<story><title>YouTube top earners: A seven-year-old making $22M</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46427910</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anonymous5133</author><text>My GF is an elementary school teacher and she says the amount of kids who are developing anti-social behaviors is increasing pretty rapidly. Kids these days have computers and are basically simply &amp;quot;escaping&amp;quot; to the internet to live in a fantasy world that is disconnected from reality. Some even display active addictions to computer games, like minecraft, while others say they only have friends online in the games or with these youtube personalities like you say. These kids literally do not know how to make friends or interact with other kids because they are so used to just sitting in front of a game or computer basically having a &amp;quot;friend&amp;quot; entertain them with only one-direction of interaction. They think this is normal relationship for a friend. They don&amp;#x27;t understand that in the real world in order to get friends you need to talk to other kids and interact with them. They literally do not know how to do this because they&amp;#x27;ve learned it is not necessary...&lt;p&gt;Parents need to take it very seriously and limit the amount of time the child uses the computer...otherwise these behaviors continue into adulthood. If you are socially incompetent then it will hold you back in terms of jobs and so on. Very troublesome is that parents are basically using computers to babysit the kids or to keep them occupied...which only helps to reinforce the lack of social skills they get. How many times do you see a kid in a shopping cart holding a tablet watching some movie or whatever? Very common.</text></item><item><author>TravHatesMe</author><text>What I find interesting is that many of these youtubers have created personas to appeal to their audience, like true entertainers. However loyal viewers are fooled into this false sense of reality, where they are friends with content creator and this is not a persona at all, he&amp;#x27;s my friend. Over time, the content creator and the audience share so many moments together, it becomes an emotional bond and a substitute for people&amp;#x27;s social needs. People grow attached to this persona, sometimes obsessively. I think it could create of a scary pattern of disassociation, has it already?&lt;p&gt;Another thought: If the content creator chooses to optimize the money-making persona, it eventually leads to sensationalized content to generate the maximum possible number of views. I think there is some sadness in that: no matter what form of art, so much of it is influenced (disrupted?) by money -- it almost seems inevitable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>closeparen</author><text>I grew up during the transition.&lt;p&gt;Before I had regular access to technology I spent most of my after-school and recess time staring off into space, pacing around constructing imaginary worlds, and reading YA fiction. I had no interest in my peers, and no idea how to connect with them, years before I ever touched a computer. When I finally did get into the internet, and programming, it was manna from heaven. Now I get to be a productive member of society, staring off into space at my desk and constructing imaginary worlds in the form of software systems for important business purposes. If it weren&amp;#x27;t for that, I might have wasted away, disintegrated, completely detached from the normal human world.&lt;p&gt;I dunno. Just because a child has no social life and a lot of screen time, doesn&amp;#x27;t mean the causality works as you propose. Some of us have a tighter grip on the world of things than the world of people. (It&amp;#x27;s definitely become more balanced for me, with time).</text></comment>
<story><title>YouTube top earners: A seven-year-old making $22M</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46427910</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anonymous5133</author><text>My GF is an elementary school teacher and she says the amount of kids who are developing anti-social behaviors is increasing pretty rapidly. Kids these days have computers and are basically simply &amp;quot;escaping&amp;quot; to the internet to live in a fantasy world that is disconnected from reality. Some even display active addictions to computer games, like minecraft, while others say they only have friends online in the games or with these youtube personalities like you say. These kids literally do not know how to make friends or interact with other kids because they are so used to just sitting in front of a game or computer basically having a &amp;quot;friend&amp;quot; entertain them with only one-direction of interaction. They think this is normal relationship for a friend. They don&amp;#x27;t understand that in the real world in order to get friends you need to talk to other kids and interact with them. They literally do not know how to do this because they&amp;#x27;ve learned it is not necessary...&lt;p&gt;Parents need to take it very seriously and limit the amount of time the child uses the computer...otherwise these behaviors continue into adulthood. If you are socially incompetent then it will hold you back in terms of jobs and so on. Very troublesome is that parents are basically using computers to babysit the kids or to keep them occupied...which only helps to reinforce the lack of social skills they get. How many times do you see a kid in a shopping cart holding a tablet watching some movie or whatever? Very common.</text></item><item><author>TravHatesMe</author><text>What I find interesting is that many of these youtubers have created personas to appeal to their audience, like true entertainers. However loyal viewers are fooled into this false sense of reality, where they are friends with content creator and this is not a persona at all, he&amp;#x27;s my friend. Over time, the content creator and the audience share so many moments together, it becomes an emotional bond and a substitute for people&amp;#x27;s social needs. People grow attached to this persona, sometimes obsessively. I think it could create of a scary pattern of disassociation, has it already?&lt;p&gt;Another thought: If the content creator chooses to optimize the money-making persona, it eventually leads to sensationalized content to generate the maximum possible number of views. I think there is some sadness in that: no matter what form of art, so much of it is influenced (disrupted?) by money -- it almost seems inevitable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alan_wade</author><text>Computers, internet, youtube, games - these things are a part of a real world. I mean, they aren&amp;#x27;t a hallucination, they don&amp;#x27;t exist on a separate plane of reality. Experiences are real, joy they bring is real, and for many people, it&amp;#x27;s far better than what the &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; world around them has to offer.&lt;p&gt;If people are tempted to escape into a virtual world, it might be because the real world around them sucks.</text></comment>