I'm an app developer who's spent my career building excellent iOS apps, previously with Google and Snap.
I have every intention of raising my kids as far away from smartphones as possible, ideally until they're at least teenagers. My fiance and I have already discussed keeping the household as de-screened as possible, it's something we consider a lot.
It's interesting you'd suggest that an app developer would have a conflict of interest that other engineers might not. In my experience, engineers who work with mobile apps, especially ones in the social space, are way, _way_ more likely to understand and be wary about the dangers in overexposing kids to a life of feeds. Colloquially, we call this "seeing how the sausage gets made".
I'd qualify that phrase as, "seeing how the factory sausage gets made".
Social media at the start may have been neutral to slightly negative, but once creators started optimizing and the various "algorithms" were installed and A/B tested, what came out the end is some pretty nasty stuff mentally. Junk food for the soul.
That's exactly what I was going to say. Every software dev I know who works on apps, social media, etc. all keep their kids from going near the shit. They know, conflict of interest or not. I've not seen anyone behind these products once they hit a mature state where they start psychologically stripmining their audiences who's eager to get any of their family onboarded.
I worked on the Twitter iOS app. Can confirm my kid isn’t allowed a phone until they’re a teen. Once they get one, I’ll be spending hours figuring out how to MDM brick the thing so they can’t get anywhere near social media.
Having said that, I’m still an app dev (personal finance & budgeting) and I’m excited to onboard my kid into that world.
It’s sad that these people know this and still work on them. I can’t imagine living my life day-in, day-out knowingly making other people’s lives worse.
You can work on a bad thing to try to make it less bad, you not being there would make peoples lives worse since the app would still exist but be even worse.
IME tech folks are, on average, more in-tune with the "keep kids away from screens" thing than the general population. I think we know enough about it to fear it.
Hmm. There are other kinds of apps you know, besides free to play and social drugs.
The only mobile phone app I did is a boring industrial thing that reads some sensors and massages the data however the user directs it. It's so boring I bet no one ever starts it except during work hours.
I don't know any single anti-gun-regulation person who manufactures guns. Anyways. I am not app developer blah blah and I'm against this. Don't want your kids to be cash cows? Don't give them a credit card...?
Attention itself is being milked, it has very little to do with money on the frontline. We a/b test these products, genetically pruning them to maximum addictiveness ("time spent on platform") and peer pressure / virality and we're maximizing people's attention spent. Adults are unable to handle it, kids even less so.
Even if you play Roblox for free, you're a) still critical to the developer (whale economics require many peasants for the whales to feel comfortable spending themselves to higher status), and you're still trading off activities that benefit you long term (reading, learning, actually interacting with the non toxic world)
Exactly, the fact that people think this comment has to do with explicit credit card transactions shows how unaware people are of all the other implications.
You said it best - the currency is eyeballs - even if you aren’t spending they want your attention without a single regard for the consequences.
One of those things that seems benign for any given app, but in aggregate has negative effects after hours/days/weeks/years of screen time and interactions with all the attention stealing content.
For very small children it probably doesn't make sense, but when they get a bit older it's not that unusual. My kids have my credit card on their phone for when they need it.
They are also joint owners of our bank accounts. We've told them if they ever get the news that we have died, they should go withdraw a bunch of money to carry them over until all the estate stuff settles.
Sharing a credit card doesn’t take an huge amount of trust. Every time a charge is made on my card, a notification flies by on my phone. If they abuse the card, I would find out right away.
Point is that things happen if you are not super careful. They could use your phone, you could have forgotten about it, etc etc. Not everyone is some carefully planning nerd who remembers everything all the time.
If they use my phone to purchase something, abusing my access code in the process, they are grounded for weeks and many other privileges will be taken away. I myself have never dared to touch my father's wallet or phone, or even look at him typing his password.
You just went to where 99% of parents don't even know how to get to. Do you think it should be expected of parents to figure out how to use whatever "PiHole" is to protect their kids?
I admire your personal dedication to making it as hard as possible to be exploited, but we really can't expect non-tech people to go to the same lengths. And at one point, we might have to admit that parents who spend 99% of their time struggling to even get by and do the basics for their kids need schools and other resources to help out by doing things such as banning phones.
