Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

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.

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.

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)

People's habits changed.

I do agree that things got worse in the last ~16 years or so.

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.

"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."

On one hand you have absolute garbage but on the other you have very niche subreddits that does feel like the internet of old.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

but things really took off when TT cracked the code for endless scrolling of "relevant" content

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.

[1]: https://one-sec.app/

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.

I wonder where tate got his ideas and influences from. And why he's free in the US.

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.

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.

Who uploaded the videos then deleted the originals.

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.

So basically, no ads on underage accounts at all should be the norm.

Anything with zero knowledge is never going to be considered robust enough by a government. Zero knowledge protocols really have no functional revocation mechanism.

Zero knowledge proof and you're good to go.

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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

We are talking about Finland here, right?

- Algorithmic recommendation / "engagement" engineering

- Profit/business model

- Images/Videos

- Real-life identity

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 mean humans are not meant to learn about the atrocities their government is funding half a world away.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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?"