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Comment by C50VGicCxmHC | Hacker News Reader

> These bills will likely face considerable constitutional challenges. Previous attempts to block minors from accessing Web sites via broad legislation, including the Child Online Protection Act, from 1998, have been struck down on First Amendment grounds.

You might get farther instead of banning children from social media, ban all ads to children on social media.

Every single ad impression shown to a child is a $1,000 fine.

If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site.

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Eh, honestly, just go all the way and ban advertising altogether (I would be so happy if this happened, even though it obviously never will). Pretty willing to tank my karma to say this, I don't care, I think advertising is one of the biggest psychological pollutants in modern society and any possible benefit (??) is vastly outweighed by the cognitive waste incurred by all who are subjected to it.

I wholeheartedly agree with you here. It’s sad that I haven’t found a way to explain this view to others without sounding like a raving lunatic - which also speaks volumes about the state of the tracking/advertising industry.

Pihole via DoH plus uBlock has changed the internet so much for me, I literally can’t stand using other people’s devices. Let’s not even talk about watching TV, going to a sports bar is downright shocking.

My impression (after suggesting it elsewhere) is that a lot of HN generally agrees with banning adds.

(Except the ones who work for advertising brokers masquerading as technology companies of course)

I ran a similar thought experiment with a collegue the other day. We talked about how the world might change if internet ads were made illegal overnight. A lot of tech companies would lose value and I suspect a significant portion of the economy would become less productive, but I don't think it wouod be catastrophic for society. In fact, I think we'd maybe all slow down, not purchase as much andaybe even desire less.

As you said, it will never happen, but I too would be pleased if it did.

Many industries would become more productive.

Consider this: useful websited that don't cover half your phone screen with ads. Productive!

We'd most likely have to pay for it some other way. But I think it'd be worth it.

We're stuck in a local minimum of ad-financing.

How would you define advertising? If there were no advertisements how would people know about products? They would have to read discussions and recommendations but how would those discussions and recommendations not be considered advertisements?

I don't think that's difficult. If no one is being paid for posting it, it's not an advertisement.

Advertisements do not have to be paid

> How would you define advertising?

Showing unprompted information about a service/product. Not much thought went in to this definition, be charitable.

> If there were no advertisements how would people know about products?

There is word of mouth, reviews, catalogs...

> They would have to read discussions and recommendations but how would those discussions and recommendations not be considered advertisements?

It is not that complicated. If somebody is getting paid to recommend or participate in a discussion on a certain service/product then that is an advertisement.

You could say no unsolicited advertising. If you go looking for a list of cars it's fine to see a list of cars.

> If there were no advertisements how would people know about products?

Wouldn't it be terrible, won't someone think of the products? :'(

If they have a need, they can search for them.

Oh, yeah how would we possibly survive without advertisements to tell us what to buy?

I've never seen a single advertisement for any amateur radio equipment in my life, yet I have spent $thousands on gear, electronics components, kits etc. for this hobby, over the past year. Not a single advertisement was necessary for me to know what's out there. I know of vendors of certain equipment and browse their website. I talk with people I know. I browse forums, engage in social networks, watch videos, etc. ... at no time was paid advertising necessary (in fact, I consider it useless as I purchase products based on their verifiable merits, not how often I see them thrown at me by a marketing team).

This same experience applies to literally anything I purchase. I've never once bought a computer component (or been even remotely inclined to purchase one) based on an ad. Nor a vehicle, article of clothing, toothbrush, pair of shoes, yardwork tool, battery, food item or grocery, etc. etc... shall I go on? I aggressively block ads, mute devices that are playing them (if I cannot block/skip them), look away from them, and generally have a well-practiced skill of averting my conscious awareness away from any form of advertising.

Personal experience with products it not an advertisement unless the person is receiving compensation to provide that review/post/recommendation. It's quite easy to define, and also why the Federal Trade Commission in the US requires "influencers" to disclose that they are being compensated for their endorsements/reviews: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/disclosures-...

