[HN Gopher] Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on so...
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Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media
Author : Teever
Score : 705 points
Date : 2026-01-31 17:06 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (yle.fi)
(TXT) w3m dump (yle.fi)
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| " _FISTA has taken advantage of the law change, brought in last
| August, which allows schools to restrict or completely ban the
| use of mobile phones during school hours._ "
|
| I find it interesting that a law change was needed to _allow_
| schools to do this.
| amelius wrote:
| Yeah if in the 80s they had to change a law to prevent children
| from taking their TV to school, everybody would be scratching
| their heads.
| sham1 wrote:
| Students do have rights - and indeed also property rights -
| here. Of course, when in class the students could be asked to
| bring their phones to the front and be given them back
| afterwards, but without the law, the use of phones couldn't be
| restricted during breaks etc. Thus the new law which can make
| the restrictions even more severe during school hours.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Of course people have rights... the point is that schools
| seem not allowed to set their own rules.
|
| The school my children went to in the UK has had a no phone
| policy for many years: phones must be off and kept in the
| pupils' bags. No need for a law change...
|
| I think this is about approach to regulation and flexibility.
| In general being too restrictive about what is allowed makes
| things inflexible and poor at adapting.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Students don't have many rights when it comes to what you can
| bring to or do at school. We were prohibited from wearing
| certain styles of clothes, hats, couldn't even chew gum in
| class. Pretty much anything that could be called disruptive,
| damaging, or dangerous was banned. I'm not sure how phones
| ever were considered acceptable in the first place. Even in
| the pre-smartphone days, SMS was a huge distraction.
| machomaster wrote:
| Phone is a personal item. It doesn't disrupt anything by
| itself.
|
| If a kid is using it during the class, then it is
| disrupting, but that can be dealt old-school way without
| the overall phone ban. If a kid starts stabbing others with
| a pencil, it will have to be dealt with, without the need
| for a pencil ban.
|
| The phone disruption happens to the kids themselves and
| during the breaks (their free time).
| alkonaut wrote:
| Not sure if the law is required to just make the rule banning
| phones or if the law is what's needed to enforce it (e.g take
| kids' phones and not return them until end of day). The latter
| would make some sense at least.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| The headline is missing an important "looks to". Politicians and
| public opinion seem to be in favour.
|
| > Finland looks to end "uncontrolled human experiment" with
| Australia-style ban on social media
| mjevans wrote:
| I'm fine with this, as long as they DO NOT require any form of ID
| or 'age' verification.
|
| Instead this should be attacked from the profit side, by banning
| any form of advertising which might target children. If there's
| no profit to be made in servicing said demographic and a law
| requesting at least end user 'agreement' that they are an adult,
| this should be sufficient.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Who decides whether an ad is targeting children or not?
|
| I'm not playing devil's advocate, I'm curious what the SOTA is
| for ad moderation. I'm sure it's relatively easy to tell a
| kid's toy ad from adult ones like alcohol, but how do you
| differentiate toy ads targeting parents vs toy ads targeting
| kids?
| joe_mamba wrote:
| _> Who decides whether an ad is targeting children or not?_
|
| Much simpler than that, you just ban all targeted ads full
| stop end of story. The ad-funded internet existed in the 90s
| before ad targeting was a thing.
|
| You went on a car forum, you'd get ads about car parts. You
| went on a PC forum, you'd get ads about PC parts. Pretty
| simple stuff that didn't need to know your age, gender,
| political affiliation, ovulation status, etc so it's not like
| the web will go bust without ad targeting.
|
| Targeted ads are exploitative and manipulative, and a crime
| against humanity, or at least on society.
| majormajor wrote:
| None of that attacks the motivation of FB to look the other
| way to kids clicking the "I'm an adult" button and
| pocketing money from advertisers buying un-targeted ads for
| snacks, clothes, makeup, computers/gaming, and a million
| other things that are equally as aimed at kids as they are
| at anyone else.
|
| (Remember how many kids bought car magazines before they
| even had drivers' licenses? Advertising has never been "oh,
| ads for things adults will buy will be completely boring to
| children.")
| qgin wrote:
| Honestly this is better than covering half of every website
| with a cookie banner that very few people understand.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Ads and media are generally exploitative and manipulative,
| even if not targeted specifically at anybody.
|
| 3 years after the nation of Fiji received its first
| television broadcasts in 1995, dieting and disordered
| eating went from unheard of to double digit percentages
| among teenage girls.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/20/world/study-finds-tv-
| alte...
|
| > Before 1995, Dr. Becker said, there was little talk of
| dieting in Fiji. ''The idea of calories was very foreign to
| them.'' But in the 1998 survey, 69 percent said that at
| some time they had been on a diet. In fact, preliminary
| data suggest more teen-age girls in Fiji diet than their
| American counterparts.
| peyton wrote:
| I mean as of 2011 over half the native women are obese
| [1]. I don't know what to make of it other than that's a
| lot. Dr. Anne Becker may be really into preserving
| traditional Fijian culture or whatever but it sounds like
| some of the local girls don't want to anymore.
|
| [1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26201444/
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The introduction of body shaming media vs. actually
| improving obesity rates is pretty poorly correlated.
| Introducing anorexia, bulimia, and now bigorexia to a
| population is probably neutral or net negative.
|
| If it wasn't, you would have expected those rates to
| decline after the introduction of media informing people.
| potatototoo99 wrote:
| I don't know, it works in Japan.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| People will comment all day on the ethics and legality of
| advertising yet they never seem to stop and think _how_
| ads even work. Ads work primarily through increasing the
| subconscious familiarity over a competitor product's
| subconscious familiarity. The vast majority of ads are
| meant to influence you through completely unconscious
| processes. The "get to know a product you didn't know
| about before" part likely doesn't even account for %1 of
| advertising. If the reverse was true, you would never see
| a single ad of Coca-Cola since everybody on the planet
| knows about it already.
|
| It boggles my mind to no end that today's society
| collectively accepts literally being manipulated against
| their free will. See the post
| https://hackernoon.com/nobody-is-immune-to-
| ads-7142a4245c2c
| joe_mamba wrote:
| It's not as binary as in all forms of advertising are
| equally evil. As much as manipulative as traditional
| media advertising was/is, targeted advertising is easily
| orders of magnitude worse, and a good place for
| regulation to start if we wish to improve anything.
| behringer wrote:
| We should ban all ads.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Since platforms know the users age, any ad shown to them
| should be considered as such.
|
| So basically, no ads on underage accounts at all should be
| the norm.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Without age verification this is obviously an unenforceable
| ban... I think Finland already has schemes for age
| verification.
| k__ wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| Zero knowledge proof and you're good to go.
| unclad5968 wrote:
| How would a zero knowledge proof of my age work?
| MatteoFrigo wrote:
| Here is one way: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/2010
|
| Our (Google) implementation:
| https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk
|
| An independent implementation by the Internet Security
| Research Group: https://github.com/abetterinternet/zk-
| cred-longfellow Still being developed but already
| interoperable with ours.
|
| European age verification app:
| https://ageverification.dev/av-doc-technical-
| specification/d...
| Aurornis wrote:
| That's not how ID checking works, though.
|
| A key part of ID verification laws is that you're
| confirming the ID presented also belongs to the user.
|
| They can't just check for "This person currently has an
| adult ID in their possession" and nothing more, otherwise
| one kid at school would borrow their older brothers' ID and
| then use it to register all of their friends' accounts one
| day.
| tzs wrote:
| You tie it cryptographically to their phone with keys in
| the phone's hardware security module. This doesn't stop
| sharing of ID but it makes it much more inconvenient.
| Aurornis wrote:
| And I access the website from my computer how?
|
| Why would you invite a technology that by definition
| makes websites accessible only via phones? These social
| media age verification laws are inevitably going to hit
| sites you use, too.
| tzs wrote:
| > And I access the website from my computer how?
|
| By cross device authentication, such as by scanning a QR
| code displayed on the computer from your phone. Nearly
| all these laws or proposed laws only require verification
| on account creation and maybe an occasional re-
| verification. They don't require it on every login.
|
| > Why would you invite a technology that by definition
| makes websites accessible only via phones?
|
| In most or all of the countries proposing age
| verification phone use is extremely high. In Finland it
| is nearly 100% for people over 15 and not retired. It is
| around 96% for retired people.
|
| Social media use is heavily skewed toward people under
| retirement age, which is were mobile use is highest. Even
| Facebook which many dismiss as the old folk's social
| media has about 92% of their users under 65. 98.5% of
| their users use it from mobile devices (82% use it
| exclusively from mobile).
|
| This all suggests it will only be a very small fraction
| of people that use social media from desktops and do not
| have a mobile phone they could use for the initial
| verification or re-verification.
|
| I haven't seen any country proposing to make mobile the
| _only_ way to do age verification. They all are including
| methods that work without a phone, although a phone can
| give much better privacy and security assurances. (I don
| 't know if any country has considered this but another
| good option would be to allow accounts that have existed
| longer than some threshold to skip verification. That
| would probably cover most of those elderly users without
| a smartphone).
| sensanaty wrote:
| DigID in the Netherlands works exactly as described here,
| the keys live on your device and are linked to your
| physical ID by scanning your ID with your phone's NFC
| scanner (or manually entering the details if your device
| doesn't have NFC).
|
| To login to say your healthcare provider's website, you
| enter a randomly-generated 4 letter keycode provided by
| DigID into the website (it's more of an OAuth flow, so
| you're actually entering it into the DigID website
| itself). You then get a QR code you scan, DigID shows you
| the details of who's trying to access your DigID, you
| then click login and you get redirected to the page.
|
| It takes literally 20 seconds, at most, it's really not
| that inconvenient and the way DigID works, the website
| gets nothing but the bare minimum of info about you, such
| as your DigID ID, >18yo? And that's basically it.
| machomaster wrote:
| 1. Make it illegal and punish people. 2. Have a certain
| limit (like 5) on virtual ids one person can register.
| Allow to withdraw consent and close virtual ids.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 1. Make it illegal and punish people.
|
| Which you will prove how? With no record of which ID was
| used and with the person who used it being under 18 by
| necessity, this means there would be no evidence to even
| punish anyone old enough to be punished.
|
| > 2. Have a certain limit (like 5) on virtual ids one
| person can register. Allow to withdraw consent and close
| virtual ids.
|
| If the ID is only checked in a zero-knowledge way to
| register accounts, you don't even need multiple IDs. You
| just need access to one, which can be used a million
| times.
|
| All of the schemes to check if it's being used multiple
| times start exposing more info or requiring a central
| party to manage. We start sliding down the slope of
| having the government manage ID checking centrally, which
| conveniently gives them a way to check which people are
| accessing which services.
| machomaster wrote:
| Mostly it's enough to have "if a minor gets caught, he
| will be punished". Similar with the alcohol, except that
| alcohol consumption is short in duration, while usage of
| social media is constant, making it much more likely to
| be caught.
|
| In this kind of case, the liability should clearly start
| before 18. Solicitations/attempts should be punishable as
| well. Punishment should also be "retroactive" - "oh, you
| are 20, but have been using this account for 10 years?
| Smack!" with consistency and public publicity/propaganda.
|
| A much greater punishment should be done towards the
| adult who allowed it.
|
| In a similar way as buying alcohol or drugs for minors.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Any kind of zero knowledge verification should be ok.
|
| But with minors it often goes a long way to just make the law.
| It's a good instruction to parents who should be able to
| control this. Laws on bike helmets for minors are followed
| nearly 100% not because they are enforced by authorities but
| because the law gives parents guidance.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| There is no such thing in practice.
|
| Anything with zero knowledge is never going to be considered
| robust enough by a government. Zero knowledge protocols
| really have no functional revocation mechanism.
| pydry wrote:
| expiry
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| (Without accepting the premise that it should be acceptable
| to have to provide _any_ kind of proof...)
|
| > Zero knowledge protocols really have no functional
| revocation mechanism.
|
| None would be needed, you (sadly) only age in one
| direction, so valid proof would never become invalid proof.
| mrob wrote:
| >valid proof would never become invalid proof
|
| Somebody can give their proof of age to another person.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| And? Presentation of someone else's valid credentials is
| not fixable by any privacy-preserving mechanism. You can
| set an expiration date in order to rotate them, and they
| can be fast-rotating.
|
| In any case, it's a moot point: the correct amount of
| required identification is zero.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > Presentation of someone else's valid credentials is not
| fixable by any privacy-preserving mechanism.
|
| And that is precisely why governments will never
| implement a privacy-preserving mechanism, which is
| exactly my point.
|
| Compromised tokens would be trivially google-able within
| a day otherwise.
| tzs wrote:
| The EU has been working on a zero knowledge system as part
| of the EU Digital Identity Wallet project for a few years
| now. It is currently undergoing large scale field tests in
| several countries with expected release late this year. All
| member states are required to provide at least one free
| secure interoperable implementation to their citizens, and
| regulated industries such as banks and telecoms, are
| required to accept it. If a member state passes a law
| requiring age verification on social media it must include
| the EU Digital Identity Wallet as one of the verification
| methods the site must support.
|
| What was that about no government would consider zero
| knowledge to be robust enough?
| nate_meurer wrote:
| Which of these governments do you trust? The same
| governments, mind you, that are working diligently to end
| anonymity on the Internet.
| Fervicus wrote:
| Same EU that wants to ban encryption?
| Mindwipe wrote:
| The EU Digital Identity Wallet isn't zero knowledge. I
| mean it's just not. It relies on Google Play Integrity
| Attestation on Android and the iOS equivalent on Apple
| devices because those give it a revocation mechanism, and
| those aren't zero knowledge.
|
| https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-
| technic...
|
| It says that it wants to be zero knowledge, but it has no
| zero knowledge implementation and no plan of how it even
| possibly could be zero knowledge, and it never will
| precisely because that is incompatible with the
| revocation requirements set down by the EU.
| peyton wrote:
| Bike helmets are for safety but reading the article the ban
| is more for some kind of societal change. I don't know if
| it's really comparable.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I think parent's _want_ to keep kids in helmets and away
| from social media. But the pressure is some times high when
| Joe can ride without helmet, or can use TikTok. A law
| really helped the bike helmet thing at least. That they are
| fundamentally different I think doesn't matter since the
| peer pressure thing and what parents want is the same.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I disagree, we should have age verification but maybe it can be
| done in a mostly anonymous way like a central arbiter of
| identity from the government or something.
| salawat wrote:
| That's exactly the opposite of anonymous. You cannot have
| anonymity & age verification that actually guarantees
| anything. It's a contradiction. Either the chain exists, or
| it doesn't.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Are you saying it would be impossible to have a service
| where the site (social media, say) would issue some sort of
| random token and ask me to sign it using a centralized ID
| service. Then I log in to the centralized id service and
| use it to sign the random token and bring it back to the
| service.
|
| The centralized service see who I am, but not what I'm
| proving my age for. The social media or other site see that
| I have signed their token so would have the appropriate
| age, but not who I am.
|
| What's impossible about this?
| tzs wrote:
| The problem with that is if someone gets a hold of the
| logs from both the centralized service and the social
| media site they can compare timestamps and may be able to
| match them up.
|
| Most people will be doing the whole process (site gives
| token, person gets token signed, person returns token) as
| quickly as possible which limits the candidates for a
| match. Worse, if the central service is compromised and
| wants to make it easier for log matching to identify
| people they could purposefully introduce delays which
| would make it easier to distinguish people.
|
| Most people will use the same IP address through the
| verification process which would really make it easy.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| This is no different from VPN providers. Maybe have the
| central authority keep no logs just like VPN companies.
| We already have government agencies that do that for
| instance the agency that handles text to speech phone
| calls for deaf people. Alternatively use a VPN to sign
| the token.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Yes, timestamp comparison will be possible. I don't think
| there is a reasonable way around it? And authentication
| on to someone else is also unavoidable with reasonable
| privacy. I think a system with both of those drawbacks is
| still preferable to most other options.
| tzs wrote:
| The way most proposals that want to support age
| verification (or verification of other things from a
| typical ID such as country) without disallowing anonymous
| users is to involve secure hardware.
|
| Briefly, someone (probably your goverment) issues a
| digital copy of your ID cryptographically tied to a key
| in a hardware security module you provide. There is a
| protocol that can be used to demonstrate to a site that
| you have such an ID and that you can perform operations
| on it using that key, and can be used to disclose
| anything from the ID that you wish to disclose (e.g.,
| what country you are in, or that your birthday on the ID
| is at least 18 years in the past) without disclosing any
| other information from the ID.
|
| This avoids the timestamp problem because the issuer of
| the ID is not involved in verifying things from the ID.
| They have no idea when or how often people are using
| their IDs.
|
| So far people working on these systems are using smart
| phones as the secure hardware with the keys locked behind
| biometrics. Google's made on open source library for
| implementing such systems, the EU has one nearing release
| after several years of development, and I believe Apple's
| new ID storage in Wallet supports such a system.
|
| The EU has said that they plan to add support for
| security devices other than smart phones, such as stand
| alone security keys or smart cards.
| machomaster wrote:
| Just let people freely register as many virtual ids as
| possible (and confirm with the real id). Then use that
| virtual ids to register in actual services.
|
| This allows anonymity, security (no timestamps
| comparison), freedom of speech and expression (to have
| independent accounts not linked to the main virtual id).
| Aurornis wrote:
| > like a central arbiter of identity from the government or
| something
|
| This comes up in every ID thread on Hacker News, usually with
| suggestion that we do it via zero-knowledge cryptographic
| primitives
|
| However, all of those proposals miss the point. These ID
| verification laws aren't simply designed to confirm that
| someone has access to an >= 18yo ID. They are _identity_
| verification to try to confirm that the person presenting the
| ID is the same person who is using the site.
|
| This concept is obvious with in-person ID checks: You can't
| go to the liquor store and show them any random ID, they have
| to check that it's your ID.
|
| For some reason when we talk about internet ID verification
| that part is forgotten and we get these proposals to use
| cryptographic primitives to anonymously check something
| without linking the person to the ID. It doesn't work, and
| doesn't satisfy the way these laws are usually written.
|
| I'm also surprised that people of this website even think it
| might work in the first place. Did everyone forget what it's
| like to be a kid trying to out-maneuver rules to access
| something? How long do you think it would take before the
| first enterprising kid figures out that if they can get
| access to their mom or older brother's ID, they can charge
| their friends $5 to use it for this totally anonymous one-
| time cryptographic ID check for their social media accounts?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| These ID verification laws aren't simply designed to
| confirm that someone has access to an >= 18yo ID. They are
| identity verification to try to confirm that the person
| presenting the ID is the same person who is using the site.
|
| This makes no sense. This is exactly like asking someone
| older to buy you beer. Will there be rule breakers? Sure
| but they will be in the overwhelming minority.
| pibaker wrote:
| In other words, total death of anonymity on the internet.
|
| Don't you love having your government name tied to every
| single word you say online, forever, potentially publicly
| accessible if someone configured mongodb wrong?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Different token every time. If something leaks then only
| the private tokens are leaked. You then have to break
| every site you visited to link them to you individually.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > This makes no sense. This is exactly like asking
| someone older to buy you beer.
|
| No, the analogy would be a kid walking into the liquor
| store to order beer with their mom's ID and the system
| allowing you to do it because the store operator isn't
| allowed to look at their face or the name on the ID.
