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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Anyone remember when they were in school and adults tried to ban access to a popular website? I imagine this ban will go down exactly the same. Never underestimate a bored teenager's ability to bypass tech restrictions. Heck maybe this is what is needed to finally get a new generation out of the comforts of their tech walled garden and get their hands dirty.

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Don't underestimate the human ability to "settle for less" if said less requires less effort from them. There's a reason people pay for Netflix despite pirating proposing a higher level of quality ; Netflix is just easier. They will settle for the "easy" solution, which will be any one of the TikTok clones already existing (YT shorts, reels, whatever).

> There's a reason people pay for Netflix despite pirating proposing a higher level of quality; Netflix is just easier

I'm slightly annoyed how this comment completely ignores the moral and ethical reasons someone might want to avoid making an illegal copy of something while denying it's creators any compensation. I need more coffee.

Netflix is not easier, but marketed heavily and competition is censored in search results. Some random pirating streaming site is unknown and probably not even easily discoverable on google (you have to use yandex for that).

I stick to pirating with adblockers because it is more convenient, there is a much bigger library of content and I don't have to share any personal info or pay for anything.

If you know the words “yandex” and “adblocker” you are already 90th percentile ability to pirate content

Netflix is absolutely easier to use than any form of pirating for the vast majority of their userbase.

Everyone in this thread talking about how people will “just get a VPN” to use TikTok have zero concept of the technical abilities of TikTok’s user base

What's amazing about this comment chain is that it's totally wrong. Netflix is missing tons of content, like older movies, and tries to replace them with store-brand "originals" that everyone knows are garbage or only have a couple seasons before being cut. It lost its most popular product, The Office. Netflix literally cannot serve the product its users want the most, so the "easiness" of using netflix to get that product is 0.

The particular shows don't matter to most of Netflix's customers. Piracy to them is someone in a dark room wearing a balaclava with a laughing ASCII skull on their laptop. The ones that care about "The Office" will either throw up their hands and watch whatever suggestion Netflix has for them, or they'll subscribe to Peacock.

Netflix has succeeded in diluting what product its users want from "The Office" to "something funny". Why hunt for one specific show when it will throw a million options at you?

Or piracy is a somewhat tech-savvy person searching "The Office 123movies 321 123" on Google, then trying on Bing cause Google hid some DCMA takedowns, giving up on 9 results that only pretend to work, then finally getting a working one. Except episode 2 is weirdly quieter than the others, episode 11 is missing, and the whole website disappears a month later.

This person may have also had uBlock Origin, or maybe they got duped into the fake uBlock that still shows ads, or Chrome disabled uBO.

Netflix's death has been greatly exaggerated on HN. It's not popular with us, and for good reasons, but it's ever more popular both in terms of subscribers and viewer hours. It's not the easiest to always get the exact and best content you want but it's the best to get okay content any time. The latter tends to drive the average user.

Their stock had a scare in 2022, but it's recovered: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/NFLX:NASDAQ?sa=X&ved=2a...

Even then that was a scare of what people's perception of the future of the company was was, not actual negative performance metrics. Netflix continued to gain subscribers despite the concerns of the time (covid ending, changes in competition, changes in content) hence the quick stock recovery as the doubts evaporated.

So whoever wants The Office so much, and hasn't seen it already, pays for Peacock.

Even just having a PC hooked up to your TV in the first place is rare. People have locked-down smart TVs or STBs.

I used to pirate, went to Netflix because it was easy, and recently went back to pirating. Not because pirating became easier... but because Netflix became shit enough for pirating to be worth the bother.

I wouldn't mind paying if it wasn't setup in a way like "oh want to watch that movie? subscribe to this service" at one point I was paying for maybe 5 different providers eg. Apple TV, Netflix, Disney+, HBOMax, etc...

> Netflix is not easier, but marketed heavily and competition is censored in search results.

Did you just confirm the parent poster point while also denying it.

Convenience wins every time. Digital photos are lower quality but easy. MP3 is worse than CD quality but easy. Etc.

Popular creators will leave, if they can't monetize their content anymore. Then, everyone else will follow the creators to whatever platform they will end up on.

The only reason social media is popular is Americans are too lazy to find stuff on the open web. They'd prefer the lazier option of the single web site deciding for them what to see and think about.

There's zero chance most will put in effort to access TikTok.

Exactly. There was a blog post a couple years ago called “The Tyranny of the marginal user” that states this principle succinctly. If it’s anymore effort than a thumb swipe, you’re losing users in a hurry.

This ban does nothing about the mobile tick tok website. You don’t need to be a techie to use the browser on your cellphone. Yet it is a point of friction compared to an app with native notifications. And given the expectations of the average american tech user who has been coddled for the last decade into safe app store apps instead of the scary web, people are legitimately concerned.

