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Lots of research on why phones for kids generally ends their childhood at the age they get it.

Phone aren’t tools anymore. They are digital slot machines designed to increase usage. It’s well researched and established and an easy google.

Using tech for creating instead of consuming is for kids and young people.




“Hammers aren’t tools anymore. They’re just another way to smash peoples faces in.”


"Every thing is the same because I made an analogy"


I wish there was a way to bookmark individual comments


There is: the link is the timestamp https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38156326


Sweet, thanks!


Using hammers for their intended purpose doesn't cause people to get sick and harm or kill themselves. Neither does hammer manufactures find that this happens and yet try to hide it and then do everything they can to cause more harm.


I was literally just hammering a thing back into shape, and I'm glad the hammer doesn't have an interactive feature suggesting other things I might like to hit.


> They are digital slot machines designed to increase usage

You made me think about how when I started using the internet (early 2000s), it wasn't optimized like that and it was still so addictive. I can only imagine the damage it does to kids minds nowadays.


A big difference between then and now is there was more creating and much less to consume.


This feels so much like 80s parents lamenting how comic books are ruining kids minds.


Do you have kids? I've got kids, and addiction to tech is a real thing. Being a parent is so so hard, and then you add this thing that is designed to trigger every impulse. Every parent I know says "I'm so glad I didn't have to raise my kids with smart phones."

And, I love comic books, and this is different.


I notice a big difference in behaviour between even old games (think SNES, PS1) and modern games. There's definitely something in the new ones.


Seems like a 4 month old spicy throwaway take account.

Comics of the 80s felt designed to let kids imagine a world bigger than the one they were in they had a place in a bigger world.

Stan Lee has some great interviews on it.


Except everyone knows it is true. Especially Meta, but a brave whistleblower made sure we all know. Well, at least I thought everyone know.


Parents lamented about comic books? Link?


I was wrong about the era, apparently the height of the comic book scare was the late 1950s, but it continued to the end of the century as far as I remember.

It's all based on this book Seduction of the Innocent: https://www.amazon.com/Seduction-Innocent-Frederic-Wertham/d...

Here's an article about it: https://slate.com/culture/2008/04/the-campaign-against-comic...

The scare went all the way to Congress.

Here's a book about the history of the comic book scare: https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Cent-Plague-Comic-Book-Changed-Am...


If you far enough back parents lamented chess.



Doubtstorming doesn’t make it legitimate or not

Not really sure how the previous posts relate to social media and mobile use in children which is well established


Agreed.

My kids have restricted mobile and no social media access.

But parents did use to think that comics would ruin their children - I'm responding to the disbelief in that.


That's it: phones for kids generally ends their childhood when they get it. Yep.


Social media on a smartphone deeply affects children.

Leaders of the tech companies don’t let their own kids use it. Easy google.

You have to ask people who grew up both with it and without it at the same time, not people who didn’t have it at all, or had nothing but tech.

Why young brains are especially vulnerable to social media: https://www.apa.org/news/apa/2022/social-media-children-teen...

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/dangers-of-social-media-f...

An interesting in between, look at the world as it’s changing way: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1047840X.2020.1...




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