Surely, children are watching lectures on quantum physics on YouTube and not that retard Mr. Beast.

I laugh out loud👍. As always, you're a little harsh, but with tears in your eyes, being a parent, I say you're right. Yes, my child, scrolling through short YouTube videos turns into a zombie, watching all the nonsense that is posted there. He watches everything, and it really pisses me off. I'm at war with him, banning time and websites at the router level, explaining to him all his future and his present, and what can and should be done now. This, of course, does not help much, but "water sharpens stone." I will follow and explain.
But he goes outside, and then his parents turn into the "ancestors" of those who bother them and teach them how to live, and they start discussing everything that their little heads have managed to remember in these 15-second videos.
You're right; I'm scared for my children, because there are soulless social networks and there are those who don't care about their children, but this generation will have to live or survive among those who now live on these social networks, in a place where no one cares about gambling addiction, and on the age of the interlocutor, and in general on everything that surrounds him.
It is always good to see you around these parts or any parts of the forum as you do read and respond to posts correctly. I do really try to write the truth as much as possible, and so do you -- styles may only be different. I am quite harsh on topics that are terrible, like the situations that we are talking about here --
especially when these situations did not have to be this way, then they are of the worst kind. If one does not have sufficient information about a topic, he or she should just shut the fuck up and not write nonsense -- as you can see here, many propose completely stupid ideas or defend gambling or gambling-like mechanisms because they are completely uneducated about these matters, but they yet insist that they know something.
I grew up surrounded by all kinds of technology all the time, yet I never got addicted to anything because it was an entirely different thing back then. There were no "stories", "shorts", "reels" or whatever else this slot machine mechanism is called that makes kids addicted for life, and this is just 1 tiny part or feature of the current environment. Many people think that just because it is not a direct gambling game in a casino that its effects could never be anything similar to actually playing at a casino, which could not be further from the truth --
they can actually be much, much worse since there is no money that is being risked. When there is no "stake" or "risk" most people and kids will simply keep engaging in an activity such as watching shorts and they will even defend it fiercely, because they do not perceive any downside to the activity -- after all, it is not gambling, right? Well that is why most kids these days are completely hooked to content, have short attention spans, have the emotional maturity of toddlers and so forth. If we want to seriously start fixing any of this, the first step is not giving money to gambling treatment centers,
the first step is fucking not creating technology-enabled addicts in the first place.
It is regrettable that this is what the world is turning into, and also that most people think this it cannot be controlled, no offence but this is the reality of today mostly because most part of the world now seems simple discipline as abuse, a child can't be punished for doing something wrong because everyone is talking about them having autonomy, if you are still living under your parents then you are absolutely supposed to still be living under their rules but tell that to the next freedom obsessed person out there snd they will claim that children have a right to whatever they want.
Exactly, and as you can see in the outcome of doing this -- the kids these days are terrible as people and completely incompetent. This generation of parenting will go down as one of the worst mistakes in the recent recorded history. Not only do children need discipline, they need a lot of it. Many people want to simplify this issue and shift responsibility on other entities or causes such as the ones that I have described above, but that would be completely wrong. Parents take a big part of the blame. After all, how many parents are really trying these days to parent well? Very few, as they would have to at least to do the things that I have described (among others). These are the ones that I feel sorry for, because they deserve so much more but they are having a hard time because the rest or the others are complete idiots.