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>Case in point, my son and his friends have a small discord server. And they play minecraft on a shared server. This not the same as scrolling TikTok / Instagram. But it's a degree of independence somewhat away from parental eyes.

I think not enough people here are understanding the distinction between a communication tool (eg. discord), doom-scrolling platform like tiktok, and video games.

A discord server can be very beneficial for your kids and allow them to coordinate activities. A lot of cool experiences I had in high school and friendships were a direct result of MSN Messenger. A shared multiplayer server like minecraft is also a great way to make friends and learn some social skills. I don't think it's as good as a physical sport activity, but it's far better than a lot solo hobbies traditionally considered "good" for them.

The lumping of these together might help explain the gender imbalance in the mental health effect. It's pretty well documented that boys play more videogames, especially going into the later teen years, and that's more conducive to smaller, tight-knit (today, likely discord) communities.

If the time being spent on a discord call with your friends playing Minecraft are being counted as social media use the same way doomscrolling Instagram or TikTok is, then that's going to obscure the social media influence on mental health outcomes. It doesn't seem too hard to control for this, but I struggle to find any studies that meaningfully disambiguate the two.

>The lumping of these together might help explain the gender imbalance in the mental health effect.

I never thought of it that way but it makes a lot of sense in retrospect.

It would also explain why the only people I know who developed IT skills on their own were boys. Running videos games or trying to create them back in 2004 required you to learn a lot about how computers work and how to use them. There were no free-to-play easy-to-install AAA games like we have today. We didn't learn it because the process was fun, we did it because it was required if we wanted to play games. If all you do is browse the web, you don't need any IT skills. I'm sure there are many security specialists now who started their career by trying to remove the virus that came with a pirated game on their parent's computer in high school. It's crazy how fast kids learn on their own with the right motivation.

In my perhaps anecdotal experience, the risk of getting a virus from a crack is and was hugely overblown. And we now know that copy protection came with malware too, most infamously with Sony's SecuROM (same group also seems to have made Denuvo).

I got a few viruses myself. There were no free easy to use like we have today to sandbox an application or run a VM and it was well known that almost all cracks/keygen gave false positive. We just rolled the dice and hoped for the best.

The viruses I have seen myself were really not that dangerous. Ransomware were not popular yet and our life not was tied to our computer as much. It was also easy to detect with task manager/services compared to today and it was possible to remove them yourself with your AV or manually. There were far less things running on your PC in the background and internet traffic was minimal.

Only if you define any driver as "malware". SecuROM didn't actually come with malware in the way normal people define it, it was just described that way by salty pirates.

Eh. If it messed with the regular optical drive’s drivers, hooked privileged kernel functions, and generally (just like modern things like EAC) introduced holes the size a semi truck could drive through, it qualified as malware. No intent to pirate anything needed.

That's my point: that's not the definition used by anyone in the actual anti-malware space.

Video games are a sore subject in my house... I grew up with them and I turned out arguably okay (healthy, employable, sociable, etc). But my wife thinks they are the bane of society. And it wasn't until recently that I realized how much the "endgame" of video games has shifted since my childhood in the 90s. Back then, it seemed like the majority of games had an actual end, or they continued to get progressively painfully harder, or both. The number of mainstream games that went on 'forever' (and encouraged you to keep playing) seemed much lower. Now it seems like it's quite the opposite, and of course its the addicting, never-ending, always-online games that our kids and their friends want to play.

For now I'm mostly letting my kids play on one of those mini Super Nintendos with a bunch of built-in games, which they always eventually get tired of and decide on their own to go do something else. When it's Minecraft... I basically have to peel it out of their hands.

yes, things have definitely changed for video games in the past few years.

Loot boxes and the concept of being peer-pressured into paying money for trendy skins is not something that existed when I grew up. TBH, I think many concepts that are popular in AAA games today should require robust 18+ (or even 21+) ID verification to be allowed to use them. I generally never like the idea to banning things for everyone, but we can at least make it a bit harder for kids to access them.

Minecraft is one of the extremely few addictive games I wouldn't be too worried about if I was raising kids but I would verify what type of server/maps they are using. They get to build things and interacts with other people and last time I checked they had relatively few dark patterns (no gambling, loot boxes, paying for trendy skins, pay-to-win, etc.). I hope it is still the same today.

I have a collection of MS DOS games that my kids sometimes play too, precisely because they are the games with a single player mode and an actual end.

Strongly agree, but the challenge is that it is not a hard and fast distinction within a single product/app. Take Snapchat for example (popular with the under 18 crowd). It is both a messaging tool to communicate with friends (great) and it also has a ton of other doom scroll/UGC feed services. I'm not sure what the break down in time and profits for the two services are, but I suspect that they make good money from the doom scroll stuff so it is hard for their executive leadership to be ethical on this issue. I would personally be very supportive if the Government would take measures to protect people under 18 from feeds without restricting access to messaging. Such a law will require a bit of subtlety in how it works.

Yep. Even for video games in my teens I created and led a clan. It was very social and constructive for me.

This is the inevitable conclusions of stranger danger and car-based suburbanization.

When people only access the world via car and avoid walking around, they never build familiarity with their own neighborhood. All locations worth stepping out of the car for, are miles away and behind security gates. Low density also means that 1 stranger can actually do damage, unlike dense areas where there are at least a few strangers within earshot.

Suburbanization inevitably caused stranger danger. Once public trust was eroded, only known parents could be trusted to supervise children. The coldness towards strangers goes both ways. 'Strange children' near you were seen as something between an annoyance and a liability. With multi-income households, the only location where children were safe and tolerated, was friends houses or ones with paid strict supervision. So, the kids retreated into indoor activities or found themselves at mandatory hobbies, a term that sounds dystopian even as I type it out.

