My Feed, My Way | Hacker News Reader

My Feed, My Way

pm.gov.au

185 pointsdotcoma161 comments

The damage is already done for most people who already use it. Whenever I go to a restaurant and see friends, families, and couples together, I feel sad that instead of talking to each other, they’re all watching TikToks or reels. On a bus or train, barely one or two people are actually doing something other than watching something online.

At least, hopefully, this rule helps future generations. People’s brains are so addicted that they can’t even focus for 10 minutes straight. On top of that, I see moms giving their toddlers mobile phones while they eat or whenever they need to get something done. People should really start considering how social media affects us in the long term.

> On a bus or train, barely one or two people are actually doing something other than watching something online.

I mean, what else should I be doing? Self-analyzing and staring in the window?

I treasure my memories of being on subways and busses and getting lost in thought while staring out the windows, yeah. I mean, people have done this for basically all of human history (okay walking or something, not on a train, but, yeah). It's not a bad thing to have some time with just your senses existing in the world.

Let people enjoy things.

The problem with being always online is not “not-enjoying” but stopping to think. People are getting used to be feed what they need to think constantly (from politics to product reviews) and then their critical thinking skills atrophy.

Moreover, I’m not sure if being on social media is something “enjoyable” anymore, and it’s more like smoking tobacco where it becomes necessary but is not enjoyed.

Do you really enjoy doom scrolling? Because I don't, it is just addictive and makes me feel tired and sad most of the times, with infrequent sparks of joy.

Don’t do things you don’t enjoy.

They are really adictive and engaging, and they trick you into spending more time there. Nobody ever says "let's watch reels for 3h", but here we are.

I mean, you're right. When I travel, I rarely use my phone or listen to music because everything is about discovering new things, and I love it

But when I'm home, on my way from home to the gym, I take the same route every day, and it can get boring sometimes

I'm also terrible at keeping my phone charged, so sometimes I end up alone with my thoughts anyway

Reading and conversing with a stranger? Maybe not every time but at least once in a while?

I read but on my phone or ebook reader and have done so for nearly 20 years. Especially since mass market paperbacks were replaced by larger ones that do not fit in my pocket or bookshelves.

I am in England – It is considered very odd to talk to strangers on a train or bus

I would say it's pretty common to talk to strangers on the train in England. I could just be the "Northerner terrifying Londoners by saying Hello" though. I do know not to start a conversation with a stranger on the tube.

I think it depends on the train journey personally. I'd never dream of striking up a conversation on the Tube or a busy commuter line; personally I'm the definition of 'not a morning person' so I've no social battery to spare in those circumstances. On the other hand I quite like a chat when I'm not in a hurry or it's not the morning, makes the time go faster.

Mind you most of the talk seems to be along the lines of 'GWR couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery' these days.

Thinking. Taking notes, ideally on a piece of paper. Relaxing. Talking to strangers. And yes, self-analysing. Staring in the window, maybe not so much.

Read, knitting/crochet, sleep, listen to music, play games (eg. emulator + pokemon games), study, read a newspaper, do crosswords, play chess online, watch a movie, listen to a podcast, learn a language, talk to other non-scrolling people, and yes, you can also stare outside, daydream or self-analyze, or even do nothing. Just a few decades ago we had a lot of dead times, it's not that crazy to pass an hour without having anything to do.

A lot of those suggestions mean staring at a phone or smilar device and a bystander like ggp might not be able to tell them apart from looking at social media.

If only there was a device I could use to play games and listen to music at the same time.

Comments like this always ignore the fact that in the olden days before phones, a majority of people read newspapers or books and busybody news columnists bemoaned how everyone was lost in their media instead of socializing.

Literally nothing has changed in the past century other than the variety of idle tasks one can keep in their pocket. People chose to not engage then exactly the same as they do now.

its ok to just be bored. that was life in the 90s for me

> Self-analyzing and staring in the window

you say this like it's a negative thing :( have you tried it?

It just gets me how some people are telling me what to do in my free time in such a condescending way.

Social media companies are also telling you what to do in your free time- they're just doing it in a much more subtle, pernicious way that goes straight to our dopamine pathways.

Believe it or not many people actually read news and books on their phones.

I think there a lot of survivorship bias in this observation, where the thing you’re most likely to see people watching is the thing that’s most flashy.

Yes and public transport isn't exactly a great environment for interacting with your friends - either its already loud or you're going to annoy other passengers.

