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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
Funny thing is, if we were to revive it now, it might end up as a pretty nice place, given that all the dumb crowds now have their 4chans, reddits, phpBBs, facebooks, instagrams, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are two different "ads" we're discussing here. One is the ads reddit the platform allows you to pay for, and it shows up in the client(s) as ads. Another is the type of ad where a company reaches out to community members and ask them to post about their project/product in exchange for a static sum, which looks like "normal posts" but are actually sponsored content.
The first one sucks for a multitude of reasons, the second one you basically don't notice are ads, yet they're all over reddit.
Can't say I know how it looks everywhere on reddit, as I'm not everywhere on reddit, but the AI subreddits I referenced earlier are filled with it, and I've even received offers myself to get paid to pay about stuff and I'm a nobody, so surely I only know of the surface.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah the reddit mod system is just ripe for abuse. They have little to no accountability, the people acting as police were the same people you appealed to and who acted as judge, there was a clear reddit mod political class with certain users or groups of users controlling significant swaths of subreddits, and with it judgements in 1 sub might get you banned from other subs. And if someone got enough mod shills in a sub they could oust original or well liked mods. And there is clear financial gains and benefits to doing all of that. Meanwhile regular users that built the site and made it a place people wanted to visit had basically zero say or influence on any of it.
I remember your story differently. You were consistently trolling /r/programming from multiple accounts for years (shevegen, shevy-ruby, shevy-java). You relied on the fact that /r/programming pretty much wasn't moderated at all.
I heartily recommend people volunteer for moderation. There’s tons of subs that need help, and the more diversity of voices in conversations like this, the better.
Modding is a shit show, and being on the other side can be quite the experience.
The more people who can chime in, the better as a society we can figure out what needs to be done.
Right now it’s rough for users, and insane for mods.
$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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Well you wouldn't want independent creators and small start-up businesses getting exposure over large corporate ventures with full marketing departments would you? Think about the pour investor class that has sunk so much money into marketing, and then some chick in a basement hand weaving some silver wire pendant gets a sale and only earns 15% markup instead of the mass produced cheap zinc pendant with a 300% markup.
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"
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The feeling have is that we don't browse the internet in the same way.
RSS for HN and other specific sites I want updates about. old.reddit/r/.../new pages. A third party app for YouTube to just view new things from people I subscribe to.
I definitely have fight harder and harder to, browse like it's 2006, avoid the Algoslop Train, but it is possible more places than you'd think.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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).
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"?
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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!
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.)
> HN commentorship is quite highly biased toward a particular demographic and set of political beliefs
I don't know whether this is true, but I've seen exactly the same "complaint" from both sides of the USA political spectrum (USA politics are overrepresented for obvious reasons).
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
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.
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
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.
But this is antithetical to what Reddit is. It's not like StackExchange websites, where the whole point is to create a database of canonical questions and answers. Reddit doesn't have some basic forum functionality by design.
I've once talked to a person connected to someone at Reddit Inc, and they indirectly confirmed this (in retrospect it was very obvious).
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.
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.
"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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 actualcommunication)
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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"
> thread ranking is useful and doesn't increase addictiveness
Can you please elaborate on what you find useful about thread-ranking? It's an anti-feature that only serves to increase addictiveness (by making top-level comments into a competition) and make it impossible to reload an active discussion and find your place again, in my opinion.
I find it useful because when browsing a post, you have the most upvoted or commented on at the top. I don't see how it increases top-level comment competition unless commenters are trying to get their comment up to the top? I think if you hide the karma, and that would also including hiding how many upvotes/downvotes your comment got, then you can't really track the "competition" and makes it much less competitive (and potentially addictive).
(I do see your point about not being able to keep your place, though I don't systematically go through all comments in a post -- or very rarely -- more just quickly browse for things that catch my attention, interesting info, etc.)
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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The topic at hand was state propaganda and BBQ recipes are outside the scope of state propaganda. Perhaps I should have made that more clear that this is only applied to political topics.
But you do point out something interesting. I still follow football sites and football is still outside of the scope of state propaganda. Although you definitely have tribalism and biased fans and pundits, the vibe is completely different from any political topic.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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"
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.”
