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Comment by quingle | Hacker News Reader

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> And the Prime Minister is on record saying if he was dictator for a day he’d ban all social media.

I'd vote for him. How secure are Oz's elections? Do I need to show ID? Just picture the world without facebook and twitter and reddit. What a wonderful place that would be. I'd trade in HN for it.

How do you suppose an intelligent 16 y/o Australian should get their news? Twitter / Bluesky / Mastodon / Youtube / Reddit are this generation's Guardian / NYT / Der Spiegel / Le Monde / Reuters.

We can bag those apps, but the fact they're 90% trash [1] doesn't mean they can't be used intelligently basically 100% of the time. Used properly, they're superior sources of information to papers/TV.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

> How do you suppose an intelligent 16 y/o Australian should get their news? Twitter / Bluesky / Mastodon / Youtube / Reddit

an intelligent 16 y/o Australian should not get their news from those propaganda outlets.

The same way a 17 year old, a 30 year old, or a 99 year old would in that hypothetical world: probably state media, or at least one with a loicense.

Nobody should get the news, it's shit and 99% of it doesn't even matter. The remainder is so local or so not really news that you don't need a usual outlet anyway.

Well, you’re right for some definition of ‘news’. I mean finding out things a reasonable person would want to know, for example hyper local safety/weather/crime events (someone was murdered a block from me, and Twitter was 2-3 hours ahead of all my city’s ‘news’ outlets in letting me know), what’s going on with regard to industry, nationally and globally, and of course updates in myriad specific/niche fields. I’m rattling on a bit but there’s lots of information an informed person would reasonably want to know about. It used to be called ‘news’ but I agree with you the definition drifted and what is now known as ‘news’ is complete trash.

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