My point is - it's under my control, if I didn't know how to do this I'd either accept the ads, pay, or not allow phone usage. There are options. I don't need the government to do that for me, I can decide myself.
Here in Europe, phone is necessary for daily life - even as a kid. And it makes it so much easier, better - and interesting, if you teach your kids that. My kids use their phone like a Star Trek tricorder, using various apps and tools to learn about the world around them. Something I wished was possible when I was a kid but it was a pure scifi - now it's here and I'm not going to take that away from them just because some bureaucrat thinks parents can't control their kids enough.
> I don't need the government to do that for me, I can decide myself.
What frustrates me about these discussions is the same pro-libertine knee jerk individualist response is parroted for it, even though this choice is not impacting you, or at least, not only and for the purposes of the topic, any impact on you is ancillary. These decisions impact your children, and not just now, but for the rest of their lives. If all goes to plan, the ripple effects from these choices will be in motion still long after you are dead.
It's the same kind of irritated I get when parents are advocating for themselves having say over school curricula, testing standards, sports programs, what have you over trained professionals who's entire careers are centered on getting kids the best outcomes possible, but who must argue as though the opinions of Bernadette Peters, who has never left Blenheim, South Carolina in her 37 years on this planet, also has input to offer.
And like, this isn't a criticism of you, it sounds like you're doing it as close to right as one can manage. And also, what about all the kids at the school who's parents don't know what you know? What about all the ones who lack the knowledge to pass on, let alone the will to? What about ones who's kiddos struggle with tech in general, either because of ignorance, or because of neuro-divergence, or because of accessibility issues, or any number of other problems?
You're effectively arguing that because you've taught your kids how to consume alcohol in a healthy way that they should be able to carry booze to school. However true that might be for your kids, there are also other kids around too, and the school admin is responsible for all of them, not just yours.
I have a big problem with comparing a pocket supercomputer to booze. It's nothing like that. And I don't just think that because I can manage, everyone else can. I also think that this regulation will be counter productive.
You raised an interesting point while talking about the professionals at school vs some backwater person. I wish I had your trust in their good intentions and abilities, but where I live these supposed professionals don't even speak English, and they're pushing their conservative agendas. It isn't unusual that my kid googles some bullshit a teacher says and it's proven wrong by a fact checking organization. For example, if my kids couldn't fact check all the shit they said during covid, I would be very unhappy.
I'm going to go to an extreme, but if we had solid research that said banning phones at school resulted in some extreme, lets say 50%, improvement in their ability to learn, would you support the ban of phones during school time? Would you expect the school to _not_ implement a policy that would benefit learning that much?
What if we swapped this out for "not taking edibles during class", would that infringe on your kids personal freedom too much?
In a world where parents feed their children fast food all the time, and let them play mindless Ipad games from an early age, I have lower faith in every parent reading the relevant literature and implementing best practices than I have in academic institutions figuring out how to optimize learning (not that I have a huge amount of faith in that either, just more)
Do you have children? It sounds like you don't since you are talking like someone on the outside. I'm not saying that would change your position, but you'd be talking with more nuance if you did.
If I follow through what you said, paper has obvious positive impact in schools, or we can at least imagine that positive impact. And so banning paper would be very likely not to result in an improvement if studied. And like any smartphone ban, it _should_ be studied rigorously before implementing.
But lets say they do find that smart phones during class _are_ good, but just social media is bad, then it also sounds reasonable to me that a kids phone might be required to have some type of block on social media app during class time. Just like it sounds reasonable for a school to ban papers _with porn printed on them_ during class time. There's no issue besides on a practical level with getting more fine grained and isolating the impact.
Or do you also oppose that later, is your kid printing porn on paper and bringing it to school part of the personal freedom you want control over and which the school should not have to authority to ban?
My kids’ high school requires kids to have a phone. They want the kids using the calendar to track assignments. The ask the kids to use the camera to take a photo of the board which contains their homework assignment. They use some messaging app where they can communicate with the teacher and the teacher can talk to individuals or the entire class. They’ve had assignments where they need to shoot a short movie with their phones.
I’ve never heard anybody say this, but I think one of their goals is to teach appropriate use of phones.
I'm pretty fine with restrictions on usage during class time - but not by direct remote control of such personal devices. The goal is to improve education and prepare children for life in the modern world. That can't be done without a smartphone, the most important item of most people that they use to run their lives. Today, many normal people don't even have desktop computers, they do everything on phones. That has privacy implications on what is reasonable to do with a person's phone - even a child has right to their privacy (in reasonable limits of course).
