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Comment by digiown | Hacker News Reader

I secretly wish it would use a verification scheme that's so invasive/annoying, that even adults would stop using it anyway.

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IMHO the main point of these schemes is to make it hard for adults to use social media somewhat-anonyously. So the government can more easily identify those posting 'prohibited speech'.

If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the worst of the Internet, there'd have been more of a crackdown on porn, gore, etc long before social media became such a big problem. And smartphones would have never been allowed in schools.

What major revolutions or important political shifts have occurred from people anonymously shitposting on Reddit or Facebook ?

The online right talk about 'the great meme war' that led to the 2016 election of Trump.

Seems pretty clear that social media is radicalising people at both ends of the political spectrum, and it's not surprising that governments would want to restrict/police it by trying to criminalise 'hate'/'misinformation' and taking away the shield of anonymity.

Donald Trump?

None. Almost by definition, the folks who satisfy themselves waxing online drive complacency away from real action. That doesn’t, however, mean they aren’t self-importantly organized to later support an organized movement.

Do you think the current anti-ICE movement would have happened without social media? Or Jan 6th, or all the Palestine protests, or even the election of Trump?

The US has it's first amendment protections, but other countries seem rather more willing to crack down on online speech.

Why not? The Vietnam War drew plenty of organised protesters. The details would be different, but big popular actions can still be coordinated through traditional media and word of mouth.

Lack of social media didn't prevent the French Revolution.

> Do you think the current anti-ICE movement would have happened without social media?

Yes. There is a reason Minnesota is effectively resisting in a way Los Angeles failed to.

Once you have a movement, social media mobilizes. But if you’re building a movement, you need footwork and commitment. Not profiteers turning your cause into clicks.

> Or Jan 6th, or all the Palestine protests

Case in point. Support for each of their underlying causes dipped with notoriety around their online activity.

If you want to drain a movement of effective energy, distract it online from its streets.

I know of one crowd sourced witch hunt on reddit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Sunil_Tripathi

A lot of the cancel culture is also crowd sourced on platforms like these.

You already basically can't use most mainstream platforms anonymously. Try registering a Facebook without a phone number (you need to give a passport to get one in most of Europe).

Do children have no phone numbers or do they use their parent's?

You need a passport associated with it, you don't necessarily need to be an adult I think. Or the parent's is fine. Either way you will have to try quite hard to get a FB account not associated with a real life identity. And then they'd shadowban you.

In the UK, pay-as-you-go SIMs are widely available. Not sure how much information you need to give to activate+use one these days, though.

Up to a couple years ago you could get them included in a £10 Nokia in Tesco and pay with cash, no ID required.

in my country you don't have to give a phone number to register a social media website when i was a kid, i always laughed at my internet friends from a neighbouring country, because they had to give their id to get one, which is very intrusive from the government turns out i was the odd one, as most of the world required an id from you

I'm very critical of all the schemes proposed but this is just a fundamental misconception on your part.

> If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the worst of the Internet

As with any disease, the impact heavily depends on virality.

The worst the internet has to offer to children, is not the gore or porn for the few that look for it (usually individually). The worst it does to children is the attention algorithm that captures practically everybody.

"But think of the children" has always been the go-to excuse for tossing freedom out the window.

So in this case, do we just stop thinking about the children in totality?

If manipulative algorithm are the problem, then perhaps we should consider regulations that would protect everyone.

Exactly. The problem is no one wants to address that maybe some of these business models just need to go extinct.

Like maybe ad supported infinite feeds can't be done in a socially responsible way and just need to be banned. If that takes down or substantially limits certain web service sizes...so be it.

In the context of government legislation on personal behavior, yes.

Parents should be the ones setting up rules for their children.

While I agree with this, I also find that the "but think of the children" ironic retort also usually ignores the very real problems that technology can cause children (and society at large). In this issue in particular, if banning social media for children makes it less likely for adults to use it, I see it as pretty much a win-win.

Would you also want the government to ban junk food and recreational drugs? What about unprotected premarital sex?

I'd much rather live in a society with personal freedoms than a "healthier" one with government mandates on personal behavior.

Literally every society mandates tons of restrictions for children, because we understand that children aren't yet developed enough to be able to understand the full consequences of personal freedoms.

I agree that children need restrictions, but that's the role of their parents, not the government.

