Technology

It’s all vertical video as well. YouTube pushes Shorts fairly aggressively on the desktop website, and it’s a crappy experience.

It's all mind-melting in my experience

There was that brief period of time where Vine existed and had actual quality content.

Then the short video format was shittified after everyone began doing it, and fairly rapidly devolved into mindless attention seeking nonsense / micro personal update vlog... or worse.

What a great way to dismiss an entire problems based that affects our society. It's easier to just hand wave it away as someone else's problem than to actually consider it...

When a problem becomes systematic it's now a societal and cultural problem and not an individual responsibility problem. Individual responsibility isn't working so it's now down to the society this is occurring in to solve the systematic problem in a systematic way.

That's how almost everything works

Yeah none of those kids should have cell phones. They should be about old enough to drive before they get one even.

Yeah, parents are getting ruined by social media algorithms too.

Our government seems to be moving towards an "we only care about the children, but everyone, including adults, upload your government papers" approach.

Y'all got any of those protections for adults? I remember reading regulations that companies couldn't show children advertisements. Can I have some of that regulation too?

I just can't stop being cynical that there is little focus on homeless or underpaid adults, or other adult issues, but the one problem we're focused on just so happens to include everyone giving up anonymity on the Internet.

We do need to help kids with social media, but there's a lot of other challenges they will soon face as adults that we're ignoring.

On tiktok too, where else.

At their second jobs.

People have been claiming that new media will destroy society at least since we invented writing, and probably before.

Look at Mr Moneybags here, getting cared for in an old person home.

my siblings managed to keep their kids away from smartphones until 4th grade. And even that was a struggle.

sadly it just falls into the camp of 'everyone else is doing it'. and if your kid isn't they will be socially ostracized.

"In my household, the only addictive spyware we use is made in the USA!!!"

Edit: everyone below me is proving my point exactly.

With YouTube kids, and the popularity of channels like cocomelon, I'd be surprised if it's less than 75%...

I don't think its difficult to imagine 30% of 5 to 7s with their own phones on tiktok nearly all the time.

Raising kids is hard, especially when youre poor and stressed out or tired all the time, its waaay easier to just get them a phone.

The number of people I've met in the last couple of years? Yeah, I live amongst the poors, the abusive parents and single moms and drunk/drug addicted dads... all their kids either have their own phones or the family has one for all the kids, who basically fight over it and get smacked by a parent or older sibling when theyre being too rowdy.

A few weeks ago I was walking, puffing on a nicotine vape. A school bus pulls up and drops off what could not have been older than 2nd graders, who began hounding me: Lemme hit that wax bro, Share your wax!

These are those 5 to 7s that are on TikTok, or close to it. I didnt even realize what Wax was at first, literally had to scurry home and lookup that wax is now the term for basically dab pens.

So yeah, theres huge segments of the population where 7 year olds want a highly concentrated dose of MJ from a literal random person theyve never seen before.

Devo: It's a beautiful world we live in... for you, but not for me.

It's probably not that bad, but I wouldn't be surprised just based on anecdotal experience.

I'm a provider at a children's hospital and phones have always been an issue during appointments. Before, it was mostly an issue with getting parents to pay attention or answer questions during the evaluation.

However since COVID, we've noticed a large increase of parents using tablets and phones as a constant babysitter. These children are so emotionally attached to their screens that they will tantrum until they have access to their screen again.