Youtube's CEO Limits His Kids' Social Media Use – Other Tech Bosses Do the Same

We should be clearer on what it means. An iPad will satisfy their need for stimulation but not their developmental emotional and social needs, nor their fine motor skills and executive functioning skills (and it likely harms the latter two, unlike old-school toys). Boredom and non-excessive stimulation levels are essential to letting the child’s inner world develop. Giving young kids iPads so they’ll be quiet is a normalized form of neglect.

Are you talking about Kanye West ? also can you expand what this means? "plugs the laptop mic with a dud cable"

An iPad addiction is arguably better than being sedated so you don't bother your parents.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brainrot

The best definition I see is

> the crippling addiction to low effort content

But also have seen it used plenty to refer to the low effort content itself

Brainrot is a small portion of social media

As compared to what? To no exposure? Or to unlimited exposure?

3 things should be studied: screens for kids, short-form video for teens, and non-shortform peer-group social media (what teens had from 2008-2015 or so). I bet we’ll see very different impacts from each.

I do strongly agree with the cigarette analogy though. I have actually said before that I think we would all be better off if social media use was both legally and socially treated like smoking. (Not to say I think we should be age gating websites because that opens a whole other can of worms, but it would probably be better for societal mental health if we did).

The real purpose is to build broad consensus for surveillance, control and censorship of social media, "to protect the children" is the thing they tell you to justify it. They are recognizing they have lost the narrative control. How do you manufacture consent for war and genocide when you have completely lost young people, they see the wall of carnage and dead children and will not be persuadable by the legacy media telling them to close their eyes and ears.

You don’t have to put your kids in front of a TV or tablet. You can simply establish boundaries and leave them to themselves. They will engage in imaginative play for hours on end just like kids have for thousands of years.

Source: my kids have been doing it since 5AM while I lay in bed.

I know this is HN and the everything-as-a-service mentality is prevalent, but come on.

I find having conversations with parents at school and the parents of their friends leads to the best results (so far, I’ve only been at it a few years for my kiddos so we’ll see I guess longterm). If you’re all vaguely on the same page it just makes things a little easier. If that’s not an option, then just don’t be the first person to buy one and when all their peers start having certain technology you give them access too, but you sit down and talk to them about it or find ways to restrict the faucet.

For instance, when it became clear YouTube was not going to be completely eradicated from my house, I just ripped a few videos and added them to my Plex server. They get to watch a little bit of nonsense content, but they’re not just getting flooded with more of it constantly (or ads). As a result those YT videos are just one among several things they watch. It isn’t special or all consuming.

Video games have also been interesting. Most of the parents I know have, like me, adopted to use older stuff and/or just not let them get on the Internet.

Ultimately at some point you have to do some combination of “controlling the faucet,” watching what your kids are watching so you know what’s going on, and ultimately educating them/giving them context to the media they are enjoying. No shortcuts!

Third grade and it’s already happening: My kid has already had trouble in his social circle at school because we made him cut back his Roblox time by a lot. It’s not even that anyone plays at school, but supposedly almost all the boys (and many girls) are playing after school.

By far the most distracting thing for kids is persistent notifications. Snap is the worst for this, but messaging apps are a close second.

I’m glad they exist but they could be so much better.

Sorry, but that's where you're wrong (at least, if you mean enforcing effective limits). What you're asking is for parents to spend their scarce time and energy on fighting a technical battle, against a system that is designed to capture attention, and kids with nothing but energy and time.

>But it’s pretty well controlled and they adjust to it

Or they did 10 seconds of googling and have all the access they want.

It wasn’t healthy for kids to just play video games every day for 5hrs straight after school in the 90s either.

Lots of parents limited their kids' TV (television, you know) time back in the day (mine sure did, thanks mum and dad, even though I didn't particularly approve of the restriction back then).

Now you have to limit smartphone (and tablet and PC and TV) time. Lots of parents do this already, CEOs are not alone.