Grandparents are glued to their phones [video]

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.

I see it a different way. Parents reach a period in life where their kids strike out on their own and want little to do with them beyond a safety net. That’s normal and natural and the parents move onto a new phase too. In fact they might just not be that into you anymore. It’s ok if visits upset their routine and holidays are somewhat irritating. Same for being not overly enthusiastic about taking on care giving roles for grandkids. They’re still individuals and it’s not like old age causes someone to lose their inner world. They’ve seen a lot and not as much is novel likely. They’re facing loss, mortality and decline. If they feel compelled to scroll let em scroll. I’m so glad assistive technologies and a11y will be there when I’m decrepit so I can have something more stimulating than TV. Maybe ask grandma to play some Lethal Enforcers the next time you visit you’d be surprised — mine did.

I've been saying this for a while. For all the talk about kids, seniors are the ones addicted to phones. Doomscrolling on Tiktok, Facebook, even locked into mobile games. Its very depressing.

I see a lot of elderly people watching AI content on youtube shorts, one after another. The monotonic voice is a dead giveaway. Their feeds have optimized around it because they cannot tell the difference. Its sad.

My parents generation are the most screen addicted people I know. Absolute slaves to Facebook’s algorithm. It’s really disheartening to see.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Grandad lives alone and has in the past 12 months really gotten into YouTube. He's long used it to learn the latest practices in plumbing, electrics, gardening and woodwork (he's a seriously capable 86yo, always has been) and honestly our subscriptions are very similar...

But he's addicted to shorts. Doomscrolls endlessly in his downtime. Doesn't question whether obvious GenAI is real or not, and having looked over his shoulder a few times, most of it is horribly fake. Loves showing my kids what he finds.

I'd rather he have this than boredom, but also it does mean he doesn't need to socialise outside the family. If I worry about anything, it's not knowing and addressing any extreme or views he's lapping up. I know first hand how insular interests can be once you express one on YouTube and it can get pretty shitty pretty quick.

As others have said, this is exactly the same worries we have for our children except I feel we have some control. No devices or screen time and content limits. It's all very easy. It's harder to address that with your parents' parents.

Before smartphones and TikTok it was casino TV at 3AM, TV infomercial shopping, and the like.

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.

to curb the doomscrolling (laptop is as bad as phone) , i gave my father a big old Lego box - a Volkswagen beetle (which stayed for years, assembled by my kids.. which don't play that anymore. So i disassembled it). He had never tried those. Took him a week to build it, rearranged the room, studied the book like plant-specs-long-time-ago.. Then i gave another one, of similar size ~1500 pieces. i have one more ready-to-give "set". And then i plan to give him the rest 40kg well-sorted-but-in crates Lego, and the heap of model-books ~100+ , and let him do whatever he wants.. hoping he'll start improvising one day. Though.. may need a new empty room :/

This is something ive started to notice, the older generation becoming victims to doomscrolling, my dad being one of them. What makes it worst is that unlike kids who group in the social media world, and therefore have some ability of discerning between whats real and fake, the older gen are so gullible when it comes to fake news, propaganda, and ai generated content.

Not only that but they then go on to spread this false news among there whatsapp friends

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."

Sunday, passable weather but still sunny, wonderful river view, restaurant at 50% capacity, outside tables full. In comes grandma and grandpa with granddaughter on a stroller. They sit, he starts smoking, gives a tablet to the granddaughter who goes through the entire meal with that in front, and grandma spends every pause scrolling whatever on her phone. Grandpa switches smoking and feeding himself through the whole time they were there. Not a word spoken at that table. Unreal.

"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.

I must admit. My parents we're right the whole time. Staring at the screen for a whole day is truly unhealthy and they should go to play outside instead.

This whole thing is beyond ironic.

There's an awful lot of ageism inadvertently on display in these comments.

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.

Old people are wonderful relays from paid trolls and propaganda to their peers, unwittingly spreading and amplifying lies and political agenda in social media. They're often retired, having entire days at their disposal, wasting them on forwarding sh*t back and forth.

Wait till you see the grandparents glued to the TV.

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.

Maybe a solution is to spend more time with grandparents, so that they have something more than just technology to keep them company.

Taking grandmas unpaid care work for granted - no longer possible. Outrage!