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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

> age restricting voting, driving, or alcohol and tobacco sales

I think those things are a bit more black and white.

How do you define social media? Is HN social media? You engage with others through comments, posts are ranked and it has voting elements as well as your profile has a gamified score for upvotes. Is a Disqus comment on any website social media if that's how we broadly define social media? Where do we draw the line?

You could make a case that leaving reviews on a site are a form of social media too. You can post something there and feel like you need to check back in hopes someone leaves a like or replies. If it were a wearable item you might take a picture of yourself and now hope people engage with it.

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You could come up with corner cases and odd delineations for those former examples too. Yet we all know the gist of the laws and manage to somehow, on the aggregate, prevent kids from engaging in said activity.

E.g. alcohol. How do we stop kids form drinking alcohol? How do you define alcohol? What about kids medicine that includes alcohol, what about medical procedures that insert substances with alcohol content. What about shops that get conned by kids with fake ID. What if the label gets scratched off and kid doesn't know it had alcohol. What if a parent gives their child a sip of beer. What about old home remedies that include whiskey. What about colic medicine that has alcohol, okay What about carving exceptions for babies, etc etc etc.

Granted some of those are contrived, but it's not as black and White as you think.

The social media platforms the bill would target include any site that tracks user activity, allows children to upload content or uses addictive features designed to cause compulsive use.

Then they can say goodbye to most online gaming. I wonder how people will feel about this when they realize their kids can’t play games anymore?

Pretty good. Pretty good. I would go to argue that online games do more harm than good to children and teenagers. In many ways banning them from playing them might steer them to more productive use of time.

Must children's use of time be "productive"? They have their whole lives to be productive - outright banning video games is not the solution in my eyes

At the time, Fortnite and Minecraft (and more) were my son’s way to socialize with friends. That was how they hung out (pre Covid). I can honestly say it would have been detrimental to him from a mental health perspective if those outlets didn’t exist or if kids were blocked from them.

Drawing the lines between what types of media are and aren’t allowed is a major issue with this type of law, regardless of if you think it’s a good idea or not.

According to another comment[1], video games are exempted.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39176380

This exempts almost everyone and everything. lol

That covers a massive range.

"I hope someone likes my review" is not that much different than "I hope someone likes my tweet" or "I hope someone replies to my IG post" or "I hope someone replies to my HN comment".

All 4 scenarios trigger the same thing which is setting up a future expectation that's hopefully met while you wait with anticipation of the event. Is that the process they are trying to get a handle on?

Personally I don't know how any of that could get enforced. Even making the internet read-only wouldn't work because that wouldn't stop people from internally comparing themselves to someone else who is allowed to post. Although that type of thing has been going on since advertising existed.

What products are children reviewing?

I would define it as a platform where the primary focus is for users post visual content of themselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com