|
| > Will there be rule breakers? Sure but they will be in
| the overwhelming minority.
|
| Some of you have forgotten what it's like to be a kid
| around technology.
|
| Every time the topic of web filtering comes up there is a
| chorus of people declaring it useless because as a kid
| they easily found ways around it, as kids do.
|
| Now extend that analogy to these wishful thinking
| cryptographic ID checks, where you only need to
| circumvent the ID check _literally once ever_ in your
| childhood and your account is approved for good.
|
| It's like if you could buy beer with your mom's ID _once_
| and the liquor store owner couldn't look at the ID or
| your face and then once you did it a single time you
| could access all the beer you wanted.
| kuerbel wrote:
| Instead of banning social media for teenagers, regulate it in
| ways that actively reduce addictive design.
|
| For example: after 15 minutes of short-form content, show an
| unskippable timer every third video, displaying today's, this
| week's, and total watch time. The same principle should apply
| to endless scrolling, make usage visible and interruptible.
|
| Base it on actual screen time. This would protect teenagers and
| benefit adults.
| yoz-y wrote:
| There is still a financial incentive to loop in teenagers that
| would stay on a platform and spend money there later.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| > If there's no profit to be made in servicing said demographic
| and a law requesting at least end user 'agreement' that they
| are an adult, this should be sufficient.
|
| Is it still advertising if an "influencer" takes money on the
| down low to sip a Pepsi not too obviously in the middle of a
| video?
|
| Is it still advertising if an attractive and young person
| provides news that happens to be colored in a way that supports
| the narratives of a particular political faction?
|
| Is it still advertising if you can't prove that a foreign power
| encouraged a popular yoga enthusiast or makeup artist to post
| some whispered ideas that weaken citizens' faith in your
| institutions? Does that foreign power ever care about profit?
|
| Advertising and propaganda love to explore the grey spaces
| around definitions, so your bans will end up being a whack-a-
| mole game. Cutting off kids with an ID check is much easier.
| Implementing age verification the Apple way would even protect
| privacy by simply registering whether Apple can attest that the
| user is over or under the age limit, without handing the ID
| over to third parties.
| prussia wrote:
| There's no profit for the _platform_. As of now, both the
| "influencer" and platform are aligned in that they want
| children to consume more slop. If the platform doesn't have
| any incentive anymore, maybe most of those "influencers" will
| fall away, if the algorithm starts deprioritising content
| geared toward children. As you say, policing the
| "influencers" is difficult, but at least it is quite easy and
| simple to target the platform. Better than nothing.
| quotemstr wrote:
| You can tell these proposals are made in bad faith because we
| _can_ do age verification in an anonymous way using zero-
| knowledge proofs but regulators demand linkable IDs instead.
|
| It's not about protecting the kids. It's about managing the
| public's information diet. The latter is not a legitimate
| function of any state.
| ozgung wrote:
| The goal is to ban anonymous internet for everyone. You won't
| be able to post anything without verifying your id. All these
| similar efforts in different countries seem coordinated and
| synchronous, suddenly after 35 years since the advent of the
| web.
| sensanaty wrote:
| In the Netherlands we already have zero-knowledge ID
| verification through DigID, I'd be amazed if the Nordics
| didn't have the same system available to its citizens.
| sigwinch wrote:
| However that's not anonymous. Ministry of Interior is
| alerted with your identity each time you use it.
| throwawayk7h wrote:
| Why not device-side headers? Kids' devices should always
| include a header saying "I'm a kid, don't show me adult
| content.
| digiown wrote:
| I secretly wish it would use a verification scheme that's so
| invasive/annoying, that even adults would stop using it anyway.
| bluescrn wrote:
| IMHO the main point of these schemes is to make it hard for
| adults to use social media somewhat-anonyously. So the
| government can more easily identify those posting 'prohibited
| speech'.
|
| If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the worst
| of the Internet, there'd have been more of a crackdown on porn,
| gore, etc long before social media became such a big problem.
| And smartphones would have never been allowed in schools.
| bamboozled wrote:
| What major revolutions or important political shifts have
| occurred from people anonymously shitposting on Reddit or
| Facebook ?
| bluescrn wrote:
| The online right talk about 'the great meme war' that led
| to the 2016 election of Trump.
|
| Seems pretty clear that social media is radicalising people
| at both ends of the political spectrum, and it's not
| surprising that governments would want to restrict/police
| it by trying to criminalise 'hate'/'misinformation' and
| taking away the shield of anonymity.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Donald Trump?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| None. Almost by definition, the folks who satisfy
| themselves waxing online drive complacency away from real
| action. That doesn't, however, mean they aren't self-
| importantly organized to later support an organized
| movement.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Do you think the current anti-ICE movement would have
| happened without social media? Or Jan 6th, or all the
| Palestine protests, or even the election of Trump?
|
| The US has it's first amendment protections, but other
| countries seem rather more willing to crack down on
| online speech.
| dmurray wrote:
| Why not? The Vietnam War drew plenty of organised
| protesters. The details would be different, but big
| popular actions can still be coordinated through
| traditional media and word of mouth.
|
| Lack of social media didn't prevent the French
| Revolution.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Do you think the current anti-ICE movement would have
| happened without social media?_
|
| Yes. There is a reason Minnesota is effectively resisting
| in a way Los Angeles failed to.
|
| Once you have a movement, social media mobilizes. But if
| you're building a movement, you need footwork and
| commitment. Not profiteers turning your cause into
| clicks.
|
| > _Or Jan 6th, or all the Palestine protests_
|
| Case in point. Support for each of their underlying
| causes dipped with notoriety around their online
| activity.
|
| If you want to drain a movement of effective energy,
| distract it online from its streets.
| thijson wrote:
| I know of one crowd sourced witch hunt on reddit:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Sunil_Tripathi
|
| A lot of the cancel culture is also crowd sourced on
| platforms like these.
| digiown wrote:
| You already basically can't use most mainstream platforms
| anonymously. Try registering a Facebook without a phone
| number (you need to give a passport to get one in most of
| Europe).
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Do children have no phone numbers or do they use their
| parent's?
| digiown wrote:
| You need a passport associated with it, you don't
| necessarily need to be an adult I think. Or the parent's
| is fine. Either way you will have to try quite hard to
| get a FB account not associated with a real life
| identity. And then they'd shadowban you.
| bluescrn wrote:
| In the UK, pay-as-you-go SIMs are widely available. Not
| sure how much information you need to give to
| activate+use one these days, though.
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| Up to a couple years ago you could get them included in a
| PS10 Nokia in Tesco and pay with cash, no ID required.
| haght wrote:
| in my country you don't have to give a phone number to
| register a social media website when i was a kid, i always
| laughed at my internet friends from a neighbouring country,
| because they had to give their id to get one, which is very
| intrusive from the government turns out i was the odd one,
| as most of the world required an id from you
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| I'm very critical of all the schemes proposed but this is
| just a fundamental misconception on your part.
|
| > If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the
| worst of the Internet
|
| As with any disease, the impact heavily depends on virality.
|
| The worst the internet has to offer to children, is not the
| gore or porn for the few that look for it (usually
| individually). The worst it does to children is the attention
| algorithm that captures practically everybody.
| pfdietz wrote:
| "But think of the children" has always been the go-to
| excuse for tossing freedom out the window.
| Noaidi wrote:
| So in this case, do we just stop thinking about the
| children in totality?
| slavik81 wrote:
| If manipulative algorithm are the problem, then perhaps
| we should consider regulations that would protect
| everyone.
| XorNot wrote:
| Exactly. The problem is no one wants to address that
| maybe some of these business models just need to go
| extinct.
|
| Like maybe ad supported infinite feeds _can 't_ be done
| in a socially responsible way and just need to be banned.
| If that takes down or substantially limits certain web
| service sizes...so be it.
| rudhdb773b wrote:
| In the context of government legislation on personal
| behavior, yes.
|
| Parents should be the ones setting up rules for their
| children.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| While I agree with this, I also find that the "but think
| of the children" ironic retort also usually ignores the
| very real problems that technology can cause children
| (and society at large). In this issue in particular, if
| banning social media for children makes it less likely
| for adults to use it, I see it as pretty much a win-win.
| rudhdb773b wrote:
| Would you also want the government to ban junk food and
| recreational drugs? What about unprotected premarital
| sex?
|
| I'd much rather live in a society with personal freedoms
| than a "healthier" one with government mandates on
| personal behavior.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Literally every society mandates tons of restrictions
| _for children_ , because we understand that children
| aren't yet developed enough to be able to understand the
| full consequences of personal freedoms.
| rudhdb773b wrote:
| I agree that children need restrictions, but that's the
| role of their parents, not the government.
| GreenWatermelon wrote:
| Should it also be the Role of parents to prevent their
| children from being kidnapped by crime syndicates? Maybe
| we should also abolish schools because it should be the
| parent's role to educate their children.
|
| This individualistic line of thinking is downright
| insane. It's preposterous. We live in a fucking society,
| no one can do anything on their own. For God's sake
| parent's shouldn't be expected to fight alone against
| MULTI-FUCKING TRILLION CORPORATIONS.
|
| Fat load of help all that anti-regulation talk did when
| the current US Gov can just get all the data it wants
| from those megacorps.
|
| Yeah let's also abolish laws preventing sale of tobacco
| and alcohol to children. This will surely lead to a
| prosperous national.
|
| No wonder the US is collapsing as we speak.
| rudhdb773b wrote:
| > No wonder the US is collapsing as we speak.
|
| If you look at the longterm trend in government intrusion
| into our personal lives, you'll see it's largely
| increasing, so if anything, the cause of any "collapse"
| would be the opposite of what you're purporting.
| expedition32 wrote:
| Children are the survival of the species our DNA wires us
| to to protect them.
| machomaster wrote:
| That's why people need to be especially careful when
| others try to use such effective methods of manipulation.
| riffraff wrote:
| 90% of the people that spout racism, conspiracy theories,
| threaten people, etc.. on social networks use their real name
| and login with their phone number, there's no need to ask the
| social networks to get ID cards, if you are the government.
| phtrivier wrote:
| I really doubt bots are using legitimate IDs.
|
| The target for those age verification schemes (beyond
| actually preventing the kids' brains from being rotten by
| American ad supported skinner boxes) is probably to make
| schemes like IRA [1] just slightly more complicated. (I
| said "more complicated", I did not say "impossible" - I
| very much know that bot factories will find their ways
| around any kind of verification ; part of being on the
| defensive side of a conflict is about not giving up.)
|
| [1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/19/airbus_sovereign
| _clou...
| riffraff wrote:
| I think GP was concerned with forbidden speech more than
| bots, so solutions differ there.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the
| worst of the Internet, there'd have been more of a crackdown
| on porn, gore, etc long before social media became such a big
| problem. And smartphones would have never been allowed in
| schools.
|
| Where are you from, because all of these things have/are
| being tried for a long time in the US (and, I'd note,
| received significant pushback from civil liberty advocates).
| Heck, TFA itself talks about how this social media ban is
| coming _after_ a ban on phones in schools.
| xixixao wrote:
| Your argument hinges on the assumption that porn and gore
| etc. have worse impact on kids. I don't think there's a
| concensus on that. One might argue that porn and gore could
| have been found in print before the internet, but that social
| media have a more novel impact.
|
| I personally like the theory that most kids problems are
| actually attributable to family issues. That kids in solid
| family environment/upbringing will not be "destroyed" by
| computer games, porn, gore (2 girls 1 cup anyone?), or social
| media. But that's also just a theory.
| mc32 wrote:
| If things in the internet didn't impact kids or people then
| people wouldn't get up in arms about non-PC content, but we
| know many different kinds of people only want thrown own
| kind of content out there and would prefer to limit or ban
| ideas they disagree with.
| okr wrote:
| I do not think it is about seeing certain things, that
| exist in the adult world. That is surely a side effect that
| one wants, though, protecting minors from a world that they
| can not comprehend.
|
| I think it is about algorithms targeting you all the time
| for hours in favour of a company. We see the effects every
| day. No attention span. Instant gratification. The next
| kick.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Gore already has been cracked down on. All the old gore sites
| like Live leak have shut down, Reddit has removed all the
| related subreddits, and governments quickly scrub the
| internet of videos like the New Zealand shooting.
| palata wrote:
| > IMHO the main point of these schemes is to make it hard for
| adults to use social media somewhat-anonyously. So the
| government can more easily identify those posting 'prohibited
| speech'.
|
| We are talking about Finland here, right?
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| "Social media" doesn't just mean Facebook right? It includes
| sites like Hacker News, yeah?
| digiown wrote:
| I'd draw a line using some of these aspects:
|
| - Algorithmic recommendation / "engagement" engineering
|
| - Profit/business model
|
| - Images/Videos
|
| - Real-life identity
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Retweet/repost is a part of your first bullet point, and is
| big in itself. There is a book about the history and
| present of social media from a few years back that calls
| out the retweet function as a major clshift in the viral
| nature of social media and its use to spread (mis)
| information.
| mrweasel wrote:
| The two first I'd get behind, the latter two I just don't
| think matter too much.
|
| Algorithmic, for profit, social media is by far the worst
| technology ever foisted upon humanity. Even most of the
| issues with AI/LLMs become moot if we where to remove
| platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X and to some extend
| YouTube. Removing the ability to spread misinformation and
| fueling anger and device thought would improve society
| massively. Social media allows Russian and Chinese
| governments to effect election, they allow Trump to have an
| actual voice and they allow un-vetted information to reach
| people who are not equipped to deal with it.
|
| It's time to accept that social media was an experiment, it
| could have worked in an uncommercial settings, but overall
| it failed. Humanity is not equipped, mentally, to handle
| algorithmic recommendation and the commercialization of our
| attention.
| petre wrote:
| You'll have bots spreading propaganda in notime if it gets
| succesful even without those. So the 'algorithmic
| recommendation' (aka ads and propaganda) don't even have to
| come from the platform operator.
| pipes wrote:
| One of my main problems with all of this is "what counts as
| social media". It's a stupidly broad term. Email? SMS?
| Forums?
| theptip wrote:
| I think it's pretty easy to write a law that doesn't
| include email and sms. They have no engagement algorithms.
|
| Forums require a little more finesse - but a good starting
| point is distinguishing upvotes from personalized
| engagement-based algorithms.
|
| Basically I don't buy that your concern is a problem in
| practice.
|
| Edited to add - here is the guidance for Australia's law
| for reference: https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-
| us/industry-regulation/soci...
| riffraff wrote:
| the approach australia took is a list of prohibited
| applications. It's not "fair" to a technically minded person,
| but it's a practical alternative, even if it would obviously
| lead to a whack-a-mole situation.
| digiown wrote:
| It works better here than most other types of blacklists,
| since networks take time to build up, and the "value" of
| social media is mostly derived from the fact that you can
| use it to interact with other people, not the software
| itself.
| tartoran wrote:
| No, HN is more like a forum. It doesn't have dark patterns
| and addictive engineering built in, even if it could itself
| be addictive. There 's been functionality built in to limit
| time spent on HN for a long time. Look at noprocrast setting
| for example. Even if HN could be seen as social media it's
| not in the same category of destructive social media a la
| Facebook/Instagram/Tiktok
| SirMaster wrote:
| What about Reddit? What about 4chan?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Yeah, agreed. While there are gray areas in the definition,
| and I can certainly waste an absolute shitload of time on
| HN and Reddit, both of those sites allow anonymity, and
| neither provide user-specific personalization (with Reddit
| you can obviously choose to subscribe to certain
| subreddits, but that's not done for you, and AFAIK everyone
| gets the same view and order of stories and comments). What
| you see in the future is not just inferred from what you
| clicked on in the past, and that for me is the cardinal sin
| of most social networks.
| hiprob wrote:
| Legally, it doesn't matter. You can talk to people? Social
| media it is.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > Legally, it doesn't matter. You can talk to people?
| Social media it is.
|
| No this isn't true at all, it absolutely does matter
| legally. Look at Australia's underage social media ban.
| Twitter was forced to ban children, but Bluesky was not
| despite being the platforms being effectively the same.
| Roblox and Discord, no bans despite being an extremely
| common place for young people to socialize.
| quotemstr wrote:
| There was no objective basis for Australia whitelisting
| BlueSky. Exempting it from the rules that govern social
| media built just like it goes to show you that these
| social media bans aren't about protecting the youth, but
| stopping the spread of ideas the censors find
| inconvenient.
| beloch wrote:
| HN has upvotes, downvotes, and people chasing them for
| exposure, just like Reddit. The biggest difference is the
| lack of subs. Everything goes into the same category so you
| can't have highly specialized echo chambers. The moderators
| also seem to be a touch more professional.
|
| HN is absolutely social media and it does have _some_ of
| the dark patterns that plague other platforms. They 're
| just more reigned in. A change in moderation policy or new
| moderators could destroy this site in a week.
|
| I personally don't think kids need to be banned from
| participating here. However, the law is often a blunt
| instrument and it's probably better to get kids off of
| Facebook _and_ HN if distinctions cannot be made.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Can you define, in a precise and actionable way, the
| specific things that make X social media and this web site
| not? "More like a forum" might be clear in your head, but
| it's not a test the system can apply in an objective way.
| digiown wrote:
| The relative lack of dark patterns is true, but the more
| distinguishing feature is that HN is boring to the majority
| of people, and isn't destructive because not using it
| doesn't make you excluded from society, and hence it has
| little leverage on the users. If HN pulls the
| enshittification trick, a much bigger portion of people
| will just stop using it.
|
| I'll try to convert it into a metric: measure the number of
| involuntary users via the comments saying "I hate this
| website". You rarely see people here saying HN is bad to
| the point of being a net negative on them, for example, but
| this is true of all normie sites, including reddit.
| calpaterson wrote:
| Finland has a whole national ID system, all interlinked. They
| aren't going to be scanning faces to implement this stuff here
| - and anyway the government here already knows what you look
| like.
| pembrook wrote:
| Do you not see the irony of posting this on a social media site
| (hacker news), given you're one of the users?
|
| I guess self-hatred is one of the motivating vectors of
| authoritarianism.
|
| Would you also secretly like it if daddy government was always
| watching you on camera and triggered your shock collar every
| time you reached for a candy bar?
| GreenWatermelon wrote:
| Hackernews is not social media. Just no. Unless the term os
| literally meaningless in which case my Company's slack ks
| social media.
| pembrook wrote:
| You may believe this, but the classification of what
| qualifies as 'social media' won't be up to you when you
| hand over this level of power to government. If Reddit is
| social media so is this site, they are literally the same
| thing.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| You are describing 4chan
| digiown wrote:
| That's good...? I don't have to browse 4chan to interact with
| local groups, and I hope I won't have to browse Facebook
| either.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I'm eternally grateful that the social media network that I was
| part of throughout my teenage years abruptly disappeared from the
| internet, never to come back again.
|
| Some say it was a technical failure during migration when the
| company was trying to pivot to file hosting, but it's impossible
| to verify.
|
| Perhaps these bans are a blessing in disguise and future
| generations will be happy to not have their most awkward stage of
| life available forever, to everyone, in detail.
| beAbU wrote:
| Are you referring to MySpace?