Social media has virally encroached into every aspect of these children's lives. But, lets not pretend that North American society didn't lay down ground work, fertilizer and all, for this travesty to take place.

People are the river and built infrastructure is the path of least resistance. Once built, the river will meander down that path, irrespective of human effort to affect outcomes counter to the built infrastructure.

___

I grew up in a dense Asian city famous for a culture of 'leaving you alone = independence' (in comparison to the rest of the nation). Even then, I knew the faces of every small store owner within 5 minutes of my house and vice-verse, and that's because I walked by them everyday. When everyone leaves home from the same door (the building exit) and walks back in through the same door, you inevitably have small talk and get to know your neighbors.

The public ground was nearby, so all parents would swing by to check-in on kids as they passed by during the day. This meant that the older kids were familiar and parents felt confident in leaving their younger children under their supervision, in return for complete freedom in terms of how the kids spent their time.

North America has no thirds spaces, thinning mom-n-pops stores and a lack of public shared spaces. North America seems to have completely forgotten that it takes a village to raise a child.

This doesn't explain why teenage girls are suffering from increased mental health issues not only in the USA, but also in other Anglosphere countries, Nordic countries... (etc. ?)

Suburbs and cars already existed 60 years ago, and that was before cell phones for coordinating meetups.

Well 60 years ago was the 60s and suburbanization only started taking off in the 50s. I don't think OP is claiming suburbanization had this effect instantly.

What city?

Great points. I was just in Spain (Madrid) and noticed teenagers playing in parks and even on swings etc along with small children. I never see that in American parks, never. I don't know the mental happiness of teenagers in Spain/Madrid in general but my wife and I thought it was interesting.

Reading the posts here I can say this seems to be an American problem. Kids here in Europe are still way more fucked up then in the 90s but still the states seem like a shithole of loneliness for kids.

Not to contradict your point (which I agree with!), but I as someone who was recently an American teenager I think you might be happy to know that me and my friends used to quite enjoy going to the park and playing on the swingsets! Though we were certainly the exception, not the rule.

Good to hear. I would love to see more of it.

> The pressure for teenagers to fill their time with activities is very high. The parents feel to perform / get into whatever good college / do well in life, they need to have their time spoken for by a large number of activities. Helicopter parenting has really taken new heights in the last decade.

This is the big one, in conjunction with other comments about how there's "no tolerance for failure" anymore. You have to be on track to be a top tier performer by the time you're 10 or else you will never make it back up (or at least that's how a lot of people feel). Plus there's a sense that either you make it to the top, or you might as well be at the bottom, because the middle class is rapidly vanishing.

The pressure is higher, and starts younger, than ever before.

As already pointed out on the other blog posts, pressure to "get into whatever good college" can't be the explanation when it is only affecting a statistically insignificant minority : even in the USA, roughly half of people don't go to college, and roughly the other half is getting accepted into one that is not hard to get into.

> Case in point, my son and his friends have a small discord server. And they play minecraft on a shared server. This not the same as scrolling TikTok / Instagram. But it's a degree of independence somewhat away from parental eyes. Should I ban them from screens, and send them to ride bikes out in a world with few other kids? Or let them have this niche of a social / independence outlet?

Haidt says male use of social media in the form of gaming is categorically different to Instagram/Snapchat/Tiktok-type social media use. Because that social activity is less about performing for the camera and bullying and social comparisons, so he doesn't see it to be a problem in need of a ban.

> my son and his friends have a small discord server. And they play minecraft on a shared server.

Maybe a little off-topic, but I think both choices made by your kid are good if not the best.

Discord is relatively a private place with specific usage (chat and game). The social pressure it creates should be far less than what's been created by a "proper" public-publishing social media network such as TikTok or Instagram. On top of that, a small friend circle might have natural tendency to guard against outsiders.

On the Minecraft side, assuming it's just a server where your kid and his friends play on, then it should have the same effect as a small friend circle. Which means far less unexpected attack (less chance of generating hate) while keeping the benefit of sharing their creations/creativity with others.

Of course, you still have to know your kid and his friend to ensure the safety of the entire circle. But that's far more controllable than just letting your kid free-playing on TikTok Instagram etc (and get hurt by a total stranger who don't gives a damn care).

> For the 10+ crowd, the days of kids roaming the streets, finding their friends and playing are gone. I think the causes for this are complicated, and social media (and screens) are just one part of the puzzle.

Blood hell. Kids will be like zoo exhibits of the last of their species. Seems in everyone's benefit that they are well-socialized, street smart, well-educated, AND not make virtually the same mistakes everyone else are making. We can rapidly go from the myth of "overpopulation" to population crash in as short as a generation.

I wonder if some of the lack of teenager tolerance has to do with larger congregations of teens due to social media. When I was young with no cell phone it was a non-trivial exercise to get a few friends to coordinate to meet and go to a movie.

Now you can start with 4 or 5 people, and if their friends and friends of friends start to get looped in then you have a larger group. Now instead of 0 or 1 obnoxious kids in a group, you may have 3-4 obnoxious ones and a much larger group.

Before cell phones, we didn't worry about making group plans. Everyone just went to the movies or the mall or the Taco Bell parking lot and everyone else went to.

Excuse me we came here to use data to dog on social media not solve actual problems.

It sounds like you have a very healthy relationship with your son!

A lot of this rings true but is this a theory that explains a sharp bend in 2012?

There is no sharp bend in 2012. I can easily interpret it as an gradual increase more from 2010 or so. Eyeballing charts is not science.

Call it whatever you like, it still has to be explained for a potential cause to be viable.

Not necessarily. It depends on whether this increase is just natural long term variance. The charts Haidt shows are very truncated. Data about suicides exists for far longer than the lines he shows.