In all seriousness though, I'm curious what counts as social media, can they not play MMORPGs anymore for example? Are niche forums included ? What about chat apps like Whatsapp? Phone texting? Email?
I'm also curious if say TikTok and YouTubed simply deactivated their social features? No comments, DMs, and so on for example? Would they be allowed again?
Of course, these things were different than the beasts today. Everything was more personal, smaller. No algorithms.
So not sure what I feel. Social media as we know it today is obviously bad (not just for teenagers). But maybe I'm just nostalgic for how it was.
But what about hn?
Hn and reddit are kinda the same concept, it's just the scale of them making it different, or?
I'm not sure there's a good example of a social network site left.
Even sites and services that can be used for social networking are designed to make that difficult. For example, on Instagram you can choose to follow and interact with only people you actually know and keep your profile private. That would be social networking IMHO because it's mostly one-to-one or at least one-to-not very many. But Instagram insists on showing suggested posts. You can turn that off, but after 30 days they turn it back on.
Youtube already decides to mark some videos as "for kids" which disables a quite a few features such as comments (I guess that makes sense), the ability to add the video to a playlist (what???), notifications (why???)
The YouTube Kids apps and services are not included in the ban for this very reason, only the "adult" YouTube app and service. I imagine Google absolutely could create a YouTube "aussie edition" that could avoid the ban for the main service.