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Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

> while in the western world it promotes debauchery and stupidity.

Isn't the narrative "that's what the western world consumers more of/wants" versus "China values achievements and education more than debauchery and stupidity"?

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We are talking about kids. They will want what you teach them to want.

With parents working insane hours in the US and outsourcing the socialisation and education of kids to electronics and corporations with perverse incentives, with local communities practically gone in an urban lifestyle, we are raising generations of porn addicted dopamine junkies. The west is fucked.

This is true. Tiktok is the current problem but there's going to be a lot of stuff like this that the world is going to throw at kids.

It's the parents responsibility to curate the world the their kids are exposed to and build up their defences for all the crap that they're going to finally encounter.

I think it's also the responsibility of societies participants to not seek profit from activities that harm and undermine the society they're a part of. If all we do is play zero sum games and try to get as much money as possible from the people around us for the least effort, you end up with this modern-west mess where we're all shooting each other's feet off to be the tallest instead of... building stools?

> we are raising generations of porn addicted dopamine junkies. The west is fucked.

Agreed on the first point, disagree on the second. I think it’s a fixable problem. Addicts can recover and further damage can be avoided.

https://www.cnet.com/culture/internet/the-way-kids-use-memes... , this article is pretty interesting, it touches on how digital culture permeates young children and how they aren't constantly connected. But they are connected enough to have these disembodied memes on the playground the way my generation heard about Marilyn Manson's missing rib and that superman S we all drew.

I had never heard the "superman" part of that, I always thought it was Stussy. But I knew exactly what you meant! Turns out both were accepted origins, but not necessarily true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S

I don't trust narratives about what people are seeing on social media without empirical data. The news media are naturally going to report the worst cases, but we don't know anything about the average case. It doesn't get as many clicks if you report on how many cool science videos kids are watching.

> I don't trust narratives about what people are seeing on social media without empirical data.

I mean, I can speak from my own personal use case (I think I average 30-60 minutes of TikTok screen time a day per week... yeah... I know, not great). I would agree with you. The only reason somebody's feed would show "low grade" content is if they curated it to be that way for themselves.

Now, is it easier to curate a feed of garbage West vs East? Not sure...

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