Over 3 years ago I was in the hospital - they put me on shared room with other men of various ages. The oldest ones liked to talk for hours, doing all sorts "memberberries", elaborated expertises on current state of European, world affairs. Because what the hell else you can do when you have vertigo or tampons in your nose and you need to lie down.
Anyway, the oldest over 80-something man was given some older Samsung phone by his great-grandson with instruction to launch tiktok whenever he feels bored. And bloody hell, that thing looped so much content with every launch but this man still tried hard to find something remotely interesting. I wouldn't say he was glued but that's a random guy who liked to attend his orchard and bees, going fishing etc. - he had something to do in the real world.
I'm witnessing more elderly people around me actually struggling using touch-capable devices - it's like they're smacking fingers in frustration that there's no tactile sensation. They were told that there are buttons to press/tap but there's no feedback they'd expect. For them smartphone screen is no different than tv.
Fortunately, I could never get used to the small screens of mobile phones as a serious computing or web browsing device. So my use of my mobile phone is limited to basic tasks like making calls, sending messages, and sometimes, reluctantly typing emails when I don't have a laptop handy.
My primary computing and web browsing device remains my laptop, with Emacs and Firefox being my main tools. One thing that does manage to distract me sometimes is YouTube recommendations. As a result I have written a little userscript for myself to disable shorts and recommendations: https://github.com/susam/userscripts/blob/main/js/ytx.user.j...
So far the userscript has been successful. As a side effect of disabling the recommendations sidebar, the video panel expands to occupy a larger part of the screen which I quite like. Here is a screenshot: https://susam.github.io/blob/img/userscripts/ytx.png
Also, I still depend heavily on physical textbooks, a rollerball pen and a stack of plain A4 paper for most of my learning and exploration activities. This routine has helped me to stay away from modern attention media too.
Try Unhook (desktop) and Untrap (iOS). At this point, my YouTube experience is just the channels I subscribe to, and the video player. It reduced my usage to almost zero.
I'm not exactly curing cancer, but my media consumption is more moderate and mindful now.
Same thing can be achieved (mostly) by disabling youtube watch and search history. It causes the home page to be blank, and all recommendations under any video are usually from your subscriptions, related your subscriptions, or directly related to the video.
It’s definitely not limited to Facebook. About half of the 50-70 year olds in my family and my wife’s family are screen addicted without Facebook. They live on questionable news websites, messenger apps, Nextdoor, and some others.
It’s strange to hear a 60-something rant about how evil Facebook is and then go on to regurgitate countless conspiracy theories they picked up from whatever websites they’re reading this month.
The parents who scroll Instagram and Facebook feel downright tame in comparison.
My Dad’s got early stage dementia and Facebook is an absolute nightmare. The apps infested with AI slop and the algorithm seems to fill his feed with stuff designed to get him worked up (currently badly behaved cyclists even though he no longer drives).
This feels similar to how you'll see rows and rows of elderly people mindlessly pushing the slot machine buttons in casinos. It makes me wonder if impulse control starts breaking down for that crowd.
Of course, I also wonder if non-digital natives also just have less of a thick skin for this sort of thing.
"But is this shift actually worth worrying about? Or are younger people just projecting their own anxieties about screen time onto their parents and grandparents?"
False dichotomies can either be the worst thing that happened to humankind or a pathway to a new way of understanding each other.
My aunt is 80 and thank goodness she has an iPhone. She’s bedridden and spends all day on it. She has no children but I lived with her for a while when I moved out of my parent’s, and we text often.
I really wish iPhone/Android had better parental controls so I could monitor my dad's screen time and the type of content he was allowed to see on YouTube.
Old people are wonderful relays from paid trolls and propaganda to their peers, unwittingly spreading and amplifying lies and political agenda in social media.
Social media is a cancer and more people need to realize this. No amount of platforming will fix this. It’s designed to extract behavioral traits about you. It’s designed to spy on your shopping and browsing habits. It’s designed to build a model of you. Everyone fell right in.
In my opinion it's best from short content feed out there but it's still useless. Too much AI slop in there. Needles to say I did get some interesting creators in there but I believe people I'm searching for are using YouTube as long videos platform and do not properly use the short term format.