Banning ads, or at least most of them (maybe allow for some designated ads-only places) will probably be a net positive for most businesses as well by removing the rat race on ad spending.

> I think advertising is one of the biggest psychological pollutants in modern society and any possible benefit (??) is vastly outweighed by the cognitive waste incurred by all who are subjected to it.

I'm pretty sure ads paid for the vast majority of useful websites that have ever existed, including sites like youtube which just wouldn't exist without them.

I tend to think a vast proportion of the freely available information on the web would not have existed without ads and that information was worth the trade off of ads.

Nobody has ever come up with a funding model for websites that actually works better than ads.

If something can't exist in a usable non-destructive form then it simply shouldn't exist. "oh we'll never have routine international flight if we price in all externalities" yeah that kinda fucking sucks oh well RIP vacations to europe.

Same deal here basically. "without brain-melting ads that warp our deepest psychic desires into weapons against us we'd never have wikipedia" idk if that's true, doesn't feel true to me, if so though then RIP wikipedia sorry. This shit sucks, if we can't make it not suck we should make it not be.

This is exactly why ad funded businesses should be banned: it's an anticompetitive business practice that hugely distorts markets. It makes it impossible to even charge at cost for a service because your competition is permanently dumping all the way to zero (or even paying the customer) using money from their advertising business.

Separately, it incentivizes creating noise. All of the talk about the web becoming poisoned by AI isn't fundamentally about AI; it's about affiliate marketing that allows people to make money on something none of their "customers" would otherwise pay for. Creating content with zero or negative value becomes a viable business, and this drowns out the useful information. Ban affiliate programs and there's no reward for creating this noise anymore. Search engines become more useful. The cost to run them goes down because there's less noise to index and try to filter.

Slave plantations also lead to the construction and donation of a lot of public buildings in the UK. At the time these would have been a major improvement in the lives of those who benefited from them. However, it's not a strong argument for continuing the practice.

I'd honestly rather get rid of advertising. The industry has shown itself far too happy to promote addiction to increase revenue. The fact that some "good" tools have been funded by it

Psychological manipulation in general should be much more regulated than it is. Tobacco, gambling, and advertising are the first that come to mind but the food industry is often just as bad, if not worse.

Yes, who needs an economy.

> ban advertising altogether

Not going to happen in the U.S. What is possible though, is banning billboards. See Maine, Vermont, Hawaii, and Alaska. Billboards are visual pollution, and blanket bans (as opposed to content bans) are constitutional.

Hrm. I'm not a big fan of this proposal, but I think that implementation would be technically interesting.

Say we create a "this is a child" header, which would be sent with all HTTP requests and would mandate that the user not be tracked or advertised to. Great solution, except that everybody would immediately switch the header on because everybody hates ads. In effect, everybody wants to be a child.

So now online services fight back and say "okay, well, TikTok is only for adults anyway, you must be 18 to use it, so if this header is present, you can't use TikTok." So adults turn the header back off, and kids go back to lying about being 18.

Except for this to have teeth, we have to say that "a user's promise that they are an adult is insufficient to avoid the fine." So now we waltz into the realm of porn sites in the 1990s or Truth Social today: enter a valid credit card number to prove that you are an adult, or maybe take a photo of yourself holding your driver's license and submit it to TikTok for approval. Ick.

Okay, so let's go further. Let's say that there's a Government Identity office that, when you turn 18, grants you an Adult Citizen ID# security key that lets you verify your identity digitally. That has the upside of solving a bunch of identity problems. You could imagine using it for voting, banking, signing contracts digitally, proving eligibility to work and citizenship. But also lets you verify to websites that you're an adult. Downside: easier than ever for governments and everybody else to reliably track you and cross-reference you between databases. Less great.

But also, I'm not going to choose to "prove I'm an adult" to most of the Internet, just the sites I want to use. Proving I'm an adult is the same as telling them exactly who I am. Ain't no way I want to do that. Ads on random websites are dead. Google's dead overnight unless they require that I log in just to use it (which presumably they would, and I don't care for that at all). Now using the Internet in incognito mode becomes practically impossible.

