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The fucking problem with this shit is even if you don't let your kids have a smartphone with social media apps, if you send them to school, every single friend of theirs does and they use these social apps to communicate and bond and if your kid is the weirdo without one they feel unable to function socially and hate you every day for restricting them.
I have an extremely hard time keeping this stuff away from my kid even though we're homeschooling. He does an online piano course from his tablet sitting above his keyboard. The course web site embeds YouTube video content. He's repeatedly had trouble just sticking to the course and I've had to ratchet up parental controls to the point where each video he watches has to be approved by me now. They just won't let you program YouTube to say "only show and allow this kid this piano guy's channel", nothing else
I'm on the third parental control regime at this point. Next thing to try is to replace his tablet with a locked down laptop where he can only run a pre installed web browser that force enables a vibe coded extension.
Yeah, I totally can't imagine any other reason, at all, why that would be. How could "boring and pointless bullshit" [from the victim's point of view- if this was interesting, you wouldn't be having this problem] ever lose to some readily-available distraction? This sort of thing has been stumping parents since time immemorial.
Perhaps not setting appropriate metrics is the actual problem? When I tend to procrastinate and go down a YouTube rabbit hole (or, y'know, write comments on the Motte) it's because either the time I have to complete a particular task is far longer than it's actually going to take (especially if I don't want to do it for some reason), or everyone's agreed it doesn't matter and I'm rationally deprioritizing tasks nobody cares about for stuff that's actually important (even if it's just important to me).
This is especially true when it's a parent ordering their kid to do something they really don't have much experience in themselves, so they have no idea how to set goals/metrics, meaningfully check in, or motivate progress (or have no idea that they even need to be doing those things). Which means that the task of figuring that out now falls to the subordinate, and if that subordinate isn't particularly motivated to do it, you're going to get some, uh, interesting answers.
Organically, I notice that others trying to learn songs will tend to set goals based around practice times- have this song/technique memorized in X practices from now- and the timetable imposes itself intrinsically based on how long that process actually takes. Some take a long time, some do not, but the key there is that if it doesn't get done, the next conversation tends to be "well, then what the fuck were you even doing, scrolling through Shorts for 8 hours?". Figuring out how long something's going to take is a skill that needs to be practiced too. (So's justifying it, for that matter.)
Also, here's your obligatory "trying to use tech to solve a people problem". Besides, what do you think's going to happen if you manage to accomplish your goal? I bet your answer isn't "they stare blankly at the wall for most of the allotted practice time", but I have first-hand experience in employing exactly that strategy in the Before Tech times, and they'll likely do it to you.
I find your comment rude and not generous and am mostly going to disregard it.
My kid loves piano and gets a lot of value out of the online lessons and he does them at his own pace whenever he wants. The problem and the point is the tablet, which is just to help with piano, is a distraction machine by default and tech-media seems happy with that and I have to exert considerable resources to change that.
And yet so far you've failed to do so.
Of course, "maybe try a different approach, here's why" (rather than getting glazed for your efforts) may understandably be offensive to someone used to sending their problems to their room if their first pass doesn't work. But hey, at least I don't have to live with the consequences of that.
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Can you please explain what this even is?
True. One would assume that this should be possible in a mobile app.
Step 1: Install a browser (maybe Chrome?). Use ??? controls to make it the only accessible application.
Step 2: Create a plugin that blocks unwanted content (or everything but specifically selected content). Use natural language instructions to an AI instead of writing the code directly.
Step 3: Install that extension on the browser, and use ??? to make it impossible to disable.
Result: A laptop that can only do one thing. For example, watch a single channel's YouTube videos.
Thanks, yeah that's what I was getting at. Basically, for the device that's just to assist with piano, only give him a user (meaning non-admin account), only have one application that can launch (Chrome), have it force enable (and not allow disabling) one particular extension that I DIY coded (via claude), which only allows loading that one web site and only allow embedding that piano instructor's YouTube videos and does not allow playing any other videos.
Re: the
???Again this is for the online piano lessons assisting device. I think it's absolutely ridiculous that I have to do this. I don't even want a relationship with YouTube but the piano course guy chose it and this is what we have to resort to. It's a shame because his course is otherwise excellent.
