this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2025
110 points (100.0% liked)

Hacker News

3027 readers
614 users here now

Posts from the RSS Feed of HackerNews.

The feed sometimes contains ads and posts that have been removed by the mod team at HN.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 13 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] RagnarokOnline@programming.dev 17 points 1 day ago (2 children)

About 48% of young women who had smartphones by 5 or 6 years old reported having severe suicidal thoughts, compared to 28% of females who had smartphones by 13 or older.

In young men, 31% of those who had smartphones by 5 or 6 years old reported having severe suicidal thoughts and 20% of males who had smartphones by 13 or older reported having severe suicidal thoughts.

Damn, smart phones need to be a controlled substance.

[–] protist@mander.xyz 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The study...analyzed self-reported questionnaire results from more than 100,000 young adults between the ages of 18 and 24.

Damn, that's not a small sample

[–] halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I bet you 90% of those didn't have any parental controls or even parents monitoring their usage after the fact.

[–] scintilla@crust.piefed.social 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Parental controls really do seem like an impossible tight rope to walk for parents too strict and the kid willvjust figure out a way around them defeating the point entirely. Too lax and they might as well not be there.

[–] halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah it's really more about monitoring usage and educating them. The tablet/phone is not a babysitter, but many parents seem to treat it like one.

[–] scintilla@crust.piefed.social 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I got way too much unrestricted access to the internet and I know it fucked me up. I was already genetically predisposed to having bad mental health but basically unrestricted internet access from the age of 8 did not help.

[–] halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

The days of dial up were the wild west online. Waiting sometimes hours for your music and porn to download through Kazaa or Limewire. And inevitably getting something totally unrelated just to troll you.

[–] fishy@lemmy.today 3 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I've got a 4 year old, screens are like crack to them. If we don't watch any TV or YouTube all week he tends to forget about it, but watch one ten minute video and there's meltdowns for the next several days because he wants to watch constantly. Adults can't keep their phones out of their hands, and we all know social media is poison.

I can't imagine how neglectful a parent must be to give a 5 year old unrestricted Internet access.

That said, what Ragnarok server are you running or playing on? Been a good few years since I scratched that itch lol.

[–] RagnarokOnline@programming.dev 1 points 5 hours ago

Oh dang! I’m actually not playing right now either, but I always get the itch to go back to it around the new year.

If you haven’t tried it, the Ragnarok Origin Mobile game is surprisingly good. It’s not exactly the same, but it hit just the right level of nostalgia that I was looking for.

And /grats on the kiddo!

[–] BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 1 day ago

Really, I think that headline applies to anyone, not just kids.

… he says, posting from a smartphone.

[–] ook@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Yeah "smartphones" are the issue here...

The study's authors recommended restricting smartphone and social media access

This comes out of nowhere in the article. It is not smartphones per se. It is the social media kids access that does it, and no wonder, we all know how insane that is for an adult mind.

While probably not possible on this scale of a study, they should have looked how much % of phone use was social media, and I am sure they'd have found a correlation between all the negatives they listed and the amount of social media they consumed.

That also means taking away smartphones is no use here if kids can access the same social media via computers.

[–] BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 17 hours ago

Well, except that without a pocket computer kids, and everyone really, will spend much less time on social media, getting notifications, seeing ads, and all of the other things that most phones push at their users.

That constant feed of notifications and prompts to partake in the daily/hourly event/contest/whatever from a bunch of apps is enough to make the most resilient mind kinda twitchy and anxious. This isn't surprising in the least.