I was reading up on some RCTs on social media and mental health recently and one of the surprising findings is that social media is actually worse for older people.
Doesn't always help. My mother (of grandparent age but coincidentally had 5 kids who didn't want to procreate) stares at her phone 95% of the time when I visit. I'll be telling a story and she's on Facebook, doesn't even look up. She's even been called out in it by my sibling who lives with them, to no avail.
Luckily she doesn't fall for right wing propaganda all over the Internet, but she sure does fall for every single piece of Trump rage bait out there.
Yes, but no. From personal experience, even around grandchildren, TikTok/FB have precedence. It’s getting sickening and we need to educate our parents about the harm that "the algorithm" causes. I just ask myself whether we are even in the position to do so.
I'd love to. The issue is grandparents are in a town with no jobs ruled by a corrupt government that only steals and embezzles money and provides no benefits to local taxpayers.
There's a reason youth migrate away to live with roommates in overpriced big metro areas. That's where all the white collar jobs are created for college educated people. And everyone in the last 20+ years has been groomed to go to college and take white collar jobs, plus deindustrialization and offshoring of manufacturing jobs meaning there's not much in-between well paying white collar jobs and dead-end neo-slavery food delivery jobs. Maybe I'll be a plumber one day and move back to my grandparent place if Claude takes my job, who knows.
If someone would like to and is willing to make the time, that’s fine, but you don’t owe them this if they are not a good person or worth spending time with imho. Connection and community is earned, not a given. My lived experience is there are some good old people you strive to make time with, some who are fine but I wouldn’t go out of my way to make time for, and some who are just terrible people who are going to die alone because of who they are. Your life experience and decisioning process about how and with whom to spend precious, non renewable time may differ.
Don’t set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm.
Seniors are the most vulnerable people on the internet, the most likely to be fooled by disinformation, the most likely to vote, and are one of the biggest threats to civil society. Boomers are destroying what previous generations have built.
Here in Germany they also ignored the demographics, so our social insurance systems (retirement but also health) are heading towards a catastrophe, because there is no capital backing them. They are fundamentally relying on the next generation being bigger or at least equal. This has turned them essentially into Ponzi schemes. The taxpayer has to jump in, making the state less and less able to do anything at all. Of course they now collectively avoid responsibility and slowly milk the young - their own children - dry.
It's been this way for 100+ years (probably much longer) and people found a way to vote. It's easier than ever in most places today, with early voting, mail-in voting, whatever other options are available.
Over 3 years ago I was in the hospital - they put me on shared room with other men of various ages. The oldest ones liked to talk for hours, doing all sorts "memberberries", elaborated expertises on current state of European, world affairs. Because what the hell else you can do when you have vertigo or tampons in your nose and you need to lie down.
Anyway, the oldest over 80-something man was given some older Samsung phone by his great-grandson with instruction to launch tiktok whenever he feels bored. And bloody hell, that thing looped so much content with every launch but this man still tried hard to find something remotely interesting. I wouldn't say he was glued but that's a random guy who liked to attend his orchard and bees, going fishing etc. - he had something to do in the real world.
I'm witnessing more elderly people around me actually struggling using touch-capable devices - it's like they're smacking fingers in frustration that there's no tactile sensation. They were told that there are buttons to press/tap but there's no feedback they'd expect. For them smartphone screen is no different than tv.
Fortunately, I could never get used to the small screens of mobile phones as a serious computing or web browsing device. So my use of my mobile phone is limited to basic tasks like making calls, sending messages, and sometimes, reluctantly typing emails when I don't have a laptop handy.
My primary computing and web browsing device remains my laptop, with Emacs and Firefox being my main tools. One thing that does manage to distract me sometimes is YouTube recommendations. As a result I have written a little userscript for myself to disable shorts and recommendations: https://github.com/susam/userscripts/blob/main/js/ytx.user.j...
So far the userscript has been successful. As a side effect of disabling the recommendations sidebar, the video panel expands to occupy a larger part of the screen which I quite like. Here is a screenshot: https://susam.github.io/blob/img/userscripts/ytx.png
Also, I still depend heavily on physical textbooks, a rollerball pen and a stack of plain A4 paper for most of my learning and exploration activities. This routine has helped me to stay away from modern attention media too.