|
| My highschool band had tracks and videos of live performances
| in the school hall on there that is forever lost and I'm still
| bitter about it.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| How is MySpace even comparable to today's social media? AFAIK
| MySpace wasn't agoritmycally driven to keep you addicted like
| TikTok or Instagram do. MySpace was just you and your friends
| from school competing on whose page is the tackiest.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| Yes, very different. A good example of we should not lump
| all platforms together.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I am not referring to MySpace. It was a local-to-my-country
| social network which was outcompeted by another local-to-my-
| country social network, which in turn gave way to Facebook.
|
| I was aware of the existence of MySpace at the time, but it
| never had mainstream adoption locally. We also had not one
| but two mainstream messaging apps and hardly anyone was using
| MSN.
|
| Come to think of it, Facebook killed a lot of that homegrown
| tech.
| zppln wrote:
| Early Facebook was inferior to local social networks in
| many ways. The real killer feature was convincing people to
| de-anonymize themselves on the internet.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Early facebook you weren't really de anonymized like we
| consider today. For the simple fact that literally
| everyone you were friends with on that site were people
| you knew in real life. Yes you were "on the internet" but
| in this hyperlocal silo of real life connections entirely
| removed from the greater whole.
|
| That is until they opened the site to boomers and then
| advertisers chasing their money.
| q3k wrote:
| My guess: grono.net :)
| miduil wrote:
| Yeah because soup.io (Blogspam Link today) simply lost
| its data because they didn't migrate and the hard drive
| crashed.
| Tade0 wrote:
| That's what killed them? I thought it was just
| financially unsustainable.
| miduil wrote:
| Platform was dying for years before it was finally
| financially interoperable, before that they've lost over
| a year worth of contents due to some corrupted hardware.
| I can't exactly remember for sure that this happened
| during a migration, but the corruption of the main
| database was the main cause to lose that data.
|
| In the end, there was just not enough money to justify
| keeping it alive.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Yeah...
|
| Nasza-klasa of course had its moments, but the flavour of
| cringe grono enabled was truly unique.
|
| All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in
| rain.
|
| Unless of course you specifically know a guy who knows a
| guy. Otherwise I think we're safe.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| How is that MySpace's fault?
|
| Who uploaded the videos then deleted the originals.
| beAbU wrote:
| My 15 year old bandmate who had no understanding of data
| redundancy or the 1-2-3 backup method, back in 2005.
|
| I'm not blaming anyone here.
| bnastic wrote:
| > technical failure during migration
|
| Showing my age when the first thing that came to mind was ' but
| ma.gnolia was more of a social bookmarking...'
| stubish wrote:
| A couple of decades ago, a politically active family I knew was
| grooming their child to be a future Prime Minister. While the
| poor kid had amazing privilege that other kids could only dream
| of, one strict rule was no Facebook or similar. Not even
| appearing on friends feeds (friends in a similar social strata,
| so workable). They could see that nobody would be getting
| elected to positions of power with such a documented past. Now
| days you of course hire someone to maintain a fake profile.
| throwaway613746 wrote:
| I just wish this was possible somehow without essentially making
| corporate mass-surveillance a requirement.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Horse. Barn. Gone.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Only if we give up. Keep fighting surveillance and control
| mechanisms.
| zhug3 wrote:
| The phrase "uncontrolled human experiment" is doing interesting
| rhetorical work here. It frames the status quo as the experiment
| and regulation as the control--when historically it's been the
| reverse.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I'd say status quo is before social media as that's where most
| childhoods have happened. Targeting children with social media
| is definitely a new thing and still an experiment since those
| poor souls that had their lives surveilled by Meta are just
| coming of age and we're just learning about the damages.
| pembrook wrote:
| The fact that you're the only one calling this out is quite
| frankly alarming.
|
| It's one of the most authoritarian statements I've ever heard
| from a western government. And just because its the trendy
| moral panic of the day, everybody is cheering it on.
|
| Anything where we allow people free will is by definition an
| "uncontrolled human experiment" and the basis of any free
| society.
|
| Should we also end the "uncontrolled human experiment" of
| allowing people to have private money and make their own
| purchase decisions? Should we end the "uncontrolled human
| experiment" of allowing people to select their own romantic
| partners?
| Wilder7977 wrote:
| You mention free will, but it would be an interesting
| conversation to discuss how much free will there is when
| people fight, without knowing it, against psychological
| manipulation, addition creation, all crafted with plenty of
| money and research. Especially when this people are young
| ones. Can the behavior still be called free will when you get
| hooked to mechanisms specifically designed to exploit humans
| in this way?
| pembrook wrote:
| Your rebuttal is based on the assumption that social media
| is uniquely manipulative, addictive and designed by a
| secret evil cabal of geniuses with top hats.
|
| This is a media narrative and a popular meme, but it is not
| reality when looking at the actual studies:
|
| [1] Effects of reducing social media use are small and
| inconsistent: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article
| /pii/S266656032...
|
| [2] Belief in "Social media addiction" is wholly explained
| by media framing and not an actual addiction:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-27053-2
|
| [3] No causal link between time spent on social media and
| mental health harm:
| https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-
| media-t...
|
| The idea that social media is uniquely bad is simply the
| same moral panic that comes up every time we encounter
| something new. The truth is every person, company and
| government engages in "psychological manipulation" when
| trying to get what they want, including the children
| themselves.
|
| Since other children engage in psychological manipulation
| with each other at school, should we ban schools to protect
| kids from it? Since the government engages in psychological
| manipulation with its policies and agendas (all backed by
| billions of dollars), should we ban government policy-
| making for children?
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| Maybe it's time to start auditing social network platforms and
| disallow certain practices.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Is it really so controversial to ban it entirely? We ban heroin
| and other hard drugs.
|
| I think most people are better off, and have a more nuanced view
| of reality if the only news they get is local. Or the updates
| from people they know always in person.
| para_parolu wrote:
| Compare it to marijuanna instead. Then it's on the same level
| of controversy.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| Social media _is not_ a hard drug.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| What is the definition of a hard drug?
| Zigurd wrote:
| "Hard drug" is a loaded term. Nicotine is more addictive than
| some "hard drugs." That big VC funded vape maker couldn't
| stay away from child friendly marketing.
| jbm wrote:
| I remember reading the Montreal Gazette as a kid, with their
| lopsided takes on various issues (local and international) as a
| result of their "organic local" writers. The local talk radio
| (CJAD) was worse.
|
| I much prefer Youtube videos and international media from
| multiple viewpoints to that world.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| You are downvoted, but you are totally right. Humans are not
| meant to cry daily over stuff that happens half a world away,
| or be exposed to a thousand new strangers every day. But thanks
| to internet, your mom and aunt can have an endless fuel to
| their various anxieties and your daughter can have eating
| disorders comparing herself to celebrities.
|
| Bring a pre-internet pre-24/7 TV person to present day and
| they'll spot the problem straight away. _Amusing Ourselves To
| Death_ was written in reaction to the societal changes brought
| by the TV. What about the impact of Internet news, and
| Facebook, and Tiktok?
| logicchains wrote:
| >You are downvoted, but you are totally right. Humans are not
| meant to cry daily over stuff that happens half a world away
|
| You mean humans are not meant to learn about the atrocities
| their government is funding half a world away.
| SkipperCat wrote:
| Social media is not designed to keep you informed. Its
| designed to keep you engaged because that helps them sell
| ads. And the best way to keep you engaged is to keep you
| enraged. I've seen in the US how social media has been used
| push false narratives, hate and other falsehoods. Its
| toxic.
|
| If you really want to stay informed, there are plenty of
| newspapers, NGOs and other organizations out there
| reporting the truth.
| sunaookami wrote:
| >If you really want to stay informed, there are plenty of
| newspapers, NGOs and other organizations out there
| reporting the truth.
|
| And they don't report on that kind of stuff because they
| either support it themselves or are indirectly funded by
| the government.
| logicchains wrote:
| >I've seen in the US how social media has been used push
| false narratives, hate and other falsehoods. Its toxic.
|
| And for decades before that mainstream media was used to
| push false narratives with absolutely no alternatives. Or
| have you forgotten about the Iraq War?
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| No, governments are not meant to be able to fund atrocities
| half a world away. Just as your body is not meant to sit at
| a chair and your eyes are not meant to look at a distance
| of 50cm for 8 hours a day.
|
| The entire current human existence right now is at odds
| with human biology and psychology. One has to swim against
| the current just to be physically, mentally and spiritually
| healthy.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| Were our ancestors physically mentally and spiritually
| healthy? When exactly was this?
| wiseowise wrote:
| It's what news made by reputable sources is for.
| drdaeman wrote:
| How do they even define "social media"? Do they just ban kids
| from participating in society using electronic communications? Or
| maintain a stoplist "here's what we consider to be social media"?
| Or what?
|
| I mean, sure, prime examples of what is colloquially called
| "social media" is crapware. I do get the intent.
|
| But I wonder what sort of unintended, unplanned, odd and
| potentially even socially harmful consequences it would possibly
| have.
| riffraff wrote:
| Australia enacted this through a stoplist, but also appears to
| require self-assessment by the services themselves.
|
| https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/soci...
| hiprob wrote:
| Are they going to conduct an uncontrolled human experiment by
| requiring age checks to use the Internet (read: surveillance
| capitalism and Orwellian lack of privacy)?
| robbbbbbbbbbbb wrote:
| No, they'll probably just follow Australia's lead[1] of:
| default allow; algorithmic age estimation; account suspend; ID
| to unblock. Chill.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyp9d3ddqyo.amp
| sunaookami wrote:
| So yes, you will need to show your ID which will connect to
| your account and obviously be used to surveil everything you
| post online. People on HN of all places need to stop being so
| naive.
| robbbbbbbbbbbb wrote:
| If your theory is that this global push by legislators to
| introduce age restrictions is actually a secret Trojan
| horse to harvest government IDs orchestrated by the
| platform owning capitalists...how do you account for the
| fact said capitalists have been desperately lobbying
| against it for years?
| hiprob wrote:
| If it's as flaky as YouTube's age estimation, it's just ID by
| default.
| weberer wrote:
| I think Surveillance Globalism would be a more apt description.
| Which is a hundred times scarier since its coming from the
| government, multiple governments around the world
| simultaneously, and its about control rather than making money
| off you.
| Noaidi wrote:
| Can we be it for adults now? Seriously, can we?
|
| I mean, if it affects a children's what makes we think it doesn't
| affect adults? Alcohol affects children, and it affects adults.
| If social media affects children, it also affects adults.
|
| The big live social media was it was meant to connect people but
| in truth, it was designed to control people.
| logicchains wrote:
| >The big live social media was it was meant to connect people
| but in truth, it was designed to control people.
|
| This is absurd. People have access to far more information
| today via decentralised media than they did when information
| was filtered through a small elite cabal of media company CEOs.
| Restricting access to information is a means of controlling
| people, and that's exactly what the governments pushing to ban
| social media want to do.
| nephihaha wrote:
| Search engines restrict information. You get a very limited
| selection of information off them nowadays.
| pxoe wrote:
| Why is it that some people are so hell bent on limiting how
| people communicate? Ironically, this is also seeking to control
| people.
| NickC25 wrote:
| If it was a pure communication platform, we wouldn't be in
| this situation.
|
| Social media as it exists in mainstream life is an
| advertising platform which happens to have a few methods
| humans can use to communicate with each other. But that's a
| bug, not a feature.
| seydor wrote:
| Are adults any better? Not sure the ban is a productive way to go
| about it.
| OsamaJaber wrote:
| The real question is enforcement They tried this, and kids just
| moved to platforms nobody knew existed
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Eventually group SMS would still function well for this, no?
| Shared email lists barring that. This seems like a race to the
| bottom.
| OsamaJaber wrote:
| Exactly You can ban platforms but you can't ban communication
| Arainach wrote:
| Neither group SMS nor shared email lists have the algorithmic
| dopamine tweaking that are the root of most of the harm.
| logicchains wrote:
| There's still a double digit percentage of parents that oppose
| the ban. The only way to make a ban work without parental
| support is requiring a video camera to be running constantly
| doing facial verification while the app is running, completely
| unfeasible.
| Arainach wrote:
| Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Our current laws and
| enforcement don't prevent 100% of murders or rapes, but that
| doesn't mean we should remove the laws prohibiting them.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Noble goal but it ends up being a defacto internet license. All
| ages need to show id to use sites and services.
| echelon wrote:
| 110%.
|
| No website of any kind should require IDV unless banking. It is
| a tool that will be used for censorship, removal of access to
| information, destruction of freedom of speech, erosion of
| privacy, and attacks on political opponents.
|
| We need anonymity, ephemerality, and public square free speech.
|
| Governments should instead regulate what these companies can
| do. How they advertise. Engagement algorithms. Stop internal
| efforts to target kids. Etc.
|
| Disallow advertising to kids. Turn off ads on children's
| accounts if the user is predicted or self reports as a kid.
| Turn off the algorithm for kids.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| This is the obvious solution, but implementing it would be a
| herculean effort. Not because it's technically difficult, of
| course.
|
| Consider the incentives of all involved powerful groups.
|
| You have social media giants who want to addict and advertise
| to users. The hate your solution, obviously. With the ID
| checks they lose out on their younger users, but they also
| get cover for even more aggressive behavior as nobody can
| credibly yell "think of the children!" at them.
|
| Then you have government officials who are nervous about
| their lack of effective control over modern media. Your
| solution offers them _nothing_ and loses them points with
| those powerful business leaders. It opens them up to attack
| from the right for being "too hard on business and stifling
| innovation." The ID checks, on the other hand, give them a
| mechanism and lever to crack down on any sentiment in the
| public that runs counter to their or their friends'
| interests. It even polls pretty well with an increasingly
| large number of paranoid and distrusting voters.
|
| There's no contest at all between the routes before us. Only
| a huge political upheaval could divert the world from this
| path. The indicator to look for in a representative is a
| willingness to champion policy that hurts entrenched
| political and economic power while providing straightforward
| utility to average citizens.
| philipallstar wrote:
| Parents should instead regulate what their kids can do.
| expedition32 wrote:
| It's the job of society to help parents otherwise the birth
| rate will just continue to decline.
|
| Remember that for the first time in history people can
| choose not to have kids.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| What does parents choosing if their kids can use tiktok
| have to do with the birth rate?
| LordShredda wrote:
| Social media's entire income model is finding out who you are
| to advertise more accurately. Facebook knows your age down to
| the day, and if they ask for ID this is them taking even more
| data.
| tgv wrote:
| There is an alternative: prohibit smart phones for youth. They
| can possess simple phones.
| philipallstar wrote:
| Parents can just do this. It's far more expensive to not do
| it.
| testing22321 wrote:
| When all the kids in school have a smart phone it's
| extremely hard to be the one kid and parents that don't.
|
| So, so much easier and more effective if they're just
| banned for all kids.
| eimrine wrote:
| prohibit all proprietary software
| tgv wrote:
| That won't help. They'll open-source it, and the addiction
| stays.
| eimrine wrote:
| Haven't you heard about the four freedoms? The software
| which meets this criteria is totally safe.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Define a smartphone.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Good, less people will waste their lives talking to bots and
| other low value activities
| viktorcode wrote:
| I expect more kids will switch to playing more games on their
| phones with their friends. Whoever thinks the kids will
| instead put down their phones and starting go out more often
| has lost touch with reality.
| GreenWatermelon wrote:
| This is still a trillion times better than the Antisocial
| media of today. At least they'll interact with their
| friends.
|
| Online competitive games at least require you to work your
| brain.
| pibaker wrote:
| >logs into his seven year old five digit karma hackernews
| account >tells people to stop talking online
| GreenWatermelon wrote:
| > reads "talking to bots and other low value activities"
|
| > translates it to "stop talking online"
|
| The mental gymnastics to arrive at 2 is insane. Either
| you're being disingenuous or you actually believe everyone
| online is a bot in which case telling people to stop
| talking online is good.
| lossyalgo wrote:
| Agreed. I think we need to ban addictive dark patterns on ALL
| platforms for ALL ages.
| clusmore wrote:
| I am an Australian Instagram user in my 30s. When setting up my
| profile a few years ago I set the birthday to some fake date
| near my real age. At no point, including when the ban went
| live, was I ever asked to prove my age through any means.
| Nobody I know has either (noting that everyone I've asked is an
| adult).
| verdverm wrote:
| How long before the kids use Ai to build their own?
| rhines wrote:
| What matters is content, not communication. They could build a
| platform to chat with each other, but they could just use
| WhatsApp or text or email for that. But they can't build a
| platform with an infinite stream of targeted content (until AI
| generates content I guess).
| verdverm wrote:
| I hear parents of young children are already sitting their
| children down in front of AI generated children's content on
| YouTube
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| Please show us the channels with the views
| andix wrote:
| Modern social media is nothing like social media in early days
| (myspace, early Facebook and even early Instagram). Back then it
| was a platform to communicate with friends, and maybe even find
| new friends to meet up with.
|
| Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged
| and to push content to them. The content must either be
| addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the content
| doesn't matter at all. Connecting people to do stuff outside of
| the virtual world would actually hurt their business model.
| People turn off their devices and go outside, instead of watching
| ads.
|
| So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or
| messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine.
| Probably even Reddit - which does have an algorithm to show
| specific content - is not as bad.
| john01dav wrote:
| Reddit is plenty addictive in my experience, and I've heard the
| same from other people ranging from high school teachers to
| tradespeople.
| tedmiston wrote:
| i think most users need more screen blocking control than
| they get out of the box on iOS. tools like one sec [1] have
| been invaluable for me.
|
| [1]: https://one-sec.app/
| baq wrote:
| Yes, but most importantly I need to manage my children's
| devices; it cannot be opt in and it mustn't be possible to
| disable without me approving. Screen time is too easy for
| kids to work around as is. I also need in-app content type
| filtering (eg. no shorts, no music videos on music
| streaming apps) and literally no one is providing such
| options, not to mention it should be managed in screen
| time, too. Parental controls are a complete shit show in
| iOS and the app ecosystem.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| So buy an Android:
| https://families.google/intl/my/familylink/
| Abekkus wrote:
| family link is not enough, try disabling gemini and news
| access with it, and you cannot block shorts
| mike_hearn wrote:
| You will always be able to come up with some unique
| combination of features you want from software that it
| doesn't have yet. Note that none of these social media
| bans would block Gemini, and most of them don't consider
| YouTube to be social media. You are still far ahead with
| Family Link, and Android is flexible enough that if
| there's actually real demand for these things you can
| implement solutions and sell them to other parents.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Hackernews is also addictive. Fortnine is addictive. World of
| Warcraft is addictive. NFL is addictive.
|
| Addiction does not strike to me as a unique trait of the
| social media.
|
| The echo chamber bubble on the other hand, seems quite
| unique.
| XorNot wrote:
| Hacker News has plenty of its own echo chamber, no
| different to any other social environment.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > Hacker News has plenty of its own echo chamber, no
| different to any other social environment.
|
| Sure, but fwiw the HN echo chamber is organic. People
| choose to interact with people who have similar opinions,
| as they have since forever.
|
| In contrast, the echo chamber on HN, Tiktok, FB, etc is
| architected specifically to drive engagement. You are
| shown more of the content that you react to, so that you
| won't leave.