It would also be nice to attach what ages your kids are, because someone arguing against Big Brother and censorship sounds a lot like someone who doesn’t have to get a kid to bed tonight. Not that opinions can’t be valid, but let’s have our cards on the table.
Reading a book to young kids worked wonders back then and once they were old enough to run outside without supervision they exhausted themselves quite naturally at the end of the day. You can really do million productive things with kids if they aren't feeling sleepy instead of dooming them to bad sleep with those screens.
I call social media and other addictionware companies the “tobacco companies of the mind.”
The problem isn’t the phone per se. It’s the apps, which is why I don’t have that shit on my phone and use screen time and app approval with kids.
Not only do these companies addict and drain peoples’ wallets, but I largely blame them for the sorry state of political discourse. I watched it happen. When the algorithmic timelines hit around 2010-ish and everything started to be engagement-maxxed everyone (IMO across the political spectrum not just one side) lost their mind.
Sane well reasoned ideas and nuance don’t maximize engagement. Trolling, controversy baiting lunacy, tabloid and conspiranoid trash, hate, fear, and lynch mobs maximize engagement.
We’ve kind of known since the dawn of media that trash maximizes engagement and that if you engagement-max you get trash, but at this point it should be considered proven.
Right, mainstream news has been doing this same clickbait for half century at least and it is the reason we allow it from social media. We're desensitized to it and actually seek it out. We live to suffer and be enraged, because in our minds democracy depends upon it.
At some point I think humanity is going to have to really declare war on addiction. I’ve been thinking about this for years.
It’s not unprecedented. China threw off the yoke of opium for one example.
I’m all for free speech and I am against drug criminalization— as long as in both cases the stuff is not particularly addictive.
The deliberate use of addiction to ensnare, monetize, or control other people whether through substances, tech, or other media should be a crime. It could be considered a form of assault.
It would be a crime to implant a chip in someone while they slept that could be used to remotely regulate their emotions somehow, right? How is deliberate deployment of addiction different? Instead of implanting something you are exploiting what amounts to a CVE in the human brain. It’s a crime to break into your computer using a zero day, but it’s okay for me to hack your brain?
This is the “Butlerian Jihad” we need — not against technology but against addiction. “Thou shalt not exploit security vulnerabilities in the human mind.”
We know enough about the mechanisms of addiction that I think we can be reasonably objective about identifying it.
A first step might be to make it civilly actionable. If you can prove that someone deliberately worked to make their product addictive they can be the target of a class action lawsuit. You could, for example, sue social media companies for the hours of lost time resulting from their addictive designs.
I like the idea of fighting addiction, but it can't be law-based. For example, I find chess to be addictive, is that evil? What action shall we take against it?
I think it would have to be reserved for egregious cases to start with, and perhaps that would be enough to have a chilling effect and scare people away from intentional addiction engineering.
I share concerns about this but I feel like eventually it won’t matter. We are getting so good at addicting each other and it’s getting so ubiquitous that eventually I think there will be a crusade with a lot of collateral damage.
Either that or we will just accept a society with a massive Matrix-like addict slave class. Maybe that’s the outcome.
It's also very refreshing to see the the link between social degeneration and these "addictionware companies" being highlighted. I also watched it happen! And sometimes you'd think you were imagining the whole thing, watching people dance around and explain away the situation.
It can be hard to even make the point in the first place, as any sort of metacomment on politics is inevitably taken as a sneaky argument for one side or the other. It's hard to see a way out of the situation (barring some major technological or social shift, provoked by who knows what).
There are plenty of people who work with children yet may not have children: teachers, child care workers, medical doctors, psychologists, social workers, etc.. In each case, we see children in contexts that parents do not. In some of those professions, we may even see individual children more than their parents do. Perhaps it is best to avoid deprioritizing people simply because they don't meet an arbitrary criteria.
(I've had people scream at me because I am not a parent. When they found out what I do professionally, they were immediately humbled.)
Some of us know these kids are cash cows and are behaving like the anti-gun-regulation lobby of the tech world.
I am not an app developer and derive no income from the sale or usage of smartphones or their software.