Writing with a pen has a lot of unseen benefits.
Fine-motor skills connected to memory, etc.
Doesn't take much to find the science.
Also, avoiding interruption is good for your train of thought.
If a train of thought doesn't matter, then stay online and leave your phone able to interrupt you.
It's your "choice" (tm)
Seriously, try everything including the things you don't think will work for your sense of peace, so you know, IOWA (I over-worry always)
Peace to you all.
If you press t key you will get a full width video player.
Try Unhook (desktop) and Untrap (iOS). At this point, my YouTube experience is just the channels I subscribe to, and the video player. It reduced my usage to almost zero.
I'm not exactly curing cancer, but my media consumption is more moderate and mindful now.
Same thing can be achieved (mostly) by disabling youtube watch and search history. It causes the home page to be blank, and all recommendations under any video are usually from your subscriptions, related your subscriptions, or directly related to the video.
This is the simplest and most effective solution, Cheers
Screenshot not found.
The article in question:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/12/do-your-paren...
Before smartphones they sat at home and watched game shows and TV evangelists, and listened to Rush on the radio. Which is worse?
My parents generation are the most screen addicted people I know. Absolute slaves to Facebook’s algorithm. It’s really disheartening to see.
It’s definitely not limited to Facebook. About half of the 50-70 year olds in my family and my wife’s family are screen addicted without Facebook. They live on questionable news websites, messenger apps, Nextdoor, and some others.
It’s strange to hear a 60-something rant about how evil Facebook is and then go on to regurgitate countless conspiracy theories they picked up from whatever websites they’re reading this month.
The parents who scroll Instagram and Facebook feel downright tame in comparison.
My Dad’s got early stage dementia and Facebook is an absolute nightmare. The apps infested with AI slop and the algorithm seems to fill his feed with stuff designed to get him worked up (currently badly behaved cyclists even though he no longer drives).
Mine got Israeli propaganda and kept texting me so often about Hamas and Muslims that I had to block him.
Mine got Iranian propaganda and kept texting me so often about IDF and Jews that I had to block him.
This feels similar to how you'll see rows and rows of elderly people mindlessly pushing the slot machine buttons in casinos. It makes me wonder if impulse control starts breaking down for that crowd.
Of course, I also wonder if non-digital natives also just have less of a thick skin for this sort of thing.
"But is this shift actually worth worrying about? Or are younger people just projecting their own anxieties about screen time onto their parents and grandparents?"
False dichotomies can either be the worst thing that happened to humankind or a pathway to a new way of understanding each other.
My aunt is 80 and thank goodness she has an iPhone. She’s bedridden and spends all day on it. She has no children but I lived with her for a while when I moved out of my parent’s, and we text often.
The concern is what you're doing when you're getting older but still able.
The decline is accelerated by muscle weakness which is accelerated by sitting around all day looking at screens.
Before smartphones and TikTok it was casino TV at 3AM, TV infomercial shopping, and the like.
I really wish iPhone/Android had better parental controls so I could monitor my dad's screen time and the type of content he was allowed to see on YouTube.
The recontextualisation of "parental" is very amusing.
As nicely illustrated in this Young Sheldon episode fragment: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Nd90rFPYVnc
Old people are wonderful relays from paid trolls and propaganda to their peers, unwittingly spreading and amplifying lies and political agenda in social media.
Social media is a cancer and more people need to realize this. No amount of platforming will fix this. It’s designed to extract behavioral traits about you. It’s designed to spy on your shopping and browsing habits. It’s designed to build a model of you. Everyone fell right in.
Time to sign off HN, I guess :-)
On a serious note YT shorts are on my radar for "things I spend too much time on that deliver minimal value."
In my opinion it's best from short content feed out there but it's still useless. Too much AI slop in there. Needles to say I did get some interesting creators in there but I believe people I'm searching for are using YouTube as long videos platform and do not properly use the short term format.
I was reading up on some RCTs on social media and mental health recently and one of the surprising findings is that social media is actually worse for older people.
Can you share some things you were reading?
That makes sense, they haven't "built immunity".