| edoceo wrote:
| Typo on second mention of HN?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| It's not at all organic. There's lots of flag killing and
| shadow banning on HN to suppress opinions, mostly
| anything that hints of right wing stuff. It mostly works,
| too.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| No, they block political stuff because this is not the
| place for political stuff.
|
| Stop playing the victim.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Nah. Hacker News has a diversity of views! In this very
| thread, you can see a robust debate between
|
| 1) people who want to ban kids from social media, and
|
| 2) people who want to ban everyone from social media.
|
| See? HN captures the full range of legitimate
| perspectives on technology.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| actually, much more diverse because everyone is in the
| same forum rather than being divided into "subreddits"
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > The echo chamber bubble on the other hand, seems quite
| unique.
|
| More specifically: using "engagement" as the metric to
| optimize.
|
| Users' use of content is measured: how long do they watch
| it? Do they leave a comment? Do they give a "like"? Based
| on that, the algorithm finds similar content that will
| elicit an even stronger response.
|
| Every action you take on modern social media is giving
| information to your drug dealer so they can make the next
| hit even better. But not better _for you_ ; better for the
| social media, who make money from ads.
|
| The continuously adaptive nature of the input stream as a
| basis for keeping users' eyeballs leashed to ads is what
| separates FB, Tiktok, Instagram, and Youtube from the more
| benign, but still addictive alternatives (HN, Fortnite,
| WoW, NFL, Reddit).
| eimrine wrote:
| > Hackernews is also addictive.
|
| False. It is good, no more addictive than a spoon.
| YuukiRey wrote:
| A spoon has no randomization.
| eimrine wrote:
| Define the randomization. Probably the content of spoon
| fits the definition.
| baq wrote:
| HN doesn't optimize for _addictive_. Fortnite and wow do.
| No opinion on NFL, but they probably do at least somewhat.
| nish__ wrote:
| The difference is whether or not the platform is for-
| profit. If the goal of the platform is to make money,
| decisions will be made to keep people more addicted than
| would otherwise be natural. And that's the problem.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| HN lets users opt to automatically lock themselves out
| after a while (noprocrast). Fortnite and WoW do not.
| Sounds like one knows they have users with problems, no?
|
| I think the term addiction is way overused in this stuff.
| If a company makes a product you enjoy using that doesn't
| mean you can just describe it as addictive and get out of
| jail free. If there's some chemical in it that messes
| with your brain, fine, otherwise people need to take
| ownership of their own choices.
|
| I think the disturbing reality is these countries are
| wanting to control social media to control the population
| politically. There was even a Labour MP in the UK who
| admitted it on television. If it weren't the case they'd
| just tell concerned parents to turn on the parental
| controls devices already have, problem solved. Instead
| they pass laws to end internet anonymity, but only on the
| big networks, which won't do anything for kids but is an
| excellent way to control political discontent.
| baq wrote:
| Parental controls don't work, they're too coarse grained
| and too easy to get past. Source: am a parent.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| They do work. You may not feel they work perfectly, but
| government mandated ID verification on social media will
| work far worse and be far more coarse grained. You don't
| even have any control with government regulation, so
| being "coarse grained" isn't even worth discussing
| because with one-size-fits-all laws imposed by the
| providers there is no grain.
| john01dav wrote:
| > I think the disturbing reality is these countries are
| wanting to control social media to control the population
| politically
|
| The current alternative is that unaccountable private
| interests control this, so some regulation in this regard
| seems reasonable to me. However, swapping private control
| for public control is only barely better.
|
| The best solution that I can think of is ending
| algorithmic feeds, and having subscription feeds, or
| maybe user curated feeds, only.
| roughly wrote:
| I think moving algorithmic feeds out of section 230 would
| do the trick. Once you're curating the feed, you're no
| longer a neutral platform.
| traktorn wrote:
| This is the best idea I've heard in a long time. This
| would solve so much.
| t-3 wrote:
| Karma and thread-ranking are adaptations that directly
| increase addictiveness while doing little else...
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| thread ranking is useful and doesn't increase
| addictiveness
|
| I do agree that karma increases addictiveness and adds
| little value; I can see it being useful for certain
| permissions (so new accounts can't do thinks like
| downvoting), but it could just not be visible to the
| user; then there's no motivation to "increase my karma"
| Almondsetat wrote:
| An infinite stream of user generated content with direct
| engagement possibilities is enough to fry our brains
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > The echo chamber bubble on the other hand, seems quite
| unique.
|
| At least you can now choose your bubble and even listen to
| your own echo. That beats having the government beam their
| psychosis straight into everybody's brain by TV, radio and
| newspapers.
|
| That makes the whole society an "echo chamber" of whatever
| the rulers have on their current agenda. And not just on
| your devices, but all the people you meet in real life.
| enaaem wrote:
| Content on social media nowadays isn't organic. State
| level resources are being thrown to influence people. So
| you are being beamed some government propaganda anyway.
|
| I grew up in the forum days and internet discussions were
| very different back then. Accounts like "Endwokeness"
| would never work. People will make fun of him for being
| so obsessed with trans. You can't just post some low
| effort political openings and walk away. Your openings
| need to have substance and you are pressured to engage.
| Otherwise people will see through your schtick and you
| get banned.
|
| I don't have a solution for this, and I think it's a
| different problem regarding social media for kids.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Content on social media nowadays isn't organic.
|
| Billions of people are posting real organic content on
| places like Instagram and Facebook. Their vacations,
| their workouts, their barbecues with friends, their
| thoughts and feelings on different matters. What you're
| saying is the opposite of truth.
| blackhaz wrote:
| I wonder if your KPI is no. of active users, page views,
| etc - then you are a priori building an addictive thing.
| cheeseface wrote:
| Agree on how the platform's have changed.
|
| However, I don't think Reddit is an exception. Popular is often
| filled with content that is driven by the feelings of fear and
| hate. Not something I'd like to continually expose kids or
| teens to.
| api wrote:
| Smaller subs can still be decent but I agree about popular
| and larger subs. They're just brain rot and engagement bait
| now.
| rhines wrote:
| Yeah that's really the issue with all social media. If you
| restrict yourself to just checking what friends post on
| Facebook, or what people you subscribe to post on YouTube,
| those platforms are pretty healthy too. It's when you go to
| the infinite content feed that sites become an issue.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I don't know any more. Even the small subs I previously
| visited for good content have turned into their own little
| echo chambers, along with a lot of drive-by posts because
| small subs get recommended in other people's feeds now.
|
| In some of the hobby subreddits where I had good
| discussions in the past it's now just one big echo chamber
| of people parroting the same information around, whether
| it's true or not. If you want to participate you either
| need to toe the line of the accepted
| brands/methods/techniques or keep your mouth shut. Most of
| us just get tired and give up
| Aurornis wrote:
| I agree completely about Reddit. It's a clickbait factory
| with a misinformation density that makes my Facebook feed
| look downright informative.
|
| I was an early Reddit user. It felt like there was a distinct
| shift when the site went from programming and news topics to
| being meme-heavy. Then again recently when they started
| recommending niche subreddits into everyone's feeds so that
| even the small subreddits couldn't count on being islands of
| quality.
|
| Now it's just a doomerism factory. The young Redditors I've
| known feel like they've had their hope about the future
| hollowed out and crushed. They open the site and consuming a
| stream of content telling them that everything is awful and
| will continue to be awful, and anyone who disagrees is
| shouted down and downvoted. It's a real crabs-in-a-bucket
| website now.
| shevy-java wrote:
| > It felt like there was a distinct shift
|
| Yeah there definitely was a change in reddit, probably more
| than once. It changed indeed. To the worse, too.
| whyenot wrote:
| What I find particularly bad about Reddit is the platform is
| specifically designed to amplify group think and silence
| competing opinions. All it takes is five more downvotes than
| upvotes and a comment will lose visibility. It can turn
| subreddits into little bubbles where like-minded people
| upvote each other and almost never have to see dissenting
| opinions. That may not be a big deal on a gardening
| subreddit, but it can be a big problem or even dangerous
| elsewhere.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > That may not be a big deal on a gardening subreddit,
|
| I had to abandon my last few hobby subreddits because there
| were a few chronically online people who had to control the
| conversation in every single post with their opinions. If
| anyone didn't agree, their comments would mysteriously go
| to -3 or below within 30 minutes of posting.
|
| It's all little fiefdoms for chronically online people now.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| What are your thoughts on lemmy, maybe the hobby can be
| extremely niche but you can even be the moderator
| yourself on a lemmy instance and I think that a federated
| reddit alternative would be nice too!
|
| If I may ask, what are the hobbies that you are talking
| about?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >What are your thoughts on lemmy,
|
| I was hopeful when I found out about it...
|
| The trouble I think, going forward, is that no matter how
| good the technology of a new forum might be, everyone is
| primed and ready to flock to it. How could anything be
| good if the same 500,000 redditors that turned it into
| shit show up the first week? Worse, even if they don't,
| there are all sorts of crackpots who try to preempt by
| colonizing new ones early hoping that they can sway the
| thing once it gets big (Lemmy and the commies).
|
| This is Eternal September.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I completely understand your comment and found the
| reference to eternal september fascinating and how it
| happened 35 years ago and people were talking about
| internet being too crowded. thanks for reference, learnt
| something new.
|
| > there are all sorts of crackpots who try to preempt by
| colonizing new ones early hoping that they can sway the
| thing once it gets big
|
| I do wonder if software can be used to prevent this tho.
| I mean Hackernews came after reddit and its community
| doesn't have crackpots (well ahem, maybe sometimes but
| definitely fewer than reddit maybe)
|
| I do think about hackernews from time to time and think
| about how the ethos around it is Curiosity >> everything.
| I mean sometimes small comments/low value comments can be
| rewarded but usually its the well thought out comments
| which get value. (Well, this explains why my comments
| don't get +1 haha, self roasts are fun!)
|
| I do think that in HN this intentional change plus the
| fact that pg spearheaded the project personally as a
| personal project for the first few years set the mood
| around it here to be like this (which is usually civil,
| even in disagreements)
|
| I think that even in HN guidelines or in some important
| place, there is this thing called HN is not reddit and
| such comparison. I find it funny right now but I think
| that they wrote this to specifically prevent some aspects
| of what you are talking about right now.
|
| I do wonder if this can be replicated with the
| communities that you mention tho. It would be interesting
| to hear what dang comments about it maybe if dang's here
| about such moderation.
|
| Also out of curiosity but when you mention shit show, do
| you mean the discussing turning into something (un-
| civil?) or lacking etiquettes as in say, the community
| turning into gifs posting as such or similar with low
| quality comments?
|
| Or what exactly would you classify as "shit show"?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > I mean Hackernews came after reddit and its community
|
| HN is a weird thing. I think it just managed the perfect
| storm of improbabilities. It managed to find just enough
| audience for it to be interesting, but didn't reach a
| critical mass that sees it going exponential (possibly
| its subject matter repels popular interest and especially
| youth interest). It has a one-man (or at least tiny
| moderation) team that (somehow) resists the urge to do
| anything but put the smackdown on bad actors (possibly
| the hard rule against political stories helps). And as
| the last refuge of people who hate Facebookization, it's
| also possible there is zero demand for it to be swipe-
| able and phone-centric.
|
| But, in truth, it is also sort of fossilized, and will
| die once our generation (and -a-half) retires and has
| little time for it. So we've got 15 or 20 years more, and
| it will shrink as it goes, and then one day it'll just be
| gone. It won't even be here to memorialize its demise.
|
| >I do wonder if this can be replicated with the
| communities that you mention tho.
|
| Maybe someone is more clever than I, and can figure it
| out. But I've spent nearly 20 years at this point, and
| I've come up with squat. I think the forums that people
| did enjoy (for awhile) were completely organic and just
| can't be artificially created.
|
| >Or what exactly would you classify as "shit show"?
|
| It's difficult to even describe what you're missing, if
| you weren't there to see it for yourself. It didn't start
| with reddit, it didn't start with Slashdot, I'm not even
| sure what it did start with that's before my time. Are
| you even aware that many of these websites didn't even
| require an account to post? That was only if you wanted
| your name attached to some comment that was really
| clever. There was this sweet spot though, where it all
| converged. It was post-internet-boom, so some of the
| people who were posting had hobbies besides the internet
| itself... making for conversations about anything and
| everything. And, as a rule, people weren't jaded about it
| in general... people weren't expecting you to be rude or
| have some agenda. If they could even _imagine_ that, then
| it was you were a spammer trying to sell something which
| was more junk than scam. There was the idea that if the
| software /website itself were bad, eventually it would be
| improved. Everything was text/typing/reading, so it was
| literate and not 10 second tiktok garbage. Phone-texting
| hadn't quite spoiled everything with text-speech. People
| managed to get fed up with bad design and bad behavior,
| there were so-called exoduses. And, from time to time, it
| was possible to be noticed without Russian mafia
| connections or Illuminati endorsements.
|
| What we have now is quite possibly the worst possible
| timeline, so to speak. All of the points I've mentioned
| don't even quite begin to describe what's changed.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > What are your thoughts on lemmy
|
| I was big on it during the reddit excursion. Eventually I
| figured out that because it's so small, that many/most
| people read the equivalent of /r/all, where many, many
| posts would end up. So even your small niche community
| would get "genpop" users. That's what made me return to
| reddit instead and delete my instance (that, and the
| politics of the creators infesting some major instances).
|
| The only halfway sane community I found was beehaw.org,
| which defederated aggressively, but that came with being
| very small, and I always cared most about the discussion
| over the links themselves. So eventually I left that as
| well.
|
| ETA: I would probably summarize it that Lemmy is (or was,
| been a while now) better than big subreddits, but worse
| for small niche communities which imo are by far the best
| part of reddit, and the only part I care about.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| > All it takes is five more downvotes than upvotes and a
| comment will lose visibility.
|
| That is true here too. And Twitter is the least
| transparent, with people regularly reporting that posts
| critical of musk or trump have reduced reach compared to
| their other posts.
| whyenot wrote:
| Yes, but HN still has a strong culture of considering
| both sides, excellent moderation, and some measures to
| help nudge people in the right direction. For example,
| right now I can only upvote your comment. I am not given
| an option to downvote it. That's a good thing!
| snigsnog wrote:
| It's because you're new. Powerusers can downvote and even
| flag comments. A couple flags and the comment is (by
| default) invisible. Enough flagged comments and your
| comments are flagged by default. There's a reason this
| place is called orange reddit
| whyenot wrote:
| I created this account in November 2009 and am fully
| aware of what "power users" can and can not do ;)
| bityard wrote:
| > a strong culture of considering both sides
|
| Ah, no, the HN commentorship is quite highly biased
| toward a particular demographic and set of political
| beliefs, which is a thing that needs to be acknowledged.
| "Considering both sides" is not something I've ever seen
| as common practice in any organic online community I've
| been a part of, full stop.
|
| HN's redeeming quality over much of the rest of the web
| is that low-effort hot-takes and aggressive content are
| actively discouraged by the mods and community. (These
| are things that other communities devolve towards,
| because they tend to drive engagement faster and easier
| than quality.)
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| Hot take: a voting system (and generally any move toward
| _ranking_ content rather than displaying it
| chronologically) will inevitably rot any social media
| platform. Just a question of time.
| holly01 wrote:
| When I used 4chan the lack of voting made engaging with
| the actual substance of a post much easier. This was
| something observed by many other posters I talked to.
| This is going to sound wishy-washy, but my theory is that
| the brain is so attuned to socially trying to figure out
| the in-group or who is in the wrong that putting a number
| that signals social agreement on a statement will
| immediately stimulate the more primal social pathways in
| your brain before you can even think.
|
| Of course 4chan isn't a great system for meaningful
| discussions, the system skews conversations towards
| outrage and shock. But reddits short, quippy, in-group
| signaling post style that is encouraged by their voting
| system seems to be absolute worst way to interact with
| other people. HN also has this problem to an extent, but
| it's properly modded and most people here seem to be not
| be living through their phones so it isn't nearly as
| extreme as reddit (or twitter, I never use twitter but
| people seem miserable in a similar way to reddit users).
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| In the first decade of the 2000s my only "social"
| platforms were traditional (chronological) forums and the
| average level of discussion and _effort_ to contribute
| was way higher than what I usually see now on social
| media.
| CRConrad wrote:
| You might be on to something there... That the _effort
| itself_ raises quality? Perhaps.
| olyjohn wrote:
| I'm going to say that the rot starts to occur whenever
| the amount of users gets too big. Too many people seems
| to ruin everything.
| baq wrote:
| Reddit mod cabal is destroying the site, has been for
| years. Not sure what the deal is, especially after IPO.
|
| The worst part is the conspiracy theories are increasingly
| being confirmed in the Epstein releases which is mind
| blowing, eg. https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/mlt7v
| /a_big_congrat... into
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29884486 and
| https://thepostmillennial.com/former-reddit-ceo-says-she-
| kne...
| bityard wrote:
| It depends on lot on the sub and how their moderators
| police the community, but yeah, I've seen lots of that.
|
| I've been aggressively downvoted before for pointing out
| facts that people don't want to be true. (And these were
| not even political discussions!) I don't even bother with
| putting my opinions online at any rate, both because they
| don't actually matter to anyone but me, and because I don't
| get any joy out of defending them against internet randos.
|
| Edit: It depends on the size of the sub as well. I'm a
| member of a few subs that I can stand because the
| moderators are good at moderating, and there are enough
| regular users coming through to counter a small number of
| very active cranks.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| HN does this too
| HK-NC wrote:
| Yeah I used to enjoy forum discussions. Reddit is agree or
| stfu. It got worse a few years ago (probably longer than
| that) with a new rule change and something about chibese
| ownership?
| oliwarner wrote:
| I use old.reddit.com but I feel like I have complete control
| over what I see. It's new posts, I check them and then I
| leave.
|
| _That 's_ what I've lost on Facebook. It forces me to see
| things its algorithm thinks I like, but more often than not,
| it's things that make me want to argue. I don't have that on
| Reddit. Long may it last.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Funny that you use old.reddit.com. I used this too. I could
| not handle the new reddit - it was useless for me.
| arational wrote:
| Lately the algorithm for the front page sorted by hot or
| best has been changed. You'd see mostly threads from
| subreddit you recently visited. So you no longer have
| control over what you don't get to see.
| GCUMstlyHarmls wrote:
| I use old.reddit on my desktop, new.reddit on my phone
| and new.reddit is constantly mashing in posts from a more
| niche "my-country" sub (eg: not the "main" /r/country)
| that's often got very baity posts (eg: guised "does
| anyone else hate immigrants??" posts).
|
| Same account, same behaviour, but the new site is really
| pushing "gross" stuff at me.
| user34283 wrote:
| If you ask me, the few posts criticizing immigration that
| do manage to stay up are the least of Reddit's problems.
|
| Click on Home in the new app and you are met with an
| endless onslaught of far left political content. "Trump
| bad, ICE bad, Republicans bad, Musk bad" make up most of
| the posts.
|
| Ideologically captured default subreddits like /r/pics
| keep pushing politics; if I'd say 50% of the pictures
| posted there were of a political nature with a clear left
| motive, that would be a low estimate. This is pushed to
| 30M subscribed users and, if my feed is any indication,
| everyone else too.
