alt Hacker News> social media mis-use is a symptom of young people having a lack of things like "third spaces" to go to to socialize at
I see all kinds of active third spaces, but never any young people in them.
I get that it is hard to bootstrap now. Trying to convince a 20 year old that they should hang out with a 70 year old to get the ball rolling for more 20 year olds to show up is not an easy sell, but when I was 20 (just before the emergence of social media) these same third spaces were full of people of all ages. It was bootstrapped once upon a time.
Why did the young people stop coming?
You’re 100% right that third places didn’t go anywhere. I do volunteer work and fact is, teens have incredibly short attention spans now due to instant media in their pockets. On the rare occasions I get a volunteer that isn’t a grey beard, the young person (usually dragged to the place by an adult) sits in a corner on their phone. Most put in absolute minimum effort so they can get on their device asap.
The kids aren’t dumb or uninteresting or anything like that, they are just plain addicted to phones. The rare volunteer kid that puts 100% effort in is usually a homeschool type with no electronic devices or someone in the top 1% of their class or something like that.
The attention economy is real, and it’s dominated by phones and by those that were born in it.