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0 points_630w5y ago0 comments

I can give some perspective on that. Ignoring the increase in academic pressure and hungry sharks in education (those shady coaching institutes everywhere making you grind 5 hours after school for a single exam).

Parents haven't caught up with how their kids interact with the world. Social media is huge for teens and internet which only now some parents are catching up to but they are on Facebook and Facebook is cancer and no one I know in younger generation uses it. I think they are exposed to a lot more information and their parents or schools are unable to help them process it.

Kids are uncertain, worried about things their parents can't relate with. Imagine feeling down because your online account got bullied by other adults on reddit because you expressed a perfectly normal but dumb opinion. People don't think about age when they are typing a response online, they just think the other person ought to have "common sense".

Few are forced into linkedin/other cancer and build online presence because they think it will lead them to more opportunities and they are probably not wrong. Various recruitment agencies seems to have gone fully online with social media/email spam.

Twitter is not healthy for a teenager. Linkedin may not be either (I saw some insane CEO posts). I mean, to give you something to compare. Have you seen marketing posts with misleading titles such as $100 and 6 months for a 3000% return on customer acquisition? (Which turned out to be fraud and fabricated). Huge amount of fabrication in their idols now. They cling to youtubers, Elon Musk, and all the exceptions. Their feed is full of them while seemingly their irl interaction is less than ideal.

Some will have a distorted view due to huge differences in the life they live online and people they interact with. Previously, it was less visible as people tend to live in the same economic class neighborhoods.

They will know about all the countries with things they can't have in their own. They will be more aware of it but they lack any political power and position to change things affecting them.

Surveillance is pushed on them involuntarily which tends to change their behaviour and normalize a specific corporate personality over time. Compare that to being in open office or public speaking 24/7 of your life.

Misinformation is pushed from top to bottom instead. I think it was always like that but now kids are more aware, they will feel remorseful and insignificant if they can't do anything. Imagine having parents believing insane rumours on Facebook and stopping you from getting vaccinated. I haven't seen many kids who are anti vaxxers but I have seen enough adults.

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Reelin5y ago

> Twitter is not healthy for a teenager.

Twitter isn't healthy for _anyone_. Neither is the vast majority of social media. The way in which most sites currently structure interactions lends itself quite naturally to misinformation, extreme polarization, and resulting anxiety.

I've personally witnessed the effect on reasonably well educated adults in my life; I can only imagine how much worse it must be for those with less general experience and knowledge.

_5yps5y ago

I've seen a lot of kids my age become Communists or Nazis due to internet-induced radicalization; I was rather close to becoming a radical leftist myself. Personally, I think it's harmless; they tend not to hold these views for a long time when tempered with the saner views of their peers and broader society. It's like the chicken pox - you get it once, become a bit nasty for a while, and then you're immune to further insanity.

It's when the person in question is mentally ill or socially isolated (i.e a NEET living in their mother's basement) that radicalization becomes harmful, because there's nothing to bring them back to the baseline. Marginal identities attract marginal people.

(I have a theory that online transgender-ism is spreading in exactly the same way - note the massive amount of trans people online who are also NEETs, weebs, and/or communists. But that's a story for another day.)

cameronbrown5y ago

At least in your first paragraph, your experience is similar to my own (19 y/o here). There's a growing population of people who are in totally polarised buckets politically.

searchableguy5y ago

I want to discuss something but I think I would rather publicly not discuss it. Do you mind sending me an email? (In the profile)

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foldr5y ago

It makes sense that trans people would be left-leaning because people who aren't left-leaning tend (painting with broad brushstrokes) to be opposed to equal treatment for trans people. Similarly, trans people can often be quite socially isolated because it's difficult for them to integrate into a transphobic society. In the US, there are 26 states where it's perfectly legal to fire someone simply for being trans.

Beyond that, I think you are quite off base in comparing trans people to online Communist and neo-Nazi radicals. You are probably looking at a much narrower slice of the trans population than you think you are. Assuming that you don't actually have some kind of anti-trans agenda, I'd rethink how you're expressing whatever point you're trying to make here.

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saagarjha5y ago

As someone not on Twitter, I do see an awful lot of good content on the platform. By not engaging with it directly I can usually skip out on or ignore the worst parts of it.

a_bonobo5y ago

I'm a researcher and Twitter has been an enormous boon for my work; within my field, most 'big' researchers are active on Twitter, they know me now, I know them, I'm always up-to-date with the research (way easier than following 500 RSS feeds) and the 'trends' within my field. It's also the best avenue for discussing anything work-related, at least 3 international collaborations of mine have started this way. I have a few thousand followers and I follow a few thousand people across different time-zones. Again, an enormous boon if you know how to use it and put in time up-front, people know who I am even though I'm only an early-career researcher. I follow mostly scientists across all career-stages and politicians with power over work-related fields.

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Reelin5y ago

I do this as well. Some of the ML (and lately COVID-19) content that gets posted there is absolute gold, but in consuming it I can be inadvertently sucked into other parts of the site. Such unfortunate occurrences are time consuming and generally have a decidedly negative impact on my mental state.

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paypalcust835y ago

It's mostly a pointless outrage, virtue signaling, approval-seeking, and social climbing sewer-drain of cyberinhibitionism. Taking the proverbial shit with the sugar would run out of toilet paper, and my supplies are low and it's not in-stock anywhere. No one needs that stuff that just won't flush unless they're hopelessly co-dependent on others to move forward.

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LocalH5y ago

Twitter isn't healthy or unhealthy. It's about how the platform is used. For discussion of political or social issues, it's garbage, certainly. But there's a lot of other content on Twitter as well.

Reelin5y ago

When the majority of people are using a platform in an unhealthy manner, I think it's reasonable to conclude that the design of the platform itself is at fault. The occurrence of a few successful interactions doesn't change the fact that the majority of social media platforms today exhibit glaring systemic flaws when their interaction models intersect basic human psychology.

troughway5y ago

That can't be good for the mental health of younger people in general. Idols are easy to fanaticize over; not just for teens, but for adults too. HN is a testament to that. But then again HN is a testament to a broad set of fucked up things in general.

I can see how the sniping from random strangers on a near constant basis would cause issues, because there are less and less actual "communities" (ala IRC channels, forums, etc) being formed, it's more of a anyone-can-drop-in-post-and-leave situation because, well, that's the nature of these platforms nowadays. There is no encouragement to build some kind of a conversation with any particular individual beyond the current post/thread/whatever.

Really shitty state of things.

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0 points_630w5y ago0 comments

They will know about all the countries with things they can't have in their own. They will be more aware of it but they lack any political power and position to change things affecting them.

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Reelin5y ago

> Twitter is not healthy for a teenager.

I've personally witnessed the effect on reasonably well educated adults in my life; I can only imagine how much worse it must be for those with less general experience and knowledge.

_5yps5y ago

cameronbrown5y ago

At least in your first paragraph, your experience is similar to my own (19 y/o here). There's a growing population of people who are in totally polarised buckets politically.

searchableguy5y ago

I want to discuss something but I think I would rather publicly not discuss it. Do you mind sending me an email? (In the profile)

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foldr5y ago

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saagarjha5y ago

As someone not on Twitter, I do see an awful lot of good content on the platform. By not engaging with it directly I can usually skip out on or ignore the worst parts of it.

a_bonobo5y ago

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Reelin5y ago

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paypalcust835y ago

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LocalH5y ago

Reelin5y ago

troughway5y ago

Really shitty state of things.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse