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Pausing “Instagram Kids” and building parental supervision tools (about.instagram.com)
180 points by decrypt on Sept 27, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 263 comments



I have this saved in my notes. Forgot from where I saved it from, but it’s so accurate:

"I work in the cyber security industry, and I can tell you over the years, I've seen kids - including my own - do things that first-world government teams and crack white hat groups could not have done any better. Give up now.

There is no app, no operating system, no proxy, scanner or firewall, and no setting that will ever defeat a determined kid. Plus, they work in groups, and are able to coordinate even better than their adult counterparts to find and disseminate new hacks. It's an arms race that cannot be won with technology. You find a setting, they find a workaround. Apple updates, they find a new weakness.

Take their phones. Put them in a box. Sit on the box and guard it. Maybe buy a Faraday bag or something. Watch them cry and talk about how they'll be social outcasts and their friends will mock them, or moan about how they need it for school to check the Facebook page their teacher posts assignments to. Turn a deaf ear. Know that you are helping them just like our parents were when they made us eat vegetables (which you know, are actually pretty darned good - thanks, Mom). "


While I agree with the sentiment that a determined kid would go to just about any length to get something, even if that something is bad for him, I will have to give a hard "no" to what you said afterwards. Pointlessly denying a child what he deems to be a necessity in his modern life without giving valid reasoning is a terrible idea and will just make the kid despise his parents.

A much better tactic, and one that I see neglected far too often is to instill the reasoning into the kids from a young age, don't bar them from what's bad from them, teach them that why and how it's bad so they themselves keep a distance. My parents did his very effectively with me and my siblings, and we, despite our age and frequent exposure to such things, naturally gravitate away from obsession. And this isn't just a niche case, there are many people, even in my generation, who are waking up to the reality and behaving in a similar manner, although it's hard to get that fact out there with all the stigma surrounding basically any teenager nowadays.

And saying that this strategy "doesn't work" or is "too hard" is usually just cope for parents with poor skills in my experience.

>Watch them cry and talk about how they'll be social outcasts and their friends will mock them, or moan about how they need it for school to check the Facebook page their teacher posts assignments to.

I genuinely can't tell if this is some sort of meta-ironic take but no, just no. The vast majority of even elementary school childrens' lives are being moved online slowly but surely, and whether you like it or not they are going to have to pull out that laptop or phone for hours a day, can you sit and watch them for that entire time?


I believe you should give valid reasoning, and also deny the harmful obsession.

Some stimulants are too addictive to trust a young child to mindfully avoid.

The people working in the social media and entertainment industries are extremely skilled at their jobs of increasing user engagement, they have huge budgets with which to accomplish that goal and little regulatory oversight.

People have a finite ability to resist obsession.

Sugar is tasty, it gives a surge of dopamine when you consume it, and fruits use that property to get animals like us to eat them so they can reproduce. But even kids can resist that with a little education and maybe a stomachache after Halloween.

Heroin is similarly addictive, in the way that a butter knife and similarly a hand grenade are dangerous to a small child.

These products are meticulously engineered to be maximally addictive and obsessive. Human nature is not necessarily up to the task of resisting them.


> But even kids can resist that with a little education

Actually—are we sure about that?

It seems like an awful lot of adults die each year basically because they couldn’t stop themselves from eating too many sugary foods.


No, I'm not. You're correct that fruit is not sufficiently addictive for adults to gorge themselves on it to fatal levels. At the very least, it has not historically been sufficiently available to cause people to succumb to heart disease or diabetes before, on average, they had >2 children per couple: Humanity has not yet gone extinct.

Whether Nestle's next concoction will be able to do that, composed of eye-catching, almost fluorescent colored dyes, unimaginably sweet high-fructose corn syrup, surreptitiously enhanced by most of your daily recommended dose of salt, tempered by delightfully tangy citric acid, all carried in a smooth, bouncy xanthan/guar gum matrix, no one knows yet. I'm pessimistic regardless of the engineering behind the treat: it seems likely that a sufficient number of people will always be able to make it through childbearing age before succumbing to diet-based problems, if that ever ceases to be the case, then the dwindling population will soon be unable to keep the global industries its manufacturing requires in operation.


fruit is not sufficiently addictive for adults to gorge themselves

The problems isn't just which foods are addictive, it's the economics of food costs too:

Fruits are expensive relative to much worse options. Fruits mostly are not very calorie dense, so you could gorge yourself completely on strawberries, eating an entire container in a sitting and paying (near me) $4 for it @ ~150 calories.

Or you could pay $2.59 for a 3-pack of microwave "movie theatre butter" popcorn for an effective price of $0.86 and consume around ~400 calories.

Calorie-dense junk foods are simply much cheaper to begin with. If you're on a budget and love, equally, strawberries & popcorn and want a few snacks for the week, you can spend $12 for 3lb of strawberries or $2.59 for the popcorn.

Or compare the cost of a 3-liter bottle of soda (about $1.10, or 1 penny/ounce) to the cost of 100% pure apple juice, which is about 3x the price per ounce. Yes both are sugar heavy, but the carbohydrates in pure juice aren't as bad and juice at least has other nutrients, and is sometimes fortified with more. enact a course-correction, it is always more expensive to

(There is at least one partial exception to the fruit issue: bananas. Compared to other fruits, they are massively cheaper on a price-per-calorie basis. But you can't live on bananas alone.)


Fruit (and no sugar added juice) consumption can make a difference in someone's diet.

I've seen people getting fat just by eating too much fruit because "fruit is healthy, it's not candy" and not having limits.

It's a infinitesimally small problem compared to processed sugar, though, so I completely agree with your point.


> "teach them that why and how it's bad so they themselves keep a distance. My parents did his very effectively with me and my siblings"

Perhaps your situation is far from universal, and you are fallacious in assuming that it will work broadly?

I remember being younger, before kids, and I thought "ah, if my children ever misbehave, I'll just logically explain why they should behave differently". It was naïve of me then to assume this would work. I was biased by my own experiences.

It didn't occur to me how irrational any individual might be, and the situation is worse now, with corporations better adept at exploiting that irrationality as part of their business model.


I'm sure that works for a certain demographic, but on the other hand for a lot of kids after a certain point the advice provided by the parent falls on deaf ears. They have to make mistakes and suffer the consequences of them before they ever truly learn from them. You're not dealing with a rational adult, for many of them I'm sure it's more or less "there goes mom, lecturing me again." and at this period in their lives they're just about to begin their ascent into puberty, one of the most transformative periods that involves a lot of rebellion and a lot of risky behavior. Kids need to see that there's consequences to their actions and if their parents can provide that in a controlled environment, I don't think its poor skills.

I think it's being ahead of the curve. Setting the expectation for not only what they might run into out there, but what to expect when they get home. If anything you should combine the two approaches.


> They have to make mistakes and suffer the consequences of them before they ever truly learn from them.

This seems to be a good strategy for things with obvious and immediate consequences. Eat too much ice cream, feel sick, etc. It seems like social media seems to have a much more slow burning, pernicious impact on your quality of life. Adults struggle to accurately diagnose this, expecting a child to do so seems unwise.


Also, "the internet never forgets."


>I think it's being ahead of the curve. Setting the expectation for not only what they might run into out there, but what to expect when they get home. If anything you should combine the two approaches.

Wholeheartedly agree with this. Well said.

I think you see this in kids of almost any age. Saying no can backfire. I do my best with my own kids to explain why I'm allowing or disallowing something, and find it works better than hard and fast restrictions. My hope is to translate this frequent conversation into the same conversation when they're older, opinionated, and rebellious. It will not work perfectly, but I think that a lifetime of deliver no answers won't work in my favor.


Yes, this, 100% agreed.

Having the kids learn on their own and experience things (and their consequences) firsthand is the right way to do things, I didn't get that far in my comment but yours sums it up fantastically.

The parent comments' take of just brainlessly shielding them from everything is the absolute worst thing you can do in such a scenario.


It seems clear you must not believe social media is as harmful to kids as the commenter you’re responding to does. If so, disallowing it (even when the kid desperately wants it) wouldn’t seem excessive.

By analogy I think it’s fairly obvious as a parent you’re right to withhold bottles of vodka from your kids even when they separately want to down them “and all of their friends are doing it”.


Trust me as a teenager who has seen the effect of social media on dozens of his peers and even close friends I can assure you I know far more than both you and the parent comment how dangerous it is for us, but I'm also aware of the possibility of using it and the internet as a whole in a responsible manner as opposed to completely abstaining from it.

>By analogy I think it’s fairly obvious as a parent you’re right to withhold bottles of vodka from your kids even when they separately want to down them “and all of their friends are doing it”.

??

Vodka, or any hard alchohol in general is far harder to get your hands on than social media and has immediate, physical consequences relatively soon after consumption, it's a terrible comparison in this case.


Social media has immediate, physical (dopamine levels while presenting a mental phenomenon are also a physical reality) consequences immediately upon consumption. There are no great comparisons to social media because of its novelty, but social media cannot be shielded from comparisons to all vices.


> I can assure you I know far more than both you and the parent comment how dangerous it is

Where does the confidence to make such an assertion come from? Simply by virtue of being a teenager yourself?


Don't you remember being that age? Even without ascribing personal traits like arrogance, its just hard to have had enough experience to understand the potential depths of your ignorance.


Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, attributed to Twain but surely not -

"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."


Calling it a terrible comparison to avoid the obvious point by analogy is effectively just a way to avoid the discussion.

If you want to engage seriously with it feel free to comment with that.


They explained why they felt it was a bad comparison. Why did you ignore that part?

If an analogy is bad, it's bad. The parent explained why they felt it was bad. If you want to "engage seriously", you should address why their points about the analogy are wrong.


It may not be obvious, but some of the folks most negatively affected by social media are the older set.


Over stimulation is the problem. You think you can drink one beer or two, but at the end you can't control the need to drink a third more. You know that you can only have one or two cigarrete a day but at the end you can't. Sometimes handling addiction is not about reasoning. And is even worse if you are a kid which don't have the maturity to understand addiction. I think the same about the parent post. Teach them about addiction, explain to them "you see this phone? You will be addicted by it, so until you are an adult I will protect you from this."


I agree.

It is interesting to speculate of what will be the end result in terms of learned behaviors. I was born without computers near me so I and I became obsessed with them as I was starting teenage years. Because of this, I can handle excessive boredom and I can find something amusing for myself without relying on someone force feeding me content they deem appropriate for me. I am not sure future adults will be able to sit still without a screen.

To be fair, my parents were about as worried as I am today, but they still purchased Pentium 120, which I promptly OC'ed and let me and my siblings to go nuts for a while until we we overboard ( I forgot the details now, but dad took PC to his shop after that incident and they couldn't just password protect it, because by then we learned how to remove password in BIOS and rely on 'keys pressed marked' trick to guess it ). It is not that different now. The face of it changed though.

Point is.. kids are kids. They don't understand addiction. Best you can do is to attempt to explain it. Even knowing that, I am still planning to severely limit phone use.


> A much better tactic, and one that I see neglected far too often is to instill the reasoning into the kids from a young age, don't bar them from what's bad from them, teach them that why and how it's bad so they themselves keep a distance.

That can work - until they fall in with a bad friend, once that happens they lose their ability to self regulate (the bad friend does it for them instead), and the parent must do it for them.

So as long as you are lucky enough that you kids never fall in with the wrong group you will have success.


"The vast majority of even elementary school childrens' lives are being moved online"

I know we're big on the tech bubble, but this is not only not the case, but we as parents should make it actively not the case. There's grass - touch it.

It turns out "online" is mostly a bunch of garbage - useless scrolling and dopamine hits from nothing. We need to turn it off. It's worse for us than smoking. I'd argue it was worse than leaded gasoline, and while we used it for a while, we finally got proper and banned it. Hopefully all "social media" gets that treatment, one day.


With hindsight today, the internet was indeed a mistake. Any good it did is compounded by so much bad. Honestly the advent of the iPhone/smartphones really accelerated this toxic nature. Facebook/twitter/instagram/etc are probably the biggest drivers of human misery today.


> A much better tactic, and one that I see neglected far too often is to instill the reasoning into the kids from a young age, don't bar them from what's bad from them, teach them that why and how it's bad so they themselves keep a distance.

This only works for those kids who were not already exposed to social media addiction on their brain. So for everyone else, they do need to deal with the tantrums from removing their addiction.

> I genuinely can't tell if this is some sort of meta-ironic take but no, just no. The vast majority of even elementary school childrens' lives are being moved online slowly but surely, and whether you like it or not they are going to have to pull out that laptop or phone for hours a day, can you sit and watch them for that entire time?

Which is a really bad thing, they will be missing out on social development from interacting with their peers in real life.


"I genuinely can't tell if this is some sort of meta-ironic take but no, just no. The vast majority of even elementary school childrens' lives are being moved online slowly but surely, and whether you like it or not they are going to have to pull out that laptop or phone for hours a day, can you sit and watch them for that entire time? "

I don't know about others and I can't speak for the parent post, but I am planning home schooling, which will be harder, but I think the removal of 'constantly online' feature will be well worth it.


i was computer obsessed as a kid and my parents could do little about it, though hard they tried. i did all the chores they came up with in exchange for hours on front of a 286 with a monochromo crt. but i had to leave it in the room, so i survived it.

i shudder to think how my life would look like if there were smartphones back then.

no reasoning is strong enough with this kind of brain candy.

i also shudder how i will proceed when my kids are "phone age". this planet is doomed.


even older...kids struggle to understand reasoning sometimes. It happens with our children and frankly, we provide them with a LOT less tech/crutches than most parents. We always limited TV/tech time and encouraged them to find other sources of entertainment.

Take example this weekend. We went on a family trip to a theme park. Got home really late (for them) and they were exhausted. The younger we carried to bed.

The next morning we didnt immediately make my youngest take a bath to wash off the residual sunscreen etc. Rather we did our morning routine. Morning got away from us and we see by about 9:30 hes playing in the play room (boy loves building things with blocks, legos, whatever he can ) but is itching like crazy. We see a splotches developing.

"Hey son, lets go take a shower, then you can get back to playing"

"No i want to play"

"You are really itching (and whining about it), lets wash off everything from yesterday and you can get right back to it"

"no i want to play"

And a standoff ensued. In the end he complied and I had to put my foot down, and he cried most of the time. We tried to explain. Calmly tried to reason and get him to calm down.

Eventually during the shower I had to raise my voice, threaten punishment to get him to snap out of his own feedback loop, collect himself and stop. There was no reasoning involved. It was, if you dont stop, punishment will be had.

This also happens to a larger degree with our older (pre-teen) kid. Shes a little more reasonable (clearly she can see 5 minutes out) but a week, a month, years? Nope.

Its always funny when people just say kids are smart and to reason with them. Its true to a degree. But making sacrifices in the short term for a better long term outcome is not natural, its a learned trait and there are many adults that cant manage that (just look at the CC debt rates in the US). Kids of any age tend to live in the short term, wanting short term rewards and not teaching them long term rewards does them a disservice into adult hood.

Managing tech is a part of that. Very few are going to be "reasonable" about moderating their usage especially as many peers will have unfettered access to the same. Hell *I* sometimes struggle with it and I dont really have any social media (short of here and a waning use of reddit).

And before you go there. My relationship with my kids is pretty solid. Moreso than most, we tend to keep lines of communcations open and they dont generally keep things from us because they know we will be judicious with what they tell us. But at the end of the day they are still kids and we are their parents, not their friends.


I'm going to echo what others are also saying, which is the unpalatable core of the crisis we face wrt Facebook and in particular Instagram and its ilk:

They are by their own admission and indeed nature, optimizing addiction.

The headline passed this week, Is this Facebook's Big Tobacco moment?, and it's a good one to take seriously.

Social media, particularly Facebook and its ecosystem, pursues "engagement" as the only ultimate KPM.

Let's say the ugly part outloud: "engagement" is the word we use in shareholder reports for "addiction."

What does that mean?

It means that a $billion company has Sauron-like focus of will on ensuring that its user base grow and are as addicted to its services as possible.

Setting aside the societal costs of the surveillance panopticon that results for another rant,

the personal consequences are that we have 21st c. data-mined constantly-tuned machinery with one purpose only: bypass and circumventing any cognitive or behavioral or social or regulatory/legal constraints,

on intensifying that addiction.

This is exactly the playbook of Big Tobacco.

We need to take seriously as a society that what Facebook et al are selling (to the consumer... who they aren't "charging"... again, a rant for another day...),

is digital nicotine.

The presumption that individual kids can "make good choices" or that activist engaged non-exhausted tech-savvy parents can "educate" their kids out addiction,

is preposterous on the face of it.

Abstinence education does not work.

There is no "just the tip" for Instagram.

Instagram is digital fentanyl.

We need to start talking about, reasoning about, and regulating it as such.

It's not enough to break up the company. Social media based on engagement would best be reasoned about as a threat to individual and societal help on par with say biological weapons.

If you think that's hyperbolic, review the WSJ Facebook files again, and the endless whistle-blowing, and look at where we are a culture wrt consensus reality around the pandemic and fair elections.

We are close to civil war, and it's a predictable outcome of the KPM Facebook uses.


Do you have kids?

Respectfully, I don't really put any weight on opinions on this topic from those who do not.


>> Watch them cry and talk about how they'll be social outcasts

Until they are. Parent always think that society is the same as it was when they were kids. They think kids can socialize the same way they did in the 80s/90s. That just isn't true anymore. Kids aren't allowed to hang out at malls. Kids don't go to parties. Kids don't listen to CDs with their friends nor get together to play video games in a friend's basement. They don't have cool part time jobs at pizza joints. Kids hang out online. They listen to music online. They work/live/play online. Trying to recreate some 80s nostalgia version of teenage social circles will end in failure every time. Those that don't learn how to exist online will be the ones a step behind their peers at every turn.


That may be too far the other direction. My teens do hang out at malls, just hang out with friends and listen to music. They do have parties, they have jobs. They do many of the things we did. They also do text between all those things, and coordinate which parents is driving which kids where and when in the process.

It is different, yes. But today's teens are not just sitting in their rooms to be online together. Honestly, they seem fairly similar to how we were, but they have replaced phone calls with apps.


Teens still hang out. Every single weekend night in the summer in my hometown, a hundred plus teens flock to the “pier”, park their cars and bikes, and do what teens do best. Vape, drink, and loudly carry on. It really doesn’t seem all that different from the teen hangouts of the 80s/90s lore, except juuls have replaced cigarettes I suppose.


> Those that don't learn how to exist online will be the ones a step behind their peers at every turn.

Worse, they may end up with actual personalities and interests other than scrolling their phone!


Great recipe to "get ahead" at being a maladjusted-borderline-suicidal-anorexic with poor social and zero survival skills. Thanks helicopter parents!


nothing will ever defeat a determined X from doing Y

I hate when this line of thinking is marched out in defense of an all/nothing approach-- The idea that you don't have a perfect solution, so you shouldn't even bother trying to implement something less than perfect.

There's no reason not to do something that discourages bad activity just because it won't be perfect. With kids especially, they may find a way around a restriction, but that doesn't mean they will always avoid detection (though sometimes they will) And in those cases it also provides a good parenting opportunity to teach lessons on consequences for the decisions made.

At a minimum, you can't simply fail to set reasonable limits just because they may not be followed. An understanding of such limits, if not a full appreciation of them, it pretty critical. And a total lock-down approach of "no X ever ever" is fairly likely to catalyze into a backlash much worse than trying to work with your kids on appropriate limits and then monitory things as they go.


> Take their phones. Put them in a box. Sit on the box and guard it. Maybe buy a Faraday bag or something.

A family member tried this. The kid's bicycle was stolen (no it wasn't, the kid traded it for a "secret" phone he used during no-phone hours).

This reinforces the "Give up now" point. You won't control access for your kids, but you can try to give them better emotional tools to cope with the world they live in.


Innovative thinking, I like it. What about internet access, which generally requires a credit card?

Moreover, if the kid has many hours alone outside schoolwork, clubs, or sports, there is something wrong. There's a reason why after-school programs were invented over a century ago.


  > I've seen kids - including my own - do things that
  > first-world government teams and crack white hat
  > groups could not have done any better.
My highest-voted Stack Exchange Group answer is an anecdote about kids solving a tech problem that I was unable to solve: https://superuser.com/a/1063708/93684


> Turn a deaf ear.

Nope.

Always keep that line of communication open. Always.


Absolutely, there's no other way to build your relationship and their trust in you as a parent.

And that goes several ways - are you sure your decisions are correct and therefor should be trusted? Do you know with absolute certainty that your child understands your decisions? Have you heard them out on the matter? Is there room for a compromise, and are you showing your child a reasonable degree of trust in return?

Without any of this, I don't see how it's a success. Your kids won't learn these strategies without seeing them. It leaves a lot of room for resentment. It seems very dysfunctional.

My kids like when I talk to them about this stuff, even if they disagree. They like to hear my anecdotes about being a dumb kid. Knowing I'm human, that my parents made mistakes, that I made mistakes, I still do - they like knowing the lines are open and I'm not a brick wall.


First two paragraphs - amazing. Gives me hope for future generations!

Last paragraph - what? Why would I want to stifle this?


I'm 29 and struggle with attention, procrastination, brain fog, and depression. I have since I was 12. It's only lately that I'm realizing that it's almost certainly connected to my usage of internet forums/stimulation (SA, 4chan, Gamefaqs, stumbleupon, etc.) which started right around that same time.

There's something wrong with me and there really are no other explanations than my compulsive internet usage.


I’m no internet psychologist, but the underlying issue is probably what drove you to those sites in the first place. Does your therapist agree with you?


Because kids are sometimes capable of getting themselves in more trouble than they realize, and this can have long-term consequences beyond childhood.


You can't socially outcast your kid like that. Seriously, any problems you thought they'd have because of Instagram are nothing in comparison to being a social outcast that never develops skills for making friends and forming relationships because their parents felt the need to kneecap that communication method which is so modern.

Teach your kid about the dangers. Use the systems in place (ie Screen Time on iOS) to help shape the way they use the technology, and be open and honest about what worries you. If your strategy for helping the kid is predicated on "I told you so"s, I may have found the reason why they keep breaking security systems.


Wow, now not using Instagram is child abuse? That's a reach by anybody's standard.

Not being in the 'in crowd' is not crippling. It will not result in stunted social skills.


The GP didn't advocate for "don't let your kids use instagram".


> Know that you are helping them just like our parents were when they made us eat vegetables (which you know, are actually pretty darned good - thanks, Mom). "

"Eat your vegetables" is hardly the right analogous situation to cellphone use.

I can't imagine what my life would be like if my parents instead decided not to buy a PC (circa 1994), nor have the internet because of all the bad things that a child could be exposed to via the internet.



Exactly.

Prohibiting access to smart phones to prevent social media surveillance is like prohibiting access to computers to prevent accessing pornography.


In your metaphor, the bad actors are inverted. Few here are arguing for prohibition as well.


Except the commenter I quoted and directly replied too...


Agreed. Leave a kid with a locked device, and with enough poking around, it will be unlocked. They will exhaust every possible route, and seek the most optimal solution to any restrictions.


Modern security is pretty good. If the kid can leverage CVEs, well, I'm less worried.


I have a feeling it's not the determined smart kids that this app targets as a primary product...


>Watch them cry and talk about how they'll be social outcasts and their friends will mock them

I don't see how potentially making your child a social outcast is healthier than just fucking talking to them. It's strange how an entire generation that grew up on goatse, single click hardcore porn, and generally unadulterated internet access have become the very luddites they used to make fun of on phpBB forums.

An incredible amount of socialization happens online today. Even if you believe that they will form "real" connections with "real" people, only the most determined of hormone raged boys will overcome the friction to include them. Secondly, the failure to actually communicate the problems of social media and resorting to lockdown is essentially sex education through abstinence. It demonstrably doesn't work.

I imagine there's a middle ground between 16 hours of Roblox every day and 0 hours of any internet access. Apps, proxies and firewalls aren't an adequate replacement to communication.


don't forget threats of suicide.


Lol, no. First, many many many kids are very clueless about technology and computers. Some kids will figure these or will be shown them by older siblings. And some other kids in their network will learn about these. But generally, majority of kids by themselves cant figure these at all. To add to it, many kids dont really have access to computer and all they know are phones and tablets. Consequently, they struggle with very basics.

Second, it is also not true that all the kids would be constantly trying to go out of bounds. There are many kids who are smart and actually don't want to break rules, fear breaking them or just simply wont go out of way to make adults angry.


Also, I've heard that Kevin Mitnick can start a nuclear war by whistling into a payphone. Better lock him up without trial, just to be safe.


Yes, determine kids will much likely find a way to find a workaround, especially if it is something that they want to do.


100% agree because I was once that kid. Now I have them


Can you kid hack Qubes OS?


Then watch them go behind your back and use the internet with their friends.


As long as it isn't 8 hours a day, and someone else is bearing the brunt of the surveillance. That's not as big a problem.


> Watch them cry and talk about how they'll be social outcasts and their friends will mock them

I hope you are at least sending them to a private school that's low tech as well. If not, then yeah, you're probably creating social pariah. They won't be bullied or mocked, just, left out... hopefully.


Parental supervision only works if the parent cares enough to even monitor digital usage. Instagram kids is quite possibly the worst idea for society I've seen in a while. The correlation between social media use and mental health issues, dropping grades, etc, in kids that are getting younger and younger, is stunning in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience. I hope this is legislated against, heavily.

Seriously, I'm seeing kids that are as young as 12 years old, spending hours on TikTok or the Instagram explore page, IN CLASS. It's just a terrible, terrible thing to see.


It's kind of sad just seeing people glued to smartphones 24/7. I guess I started noticing it when going out again after lockdown restrictions were lifted where I live.


Yes, there needs to be a larger conversation about the level of addiction exhibited by adults. Kids are also an issue, but it doesn't help when adults are setting the expectation that phone addiction is okay.


At least my generation of adults has had smartphones since middle school now. People have neck problems from craning over. The minute there is a lull in the conversation the addicted and hungry brain seeks to fill the void with dopamine, and a phone appears open to some infinite scrolling app before the user can understand what even just happened. Oh and people rip juuls like there is no tomorrow either, so there are physical addictions among my generation. You have older millenials now in their mid thirties who are hiding in the bathroom stalls at their workplaces to hit their juul. All that effort getting generation X off of cigarettes and the work is undone within a few short years with a single company from san fransisco.

Unbelievable that we always foolishly go after the vice of the day (when I was a kid it was flavored cigarettes, look at all the good banning that did) instead of outlawing using the science of addiction for profit in the first place and nipping all of these dark patterns in the bud in one fell swoop.


It is absolutely as pervasive as you say, I can confirm. It takes a LOT of discipline to not fall in the pit. The algorithms truly are that hard to resist especially at a young and impressionable age.


I’m super guilty of this. I don’t take a piss without scrolling Reddit


Which is why it's especially troublesome when we see _kids specifically_ being targeted with dopamine-addictive services like this. Get 'em when they're young and stupid, and they'll be your recurring revenue for the rest of their useless wretched lives. Why useless and wretched? Because they got hooked on dompamine hits from this, and never had the time to develop any skills which we, adults, lucked into developing due to not having these "services" which consume 5-8 hours of our kids' days, every day, for years on end. Quite simply I'm a software engineer today because I was bored out of my mind when I was 10 years old. There were only 3 TV channels (USSR), only about 30 minutes of children's programming a day, and no internet, let alone smartphones or Instagram. If there was all that, I'd be literally cleaning pig shit between dopamine hits from my smartphone.


If they're doing that in class it sounds like a failing of the school itself. They can confiscate phones if they're being distracting or disruptive.

Whatever happened to rules in class?


Parents freak. The. Fuck. Out. If you touch their kids' phone, these days. You can maybe keep it to the end of the day (and some parents will still complain, "what if I needed to reach them?" Gee, I dunno, maybe call the office, just like all of history since schools got office phones) but past that, phew boy. No.

I'm shocked that schools allow phones at all, and that they're not harsher on kids when they find one, but I gather messing with phones is a really good way to have pissed-off parents up your ass, and schools all really hate that, so they give in. Result: constant phone shenanigans.


> "what if I needed to reach them?"

What parent would call a child in the middle of class, rudely interrupting the entire class? And what would they possibly have to ask their child that so important that warrants interrupting their child's class?


It has been known to happen. And not for anything actually urgent. Yes, really. And not a one-off, but one of those "oh yeah, time or two a year that happens" sorts of things.

Apparently taking kids out of school to get their nails done or whatever is also A Thing for some folks. I'd never have imagined it, but some parents treat school very differently than the parents I (fortunately) had.


My spouse has taught for over two decades, I taught for 10 or so years before transitioning to gasp administration.

Kids miss school more often today than when we started; our original attendance books prove that, at least for our classrooms. Reasons now range from spa days, to the kid didn't feel like getting up, to, and this is p.e.r.v.a.s.i.v.e., 7-10 day long vacations in September and October.

This year, my spouse has not had a full classroom any single day due to family vacations. Pre-covid, it was not better, either.

I'm afraid that I come across as a grumpy old man, but this is a problem that did not exist in the past. Education is seen as a burden, and a box to be checked anymore. Take from that sentence whatever you want.


I also hear technology is destroying what is left of their actual class time. Kids are now given laptops so they have plenty of opportunity to tune out class work and do whatever they want and the teachers just have to deal with it. When I was in school tech gadgets were confiscated be it a beeper, gameboy, calculator or walkman, and later on, cellular phones.

Just last night I was talking about this with my brother who told me about his co worker who is a former NYC school teacher. He said he spent half of his teaching time telling kids to stop playing fortnight or browsing social media. After talking to my brother I called a friend who is a 4th grade teacher and said he also deals with social media browsing and gaming in class.

Feels like we're actively working on building an actual Idiocracy.


Interesting—my spouse has only been in a little over a decade, and has switched districts enough times that we hadn't put together any kind of pattern of changes over the years. I just know that the frequency with which kids are out for a week to visit family in another state (not even around a holiday!) or out for spa days / nails / haircuts et c., seems totally alien to me. I was only out for, like, funerals, or if I had a fever or was vomiting or was in the hospital. I think there might have been one or two times, in my 13 years of school, when we cut out one day before a break to get a jump on a long drive, but that is the entire extent of "optional" days off I had, for all those years. One or two days, total, in 13 years, and I'm not entirely sure we actually did that ever, or maybe my parents just discussed it but ended up not doing it. I grew up thinking that was the overwhelming norm for attitudes toward schooling. It blows my mind that quite a few parents think nothing of pulling their kid out for a whole day, or taking them out early, just to go hang out! Often several times every year!

> This year, my spouse has not had a full classroom any single day due to family vacations. Pre-covid, it was not better, either.

I've got some friends saying their schools are hovering around 80% daily attendance this year, between the usual stuff and COVID. And I think some of the more lax parents are using COVID excuses for their usual BS, making things even worse. Plus the too-frequent days when they can't find enough substitutes and just have to stick 3+ classes in the cafeteria or gym for babysitting. Educational outcomes for this ~2.5 years (once this school year's over, it'll have been about that much) are gonna be really bad. Online, in-person, barely matters, it's all bad. :-(


>Educational outcomes for this ~2.5 years (once this school year's over, it'll have been about that much) are gonna be really bad.

And depending on what grade the student is, that 2.5 years could have repercussions for anywhere from 6 months for the older students trying to be competitive in college, to the rest of their lives. I really, really, really am afraid for students who are just learning the fundamentals and are missing so much social/emotional/educational development.

My money says this is going to have repercussions for decades.


It really will have lasting repercussions and I'm afraid of what some of the administration is doing to band-aid it. I spoke to an IB coordinator last week and I was told that the finals grades had dropped so significantly that the curve system had to be reworked. Not just made stronger, but completely changed.

In fact, the in-class tests were curved according to this formula: 10sqrt(x). A 10% is curved to a 31%, a 25% to a 50%, a 40% to a 63%, a 50% to a 70%, etc.

I spoke to an AP World teacher and he said less than a quarter of students got a 5/5 and less than half a 4/5 compared to pre-pandemic.


> and this is p.e.r.v.a.s.i.v.e., 7-10 day long vacations in September and October

Any theory on why that happens so much nowadays?

My pet hypothesis is that travel got cheaper so more people do 1-2 weeks vacations abroad, and at most companies, summer months are overbooked for leaves, so people use September and October as backup vacation time.


No, I don't think so. We work in very low-income districts. These people are not taking vacations abroad. They're not really planning outside of "it's cheaper then". No thought put into the repercussions, or the absolute lesson they're teaching their kids about the value of education.

The other poster is correct. In a vast majority of cases, k-12 education is just seen as babysitting, so missing a week or two isn't that big of a deal.

It has gotten so bad that my spouse's district now allows 9 unexcused absences before getting the truant officer (who is useless) involved, because they had too many referrals to the officer three years ago.

It's just ridiculous.


It's not even vacations abroad. I worked at a poorer district, and it's really parents just not caring. They go when they can get off or get good deals and pull the kid with them. Sadly enough, they can often get it excused as a "learning excursion", even if the teachers don't sign off on it. There's no value being seen in education; it's seen simply as babysitting, and it shows in the students' attitudes as well.


I think it’s justified to be angry if the school kept your kids phone past the end of the day. That’s your property and they don’t get to keep that after hours.


While I agree phones shouldn’t be allowed in school I can understand freaking out if the school takes a very expensive thing like a phone from a kid, especially like you said as it’s a means to reach the kid.


Me, I'd be like, "huh, it sure was dumb of me to let my kid take an expensive electronic distraction to school. I probably shouldn't have done that."

But I think that puts me in old-man-yells-at-cloud territory, these days.


Hardly "old-man-yells-at-cloud territory". It's been only four years in our district since we were told to leave our phones in the lockers or at home, preferably. In those four years they implemented "Bring your own technology" policies to cut down on tech spending, and now everyone has their own laptop in our district. No one blinks an eye at using devices, except during assignments. "I'm taking notes" is the typical excuse.


Why do you need to reach your child while they are in class? Why can’t you call the office?


I think a better question is why should parents not be able to directly reach their children when the technology exists. These kids aren’t in prison and parents have every right to decide whether or not their child has a phone on them.


Because children are taking them out in class. If a child actually keeps the phone in their bag that's fine, but if they take it out (and it's not a true emergency), the teacher has every right to confiscate it.


And I would argue that they don’t have the right just as your employer doesn’t have the right to take your phone. Apparently a lot of parents agree with me which is what spawned this comment chain.


Teachers have large class sizes and limited ability to give each student individual attention. A student can whip his phone out for the 5 minutes the teacher is on the other side of the room, and even if they do catch phone usage it becomes a liability to physically take and store the device even with the support of administrators.


Back in my day most of us could t9 text without removing the phone from our pocket, so you just needed a few seconds of the phone up your sleeve to read the responses. If anything, the need to physically look at the screen to use it should increase the window for the teacher to detect it?


In a case near me, I know a middle school teacher who has to negotiate with students for lectures: "We'll do 20 minutes and then you can do 5 minutes for a phone break." Without this, the classroom cannot be controlled. She says without knowing when the next phone break is makes them very nervous, and very difficult to retain their attention. This is a classroom in a "good school" area, extremely high funding, all kids claim learning disability to get advantages, and parents come down on the teachers. The school bureaucracy is deeply anti-teacher, and allows parents to treat them this way. I definitely agree that it is a failing of the school itself.

I have another friend who is a science teacher, but he doesn't have exciting stories like this.


Growing up whenever a teacher thought they were clever and would confiscate phones, kids got even wiser and started bringing in their ancient phones to offer up as a sacrifice, and kept their smartphones hidden in hoodie pockets.


When I was going through High School in the early 2000s teachers had a box you had to put your phone into at the beginning of each class. Worked fine then, can't see why it wouldn't now.


When I've worked in classified environments, they'd have an array of phone-sized lockboxes right outside the classified area. Put your phone in, take the key (which is on a springy lanyard to go around your wrist).

I assume high school students would immediately invent The Key Eating Game or something, where you swallow the lockbox key for TikTok clout


When I was in highschool about a decade later we figured out we could just hand the teacher some ancient flip phone and keep our actual iphones in our pocket.


Nowadays the kids are given laptops to perform their classwork on so there's no point taking the phones away when they have a more capable computer.

And it is concerning when you hear stories from teachers about how they spend half of the day telling students to stop playing fortnight or browsing social media in class.


They should install mirrors in the cieling like CVS has so the clerk can monitor the entire store for shoplifters from the front


I have to agree here. It is no different then any other distraction, toy or whatever in class. If the teacher is unable to get control over those, there is larger issues in there - either with teacher or with the school not empowering teacher.


It's far worse than that. You take a toy, they're done for the day. Kids have been known to bring iPods, old phones, etc to sacrifice to teachers. Plus, laptops are mandatory to have in my district (though not mandatory to use), so it takes about five seconds to cheat or get distracted in class.


Maybe it needs a system where the account locks if there isn't occasional parental monitoring. Then the kids would be the ones encouraging their parents to check. Maybe the parent has to take a selfie for facial verification or something.


Sometimes software isn't the answer. I think this is a good example. One of my child's friends plays Roblox nearly every waking hour outside of school. He's 5.

People naturally would ask "where are his parents?" ...she's a single mom working two jobs, and he's at home with a teenage sister as his only supervision most of the time.

This isn't uncommon in the US. I was a latchkey kid myself, my babysitter was TV. People say that parents need to pay attention to their kids more, but parents don't need more or better software, they need money and time.


This issue with this is that contemporary American parents are already spending more time with kids then used to be norm. Compared to past, even relaxed parents are helicopter parents. Maybe the expectation that parents will be constantly there, hovering over the young teenagers itself, micromanaging every aspect of their lifes on itself is unhealthy on itself.


I agree that this is a problem, albeit a different one.

The subset of people I'm talking about almost certainly don't fit into this category. There are still millions of kids with struggling parents who don't have proper guidance (note, guidance isn't necessarily supervision).

In the case of parents who are spending more time than ever with their kids, the problem could certainly be more related to aptitude. We live in a society where our lawmakers don't fully understand the technology most people are spending hours a day being manipulated by, so it certainly seems likely most parents don't understand the impact either.

Either way, to say that these companies will solve it themselves with better software for parents doesn't seem like a solution to either issue. It's kind of like "the factories are safer for children now because they're wearing hard hats" — it's the wrong conversation driven by the wrong people.


Most parents are unaware of the issues that are caused. Parent would often just be annoyed and press the approve button without thinking. Like the way no one reads the TOS.

Those selfies for facial verification would most likely be used for something unrelated and most people would be unhappy with if they knew. Think of the ways these could be misused.


Jesus, that's dystopian. Get the parents in the system by hooking the kids?


This is going to end in a social media monitoring SaaS. Get curated alerts for "problematic" behavior. Completely transparent. Inevitable customer pressure will make current LGBT discrimination look quaint. Wonderful.


Parental supervision only works if the parent *IS CAPABALE* enough to even monitor digital usage.


I mean both need to be true


You can “care” and be incapable.


Facebook figures parents don’t care about their kids privacy or letting the kids be manipulated. They just figure that parents want in on it, so they’re sharing their data and tracking.


Makes me wonder if its possible to install a faraday cage within the walls of the classroom in order to block signal.


In fact, a school I took my most recent SAT at did indeed have some sort of cell blocker. But they had in-school wifi, so I'm not quite sure what the reasoning is. (Apps like Snapchat and Spotify and Netflix are blocked, but Instagram and TikTok are not, so the firewall's not super well-made)


wow you figured it out parents don't care about their kids.


"We started this project to address an important problem seen across our industry: kids are getting phones younger and younger, misrepresenting their age, and downloading apps that are meant for those 13 or older."

Just because kids have access (which is mostly on Parents to blame), you want to add another app in the name of "it is kid friendly". I can only lol at this. Seriously, I don't criticize such harshly in general but as a parent of young kids, I would rather have Instagram be honest and say "We want to make more money and Kids under 13 are a great target nowadays".

I am very open with kids having access to things in a moderate way. We allow them to watch movies/TV or even Ipad etc but restricted. I believe that the more you stop kids, they more they want to do it. One exception we will make will be Social Media. What a cesspool it is and there is no way I am allowing my underage kids to do Instagram or FB or whatever. I will fight hard to keep them away from the toxicity of Social Media. Some things they won't understand and you need to protect them from it regardless. The good thing is both my wife and I hardly use Social Media if any. So that hopefully will be an example for kids but I know that may not be enough considering other kids in their school may be doing it and there will be peer pressure. Ah well, I am ready to fight that.


I don't disagree with you, but this is not a situation where you are going to find a solution in the problem cause.

Many parents will keep raising theirs kids with undiscriminate access to smartphones. Just because you have it under control in your household, doesn't mean everyone does.

You're basically saying: "Not my kids, not my problem".... and that's the position many will take.

I'm not convinced IG for Kids is the right solution, but it is at least an intentional move towards fixing the foundation of the problem. It will take more than that, though. It's probably a problem that needs to be fixed by forcing big tech companies to cooperate, something that it's unlikely to happen in an era where those companies enjoy antagonizing each other.


I think overall we don't really need Instagram for kids. We have plenty of apps that are used by kids already. I don't see a reason why a Kid needs Instagram.


Forget "kids", I'm an adult and I'd love to have versions of all modern social media with the 'growth hacking' features axed.

Remember the days before forever scrolling on Reddit? When Facebook timelines were chronological? When bullshit clickbait links didn't show up as "recommended" after you meticulously pruned bullshit clickbait groups from your feed? When Youtube didn't just autoplay down into the deep dark depths of crazytown? How about social media that's actually social instead of just being the same national outrage "conversation" being replayed in a slightly different setting?


Alternatively: delete your accounts, and stop using these services first, instead of maintaining them hoping a better thing comes along you can switch to.


Indeed. It's akin to complaining that there's too much poison in cigarettes because of course it'd be inhumane to suggest people stop smoking.


I deleted Facebook a few years ago. Great decision. I don't miss it at all. But of course - I can't remember anyone's birthday anymore.


> growth hacking

More like mind hacking. It's like these apps want to hook into the reward center of people's brains. Get them addicted to stupid bullshit so they spend hours scrolling through that stuff so they look at more and more advertising. Funny how advertising is always at the root of all this evil. Maybe we should get rid of it.

Only thing worse is video game design which does this explicitly and unashamedly. They wire the dopamine button to the player's credit card.


> Remember the days before forever scrolling on Reddit?

Yea it was awful. Pagination is an optimization for faster page load speeds that has nothing to do with user engagement. Sure some people can get caught in the doom scrolling, but for normal users, having to navigate between pages is an awful experience compared to just scrolling to the bottom to get the next "page"

I use old reddit redirect and without reddit enhancement suite that adds infinite scrolling, it's awful to use


It's a good thing that its awful to use with pagination. Frequently I would find myself using RES and scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, the only thing stopping me from continuing scrolling was suddenly noticing that these posts had 12 upvotes and I was 600 posts off the front page at this point. Friction like pagination gives you pause. Sure, its annoying, but subconsciously that annoyance leads you to make a finite ending of saying "I'll stop after I get through this page," instead of time flying by scrolling and scrolling.

Looking at your last line I think it would be helpful to assess your addiction in brass tacks. Imagine if you said, "I only use cocaine intraveinously, insufflation is awful." Sometime its helpful to add some breaks to unhelpful habits than trying to min max them all the time. I still have a lot of problems with this myself and I am doing my best to introduce more friction to my internet usage, since you can't just flush it down the drain and walk away like a pack of cigarettes in this day and age when internet means work.


Should it be up to social media companies to integrate controls for people who lack self-control into their products? Should alcohol companies include a BAC meter on each bottle to determine if you can drink from it? Should casinos allow you to only withdraw a certain amount when you enter and no more?

I don't believe it's the place of these companies to implement these kind of controls. Governments will create regulations that force these companies to implement controls, but I don't believe that addresses the root cause.

The root cause is, why can't you control your social media/gambling/alcohol use? It's a wide ranging cause from genetics to mental health problems to other external causes. I believe those should be the first level of addressing from the government, but it's easier to just regulate


Its not so much that they should build controls, but the other side of the argument, that they shouldn't spend so much effort hiring psychologists as consultants to figure out how to make their website/app/service the most dominating thing in at least a portion of their user's daily life (most companies call these sorts of users "whales" since they produce so much meat for the company).


Infinite-scrolling is awful for 2 reasons:

1. What you’re currently looking at is not directly addressable (instead it’s “open this URL, within this time-window, and scroll exactly X-many pixels in exactly S-seconds to get to the exact same content as me”).

2. It makes it impossible to get to the real page footer, which often contains essential links like Contact Us, the About/Impressum page, and other important stuff.


For #1 it's the same because the content on each page is dependent on reddit's algorithm, which may change by the time you load up the next page (maybe reddit has some caching that prevents this), so if you link page 3 to someone, they will see something different depending on when they open the link

For #2 that's useful for novice users but as a reddit user for who knows how many years I don't care about the footer


The truly awful implementation is the paging of comments on this website.


At least for YouTube you can disable auto play.


Actually, my issue with YouTube isn't really the autoplay per se, it's how the recommended videos (including autoplayed videos) go very aggressively into rabbit holes.

I'll listen to an anime music playlist and my entire recommended video / front page becomes full of anime stuff. An in-law joins Youtube to watch bible study videos and now they're an avowed freedom fighter against the globalist satanist cabal running the world. That sort of thing.


This is a feature and I love it. I don't want to subscribe to football channels, for example, but if I'm in the mood I watch a couple of them and then it shows me related videos for a few more hours and then it switches when I decide to search for cooking videos, of which I don't want to subscribe to either. Works great.


They could easily let you accomplish this by just giving you an option to actively seek out this content by giving you a "What else is like this?" button that takes you to a 'related videos' page.

The problem when it just puts it all in a single recommendation feed is that that feed more-or-less presents itself as "here's what the world is talking about" rather than "here's a bunch of stuff that conforms to the biases and ideological filters of the stuff you've been watching lately." It creates a solipsistic worldview if you're not aware of what's going on.


There needs to be a plugin to wipe cookies on every YouTube page load. The recommended videos list for a given video on your first visit? Excellent. Every subsequent page load where they give recommendations pertaining to a video from 30 minutes ago? Absolute garbage.


You can reject the recommended videos and purely exist either checking subscribed channels or using the search function for every video. I've found that their recommendations are usually pretty good but I use youtube on different devices for different "moods" so I've got my background lets-plays on one device - people talking about maps on another device - and my youtube-only music needs on a third device - this helps keep my stuff pretty siloed.


Curiously, I don't have that experience at all. I'll play Backyardigans videos to watch with the baby ~4 times per week and nothing of the sort ever shows up in my recommended feed. I can't understand the reports of sub-par recommendation experience on YouTube. Maybe my behavior is somewhat different -- I tap "watch this later" a lot (and rarely do).


Sorta, kinda. Except it tends to turn itself back on at random. Except there IIRC are two auto-plays on YouTube: one for normal videos, one for playlists - and YouTube's search has a nasty habit of returning results that happen to be smack in the middle of some random playlist.

And speaking of YouTube, the other annoyance is the extremely idiotic anti-feature of pausing the playback and displaying "Are you still watching?" popup after you go a couple of minutes without moving your mouse or tapping on the screen. No YouTube, I'm not watching, I'm only listening on my wireless headset. But you already know that. What you don't know is that I'm in the middle of some household cleaning and my hands are covered with caustic chemicals, so I frikkin do not appreciate having to press a stupid button you introduced to get more "engagement".


To be fair, you can disable autoplay by using youtube-dl[0], and it's (effectively) physically incapable of turning itself back on. Also fixes "Are you still watching?" and other engagement 'features'^Wdefects.

0: http://youtube-dl.org/


...and yet it still manages to turn itself back on whenever you sign in again, when you cast to a new device...and you can't tell me the company that knows everything about me can't remember my preference for not wanting auto play. Other services seem to remember it just fine, I set it once on Netflix and have never needed to set it ever again.


I wish you could disable the free trial offers.


Agreed, funny that it takes "for Kids" for instagram to finally (pretend) to care about involving external stakeholders on the implications of their at-any-cost growth mechanics


These services are so fucking needy. It's like they were designed by broken people. How about some respectful technology that knows its place, and can say "hey, you've accomplished the task you wanted to do here, so go do something else."


There were two days last week where I got on TikTok around bedtime as a distraction from actually going to bed. After a while a clip came up on my FYP with someone saying "hey, maybe you wanna be done scrolling and go to bed", and I was like, "yeah, that's a very good idea, thanks".

It was the second time that I realized the clip was from TikTok. Honestly, I appreciate it.


right - cos tiktok is totally looking after you more than any of the other services /s


I mean, I don't get the sarcasm. Have you had another app steer you away from engagement for the sake of your mental/behavioral health in this way?

I certainly haven't. Other than maybe Nintendo suggesting go outside breaks or something.


Many Gacha games do it either through limits of stamina or just directly saying go do something else.

A few other regular games do it too.


Maybe figure out why it is you don't want to go to bed. It's usually because you don't like doing the thing you do after waking up.


Netflix asking me if I'm still alive after three hours does nothing to prevent mindless consumption on the whole


TikTok ran out of clips to recommend to you lol


> How about some respectful technology that knows its place, and can say "hey, you've accomplished the task you wanted to do here, so go do something else."

From bitter experience: people don't like being told they're done for the day. It wears you down having to explain it.

Add in the profit motive and it's easy to see why people cave to adding infiniscrolling


Nintendo does this in some of its games, like Zelda Ocarina of Time 3D. Navi says, 'You've been playing for a while, maybe take a break?' I found it more annoying than anything, and I don't think it ever caused me to stop playing.


The only popular social app that claims to do this is Hinge.


Hinge has all sorts of dark patterns to keep you swiping on the app as long as possible. Recently they added some feature called Standouts that removes the "best" matches from your ability to match, so you have to wait until those matches drop from the exclusive-only bin. The idea behind limiting max likes is nice (10), but they also have some ranking algorithm that only starts showing your preferred matches near the end of your match limit, extremely subtle but I noticed it started making me feel like I was anxious about preserving my bin of likes. It's all a money game to these Match companies and pretty obvious why people are burning out on all the ghosting / terrible interactions etc.


You can still pay for unlimited likes, right? I would see the limit more as incentive to pay than to limit engagement for the user's sake.


What you describe is antithetical to capitalism as it is currently implemented


Subscription services (at very low cost) could achieve this.

In 2019, Instagram only made around $11.98 per user annually.

Imagine if you could pay $12 a year and never see an ad, never be manipulated by an algorithm, never have to worry about any of that. All engineering would be focused on retaining you as a user, not as a market segment for advertisers. The incentive wouldn't be to addict you with an infinite scroll but to provide enough value for you to maintain the annual cost. Possibly even minimizing the attention it demands because the greatest profits is in justifying the subscription while encouraging the least amount of resource use.

Unfortunately, growth-hacking meant VC subsidized growth with free services and there was no way that subscriptions could compete.

The question is if anyone could ever sell low cost, user-centric subscription-based apps in a world where free (but not really) is taken for granted.


Last quarter, they made $10.12 per user[1, slide 4], however that's not evenly distributed. They made $53.01 per user in US and Canada. But even that isn't evenly distributed. The users who are likely to pay for the subscription are also the most valuable to advertisers because they have disposable income. Some Instagram users see ads for luxury cars, real estate, and vacations, while other users see ads for dollar stores and dropshipped junk. FB earns much more in their auction from that first set of users, but those will be the first users willing to pay to opt out of ads.

Dynamic pricing would probably offend both audiences - "what do you mean the algorithm thinks I'm worthless?" "what do you mean that I'm worth thousands of dollars to you?"

[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q2...


That's for Facebook broadly, which is a beast of a corporation that encompasses dozens of services and properties. I'm talking about instagram specifically.

those will be the first users willing to pay to opt out of ads.

The service would have to be built from the ground-up to not have a free option, it would have to be equalized across all users. Again, this is where the difficulty lies in an economy that already offers so much for free.

IF someone could pull it off, they would benefit from the gym membership effect of people keeping the subscription while barely using the service (and it's resources).

There would also be considerable savings on the engineering and sales side if you cut all adtech out of the equation and provide a simple time-series feed.


I felt this way when Hulu gave me the option to opt out of ads for $4 a month extra…

“Wait that’s all my eyes are worth?!”


It’ll be less than $4/mo: part of that $4 will have to pay for building-out the ad-free experience.


$12 a year is misleading. Paying users are much more valuable ad targets than free users once you start segmenting them.

So now you need to charge significantly more than $12 to make up for that. The higher price makes the paid users even more valuable to advertisers. Eventually the service slips in a few ads because it’s just too much money to leave on the table.

Cable TV started as an ad free subscription service. I’m not saying it can’t work, but historically most subscription services don’t stay ad free forever.


This is extremely important, and something I think many people don't realize. Charging a fee might make it possible for a company to be profitable without needing ad revenue, but it likely won't change the underlying economics such that also showing ads won't be even more profitable. The only ways around this that I can see are 1) a company steadfastly choosing to forgo the ad revenue, 2) a company maintaining a customer base that is willing to pay the subscription fee and has a principled opposition to ads such that introducing ads wouldn't be viable, or 3) somehow reorganizing the economy such that the negative externalities of advertising are greatly reduced.


> somehow reorganizing the economy such that the negative externalities of advertising are greatly reduced.

What “negative externalities” are you referring to?


Some simple and direct ones to start with: bandwidth and CPU usage, blatant malware, annoyance.


Strictly speaking, I don't think those are "externalities" though


most subscription services don’t stay ad free forever.

This is true, for two reasons: Declining profit as markets mature and the need for investors to see greater returns YOY. Eventually, all companies turn to more intense methods of profit extraction.

This isn't specific to digital services of course, we're seeing the effects of this broadly across the economy.

One way to put off the inevitable (for potentially quite some time) would be to bootstrap instead of taking investment. Easier said than done, of course, but maybe not impossible since the hardest part may be breaking open the market in the first place and it might be a lot easier to build an alternative app in a mature space than it was to create Instagram in 2010.


This reminds me of the NYT banner ad prompting subscribers to allow ads on articles. $35/month and ads? Yeah, no.


Before being acquired, WhatsApp served a half a billion users on a $1 per year subscription model (first year was free, and they were competing against comparatively high charges for sms), and apparently only a few dozen engineers. Signal manages a similar feat on a handful of (large) donations. It's possible to have a profitable business while charging users a small fee, but once a public company achieves network effects and a captured user base, there is a pressure to milk it for all it is worth.

In a normal market there would be competition and an equilibrium would be reached, but where network effects dominate, it takes something like Signal to make a dent in this regard. That said, there's no reason that a non-profit version of instagram couldn't eventually compete or dominate by charging users a pittance.


Lets be honest here, they'd just charge you the money as an added bonus on top of productizing you as a user


Moving to a subscription fee model is dangerous for a service that's reached saturation point. They can no longer project infinite growth in value extracted from eyeballs going into the future, and are stuck with whatever they choose to charge (along with some limited increases in fees. Building a better service cannot be fully leveraged into higher fees, since there's only so much YoY increase in costs users will stomach.)

On the other hand, subscription models are fine for new entrants, even with VC hyper-growth expectations - there are still billions of users to capture even if per-user revenue is fixed! Then the game becomes delivering as much value to these customers as possible to attract more paying users.

Perhaps this is another malincentive that comes about from monopolies.


They can no longer project infinite growth

This is true, but only applies to the "tech unicorn" VC-funded model. There are other ways to build businesses and if the model we're used to always ends up with such terrible social results, maybe it's time we strongly considered them.


> The question is if anyone could ever sell low cost, user-centric subscription-based apps in a world where free (but not really) is taken for granted.

Well, yes, it does come down to this, and I'd say the answer is very clearly that this cannot be done, at least not at any scale remotely close to the scale of the big free social media networks.


I came here to say I am ready to pay for that service!


There's always Glass. $5 / month, no ads, no VC funding, no manipulative algorithm.


Everyone knows these things are bad. Everyone knows they are causing harm to society. Everyone knows these services are actively doing this stuff despite knowing the risks. And yet we allow them to operate. I am with you on this. The current system has no real incentives to stop this. They are essentially developing a drug and we praise them for it.


Then maybe we should implement capitalism differently. Hopefully by making the "surveillance" part of it illegal even if it kills these companies.


