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Comment by offtop5 | Hacker News Reader

My gut reaction was to say 'No if social media makes you do something stupid, that's your fault'

But a speed filter , which outright encourages breaking traffic laws is a whole different story. Who ever greenlit this trash needs to be put in jail.

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A filter that displays your current speed has no inherent danger and does not encourage anything in and of itself. Idiots that decide to drive over 100mph in a car not designed for high speeds, on public roads, and with no proper training just to capture a cool number on a screen are the ones who should be put in jail.

Should we jail the person that invented the speedometer as well?

A speedometer does the opposite of encouraging unsafe behavior by alerting you to the unsafeness of that behavior. The filter in question encouraged unsafe behavior by incentivizing such behavior for social engagement, however absurd you think that incentivization is personally. This is a bit like saying a frat house hazing isn't wrong because no one actually makes the kids drink, the social incentive remains dangerous.

A speedometer is completely neutral in the same way the filter is. It displays speed. It does not indicate to you that what you are doing is safe or unsafe.

If it wasn't the filter then people would be sharing pictures of their speedometer while going fast thinking it's cool. What's the difference?

This is not at all like frat hazing, no one is forcing you to take a snapchat to be a part of their organization.

Having been a teen not that long ago, I've definitely seen camera photos of 100+ mph on a physical speedometer posted to social media. I don't see the difference here.

It's not the filter or the speedometer, it's the social incentive. If Twitter created a #highspeedometer hash tag, that would also be encouraging dangerous behavior.

>This is a bit like saying a frat house hazing isn't wrong because no one actually makes the kids drink, the social incentive remains dangerous.

Frats typically do force/heavily encourage members to drink... especially as part of the hazing process for new members.

If it's just all people drinking without being forced into it, that's truly no different than a regular college party, which also provides social incentives to act dangerously but is pretty different from hazing with alcohol.

> A filter that displays your current speed has no inherent danger and does not encourage anything in and of itself.

To anyone with a passing acquaintance with the male teenage mind, it is entirely predictable what anything that captures your current speed and broadcasts it to your friends will encourage.

I feel like the crucial difference is context. A speedometer built into a social media app based around sharing video clips/photos is vastly different from a speedometer built into a car.

Context matters as hell. But context can also add layers of discussion. Say I've created a filter showing how many meters underwater I am. Should I be held accountable for people who drown using it? How this is different from the speed filter? If the difference is "because people don't dive with cellphones" then you are putting the intention (and responsability) on users by default. Why not do that in the case for the speed filter as well?

For me the difference is in the main utility of the app. If all it does is measure, there's no issue IMO, but Snapchat is specifically for sharing content with others. It'd be like having a speedometer or depth meter with a load of 'share your speed/depth to twitter/fb/etc buttons. I would see that as just as bad.

A filter that broadcasts your speedometer to your followers live is different though. Almost like watching a live race car driver.

No because snapchat doesn't have live features, so it's only captured at one point in time via a photo or video

Agreed. In fact, some dashcams have built-in speedometers (via GPS tracking I believe). Should manufacturers be forced to disable them and/or face liability in case someone uses a dashcam to capture their dangerous driving?

We have speed limits on e-scooters and e-bikes, it's only path dependence that means we don't have them on cars, despite the obvious difference in risk.

This reminds me a bit of the McDonald's coffee case, something that seems absurd in a headline, but once you take time to understand it (like a jury or court would), makes a great deal of sense. The court of public opinion is generally a bad place to try things.

Not only did it make sense, McDonald's spent countless millions of dollars and years on influencing public opinion to make the general public believe it was about an elderly woman being clumsy. And it all turned into a joke until more people stepped forward.

The immediate similar product that springs to mind is the speed cameras. They'll tell you your speed along with a speed limit sign as you drive by them, but every single one I've seen in the past decade will just flash and say something like "slow down" if you're more than 10 over (don't ask how I know). It was obvious that people were going to try to get high scores.

This absolves the driver from the responsibility of using their vehicle safely. When you are in a car it is your responsibility to not drive it recklessly, end stop. I don't see how Snapchat is at fault, even if the app is boneheaded.

How is it different from snapping the speedometer in a car for clout?

Since we're throwing blame around how about the parents take actual responsibility for their shitty parenting?

This lame excuse is as infuriating as it is erroneous. If I hand your child a gun and drive them to a school and help them squeeze the trigger as I use every psychological trick to coerce them in to killing their peers, is it my fault or yours? Sounds like you think it's yours.

Perhaps modern social media isn't coercing kids in to crimes quite as overtly, but they are absolutely using their billion dollar budgets to manipulate our children in any way they conceivably can. And you want to blame the parents for what happens?

Last time I checked parents can confiscate their children's smartphones or at least ask about their whereabouts and which friends they're hanging out with.

Children are children, you can't expect the world to be a safe place, our job as parents is to protect them, not Let them run amok and then hold the world accountable.

I am not saying it's the parents' fault this happened but they bear more responsibility than Snapchat in my opinion.

My reply was too harsh, and I regretted it after. Sorry about that.

I agree that it is the parent's job to protect them. I just don't think it's fair that multi-billion dollar companies are allowed to do things that make my job harder. I'm one man with a very limited budget of time and money to devote to parenting. Facebook/Snapchat has an army of employees who go to work all day every day to get my kids addicted to their platform. That doesn't seem fair, and if they are able to get children to do things that are unwise, they should be held responsible for that. That's what I was trying to get at.

not gonna happen, as in modern standards, everyone else are to blame for your faults except you.

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