a chorus of people declaring it useless because as a kid they easily found ways around it, as kids do.
Now extend that analogy to these wishful thinking cryptographic ID checks, where you only need to circumvent the ID check literally once ever in your childhood and your account is approved for good.
It’s like if you could buy beer with your mom’s ID once and the liquor store owner couldn’t look at the ID or your face and then once you did it a single time you could access all the beer you wanted.
Don't you love having your government name tied to every single word you say online, forever, potentially publicly accessible if someone configured mongodb wrong?
The centralized service see who I am, but not what I'm proving my age for. The social media or other site see that I have signed their token so would have the appropriate age, but not who I am.
What's impossible about this?
Most people will be doing the whole process (site gives token, person gets token signed, person returns token) as quickly as possible which limits the candidates for a match. Worse, if the central service is compromised and wants to make it easier for log matching to identify people they could purposefully introduce delays which would make it easier to distinguish people.
Most people will use the same IP address through the verification process which would really make it easy.
Briefly, someone (probably your goverment) issues a digital copy of your ID cryptographically tied to a key in a hardware security module you provide. There is a protocol that can be used to demonstrate to a site that you have such an ID and that you can perform operations on it using that key, and can be used to disclose anything from the ID that you wish to disclose (e.g., what country you are in, or that your birthday on the ID is at least 18 years in the past) without disclosing any other information from the ID.
This avoids the timestamp problem because the issuer of the ID is not involved in verifying things from the ID. They have no idea when or how often people are using their IDs.
So far people working on these systems are using smart phones as the secure hardware with the keys locked behind biometrics. Google's made on open source library for implementing such systems, the EU has one nearing release after several years of development, and I believe Apple's new ID storage in Wallet supports such a system.
The EU has said that they plan to add support for security devices other than smart phones, such as stand alone security keys or smart cards.
This allows anonymity, security (no timestamps comparison), freedom of speech and expression (to have independent accounts not linked to the main virtual id).
Zero knowledge proof and you're good to go.
A key part of ID verification laws is that you're confirming the ID presented also belongs to the user.
They can't just check for "This person currently has an adult ID in their possession" and nothing more, otherwise one kid at school would borrow their older brothers' ID and then use it to register all of their friends' accounts one day.
Why would you invite a technology that by definition makes websites accessible only via phones? These social media age verification laws are inevitably going to hit sites you use, too.
By cross device authentication, such as by scanning a QR code displayed on the computer from your phone. Nearly all these laws or proposed laws only require verification on account creation and maybe an occasional re-verification. They don't require it on every login.
> Why would you invite a technology that by definition makes websites accessible only via phones?
In most or all of the countries proposing age verification phone use is extremely high. In Finland it is nearly 100% for people over 15 and not retired. It is around 96% for retired people.
Social media use is heavily skewed toward people under retirement age, which is were mobile use is highest. Even Facebook which many dismiss as the old folk's social media has about 92% of their users under 65. 98.5% of their users use it from mobile devices (82% use it exclusively from mobile).
This all suggests it will only be a very small fraction of people that use social media from desktops and do not have a mobile phone they could use for the initial verification or re-verification.
I haven't seen any country proposing to make mobile the only way to do age verification. They all are including methods that work without a phone, although a phone can give much better privacy and security assurances. (I don't know if any country has considered this but another good option would be to allow accounts that have existed longer than some threshold to skip verification. That would probably cover most of those elderly users without a smartphone).
Which you will prove how? With no record of which ID was used and with the person who used it being under 18 by necessity, this means there would be no evidence to even punish anyone old enough to be punished.
> 2. Have a certain limit (like 5) on virtual ids one person can register. Allow to withdraw consent and close virtual ids.
If the ID is only checked in a zero-knowledge way to register accounts, you don’t even need multiple IDs. You just need access to one, which can be used a million times.
