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You all know this is the answer. In fact you will do this and then post it on Show HN proudly.

We are in the 80s smoking phase. It's still all OK and it's normalized. We're seeing the first blips of trouble on the horizon.

In, say, about a decade this tech bullshit will be regarded as the relentless toxic insanity that it was and we'll be better for it. Social tech CEOs will be lucky to evade prison if I had my way.

You could and when you would end up in the hospital your parents would have gotten a visit by people with sticks.

You can let your kid play in traffic. You can let your kid run around with knives. Sure, but when shit hits the fan you'll be luck to pay a hefty fine and lose all social credibility you had. In the worst case you're looking at jail time. Those sort of incentives will tend to smooth these issues out.

We need to calibrate the incentives. Parents can be held accountable for neglect and abuse. Giving your kids phones and letting them use it without supervision is abuse. Enforce it. Denormalize this bullshit.

I have knives in my kitchen. Do I give it to them and let them run around the neighborhood? I could but there are consequences and I would be held accountable for it.

Social media = knives or as some other commenter pointed out, similar to letting your kids play in traffic.

I think he questioned the wisdom of isolating yourself from "people" in general.

On a related note I would like to add that social activity of any online kind is completely useless and can be get rid of immediately and without any adverse side effects whatsoever.

I'm pretty convinced the next generations will view being online as cheap and stupid. Offline is where the real value is.

Unrelated, but you remind me of how absolutely useless ad technology is. The literal second I cross the border into Spain on holiday all I see is completely Spanish ads for stuff I never heard of and aren't even appropriate for my gender. This is for a ten year old YT account that basically knows everything there is to know about me. Even when I continue and look for English videos they keep shoving Spanish bullshit into my face.

Even at home I still get ads for music festivals, shoes and toothpaste, none of which are withing a thousand yards of my personal preference. The times I saw an ad for mechanical keyboards, interesting APIs, IDEs etc I can count on literally one hand and that's being online for decades.

iPhones' builtin autocomplete, Netflix and Spotify's recommendations all have robbed me of the illusion that smart people are actually working on this problem. If they are, it ain't working. The money printer works but not because of clever tech. YT's ad tech basically boils down to a geolocation of IP and I sometimes even question that.

People make problems where there are none. Parents all around me are giving smartphones to their eight year olds without supervision.

I have kids and no amount of bullshit is going to convince me this is necessary for social interaction of any kind. If anything the "phone kids" are the weird ones.

People are creating this problem. You can easily, very easily, say "no" to a kid. I pay to keep you bloody alive and I will defend your sanity with everything I got because these kids are our future. Being disliked or "hated" by them is the least of my worries. Are we adults or what?

Sometimes I think there is a severe lack of "adulting" lately. No amount of legislation will fix that.