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Comment by htag | Hacker News Reader

This is movement is going to be widely regarded as on of the largest prohibitions in our era.

* Whatever verification system a user has to do to prove they are older than 13 will also being to freak users out about 'whoes listening'. It's insane to think a First Name, Last Name, and Address might be tied to _every reddit account_.

* That data will be used for government surveillance. Maybe I should start creating a hat out of metallic kitchen supplies, but I largely think 'how can we spy on more Americans" has been a central political battle fought over the last 3 decades. It's a long fight, not over.

* This could cause all users to stop adopting these public networks, and and move to underground networks. Some underground networks will just normal application with some social space that aren't targeted. Some might be based on traditional dark-web style services. Others might be based on something more web3-y.

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A system to verify age is not needed. Simply making it illegal and holding parents accountable is enough.

It's one of those things where perfection is the enemy of good. Some kids will do it anyways but parents can install hard to remove monitoring software on devices and the penalty can be similar to a somewhat serious traffic citation.

We haven’t had a good track record in recent years of businesses honouring the spirit of the law. For example cookie consent banners with horrible dark patterns aren’t necessary to operate in the EU but some companies feel this is a better approach than reducing the amount of data they harvest. Likewise some companies will see this new legislation as an excuse to collect more data too.

The fact that a lot of social networks require or request phone numbers “for security” rather than TOTP codes (for example) is another such example of how data collection is hidden behind “safety”.

1. Start asking the software engineers in your company about their experience with parental control software as a teenager. Me, and all my friends, had clever bypasses on several systems. In addition, this type of story seems to be very common.

2. The amount of teenage smoking/drinking/drug use is pretty considerable. This is even true if you select for involved parents. Shouldn't parents focus be on preventing these? If parents can't stop this, why would they be able to stop social media?

3. Without age verification, how would you know someone on social media is underage?

4. Wouldn't this disproportionality punish lower income families, and richer families could more easily pay the fine?

I'd love to live in a town with these parents with superpowers you envision. In my town, people look at me like I have 3 heads when I explain we've enabled Microsoft's Family Link on our son's computer and that screen time rules make it so he just can't use it after bedtime, which is why unlike their kids, he's not up til 2 am.

Installing software? How about just using what's already there and begging you to use it.

Forget about showing credentials to use social media. The issue here may be needing credentials to breed -- but, you know, who watches the watchmen?

That's not a problem, device makers and carriers would gladly sell you all that and even install it if it isn't already. And that software isn't needed if they're a good parent that can actually tell their kid stuff and their kid trusts them enough to do that.

Parents don’t do that and nobody is going to be able to enforce a law specifically against them

It can be enforced when other parents,teachers,etc... find out.

I will give you all an example, cyberbullying is illegal right? Yet it happens a lot but making it illegal and when caught, punishing offending kids has reduced the volume (where such laws exist). No ominous backdoor involved.

> Yet it happens a lot but making it illegal and when caught, punishing offending kids has reduced the volume (where such laws exist). No ominous backdoor involved.

Source?

There are solutions like Yivi[1] (previously IRMA) that allow you to have a wallet of attributes signed by federal or local government (eg. "user is over 13" or "user lives in Wisconsin"). That way you never have to share your identity, just certain attributes that are specific to the use-case.

[1] https://www.yivi.app/en

Even with that it would be trivial to uniquely identify specific individuals. If anything that would be worse than the current situation as you would know certain attributes are definitely not spoofed.

With zero knowledge proofs, no it won’t be trivial. Because it will be binary as opposed to identifier based.

No, because it would be widely known what information is collected and what information is given in a verified fashion.

How exactly would you prevent leaking?

Are those attributes reversible to an index of real PII? Asking because these things all seem to oopsie leak or get sold or hacked or turn out to be sitting in a public S3 by mistake eventually.

How does the site know that I am using my wallet attributes and not someone else's?

It looks like the answer is yes

1. These 'digitally signed attributes' (example: 'age: 19') are consistent across services. So if you attribute is leaked in a way that it connected to other PII, then everyone with the attribute will know your PII.

2. These attributes are generated by a central authority. Presumably the goal would be to have governments issue these attributes. Regardless, whatever verification you do with the central authority will reveal your identity, and they can always determine your PII from the attributes they created.

[0] https://irma.app/docs/what-is-irma/

> verification system a user has to do to prove they are older than 13

Once LLM-powered bots flood social media [1], websites will have to implement verification as a means of survival.

[1] That hasn't even really begun. Wait until ChatGPT+ capabilities can be run from home at next to zero cost.

I read this a lot, but I don't get it. ...and I don't get the implied paradigm shift that's supposed to happen with better text generators.

If people generate better content with bots, that's a good thing. If the content people generate with bots is worse, then they're not going to be successful with it.

If bad content outperforms good content, that would be a problem for the social network. ... but that would be a problem regardless of the tools used to create that content.

Let’s say you’re right and only the good content rises to the top. What’s the motivation behind that content? It’s likely not just to improve online discussions and be your AI online thought partner. It will have an agenda and it will be using crazy amounts of computational power to steer you towards someone else’s financial or political goal.

The point of social media is to interact with real people, no?

Personally, I engage with hacker news for the content, not the people. It's the thoughts, opinions, narrations, and arguments that I enjoy consuming and contributing to.

How would my position in this argument be any less valuable if it turned out that I automated it with the help of a text generator?

I think it would be funny to write LLMs to generate noise and jam the Reddit signal. Do it slowly so the frog doesn't notice it's getting boiled. I can't be the only one with this thought.

I wouldn't personally act on this, of course. It's not at all constructive. I find it amusing to contemplate, though, and I also believe it's plausible others will execute on a similar vision.

There will be all sorts of other actors using LLMs for their own ends, too. Astroturfers. Trolls. Griefers. You name it.

That’s interesting. I come here for content specifically posted by real people. If for instance you were a LLM and I knew this I wouldn’t even bother replying.

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