|
| If we want to talk "gross stuff", some Arabic subreddits
| openly celebrate terrorist groups, talking about how
| brave they are. I saw a "moderator" compare the actions
| of the Al-Qassam brigades to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
| To get the post taken down it required sending the "EU
| illegal content" form rather than using the regular
| reporting channels.
|
| Given that any moderately conservative opinion has a hard
| time staying on Reddit without being censored or the
| poster being harassed by a bunch of left extremists, I
| find your comment complaining about posts criticizing
| immigration to be particularly hypocritical.
| oliwarner wrote:
| Honestly, I don't use the front page. I frequent a
| diverse set of communities there but I can't imagine
| wanting to see all the posts mixed together.
|
| I go straight to subs' /new URLs.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| That feeling of controlling your feed. It's just a feeling.
| Carefully calibrated so you feel like you can do something
| without doing it.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > That's what I've lost on Facebook
|
| As I found out a while ago on HN when I complained an
| extension I used stopped working, ?sk=h_chr still works to
| get a sane FB view. No sponsored shit, no algorithmic
| suggestions, no posts people have reacted to, just
| chronological posts of people & pages you follow.
|
| I also use old reddit.
| UltraSane wrote:
| I've been on reddit long enough to get sick of the constant
| reposts. They really should have a filter for that.
| tedmiston wrote:
| reddit having tons of niche subreddits and the ability to sort
| them by best all time is one of my favorite ways to filter for
| higher-quality content. (i don't use the main feed much.)
| XorNot wrote:
| I'd argue it's closer to the ability to search it with Google
| to get alright non-clickfarm responses to questions, or
| product reviews.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I remember when they saw what a certain game app was doing and
| were disgusted by it. Wild to me that those same people later
| almost instantly chose to not only adopt the behavior but make
| it core functionality. It's way worse when you see the evil and
| STILL chose it.
| api wrote:
| It's not really social media at all and we should stop calling
| it that. I call them chum feeds or scrollers. There's no social
| component. It's just addictive short form infinite scroll brain
| rot.
|
| Social media deserving of the name is almost dead. It's not
| that profitable and the sites are expensive to run.
| tedmiston wrote:
| likes and comments aren't social?
| rhines wrote:
| Not if there's no reputation. If you see someone liked your
| post and then you go check out their posts, or if people
| recognize commenters and remember things about them, then
| it's social. Think engaging with friends on Facebook or
| participating in a hobby forum. But there's nothing social
| about engaging with a popular Reddit post or some
| celebrity's Twitter feed.
| andix wrote:
| Only on the most shallow level. Early Facebook was like
| meeting up with friends. Modern social media is like
| shouting at strangers on the street.
| parineum wrote:
| I get where you and parent are coming from. It's social in
| the way that anti-social behavior is social.
|
| The content is generated by users but the consumer of the
| content is served whatever user content drives engagement.
| People aren't really having conversations on these
| platforms.
|
| The only places where you can really have a conversation
| are places where engagement is low enough that the odds off
| a set very high engagement comments can't shove everything
| else down the page.
| susam wrote:
| > Modern social media is nothing like social media in early
| days
|
| Indeed. I no longer call them social media. They have all
| become attention media platforms. I recently expressed my
| thoughts about this on my blog at <https://susam.net/attention-
| media-is-not-social-media.html>.
|
| These days I typically resolve the domain names of these
| attention media platforms to 127.0.0.1 in my /etc/hosts file,
| so that I do not inadvertently end up visiting them by
| following a link somewhere else. I think there are very few
| true social media platforms remaining today, among which I
| visit only HN and Mastodon.
| hamdingers wrote:
| > I no longer call them social media.
|
| Social media is the correct name for what they are now,
| they're channels that push curated content out to their
| users.
|
| The thing they used to be is social networking.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| What is social about it tho?
| olyjohn wrote:
| You can gang up on people with low effort, negative
| comments about anything.
| CRConrad wrote:
| That's anti-social. They're anti-social media.
| gman83 wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if Meta turned WhatsApp into a TikTok
| clone just to get around the restrictions. They know that
| banning WhatsApp for teenagers in Europe is almost impossible.
| I look at my kids, all their sports clubs and other
| extracurricular activities are organized through WhatsApp. I
| already had to block Youtube on their devices. I was alright
| with them watching a couple of long-form youtube videos every
| day, but now if I unblock Youtube all they do is watch Shorts,
| with no way to disable it.
| grekowalski wrote:
| Check out the NewPipe app. It works only on Android -- it's
| YouTube for minimalists. No Shorts, no feed, no ads.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > extracurricular activities are organized through WhatsApp.
| I already had to block Youtube on their devices. I was
| alright with them watching a couple of long-form youtube
| videos every day, but now if I unblock Youtube all they do is
| watch Shorts, with no way to disable it.
|
| If you want to block Shorts. I recommend you to try out
| revanced which gives you youtube without any ads and a lot of
| other customizations.
|
| To be honest, I find it funny that paid youtube customers
| might shift to revanced which is technically piracy jsut to
| remove shorts.
|
| I was this close to rooting the phones but she had just
| bought a new phone.
|
| But if pricing wasn't the concern for me (which right now it
| is but I don't think for many HN users it might be), here's
| what I suggest.
|
| Go buy a phone which can be easily rooted and also use an
| somewhat secure os (just short of graphene)
|
| Patch revanced (I have even made a nix flake or some nix file
| [i don't use nix that much but I was curious and ended up
| using LLMs to generate the file] whose purpose was to take
| android file and patch it when I was in nix, but I don't have
| it with me right nwo as I may haev lost it)
|
| Have in the options the short block option.
|
| Newpipe is great as well but it doesn't really allow having
| comment support.
|
| Also given that HN is a very techie and well hacking with
| software community. If anyone's interested to take an
| challenge within Java/Kotlin (Unfortunately, they scare me)
| then I have got an idea for you guys:
|
| "But the option of turning shorts back on can still be
| toggled. I wish if anybody whose an expert in java/kotlin can
| take a look at how revanced works and maybe how to have a
| revanced patch which can block shorts by default
| (additionally with ads preferably too with the download
| option patch as well & the sponsorblock) while atleast in the
| revanced specific settings option blocking just the
| option/toggle switch to turn shorts back on."
|
| Also I am a teenager. I would consider the fact that I am on
| this website partially because of a loop of youtubers that I
| started following [ Fireship the goat before he turned VC ->
| Primagen the legend -> Theo t3 (I do feel like he's not the
| best guy following but he covered so much about YC that I
| ended up opening news.ycombinator.com and reading it and not
| watching him read it and ended up making account)
|
| oh yeah before Fireship, I used to follow Code with harry
| when I was around ~13 yo. I learnt python from him many years
| ago before it was introduced to us in school so much so that
| I ended up picking the finance subject out of curiosity and I
| enjoyed both finance and tech.
|
| One of the funniest stories from this whole is when Code with
| harry loved one of my comments on youtube loooong time ago
| and I was around 14 or osmething and then my mum saw it and
| she didn't know what loving a comment in YT mean and she got
| suspicious about it and questioned me and then I had to
| describe hearting a comment to her xD.
|
| Oh yeah. I started learning about python itself around this
| time because one of my cousins whom I deeply respect who
| works in aerospace but back when in his university started
| mentioning how he worked on a ~2-3k loc and he mentioned
| python and I was like hmm what's python.
|
| I don't know if a parent is interested to hear this but I
| feel like teenagers really replicate those they admire. A lot
| of my traits first started just being around that cousin & he
| actually taught me about assets/liabilities when I was in 5th
| grade and taught me chess which both became very obsessive
| points for me later down the life (My joy when I finally
| ended up beating him at chess fair and square)
|
| I don't think that I do that well academically per se though,
| it really just depends on my mood so :/ yeah but I really
| ended up butchering some prestigious college's paper real
| hard and still tensed about it but honestly as a teen, I
| don't even know why I am typing this but my point is that
| your kid would have a personality and just nudge him in the
| right manners & let him think for himself to think that he
| reached at a particular conclusion. I do feel like that's
| generally how I approached and I was the youngest of my whole
| entire family tree so that made me more mature but I do feel
| like it came at a trade off of wishing to grow up fast asap
| when I was a child and now wishing to go back too seeing say
| not being able to cope up with massive study efforts or
| competition but that's another matter I guess.
|
| Though parenting is definitely really really hard, kudos to
| every parent out there.
|
| Did go a little tangent so sorry about that.
| stevage wrote:
| If WhatsApp got banned, all those groups would simply switch
| to Telegram or Signal or similar. It would be very easy.
| attendant3446 wrote:
| But why does it always have to be a mobile app?
| stevage wrote:
| As opposed to what?
| attendant3446 wrote:
| Tbh, anything that is not a proprietary closed garden.
| Why access to the clubs/interest groups now requires to
| compromise the privacy?
| Salgat wrote:
| The second a ban is announced everyone would just migrate to
| the next thing. That's the nice part of social media and
| communication apps, they're easy to migrate off of.
| pests wrote:
| You're in luck! They recently rolled out updated parental
| controls letting you block it.
|
| https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/updates-youtube-
| supervi...
|
| "YouTube has introduced enhanced parental controls allowing
| parents to manage or block YouTube Shorts for teen accounts.
| Parents can set daily time limits for Shorts ranging from
| zero to two hours, configure custom bedtimes, and set "take a
| break" reminders" (AI summary)
| bityard wrote:
| You can block shorts this way? Neat! Excuse me, I need to
| go set up a subaccount for my newly adopted fictional
| child.
| pests wrote:
| Ha, didn't even realize the possibilities.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| all they have to do is log out of their google account
| and clear their cache, and there go the YouTube parental
| controls
| attendant3446 wrote:
| I'm a bit glad that it's no longer Facebook groups. But
| WhatsApp is also disappointing. I have to keep an account on
| my 'throwaway' phone for junk apps just to communicate with
| those groups and clubs. And usually WhatsApp is the only way
| with them.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Probably even Reddit - which does have an algorithm to show
| specific content - is not as bad.
|
| I'm surprised Reddit gets a pass or borderline pass in social
| media discussions.
|
| In my experience working with kids, Reddit was the worst of the
| social media platforms for mental health. By far. The kids who
| were into Reddit were always spouting off information they got
| from Reddit and had soul-crushing amounts of cynicism about the
| world. On top of that, they had a chip on their shoulder about
| it all, believing that Reddit was a superior source of truth
| about the world.
|
| The whole experience caught me off guard because going into
| this I mostly heard about the stereotypical social media
| dangers that get talked about, like boys following Andrew Tate
| and such. Instead the biggest problem was Redditors on a fast
| path to doomerism.
| andix wrote:
| thanks for that insight
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| > ....the stereotypical social media dangers that get talked
| about, like boys following Andrew Tate and such
|
| I wonder where tate got his ideas and influences from. And
| why he's free in the US.
| qwerpy wrote:
| Agree, I consider Reddit worse than Tiktok because of the
| downvote. Even a mild lean in one direction immediately
| results in extreme viewpoints bubbling up to the top and all
| other opinions silenced. Few people I know spend much time
| there, but the one that does sticks out like a sore thumb,
| always finding every opportunity to get upset about whatever
| the outrage of the day is.
|
| It's a shame that HN's "don't talk about HN is turning into
| Reddit" guideline is there. It's preemptively used to shut
| people down when there are real issues with threads randomly
| devolving into uninteresting politically charged therapy
| sessions.
| krapp wrote:
| Accusations of HN "turning into Reddit" are far less
| interesting to read and of lower quality than the politics
| such comments are meant to denounce.
| jnordt wrote:
| Tictoc, Instagram, Youtube shorts and in parts Linkedin are
| Digital Drugs. Similisr to smoking cigarettes or vaping.
|
| Whats fascinating about thid is that we have managed to create
| a new class of drugs - that does not require physical
| substances to be added to our bodies...and works via visual
| stimulous only.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| I'm delighted and honoured to announce that you are
| completely correct.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums
| or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably
| fine.
|
| Even better might be to just destroy the big platforms by
| breaking them up.
| dragoncrab wrote:
| Myspace and early Facebook were already a downgrade to classic
| chatrooms. I met with so many interesting people on chat in the
| early 2000s and have met with many offline as well. Multiple
| times I've travelled 6+ hours to participate in chat meetups
| with 20-50 others from the same chatroom.
|
| Those were different times: Over 4 years, I've never received a
| d*ckpic or was target of stalking, harassment, abuse or scam.
| People were genuinely interested in each other, chat was not
| about building a personal brand and anonymity didn't make
| commenters psychos.
|
| I'm not sure if ignorance was bliss, or times changed so much,
| but as an adult, I feel online communication has became a
| battlefield where I need to protect my sanity every time I
| interact with it. Rage bait, fake news, ads, bot farms, lies in
| a never ending flood. I wouldn't let my children to even try to
| live the same, uncontrolled online life I had.
| mrighele wrote:
| > Myspace and early Facebook were already a downgrade to
| classic chatrooms.
|
| They were not a downgrade, they just worked the other way.
| With classic chatrooms (or a random vBulletin forums, if you
| wish) you would meet somebody online, then you would become
| friends over time and then you meet them in real life. I did
| that too.
|
| With early Facebook, you would meet somebody at a party, have
| fun together, and decide to become friends on Facebook, not
| much different from exchanging phone numbers, but somehow
| better.
| NickC25 wrote:
| > With classic chatrooms (or a random vBulletin forums, if
| you wish) you would meet somebody online, then you would
| become friends over time and then you meet them in real
| life. I did that too.
|
| And it was usually themed around a specific hobby or
| activity, which would naturally turn into offline, real-
| world activity. almost as if it was a conduit to connecting
| real people with real interests, who would seek out
| communities based around their interests, connect, and then
| eventually go and do those interests.
|
| I was heavily into a few growing up, all of which revolved
| around real-world activities, which the forum members all
| actively participated in. One, in particular that really
| stuck with me for years, was tennis. The forum I was on had
| monthly meetups for my region (NYC metro area) and dozens
| of people would show up, engage, and enjoy each other's
| presence and participation. There was also a travel
| section, so if I was traveling to another country or part
| of the US, I'd be easily able to tap into that region's
| meetup and get a chance to hit some balls whenever I was on
| the road. Lovely.
|
| What was nice is that genuine communities were formed, and
| people actually and actively policed their own communities
| not as a power trip (hey Spez!) but rather in earnest to
| ensure their communities were welcoming and that whoever
| was interested in that topic/activity could participate.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| Man I miss the days when forums were hopping. They all
| really had their own "character," too, often informed by
| whatever interest group they were catering to.
|
| It feels like by including everything on one site, Reddit
| et al just end up as a bland "soup." But they're so
| useful by the sheer mass of population that they end up
| drowning out everything else.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| I even made friends on various forums. Hard to imagine
| these days
| random3 wrote:
| Not many digital cameras, not enough bandwidth for multimedia
| either. Your "face" was a nickname.
| thijson wrote:
| I remember people complaining about the degradation of the
| Usenet experience after AOL brought more people online.
| jmathai wrote:
| I wish the same would happen for games like Roblox. These games
| suffer from all the same problems social media does.
| buckle8017 wrote:
| Reddit is actually the worst of the bunch.
| UltraSane wrote:
| I've noticed comments on YouTube videos about politically
| controversial things in the US show incredibly obvious bot
| activity.
| alexjplant wrote:
| Reddit has been a cesspit of recycled pablum, populist image
| macros and low effort reply comments for more than a decade.
| Enthusiast subreddits are astroturfed to hell and back by
| people with a Shopify storefront and a dream trying to growth
| hack their way to a hockey stick. The low barrier to entry to
| each community means that this vapid culture eventually
| diffuses itself across subreddits that might otherwise be good.
| It's a postmodern toilet that flushes into its own tank.
|
| I don't care if I sound old and salty when I say this: I miss
| phpBB and Invision forums. Even those are being bought up by
| marketing companies to sell ads and transformed with social
| media features... Xenforo (which everybody uses now) allows
| liking posts and supports Instagram-style content feeds.
| SauntSolaire wrote:
| Agreed. I wish they would consider charging a small fee (~$1)
| to create an account. That alone would cut down on all the AI
| spam and give subreddit moderators a fighting chance.
| slumberlust wrote:
| Reddit could pay the mods. Let us not act like spam
| accounts are undesirable for the lil piggy. MAU doesn't
| differentiate between real and fake users.
| shevy-java wrote:
| But one problem on reddit were the mods. It was why I
| retired.
|
| Bots and AI spam can be annoying but mods that lock you out
| of discussions are much worse.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > give subreddit moderators a fighting chance
|
| Moderators are part of the problem really, there are a
| handful of moderators holding the reins over all the
| popular subreddits, and "smaller" (even big ones)
| subreddits suffer from the same problem.
|
| As an example, r/MistralAI, r/LocalLLaMA, r/ChatGPT,
| r/OpenAI and r/grok are all run by the same person.
|
| The only survivable places on reddit left are the
| subreddits with small amount of contributors that aren't
| trying to gain something by participating and organizing.
| But they're so few.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > But they're so few.
|
| Given how many subreddits there, I have to ask if you
| have statistics to back up this claim.
|
| My intuition is that people have problems with a bunch of
| popular subreddits, but the vast majority of subreddits
| are just fine. I have no statistics to back up this
| intuition.
|
| Do you?
| peyton wrote:
| There's a whole vibrant industry of people you can pay to
| market whatever you want on Reddit. They can't all be
| competing for the same few popular subreddits. They must
| be differentiated by targeting niche subreddits.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There's about 138,000 active subreddits. I don't believe
| that this industry is targetting even a majority of them.
| bostik wrote:
| That number alone is a _very good reason_ for the
| industry to target as much of it as they can / dare.
|
| You say "sudreddit". Marketing teams say "self-selecting
| target segment".
| tormeh wrote:
| You'd think so, and yet Reddit adds suck.
| lozenge wrote:
| They are targetting whatever has eyeballs. If people are
| looking for purchasing advice they have probably come
| from Google. So if Google is indexing the subreddit it is
| fair game. That means every subreddit that is not 18+,
| and Reddit also forbids marking a subreddit as 18+ when
| the contents isn't really 18+ (as this was a form of mod
| protest a few years ago).
| Saline9515 wrote:
| You can advertise on Reddit. If the return/cost ratio of
| industrialized astroturfing is better than ads then
| people will use it to promote their products.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| I don't necessarily agree, the Rust subreddit is fine
| (except for all the AI slop posts this year, which the
| moderators have a hard time keeping up with) and some of
| the more niche 3D printing subreddits are doing fine,
| basically it feels like the past few years haven't
| happened there. The Arch Linux subreddit is a bit
| chaotic, but the moderation is not really the problem I
| think.
|
| Maybe all of these fall into your last paragraph and I
| simply don't frequent the type of subreddit you describe.
| The thing is, it is hard to tell if it is you or me who
| have a representative sample here, or if we are both off.
| Two samples is not statistically significant.
| jibal wrote:
| There are over 100,000 subreddits and the vast majority
| of them (and all of the ones I follow) fall into their
| last paragraph ... it's not at all "so few". And even if
| it were, "representative sample" isn't really relevant
| when you can select and mute subs ... it's really not
| much different from usenet, which I was very active on in
| the 80's and 90's.