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.)
I remember when they saw what a certain game app was doing and were disgusted by it. Wild to me that those same people l̶a̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶ 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
>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.
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.")
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.
> 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
Anything with zero knowledge is never going to be considered robust enough by a government. Zero knowledge protocols really have no functional revocation mechanism.
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?
Introducing a solid zero-knowledge age verification option is the opposite direction of ending anonymity in the Internet, which other parts of the same governments are also working on.
So yeah, I'll gladly trust and cheer on the part working in the right direction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
>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.
The difference here is meaningless. Mom’s ID in this case is her personal password which is a lot harder to get. I would bet 99.9% of folks don’t know their parent’s email password.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
What makes those of you who advocate for the state control over what children can do on the Internet (which used to be parents' business, prerogative and liability - all implied to be a total failure of parenthood now) so sure that you, grown ass adults, won't be the next target of the police state nanny?
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).
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.
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.
It's not even a noble goal because it's entirely populist rather than evidence and logic based. It's giving: "Yay we solved bad parenting by pretending that bad stuff is not allowed on the internet, but only for those who are under 15". It's sad that anyone believes that this would have any real positive outcomes for our society.
> 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.
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.
You don't understand, we're going back to the good old days.
Kids will go back to rolling hoops and playing jacks in the street, they'll write letters to each other in cursive, because print is addictive, and we can finally go back to the time where if a kid is even a little bit different from those around them, they're robbed of having any type of social support system that doesn't ostracize them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
> 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.
> 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'.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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:
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?
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?
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.
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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
"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.
It's worse. It's the last thing before going to sleep that the addict uses and it's the first thing they check in the morning before having a thought to themselves. It doesn't run out. Everybody's doing it. People are losing jobs and relationships over it. At least fetty you gotta leave the house to get more. Instagram Reels never make you leave the house.
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?
We live in houses, with artificial light, heating and air conditioning, having sex without risk of pregnancy or "god-forbid" sex with people who are not capable of being pregnant. So, what exactly are we not meant to do?
There's a certain natural human nature but it's expressed through abtract virtue like justice, knowledge, safety, connection - this is the only acceptable and reasonable expression of what humans are "meant to" do.
This makes me angry because fundamentally this is an attack on average person's intelligence and capabilities. We are not beasts that need to be hearded by some illuminated masters who deem what is and what isn't human nature.
It's the 'reputable' news sources that have often pushed misinformation and half-truths, often in subtle ways.
Just do a review of BBC headlines for it's coverage on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Many headlines where Israel was the aggressor were passive, never naming Israel as the aggressor, but whenever it was aggression from the Palestinian side, it was highlighted.
Even the death toll in Gaza, where for the last few years the headlines, when reorting on the death toll, often stated 'unconfirmed', or 'Hamas-provided', to cause doubt in the numbers, when historically, the numbers provided by Hamas were relatively accurate, and just the other day the IDF admits that the ~70k death toll is realistic.
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.
>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?
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm working on an article targeted at a Taiwan audience titled "你不是人類，你是IG代理," "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.
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+.
"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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Social media age restriation is just an anonymity ban in disguise. Governments should focus on regulations knowingly addictive and overly engaging mechanics instead.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Also how else do you get evidence on them working if nobody else has done a ban. Why does you have to wait for someone else to do it before you do it for your own country.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.”
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
Funny thing is, if we were to revive it now, it might end up as a pretty nice place, given that all the dumb crowds now have their 4chans, reddits, phpBBs, facebooks, instagrams, etc.
> Usenet before the Eternal September?
Even well after it, in many places. The effect wasn't universally immediate.
MAKE. MONEY. FAST ;-)
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
There's about 138,000 active subreddits. I don't believe that this industry is targetting even a majority of them.
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".
You'd think so, and yet Reddit adds suck.
There are two different "ads" we're discussing here. One is the ads reddit the platform allows you to pay for, and it shows up in the client(s) as ads. Another is the type of ad where a company reaches out to community members and ask them to post about their project/product in exchange for a static sum, which looks like "normal posts" but are actually sponsored content.