I forgot they made a product just got kids, right when their teenager harm report was released.


Now that most of them are the hyper growth stage, you’d think they could figure out which growth hacky things they could turn off and still retain users.


I personally use Telegram as my main social network. No algorithms, no "recommended", just channels and chats you want. It is not secure, sure, but I don't need it to be secure. A lot of Russian buisness and science-related media is only found there. That said I am Russian and AFAIK most English content there is far-right propaganda so it might not be useful to you.


you’re asking for them to remove the part that prints them money. the only reason they’re going this route is the whistle blower leaking and hopes to appease regulators before regulation.


None of that really describes Instagram today, though. The problem with IG today is literally everyone is trying to sell something. 100% of Instagram today is marketing and there is no longer any reason to use it.


Unfortunately, there is: it's the few acquaintances you like that insist to post news about themselves as stories on Instagram.

God, I hate stories. This is probably the most antisocial "growth hack" these companies invented. A simple way to boost and exploit FOMO to ensure most users will be checking with your app at least once every single day.


This idea is about punting responsibility onto parents. This way FB can claim the responsibility is not on them but on parents. It's in many ways a legal maneuver.

The reality of helping kids requires parents who are well enough informed and engaged here. This is something we don't have. I've talked with many people outside of tech circles and they are typically unaware of any consequences to kids. Sometimes they just don't believe it.

This isn't about helping kids. It's about shifting legal responsibility so they can keep doing what they do.


I think it should be the parents responsibility. If we let social media determine what is acceptable for all children it is guaranteed that the bar will be too low for many and too high for many others. Parents should be the final say in what is right for their kids. Kids develop at vastly varying rates. Not absolving themselves of liability implies that they are making decisions in a vacuum that parents should be making themselves.

But like you said, most parents don't understand the risks. That's why social media should be forced to perform studies on the risks associated with their products and make those studies public. Then, when you use a device for the first time it should show you in plain language - like a new user signing into Windows ("Hi, we're getting everything ready for you...") - where to find that information.

When a single change of code can instantly impact millions of children (or anyone really) the stakes for the public are high enough that the public deserves transparency. If nothing else to ensure that Instagram is making decisions backed by due diligence.


> I think it should be the parents responsibility.

Parents and corps aren't the only ones in this conversation. There is also governments.

Should we have let parents decide if kids smoking was ok or not? Some governments stepped in and required labels be placed on packages and set age limits.

I'm not saying that the way smoking was handled was right or wrong. I'm using it to illustrate that there are other angles and players.

> That's why social media should be forced to perform studies on the risks associated with their products and make those studies public.

One of the things I've found is that studies performed by an organization on their stuff tend to show it in a much better light than independent studies. When there is a financial interest people tend to contort things to improve on their financial interest.

I don't want to see studies from them. I want independent studies with researchers who are allowed to get enough data to perform them.

> Parents should be the final say in what is right for their kids.

What happens when you have uninformed parents? I'm reminded that these tech companies are using strategies meant to hide the knowledge of what they're doing from the people they're doing it to. How do you handle that part of the equation?


> What happens when you have uninformed parents? I'm reminded that these tech companies are using strategies meant to hide the knowledge of what they're doing from the people they're doing it to. How do you handle that part of the equation?

I think if we had enough transparency we would get less uninformed parents. We force slot machine manufacturers to put addiction warnings on their machines, and only a couple hundred people use one of those per day. Facebook has no warning labels and they use the same techniques. It is no secret today that gambling is dangerous and addicting.


Tangent: incidentally, we don't force addiction warnings on games in the arcades, even though those machines use many of the same techniques and actively misrepresent themselves as games of skill, while being games of chance. This is one of those open secrets that pisses me off to no end.


To have warnings requires government intervention.

It's not just a thing that involves parents, kids, and companies.


> It's about shifting legal responsibility so they can keep doing what they do.

Minors are the legal responsibility of parents. However I get your point.

No, I don't think its actually that. I think its much worse than that. I think they thought it might be a good safe idea.

If I was being uncharitable I'd say they looked at tiktok hoovering up the next cohort of instagram users and thought, we can provide a safe way to do that and convert them onto our platform.

All the problems we've had with instagram, facebook and friends reunited are going to pop up on tiktok, but all at the same time and for a younger, less well equipped generation.


Agreed.

Facebook, et al is essentially pushing a casino / Skinner box at my kids that evolves every day. My change in thought happened when I found out that Facebook/YouTube was pushing pro-eating disorder material to a teenage relative and my 6 year old was getting pulled into weird videos that had a visible impact on his behavior. I don’t work for Facebook and frankly don’t have the energy to stay up on the latest innovations for stealing my kids attention at any cost.

The only responsible choice that I can make as a parent is to not use it, but that obviously creates a forbidden fruit situation where I have to balance what I believe against peer pressure and other factors to avoid a worse outcome. Avoidance also means that the great material on these platforms is walled off.

Running a cesspool is too profitable for self-reform, something needs to change the way this business works.


> punting responsibility onto parents

The end result will be T&Cs that few parents will read, and they will simply hit AGREE--> FINISH with default settings that don't restrict/monitor anything.


Parental supervision is just a means of externalizing the societal costs of the platform onto the parents. How about building a product that isn't a net negative to society in the first place?


I say do nothing and let the chips fall where they may. There's no big tech solution to this insanity. People born today will fall into 1 of 2 categories:

1. Those whose parents gave them phones as children

2. Those whose parents did not give them phones as children

The former group will become fragile, suicidal narcissists who can't cope with or navigate the external world. They'll have soon-to-be trite problems like gender dysphoria and agoraphobia and will mistakenly think this makes them interesting or constitutes a personality. The later group will grow up as ordinary people by objective standards, but against the backdrop of the first group they will seem like they have superpowers - the Joe Bauerses of tomorrow so to speak.

The internet and social media ruin all minds, but especially the child's mind. Hopefully once these two groups are well articulated and obvious to all, parents will start to make better decisions.


There are more than just these two categories, there are also parents who give their children phones and then heavily regulate usage with third-party tools.


Was expecting to disagree, but then read the whole post. (^insert something about subscribing to your newsletter.)


Adopted a teenage daughter. Gave her a phone. We had a 5 year cycle of deep depression on phone. Take away phone for x months. Teen becomes happy and full of life. Couple days after getting phone back she was super depressed again. Every single time. No variation. Phone == depression no phone == happy teen. Not perfect without phone by any stretch, but general mood was involved with family and cheerful.

This went on until she was old enough to move out so we would stop taking her phone away. A couple years later she finally realized what social media was doing to her and she turned it off herself. Started getting her life together.

Other daughters are pissed because they can’t have a phone. When I query about the friends. It’s the same pattern. Every friend with a phone is obsessed with it. The ones without are much more fun to hang out with.


Maybe, just maybe, in the battle between a billion dollar marketing and addiction machine staffed by world brightest minds vs a teenage brain, teenage brain looses. Probably adult brain looses too.

We dont expect everyday joe to fight a heavyweight chamption, or defend himself in court.

Some changes are needed.


I was really happy to read that she voluntarily cut herself off from the phone when she moved out. I was afraid the punchline was going to be "so now she's constantly miserable". Good for her!


She was utterly miserable for two years after moving out. She got to know her “real” family. After dragging her bio dad out of literal ditch in 2 occasions. Well she decided she wanted to get herself together. Was a wake up call.

I’ll be waking her down the aisle soon. She is marrying a very nice guy.


Here's why supervision is hard:

All text books and school assignments are now done online. Some grading is even outsourced to the textbook companies.

Kids are skilled at switching between apps (alt-tab). Parents don't have time to hover over the kid and laptop for 2 hours each night.

And kids have internet access at school, or at a friend's house, or at the stores nearby. Phones and laptops are difficult for parents to lock down.


Instagram says they'll be consulting with "parents, experts and policymakers" but this leaves out a very important part of the 'safe apps for kids' ecosystem - the children themselves.

They are using apps and online social spaces in ways that adults can't imagine or comprehend. They're dealing with self-esteem issues, bullying, predators, extreme content and targeted advertising & algorithmic content to keep them engaged. Kids aren't dumb. They're certainly as - or more - susceptible to the negative effects of social media as the rest of us but they shouldn't be ignored here or relegated to a class to be protected because of some kind of diminished capacity. Instead, IG and the experts should be working with them, including their ideas and feedback.

Similar to the iOS feature that can scan the messages of people under 18 on a family account for nudes, features like will get LGBTQ kids who don't have supportive homes in trouble for exploring their sexuality & identity. It will get kids who are looking for support in abusive situations via actually helpful posts in trouble when their adults see what they've been looking at.

I remember what kind of issues I had at home before I learned how to clear my web browser history in the 90s - I can only imagine how much worse this could be in terms of surveillance of kids.


> Similar to the iOS feature that can scan the messages of people under 18 on a family account for nudes, features like will get LGBTQ kids who don't have supportive homes in trouble for exploring their sexuality & identity. It will get kids who are looking for support in abusive situations via actually helpful posts in trouble when their adults see what they've been looking at.

This is a minor point of yours, but I don't see any valid reasons for kids below 13 to ever send or receive nudes, and I would hope that most of them wouldn't even have a "sexual orientation" at that age. Opposing policies that are as close to "universally good" as you can get, is going to make it even harder to solve the problems of kids using technology.


Counterpoint: children should relegated to a class to be protected


I probably wasn't clear enough - children should be protected for a variety of reasons, but they should also be consulted about the issues they face and how best to protect them.