YouTube has a lot of product placement. Is Mark Rober going to get fined if I show my kids his videos? On the other hand, Ryan and Blippi become illegal. Actually, I'm suddenly 100% on board with this.

The key can attest "the identity associated with this key is over 18" without leaking the identity

Why would the government do that, though?

we're so far in imaginary territory that the government doing something competently is hardly an objection.

It's the competence I'm afraid of! If they did it competently, they would make sure they had absolute surveillance of every american's internet history.

> Let's say that there's a Government Identity office that, when you turn 18, grants you an Adult Citizen ID# security key that lets you verify your identity digitally.

There's really no reason a non-SSN identification number couldn't be used for this. If SSNs weren't sensitive, you could just have a government endpoint that takes an SSN tells you whether the holder is over 18 (or "no, or the SSN is not valid).

The only challenge is knowing whether the number belongs the the person sitting in front of the computer. There's no way to stop a kid from using their parent's number. Which is sort of the whole problem with SSNs in the first place: their value largely comes from the fact that they're secret-ish. In effect, they're passwords.

There's also nothing stopping the service from remembering this hypothetical SSN equivalent (or a fingerprint of it), exchanging data with other service providers, and tracking you that way.

There are certainly cryptographic primitives that can be used to solve the privacy concerns but I have approximately zero confidence that they would even be considered for use by the current technically illiterate batch of legislators.

Maybe, if we're being idealistic, it needn't be particularly powerful. We could just say that every authority would get their own permutation of the ID, a hash of the real ID and the authority's ID or some such, just to make it fairly difficult for two companies to see if their respective IDs are identical. Not perfect, but simple and makes it harder to exploit.

> I'm not going to choose to "prove I'm an adult" to most of the Internet, just the sites I want to use.

Except for purchases and other business or government type interactions I flat out refuse to do this. I simply do not use web sites or services that require a real name. I only rarely use ones that require an email.

Yes, this means I don't use most commercial services and major websites. I honestly think I'm better off for it. But it's also a line in the sand and I feel much better for observing it.

HN doesn't require an email to sign up. If it did, I almost certainly would never have created an account here.

Right, but that's the problem with the "no advertising to kids" thing. It means that advertising probably can't be used on any site that doesn't require logins, and that means that most of the commercial sites that don't require logging in will go out of business overnight.

Surely you could have a trusted age verifier (perhaps a non-profit open source platform) that has the legal responsibility to verify age (via credit-card or photo or gov id or some other way). Then you can have something like an oauth flow, except the only piece of identity it exchanges is the is18? boolean field.

One has to realise that for social media their networks effects are both their biggest strengths and their biggest weaknesses. Unlike for things like gaming or porn where there is a relatively large problem (i.e. 20%) if you manage to block only 80% of illegitimate access, for social media if suddenly 80% of the network disappears, than the incentive for the remaining 20% to keep coming drastically decreases.

have fun uploading a copy of your passport every time you visit a new domain then.

Which will be very expensive for startups as well and ensure those with market dominance stay that way no matter how bad they get. This isn't sounding good.

Only startups that are based on advertising.

Or any startup that allows user-posted content, which could be an ad.

Hacker News would be gone. Or at least not allow open submissions and comments because they’d all have to be individually checked to confirm they aren’t ads.

I already plug my own birthday into all my kids accounts when I create them. A lot of sites wont even let you create an account for somebody less than 13

because of COPPA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...

A start would be ban ads that target children, base the rules off the banning of cigarette ads targeted at children. Much easier to implement, I would think.

While I'd like this, the YouTube 'made for kids' debacle shows that neither legislators nor platform owners can be trusted to implement this in a sane fashion.

The problem is that ads and content are blurred today. I'd say something approaching 50% of "content" is actually some sort of advertisement. It would be pretty much impossible to root advertisements out of user generated content. At least ads placed by the website are clearly labeled (well they're supposed to be by law at least).

