this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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for fuck's sake why does this get upvotes here
For teenage me the Internet was the only escape from the horribleness and stress of my offline life. Probably for many current teenagers too (if you are one of them: trust me, life will get better as an adult). There is no way I will ever support "keeping children off the Internet" and not just because it requires adults too to verify their age, also because it is a bad idea in the first place. Teenagers might not always make great decisions about everything, but this is also true of adults.
I completely get where you're coming from and this is something I think about a lot. There are so many people I know (myself included) who have benefited as kids from being able to access the internet and find a community, but overall the data I've seen shows a net negative in terms of social outcomes. And to be completely honest I just think that a lot of spaces on the internet suffer from having too many adolescents around.
I don't want to enforce a law or something but I think we just need to be more socially aware of the kinds of spaces that kids have access to
As a teenager I found it utterly stupid when adults thought they knew better than me what was good for me, and I decided I didn't ever want to be one of those adults. I have not (yet?) become one of them even though my teenage years are long over.
Today's Internet is a lot "safer" (locked down) anyway than it used to be. Posts I made as a teenager and even preteen to online forums can still be found through search engines even now today. Compare that to interactions on today's social media sites that are mostly not indexed by search engines, mostly forgotten after a short time and it is easy to delete them (or even one's entire account).
I don’t think social media is the problem. It’s the fact that something like 60% of children aged 7-14 have watched Andrew Tate. There’s just so much more shit out there nowadays than there was in the past. I don’t care if kids see a dead body or porn on the internet, I care that there are some people with sinister ideologies who are doing serious damage to impressionable children. And it’s just an endless of stream of content that caters to our worst instincts in a way that is not healthy for development as a human. This shit is like a drug for constant dopamine.
When I was a kid I swore not to be someone who acted like I do now, but yknow what? I didn’t have near as much knowledge or experience. I thought I knew everything back then but the reality is that, yeah, sometimes adults do know better. I’m a big advocate for more freedoms for adolescents because I genuinely believe they are treated like shit in society but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still some lines that you have to draw
They probably had a privileged childhood, not that I didn't too, but in some things the internet was the only out for me and helped me a lot, so I'll agree with you. I do see their point about the exploitative nature of the current landscape but that's a systemic problem that won't be solved by banning children from accessing the internet
Of course. I spent most of my time then on IRC or on text-based forums. TikTok or Snapchat or whatever today's kids use all the time weren't things, I have literally never had an account on either of them. I think recommendation algorithms are a bad thing and we should try to build platforms that don't have them; this is independent of users' ages though.
I agree the issue is systemic and those issues need to be solved first. The main problem is that kids are not learning how to socialize as much as they used to and you can see this reflected in data about the number of friends and romantic partners going down. The most important thing that we need to do is rebuild local communities and have places where people can meet, have events, and spend times getting to know new people