The first one sucks for a multitude of reasons, the second one you basically don't notice are ads, yet they're all over reddit.
Can't say I know how it looks everywhere on reddit, as I'm not everywhere on reddit, but the AI subreddits I referenced earlier are filled with it, and I've even received offers myself to get paid to pay about stuff and I'm a nobody, so surely I only know of the surface.
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).
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.
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Tell me more ... what's so naive?
Looking at their other comments (e.g., "h1b invasion" and lots of misinformation about COVID) it's probably not in your interest to engage with them.
Imagine coming to a place where the written rules ask us for to be intellectually curious and to reply to the strongest interpretation of others.
Then pulling down your pants in the living room and taking a shit on the floor.
At least try not to be a cunt, mate.
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.
Reddit is eager to remove mods who it disagrees with. Any remaining mods are there because Reddit approves of them.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Reddit recently announced a change that capped the number of large subreddits than any individual can moderate. It might reduce this problem.
They'll get two accounts
Here's one of 'em [1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E36G9QOolxk [video][12 mins]
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.
Yeah the reddit mod system is just ripe for abuse. They have little to no accountability, the people acting as police were the same people you appealed to and who acted as judge, there was a clear reddit mod political class with certain users or groups of users controlling significant swaths of subreddits, and with it judgements in 1 sub might get you banned from other subs. And if someone got enough mod shills in a sub they could oust original or well liked mods. And there is clear financial gains and benefits to doing all of that. Meanwhile regular users that built the site and made it a place people wanted to visit had basically zero say or influence on any of it.
I remember your story differently. You were consistently trolling /r/programming from multiple accounts for years (shevegen, shevy-ruby, shevy-java). You relied on the fact that /r/programming pretty much wasn't moderated at all.
I heartily recommend people volunteer for moderation. There’s tons of subs that need help, and the more diversity of voices in conversations like this, the better.
Modding is a shit show, and being on the other side can be quite the experience.
The more people who can chime in, the better as a society we can figure out what needs to be done.
Right now it’s rough for users, and insane for mods.
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.
$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.
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.
Something Awful has retained a weirdly high level of quality these days by (still) charging :tenbux: to register an account.
Also survived the great cancellation [1]
[1] - https://www.somethingawful.com/cliff-yablonski/i-hate-you-01...
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.
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).
> 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.
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>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)
Oh man spacebattles is still active? I haven’t been there regularly in 20 years.
There's also sufficientvelocity, its offshoot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are shielded from liability if you respond to abuse reports.
In the US, maybe. In Europe, not necessarily. The UK's OFCOM regulations are particularly concerning.
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.
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/
seems like their complaints are in two areas: bureaucracy to register, and needing to respond to abuse reports. Which is what I said.
They complain about hiring a moderation team to respond to abuse reports? How are they doing it now? Do they not respond?
DMCA was already a thing 20 years ago?
It's closer to 30 now, passed in 1998.
he ran a forum 20 years ago, but today, with things like DMCA.....
DMCA was already a thing 20 years ago
Wow that seems like yesterday. Time really does fly. Yeah you are correct I didn't think of the actual dates.
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.
We can’t have threaded conversations because that would elevate some users and subordinate other’s comments.
Everyone is equal and hierarchy is bad.
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.
What, really, is the difference between phpBB and discourse (not discord) in the context of the discussion we're having here?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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>
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.
Well you wouldn't want independent creators and small start-up businesses getting exposure over large corporate ventures with full marketing departments would you? Think about the pour investor class that has sunk so much money into marketing, and then some chick in a basement hand weaving some silver wire pendant gets a sale and only earns 15% markup instead of the mass produced cheap zinc pendant with a 300% markup.
/S
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."
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"
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
Exchanging messages with your contacts isn't really that hard that you really need to prepare for it.
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.
Ok, I'm imagining it. Looks good. What's the problem?
In the UK that was naturally the case 20-25 years ago - text messages were priced per message, and bundles were small.
Which part is "keep the town square terrible"?
The part where social media goes completely unchanged except for banning some kids from communicating with their friends
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.
You could ban it
I miss slashdot 20 years ago :/
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.
More like 25-30 years, innit?
