Tell me again about how we need to keep children off social media....

We absolutely need to make efforts to limit kids' exposure to addictive social media mechanisms.

People aren't generally against kids using the Internet to communicate; they are against giant tech companies using children as a captive audience without regard to how their decisions might hurt them.

If kids are misusing a comments feature as a general-purpose chat room, good for them. They figured out how to manipulate the system instead of letting the system manipulate them.

Regardless, we need to regulate social media so that it doesn't harm children, and we need to do so without sacrificing the privacy of every adult (age-gates don't work).

This is why we need to rename "social media" to the more accurate "antisocial media". I think everyone reasonable wants kids to be social with each other.

Good parenting. This is not a technical or legal issue, this is parenting one.

I'll pretend for a minute that you are right and it's a parenting issue.

Now what? Apparently most parents are bad so what do you do?

You mandate parents to attend training and educations, in fact, this is done in many countries even before they get married let alone having kids. You make it the spotlight, the current hot new thing, that parents need to learn how parent, it’s mentioned on ads and TV or podcasts or whatever, a full campaign, instead of wasting all these money on political campaigns or corporate ones that brings nothing of value, or instead of funding entertainment industry with who knows say 10bn from tax payers, make it 5bn and the rest goes into teaching and training parents, not just for the kids, but also to be a good family, that’s an investment definitely worth it. There are many ways but obviously it’s the least priority, because it’s in the interest of the state to keep it like this, to justify later when laws are passed that violate people privacy and rights.

You start with:

This is not a technical or legal issue, this is parenting one.

And then go ahead by proposing it is enforced via legislation:

You mandate parents to attend training and educations

The problem is for-profit corporate social media.

Fediverse has never hired thousands of psychologists to gamify everything.

Fediverse hasn't added adverts to sell really seedy or blatantly illegal products.

Fediverse hasn't engaged in genocide in Myanmar or Rohinga, or anywhere else.

Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.

But Facebook/Meta, X, and others definitely have.

Edit: for those of you who -1'ed it, where am I wrong?

I didn't downvote, but I am having trouble connecting your comment to the one you're responding to.

The whole social media and under-18 argument isn't a problem with all social media.

Its a problem with for-profit social media. The companies use gamification to addict and create terrible trends for everyone involved.

Mastodon, peertube, lemmy, and federated media doesn't do any of these gamblification, gamification, psychological attacks, and more.

To be fair, the techniques should be banned by the FTC for deceptive practices, for everyone. But the kids angle is what's being gravitated towards.

"I would say that I'm definitely a bit hard to get to know because I don't know a lot about myself yet. But I think if you do get to know me, you'll find out I'm a pretty cool person."

Such an excellent line from a young person.

i think that's a meme. My youngest says this and follows it with "how does a missile know where it is? it knows where it is because it knows where it isn't..." and on and on and on and on.

so exhausting to listen to this but i think this is where he and his crew gets it. https://youtu.be/bZe5J8SVCYQ

Before I tell you about the first thing, I just want you to remember our brains were still developing when we thought this was so funny.

Are we seriously going to keep saying stuff like this to enculturate young people?

I used to love NPR (I suppose my brain was still developing), but it's offhand comments like this that show too much ulterior motive and keep driving me away from ever listening again.

This American Life is an independent program, not produced or distributed by NPR. The person who wrote that is a TAL producer, not affiliated with NPR.

Also, were you trying out some new vocabulary? enculturate is not appropriate in the context you used it, and it’s not clear what exactly you were trying to convey, other than your own grumpiness, which came through loud and clear.

enculturate

I think he meant inculcate as, presumably, an "eggcorn"...

"This American Life is an independent program, not produced or distributed by NPR."

TAL is independently produced, but distributed by PRX() for broadcast to NPR, and NPR is partially financing it by paying for the right to air it.

The Onion predicted this in 2014: "Teens Migrating From Facebook To Comments Section Of Slow-Motion Deer Video" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4mMY2Kl3GY)

Reminds me a little bit of the agent improvised coordination schemes.

The Onion isn't satire it's just a dystopian Cassandara.

TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra_(metaphor)

Whoever downvoted this has no love of curiosity and doesn't belong here.

Why? We weren't all taught Greek mythology in school, and there are plenty of other interests to explore thereafter

The downvote is optional.

Thats a pretty clever work around… sharing a playlist and using the comments on a podcast as group chat, not sure I’d have come up with that. the kids are alright I guess, good for them.

Discovered my kid doing exactly this years ago. We purposefully limited all social media, locked dowb devices etc, but life uh.. finds a way.

I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never share personal information, etc

Now they are older and are on ridiculous group chats with their friends. Pretty impossible to control tbh. At least they keep me up to date with the latest memes!

everything you put out on the internet never goes away

I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it) and there is surprisingly little information left which is easy to find now, 30 years later. I remember the web being awash in more contemporary technical minutia than I could read in a lifetime. Now, the vast majority of it seems to be flat-out missing or at least very well hidden/distributed.

I think it is more accurate to say, "everything you put on out on the Internet _might_ never go away." Because my experience has been, a lot already has.

I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it)

Say more!

I'm working on a blog article about my adventures on toll-free BBSes before I had access to the Internet. It's about halfway done, and I hope to have it ready to publish soon, somewhere between a week and a year from now.

Just wondering what an internet archive for usenet groups might have looked like. Back then, it was cool to have messages have a finite time limit before going away. Snapchat isn't an original idea. Now, unless you're Snap, it's anathema for a company to think that willingly removing user content would be a good idea.