All of the schemes to check if it’s being used multiple times start exposing more info or requiring a central party to manage. We start sliding down the slope of having the government manage ID checking centrally, which conveniently gives them a way to check which people are accessing which services.
Our (Google) implementation: https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk
An independent implementation by the Internet Security Research Group: https://github.com/abetterinternet/zk-cred-longfellow Still being developed but already interoperable with ours.
European age verification app: https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-specification/d...
So, so much easier and more effective if they’re just banned for all kids.
No website of any kind should require IDV unless banking. It is a tool that will be used for censorship, removal of access to information, destruction of freedom of speech, erosion of privacy, and attacks on political opponents.
We need anonymity, ephemerality, and public square free speech.
Governments should instead regulate what these companies can do. How they advertise. Engagement algorithms. Stop internal efforts to target kids. Etc.
Disallow advertising to kids. Turn off ads on children's accounts if the user is predicted or self reports as a kid. Turn off the algorithm for kids.
Consider the incentives of all involved powerful groups.
You have social media giants who want to addict and advertise to users. The hate your solution, obviously. With the ID checks they lose out on their younger users, but they also get cover for even more aggressive behavior as nobody can credibly yell "think of the children!" at them.
Then you have government officials who are nervous about their lack of effective control over modern media. Your solution offers them nothing and loses them points with those powerful business leaders. It opens them up to attack from the right for being "too hard on business and stifling innovation." The ID checks, on the other hand, give them a mechanism and lever to crack down on any sentiment in the public that runs counter to their or their friends' interests. It even polls pretty well with an increasingly large number of paranoid and distrusting voters.
There's no contest at all between the routes before us. Only a huge political upheaval could divert the world from this path. The indicator to look for in a representative is a willingness to champion policy that hurts entrenched political and economic power while providing straightforward utility to average citizens.
Remember that for the first time in history people can choose not to have kids.
Kid's have unlimited time. They'll find something else, likely pretending to be adults and thus even more at risk.
Meanwhile everyone else gets an internet license and the government every website tracks you ...
This is a classic case of nice idea and the results will be all wrong / not even address the problem.
Everyone but kids is still exposed, and likely still kids...
Also you now have to have a license for social media, probably the internet eventually.
If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the worst of the Internet, there'd have been more of a crackdown on porn, gore, etc long before social media became such a big problem. And smartphones would have never been allowed in schools.
I personally like the theory that most kids problems are actually attributable to family issues. That kids in solid family environment/upbringing will not be “destroyed” by computer games, porn, gore (2 girls 1 cup anyone?), or social media. But that’s also just a theory.
I think it is about algorithms targeting you all the time for hours in favour of a company. We see the effects every day. No attention span. Instant gratification. The next kick.
> If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the worst of the Internet
As with any disease, the impact heavily depends on virality.
The worst the internet has to offer to children, is not the gore or porn for the few that look for it (usually individually). The worst it does to children is the attention algorithm that captures practically everybody.
I'd much rather live in a society with personal freedoms than a "healthier" one with government mandates on personal behavior.
Parents should be the ones setting up rules for their children.
Like maybe ad supported infinite feeds can't be done in a socially responsible way and just need to be banned. If that takes down or substantially limits certain web service sizes...so be it.
Where are you from, because all of these things have/are being tried for a long time in the US (and, I'd note, received significant pushback from civil liberty advocates). Heck, TFA itself talks about how this social media ban is coming after a ban on phones in schools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Sunil_Tripathi
A lot of the cancel culture is also crowd sourced on platforms like these.
The US has it's first amendment protections, but other countries seem rather more willing to crack down on online speech.
Yes. There is a reason Minnesota is effectively resisting in a way Los Angeles failed to.
Once you have a movement, social media mobilizes. But if you’re building a movement, you need footwork and commitment. Not profiteers turning your cause into clicks.
> Or Jan 6th, or all the Palestine protests
Case in point. Support for each of their underlying causes dipped with notoriety around their online activity.