A phone is a pretty bad proxy for what someone is actually doing with their attention

I kind of agree, but I will push back just to work through my conflicted feelings. In America 50% of people basically can't read. I think the official stat is 48% read at or BELOW a 6th grade level. The average American reads 0 books a year, shamefully myself included. Especially post covid, there is a serious degradation in social skills and using a phone instantly makes people more comfortable and less likely to socialize. The mobile gaming industry is 148B this year.

All that is to say, I don't think this forum is indicative of wider behavior AND smart people definitely inflate the value of "work" and "productivity" they do on their phone. We will never know unless we get Apple data, but I suspect a phone might be like 90% entertainment and 5% communication for most people. Maybe 5% is semi-productive work email, reading an article, etc.

I guess I am not sure if it matters where their attention goes. Although, it might be a bit of selective memory in how social people were before phones.

Do people really ignore family and do completely separate things on their devices right next to each other?? Usually when I'm next to someone, I'm using my device to look up things related to the conversation, just like how I'd use a search engine during an internet discussion. I can't imagine just sitting around watching shorts right next to someone during a family gathering.

There isn't any need to "look things up related to the conversation", and if that is seen as acceptable then that itself is a sign of how things have changed, and how addicted we all are to information.

I dunno, to me it feels kind of like pulling a book off the shelf to double-check something from there. It's just, you know, digital instead. It's definitely something that's been acceptable to some kinds of people even before devices, but of course it's not for everybody. Some people prefer to say "I'm not sure", leave the conversation, and then come back later (or not) after they've studied up. Some people prefer not to have their conversational partners dwelling on details by digging into books during conversation. I personally like to get to the bottom of details on the spot, but that's probably my ADHD. (potentially also other things too)

Instead of spending 45 minuter discussing back and forth whether Tim Burton is still alive, we can take five seconds to look it up, and then move on to more interesting topics.

Discussing back and forth whether Tim Burton is still alive is a rabbit hole worth exploring.

Not sure what would be more interesting than that.

Not in my family or extended family. But you can see examples of this all the time when eating out. So many young couples sit at a table at a restaurant, get out their phones and scroll away, occasionally showing their partner something they enjoyed. It's rare to see them talk more than a few words on what is presumably a date night.

Well, I don't watch shorts... but I do open my phone and read HN sometimes, when I don't want to actively participate in the (current) conversation. Which also shows that "curated" feeds will not solve this particular problem of interesting content on phones distracting one from boring family and friends.

People assume I’m on TikTok but I’m working. Dozens of client updates per day plus back and forth

> instead of talking to each other, they’re all watching TikToks or reels.

There's only so much to talk about, and if they're doing that, they've probably already said all there is to say. I'm glad we have something to do now besides make awkward trivial banter or sit in awkward silence.

Why do people (or at least politicians pretend to) believe that social networks are popular despite the content algos and not because of them? The reason Tik Tok blew up is because it shows you what you want to see without you twiddling with a dozen dials.

Maybe giving people what they want is not great for them. I am ok with this argument. But then "giving people control" won't change anything. Vast majority of users would rather put up with shocking (to me) levels of annoyance and expense just not to configure/fix anything themselves.

Why not give people the option? They don’t all have to use it, but it means some can.

Because the people most severely impacted don't understand that they are being severely impacted.

Sure, there’s an argument for improving the default too. I was just replying to what I thought was someone saying “it doesn’t matter, most people won’t use it, give up”

Fair enough. I legitimately hate people who do that - gaslighting people into not wanting change. I don't even understand what drives that mentality half the time.

that doesn't seem correct. it's equivalent to saying nobody should be allowed to drink because a small minority of ppl cannot control themslves

The answer/comeback is "popular with whom?"

Most of my crowd seem to have left them behind because they went from a tool where I could see what my people were up to, and maybe the odd update about a band or a business I was interested in, to "Here are 50 things you have no interest in and by the way I deprioritised what your actual friends post".

This happened so much that most of the actual friends wandered off, making those posts even rarer. There seems to be a de-networking effect.

Should government be legislating that social networks work the way I want? Very good question, probably not. Am I still happy with this change? Broadly yes.

Social media and other such things were gaining explosively popularity (and addiction) long before 'the algorithm' was even a thought. Even in the pre-social media age, newsgroups and other such social venues had a similar effect, but relatively low reach because it wasn't mainstream and there were some significant barriers to getting started.