| Bender wrote:
| Here's one of 'em [1]
|
| [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E36G9QOolxk
| [video][12 mins]
| miki123211 wrote:
| There are two problems in computer science, accepting
| payments and naming things.
|
| Reddit's principal problem is that the first person to
| take r/foo is often a BDFL for foo for life, and no other
| subreddit about foo will ever be quite as recognizable.
| If we instead had subreddits with a numeric ID and a non-
| unique display name, that problem would be solved.
|
| Payments would also solve the spam problem, but many
| users who have $1 can't easily get that $1 to Reddit, so
| that's not really an option either.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Reddit is eager to remove mods who it disagrees with. Any
| remaining mods are there because Reddit approves of them.
| miroljub wrote:
| Don't you understand that paying even one cent to Redeit
| (or any other social media) would completely deanonymise
| it?
|
| So yeah, I'd rather live with spam than with whatever
| public online identities give any government.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Don't you understand that paying even one cent to
| Redeit (or any other social media) would completely
| deanonymise it?
|
| For a site of that size I wonder if it wouldn't work to
| just have them sell gift cards in physical retailers and
| then you could buy one for cash.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Admins actively choose moderators, removing ones they
| don't like and inserting their favorites. Recently, a mod
| was removed from r/LivestreamFails and made a public
| crashout video. In exactly the way you'd expect a Reddit
| mod to.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Reddit recently announced a change that capped the number
| of large subreddits than any individual can moderate. It
| might reduce this problem.
| sejje wrote:
| They'll get two accounts
| crooked-v wrote:
| Something Awful has retained a weirdly high level of
| quality these days by (still) charging :tenbux: to register
| an account.
| Bender wrote:
| Also survived the great cancellation [1]
|
| [1] - https://www.somethingawful.com/cliff-
| yablonski/i-hate-you-01...
| alisonatwork wrote:
| $1 is far too low to discourage abuse. Spammers and
| scammers will still make exponential returns. PR agencies
| are paid tens of thousands to craft narratives for their
| clients. With institutional actors the sky is the limit.
| Even just your average basement dwelling troll might
| consider it worth their while to pay a dollar for a sock
| puppet account.
| rchaud wrote:
| Requiring a valid payment method before posting will take
| out 99.9% of spammers and trolls. Newspapers discovered
| this when they went behind paywalls. SomethingAwful
| discovered this 20 years ago when they required $10 to
| create an account.
| leptons wrote:
| Lol, I guess I'm glad I checked-out from reddit before the
| whole "AI" thing took off. My life is honestly way better
| without reddit. HN isn't far behind though, honestly. The
| less time I spend here, the better for everything else
| going on in my life. HN has at least been somewhat useful
| for my day-job and employment future.
| shevy-java wrote:
| phpBB was quite nice, but you must remember that people used
| phpBB less and less over the years. Many phpBB style
| webforums are dead, and died before discourse etc... came
| about.
|
| People's habits changed.
|
| I do agree that things got worse in the last ~16 years or so.
| Arainach wrote:
| The legal landscape has also changed. 20 years ago I helped
| run a web forum, but with today's legal landscape - DMCA in
| the US, various different laws in the EU and other
| countries - I would never do so. The amount of liability on
| the host for user-created content is far too high.
| int_19h wrote:
| DMCA was already a thing 20 years ago?
| pests wrote:
| he ran a forum 20 years ago, but today, with things like
| DMCA.....
| direwolf20 wrote:
| DMCA was already a thing 20 years ago
| pests wrote:
| Wow that seems like yesterday. Time really does fly. Yeah
| you are correct I didn't think of the actual dates.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| It's closer to 30 now, passed in 1998.
| Bender wrote:
| _The legal landscape has also changed._
|
| It did change a lot but the biggest changes were the
| ToS/AuP of server/VM providers. What was not even taboo
| in the early 00's was becoming a problem keeping an
| account active on clear-web sites. Across the board many
| providers starting using the vague word _" lewd"_ a word
| I had never heard of even after running porn sites for a
| long time.
|
| Many of us moved to .onion despite being incredibly slow
| at the time. We would keep an unpublished clear-web sub-
| domain active for the old time users so they had a fast
| connection. Eventually that was even problematic so many
| forum operators stopped accepting new users and made
| their forums private or semi-private. Some still exist
| and some got married, had kids and real life took too
| much time and energy to also run such sites.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| You are shielded from liability if you respond to abuse
| reports.
| Arainach wrote:
| In the US, maybe. In Europe, not necessarily. The UK's
| OFCOM regulations are particularly concerning.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Europe is more bureaucratic. You have to register with
| the government to say you host user content and respond
| to abuse reports, and then respond to abuse reports, and
| you're shielded.
| Arainach wrote:
| No, the reality is far worse - and prohibitively
| expensive in time and money to any individual as opposed
| to large corporation.
|
| https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/401475/
| zdragnar wrote:
| There's one or two still kicking around that I visit
| myself, but I'll admit I don't miss not having threaded
| conversations. Trying to follow a conversation with other
| people butting in with low effort shit posting is way
| harder with everything being linear.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| We can't have threaded conversations because that would
| elevate some users and subordinate other's comments.
|
| Everyone is equal and hierarchy is bad.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| What, really, is the difference between phpBB and discourse
| (not discord) in the context of the discussion we're having
| here?
| Bender wrote:
| For phpBB site behavior, access control lists, ranks
| _unless discourse has added that_ , per board policies,
| per rank policies. I have not used Discourse in a long
| time so I have no idea what they have added but that was
| the difference long ago.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| What really killed phpBB and that generation of boards was
| mostly the sketchy codebases they ran off.
|
| The code was rife with vulnerabilities, so the boards
| needed constant patching (which was a non-trivial that
| sometimes killed the database). If you didn't patch on
| time, a script inevitably dropped by, exploited the
| software, dumped all credentials, and nuked the database.
|
| Those old forums were not built with the adversarial nature
| of the 2010s internet in mind. Boards were dropping like
| flies a few years there. Most simply never recovered.
| Bender wrote:
| Absolutely avoid all the extensions. Supposedly that got
| tightened up in v3.x but I saw some boards get pwned in
| 2.x from the extensions. Another issue is that most
| people were too lazy to harden php.ini _yup this is a
| thing_ and their servers allowed outbound connections so
| exploiting some of the core code was much easier. Maybe I
| am just lucky but I never had a security issue with
| phpBB. One of my earliest forums using phpBB had over 50k
| people on it. That may not sound like much but it was a
| niche community and very early in the Internets
| existence.
| Bender wrote:
| I still use it for private and semi-private forums. The
| access controls make it much easier to stop drive-by
| spammers or at very least prevent anyone seeing their crap
| posts.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| The craziest thing about Reddit for me is how most
| communities forbid "self-promotion." To me that sounds like a
| thing only admins would want because it keeps users on the
| site/app, but this is enforced by moderators for some reason
| and a lot of drama has occurred over banning creators over
| these silly rules.
|
| It's a place that originally was a link-sharing platform,
| where you literally can't share a link to your own website on
| any subreddit. At least not if you are honest about it. It's
| okay if you pretend you aren't associated to it.
|
| Reddit has become essentially watermarked videos posted by
| people pretending they aren't the creator of the video,
| twitter screenshots with 10 likes posted by people pretending
| they aren't the user who tweeted the tweet, and links to news
| websites posted by users whose only activity on reddit seems
| to be posting the same link to 5 different subreddits as if
| it was their job, because it probably is.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I'm not a good marketer, so take what I say with a grain of
| salt, but the only thing I've found that works is replying
| to relevant comments in popular threads with neutral
| looking promotional material (e.g. github links). A well
| placed reply in a hot thread will easily drive 10x the
| value of a blog post.
| cube00 wrote:
| Sadly a few have started doing this on HN now.
|
| _(Short low effort comment agreeing with parent comment)
| I wrote more about this here... <url>_
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I think it's possible to do it ethically, but anything
| that works is going to get gamed.
|
| It's a pretty dark dystopian future where the only way
| for anyone to hear about anything is advertising or paid
| promotion by influencers because we're so aggressive
| about policing individuals marketing themselves.
| whatshisface wrote:
| After a certain point, these threads start sounding like,
|
| "I hate my rights. I hate the town square. There is litter in
| the common square. There is a child outdoors. Take away my
| pubic square."
| Aeglaecia wrote:
| I think it sounds more like "why is the town square covered
| in ads now , who installed actual mantraps in the town
| square , why is everything we do in the town square used
| against us , town squares were fine less than two decades
| ago and we let the rich parasitize them for profit"
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Except you're doing nothing about that besides going
| "let's keep the town square terrible" and ensuring kids
| are 100% unprepared for the way the modern world
| communicates in the 21st century lol
| collingreen wrote:
| Which part is "keep the town square terrible"?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| The part where social media goes completely unchanged
| except for banning some kids from communicating with
| their friends
| yallpendantools wrote:
| Which just begs the question, how much can you really
| change social media? How much are you really in control
| of your feed? This is where the "pubic square" analogy
| breaks down. Besides, there are _a lot_ of communication
| mediums /messaging apps that are not social media.
|
| Even back in the early 2010s I've been trying to consume
| social media mindfully. I made sure to follow pages with
| meaningful content (e.g., The Dalai Lama, The Long Now
| Foundation, Aeon Magazine, tech-related pages, SpaceX,
| Elon Musk, indie creators). I don't just add or follow
| blindly.
|
| Back then I could justify why my selection was "good" but
| even then, they were drowned out by the tedium of
| vacations, new restaurants, felt-cute-might-delete-later
| selfies. Slop/engagement bait is quicker to produce than
| meaningful thought-provoking content.
|
| I am also pretty sure Facebook's negative signals
| (unfollow, don't show me this type of content) did not
| work back then, at least not deterministically. If
| something I did not like had enough traction, it will
| still pop up in my feed.
|
| And of course, goes without saying that a lot of my
| choices aged like milk. Elon Musk turned out to be, well,
| Elon Musk. Some of the tech pages started shilling out
| crypto (and nowadays doubtless AI). The indie creators
| either stopped posting or fell out of favor with the
| algorithm which meant exodus from the platform. All that
| goes on top of my pre-existing grievances against my feed
| recommendations.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| You could ban it
| spaqin wrote:
| Exchanging messages with your contacts isn't really that
| hard that you really need to prepare for it.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Zealous parents are using this as an opportunity to take
| phones, computers and means of digital communication
| away. Hell, by law, you can't even use Discord without
| verifying your age lol
|
| Imagine if they banned video games and texting 20 years
| ago because parents were convinced their kids were
| addicted to Halo and T9Word. They could always roll hoops
| in the street and send letters to each other with a
| little planning, too.
| jen20 wrote:
| In the UK that was naturally the case 20-25 years ago -
| text messages were priced per message, and bundles were
| small.
| eudamoniac wrote:
| Ok, I'm imagining it. Looks good. What's the problem?
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| >Xenforo (which everybody uses now) allows liking posts and
| supports Instagram-style content feeds.
|
| On spacebattles you get infracted for chan-like (or
| instagram-like) behaviour. It's all about how strict
| moderation is. They do allow likes (but there's no algo)
| sarchertech wrote:
| Oh man spacebattles is still active? I haven't been there
| regularly in 20 years.
| bananaflag wrote:
| There's also sufficientvelocity, its offshoot.
| ValentineC wrote:
| > _I miss phpBB and Invision forums._
|
| As someone who's paid for an Invision Power Board licence
| before: I remember when they screwed all existing
| "lifetime/perpetual" licence holders with v3, and once again
| with v4.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I miss slashdot 20 years ago :/
| stateofinquiry wrote:
| I still visit regularly (and have since about 2000 or so),
| but I agree that it is not the same as in those days. I
| remember feeling like I was gaining actual insight into the
| topics from the comments, today... much less so. Maybe
| being older also plays a role, but I think /. has certainly
| changed as well.
| CRConrad wrote:
| More like 25-30 years, innit?
| MatejKafka wrote:
| True for the popular subreddits, but there are occasional
| niche communities that imo managed to keep the forum vibe
| (e.g., r/progmetal, r/cpp).
| jwr wrote:
| > I don't care if I sound old and salty when I say this: I
| miss phpBB
|
| I'll one-up this: I miss USENET.
|
| I never understood how anyone could like phpBB, compared to
| USENET news readers, it was a chaotic mess. But USENET, that
| was great for discussing things.
| netsharc wrote:
| Usenet before the Eternal September?
|
| I remember using some forums, and there'd be pages and
| pages of idiots just replying "Wow, this is great, thanks
| OP!", or "Thanks from me too!". How the fuck do you think
| you're contributing rather than polluting?
|
| And nowadays they can even create Github accounts and do
| this...
| lizknope wrote:
| I first got on the Internet in 1991. The older students
| told me to lurk on Usenet and not post anything for a
| month or 2 to avoid getting flamed. I did and then I
| loved it. Once all the @aol.com people started showing up
| it went downhill. By 2000 it was so full of spam and
| garbage that I stopped going. I connected to a Usenet
| server last year for the first time in over 20 years and
| it was just full of junk.
| CRConrad wrote:
| > Usenet before the Eternal September?
|
| Even well after it, in many places. The effect wasn't
| universally immediate.
| appstorelottery wrote:
| MAKE. MONEY. FAST ;-)
| afandian wrote:
| I've just set up a forum for up and coming bagpipe makers
| (not the loud Scottish kind).
|
| It's been a real breath of fresh air seeing a community
| coalesce without the feeling of predators on the horizon (eg
| a hosting provider with misaligned incentives or
| astroturfers).
|
| I don't do social media (beyond HN) much at all these days
| but I'm enjoying seeing it slowly take off.
|
| Using hosted Discourse. I'm glad there's still a market for
| it.
| lawn wrote:
| The problem with reddit is that subreddits vary wildly in
| feeling and quality.
|
| On one hand you have absolute garbage but on the other you
| have very niche subreddits that does feel like the internet
| of old.
| this_steve_j wrote:
| Comment of the week!
| johnisgood wrote:
| Yeah, we all had such forums set up. I personally used
| Vanilla Forums and phpBB. I remember I did set up Invision
| once and I felt great about myself. (I was a kid) :D
| figassis wrote:
| When did this start? IMHO it started with instagram. I remember
| back then there were multiple retro photo apps, insta was one
| of them, I had several on my phone and kept playing around with
| them (at the time apps felt like Christmas presents, each
| update exploring a device feature in creative ways).
|
| I don't quite remember, but I don't think it was a social
| network then, I think you posted the photos in other networks,
| and then they made it into a social network and something
| strange happened. People started posting pictures of food and
| just general daily life stuff and I thought this was a small
| group of people who were a extroverts and just wanted to show
| off idk, they ate beautiful food.
|
| Then something strange happened. This behavior started getting
| normalized, all other insta like apps disappeared and shortly
| after, it became necessary to have an instagram account.
|
| I remember at the time I thought something was off, to this day
| I think I have posted a total of 10 instagram images, they
| still have the old filters, and stayed off of it since.
|
| But it's been interesting watching it morph into this hydra
| that simply cannot be put down, to the point where it's more
| powerful than governments.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Really good question...TL;DR: I'd put it around when Mark Z
| decided Instagram also had to be Snapchat. (copied Stories)
| It normalized a behavior of copying.
|
| I had gotten completely out of these apps, then ended up in a
| situation where I needed to use Snapchat daily if not hourly
| for messaging, and needed to use TikTok to be culturally
| literate. (i.e. I got into something romantic with someone
| younger).
|
| It was a stunning experience. Seeing _everyone_ had
| normalized this "copy our competitor" strat, hill-climbing on
| duration of engagement.
|
| YouTube Shorts is a crappy copy of TikTok with mostly TikTok
| reposts and no sense of community.
|
| Snapchat has a poor clone of TikTok that I doubt anyone knows
| exists.
|
| TikTok is the ur-engagement king. Pure dopamine, just keep
| swiping until something catches your attention, and swipe as
| soon as it stops. No meaningful 1:1 communicating aspect
| (there's messages, but AFAICT from light quizzing of Gen
| Zers, it's not used for _actual_ _communication_ )
|
| Instagram specifically is hard for me to speak to, because
| Gen Zers seem to think its roughly as cool as Facebook, but
| my understanding is millennials my age or younger (I'm 37)
| use it more regularly, whereas Gen Z uses it more as like
| we'd think of Facebook, a generic safe place where grandma
| can see your graduation photos, as opposed to spontaneous
| thirst traps.
| notpushkin wrote:
| > and needed to use TikTok to be culturally literate
|
| I wish we had something like Lurkmore for the modern
| Internets(tm). KYM could be it, but it seems to focus on
| random celebrity gossip instead? Idk.
| refulgentis wrote:
| This is a really good point.
|
| It made me realize there's something weird about TikTok,
| it's kind of like Twitter except with an audience much
| more compliant with/sanguine about The Algorithm. i.e. no
| one's fighting for a "people I follow only" feed (there
| is one, but it's not worth fighting for, in a cultural
| sense)
|
| They will overpromote one thing and some story you're not
| part of will be hyperviral for 6 hours, so there's almost
| no time for someone else to digest it. (example that
| comes to mind is Solidcore Guy, https://people.com/man-
| finds-empty-6-a-m-solidcore-class-fil..., took People 10
| days to catch up to something you'd need to know for
| small talk in a 48 hour window)
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| it started with FB before IG, but infected IG once Zuck
| bought it
|
| but things really took off when TT cracked the code for
| endless scrolling of "relevant" content
| shevy-java wrote:
| > Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user
| engaged and to push content to them.
|
| Agreed but you have this on many websites such as youtube. Is
| youtube the next to get banned here? I mean you can write
| comments to so it is kind of a social mediua setup as well.
|
| > So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums
| or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably
| fine.
|
| I don't know. It sounds quite arbitrary to me.
|
| Not that I have anything against chopping down the big
| platforms. They truly abuse many people.
| thijson wrote:
| Probably the online dating platforms are the same way. Someone
| actually finding their mate, and no longer needing the platform
| is counterproductive to their business model.
| seneca wrote:
| I totally agreed with you, right up until the last paragraph.
| Reddit is among the worst communities on the internet.
| pokstad wrote:
| 100%. Go on Facebook or Instagram today and you're more likely
| to see viral videos than to see anything to do with your
| friends. It's just a moth to flame.
| lazarus01 wrote:
| > Quality of the content doesn't matter at all
|
| Exactly.
|
| Engagement is prioritized over quality on most mediums. I find
| user generated content on social media absolutely abhorrent.
|
| Thank goodness for hacker news. I can read something, share my
| views and in some cases, my views may be based on some weak
| intuition and I learn from polite correctness.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user
| engaged and to push content to them._
|
| Heard the same thing about video games, TV shows, D&D, texting
| and even youth novels.
|
| There are a lot of big feelings about social media, but little
| data.
|
| If the goal is to make social media "less addictive", the
| article in the OP does nothing to stop that. The article claims
| that social media affects youth mental health, but does the
| data actually back that up?
|
| From the Guardian[1]:
|
| > _Social media time does not increase teenagers' mental health
| problems - study_
|
| > _Research finds no evidence heavier social media use or more
| gaming increases symptoms of anxiety or depression_
|
| > _Screen time spent gaming or on social media does not cause
| mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale
| study._
|
| > _With ministers in the UK considering whether to follow
| Australia's example by banning social media use for under-16s,
| the findings challenge concerns that long periods spent gaming
| or scrolling TikTok or Instagram are driving an increase in
| teenagers' depression, anxiety and other mental health
| conditions._
|
| > _Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000
| 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their
| self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and
| emotional difficulties to find out whether technology use
| genuinely predicted later mental health difficulties._
|
| From Nature[2]:
|
| > _Time spent on social media among the least influential
| factors in adolescent mental health_
|
| From the Atlantic[3] with citations in the article:
|
| > _The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn't Help Teens, It may only
| make things worse._
|
| > _I am a developmental psychologist[], and for the past 20
| years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental
| illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using
| their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range
| of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology
| use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have
| repeatedly failed to find[4] compelling support for the claim
| that digital-technology use is a major contributor to
| adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms._
|
| > _Many other researchers have found the same[5]. In fact, a
| recent[6] study and a review of research[6] on social media and
| depression concluded that social media is one of the least
| influential factors in predicting adolescents' mental health.
| The most influential factors include a family history of mental
| disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and
| discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among
| others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of
| Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report[7]
| concluding, "Available research that links social media to
| health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be
| influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences.
| Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is
| universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more
| complicated."_
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7
|
| [2]
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/candi...
|
| [3] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-
| media-t...
|
| [4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31929951/
|
| [5]
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7#:~:text=G...
|
| [6] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32734903/
|
| [7]
| https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27396/Highlights_...
| cmurf wrote:
| The medical and financial predators targeting elderly makes me
| wonder how to constrain it. The law doesn't really help, short
| of having a court determine there's some level of incapacity.
|
| In theory the law doesn't require victim cooperation. In
| practice, I've found local prosecutors won't touch a case with
| an uncooperative victim. And most victims don't cooperate
| whether out of humiliation or rejection pf the very idea they
| can be scammed. Because to them all scams are obvious, and only
| morons are scammed. They consistently lack imagination for the
| sophistication and manipulation component of scams, thinking
| it's all about obviousness.
|
| I'm sure it's not only a case of "save the children". Saving
| grandma's retirement accounts is also important. The internet
| is a cesspool.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > Back then it was a platform to communicate with friends, and
| maybe even find new friends to meet up with.
|
| Those still exist... and this ban will probably outlaw them for
| the people who need it the most.
| tamimio wrote:
| The keyword here is monetization, it's what ruined social
| media, among many other entertainment industries. If we somehow
| managed to ban monetization through social media or internet,
| you will notice how it will reset back to ol' fun days.