If you want to drain a movement of effective energy, distract it online from its streets.
Lack of social media didn't prevent the French Revolution.
Seems pretty clear that social media is radicalising people at both ends of the political spectrum, and it's not surprising that governments would want to restrict/police it by trying to criminalise 'hate'/'misinformation' and taking away the shield of anonymity.
The target for those age verification schemes (beyond actually preventing the kids' brains from being rotten by American ad supported skinner boxes) is probably to make schemes like IRA [1] just slightly more complicated. (I said "more complicated", I did not say "impossible" - I very much know that bot factories will find their ways around any kind of verification ; part of being on the defensive side of a conflict is about not giving up.)
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/19/airbus_sovereign_clou...
HN is absolutely social media and it does have some of the dark patterns that plague other platforms. They're just more reigned in. A change in moderation policy or new moderators could destroy this site in a week.
I personally don't think kids need to be banned from participating here. However, the law is often a blunt instrument and it's probably better to get kids off of Facebook and HN if distinctions cannot be made.
I'll try to convert it into a metric: measure the number of involuntary users via the comments saying "I hate this website". You rarely see people here saying HN is bad to the point of being a net negative on them, for example, but this is true of all normie sites, including reddit.
No this isn't true at all, it absolutely does matter legally. Look at Australia's underage social media ban. Twitter was forced to ban children, but Bluesky was not despite being the platforms being effectively the same. Roblox and Discord, no bans despite being an extremely common place for young people to socialize.
- Algorithmic recommendation / "engagement" engineering
- Profit/business model
- Images/Videos
- Real-life identity
Algorithmic, for profit, social media is by far the worst technology ever foisted upon humanity. Even most of the issues with AI/LLMs become moot if we where to remove platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X and to some extend YouTube. Removing the ability to spread misinformation and fueling anger and device thought would improve society massively. Social media allows Russian and Chinese governments to effect election, they allow Trump to have an actual voice and they allow un-vetted information to reach people who are not equipped to deal with it.
It's time to accept that social media was an experiment, it could have worked in an uncommercial settings, but overall it failed. Humanity is not equipped, mentally, to handle algorithmic recommendation and the commercialization of our attention.
Forums require a little more finesse - but a good starting point is distinguishing upvotes from personalized engagement-based algorithms.
Basically I don’t buy that your concern is a problem in practice.
Edited to add - here is the guidance for Australia’s law for reference: https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/soci...
I guess self-hatred is one of the motivating vectors of authoritarianism.
Would you also secretly like it if daddy government was always watching you on camera and triggered your shock collar every time you reached for a candy bar?
It's one of the most authoritarian statements I've ever heard from a western government. And just because its the trendy moral panic of the day, everybody is cheering it on.
Anything where we allow people free will is by definition an "uncontrolled human experiment" and the basis of any free society.
Should we also end the "uncontrolled human experiment" of allowing people to have private money and make their own purchase decisions? Should we end the "uncontrolled human experiment" of allowing people to select their own romantic partners?
> Finland looks to end "uncontrolled human experiment" with Australia-style ban on social media
The dangers of algorithmic content are so obvious, and the only way to stop companies from doing this stuff is to legislate against it
Let's not forget that social media are just one of the many scapegoats tried over the past decade in hopes of pushing this idea forwards. And while there's no denying that today's social media have gotten destructive, they're still only a scapegoat; no attempt is being made here to bring them back to their original, non-malicious shape.
Is the social media hate really so powerful that, channeled carefully, it can overshadow free speech?
Social networks can revert back to original form any minute, nobody’s stopping them.
> Is the social media hate really so powerful that, channeled carefully, it can overshadow free speech?
Bots giving platform to schizos and fringe radicals is a freedom of speech?
Seems like a horribly bad idea.