Comment of the week!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Funny that you use old.reddit.com. I used this too. I could not handle the new reddit - it was useless for me.
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.
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.
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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.
That feeling of controlling your feed. It's just a feeling. Carefully calibrated so you feel like you can do something without doing it.
The feeling have is that we don't browse the internet in the same way.
RSS for HN and other specific sites I want updates about. old.reddit/r/.../new pages. A third party app for YouTube to just view new things from people I subscribe to.
I definitely have fight harder and harder to, browse like it's 2006, avoid the Algoslop Train, but it is possible more places than you'd think.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
>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.
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"?
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
You might be on to something there... That the effort itself raises quality? Perhaps.
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.
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...
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?
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.
HN does this too
> 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.
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!
> 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.)
> HN commentorship is quite highly biased toward a particular demographic and set of political beliefs
I don't know whether this is true, but I've seen exactly the same "complaint" from both sides of the USA political spectrum (USA politics are overrepresented for obvious reasons).
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
I created this account in November 2009 and am fully aware of what "power users" can and can not do ;)
Sorry, but 50 day old accounts shouldn't so confidently (yet incorrectly) explain HN to other users. This is not really how it works.
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.
> 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.
Smaller subs can still be decent but I agree about popular and larger subs. They’re just brain rot and engagement bait now.
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
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.
I've been on reddit long enough to get sick of the constant reposts. They really should have a filter for that.
But this is antithetical to what Reddit is. It's not like StackExchange websites, where the whole point is to create a database of canonical questions and answers. Reddit doesn't have some basic forum functionality by design.
I've once talked to a person connected to someone at Reddit Inc, and they indirectly confirmed this (in retrospect it was very obvious).
Why can't it be an option?
> 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.
> 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.
What is social about it tho?
You can gang up on people with low effort, negative comments about anything.
That's anti-social. They're anti-social media.
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.
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)
You can block shorts this way? Neat! Excuse me, I need to go set up a subaccount for my newly adopted fictional child.
Ha, didn't even realize the possibilities.
all they have to do is log out of their google account and clear their cache, and there go the YouTube parental controls
If WhatsApp got banned, all those groups would simply switch to Telegram or Signal or similar. It would be very easy.
But why does it always have to be a mobile app?
As opposed to what?
Tbh, anything that is not a proprietary closed garden. Why access to the clubs/interest groups now requires to compromise the privacy?
Wait, you're saying that using Signal or Telegram is compromising privacy?
I'm really curious what you're hoping for?
For starters, not sending a notification "he is now using this app!" to everyone who has my phone number.
Check out the NewPipe app. It works only on Android — it’s YouTube for minimalists. No Shorts, no feed, no ads.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
> and needed to use TikTok to be culturally literate
I wish we had something like Lurkmore for the modern Internets™. KYM could be it, but it seems to focus on random celebrity gossip instead? Idk.
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)
Reddit is plenty addictive in my experience, and I've heard the same from other people ranging from high school teachers to tradespeople.
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.
HN doesn’t optimize for addictive. Fortnite and wow do. No opinion on NFL, but they probably do at least somewhat.
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.
> 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.
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.
This is the best idea I’ve heard in a long time. This would solve so much.
Parental controls don’t work, they’re too coarse grained and too easy to get past. Source: am a parent.
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.
Karma and thread-ranking are adaptations that directly increase addictiveness while doing little else...
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"
> thread ranking is useful and doesn't increase addictiveness
Can you please elaborate on what you find useful about thread-ranking? It's an anti-feature that only serves to increase addictiveness (by making top-level comments into a competition) and make it impossible to reload an active discussion and find your place again, in my opinion.
I find it useful because when browsing a post, you have the most upvoted or commented on at the top. I don't see how it increases top-level comment competition unless commenters are trying to get their comment up to the top? I think if you hide the karma, and that would also including hiding how many upvotes/downvotes your comment got, then you can't really track the "competition" and makes it much less competitive (and potentially addictive).
(I do see your point about not being able to keep your place, though I don't systematically go through all comments in a post -- or very rarely -- more just quickly browse for things that catch my attention, interesting info, etc.)
An infinite stream of user generated content with direct engagement possibilities is enough to fry our brains
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.