This part is unclear to me. I know the article says "app," but this is general news reporting, and the term "web app" for stuff in the browser is acceptable terminology anyway. It also says that opening the app will redirect people to a page with information about the ban, not to the main page of the website. Prior to this discussion, I thought a ban at the ISP or CDN level was part of the plan, so a VPN would be required to circumvent it. No?

In any case, yeah, I'm not sure that "the average american tech user who has been coddled for the last decade" knows what a web browser is. I've observed some user behavior among family members that indicates a pretty bizarre mental model of how the Internet, web, and mobile applications work.

how would this actually work? iOS is so dominant among US teens it's crazy, and the ability to sideload on that platform is nonexistent even to very technically savvy users.

If the holding power of TikTok is strong enough (which it just might be) then you might actually see teens start to switch to Android.

I wonder how many Android users would actually sideload it. Same happened with Fortnite for a few years, and idk how many people did that.

Fortnite never had even a hundredth of the smartphone screentime as Tiktok. I honestly think a lot (at least 5 million) Android users will sideload it once it comes to that.

Yeah but what % of them. Cause if it's only 1%, and 99% are going to some other app...

Or DJI. Side loading is so easy, we usually just call it "installing an app" there is no hacking or magic around that, works just like a .exe with some extra protections.

you won’t

I don't think it would be as unlikely as you'd think. It's not impossible for a significant amount of people to get a cheap Android for these apps, after all iPhones are a result of iMessage.

“Large portions of US teens will get second phones for one specific social media app” is an absolutely wild thing to predict seriously

Most US teens probably already have a second smartphone-like device, and large portions of them have purchased them purely for one specific social media app.

I'm not saying it's more likely that not, but I am saying I wouldn't be surprised. If you replace "one specific social media app" with "iMessage", it has already happened.

Not only this - my observation is that having a secret backup phone is not an unusual practice for kids who might get their primary phone taken away at times by parents, school officials, etc. Or if their primary phone is subject to technical parental controls.

Yes, anecdotally many of my friends (and I) had a backup phone. Second hand Android phones are so cheap that why not? By the time the app has to be reinstalled it may make sense, if sideloading on Android takes off.

Many of your high school aged friends had a secondary backup phone with a separate cellphone plan they pay for? That’s wild!

I don’t think the average American high school student has two smart phones one of which is a secret from their major source of income (their parents).

No, why would they pay a cellphone plan for it? For most of them it was their or their siblings' previous phone, or their first phone they paid for themselves when they got a job, for others it's a cheap 60$ used phone they bought when their parents took theirs away at some point. That's like money for going out for lunch three times.

There's no use for a cellphone plan, we would just use wifi or hotspot from their main phone.

I think it's more likely that people would simply use the browser

I got popcorn ready to see how the masses of iOS users will react to the TikTok ban

That is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that if I have a tiktok channel, and the only way for people to see it is through a hack, then obviously my channel won't do that well.

The bored teenager will learn ways to get tiktok. But the bored tiktokker won't learn ways to get the audience on tiktok

All they're really banning is the app on the App or Play store basically. Anyone who still has tiktok on their phone can continue on and even make a new account. Anyone who cares enough can probably get a cracked APK too

TikTok will probably die slowly not suddenly

The duopoly of app store and play store makes this kind of ban much more effective. India banned TikTok and nobody uses it over here now. It's simply too hard to download the app. Google won't let me download it even when I'm traveling abroad.

Banning websites has been very hard, but today's closed marketplace ecosystems make banning apps much easier and people are not motivated to find loopholes.

When Ukraine banned russian social networks in 2015, all the teens had free FSB-sponsored VPNs running on their phones in no time. Like, almost 100% of them. In mere days. Now leaking not just the social network data to russia, but rather the entirety of their traffic.

Let's see if US teenagers are as savvy and motivated.

If it works on 75% of the population, that’s good enough. The other 25% will give up and move on as well, because people flock to social media where the others are.

> Anyone remember when they were in school and adults tried to ban access to a popular website?

Uhhh there are many websites that are banned in the USA. Otherwise working URLs that wont work in the USA. Mostly hostile state actor stuff.Iran, NK, etc. The fact that you don't know about it just says how effective it is.

Sure, VPN. But (serious question, not rhetorical) is that going to get the app on your phone? And are you going to go to the trouble when the algorithm thinks you're eastern european? When the user base is smalelr?

AFAIK most teenagers use iPhones in US. What are they going to do? I'm Apple fanboy but this is the exact type of power they shouldn't have.

Maybe you agree with the ban, I'm curious how would many people be feeling around year of 2028 after a few years of oligarchs consolidating their power and designing an obedient society through full control of the communications. Maybe you have ideas against H1B or maybe you use birth control, whatever your current opinions oh these are there's non-zero chance that you will be enforced into the correct opinions.

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