YouTube's CEO limits his kids' social media use – other tech bosses do the same

All ages benefit from time-limited exposure to social media. We have a term for it now: brainrot. Fully convinced it is the cigarettes of our generation: ubiquitous enough to be pervasive despite negative externalities.

"brainrot" is not used that way

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brainrot

The best definition I see is

> the crippling addiction to low effort content

But also have seen it used plenty to refer to the low effort content itself

Brainrot is a small portion of social media

I have seen it used plenty by younger people even in a positive sense as a genre label for the aesthetics and humor of their generation.

>All ages benefit from time-limited exposure to social media.

As compared to what? To no exposure? Or to unlimited exposure?

Unlimited.

As opposed to unlimited exposure. There are also many adults that spend several hours per day on social media. It’s not good for society.

In schools there should be a class about safe internet use and it should be mandatory to write an essay about the benefits children get personally from using social media as well as the downsides.

There has been for like 15 years. At least around here, well withouth the essay. I'm not sure what the essay would do, it would be written by a LLM anyway. Don't worry, LLM usage and risks is the next class we're beginning to teach as a society. Of course my own generation won't get that, so we're going to be fun "boomers" that way.

I think it’s a mistake to put even teen social media use in the same category as screens for young kids, and I suspect most problems are from the latter.

3 things should be studied: screens for kids (regardless of app), short-form video for teens, and non-short-form peer-group social media (what teens had from 2008-2015 or so). I bet we’ll see very different impacts from each.

> I think it’s a mistake to put even teen social media use in the same category as screens for young kids

Dangerous for different reasons. Unregulated screen time for young kids teaches their brain to expect stimulation at all times, and will usually increase their discomfort when they don't have it.

We try really hard to limit screen time to a couple times a week for max 30-45 minutes. Nothing saddens me more than seeing a totally content kid in public being sat down and handed a screen as the default (because it's 'easier' for the parent), depriving them of enjoying the world. Also see a lot of young kids who will cry and cry until they get it.

I don't think this is what you really meant, but the way this is worded I strongly disagree. What you wrote implies everyone should be exposed to social media, just in a limited fashion. No exposure is still an option that would probably be ideal for most people.

I do strongly agree with the cigarette analogy though. I have actually said before that I think we would all be better off if social media use was both legally and socially treated like smoking. (Not to say I think we should be age gating websites because that opens a whole other can of worms, but it would probably be better for societal mental health if we did).

Saying this as a current high school student: there should be as few mandatory classes as possible. Your maths, sciences, and Englishes make sense. In Ontario, we also have to take French (bit more iffy, but I guess it's an official language), Civics (fluff), careers (more fluff), and technology and the skilled trades (I like technology, but still fluff). The more classes you stuff into school that don't relate to what a student wants to pursue, the more disengaged they become. Ironically, if this were a class, I, and most others would be on our phones for pretty much all of it.

It's funny how much you think you know better than adults when you're a teen (and even into your twenties, when your brain is still developing for half that time).

I never would have thought there was value in a lot of things I was forced to learn at that age. Even for the stuff that hasn't had practical application in my life (flying buttress, for example), I wouldn't retroactively reduce how much learning I was expected to complete.