> 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).
I wonder if your KPI is no. of active users, page views, etc - then you are a priori building an addictive thing.
Hacker News has plenty of its own echo chamber, no different to any other social environment.
> 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.
Typo on second mention of HN?
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.
No, they block political stuff because this is not the place for political stuff.
Stop playing the victim.
actually, much more diverse because everyone is in the same forum rather than being divided into "subreddits"
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
The topic at hand was state propaganda and BBQ recipes are outside the scope of state propaganda. Perhaps I should have made that more clear that this is only applied to political topics.
But you do point out something interesting. I still follow football sites and football is still outside of the scope of state propaganda. Although you definitely have tribalism and biased fans and pundits, the vibe is completely different from any political topic.
> Hackernews is also addictive.
False. It is good, no more addictive than a spoon.
A spoon has no randomization.
Define the randomization. Probably the content of spoon fits the definition.
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/
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.
So buy an Android: https://families.google/intl/my/familylink/
family link is not enough, try disabling gemini and news access with it, and you cannot block shorts
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
thanks for that insight
> ....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.
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"
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
I even made friends on various forums. Hard to imagine these days
I remember people complaining about the degradation of the Usenet experience after AOL brought more people online.
Not many digital cameras, not enough bandwidth for multimedia either. Your “face” was a nickname.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
I'm delighted and honoured to announce that you are completely correct.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
likes and comments aren't social?
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.
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.
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.
I can relate to this. Early social media were forum sites, boards, irc, mailing lists and things like that.
I wish the same would happen for games like Roblox. These games suffer from all the same problems social media does.
> 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_...
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.)
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.
I remember when they saw what a certain game app was doing and were disgusted by it. Wild to me that those same people l̶a̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶ 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.
> 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.
I totally agreed with you, right up until the last paragraph. Reddit is among the worst communities on the internet.
Reddit is actually the worst of the bunch.
>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.
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.
I've noticed comments on YouTube videos about politically controversial things in the US show incredibly obvious bot activity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, very different. A good example of we should not lump all platforms together.
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.
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.
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.
My guess: grono.net :)
Yeah because soup.io (Blogspam Link today) simply lost its data because they didn't migrate and the hard drive crashed.
That's what killed them? I thought it was just financially unsustainable.
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.
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.
How is that MySpace’s fault?
Who uploaded the videos then deleted the originals.
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.
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.
> 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...'
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
>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.
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.")
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.
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
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.
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/
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.
I don't know, it works in Japan.
One out of 190+ countries would be a poor correlation indeed.
Honestly this is better than covering half of every website with a cookie banner that very few people understand.
We should ban all ads.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Which of these governments do you trust? The same governments, mind you, that are working diligently to end anonymity on the Internet.
Introducing a solid zero-knowledge age verification option is the opposite direction of ending anonymity in the Internet, which other parts of the same governments are also working on.
So yeah, I'll gladly trust and cheer on the part working in the right direction.
Same EU that wants to ban encryption?
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.
(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.
>valid proof would never become invalid proof
Somebody can give their proof of age to another person.
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.
> 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.
expiry
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.
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.
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.
There is still a financial incentive to loop in teenagers that would stay on a platform and spend money there later.
Without age verification this is obviously an unenforceable ban... I think Finland already has schemes for age verification.
Yeah.
Zero knowledge proof and you're good to go.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
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.
How would a zero knowledge proof of my age work?
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...
Why not device-side headers? Kids' devices should always include a header saying "I'm a kid, don't show me adult content.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
>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.
The difference here is meaningless. Mom’s ID in this case is her personal password which is a lot harder to get. I would bet 99.9% of folks don’t know their parent’s email password.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
However that’s not anonymous. Ministry of Interior is alerted with your identity each time you use it.
What makes those of you who advocate for the state control over what children can do on the Internet (which used to be parents' business, prerogative and liability - all implied to be a total failure of parenthood now) so sure that you, grown ass adults, won't be the next target of the police state nanny?
Noble goal but it ends up being a defacto internet license. All ages need to show id to use sites and services.
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).
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.
Parents should instead regulate what their kids can do.
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.