I'd look at trends as well. There is a time when Facebook was hot and trendy, whereas now it's a place for people's parents and grandparents - while all the cool kids are on Instagram. I think it's safe to say that the shift there was more social than technological. Younger generations wanted their own thing.

And I'd see TikTok as being in the same vein there, especially as YouTube has gradually shifted away from being YouTube and more like CorpoTube. But there weren't any especially viable stateside competitors. The few that did exist basically just tried to be YouTube, but with less content and worse CDN networks.

Facebook is for parents and grandparents and honestly it’s pretty good at it.

No other place is as convenient to form small communities.

The first social networks were actually social (ie relating to friends), algos came later, to better exploit attention for ads.

When twitter changed its feeds it had to force people into the new style feed by giving them a choice but wiping their choice every time they opened the app and forcing the algorithmic slop feed.

This is long overdue and I hope all countries adopt it. It should be the default and if people want to consume slop they will always have a choice to do so.

I came here expecting an apologia for the manipulative feeds of big tech, and found one at the top. If that’s not what you intended, perhaps consider that you’re acting as a useful idiot for them.

Every social media is popular because of the network effect. Even TikTok launched just under a decade ago, grew with help from China’s government and cultural isolation, and only became “mainstream” (in 2020) after already having hundreds of millions of users including celebrities like Justin Bieber.

> Why do people (or at least politicians pretend to) believe that cigarettes are popular despite the content nicotine and not because of them? The reason Malboro blew up is because it gives you a surge of dopamine without having to do anything for it.

Yes - TikTok is popular, precicely because the algorithmic feeds are designed to be addictive. They show content, not because its good, not because its what you ask for, but because its exactly what will keep your eyes glued to the screen.

I would assume that the majority of users would prefer a Facebook experience that showed them just the friends and family they follow, and nothing else.

Before it was social “media” Facebook was a great way to see friends & families updates in a chronological way with very little clutter. Then people began soapboxing, then came the ads, then all the random “interests” they assign to you and it’s completely useless now.

TikTok, IG etc are a little different as they’re actually media streams but I wanted to say that about Facebook - give me what I want on Facebook and it would be a wonderful service.

I cannot relate to liking Facebook because I never did in any of its eras but once upon a time newspaper was a competitive information technology. People would read them on the subway and at the beach. I did this, I am old enough to remember "saving" articles to read when I took a magazine into the sauna.

The same happened to algo-less social media sites.

They don't. They want to let people opt out of social media feeds for the same reason they currently let gamblers self-exclude[0].

Politicians do not believe that casinos are popular despite the gambling and they do not believe that social media is popular despite the feed. They want to protect the general public from addiction.

It's all fun and games when you download Tiktok. Then one day you're scrolling while your kid is in the pool, the lifeguard jumps in to save her, you realise you would have let your daughter die because you're addicted to watching dance videos on the fent rectangle, and you decide to quit.

[0] https://www.betstop.gov.au/

Someone measured that if a user is teenager boy, it will take Tik Tok 9 minutest to serve misogynistic content...

I was a teenage boy in the 90s and "girls are stupid" is definitely not a Tik Tok original. Yeah, yeah, scale matters but this is not in fact the first generation to discover sex differences or vices.

You are massively underrepresenting the situation. This is not “girls have cooties”, this is full-on women bashing. This is calling all women subhuman whores who don’t deserve respect. For crying out loud, there are massive “influencers” out there whose whole job is to degrade women online. You might’ve heard of a couple of wildly popular brothers who have just been arrested for literal human trafficking who forced women to be cam girls while making money publicly bragging about it, and those guys are (again, publicly) connected to the president of the USA.

Let’s please not pretend this is even comparable to the 90s. Scale is a quality of its own, and the scale of the current situation, both in severity and reach, is very different.

Yeah, it has gone further. You wouldn't hear "kill all men" at a uni in the 90s either. But I am not convinced that this is social media because hardline feminism predates it significantly.

But could it be that formerly unrealistic levels of exposure has normalised these things that always existed, and now they are mainstream and affecting kids __due to social media__ ?

Bingo. And algorithmic social media feeds reward fringe opinions—the more hateful the better—because those drive “engagement” which translates to attention, fame, money. Which means people are incentivised to be as controversial as possible. They don’t even have to fully believe what they preach, they just have to ensure they can enrage a large enough number of people. Which in turn brings the people who really believe those things out of the woodwork and the slime ball of hate gets bigger and rolls faster.

