I'm not writing this from a moral high ground. Please read this as someone down the road talking about the on-ramp, not a guy who's never touched it lecturing people who have.
What's been bothering me isn't that gear exists. It always has. It's the machine that now decides who finds it, how young, and how fast.

my gripe: A literal recommendation engine optimizing one number: how long it can keep you from scrolling away. And it turns out the most reliable way to hold a teenage boy's attention is to make him feel slightly behind, slightly too small, too soft, "cooked". Insecurity is high retention, and the algorithm points at the youngest, most insecure person in the room. The system doesn't even know it is doing this, and the user doesn't know they're being pushed farther into the scene with a continuously moving goalpost. That narrowed feed is a peak frame. Best pump of the week, dehydrated, backlit, one working angle, increasingly run through the same editing that's been done on faces for years, except now it does delts and waists too. So the standard you're measuring against isn't a person. It's a composite stitched from strangers' single best moments, and the algorithm only shows you the composite.

Its implications on age: gear was a late-twenties decision in my circle, after years of training, considering FFMI, and usually with at least one older guy in the gym who'd tell you to your face you weren't ready. That gatekeeping was annoying but load-bearing; with that gone, the mentor became a recommendation engine that has no opinion about whether a 16-year-old should be watching this, only whether he'll keep watching. The path becomes a 17-year-old gets spoon-fed, shredded 19-year-olds, the feed sells that teenager an impossible standard, whilst supplying him with the "hormonal" fix. Confidence, size, and even longevity are promised, while the thing actually delivered is a kid intervening on an endocrine system that hasn't finished the job it was supposed to finish on its own. That window doesn't reopen. He never gets to find out what his FFMI would've topped out at naturally, what his own ceiling was, because he capped it before he ever reached it. The thing that gives the whole loop away is when the costs get reposted as wins. Kid posting his subq welts like a milestone, ignoring the fact it's an injection-site reaction: irritation, a technique problem, possibly bad oil, worst case the start of something that needs a real doctor. it all reads as engagement, and engagement is the only thing his brain has been trained to chase, can't tell the difference between people laughing at him and people looking up to him because both have been flattended into the same metrics, views, likes, messages, and comments: a genuine child who's been taught his worth is based on how many views or likes he receieveves perceibves this as; "My welt got him more eyes than any clean photo I've ever posted" and this will continiously escalate: welts are fun till it's the 20th video, so he does what he was taught: hurt yourself again, but louder.

barrier to entry: the barrier to entry collapsed to nothing. In most circles you needed a source you'd actually met, someone vouching for you, months of asking around, and that friction was its own filter. That's gone too. Now it's a Telegram handle in a comment section, a cash-pay telehealth checkout, a research-chem vendor that ships to a doorstep, a peptide site that styles itself like a supplement store. Sourcing, dosing, "protocols" all of it sits two taps away, located in any influencers bio. There's no gap anymore between 'I feel behind' and 'I have a vial in my hand', and the gap was the only thing that used to protect anyone. A 16-year-old can go from insecurity to injection in an afternoon, and nothing in the chain is built to slow him down, because every party in it profits from him not slowing down.

parents on this forum: Monitor what your kid is watching. I know how that lands on a board like this. But most of us are enhanced, or deep into lifting, or both, which means we are exactly the households where this content is one tap from your son's or even daughter's feed. You're constantly one search from your own browsing history bleeding into his recommendations. The overlap isn't theoretical. The algorithm doesn't firewall your interests from his account on the same WiFi, the same brand affinities, the same explore page. Thankfully, you're also one of the few parents equipped to actually recognize what he's looking at if you're in this, reading this, YOU ARE AT THE HIGHEST RISK, the pipeline is closer to your kid than to almost anyone else's you know what a fake natty looks like, you know what a bad injection site looks like, you know "blasting" isn't a video game. you have to use that. You're not the clueless parent in this scenario; you're the one person in the house who can read the feed's intentions.

Knowing that: I'm not telling anyone to throw their children's phones in the ocean (though these days it might be the best option), or pretend the downsides of what we do don't exist. I'm saying the implications of an algorithm raising your child's sense of his own body are too dire to leave unsupervised. Have an idea of his accounts. Look at his explore page sometime. Notice if he goes quiet and lean and obsessive in a way that doesn't track with just discovering the gym. The conversation you have at 15 is the one that doesn't have to happen at the endocrinologist's at 22

be the friction!

Everything above is framed around gear, FFMI, a teenage boy, because that's what I lived in and can speak to honestly. But the algorithm doesn't care about sex. The same engine that points a 16-year-old at shredded 19-year-olds points his sister at filtered faces, edited waists, and whatever the "look" is supposed to be. The mechanism is identical: find the most insecure person in the room, hold them with a moving goalpost, sell them the fix. What's changed on the male side is the volume. The spike in guys getting caught in this tracks almost exactly with the rise of "looksmaxxing", the feed found a new vein and started mining it, jawlines and body fat and "mogging" and all of it, and suddenly boys are getting the treatment girls have been getting for twenty years. I'll be straight about: as a man, I don't have the lived insight into the other side of this that I have into mine. I can read an injection site. I can't read what a beauty filter does to a 14-year-old over three years. But I'd bet it's at least as severe, and probably more normalized.

I have no final words and no way to predict where this goes. I don't know, and that's exactly what scares me. I just hope I'm not alone in that.
https://imgur.com/a/Mydf7rv