What does parents choosing if their kids can use tiktok have to do with the birth rate?
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.
It's not even a noble goal because it's entirely populist rather than evidence and logic based. It's giving: "Yay we solved bad parenting by pretending that bad stuff is not allowed on the internet, but only for those who are under 15". It's sad that anyone believes that this would have any real positive outcomes for our society.
There is an alternative: prohibit smart phones for youth. They can possess simple phones.
Parents can just do this. It's far more expensive to not do it.
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.
Define a smartphone.
prohibit all proprietary software
That won't help. They'll open-source it, and the addiction stays.
Haven't you heard about the four freedoms? The software which meets this criteria is totally safe.
Good, less people will waste their lives talking to bots and other low value activities
>logs into his seven year old five digit karma hackernews account >tells people to stop talking online
I'm not quite sure what your point is, but if you continue to post at your current rate you'll have twice as much "karma" as I have in 7 years...
> 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.
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.
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.
You don't understand, we're going back to the good old days.
Kids will go back to rolling hoops and playing jacks in the street, they'll write letters to each other in cursive, because print is addictive, and we can finally go back to the time where if a kid is even a little bit different from those around them, they're robbed of having any type of social support system that doesn't ostracize them.
Agreed. I think we need to ban addictive dark patterns on ALL platforms for ALL ages.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At best everyone but kids still has unchecked access.
I secretly wish it would use a verification scheme that's so invasive/annoying, that even adults would stop using it anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"But think of the children" has always been the go-to excuse for tossing freedom out the window.
So in this case, do we just stop thinking about the children in totality?
In the context of government legislation on personal behavior, yes.
Parents should be the ones setting up rules for their children.
If manipulative algorithm are the problem, then perhaps we should consider regulations that would protect everyone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree that children need restrictions, but that's the role of their parents, not the government.
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.
> 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.
[dead]
Children are the survival of the species our DNA wires us to to protect them.
That's why people need to be especially careful when others try to use such effective methods of manipulation.
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).
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
Do children have no phone numbers or do they use their parent's?
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.
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.
Up to a couple years ago you could get them included in a £10 Nokia in Tesco and pay with cash, no ID required.
> 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.
> 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?
What major revolutions or important political shifts have occurred from people anonymously shitposting on Reddit or Facebook ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Donald Trump?
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.
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.
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...
I think GP was concerned with forbidden speech more than bots, so solutions differ there.
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.
You are describing 4chan
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.
"Social media" doesn't just mean Facebook right? It includes sites like Hacker News, yeah?
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
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.
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.
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.
What about Reddit? What about 4chan?
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.
Legally, it doesn't matter. You can talk to people? Social media it is.
> 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.
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.
I'd draw a line using some of these aspects:
- Algorithmic recommendation / "engagement" engineering
- Profit/business model
- Images/Videos
- Real-life identity
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.
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.
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.
One of my main problems with all of this is "what counts as social media". It's a stupidly broad term. Email? SMS? Forums?
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...
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.
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.
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?
Hackernews is not social media. Just no. Unless the term os literally meaningless in which case my Company's slack ks social media.
Sorry, yes. Ever hear of Yammer?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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
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?
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.
> 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?
Has anyone ever argued that children should have full access to the entire internet?
Seems like a horribly bad idea.
Will adults be exempt from the invasive age verification?
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.
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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
Social media is not a hard drug.
"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.
It's worse. It's the last thing before going to sleep that the addict uses and it's the first thing they check in the morning before having a thought to themselves. It doesn't run out. Everybody's doing it. People are losing jobs and relationships over it. At least fetty you gotta leave the house to get more. Instagram Reels never make you leave the house.
What is the definition of a hard drug?
Compare it to marijuanna instead. Then it’s on the same level of controversy.
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?
> Humans are not meant to
not meant to? by whom?
We live in houses, with artificial light, heating and air conditioning, having sex without risk of pregnancy or "god-forbid" sex with people who are not capable of being pregnant. So, what exactly are we not meant to do?
There's a certain natural human nature but it's expressed through abtract virtue like justice, knowledge, safety, connection - this is the only acceptable and reasonable expression of what humans are "meant to" do.
