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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

This kind of complex leglislation already exists in many areas of the law: revenue collection being the most obvious one. We could choose to treat "societal harm" the way we treat "tax collection".

I'm not saying there aren't infinite edge cases and second-order effects - but we tolerate those already for many things. I'm not pretending this is simple or even desirable - I'm merely stating it's possible if we want to do it.

My biggest fear is that (like the UK Online safety act) this acts to favour the huge corporations because they are the only ones that can afford a team of lawyers. Any legislation should aim to carve out exceptions to avoid indirectly helping monopolies.

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Great example. These companies are already experts at circumventing taxes, what makes you think they can’t weasel their way around some arbitrary written law?

Just look at the malicious compliance that Apple and Google have around the App Store stuff, they’ll find a way to comply with the law and implement different addictive dark patterns.

I’m not saying that I disagree that these companies need to be regulated, I absolutely do. I just think it’s going to be a complicated process, and not “oh just ban everything that’s an algorithm”.

And I have absolutely 0 faith in companies like Meta willfully complying.

Regulated by who?

There’s no political organization (yes Mamdani actually out-raised cuomo so let that sink in) that isn’t being actively bribed

Although it should be noted that Mamdani’s average donation size skewed much smaller than Cuomo’s, so it is possible that Mamdani was “bribed” by the general public.

I have a feeling taxes are possible to circumvent only because a government tends to have one arm that wants to collect taxes, and another that wants to reduce them to encourage certain outcomes (like having a business setting up shop within its borders).

The US may have this dual incentive structure since it wants to build its tech giants while limiting their control, but the EU doesn't. The arrival of a foreign tech social media giant might make the legislation a bit more palatable to pass.

It will undoubtedly be complex to regulate all dark patterns away. But there are a few obvious, easy wins. It'd be a shame to make perfect the enemy of good.

Yeah it’s a tough situation to figure out.

But here’s the real problem: people don’t care. And I say that as someone who hasn’t used social media since 2014.

My observation of people’s behavior indicates that when all is said and done, people don’t care—they would rather get the endorphins from posting, liking, following, etc.

But the solution is to allow people to control their own algorithm, and to have open source solutions where communities manage their own social network.

It’s not the algorithm that is the problem it is that people don’t have the choice to curate their own content.

People don’t care because the broader reality offers no alternative today.

We have failed at creating a society with hope for the future.

This is like prohibition talk. It was all the avoid the fact that America in that period was a social hellscape.

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