Do you have kids? I'm guessing you don't, because the answer is pretty obvious to those of us who do - the vast majority of parents seem to give not one single fuck about what their kids do with technology. I've known families who have a cell phone - a dedicated device - for their four year old.
My armchair diagnosis is that parents who are just a little bit older than me (I'm 34) and especially parents who didn't grow up as nerds just don't see the problem. Among the class of people who spend their time on Substack or Hacker News the horror of the modern net and its affect on childhood are well understood at this point. Among "normal people" you will definitely get weird looks if you suggest that this stuff is terrible for your kids.
My kids (4 and 6) have a "dedictated" iPhone, a iPad with the pencil, and a MacBook Air. But they were just hand me downs. They don't get to use them unless we let them, but we mostly use them to learn how to type, write, draw, play learning games, Khan Academy, and to mess around in general.
They also call or text aunts/uncles/cousins/grandparents. I feel like it has helped them with reading and just the exercise of trial and error to figure out how it works is beneficial.
Haven’t needed to delve into parental controls yet though.
> They don't get to use them unless we let them, but we mostly use them to learn how to type, write, draw, play learning games, Khan Academy, and to mess around in general.
That seems fine to me. What I'm referring to above is that the kid literally just has an iPhone with, as far as I can see, virtually no restriction. I imagine you would not let your kids use their device to scroll through Youtube Shorts for an unsupervised 2 hours, for example.
Just like it's hard for me to find the right balance of benefit to downside in technology for my kids, it's also hard to strike a balanced tone when discussing my feelings on this stuff. Every time I write something about this problem online I feel like I'm coming off as some authoritarian luddite - which I'm definitely not. I want my kids to get the benefits of technology. Any bright future for them is almost sure to include the need to engage with the net.
Instilling the values that allow for that is the hard part.
> That seems fine to me. What I'm referring to above is that the kid literally just has an iPhone with, as far as I can see, virtually no restriction. I imagine you would not let your kids use their device to scroll through Youtube Shorts for an unsupervised 2 hours, for example.
Yes, they aren’t allowed to watch youtube shorts at all (nor do either of the parents), but we’ll look up nature or physics videos, and if they want to watch a video on repeat, we use yt-dlp to download and they watch via infuse. But again, not of their own accord. When it’s time to play outside or elsewhere, it’s time to do that. And no devices at meal time, even if they see other kids at the same table with them.
I guess my point was that the devices are immensely powerful tools for learning and communication, so I try to teach them how. But they also play games with non gambling mechanics (thank god for Apple Arcade).
This is key, in my experience. I've told my kids that if they catch me scrolling shorts or reddit, they have the right to confiscate my phone. A big part of instilling the values I referenced above is embodying them myself. (obviously, but it bears repeating).
> But they also play games with non gambling mechanics
This is important too. There's so much genuinely great media out there - TV shows, video games, movies, books. It's not that I don't want my kids to experience that stuff - I just want them to learn how to focus on the stuff that's quality rather than the stuff that is slop.
There is enough general public concern about minors having access to online pornography that jurisdictions all over the world are passing age restrictions but I think the HN discussion is one sided.
That is, HN users see the costs, the difficulty, the privacy concerns, etc. But they're also dismissive of the harm, which in terms of the young Gen Z men that I know personally is real. I can't attribute online pornography 100% but the damage includes criminal convictions, falling victim to "blackpill" ideology and other false answers to gendered problems and frequently people giving up on work and love.
I collect ero images and restrictions would personally be a hassle for me, I can't say I am against pornography in general, but I've got some concerns about pornography today. I think advocates are stuck in the 1970s when it was tamer and much less prevalent than it is today -- it's entirely different for a teen to have a few issues of Penthouse or Hustler than it is today.
I think the story of how it relates to relationship satisfaction is nuanced. Personally I think OnlyFans is a cancer. I want to feel special in a fantasy, and not as the biggest simp in a room full of hundreds of simps. (And this is healthy narcissism [1], not pathological narcissism. In good sex or sex with love, somebody thinks you are special)
I'm not sure what the answer is but I can see it both ways and that seems rare on HN.
Yeah, I think this is a sort of similar issue to the kind of thing I describe above, where parents of a certain generation / certain technical background might not be fully aware of the sorts of harm that can come in through technological channels.
I would never actually do this, but there's a part of me that would like to just give my kids a magazine to hide under their bed, or even some sort of curated private video site on the LAN, just to allow for some expression of natural puberty urges in a way that is ... if not "healthy," per se, then at least "harm reduced?" Obviously that idea in practice would be way too weird to consider, lol.
