Hacker News Reader

Comment by circuit10 | Hacker News Reader

I worry that these measures (if they actually work, which is unlikely) will isolate people who struggle with real-life interactions. I remember reading somewhere that autistic people tend to find community in online spaces, and it seems like a lot of people gain their tech skills that way, including me. So indiscriminately banning young people from these spaces will prevent them from finding community and people like them

View on HN

What real life interactions? With scammers, bots or troll farms? Facebook from first years is long gone. I am pretty sure that autistic people as easy target should be kept away from internet for their own good. There is nothing good to find there.

Personally I joined Discord servers for open source projects and this is how I got my start using GitHub, learning how code review worked and the process for communicating with other devs etc. I feel like I may not be in a software development career if these laws had existed when I was growing up

Autism is a wide-ranging spectrum, I find the idea that I should be “kept away from the Internet” because I have (high-functioning) autism quite patronising. Maybe this is true for some people, but my point is that these social media ban ideas are too indiscriminate

I would agree that addictive platforms are harmful for children, and I haven’t looked into this law so maybe it does make a distinction, but any online communication (e.g. GitHub) is sometimes considered “social media”. A lot of people seem to exclude the platforms they like from what they count as “social media”, as they see social media as the evil thing they look down upon

I guess it depends on which spaces they're banned from. Before Facebook, online communities were bulletin boards and chat rooms. They weren't hyper-addictive social media platforms designed to suck as much attention as possible; they were genuine places of connection.

My hope is that children being banned from the mega platforms would lead to a growth in less harmful online communities for folks who can benefit from it. But I don't know.

Unless an exception is made these types of laws only make things much harder for small communities, since they can’t afford to implement the required measures and take on the legal liability. The result will be that everyone moves to larger platforms that are able to do these things

Reply on news.ycombinator.com