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Comment by hrimfaxi | Hacker News Reader

> I think we’re seeing a natural result of kids being scared of that one bad night being immortalized or that one fight turning into an arrest.

> You’re just not allowed to be a kid really.

I learned yesterday about the skull breaker challenge, where you and two friends line up and jump at the same time to see who jumps highest, except the outside two people conspire to kick the legs out of the middle one. Is that being a kid? If anything, the proliferation of social media is enabling the normalization of deviance in the form of these meme challenges. People are going around spraying bug spray on the produce at the grocery and posting it on TikTok.

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> People are going around spraying bug spray on the produce at the grocery and posting it on TikTok.

One single person did this, and was sentenced to a year in prison for it.

Funnily enough not even a new phenomenon due to social media: remember to beware razor blades in candy this Halloween /s

Yeah I would be willing to bet serious money that this is a few kids and that the number is not even greater than a fractional fraction of a percent.

You're seeing point wise incidents, chosen to generate outrage, and trying to apply them like all kids are doing these things, which per all trends they are not.

Sorry some fraction of people will always be stupid, we shouldn't apply constraints on the many to save the few stupid ones.

How many of these trends are we seeing and how much of a fraction of a fraction do they represent in sum? The article discusses specific declines but doesn't look at data regarding increased incidences of social-media-driven acts of deviance. That's like pointing at the declining use of the saddle while ignoring the rise of the automobile. I guess I should revise my previous hyperbolic statement as I don't know if the deviance is made up for in other ways, I would just have appreciated a broader view.

> Is that being a kid?

Imo, it is being an asshole kid, potentially a bully. That totally existed when I was young.

I'm sure you never heard "if your friend jumps off a bridge would you?" question growing up. But it seemed to be very common saying in my family and in others at the time. So it seems like kids were making bad decisions based off of peer pressure well before social media. It's only that it goes "viral" that anyone pays attention at all. Just more ammunition for the "kids these days" type of people I guess.

I jumped off the bridge. Chicken if you didn’t. 27 feet, so a bit less than an olympic high dive.

Deep water Jetty's are way more fun - from the deck at a king high tide, barely ten feet, from the top of the service shack at a King low tide, fifty feet and more.

Plenty of time from primary school to junior high to work up to a proper jump.

Bonus salt water sharks and crocodiles.

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