One alternative to bans could perhaps be if the EU created an IdP or something similar, with a fee for each authentication request, and then forced all commercial services within Europe to use it. I’m not sure if the fee should go back to the user or be paid as tax to the government, but either way, it would change the incentives around connecting traffic to you and making profit from it by harvesting data or steering recommendation engines.
Because I do think there’s nothing wrong with the government doing this, just like in the physical world.
And in some cases, we might prefer cheap authentications… like when posting comments, to avoid trolling/manipulation/bullying. Perhaps when doing “writes” on the internet, if there’s a robust way to identify that type of traffic.
I think most people are better off, and have a more nuanced view of reality if the only news they get is local. Or the updates from people they know always in person.
I much prefer Youtube videos and international media from multiple viewpoints to that world.
Bring a pre-internet pre-24/7 TV person to present day and they’ll spot the problem straight away. Amusing Ourselves To Death was written in reaction to the societal changes brought by the TV. What about the impact of Internet news, and Facebook, and Tiktok?
You mean humans are not meant to learn about the atrocities their government is funding half a world away.
If you really want to stay informed, there are plenty of newspapers, NGOs and other organizations out there reporting the truth.
And they don't report on that kind of stuff because they either support it themselves or are indirectly funded by the government.
And for decades before that mainstream media was used to push false narratives with absolutely no alternatives. Or have you forgotten about the Iraq War?
The entire current human existence right now is at odds with human biology and psychology. One has to swim against the current just to be physically, mentally and spiritually healthy.
I.m sure there'll be downsides to this but, have to say, I'm happy the de facto position that social media's should be allowed to be the wild west is now seriously being questioned
There's enough of us devs that absolutely fucking hate the idea of governments controlling how people communicate that the next stage of social media will probably be a decentralised system that's extremely difficult to shut down. Unless every government devolves into full on China-style authoritarianism with deep packet inspection, a national firewall and ubiquitous surveillance, there's no way to stop a well designed distributed social media platform. There just hasn't been enough incentive yet for people to build one.
It's interesting how few governments believe this. Your rulers know what's best for you, and it's not freedom.
Driving involves danger to other. We restrict adults from doing things that are a danger to others, it has nothing to do with being "vulnerable."
I mean, sure, prime examples of what is colloquially called “social media” is crapware. I do get the intent.
But I wonder what sort of unintended, unplanned, odd and potentially even socially harmful consequences it would possibly have.
https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/soci...
This will become closer to truth than conspiracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
I find it interesting that a law change was needed to allow schools to do this.
If a kid is using it during the class, then it is disrupting, but that can be dealt old-school way without the overall phone ban. If a kid starts stabbing others with a pencil, it will have to be dealt with, without the need for a pencil ban.
The phone disruption happens to the kids themselves and during the breaks (their free time).
The school my children went to in the UK has had a no phone policy for many years: phones must be off and kept in the pupils' bags. No need for a law change...
I think this is about approach to regulation and flexibility. In general being too restrictive about what is allowed makes things inflexible and poor at adapting.
Under 15
At this point I do not think it is reasonable to deny the harm that certain modes of social interactions over the internet have caused. At the same time these bans should not be considered reasonable options. They exist to cover for the decade of inaction of politicians in addressing youth dissatisfaction and dysfunction.
A reasonable approach should not assume that the root cause of this dysfunction is youth interacting with social media, but should consider what lead to this in the first place. Apparently most adults seem to be capable of dealing with this situation, if they are not why would this ban, or at least some regulation, not extend to social media for adults.
In general I believe that dysfunction in the youth has multiple causes and that overuse of social media is just on part of the puzzle and that unhealthy use of social media is often caused by other problem and used as a coping mechanism.
These bans will not be effective and they will be assaults on the free internet, as the bureaucrats establishing the laws are also seeking to control the internet for themselves and will use this as a backdoor.
Yes, it is reasonable to doubt the purported harms are real, because
1) I've yet to see evidence that the medium is the problem,
2) people keep telling me that they don't need evidence because the harms are obvious, and
3) I have an strong prior, as an American, that anyone preventing people sharing ideas with each other is a villain of history.