Reminds me of Chade and The Skill from the Robin Hobb books
Amazing opportunity! One more demographic to save via age verification laws, with a side dish of reliable personalized advertisement profiles.
Wait till you see the grandparents glued to the TV.
Maybe a solution is to spend more time with grandparents, so that they have something more than just technology to keep them company.
As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.
In our household, the worst offenders of phones at the dinner tables are the grandparents.
It's as gross as 2 knuckles deep in your nose.
Sure, but I've seen since the 70s old folks just staring at TV all day, so it's not just a mobile phenomenon either.
Very true, phone addiction is that taken to a new level but the same underlaying issues remain.
I know a lot of old bored retired people.
They need something physical and social. Like softball or something. But compatible with their decripitude.
I hook them up with each other. There are parties.
Still working on the softball part.
Ideas are welcome
> I hook them up with each other. There are parties.
OnlyGrandparents.com?
(I looked it up, the domain name was registered six days ago!)
If anybody wants to do something with instagran.org, I know somebody who would be willing to part with it for a good cause…
OnlyGrans.com is available for only $50k
That’s worth about $5
Doesn't always help. My mother (of grandparent age but coincidentally had 5 kids who didn't want to procreate) stares at her phone 95% of the time when I visit. I'll be telling a story and she's on Facebook, doesn't even look up. She's even been called out in it by my sibling who lives with them, to no avail.
Luckily she doesn't fall for right wing propaganda all over the Internet, but she sure does fall for every single piece of Trump rage bait out there.
Yes, but no. From personal experience, even around grandchildren, TikTok/FB have precedence. It’s getting sickening and we need to educate our parents about the harm that "the algorithm" causes. I just ask myself whether we are even in the position to do so.
edit: typo
I'd love to. The issue is grandparents are in a town with no jobs ruled by a corrupt government that only steals and embezzles money and provides no benefits to local taxpayers.
There's a reason youth migrate away to live with roommates in overpriced big metro areas. That's where all the white collar jobs are created for college educated people. And everyone in the last 20+ years has been groomed to go to college and take white collar jobs, plus deindustrialization and offshoring of manufacturing jobs meaning there's not much in-between well paying white collar jobs and dead-end neo-slavery food delivery jobs. Maybe I'll be a plumber one day and move back to my grandparent place if Claude takes my job, who knows.
If someone would like to and is willing to make the time, that’s fine, but you don’t owe them this if they are not a good person or worth spending time with imho. Connection and community is earned, not a given. My lived experience is there are some good old people you strive to make time with, some who are fine but I wouldn’t go out of my way to make time for, and some who are just terrible people who are going to die alone because of who they are. Your life experience and decisioning process about how and with whom to spend precious, non renewable time may differ.
Don’t set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm.
It’s all fine, but in that case also do not worry about this hypothetical old person spending time the way they like to.
Certainly, how they spend their time is their choice, concepts of free will and all that.
Seniors are the most vulnerable people on the internet, the most likely to be fooled by disinformation, the most likely to vote, and are one of the biggest threats to civil society. Boomers are destroying what previous generations have built.
Here in Germany they also ignored the demographics, so our social insurance systems (retirement but also health) are heading towards a catastrophe, because there is no capital backing them. They are fundamentally relying on the next generation being bigger or at least equal. This has turned them essentially into Ponzi schemes. The taxpayer has to jump in, making the state less and less able to do anything at all. Of course they now collectively avoid responsibility and slowly milk the young - their own children - dry.
It is truly the most egoistic generation ever.
> the most likely to vote
Well... who's fault is that.
It's because election day is a weekday and the rest of us have to keep up with the grind. It's entirely because they don't have jobs
It's been this way for 100+ years (probably much longer) and people found a way to vote. It's easier than ever in most places today, with early voting, mail-in voting, whatever other options are available.
Early voting exists in many states. Even in these states you’ll find that younger folks hardly vote.
And also the most likely to fall victims to scams. An elderly family friend lost millions to a pig butchering scam.
Taking grandmas unpaid care work for granted - no longer possible. Outrage!
More: If you want to spend time with your grandkid please do not just sit besides him, phone in hand. If you do not want to then that's fine