This is my kids too, life finds a way. I've blocked Youtube, and yet I discovered they are watching their favourite Youtube creators via Spotify.

These always happen, whenever you try to block something, people will find an alternative, sometimes using email drafts with shared login to avoid sending an email and gets detected, other times console chats, and now comment sections, and others will follow. It’s why these things (allowing or disallowing to access the internet or PC or whatever) should be done at the family level, not the state, the state has no business to decide how to parent your kids.

Except that parents have no power whatsoever to effectively prevent kids coming into contact with harmful algorithms, sites eliciting dark patterns etc. Parents don't have power over multi billion dollar companies that have their stakes in harvesting the attention of kids. Only governments can blanket ban these things. At this point the responsibility should not be placed on parents but on companies.

I really dislike the font on this website. It renders extremely misaligned at small sizes, or is that just my browser?

Peak HN comment :-)

I've seen this in a few apps! essentially all you need is an editable text field and some slightly social feature and a handful of kids will collude to use it to circumvent restrictions (of either screen time or school network blocks). Sleep apps, meditation apps, music apps, etc

My kids and their friends certainly spend a lot of time trying to get things to work. My 16 year old found some vpn client he could get running on his school laptop but he can only get past the filters by connecting to a particular gateway outside the United States (i have no idea how he figured out a client that can work nor the IP to connect to). He also showed me how he takes a thermos, puts his phone in it, pads with paper towels and then drops that in his lunch bag. When they go through the metal detectors and bag inspection (yes, includes lunch bags) they shake the thermos, nothing rattles around, and clear him through. Now he has his phone at lunch.

His HS (Townview SEM in Dallas) is ridiculous and run by less than the best to put it mildly so I don't really mind as long as he handles up on grades. heh once i was dropping him off to a line of about 50 kids standing in the rain in maybe 40F weather waiting to go through the metal detector. We went to a coffee shop instead.

Islamist terrorists have been doing similar things, starting with unsent emails in draft.

...and the occasional director of the CIA to his girlfriends... la tee dah...

Me and my friends used to do this in middle school/high school with Google Docs.

We would share a Google Docs link with each other and use it to communicate, and then pretend we were doing homework

"The goal is just to connect with people. You have nothing to talk about. You don't know each other very well. You're just seeing each other and acknowledging each other's presence"

This right here is ham radio in a nutshell. These kids need transceivers and should give morse code a try.

I think the biggest attraction is the formation of the group with no established processes. Nobody telling you "This is how things are done around here". Exactly the opposite of ham radio

This right here is ham radio in a nutshell.

At least in my area, Boomers have done a great job gatekeeping amateur radio by making it so unpleasant to use that nobody under the age of 40 is willing to engage with that community.

I've bounced off ham radio at least 3 times in my life, each time repelled by grouchy senior citizens with too much free time.

ham radio is the coolest technology in the world but sadly mostly allows you to talk to old people who have the same attitude as stack overflow mods - "you're doing it wrong"

I was surprised last week to find that Spotify has turned in to full on social media/youtube now.

I left Spotify off of screentime limits for my son so that he could listen to music or books at bedtime, and found him watching "podcasts" which have full youtube style pages with videos and comments.

Nobody stops to think "why not" when it is so easy to add certain features to software these days. But everyone wants to capture peoples attention and adding messaging is one way to do it.

Spotify had Podcasts before they got Audiobooks in.

Zawinski's Law* except now it’s a social media messaging app.

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.”

I seem to recall people "claiming" GameFAQs message boards for obscure games for this same purpose back in the day.

Back in ~2001 I ran a fairly popular blog commenting system - back then most blogs didn't have built-in comments, so I offered javascript embeds to add them to posts.

One day performance started to go down rapidly, and within a few days my host got in touch about unusual CPU usage.

I tracked it down to a series of random blogger.com blog posts with colossal comment threads measuring in the thousands. Each post only got comments for a single day, and all of the comments were in Japanese. The blog owners seemed very confused.

Turns out Japanese schoolkids figured this trick out 25 years ago.

I have seen something like this before but it was mostly spammers/scammers. Don’t think they were kids at all.

secret group chat, etc.

I have often thought about how I could put steganographic techniques into application in the comments I've left sprinkled around the Internet over the past decades, so while it looks like I'm commenting on some relevant topic, I've just given myself 64 bytes of read-only memory, or so, to stash some magic message to myself in the future.

Just a thought, though ..

I went on Spotify to check out these playlists. I very quickly found that they have “corn” playlists that abuse the fact that you can upload videos for podcasts. A few are a screen recording of a windows Home Screen with a tiny video player in the corner playing adult videos. I had a laugh, nature always erm finds a way

This is gen alpha's squinting at scrambled cable porn haha

It's fascinating to see these online communities develop.

See also:

- The Slate comments. Here an author profiles the regular commentors that disparage his articles, and it's surprisingly wholesome [0]

- Odd Lots Discord chat. Odd Lots is a podcast about the economy, and has a massive Discord that has an entire life of its own [1]. There are long substack posts profiling some of the most prolific users [2]

[0] https://slate.com/life/2026/09/comments-commenters-slate-fri... ( https://archive.is/vs8OD )

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/business/odd-lots-podcast...

French kids started doing this in the 1930s with the talking clock (a French invention BTW). The clock was basically a busbar: callers were all connected to the clock. When it was not speaking the time (at the minute) callers could speak and be heard by others. And it was a free call!

The phone system had switched to digital by the time I started using it so I never got to experience this, but in exchange I could use Minitel!