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| I can relate to this. Early social media were forum sites,
| boards, irc, mailing lists and things like that.
| leptons wrote:
| >Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user
| engaged and to push content to them. The content must either be
| addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the
| content doesn't matter at all.
|
| "AI" is really no different. These social media bans should
| include "AI" too, for people under a certain age. I even see
| adults that don't understand the limits of "AI" and that it
| shouldn't be trusted blindly.
| vjk800 wrote:
| The problem is not the whole of social media per se, it is the
| monetization mechanisms used in the social media platforms. I'd
| think it would be better to ban the addictive algorithms,
| although it would be difficult or impossible to define
| precisely what to ban then.
|
| Hacker News is a sort of social media platform, but I would
| have no problem with my kids using it without any sort of
| restrictions. The same is not true for Tik Tok or even
| Facebook.
| NalNezumi wrote:
| No reddit is not fine.
|
| It's simple really. Do you have a recommendation algorithm that
| is tuned to individual preferences to increase engagement?
| You're a social media that falls under the ban.
|
| You're a messaging app that is between individuals (or group
| messages) with no recommendation algorithm but just for
| communication? You're an communication (or at worst Social
| network) app, you're good to go.
|
| If I would add, I'd add a clause that says "if you can make a
| non-algorithms version of your product and keep it separated,
| you can maybe circumvent the ban"
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Tech folks went crazy for Google+'s _circles_ back in 2011 but
| the demand from normal users just wasn't there for that level
| of control. FB brushed it off with friends, "close friends",
| and public. That was enough -- even "friends of friends" was
| dropped or buried after a while.
|
| Fast forward to 2025 and circles is absolutely the winning
| paradigm, except it's called "group chat" where it is the
| vector for cat pictures, hollandaise bragging, and vacation
| snaps.
| grishka wrote:
| That's why I started distinguishing these two concepts when I
| talk about them in English. The terrible thing that insists on
| obnoxiously getting in your way with its stupid algorithms when
| you're just trying to have conversations with your friends is
| "social media". Early Facebook and Twitter, and current open-
| source initiatives like the fediverse, are "social networks".
| drecked wrote:
| The hint is in the name.
|
| In the early days they were social networks. The idea was to
| connect people. (The Facebook movie is called the Social
| Network...)
|
| Now they're social media. The idea is to push messages to you
| but this time the message is coming from a person you know so
| you're psychologically more inclined to believe it.
| steve1977 wrote:
| > So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums
| or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably
| fine.
|
| One idea would be to only allow non-profits maybe.
| malklera wrote:
| Do parents do not exist? I mean if the parents pass hours looking
| at their phone, the kids would want to use a phone, maybe making
| a law is easier than setting an example? Each parent could
| educate themselves and bloc "harmful" websites from their kids
| phones, that is what parental control is for.(single, no kids)
| ottah wrote:
| Never accept the bullshit false dichotomy of people pushing an
| agenda. There are many, many ways to solve this issue other than
| the nuclear option of a ban and doing nothing.
| rendall wrote:
| The impression that one might get from this article is that the
| ban is essentially a done deal, but it's not. What exists right
| now is political signaling by Prime Minister Petteri Orpo, plus
| preliminary fact-finding and position papers by ministries and
| agencies, but no enacted legislation. There's still a big gap
| between "government floats an idea with broad public support" and
| "a legally enforceable, technically workable ban".
|
| The Finnish language article about it is much thinner.
|
| https://yle.fi/a/74-20204177
| spicyusername wrote:
| Under 15
|
| Heck I'd support banning under 18.
| abdelhousni wrote:
| Tiktok was also the wake up call for US and other western
| countries who found out they lost a part of their youth about the
| Israeli war on Gaza. Youth thorough the ages always stand against
| perceived injustice. The oligarchy also want to control that
| aspect.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| Banning youth from communicating is just not appropriate. And
| forcing adults to give up privacy to discuss things is a huge
| risk and a path to enabling authoritarianism, like in Trump's
| America.
| duxup wrote:
| Rather than really address what is ass about social media, we
| just "ban" it for folks who we can ban it for. This seems off.
|
| Kid's have unlimited time. They'll find something else, likely
| pretending to be adults and thus even more at risk.
|
| Meanwhile everyone else gets an internet license and the
| government every website tracks you ...
|
| This is a classic case of nice idea and the results will be all
| wrong / not even address the problem.
| hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm wrote:
| By creating 'rules' for social media based on what's good and
| bad instead of banning it altogether you end up creating
| loopholes instead. Even in the case we instead first discuss
| what is "ass" we will probably end up having a debate instead
| of getting anything done for another 10 years. I'm on team,
| just get shit done.
| duxup wrote:
| What is getting done here?
|
| Everyone but kids is still exposed, and likely still kids...
|
| Also you now have to have a license for social media,
| probably the internet eventually.
| GreenWatermelon wrote:
| Not exposing kods to addictive drugs while they're still
| young and naive lowers their chances of consuming drugs
| when they're adults.
|
| The societies that will allow unchecked access to social
| media will collapse, just like ehat happened to China
| during the Opium wars.
|
| Everyone but kids still has access to cigarettes, doesn't
| mean we should allow sale pf tobacco to Minors.
| duxup wrote:
| At best everyone but kids still has unchecked access.
| constantcrying wrote:
| This is of course a trend in many western countries. With some,
| like the UK and Australia, leading the way.
|
| At this point I do not think it is reasonable to deny the harm
| that certain modes of social interactions over the internet have
| caused. At the same time these bans should not be considered
| reasonable options. They exist to cover for the decade of
| inaction of politicians in addressing youth dissatisfaction and
| dysfunction.
|
| A reasonable approach should not assume that the root cause of
| this dysfunction is youth interacting with social media, but
| should consider what lead to this in the first place. Apparently
| most adults seem to be capable of dealing with this situation, if
| they are not why would this ban, or at least some regulation, not
| extend to social media for adults.
|
| In general I believe that dysfunction in the youth has multiple
| causes and that overuse of social media is just on part of the
| puzzle and that unhealthy use of social media is often _caused_
| by other problem and used as a coping mechanism.
|
| These bans will not be effective and they will be assaults on the
| free internet, as the bureaucrats establishing the laws are also
| seeking to control the internet for themselves and will use this
| as a backdoor.
| quotemstr wrote:
| > At this point I do not think it is reasonable to deny the
| harm that certain modes of social interactions over the
| internet have caused
|
| Yes, it is reasonable to doubt the purported harms are real,
| because
|
| 1) I've yet to see evidence that the medium is the problem,
|
| 2) people keep telling me that they don't need evidence because
| the harms are obvious, and
|
| 3) I have an strong prior, as an American, that anyone
| preventing people sharing ideas with each other is a villain of
| history.
|
| The furor over youth social media has all the hallmarks of a
| moral panic, including over-reliance of weak evidence, personal
| attacks against skeptics, and socially disruptive remedies of
| dubious efficiency, the collateral damage of which people
| justify by pointing to harms to children they say, falsely, are
| obvious and ongoing.
|
| I'm not convinced that these social media bans are solving a
| real problem. The more people breathlessly tell me I'm a bad
| person for asking for evidence of the alleged harms, the more I
| think it's a public mania, not a civilizational problem.
|
| It really doesn't help that it'd be suspiciously convenient for
| the worst actors in power if sharing ideas on the internet
| required ID.
| constantcrying wrote:
| For the reasons outlined in my post I believe that it is hard
| to show specific causal claims which relate overuse of mobile
| devices and especially social media to specific problems.
| Although I think for some specific cases this could still be
| reasonably inferred.
|
| Just to be clear, the evidence seems overwhelming. This is
| not some novel research field, but this questions has been
| researched for long enough to have been pretty conclusively
| answered.
|
| >1) I've yet to see evidence that the medium is the problem,
|
| This is not relevant to the claim. The claim is that the
| specific usage pattern of young adults is harmful to their
| development.
|
| >I'm not convinced that these social media bans are solving a
| real problem.
|
| I largely agree.
| perfmode wrote:
| I miss the days of chatting at home with friends after school on
| MSN Messenger and ICQ.
| notthemessiah wrote:
| People in this thread are celebrating this, though it inevitably
| means ID-checking and mass surveillance. Australia's ban also
| exempted Roblox, a platform that exploits children and is a haven
| for child predators. Also, it's no coincidence that all these
| social media bans are arriving the same time youth are using
| social media to spread awareness of Israel's genocide of
| Palestine.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| Have you ever played Roblox?
| m132 wrote:
| Open Internet dying in front of our very eyes.
|
| Let's not forget that social media are just one of the many
| scapegoats tried over the past decade in hopes of pushing this
| idea forwards. And while there's no denying that today's social
| media have gotten destructive, they're still only a scapegoat; no
| attempt is being made here to bring them back to their original,
| non-malicious shape.
|
| Is the social media hate really so powerful that, channeled
| carefully, it can overshadow free speech?
| testing22321 wrote:
| Has anyone ever argued that children should have full access to
| the entire internet?
|
| Seems like a horribly bad idea.
| m132 wrote:
| Will adults be exempt from the invasive age verification?
| wiseowise wrote:
| > no attempt is being made here to bring them back to their
| original, non-malicious shape.
|
| Social networks can revert back to original form any minute,
| nobody's stopping them.
|
| > Is the social media hate really so powerful that, channeled
| carefully, it can overshadow free speech?
|
| Bots giving platform to schizos and fringe radicals is a
| freedom of speech?
| Nursie wrote:
| Social media is not the open internet, pretty much by
| definition. With a few notable, niche exceptions it's big
| centralised services entirely in the control of single
| companies.
|
| They've long been explicitly targeting human psychology for
| profit, it's hardly surprising there's a backlash. But that
| doesn't mean the open internet is dead. In fact the open
| internet could benefit from the slaying of these centralised
| monsters.
| GreenWatermelon wrote:
| In what universe are corpo-controlled walled-gardens considered
| "Open Internet"?
|
| > no attempt is being made here to bring them back to their
| original, non-malicious shape.
|
| Because it's impossible unless you ban for-profit social media.
| Naturally I'd support such a ban.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| Wrong. Ban phones. Would benefit more than just children. The
| internet must again become something you sit down to use.
| eimrine wrote:
| ban proprietary software, do not let microsoft or apple to
| "offer deals" to schoolchildren.
| machomaster wrote:
| Not phones. Smart phones.
| cal_dent wrote:
| It's all picking up steam. The thing is whatever the
| implementation may be, the writing is on the wall that social
| media's are numbered, well at least its in current form.
|
| I.m sure there'll be downsides to this but, have to say, I'm
| happy the de facto position that social media's should be allowed
| to be the wild west is now seriously being questioned
| logicchains wrote:
| >the writing is on the wall that social media's are numbered,
| well at least its in current form
|
| There's enough of us devs that absolutely fucking hate the idea
| of governments controlling how people communicate that the next
| stage of social media will probably be a decentralised system
| that's extremely difficult to shut down. Unless every
| government devolves into full on China-style authoritarianism
| with deep packet inspection, a national firewall and ubiquitous
| surveillance, there's no way to stop a well designed
| distributed social media platform. There just hasn't been
| enough incentive yet for people to build one.
| hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm wrote:
| Social media really is downhill from here. There is already a lot
| of bot activity (and I don't mean moltbook) and it will only get
| worse.
|
| This will become closer to truth than conspiracy:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
| VortexLain wrote:
| Social media age restriation is just an anonymity ban in
| disguise. Governments should focus on regulations knowingly
| addictive and overly engaging mechanics instead.
| pembrook wrote:
| Watching people cheer this on uncritically without thinking
| through what this actually means in practice (the end of privacy
| on the internet, forever)...just because of some silly moral
| panic and people being too lazy to parent their kids...it's just
| sad.
|
| Unfortunately, rationally thinking through 2nd and 3rd order
| effects is hard. As we see on social media, appeals to emotion
| drive the highest engagement, and "think of the children" is the
| ultimate emotional appeal.
|
| But hey, with European countries moving to tie all internet
| activity to their national ID system to "protect the children
| from social media" and "ban speech we don't like" maybe we can
| finally get rid of those cookie popups?
|
| Making Lambi Toilet Paper jump through bizarre hoops when
| targeting their toilet paper ads to people seems silly
| now...given we're voluntarily handing our browser history &
| permission to access the open web to a much more powerful entity
| (the government). Consumer goods companies combining your IP
| address and email address together for the purpose of selling you
| more toilet bowl cleaner...becomes a bit of a moot point, no?
| donatj wrote:
| Do people under the age of sixty even use traditional social
| media anymore? Do we have actual stats?
|
| I am in my late thirties so surely out of touch, but am friends
| with people in their mid twenties and frankly I don't know anyone
| who spends any significant time on anything other than TikTok. I
| guess you could call TikTok "social media", but it wouldn't fit
| my old person definition.
|
| I think pretty much everyone below the age of 60 is aware that
| Facebook/Instagram/etc is just slop now. You don't even see your
| friend stuff. You just see slop. I use Facebook primarily for
| marketplace these days, but when I do scroll my feed, it's all
| like weird east asian AI slop. Women cutting open impossibly
| large fruit, fake tartar removal, fake videos of fights.
|
| Literally nothing that compels me to stay on the site like I hear
| people on here talk about.
| hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm wrote:
| >I think pretty much everyone below the age of 60 is aware that
| Facebook/Instagram/etc is just slop now.
|
| Sorry, but to me you just revealed you don't speak to many
| women.
| donatj wrote:
| I'm married with children, work from home, and weeks away
| from my 40s. So yes. Not a big revelation.
|
| I have more than a couple nieces and nephews in their late
| teens/early 20s though and if you ask them, social media is
| for old people.
| expedition32 wrote:
| Its a very dangerous experiment. Remember: we only get ONE
| childhood. No do overs.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Hmmmm. So I do understand some concerns here. On the other hand,
| I also absolutely hate all forms of censorship. I don't use any
| of these anti-social media myself (though, perhaps hacker news is
| declared social media? I also used to use reddit in the past, is
| that social media? Where are the boundaries of that term
| definition by the way?), but I still absolutely dislike state
| actors banning websites. I have no illusion about e. g.
| Zuckerberg and others here; see the recent news how Facebook
| tried to "hook" up young kids like a drug addict; Google via
| Youtube on the "swiping" of videos (that one is hard to resist
| ... I keep on scrolling down in the hope of finding better
| videos, fail, and eventually realise how I am wasting my time
| swiping ...). But even then ... I actually think I dislike
| censorship more than those anti-social websites that I am not
| even using anyway. This may be different for younger brains, so
| it is not that I am not understanding the rational behind. But
| still ... I can't get myself to want to like censorship either.
| httpsterio wrote:
| I wouldn't call it censorship. We don't allow kids to drink or
| smoke either, is that censorship? Gate keeping media thats
| possibly harmful for developing brains, when the users are
| possibly unable to make an informed decision for themselves,
| isn't inherently bad.
| zinodaur wrote:
| We should ban dynamic feeds that aren't based on explicit user
| action. E.g., Youtube should only be able to show search results
| based on search term, not search context. The recommendations
| should only be videos from channels you have subscribed to.
|
| The dangers of algorithmic content are so obvious, and the only
| way to stop companies from doing this stuff is to legislate
| against it
| barbazoo wrote:
| Ranking might be deterministic but it's never free from bias.
| zinodaur wrote:
| i'm sure they can still scramble our brains pretty good by
| exploiting ranking, but if they aren't allowed to customize
| it per person (e.g., if the same searches have to return the
| same results for different people), I think it will be a lot
| less effective
| cowboylowrez wrote:
| The internet should be 18+, no internet for kids, there is
| literally no need for kids to have internet access and its easy
| too, treat the devices themselves as contraband. This way you
| need no age checks for social media because internet itself is
| 18+.
| nephihaha wrote:
| Australia, France, soon the UK... All within a few months and
| they have the chutzpah to suggest they came up with this notion
| independently.
| mna_ wrote:
| Are they suggesting that they came up with this notion
| independently? I can't speak for other countries but UK
| politicians who are for this say they're monitoring the
| Australian ban closely to see if it works, so it's clear
| they're not claiming they came up with this notion
| independently.
| nephihaha wrote:
| What happens in every case is this political party or that
| party in each country takes the blame for it, and their
| opposition will pretend to be against it, when in fact it
| appears to be part of a bigger picture.
|
| You're right that reactions are being monitored but this has
| clearly been discussed somewhere and appears fairly co-
| ordinated, much like the emergence of digital ID and AI
| chatbots. It seems to be a common pattern now... Smoking
| restrictions and car ownership seem to approached in a fairly
| similar manner across different countries.