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Kids have hated their parents for placing restrictions for their own good since time immemorial. Doesn't make it ok to give up though (to be clear: I'm not accusing you of giving up, just that many parents do seem to give up these days). If social media truly is tantamount to doing drugs in terms of the harm it causes kids (as I've seen alleged), then even being a complete social outcast is less bad for the kid than being on social media.
I disagree a lot.
Two ideas:
I saw a study recently that claimed that it's quite literally healthier to be a pack a day smoker with an active social life than a wellness guru who has no friends.
my parents did this to me as a child/teenager (now ~20 years ago, yikes!). Even back then, not having a blackberry/dumb cellphone was rapidly causing social issues as adoption pumped. And finally at the end of grade 9 my parents, realizing this, started listening to my pleading and got me a phone.
Would I be better off if I AND ALL MY PEERS never interacted with the Internet or social media until age 18 or 25? Sure.
Was I better off after I got a phone, so I could stop being "that guy with no phone" amongst my peers? 1,000%. Being othered is no joke, especially for kids/teens who are WAY more sensitive to this.
I mean define “better”, because I’m generally social media negative and I don’t see it making life better in any sense that I can consider “the good life” as it existed in the before times. Kids don’t seem to spend as much time really socializing offline, playing pickup games, having healthy hobbies, and so on. Even adults, a lot of times they don’t spend time talking to other adults in work downtime, they are generally in their phones doing some form of social media or games. How is that a better life? How is a loneliness epidemic good for American society? How is it good for kids or adults to get less exercise, spend less time socializing, etc?
To me the good life is one that’s fairly simple and balanced. A person should be spending time with others, spend time being active, have creative hobbies, and have a good enough job to live on. The phone seems to eat most of the non-working hours for a good number of people around me.
I agree with everything you said
The ideal solution is we RETVRN and tech is a side enabler of what you described, and screen time is much lower across the board.
But that requires collective action and minimal defection (especially in the context of kids and teens).
100 teenagers with no social media all doing 1990s activities (spraypainting the train tracks? Whatever) are clearly all better off
100 teenagers all addicted to social media? Clearly worse off than the above group.
95 teenagers addicted to social media, and 5 teenagers who aren't allowed on social media and are thus cut out from participating in many shared experiences with their peers? Of all three scenarios, those 5 teens are by far the worst off.
I can look for it later, but teenagers literally say this. They wish they could leave social media but because the supermajority of their friends and peers do not, they are stuck participating, lest they be left behind socially.
I think this is true, and honestly I think the best thing is to simply pick a level of technology use that fits. I mean honestly other than this place and I’m trying to learn to blog, I mostly limit my internet to radio and podcasts. It’s actually an improvement over indiscriminate of the internet. And it started from reading about live in the 1940s and following a few video blogs about people trying to live life for a week or a month as if it were 1942 (in Britain). I tried it out because I thought I was using the internet too much, and tbh it is an interesting experiment because it has improved my life in ways I didn’t expect.
If you don’t want that, I suppose you could go more modern. But even simple things like having one TV and one tower style computer where you do all the internet stuff and keep it in a public place in the home would probably work. It’s what happened in 1990. It was pretty good.
If anyone here wants the complete story I’d be willing to do an effort post on the experience and the things that it changed.
I remember hearing about this!
I read and enjoy basically every effort post on this site. So very interested
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Yes, please!
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I seriously doubt that is true (the study's claim, not that you saw it). I would need a lot of evidence to be convinced of such an incredible claim, like years of studies repeatedly finding that to be true.
I mean I'm the same age or very similar, and I experienced no such issues. I think that part of growing up is learning to shrug off people who are jerks and who mistreat you for petty reasons. Yes, kids are super sensitive to being shut out of things, but they need to learn to ignore that to be well-adjusted adults.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK595227/pdf/Bookshelf_NBK595227.pdf
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28880099/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38824784/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37337095/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39836319/
While I agree with you overall, in this case being quite literally the singular only person in homeroom without a cellphone was not "shrug off a bully", it was incredibly other-ing. I think my parents made the right call.
This is why I am generally rather (classical) liberal but for youth social media bans, I am much more in favor. It's a situation where even the teenagers today say social media makes their lives worse, but they can't leave if everyone else is still on it. The solution requires coordinated action.
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Sure, but you can do things to change what peer pool they have access to to draw friends from and can take steps to minimize what proportion of them will be druggists. But even at good schools full of kids from high SES homes you still have almost all of them on devices with social-crack apps.