Demonetize children has the making of a pretty good slogan.

There are billions of dollars waiting to shred any lawmaker to pieces for uttering this phrase off record and tens of billions when on record. Good phrase though.

> If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site.

Absolutely not. Where do you think 18 year old users will come from? They will come from 17 year old users who turn 18. Therefore, social media sites will still have an incentive to corral kids onto the platform. Because they will one day turn 18 (or 16, or whatever the legislated age cutoff is) and become a source of revenue. Moreover, social media sites want network effects and want to be trendy among young people, even if these things don't directly lead to revenue.

The majority of Instagram posts are ads, whether actual advertisements or not.

This would be almost impossible to enforce.

Actually, it would be quite simple.

- Record a social media site advertising to a user who is under XX years old. Complain to a portal.

- Fine $1000 x complaint received each month.

- Continue to do so until the service's accounts satisfy some sort of auditing standard.

Come on, we do this for all kinds of things like credit card information and other data certifications.

> Fine $1000 x complaint received each month.

Ahh yes, fine companies $1000 for each complaint received. Surely nothing will go wrong and nobody would ever think to do this to sink their competitors? Surely the government overhead of enforcing this would be cheap?

It’s so weird to read all of these HN comments that can’t take basic realities of the internet and regulation into account.

Suggesting automatic $1000 fines to companies for “complaints received” is the most obviously exploitable system, which is bizarre to see on a site that usually brainstorms ways something can be exploited.

Websites like Hacker News would disappear because they can’t risk $1000 every time someone complains or if someone posts something that might be an ad. Reddit gone, forums gone, Discord gone.

The internet would become a walled garden of pre-approved corporate content, viewable only after you verify your ID and add a credit card to confirm that you're an adult.

Or you prepare before launch to a provided set of standards. PCI hasn't sunk innovation, for example.

You're targeting this at the wrong end. Fine the advertisers for buying the ad space, not the platforms for showing it. Make disclosure of recipients of advertising expenditure mandatory for tax purposes. Hiding advertising expenditure? Fraud. Failure to disclose? Well, you don't get tax write-offs on undisclosed expenses, so nobody would do that.

This would require Nato++ cooperation between many, many agencies - and, at every stage. Unworkable.

Nah, let the tech companies figure it out while getting sued. It's a pressure on the market that gets the incentives aligned. Edge cases are a good thing here, as it leads to a desired outcome that age verification and permissioning are legit because you can be sued to pieces.

Can't run your social media without advertising or ad-funded content? Mission accomplished.

From my experience it took very active moderation to even poorly enforce COPA style rules and that was with a small user base, not the mega-userbases of today's social media. Kids just sign up anyway and then the moderators wait for them to slip up and still are just making an educated guess.

The only way to make it more effective I feel is ID verification but then you are looking at collecting IDs from kids and that is a total non-starter in my opinion, not to mention they don't usually have a verifiable ID yet.

I don't have the solution, but if we look at other age prohibited activities they are usually restricted up until the age that you are considered an adult and as such ID is more reasonable to ask for.

> Kids just sign up anyway and then the moderators wait for them to slip up and still are just making an educated guess.

I’m baffled by all of these HN posts from people who seemingly forgot what being a kid is like. Kids are experts at circumventing the rules.

All of these suggestions about fining companies any time a kid manages to use the website are DOA. Kids will use the internet and steal their parents accounts, IDs, and credit cards. The harder you lock it down, the more terrible the internet is going to become for anyone trying to use it.

Meanwhile, every social website will just pick up and relocate to a country with sane laws overnight.

i mean really.. the site is called "Hacker News" and breaking established rules and restrictions is kind of the point.

The government or a bank or some other private or public trustworthy institution could be a limited identity provider which could authenticate that this guy is not really a kid.

The trustworthy part is going to be difficult though. It works in Europe for adults, but US folks seem to be allergic to the idea.