| blackqueeriroh wrote:
| Welp, let's just keep screwing over anyone who doesn't fit
| society's mold of who is acceptable. Particularly queer kids,
| neurodivergent kids, disabled kids, etc.
| wiseowise wrote:
| What does this have to do with social networks ban?
| jimmcslim wrote:
| Meanwhile in Australia two teens I am responsible for still have
| TikTok appearing in their screentime usage and for longer than
| the time limit I have set for them.
| blackqueeriroh wrote:
| As someone who has literally been on the internet since BBSes,
| the idea that those days were better absolutely is contradicted
| by my own experience, in which I was victimized and exploited
| several times because of the lack of any real moderation.
| irusensei wrote:
| Seems its just another country coming up with the same convenient
| excuse to implement KYC to access the internet.
| lovlar wrote:
| It's going to be interesting to see how these types of bans play
| out.
|
| One alternative to bans could perhaps be if the EU created an IdP
| or something similar, with a fee for each authentication request,
| and then forced all commercial services within Europe to use it.
| I'm not sure if the fee should go back to the user or be paid as
| tax to the government, but either way, it would change the
| incentives around connecting traffic to you and making profit
| from it by harvesting data or steering recommendation engines.
|
| Because I do think there's nothing wrong with the government
| doing this, just like in the physical world.
|
| And in some cases, we might prefer cheap authentications... like
| when posting comments, to avoid trolling/manipulation/bullying.
| Perhaps when doing "writes" on the internet, if there's a robust
| way to identify that type of traffic.
| newzino wrote:
| I get the instinct to ban it, but I'm not convinced the evidence
| supports treating "social media" as a single public-health toxin.
|
| 1) The best large-scale work I've seen finds the average
| association between overall screen/social-media use and teen
| well-being is tiny. That doesn't mean "no one is harmed"; it
| means the "it's wrecking a generation" story doesn't fit the data
| very well.
|
| 2) "Social media" lumps together very different things: -
| messaging friends, hobby groups, learning communities, identity-
| affirming support - infinite-scroll algorithmic feeds + targeted
| ads + push notifications + autoplay People in this thread are
| mostly describing the second category ("attention media"). If
| that's the problem, regulate _that layer_.
|
| 3) Blanket bans are easy to route around and may push kids to
| smaller/shadier apps with weaker controls. If you want a lever
| that actually changes incentives, go after business model &
| design: - no targeted ads to minors - default
| chronological/subscription feeds for minors - disable
| autoplay/infinite scroll for minors by default - limits on
| notifications (especially at night) - transparency + researcher
| access to study effects - device/school-hour phone restrictions
| (where enforcement is actually feasible)
|
| If you want to "end the experiment," change the rules of the lab
| (platform incentives + design), not prohibit the existence of
| teens talking online.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Teens can still talk online. Social media is an obvious poison
| and we shouldn't give kids access to it.
| pembrook wrote:
| OP writes a thoughtful, evidence-based comment.
|
| The mob responds with a 1-sentence emotional meme. Classic
| moral panic 101.
|
| It's impossible to fight feelings with logic unfortunately,
| which is why many western countries are going to fall into
| this trap and ultimately kill the idea of digital privacy and
| the open web forever.
|
| This particular moral panic is reaching peak trendiness, and
| the baptists and the bootleggers are out in full force. Both
| parties are begging for hamfisted over-reaction from
| government (the bootleggers and politicians for more
| nefarious reasons of course).
| toofy wrote:
| > The mob responds with a 1-sentence emotional meme.
| Classic moral panic 101.
|
| it was one person.
|
| im writing this comment 1 hour after yours, and still only
| a single person has responded and you've called one person,
| a mob. you've declared one person commenting to be a "moral
| panic."
| Lerc wrote:
| I shall echo the comment of pibaker with one caveat.
|
| > _The exact same sentiment is widely observed across
| this entire website._
|
| You do see this sentiment across this website, but this
| doesn't mean that it is a view held by the majority of
| people here, the people motivated to act can create the
| illusion that their opinions are more widely held than
| they are.
|
| A few days ago I posted a comment which, in it's entirety
| reads
|
| > _Perhaps things would work out better if people didn 't
| say mean things regardless of who it's about._
|
| > _You can still criticise without being mean._
|
| The comment sits at -4 today, and has one antagonistic
| response. I don't really think most people disagree with
| this sentiment.
|
| The antagonistic response came from the same one person
| as the comment in this thread.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Who cares, nothing of value is being lost.
| stubish wrote:
| The Australian 'social media' ban is only blocking specific
| platforms, so not really a social media ban. Lots of 'but what
| about' and 'kids will just' articles in the media, which didn't
| really address that forcing kids to move from a known toxic
| environment to a hopefully less toxic environment is at least a
| step in the right direction, even if not a silver bullet. There
| are certainly good reasons for kids to be on social media, but
| none of those reasons are valid when talking about Twitter.
| Youtube seems the hardest one to deal with, combining a great
| information resource with uncontrolled toxic comments and
| borderline illegal and harmful content.
| ares623 wrote:
| Once again I am hoping for a ban on _smart_phones. Not laptops.
| Not tablets (although those could get tricky I admit). Not dumb
| phones. Details will need to be worked out (like smart watches
| or future VR devices). Maybe a combination of:
|
| - SIM - large enough screen or video playback capability -
| camera
|
| Easier to democratise enforcement (report and fine) and you
| don't need to rely on the very platforms you are trying to
| restrict.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I think that's misguided. It's tricky to define a smart phone
| in a useful fashion as kids could get hold of mini devices
| that have wifi and bluetooth, but no other phone connections
| and surely that would be as bad as the smart phones.
|
| I don't really see the issue with smart phones themselves -
| the problem is the attention whoring platforms that are
| warping people's minds and especially with young people,
| pushing unrealistic beauty/body standards.
| ares623 wrote:
| IMO the problem has two parts to it. The platforms and the
| hardware that allows near constant read access to it and
| instant write access.
|
| Taking away the hardware half is easier and will have
| enough effect to force people out of the addiction.
| parineum wrote:
| > 2) "Social media" lumps together very different things: -
| messaging friends, hobby groups, learning communities,
| identity-affirming support - infinite-scroll algorithmic feeds
| + targeted ads + push notifications + autoplay People in this
| thread are mostly describing the second category ("attention
| media"). If that's the problem, regulate that layer.
|
| I think you're not focussing on the "media" half of social
| media to differentiate some of that stuff.
|
| > "messaging friends, hobby groups, learning communities,
| identity-affirming support"
|
| Those things are all social but I don't see the media.
| bildung wrote:
| _> The best large-scale work I've seen finds the average
| association between overall screen /social-media use and teen
| well-being is tiny_
|
| Can you share the source? The last time I looked the
| association was both clear and pretty strong, e.g. "There was a
| linear dose-response association of TSSM and risk of
| depression. The risk of depression increased by 13% (OR = 1.13,
| 95%CI: 1.09 to 1.17, p < 0.001) for each hour increase in
| social media use in adolescents." DOI:10.3390/ijerph19095164
|
| _> "Social media" lumps together very different things_
|
| HN does this, but the research is usually pretty clear in
| spelling out they mean FB, Insta, TikTok and so on.
|
| _> If you want a lever that actually changes incentives, go
| after business model & design_
|
| I too would like changes in that direction (mostly because
| adults are also affected negatively by social media), but keep
| in mind even a non-optimized, strictly chronological feed
| produces these negative effects, see keyword (and associated
| studies for) "upward social comparison", i.e. people are always
| more inclined to post about things that went well or are fun,
| and thus even a pure chronologically sorted feed produces a
| warped perception of normal social reality.
| newzino wrote:
| Yep -- what I had in mind was Orben & Przybylski, Nature
| Human Behaviour (2019). They use a specification curve
| analysis across three large datasets (total n [?] 355k) and
| find the association between digital technology use and
| adolescent well-being is negative but very small (explains <=
| 0.4% of the variance). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0506-1.
|
| I think your cited meta-analysis (Liu et al., IJERPH 2022;
| DOI: 10.3390/ijerph19095164) is useful too -- but it's
| answering a narrower question (depression specifically, "time
| spent on social media" specifically) and it's based on 5
| studies with high heterogeneity, mostly observational/self-
| report. The paper itself basically says "interpret with
| caution; motivation/content/engagement matter." So I don't
| read these as contradictory so much as "big-average effect
| looks small, but there may be real effects for specific
| outcomes / subgroups / behaviors."
|
| Also worth noting newer longitudinal work is starting to
| tease directionality: e.g. Nagata et al., JAMA Network Open
| (2025) (ABCD cohort) finds higher social media use predicts
| later depressive symptoms more than the reverse. That to me
| is the strongest argument that "time" isn't purely a proxy
| for pre-existing depression.
|
| On "social media lumps together": agreed research often names
| Facebook / Instagram / TikTok etc -- but even within one
| platform, the mechanism differs a ton (DMs / group chat /
| creating vs passive feed consumption + ads + notifications).
| That's why I'm more bullish on regulating business model +
| engagement features than banning the category.
|
| And on "upward social comparison": totally agree it's not
| "solved" by chronological feeds. People curate; viewers
| compare. There's direct work on the "everyone else is
| happier" perception effect on Facebook (Chou & Edge 2012,
| DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2011.0324) and adolescent social-
| comparison/feedback-seeking being linked with depressive
| symptoms (Nesi & Prinstein 2015). My claim is just that
| algorithmic ranking + push/autoplay/infinite scroll likely
| makes that dynamic more frequent/intense, so design changes
| still buy meaningful leverage even if they don't make the
| risk zero.
| Aerroon wrote:
| Does the evidence actually say anything about social media bans
| helping? Because these bans aren't really based on anything
| other than vibes. The proponents are the same people who will
| say that social media has rotted the brains of kids and reduced
| their attention spans. Their evidence for that? Someone else
| said so. That someone else said so, because
|
| 1. Microsoft research saw that people spend less time on a
| website (less time to see an ad) in the modern day compared to
| a decade prior
|
| 2. _knowledge workers_ now spend less time before they look
| away from a screen when composing an email
|
| From this somehow we've concluded that kids have shorter
| attention spans today. And the obvious 'culprit' is social
| media.
|
| Evidence is optional. It's all about vibes. It _feels_ right to
| ban social media, so we 're gonna do it. If the "researchers"
| get it wrong it doesn't matter, because there will be no
| consequences for them.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| Nice try to force digital IDs onto an entire country.
| phyzix5761 wrote:
| Does this actually solve the problem? Or is the problem something
| deeper in the human psyche that keeps us addicted to pleasure and
| avoiding pain regardless of the moral or psychological
| repercussions? I have a feeling if you remove one vice people
| will just replace it for another if the underlying cause is not
| treated.
| jibal wrote:
| Ironically, Finland is where it started because of Nokia.
| danny_codes wrote:
| Probably best to just ban it for everyone.
| komali2 wrote:
| I'm working on an article targeted at a Taiwan audience titled
| "Ni Bu Shi Ren Lei ,Ni Shi IGDai Li ," "You aren't a human,
| you're an Instagram agent." I want to reframe how everyone with
| their phones out at the rave isn't there for themselves, they've
| been directed to attend by IG so as to acquire training data for
| IG visual models. IG can't just order humans around like we do
| for LLMs but it's easy enough to program our sloppy brains: just
| chemically induce FOMO, show the right ads at the right time,
| easy, off go your little data acquisition agents to physically
| film the required data.
| Minor49er wrote:
| I hope you post it to HN once it's ready
| president_zippy wrote:
| Enforcement of that law is going to be a certifiable joke. My
| Chinese classmates back in undergrad in the early 2010s used to
| use a VPN to access their Facebook accounts when they went home
| for break. Like anyone else around here in their 30s, I didn't
| have much trouble bypassing "WebWasher" or its ilk in the 00s
| either. I have a better proposal to get kids off social media,
| hear me out:
|
| In order to make a teenager stop doing something, all you need to
| do is show them videos of someone their parents' age doing it.
| Juxtapose a bunch of 40-somethings doing cringy little "TikTok
| dances" alongside people young enough to be their classmates, and
| they'll stop. Make another TikTok Cringe Compilation, but this
| time add more clips from middle-aged TikTok users.
|
| My proposal might be insufficiently sophisticated and too
| actionable for the members of this community who think themselves
| to be righteous members of an enlightened class and who seek only
| to complain about current events to self-affirm their
| superiority. Nonetheless, I insist that anyone who will listen
| gives the following proposal consideration for the future of our
| children, whose FICA taxes shall pay for our retirements.
| energy123 wrote:
| This misunderstands the objectives of the law. Perfect
| enforcement is not the goal. Breaking the network effect for
| teens is the goal.
| president_zippy wrote:
| I didn't misunderstand anything. Your little "network
| effect", as you have so pretentiously worded it assumes
| teenagers are only getting on social media for their
| classmates, not for all the other users on a social media
| site. You also assume a little government-made dumpster-tier
| firewall written by peons making $70k like "WebWasher" is
| going to stop them. It didn't stop me from opening up goatse,
| meatspin, or 2G1C, so your argument carries no water.
|
| All they need is one classmate similar to most of us here on
| this site. Someone in their high school who will show them
| how to use a proxy or a VPN not for cred, not for reward, but
| just because "fuck it, why not?"
| erichocean wrote:
| "Citizens should be free to make their own choices for themselves
| and their children, especially benign ones about how to socialize
| and who to socialize with."
|
| It's interesting how few governments believe this. Your rulers
| know what's best for you, and it's not freedom.
| barbazoo wrote:
| We regularly restrict choices of vulnerable people in our
| society. That's why kids can't drive, drink, smoke, etc.
| erichocean wrote:
| Parents can give their kids alcohol and cigarettes, that's
| fully legal.
|
| Driving involves danger to other. We restrict _adults_ from
| doing things that are a danger to others, it has nothing to
| do with being "vulnerable."
| barbazoo wrote:
| Is it? Wow. Yeah it's different then but still the
| motivation is the same. To protect vulnerable people from
| doing something that's either harmful to them or others.
| Same with social media. If parents want to allow their
| kids, sure, but sad those poor neglected souls.
|
| It might not be a perfect implementation but it will
| prevent a lot of the real world harm that people are
| seeing.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| I cannot overstate how sympathetic I am to this in theory but the
| only way this is enforceable is through ID laws that endanger
| privacy online for everyone.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| On the bright side, if every big SNS required ID verification,
| and majority would stop using it, then they would die it. Win
| for a humanity, no?
| Fervicus wrote:
| Quite interesting how these countries are doing this one after
| another - Australia, France, and now Finland.
| Fervicus wrote:
| They intend to normalize requiring ID to use certain websites.
| How fast will we go from "it's fine as long as they do zero
| knowledge verification" to most websites on the internet
| requiring some government ID proof?
| mnsc wrote:
| What would help so much would be to force the platform to act in
| a way to not try to retain the user at every cost.
|
| Like YouTube. I would love to have parental settings, "no
| shorts", "no recommendations on video page". Kids could search
| and click on the creator to see more. Combine that with
| blocklists and curated allow lists. Boom, YouTube is not a
| problem. And kids getting bored of clicking around would be a
| feature.
| Phenomenit wrote:
| They should just ban showing ads to people under 18. That will
| remove the incentive to produce and feed dopamine garbage to kids
| with unfinished brains.
| hgomersall wrote:
| There's still the incentive to get them hooked. They'd need to
| ban any platform for under 18s that increases its revenue from
| greater "engagement".
| xkbarkar wrote:
| Eh. This is pointless.
|
| There will always be at least one country that has not rules and
| everyone will vpn there.
|
| Danish minister was about to solve that nut airing ideas of
| banning vpn ( was of course dropped, most politicians have zero
| technical skills, not even rudimentary ones).
|
| Of course this is all to protect the children.
|
| I am unscientifically convinced that the average 12 year old is
| more technically apt that the entire adult governmental body of
| north europe.
|
| If the will is there, they will circumevent it and the only
| outcome was another pointless level of buerocracy that is
| impossible to enforce.
|
| target the algorithm instead. Its a more difficult area and
| harder to design that law and it would require understanding
| technology, the end result would be targeting the platforms, not
| the users. Possibly with hundreds of millions in fines and less
| predatory platform behaviour.
|
| This low quality , protect the children yelp regulation set will
| have no long term effect whatsoever.
|
| It is far to easy to circumvent.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Periodically, Amazon gets it in the neck for tax avoidance. While
| the news cycle plays out, all the other FAANGS Homer-Simpson
| their way backwards into a hedge to let Bezos take the flack for
| something for which they are just as guilty.
|
| It's the same with screen time.
|
| Apple and Google are surely delighted that the heat is on Meta
| and TikTok. As long as the pariah is being labelled as "social
| media" then their reputation goes untouched. They could be doing
| just as much, if not more, to protect adolescent brains from
| going rotten.
|
| I'd like to see them held to account not so much for doing harm
| -- pretty high framerate OLEDs are harder to treat as boogeymen
| than evil feed algorithms -- but for not doing very much to help,
| either.
| everdrive wrote:
| People are often focused on the harm to kids. I think there is a
| lot of good evidence there. However, I don't know if people
| recognize social media as the main driver of the rise of populism
| and political instability and political extremism.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I think trying to argue that the viral/algorithmic addictive
| short-video feeds are "social media" is a bit of a stretch.
|
| If you banned any network that does algorithmic feeds, or that
| don't have good moderation, then I'd be fine with my teenagers
| using it. I think the problem is the mind-numbing video scrolling
| more than any other risk with social media.
|
| And I don't think there's a danger to it per se, I think it's
| just too addictive and distracting.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| So blatantly coordinated and paid off it's ridiculous.
| shartshooter wrote:
| I'd be open to a version of social media that is not banned and
| the version looks like this: - a straight linear feed with three
| tabs, 1) people close to me(default), 2) brands and influencers I
| choose follow and 3) everything else the algorithm wants me to
| see(this could be curated and not a linear feed)
|
| My ex and I have an agreement in our separation agreement that
| our children can't have social media until they're 16. This is
| the version of it I'd want for them, if they choose(or feel
| pressured) to use it
| esarbe wrote:
| It's about time.
|
| Social Media providers have spent the last 20 years to make
| everything more toxic, more harmful. They are aware that their
| products are damaging, but instead of trying to reduce the harm
| and to come up with some self-regulation ("Oh noes! Then we make
| less profit from harming teenagers! Impossible! Think for the
| Shareholders!") they spent all their money lobbying against any
| form of mitigation.
|
| Just shut them all down.
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| Maybe they are just discussing it but even that leads to buy in,
| and right now buy in looks a little premature. In Australia this
| ban is viewed as an experiment - even by the politicians that
| championed it. My guess is it will take at least a year to figure
| out it if it is workable. Surely it would be prudent for Finland
| too let us wear the first mover pain before doing something
| themselves.
|
| Speaking personally, I'd be much happier with it if they rolled
| out some zero knowledge proof of age infrastructure so the
| platforms could verify ages without all the PPI age
| identification currently requires flying around. It would remove
| a major criticism - government monitoring of consenting adults.
| Even if that aspect doesn't concern you in Australia had numerous
| leaks of identify documents in the past few years. Both my wife
| and I have had to replace our drivers licences due to leaks.
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