• schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    4 days ago

    No, it has not. What on Earth could possibly be wrong with a young person reading our discussions here on Lemmy and expanding their knowledge about all the topics we discuss here, for example? Even participating in it, asking and answering questions about any topic they find interesting? I find it hard to think of a more harmless hobby.

    I myself started regularly participating in online communities at the age of 10 (that was more than 20 years ago, when there were not yet even rumors of a product called “iPhone” and I didn’t even have my first own desktop computer yet). The vast majority of my joyful memories of my preteen and teen years stem from my participation in online communities. The vast majority of memories I have of pretty much anything else during that time period are negative. Online communities taught me many important things about life that I now use every day and that I probably wouldn’t have easily learned elsewhere. They turned me into a more creative person with better communication skills, especially in writing.

    So, no, the situation is not that people who want to ban young people from social media have a noble goal that oh-so-unfortunately cannot be achieved without invading everyone’s privacy. The situation is that those people have a completely illegitimate (in my mind, outright evil) goal in the first place.

    • Jax@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      4 days ago

      There are plenty of reasons why I don’t think kids should be on Lemmy, at the very least without supervision. Like, come on — people post porn here regularly.

      • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        6
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        4 days ago

        We now already have a few generations with plenty of members who started watching online porn when they were technically too young for that, and we can now tell that this hasn’t harmed them.

          • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            3 days ago

            You can’t prove a negative, that’s not how experiments and hypothesis works.

            If you’re making a claim that early exposure causes harm, you’re the one that has to prove it via the following steps:

            • Set up criterias for assessment
            • Decide on a test methodology
            • Collect data
            • Analyze results and draw conclusions
            • Publish for peer review to make sure your methodology was appropriate

            Congratulations, you have just been taught how to do science

            • Jax@sh.itjust.works
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              3 days ago

              You can’t prove a negative, that’s not how experiments and hypothesis works.

              Yet you completely ignored studies like this from the National Library of Medicine

              Excerpt:

              Prolonged exposure to pornography is known to lead to habituation, resulting in blunted processing of pleasurable stimuli and greater sensitivity to negative stimuli (21). Continuous use of pornography impairs emotional processing capacity and flattens affect, reducing emotional connection to real-life sexual experiences. The reward and gratification system adapts by releasing large amounts of dopamine, but tolerance develops, requiring increasingly higher doses, quantities, and intensity to achieve arousal

              So we know it behaves like a drug, the study goes into further detail how it affects adolescents — and here you are saying ‘no it isn’t actually that bad’.

              Ask a heroin addict about his quality of life and his answer depends on his last hit.