There's nobody to consult. It's like making drone strike pilots more inclusive. Normalizing children posting pictures of themselves online is pure evil. Children's pictures shouldn't be posted publicly online, period. This goes for parents posting them too. Because they can't consent. We have never had anything like the internet before, where you can instantly put things into the global public record forever. I only hope people will to stop and think about this. History doesn't make one optimistic though


I had unfiltered internet access as a kid. When I was a preteen, I had a MySpace account by just simply lying about my age. A lot of my friends did the same. In middle school, we figured out ways to go around school district firewall/filter to access flash game sites.

I honestly think that kids won't use "X for Kids" when they have access to devices. They will just figure out ways to get around the block and do what they want.

For my children, I'm not giving them personal devices until an appropriate age and with an MDM to manage the device and set limits especially around how long they can spend on apps/device.


> For my children, I'm not giving them personal devices until an appropriate age and with an MDM to manage the device and set limits especially around how long they can spend on apps/device.

I didn't have internet access until age 10, and was only given a flipphone shortly after that. On the one hand, I was immature for my age and can imagine millions of ways in which things could have gone catastrophically wrong; and the way my parents did things feels pretty well thought out. But on the other hand, I'd have definitely preferred having local development tools, maybe a Raspberry Pi (didn't exist then), predownloaded PDF manuals, anything I could have tinkered with. Instead all I did before age 10 was play video games, since that (and typing documents) was all there was.

In a world where kids grow up with computers from a young age, some will entertain themselves all day, and some will learn from program all day, and obviously have access to very different opportunities. I'm tempted to say: "no electronics until 10, etc" like some strict parents I know, but it does feel like an outdated attitude that can hinder kids as much as it helps them.

Some of my friends at 13-15 played games all day, while some worked hard at school, had great extracurriculars, and still had access to the exact same tech.

I'm convinced the problem is not technological but emotional/psychological, and that one day we'll figure out how to raise kids in a a way that you can give them unrestricted tech, and they'll experience all the benefits and no downside, we just haven't reached that level of "parenting science" yet to make it reproducible.


It's mind-boggling* that a company can be entirely aware of their negative impact on teenagers and think, "We have to go deeper".


They don’t care. Why is that hard to understand?


>The reality is that kids are already online

tbh once they are it's already over anyway, you're just holding back the tide at that point. Need strict supervision to protect them from online dangers and there is nothing you can do to prevent the dopamine addiction.

It's no coincidence many of the people who create this hardware/software and networks don't let their own children anywhere near them.


Pretty clear FB thinks it’s unfairly targeted every time it faces a PR crisis and it comes across in their messaging.


Can you imagine the shareholder reaction if they even hinted at feeling justifiably targeted by a PR outrage?


Sure but PR is an artform for a reason. This one just seems too transparently "We stopped work on this thing but this is why you are all wrong for being mad at us."


"Pausing." Permanently shelving would have been the move. This is almost certainly smokescreen to shift the PR, hoping to sneak "Instagram Kids" back in when there's less heat.


As a parent of an almost 13 year old, I have no fucking idea what to expect from the next 5 years trying to raise him in this world. And I mean that literally, sometimes I think it's going to be great sometimes I think it's going to be 100% awful, I'm assuming it will be somewhere in the middle. I don't know what to expect. It's truly terrifying. I'd love any help getting perspective and developing techniques to survive and help my son navigate this new world he is growing into.


Instagram doesn't need to bother with this. Parents do.

None of my kids will have access to this stuff unattended until they're mature enough to do other adult things on their own (like drive, get married, etc.).

The Internet has never been a safe place for kids, and it never will be. I blame most of my adult issues on the fact that I had Internet access from a PC in my room from the age of 10. And that was more than 20 years ago when porn was harder to find and social media just consisted of yahoo chat rooms.


Why do I get the feeling that these "Parental Supervision Tools" is a ploy to force parents to make Instagram accounts, with all of the data harvesting that goes along with that? The alternative is to not make an Instagram for kids -- this approach uses the social pressure felt by kids to leverage parents into the next billion users...


The problem I've found with kids' platforms - thinking mostly of YouTube Kids but others too - is that they are so tied down that your children can't get to things that they or indeed that you want them to - often quite educational things, so you end up just giving them access to the adult versions because you want to support their interests.

Also, the 'needing to be 12 years old' rule for many sites is a very handy one for parents as it gives you a solid reason for not giving permission for certain sites. It may be widely ignored but it's still very useful and enough parents do adhere to it, that you don't feel like you are making your children an outcast!


A service like Netflix should really have age groups. There is such a huge gap between kids and open access. Something like under 8, under 10, under 13, under 16 would be about it.

Just because I don't mind if I let my 12 year old watch PG-13 movies doesn't mean I want them to start watching softcore porn in Game of Thrones.


> We believe building “Instagram Kids” is the right thing to do

No it’s fucking not, you morally corrupt sacks of garbage.


Problem is if they do not, kids will hang out on TikTok. That said, I don't think content restriction will work for anyone at least a little bit curious. Good that kids aren't...


I find it strange that everyone loses their mind at the prospect of IG for kids, but no one bats an eye at the already-released YouTube for kids or TikTok for kids. The latter, of course, is built by a company entirely beholden to the Chinese government. That sounds pretty scary to me. I guess it's just a matter of what will make the best headline.


I wonder how long will it take for society to ban all social media usage for people under 18 years old.


It will come as soon as governments realize that's a great excuse for requiring an ID to connect to the internet. Think of the children, etc.


It all depends on how soon Congress can act.


Does this include all multiplayer gaming (for example)?

Doing as you suggest is basically what the Chinese government just enacted.

If not, what sets one communication app from another?


Social media just makes it easier for kids to be awful to each other, and extends that opportunity from school hours to 24/7. This is not a not-having-the-right tools problem. It's a human nature problem, and no software will ever change that.


Stop trying to be Joe Camel.

Edit: downvote all you want, but show evidence that Instagram is in any way healthy or appropriate for children, sure looks like trying to hook the next generation on Instagram, no different than Joe Camel with cigarettes.


Telling that Facebooks solution is surveillance.


Question for parents commenting on this: rather than block the apps, have you instead just blocked access to the services instead?

E.g. blocking Instagram/Facebook/TikTok URLs from passing through your network? May seem silly and/or not even worth it but I'm curious about the different ways people are practically addressing this problem - control over the phone via app blocks, network blocks, taking phones away?

What's working for you?


I have a hunch -- and it's no more than a hunch -- that this has nothing to do with anything except the Metaverse. I think Facebook believes children won't grow up socializing on Instagrams and Tiktoks...they'll socialize in something that looks more like a virtual world, whether it's Fortnite or Minecraft or whatever the equivalent is in 5-10 years.

Through that lens, it's perfectly appropriate to shift your investments.


So they were trying to build an "Instagram Kids" without any thought about parental supervision?

I guess the original plan was to just moderate all the content, until they realized how that wouldn't scale, so now the moderation will be outsourced to the parents: "Your kid found something nasty on Instagram kids? That's your fault because you didn't properly supervise it with the tools we gave you!"


I’d like to see an Instagram where you can’t post a picture of a person. So the competition becomes who can take the coolest photo. Of course that rewards kids with the resources to get to interesting places, but I think it’s less toxic to be compared for your means than it is to be compared for your appearance, especially for girls.


I want to take a “trust, but verify” model with my kids, but all the different apps, capabilities, websites make it exceptionally difficult. Apple+ screen time is okay in centralizing some things , but I wish apps could expose some controls or logging to that or some other centralized service.


Are they use "pause" in the "pile into a heap and set alight" sense?

Edit: I ask because Insta is still using the "your browser may have ways to block cookies" which I can't believe for a second is GDPR compliant.


"Don't blame us, kids are already online."

What a tone deaf response.


'You're Enough' by Laurence Fuller https://vimeo.com/537977184


Kids won't use Instagram for kids.


I think this is the better question - will teens stop participating in grown-up spaces just because there's a 'safe' version just for them?

However, for younger kids (say, 5-11) I think a separate environment is the best solution. Up to a certain point, parents have more influence on what their child does. For all its problems, most parents I know are comfortable with YouTube Kids because it's the lesser of two evils. I know that my child is going to participate in social media either way, so I want them to do it in a sandbox until the day I don't get a say.


I think you are right, but it allows parents to say "you can get instagram for kids" as a way to compromise.


Kids will, teens won't. Starting from about eleven or twelve-teen.


I wonder what Bill Hicks' take on "Instagram for Kids" would have been.


Kids need social networks, but they need them IRL.

Instagram and Facebook are a scourge.


am I the only one with TLS error?


Browsing at work and got hit by a social media content filter? ;)


you got it!


Loads okay at my end.


Shouldn’t their machine learning models be able to detect who looks like a kid and provide age appropriate content on Insta? If they are not doing that already, Insta is basically recommending adult content to kids.


Young children, sure. But teenagers? I had a full beard by 16. The only reliable way we've ensured not to sell alcohol to kids is to verify ID. (And it's not terribly reliable anyway.)


its not very accurate, easy to fool and requires facebook to build an archive of pictures of children to build models against....


If my account got locked because Instagram thought I was a child (and I wasn't) I think I'd be pretty upset.


I'd take it as a complement, but I think that's a thing that comes with age.


As someone who has a genetic condition where I look younger than I am I've come to believe they if someone has to explain that it's a compliment they should really do more second guessing


They do claim to know your age to target ads, so what gives? Either it doesnt work or they don't care


Oh some people would have problems with that, not every adult looks like one and stuff.


As I get closer to thirty years old, the idea of a person or machine asking for a grown-up to verify my identity gives me feelings that are more mixed than I expected.




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