Sweet. New Social Engineering vector just dropped.

You would need an ID intermediate I agree, but there is not a single institution I trust to keep children's data safe. It is just better for it not to exist at all.

I am aware of government records of birth and medical records etc, but they exist as a tradeoff of necessity over security. Gaining access to a social network doesn't warrant the same tradeoff in my opinion, and it introduces much extra risk during the handoff and third party processing and storage. We could bikeshed technical solutions, but history tells us tech is fallible, and I think it's just not a road worth going down.

> If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site.

Nah. The marginal cost of a cigarette is tiny compared to the lifetime revenue of an addict. The marginal cost of a some GBs is even lower than that of a cigarette, and the lifetime revenue of a social media addict is enormous.

I wonder what the lifetime value of the "average" HN participant is, if HN leads to YC backing just one company per year that eventually become a unicorn.

No they won't. They'll keep the kids on as a loss leader. So much value add in indirect ways. Put up with a few years of not advertising to them so you have a user base later on. Keep the parents on-site under the delusion they are "spying" on their kid.

I don't think that banning ads would make much difference.

TikTok doesn't even have that many ads.

And weirdly - TikTok ads are generally decent - they are short, to the point, kind of authentic, not creepy. It's actually something they've done well.

Always baffling to see suggestions like this on HN:

> Every single ad impression shown to a child is a $1,000 fine.

> If you do that, social media companies will figure out how to keep kids from accessing their site.

Do you really want to live in a world where every website forces you to log in and verify your state-issued ID?

I think some people see the words “social media” and assume it only applies to sites they don’t use, so they don’t care how unreasonable the demands are.

Yet everything from HN to Reddit to YouTube is a social media platform. Do you really want to go through the process of ID verification for every single site you sign up for? Put everything behind a paywall so the website can confirm you’re an adult?

It’s weird to see how quickly HN likes to jump to extreme government regulation of online spaces these days.

I'm so tired of this argument. HN and Reddit are not social media. Is your real name Pragmatic Pulp? Do you post pictures/videos of yourself here, or update us about your family? I could go on but I hope you get it.

"Social Media" is a really specific term and it doesnt mean any random forum.

>Is your real name Pragmatic Pulp? Do you post pictures/videos of yourself here, or update us about your family? I could go on but I hope you get it.

At least on wikipedia, the definition for "social media" doesn't include real names, or posting stuff about your life specifically.

>Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks.[1][2] While challenges to the definition of social media arise[3][4] due to the variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available, there are some common features:[2]

>1. Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.[2][5]

>2. User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions—is the lifeblood of social media.[2][5]

>3. Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.[2][6]

>4. Social media helps the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.[2][6]

both, sure, are social media. people on hn, for instance, use their real names, put their emails in their bios, link to their website or linkedin, etc.

not everyone stays pseudonymous.

Everything you just said is grossly and obviously wrong.

> I'm so tired of this argument. HN and Reddit are not social media.

Reddit is very much a "social media". So is HN.

Removing photo posting or allowing people to use pseudonyms doesn't exempt a site from being social media.

If someone doesn't post photos to Facebook, does that make it not a social media for them?

If Facebook decided to allow pseudonyms, would it not be social media?

I don't go to HN or Reddit and get anxiety about all my friends posting about their awesome lives. I go for information only.

Forums, imageboards, and psuedonymous or anonymous places are not the same as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc

>If Facebook decided to allow pseudonyms, would it not be social media?

You can name your account anything on Instragram or TikTok, but even so most people will connect it to their real identity, add all their IRL friends, etc. Not the case on HN Reddit or any other forum

This sounds a lot like cope: let's ban stuff I don't like and keep what I do.

Addiction and status anxiety are arguably the worst things about social media, and they definitely exist here on HN.

That's about as likely to happen as banning sugary cereal

One way they might do so is to require government ID, like other countries do. If we want accountability then perhaps every account should be tied to a government ID.

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