Should it also be the Role of parents to prevent their children from being kidnapped by crime syndicates? Maybe we should also abolish schools because it should be the parent's role to educate their children.

This individualistic line of thinking is downright insane. It's preposterous. We live in a fucking society, no one can do anything on their own. For God's sake parent's shouldn't be expected to fight alone against MULTI-FUCKING TRILLION CORPORATIONS.

Fat load of help all that anti-regulation talk did when the current US Gov can just get all the data it wants from those megacorps.

Yeah let's also abolish laws preventing sale of tobacco and alcohol to children. This will surely lead to a prosperous national.

No wonder the US is collapsing as we speak.

> No wonder the US is collapsing as we speak.

If you look at the longterm trend in government intrusion into our personal lives, you'll see it's largely increasing, so if anything, the cause of any "collapse" would be the opposite of what you're purporting.

Children are the survival of the species our DNA wires us to to protect them.

That's why people need to be especially careful when others try to use such effective methods of manipulation.

90% of the people that spout racism, conspiracy theories, threaten people, etc.. on social networks use their real name and login with their phone number, there's no need to ask the social networks to get ID cards, if you are the government.

I really doubt bots are using legitimate IDs.

The target for those age verification schemes (beyond actually preventing the kids' brains from being rotten by American ad supported skinner boxes) is probably to make schemes like IRA [1] just slightly more complicated. (I said "more complicated", I did not say "impossible" - I very much know that bot factories will find their ways around any kind of verification ; part of being on the defensive side of a conflict is about not giving up.)

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/19/airbus_sovereign_clou...

I think GP was concerned with forbidden speech more than bots, so solutions differ there.

> If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the worst of the Internet, there'd have been more of a crackdown on porn, gore, etc long before social media became such a big problem. And smartphones would have never been allowed in schools.

Where are you from, because all of these things have/are being tried for a long time in the US (and, I'd note, received significant pushback from civil liberty advocates). Heck, TFA itself talks about how this social media ban is coming after a ban on phones in schools.

Your argument hinges on the assumption that porn and gore etc. have worse impact on kids. I don’t think there’s a concensus on that. One might argue that porn and gore could have been found in print before the internet, but that social media have a more novel impact.

I personally like the theory that most kids problems are actually attributable to family issues. That kids in solid family environment/upbringing will not be “destroyed” by computer games, porn, gore (2 girls 1 cup anyone?), or social media. But that’s also just a theory.

If things in the internet didn’t impact kids or people then people wouldn’t get up in arms about non-PC content, but we know many different kinds of people only want thrown own kind of content out there and would prefer to limit or ban ideas they disagree with.

I do not think it is about seeing certain things, that exist in the adult world. That is surely a side effect that one wants, though, protecting minors from a world that they can not comprehend.

I think it is about algorithms targeting you all the time for hours in favour of a company. We see the effects every day. No attention span. Instant gratification. The next kick.

Gore already has been cracked down on. All the old gore sites like Live leak have shut down, Reddit has removed all the related subreddits, and governments quickly scrub the internet of videos like the New Zealand shooting.

> IMHO the main point of these schemes is to make it hard for adults to use social media somewhat-anonyously. So the government can more easily identify those posting 'prohibited speech'.

We are talking about Finland here, right?

Finland has a whole national ID system, all interlinked. They aren't going to be scanning faces to implement this stuff here - and anyway the government here already knows what you look like.

Do you not see the irony of posting this on a social media site (hacker news), given you're one of the users?

I guess self-hatred is one of the motivating vectors of authoritarianism.

Would you also secretly like it if daddy government was always watching you on camera and triggered your shock collar every time you reached for a candy bar?

Hackernews is not social media. Just no. Unless the term os literally meaningless in which case my Company's slack ks social media.

You may believe this, but the classification of what qualifies as 'social media' won't be up to you when you hand over this level of power to government. If Reddit is social media so is this site, they are literally the same thing.

Sorry, yes. Ever hear of Yammer?

You are describing 4chan

That's good...? I don't have to browse 4chan to interact with local groups, and I hope I won't have to browse Facebook either.

"Social media" doesn't just mean Facebook right? It includes sites like Hacker News, yeah?

