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Comment by ur-whale | Hacker News Reader

Now is really not like back then.

I was like you, spending inordinate amounts of time with computers during my teenage years.

But back then, I was learning useful skills from it.

The computer I owned had almost no games for it. All you could do was program it in either basic or assembly.

Move forward 15 years, my kid who owned a PC from around age 10 was never interested in using it as anything but an entertainment platform.

There was simply way more interesting things to do with it than understanding how it worked and bending the hardware to your will.

And this was pre-social networks.

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This resonates with me because when I was a kid I really enjoyed video games and I would program them into my cheap, rudimentary computer. I even sold some games I made on cassette tapes. My parents were really distressed that I was wasting my time. But-- surprise-- I had/ have a long and successful career making video games.

Now I am a parent and I tend to let my kids play a lot of game on their computer. But it is different. In the old days computers weren't really that entertaining except if you programmed them. Now they have a lot of passive entertainment value. It's a lot more like watching television or talking on the phone then the engaging hobby I had as a child. I tell them it is important to create media as well as consume media.

> I tell them it is important to create media as well as consume media.

I agree with you, this is something that I seem to believe deeply. But why is it important? Do they ask you that? What do you/would you tell them?

To create value for society and humanity. To live a free life thanks to the value you created.

That's how our family supports itself. If I were a fisherman, I would teach them to fish.

TikTok is all about creating media as well as consuming media though.

My kids (boys) are not on tiktok. I think social media is a waste of time and I actually would worry if either of them used it. They do go on Discord a lot, and that also has some problems.

I agree the vast majority of computer users do not get those benefits, since their main computer is their phone. Phones do not lend themselves to learning about computers, they provide sterile environments that try to get you to forget its a computer in the first place and scroll facebook instead.

Seems like your kid just isn’t interested in the same things you are. If the flashy entertainment were stripped away, they probably would’ve never cared about it.

And that’s okay.

I don't think it's that easy. The dopamine-traps of today can hardly be compared to the ones from twenty years ago.

Compared to the effort of creating, there's some seriously low hanging fruit these days.

The poster said their kid wasn't interested in fiddling with workings of computers before social media was a thing, so I don't think that's the problem in their specific case.

There's always been low hanging fruit. There were video games from the dawn of computing. I played games and did programming, sometimes more gaming, sometimes more coding. My mother worried generically about 'computer time'.

Many of my friends had games consoles, or computers but they only used BASIC to load games from cassettes. They turned out fine. None of them ever expressed the slightest interest in creating anything but they went on to do other useful things, like teaching or social care.

We are way, way too quick to assign complicated sciencey sounding explanations to stuff earlier generations would have described as common sense. Games are fun. Reading is fun. Talking is fun. Parents used to despair at the hours their daughters would spend on the expensive telephone instead of doing more child-y or creative things, and so what? They all worked out fine. The world is not short on creative people.

I spent from age 7 to 12, treating computers as entertainment device and then started programming.

My dad never really pushed for me to do it, it was out of necessity. My mom actively fought it. Somehow it stuck with me and I realised the potential to automate my entire life and, later, that I could use it to make money, even if I was underage.

For my own kids, I'm planning to put them in a situation where they will need to learn how to create and be independent, without pushing them in that direction, or helping them out.

Arguably they're learning the most useful skill in the modern attention economy: online marketing.

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