Hacker News Reader

Comment by chasebank | Hacker News Reader

The cause is having a tiny computer in your hand all day. It's so glaringly obvious.

Is that the cause of the loss of community? Or is that a coping mechanism for the loss of community? Or a combination?

I agree it's related. But that it's glaringly obviously the cause? I'd need to hear more.

Seems to be the cause to me. Community is the natural result of putting a group of people together. The dopamine drip disrupts that.

i would guess one effects the other in a negative (positive?) feedback loop. access to your phone & 24/7 easy access to social media started to erode communities and now people just rely on their phones because they have zero community around. there is nothing interesting to look to if you look away from your phone because the rest of the people around you are on their phones. EVERYBODY is glued to their devices every second of the day. waiting in a line for a coffee? have to stare at instagram stories. a random boring moment where you are allowed to be alone with your thoughts and maybe observe other people around you and get to start talking to someone? why? you have your twitter feed full of rage & engagement bait.

the only thing these days that actually can foster any community is playing sports. thank god we at least still have that. can't exactly pull your phone out in the middle of a basketball or volleyball game.

Positive feedback loop. Negative feedback loop is like homeostasis or a PID controller.

had a feeling. thanks

The issue started long before that, it’s not like mental health was great in the 90s.

Loss of third places, TV, necessity to move around for studies then jobs (and moving your kids along if / when you got them), increased cost of living, … are all massive contributing factors.

> Loss of third places

People keep bringing up the loss of third places.

Every time I look into it I come to the conclusion that there are more third places now than there has ever been in the history of humanity.

In the 80s and 90s there were no skate parks, there are now skate parks.

There are more bike and walking trails.

There are more libraries.

There are more community centers.

My local neighborhood is breaking ground on a new fire station in the fall, it will include a community center where in the past it was just a garage and bunk house for firefighters-- but give me any county in the entire country and I'll find a 40 year history of building things for public use. I just looked up the small (28k), impoverished ($45k/house), rural county in Indiana where my now-deceased grandparents lived and according to their charmingly retro county government website over the last 20 or so years they've built trails, parks, playgrounds, a new library, and... a skate park.

People are not lonely because there are fewer third places.

People are lonely because they're not going to the third places.

I see the opposite as someone born and living in San Francisco. Growing up in the city, we had arcades, bowling alleys, mini golf, Lan Party Cafe's, etc.

Then the city got more and more expensive, and businesses couldn't afford the rent / leases in the city anymore.

Affordable recreation isn't available in SF and that leads me to just stay at home as an adult instead of going out and doing something that doesn't involve drinking.

And yet this loss of community has different levels across the world, and yet in all of those countries teenagers still have tiny computers in their hand all day.

I spent part of the summer in Spain, and you'd see teenagers hanging out in the park, or at the beach huddled together while looking at their own tiny computers.

While I agree with your scepticism of our smart phone use, this comment doesn't do the article justice. (The author addresses that point and explains why he thinks that smart phone use, while a problem, is not the root cause.)

That doesn't seem very obvious to me. Would you mind elaborating?

It tracks very well with the increase in mental health issues among young people.

Mobile tech and social media will be seen as the equivalent of tobacco companies in the history books of the 22nd century.

Drownings and ice cream sales also track nicely, but it doesn’t mean it’s the ice cream that’s causing the drownings.

Right, you need a mechanism. (Ice cream makes you fat, fat people can't swim, ergo drownings). Haight clearly outlines the mechanisms by which social media and smartphones have detrimental effects on mental health, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-l2TdinWoM8

But ice cream doesn't make you fat. Eating too much ice cream makes you fat.

And if you swim enough, you can't get fat no matter how much ice cream you eat. Ever seen the diet Phelps was on? Guy ate like crap, has over 20 gold medals to his name.

That's not why ice cream sales are correlated with drowning. Ice cream sales generally peak in the summer, and that's also when most people swim.

But if drownings had suddenly increased when ice cream was first introduced, that's a stronger suggestion that there's a relationship.

Kids' mental health went off a cliff at the same time that they started getting smartphones and social media.

Something else could be the cause, but we all know it's not, even if we earn our living from it.

Apps on your tiny computer are engineered to get you hooked. The time that you spend on it is time that you cannot spend making and cultivating face-to-face friendships.

As far as I can tell, friendships are necessary for mental health. So those apps have a negative effect on your mental health.

In principle, they could also have a positive effect that counterbalances the negative. But in my personal experience, that's dubious.

I was in middle school when the iPhone first became popular among teens. Within a couple of months, everything changed. Kids talked a lot less on the bus, at lunch, etc. If you didn't have an iPhone, your friends probably did, so same issue. It felt a whole lot worse and stayed that way. I ended up becoming closer with my few friends who didn't have phones and further from my old best friends, just because of who was more willing to hang out together.

Indeed. The old trope of the asocial "computer nerd" too focused on the machine to talk to girls.

The trope is real, and what we are experiencing here is simply the "nerdification" of mainstream society. Everyone is more screen addicted in 2024 than even the most nerdy person was circa 2008.

I honestly love it though. Sure, there is a "dystopian" bent to the idea of most people zombifying themselves in public - but all a westerner needs to do is spend even a week in a very communal society to realize that the radical individualistic society we have cultivated is actually pretty awesome. I LOVE the idea that I can be who I want to be and genuinely not care about what some "community" of people think of it. Everyone pretending that no one around them exists and being screenlocked means I can pick my nose in public, or do any number of even more weird shit without being noticed. Compare this to japan where eating a burger without covering your mouth as a woman is a social death sentence.

Western individualism (and east asian hermitism and maybe eastern european depressive paranoia) are by far the most productive social situations for tech development, as we now have far more "tech autistic" types who tend to be the primary drivers of code innovation. Is it any surprise that there is basically consensus that the best "hardcore" games tend to come from either the west (usually the USA or northern europe), a post soviet state, or japan.

Everyone in this thread bemoans the things that cause the youth mental health crisis, but honestly, I wouldn't go back and I think that higher youth mental health rates are simply worth it. Actual "nerds" in 2024 are less likely to be bullied than in the eras of good youth mental health, and the average becky or chad can learn to deal with the same things that the nerds of 2009 learned to deal with a fortnight ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com