I'd draw a line using some of these aspects:

- Algorithmic recommendation / "engagement" engineering

- Profit/business model

- Images/Videos

- Real-life identity

Retweet/repost is a part of your first bullet point, and is big in itself. There is a book about the history and present of social media from a few years back that calls out the retweet function as a major clshift in the viral nature of social media and its use to spread (mis) information.

The two first I'd get behind, the latter two I just don't think matter too much.

Algorithmic, for profit, social media is by far the worst technology ever foisted upon humanity. Even most of the issues with AI/LLMs become moot if we where to remove platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X and to some extend YouTube. Removing the ability to spread misinformation and fueling anger and device thought would improve society massively. Social media allows Russian and Chinese governments to effect election, they allow Trump to have an actual voice and they allow un-vetted information to reach people who are not equipped to deal with it.

It's time to accept that social media was an experiment, it could have worked in an uncommercial settings, but overall it failed. Humanity is not equipped, mentally, to handle algorithmic recommendation and the commercialization of our attention.

You'll have bots spreading propaganda in notime if it gets succesful even without those. So the 'algorithmic recommendation' (aka ads and propaganda) don't even have to come from the platform operator.

One of my main problems with all of this is "what counts as social media". It's a stupidly broad term. Email? SMS? Forums?

I think it’s pretty easy to write a law that doesn’t include email and sms. They have no engagement algorithms.

Forums require a little more finesse - but a good starting point is distinguishing upvotes from personalized engagement-based algorithms.

Basically I don’t buy that your concern is a problem in practice.

Edited to add - here is the guidance for Australia’s law for reference: https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/soci...

the approach australia took is a list of prohibited applications. It's not "fair" to a technically minded person, but it's a practical alternative, even if it would obviously lead to a whack-a-mole situation.

It works better here than most other types of blacklists, since networks take time to build up, and the "value" of social media is mostly derived from the fact that you can use it to interact with other people, not the software itself.

No, HN is more like a forum. It doesn’t have dark patterns and addictive engineering built in, even if it could itself be addictive. There ‘s been functionality built in to limit time spent on HN for a long time. Look at noprocrast setting for example. Even if HN could be seen as social media it’s not in the same category of destructive social media a la Facebook/Instagram/Tiktok

What about Reddit? What about 4chan?

Yeah, agreed. While there are gray areas in the definition, and I can certainly waste an absolute shitload of time on HN and Reddit, both of those sites allow anonymity, and neither provide user-specific personalization (with Reddit you can obviously choose to subscribe to certain subreddits, but that's not done for you, and AFAIK everyone gets the same view and order of stories and comments). What you see in the future is not just inferred from what you clicked on in the past, and that for me is the cardinal sin of most social networks.

Legally, it doesn't matter. You can talk to people? Social media it is.

> Legally, it doesn't matter. You can talk to people? Social media it is.

No this isn't true at all, it absolutely does matter legally. Look at Australia's underage social media ban. Twitter was forced to ban children, but Bluesky was not despite being the platforms being effectively the same. Roblox and Discord, no bans despite being an extremely common place for young people to socialize.

There was no objective basis for Australia whitelisting BlueSky. Exempting it from the rules that govern social media built just like it goes to show you that these social media bans aren't about protecting the youth, but stopping the spread of ideas the censors find inconvenient.

HN has upvotes, downvotes, and people chasing them for exposure, just like Reddit. The biggest difference is the lack of subs. Everything goes into the same category so you can't have highly specialized echo chambers. The moderators also seem to be a touch more professional.

HN is absolutely social media and it does have some of the dark patterns that plague other platforms. They're just more reigned in. A change in moderation policy or new moderators could destroy this site in a week.

I personally don't think kids need to be banned from participating here. However, the law is often a blunt instrument and it's probably better to get kids off of Facebook and HN if distinctions cannot be made.

Can you define, in a precise and actionable way, the specific things that make X social media and this web site not? "More like a forum" might be clear in your head, but it's not a test the system can apply in an objective way.

The relative lack of dark patterns is true, but the more distinguishing feature is that HN is boring to the majority of people, and isn't destructive because not using it doesn't make you excluded from society, and hence it has little leverage on the users. If HN pulls the enshittification trick, a much bigger portion of people will just stop using it.

I'll try to convert it into a metric: measure the number of involuntary users via the comments saying "I hate this website". You rarely see people here saying HN is bad to the point of being a net negative on them, for example, but this is true of all normie sites, including reddit.

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