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It also doesn't make it OK for parents to demand that everyone else do the work to make it easy for them to implement their desired restrictions.
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Depends on the drug to be honest. If it's equal to every social outing including a mandatory dose of heroin, then sure, being an outcast is better. If it's more like having a beer now and then with some risk of getting blackout drunk - I'm pretty sure such harms and risks were usually implicitly accepted as part of growing up.
Sure, that's reasonable enough. My impression is that people mean the heroin end of the spectrum (not beer) when they make the comparison, but perhaps it will turn out to be more like beer.
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Social media may be the best way of achieving outcast status in 2026. I remember when MySpace was on the decline and my peers and I were first hopping over to Facebook. I was one of the guys at the tail end of that lane change and I remember getting into a messaging exchange/argument with one of my peers who I never liked. It was over the fact that I added about 40-50 at the beginning, because a lot of my family hadn't yet made the transition and I don't go around adding random people I don't know in-person. He was mocking it because he had nearly "300 friends!" and I wasn't even close to him. I simply replied, "Uh, yeah dude, I don't have 284 imaginary friends like you do..." Got blocked shortly after that. In real life, this dude had no friends because we all knew him.
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And further in defense of parents, it's hard to figure out how to square that circle. I don't have a good answer to it either. Aside from living in an Ultra Orthodox Jewish community, the balance between things like that are notoriously hard to navigate. One thing that's ironic though is that prolonged exposure to this trough of horseshit usually leads to 1 of 2 different outcomes. Either they become fully absorbed and consumed by the technology and become addicts glued to social media and everything else, or they become so desensitized to it, none of it has any appeal to them, they get bored and tired of it and just tune it all out and barely notice it anymore; if they even did to begin with. Some years back I read a mathematics textbook that was written on the kind of "recommender systems" that Amazon uses. If you count that as "advertising" as some might, then I'm somewhat susceptible to it because I've actually found it to be useful as a sort of consumer bibliographer of related items. But in my own case when it comes to traditional advertising, I came to the original, latter conclusion and I think it's for the better. And that came naturally, not through any sort of parental supervision. I grew up during the time with there were still all these turbulent changes and things didn't settle into where they are currently.
I've often wondered for instance how the advertising industry calculates the success of it's marketing campaigns because I've 'never' thought of myself as someone who's susceptible to advertising. I do my research and due diligence in advance. Walk into the store immediately to buy what it is I already did my homework on and leave. I block out all forms of advertising. I ignore everything else without any effort. Maybe it's just a personality thing. Some cats you dangle a ball of yarn in front of and they snatch onto it and get wrapped up in the whole thing. Other cats get annoyed, get up and move and go back into hibernation mode. That was me.
The old saw about advertising is that only 50% of it works; but there's no way of knowing which 50%.
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There's a tool called yt-dlp which allows you to easily download youtube videos (including entire playlists).
You could download the "whitelist" videos to your computer, transfer them to the tablet via USB thumbdrive or somesuch, and just cut youtube out completely.
If you really wanted to be crafty, you could install jellyfin on a computer somewhere on your network, download the videos to that (as well as any other videos you want to whitelist), and then put the jellyfin client on the tablet and give him a youtube-like experience.
Yes I could do a lot of things. The videos are integrated into the web site so there's written parts and video parts that need to be next to each other to not be frustrating with, say, scripting
yt-dlpto download all of the allowed videos to a folder that he has to switch to and find and run.Anyway, I'm an ex Google engineer and I'm just saying it's not trivial to work around the viral and distracting content being jammed at him from every direction. It's a lot worse than me being on the internet unsupervised when I was a kid.
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You could also script the download to run every day for a set of approved channels. And you could also, if you are so inclined, set up something like ErsatzTV and create your own TV channel (complete with EPG) with youtube videos, music videos downloaded with yt-dlp as well from playlists of best 80s, 90s and 00s music videos, ripped TV shows from DVDs (and not torrents, that would be piracy!), movies and even 80s and 90s ads as padding between "shows" (there's channels with lots of ads on youtube). And then serve that through Jellyfin.
*EDIT: The perils of new comments browsing! I missed the part in the OP where he wanted a specific channel and nothing else! Still, he could make a curated channel with a specific schedule for his kid; piano lessons run from this time to that time. Having to follow a hard schedule probably teaches kids a valuable lesson about punctuality and understanding that the world doesn't revolve around them.
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