Comment on Kids are short-circuiting their school-issued Chromebooks for TikTok clout
frostysauce@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Parents and psychiatrists have been trying to wrap their heads around how some of the more dangerous Internet trends take off, especially among kids.
Kids are dumb and they do dumb things. There’s not really that much to wrap one’s head around.
RedAggroBest@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
And it’s not even like Internet trends are a new thing. TikTok has simply offered a platform that’s extra predatory about it.
I can imagine that TikTok has been for Internet trends, to what slot machines did for gambling.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah, like, first time?
The presentation has changed slightly but the content is much the same. Back in the good old days I was a moderator on Totse forums (the original, but its web bulletin board incarnation and not when it was a BBS) and we literally had an entire subforum just titled “Bad Ideas.” This was where things got launched, torched, smoked, blown up, stolen, scammed, or otherwise mutilated. Or at the very least all of the above talked about, at length. Most of the kiddos did not actually have the means to pull of what they claimed they did but the ones who could and more importantly had the means to prove it were celebrities. Usually only for a short time, for various reasons.
The early Internet was basically just a repository for bickering about Star Trek, low grade porn, plans for how to build potato cannons, or schemes involving smoking dried banana peels. An immense amount of stupidity has always been there to be found, because the place was and is full of teenagers and teenagers are stupid.
I sure was, when I was one.
Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Anyone else remember kids watching videos of other kids nearly choking to death on cinnamon, and thinking “hey this looks like fun”? Or the “chug a gallon of milk” thing. Those “trends” were just weirdly masochistic and sadistic. It wasn’t even misinformation or anything. Kids watched other kids suffer, and then chose to suffer too.
It’s closer to what mobile apps did for gambling. Crazy how quickly that was normalized in the US, and it’s tragic how easily people can just delete thousands of dollars from their bank account on a whim from the comfort of their couch.
I guess what I’m saying is, maybe sometimes children and adults really do need some protection from their stupid impulses.
RedAggroBest@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
To be more specific than mobile apps, sports betting apps are so insanely predatory