Comment by kurikuri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kurikuri | Hacker News Reader

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> Those are symptoms of underlying issues from someone who shouldn't be using such services in the first place. Protecting people from their own mental and moral malleability and ignorance is futile, as there will always be an issue to be resolved.

Why is the blame on people for what is made available to them? This wouldn't be 'protecting people from their own mental and moral malleability,' this would be preventing others from making this which abuse those malleability for profit.

The same type of argument you have made here could be made for legalizing ponzi schemes. People _should_ know that there is no quick rich scheme and the history of these schemes are full of fraudsters. Is it wrong to ban this type of abuse because their victims made the choice to engage in the first place?

And, to preempt the "ponzi schemes are different" response, I ask for a response of this type to qualify it with how those differences matter.

  - If it is in legality, that only applies until a law is made about addiction-intended media and is circular (it is wrong because it is legal <--> it is legal because it is wrong).

  - If the difference is in the intent of the ones perpetrating it, both perpetrate primarily for monetary gain. I don't believe a ponzi-scheme's primary intent is ever malicious (with the qualifier that I'm not assuming pursing monetary gain is malicious in of itself), nor do I believe this about social media.

  - If it is the directness of ponzi schemes in their fraud versus social media, I don't view that is very relevant... I think it would be reasonable to not blame someone for being the proximal cause of an issue if they didn't know beforehand, but the abusers in this case know by now that they are at _least_ a proximal cause.

> Why is the blame on people for what is made available to them? This wouldn't be 'protecting people from their own mental and moral malleability,' this would be preventing others from making this which abuse those malleability for profit.

I do believe our own actions are the only thing we have absolute control in life. In a perfect world, maybe such efforts would be more effective. I take in account the subjectivity of human actions and behavior in that case. The amount of safeguards you would need to put in order to protect people in that scenario would leak into many other areas, or create an eternal conflict at minimum (it isn't like we don't have one already...). I believe that education and knowledge is the path to solve such issues, because it creates a mechanism for people to deal with them (like a vaccine), not to never see them.

> The same type of argument you have made here could be made for legalizing ponzi schemes. People _should_ know that there is no quick rich scheme and the history of these schemes are full of fraudsters. Is it wrong to ban this type of abuse because their victims made the choice to engage in the first place?

People should be educated about it. It wouldn't solve all the problems immediately, but it is more efficient if people protect themselves from these issues. Ponzi schemes are illegal and they still an issue, the same would happen to other regulations in my opinion. Companies always find a way to profit.

Social media is a moneymaking machine, and data is valuable. It's not just internet fun, it's serious business. In a way, i don't think they are too far apart. I dislike social media and haven't used it in many years. You could apply regulations, is not that it is wrong, it's just ineffective against underlying issues and the problem itself in the long term. The effort should be more towards a long term solution. The line here is blury, that's what happen when you deal with humans. You could go towards the "protect people from harm" or "give them tools for self-protection" idea, i honestly prefer the latter.

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