The furor over youth social media has all the hallmarks of a moral panic, including over-reliance of weak evidence, personal attacks against skeptics, and socially disruptive remedies of dubious efficiency, the collateral damage of which people justify by pointing to harms to children they say, falsely, are obvious and ongoing.
I'm not convinced that these social media bans are solving a real problem. The more people breathlessly tell me I'm a bad person for asking for evidence of the alleged harms, the more I think it's a public mania, not a civilizational problem.
It really doesn't help that it'd be suspiciously convenient for the worst actors in power if sharing ideas on the internet required ID.
Just to be clear, the evidence seems overwhelming. This is not some novel research field, but this questions has been researched for long enough to have been pretty conclusively answered.
>1) I've yet to see evidence that the medium is the problem,
This is not relevant to the claim. The claim is that the specific usage pattern of young adults is harmful to their development.
>I'm not convinced that these social media bans are solving a real problem.
I largely agree.
The Finnish language article about it is much thinner.
I am in my late thirties so surely out of touch, but am friends with people in their mid twenties and frankly I don't know anyone who spends any significant time on anything other than TikTok. I guess you could call TikTok "social media", but it wouldn't fit my old person definition.
I think pretty much everyone below the age of 60 is aware that Facebook/Instagram/etc is just slop now. You don't even see your friend stuff. You just see slop. I use Facebook primarily for marketplace these days, but when I do scroll my feed, it's all like weird east asian AI slop. Women cutting open impossibly large fruit, fake tartar removal, fake videos of fights.
Literally nothing that compels me to stay on the site like I hear people on here talk about.
Sorry, but to me you just revealed you don't speak to many women.
I have more than a couple nieces and nephews in their late teens/early 20s though and if you ask them, social media is for old people.
Unfortunately, rationally thinking through 2nd and 3rd order effects is hard. As we see on social media, appeals to emotion drive the highest engagement, and "think of the children" is the ultimate emotional appeal.
But hey, with European countries moving to tie all internet activity to their national ID system to "protect the children from social media" and "ban speech we don't like" maybe we can finally get rid of those cookie popups?
Making Lambi Toilet Paper jump through bizarre hoops when targeting their toilet paper ads to people seems silly now...given we're voluntarily handing our browser history & permission to access the open web to a much more powerful entity (the government). Consumer goods companies combining your IP address and email address together for the purpose of selling you more toilet bowl cleaner...becomes a bit of a moot point, no?
I mean, if it affects a children’s what makes we think it doesn’t affect adults? Alcohol affects children, and it affects adults. If social media affects children, it also affects adults.
The big live social media was it was meant to connect people but in truth, it was designed to control people.
Social media as it exists in mainstream life is an advertising platform which happens to have a few methods humans can use to communicate with each other. But that's a bug, not a feature.
This is absurd. People have access to far more information today via decentralised media than they did when information was filtered through a small elite cabal of media company CEOs. Restricting access to information is a means of controlling people, and that's exactly what the governments pushing to ban social media want to do.
In order to make a teenager stop doing something, all you need to do is show them videos of someone their parents' age doing it. Juxtapose a bunch of 40-somethings doing cringy little "TikTok dances" alongside people young enough to be their classmates, and they'll stop. Make another TikTok Cringe Compilation, but this time add more clips from middle-aged TikTok users.
My proposal might be insufficiently sophisticated and too actionable for the members of this community who think themselves to be righteous members of an enlightened class and who seek only to complain about current events to self-affirm their superiority. Nonetheless, I insist that anyone who will listen gives the following proposal consideration for the future of our children, whose FICA taxes shall pay for our retirements.
All they need is one classmate similar to most of us here on this site. Someone in their high school who will show them how to use a proxy or a VPN not for cred, not for reward, but just because "fuck it, why not?"