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Comment by gnarlouse | Hacker News Reader

This doesn’t strike me as “bad”. Seeing the content on Twitch and how parasocial it is, it doesn’t seem healthy for kids under 18 tbh. Like Facebook was the craze when I was exiting highschool, and then it was instagram/snapchat/twitter through college. “Quitting” social media was one of the healthiest adult choices I ever made—comparison is the thief of joy, blah blah blah.

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Problem is, that it sets a precedent, and next they will come for other websites whose ban will strike you as "bad".

Edit: I can definitely see them banning anything related to Linux and resources related to OSes because of how processes can be handled, e.g. "kill parent", "kill child", and so on. The term "kill" already has to be censored out on many websites. Of course context matters, but people really have difficulties with this these days.

You can use this train of thought to argue against laws in general, it doesn't sound like a very strong argument

First they forbade kids to smoke, and I said nothing

Then they forbade kids to drink, and I said nothing

Then they prevented kids to watch porn, I said nothing

And when the time came for me to complain about the price of cigarettes and booze, there weren't any kids to say anything.

Or something like that

Within this context, how? I do not think it can be used to argue against laws in general. Plus we have a lot of experiences now about it setting a precedent and them coming for your beloved websites. It is not even debatable today.

Laws tend to set precedents (that may be used to justify other laws)

Yeah, so should we have something like Chat Control and more, similar regulation(s)? It really is not so far off from banning platforms. I remember when people were trash-talking China for doing this, and now "we" are doing the same thing we initially opposed. I suppose people may only start opposing it when it starts to affect them.

I am also wary of things like government owned encryption backdoors and ChatControl, mostly because I feel like like society should be resilient to authoritarian takeovers (and they always seem to happen much faster than we would expect, we'll see if see the US gets another fair election in 2028)

I am just not swayed by the slippery slope argument because as someone else said, it can be used for anything.

Do we actually have a disagreement? I genuinely have no idea.

I do not care about Twitch and I consider Facebook outright harmful, but I do not think they should be banned. I have not fully read the article, but I bet it is "think of the children", a really old justification for "I want more control", a classic power grab.

"we" do what china did because they're beating us at our own games. It's "free market" until BYD shows up, it's "no regulations" until tiktok shows up

Allowing everything from everyone doesn't automagically make "us" the good guys

> Allowing everything from everyone doesn't automagically make "us" the good guys

I never implied this, that would be silly on many fronts.

Are you in favor of Chat Control or not? Why?

While your slippery slope argument can be applied to literally anything that children are restricted from, it consistently fails to materialize.

Perhaps it's predictive power is not as expansive as you think.

They won't ban Linux for containing "kill" but because it teaches kids to "hack" :)

Talk to your kids about the danger of using 'linux' today!

https://www.zdnet.com/article/uk-police-distance-themselves-...

I think there is such thing as a moat on legislative and cultural movement, whether that moat is good or not. So rather than "slippery slope" I think of it more like reducing or building moats.

It’s actually a good example nations should follow. It will still be exploited and sought after which also is a good thing in its own. And that’d be OK. While the general uninformed public, which is oblivious to its dangers, will be spared.

I see what you're saying, but it's a little bit ironic that you write this on a social media platform. Granted, a more niche and focused one with not all of the misgivings of the big platforms, but still.

I don’t think it is ironic. When people quit social media, they usually do not mean quitting to other people via electronic media. Allegorically you could say that same way when people quit drinking, they rarely mean water.

What they mean is quit predatory electronic platforms that only exist to make you addicted so they can use your life and data as a money cow. HN is a dinosaur from the age when forums were just bunch of nerds and geeks talking about computers and stuff.

1) Hence why i put “quitting” in quotes, I certainly still use YouTube,

2) but even as such I don’t consider HN to be a social media platform. It’s more of an RSS feed/forum + comments. Sure it’s a social media platform in the clinical definition. But there are no dark patterns AFAICT, no explicit advertisements to support funding, no corporate-powered psy-op campaigns to sway public opinion.

Twitch problem is not just parasocial... possible to get stalked. sometimes full chat of kids is prompted into disclosing their ages/locations and they do it because guard is down

Twitch works overtime to drive people to spend as much time on streamers, which isn't good for either side. Caps on donations, especially based on age, would go a a long way.

Some 'performers' need comparison to not be whiny little bitches.

Some parents make sure their kids get amphetamines before puberty, or testosterone shots. Just so that they come out on top in comparison. If it's not enough, some go as far as to sabotage other families and to poison other kids.

This whole social media thing is all that on a global scale. Just a bit more subtle in the early days. But it's still poisoning teens.

It's no more than that; sleazy, overwrought, raunchy.

It reduced overall competence which means it kept even the top far below potential. But to them it's enough, and the rest only cares for fun, anyway.

We will never see what could have been. It's not even future generations' luck that it's so obvious. Nothing can be learned from this that would stop the toxicity. Just fall in line and be boringly, hyper-relatablablaby awesome.

It's a showgirl's kind of world. /wu˞…/

(still hitting that depressed tone instead of that cynic, 'noir' kind. Ffs, it's creeping all over me.)

so you litte wanker downvote without adding context? we can have a public debate, if you want. I won't prepare. I'm in the bottom 1% of our species, if you need assurance that you are capable of making me smile with respect for who you are ( I've met very very few who are, but ALL of them have more than I do )

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