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Comment by Calvin02 | Hacker News Reader

I realize this is old, but you’d think the HN commenters would ask the obvious: “what will fill the gap”?

The human need to connect isn’t going away.

Hint: Twitter, TikTok, VK-variant, or some government supported social network.

With Russia and China vying for influence, they’ll likely want to do everything possible to influence the replacements. It is unlikely that Victor Orban wouldn’t also want some control and tilt the scale in favor of something he controls.

I really wish Meta pulls out of EU.

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An array of smaller networks would be great, with interoperability.

The fact that Big Tech exploits network effects is a very negative outcome, but most people don't realise it.

Maybe the EU could experiment with "personal data interoperability" to promote a counterbalance to network effects.

Haven't really thought this through, but it would be nice for the web to work this way generally and promoting competition instead of being tied to these large corporations.

Ideally, laws would be written such that the only thing that could fill that gap would be real life social interaction.

Social media is, ipso facto, a bad thing.

> Ideally, laws would be written such that the only thing that could fill that gap would be real life social interaction.

I would love to hear a proposal around this. As an immigrant in the US, “social media” is my connection not only to people back home but also to my friends from junior high, high school, and college.

> Social media is, ipso facto, a bad thing.

It would be great if you could define what is social media.

Are chat threads social media? What about iMessage groups? What about various online? What about Digg / Reddit / 4chan?

Great point, the distinction between what is and isn't social media is absolutely quite grey. There are definitely people who would be better than me at defining it in a legal way, but my general take would be start asking questions like:

* Is there algorithmically driven engagement / content discovery?

* What is the size of the community?

* Is there anonymous interaction?

Chat threads in general are, I believe, acceptable, as they chiefly involve small groups of people who know each other. Digg / Reddit / 4Chan / Twitter / Instagram would all be banned, as they facilitate interaction between large groups of people who don't know each other.

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