But this comes back to the balance thing I was talking about on my other post in this topic. Full abstinence is probably practically impossible and I'm not sure it's even the right approach. The other end of the spectrum - throwing the kids into the waters of Pornhub, OnlyFans, and whatever the TikTok equivalent of porn is (surely that exists, right?) - that seems pretty fraught too. The taboo nature of this discussion makes things harder - but I have tried to overcome the weird feeling and have fairly frank discussions about these sorts of things with my oldest.
You’re getting downvoted but I agree that this person has a communication problem with their child. And it isn’t because the kid figured out how to use the device.
Yeah, I just learned about that, TBH. Never knew about it. I'm still hardwired to tap in the lower right corner for tabs. I haven't retrained my monkey brain just yet...
I'll concede that all this Safari tab stuff, with the workarounds, is less problematic to me than the Apple Watch face swiping thing when it arose. They conceded that too, but it took a .1 release to do it.
At the point in time when I disabled notifications for the app, it did not. I tried that. Even after navigating dark patterns, digging into the menus, and turning those options off, I still received promotion notifications.
Perhaps they've fixed it since? I don't know because they've already burned my trust and they've done nothing to earn it back. Publicly acknowledging and apologizing for this would have been a way to start getting off my list of bad actors.
Even if they've made it possible to successfully turn those off deep in the menus now, whatever dreamed-up definition of "opted in" it's operating under is a tortured legalistic one that undermines the actual meaning and spirit of opting in.
I can sympathize. I don’t know about uber in particular but it gets quite tiring trying to find and follow these obscure settings.
And what’s worse is that the companies always seem to find a way to reset it to what they want quite frequently. One of their tricks is to reorganize permissions frequently so the ones that allow their spam to get through are always new.
I had to completely turn off notifications for Instagram because none of the provided settings appear to disable the almost-daily "for you" and "trending" notifications. Now I don't get notified when someone DMs me there, which has lead to me missing important messages.
Same. And I used to work there, and I raised it with them. They have all their career incentives aligned to getting people to see spammy notifications. I was powerless.
The problem with the user hostility is that, in the long term, people don't use it.
As a web dev I see so many things that are lights-on-nobody-home about Meta. The Meta app on my phone generates numerous notifications, when I get one that says a game that looks really cool is 50% off, clicking on it doesn't send me to the landing page in the their app store, it sends me to the senseless home page of the app which seems to have the message "move on folks, nothing to see here"
The Instagram web application fails to load the first time I load it on my computer and I have to always reload. On either Facebook or Instagram I am always getting harassed by OnlyFans models that want me to engage with them... on the same platform where I engage with my sister-in-law.
When they say they are "careless people" I wonder if they are not just careless about sexual harassment and genocide but careless about making money because we're in a postcapitalist hell where Zuck could care less for making money for his shareholders but rather gets a squee from sitting behind Trump at his inauguration and hires people with $100M packages not because he wants them to work with him but because he doesn't want them to work with someone else.
I went through a couple rounds of trying to raise specifically this issue with support before simply uninstalling the app out of principle. They had their chance and burned it.
1. your profile icon (bottom right) > hamburger menu (top right) > Notifications > Posts, stories, and comments > turn off ‘Posts suggested for you’ and ‘Notes’
2. on the same screen, set ‘First posts and stories’ to ‘From people I follow’
3. back out to Notifications > Live and reels > turn off ‘Recently uploaded reels’ and ‘Reels suggested for you’
This works for me, but if you’re still getting notifications you don’t want, you’ll have to figure out what category/type they fall under and turn that off.
Yes, unfortunately, they have changed their permissions structure a few times, and each time I have had to go back in and re-configure it so that the ads don't show up. It's quite annoying, they seem to be doing everything they can to follow the letter of the law while disobeying its spirit.
I discovered this a few months ago - it's worth spending the 60 seconds to update these settings to get rid of Uber's terrible promotion notifications!
It's interesting that 600MB can be perceived as both trivial (e.g. on a fiber connection this is a matter of seconds) and excruciating (e.g. on a rural satellite line this could be 15-20+ minutes).
can't find what you're talking about. Per ChatGPT, "In iOS, there is no universal path like Account > Settings > Communication > Marketing Preferences across the system. That type of menu usually appears within individual apps or websites, not in iPhone’s system-wide Settings."
I had the same feeling when I first rode it. It’s wasteful - a theme park is fundamentally wasteful. But it’s the only time in my life I’ll get to ride a steam engine. And for many others, the only time they’ll ever be on a train.
reply