This makes me angry because fundamentally this is an attack on average person's intelligence and capabilities. We are not beasts that need to be hearded by some illuminated masters who deem what is and what isn't human nature.
>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.
It’s what news made by reputable sources is for.
It's the 'reputable' news sources that have often pushed misinformation and half-truths, often in subtle ways.
Just do a review of BBC headlines for it's coverage on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Many headlines where Israel was the aggressor were passive, never naming Israel as the aggressor, but whenever it was aggression from the Palestinian side, it was highlighted.
Even the death toll in Gaza, where for the last few years the headlines, when reorting on the death toll, often stated 'unconfirmed', or 'Hamas-provided', to cause doubt in the numbers, when historically, the numbers provided by Hamas were relatively accurate, and just the other day the IDF admits that the ~70k death toll is realistic.
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.
>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.
>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?
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.
Were our ancestors physically mentally and spiritually healthy? When exactly was this?
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I miss the days of chatting at home with friends after school on MSN Messenger and ICQ.
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
Ranking might be deterministic but it’s never free from bias.
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
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
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.
The real question is enforcement They tried this, and kids just moved to platforms nobody knew existed
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.
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.
Eventually group SMS would still function well for this, no? Shared email lists barring that. This seems like a race to the bottom.
Neither group SMS nor shared email lists have the algorithmic dopamine tweaking that are the root of most of the harm.
Exactly You can ban platforms but you can't ban communication
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Probably best to just ban it for everyone.
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.
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.
I'm working on an article targeted at a Taiwan audience titled "你不是人類，你是IG代理," "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.
I hope you post it to HN once it's ready
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+.
"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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Social media age restriation is just an anonymity ban in disguise. Governments should focus on regulations knowingly addictive and overly engaging mechanics instead.
Nice try to force digital IDs onto an entire country.
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?
I just wish this was possible somehow without essentially making corporate mass-surveillance a requirement.
Horse. Barn. Gone.
Only if we give up. Keep fighting surveillance and control mechanisms.
Maybe it's time to start auditing social network platforms and disallow certain practices.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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)?
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.
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
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.
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?
If it's as flaky as YouTube's age estimation, it's just ID by default.
Quite interesting how these countries are doing this one after another - Australia, France, and now Finland.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Have you ever played Roblox?
Australia, France, soon the UK... All within a few months and they have the chutzpah to suggest they came up with this notion independently.
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.
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.
Are adults any better? Not sure the ban is a productive way to go about it.
Seems its just another country coming up with the same convenient excuse to implement KYC to access the internet.
How long before the kids use Ai to build their own?
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).
I hear parents of young children are already sitting their children down in front of AI generated children's content on YouTube
Please show us the channels with the views
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.
Why is it that some people are so hell bent on limiting how people communicate? Ironically, this is also seeking to control people.
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.
>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.
Search engines restrict information. You get a very limited selection of information off them nowadays.
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.
What does this have to do with social networks ban?
Ironically, Finland is where it started because of Nokia.
Its a very dangerous experiment. Remember: we only get ONE childhood. No do overs.
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
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.
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.
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"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.
We regularly restrict choices of vulnerable people in our society. That’s why kids can’t drive, drink, smoke, etc.
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."
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.
Wrong. Ban phones. Would benefit more than just children. The internet must again become something you sit down to use.
ban proprietary software, do not let microsoft or apple to "offer deals" to schoolchildren.
Not phones. Smart phones.
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.
>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.
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.
So blatantly coordinated and paid off it’s ridiculous.
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?
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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.
Here is a very good meta analysis on short form content
https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-89350-001.html
Also how else do you get evidence on them working if nobody else has done a ban. Why does you have to wait for someone else to do it before you do it for your own country.
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.
This meta-analysis from the results section is very good at explaining some of the damaging impacts of short form video content.
https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-89350-001.html
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Teens can still talk online. Social media is an obvious poison and we shouldn't give kids access to it.
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).
> 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.”
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.
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Who cares, nothing of value is being lost.
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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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
This misunderstands the objectives of the law. Perfect enforcement is not the goal. Breaking the network effect for teens is the goal.
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?"