Social media as a technology isn’t necessarily the root cause of all those problems. But it is the medium by which those were allowed and incentivised to proliferate at an ever increasing pace.

The thing that doesn't get written about is that precisely the same situation occurs for women. Decentering men is equivalent to MGTOW. The torrent of misandrist content on social media utterly dwarfs the amount of 'red pill' / manosphere or similar content. It's mainstream in a way outright misogynistic content hasn't been for decades. Worse still, it's almost impossible to have this discussion without the immediate repost of 'but actually men are terrible', or some other such nonsense.

There's a very old fashioned 'battle of the sexes' being pushed by algorithmic content, and it's having visible toxic effects on the capacity of people to socialise, form relationships, engage in social reproduction and function normally in society. There's a vast torrent of such poison aimed at both men and women. Pretending it's only occurring to men, or that only men are being radicalised, is refusing to engage with the problem.

The comments section of literally every mainstream video on instagram reels, tiktok and the like that in any way touches on gender, masculinity, femininity etc - isn't dominated by misogynistic comments and hasn't been for years. But rather thousands of 'not all men, but always a man', 'yaas goddess', 'men aren't lonely enough', and countless other shibboleths.

The normalisation of FLINTA only spaces (and accommodation) and the like offline has brought these dynamics into the real world in ways that further isolate and dehumanise.

This has always been my issue with these causes that claim to promote equality. If your way of promoting equality and inclusion excludes a whole gender, you're doing something wrong.

The idea of decentering men and the manosphere are so wildly different in goal, tone, and motivation that I can't seriously believe you think they're equivalent. Nevermind the vast over-inflation of your perceived "torrent" of this content

The fact that you can't perceive the equivalence is instructive. Group A generalises individual issues with members of Group B and forms an ideology of blame and exclusion. But Group B was evil all along, cry Group A. Group B have become deranged cry Group A. And so it goes.

I don't see much issue with FLINTA spaces, other than it still failing at the ye old question "how to easily filter bad people from people". The options for regular spaces are still HUGE, some people deciding to have FLINTA and apparently enjoying themselves is a plus.

Having lived in Berlin, FLINTA only apartments are a significant minority (up to half) of spaces seeking housemates through publicaly available groups on platforms like Facebook (as opposed to websites like WG-Gesucht). So there's quite a significant material impact. Living in Ireland currently, more and more arts workshops, funding opportunities, arts mixers and the like are FLINTA only or FLINTA preferred (terminology can differ). Ditto club nights, but that's whatever. This is a real and growing issue if you're not a member of the approved groups, but have to function in those environments.

If you're as baffled as I am, FLINTA is apparently a German acronym meaning anyone who's not a born and current man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLINTA*

Even if someone was crazy about facebook, there was a limited amount of content they could see from my friends, you'd be done watching everything in 10 minutes. The levels of addiction we see today on TikTok, IG, etc were not even possible.

Maybe read the bill first before commenting.

These algorithms can be incredibly predatory towards people who engage with content they don't want to see, because they're optimizing for engagement, not enjoyment.

Engagement does not correlate with want. I know people who hated every second of their time on TikTok because it kept showing them only the most awful and traumatic shit, but for the same reason, they couldn't just leave because the reason it was traumatic was because they felt terribly guilty to leave it alone. They were shown all sorts of threats about how terrible of a person they'd be if they didn't like, share, comment, etc. and they were scared out of their mind into having to do it, and that only taught the algorithm to show them more -- to seek out only the worst, most horrible and awful and traumatic content to show them because that scared them the most and compelled them the most. It's awful, horrible, sure they shouldn't have been on TikTok at all (no one should), but it shouldn't have done that to them either

Kind of ridiculous, isn't it? Personally I think recommendation algorithms should be more powerful, customizable, and transparent. Currently they just make too many assumptions about the user without providing mechanisms to directly assign positive and negative weights to categories of content, which is what makes them unusable as a tool.

> Why do people (or at least politicians pretend to) believe that social networks are popular despite the content algos and not because of them?

Some are, some not. But the motivation is the harm of algo-feeds, the potential for manipulations from bad actors.

> The reason Tik Tok blew up is because it shows you what you want to see without you twiddling with a dozen dials.

That's more of a delusion, it does not shows you what you want, but what engages you, which just happen often enough to be something you want.

> But then "giving people control" won't change anything.

Probably true, but feeds like are tapping into addiction-mechanisms, returning control can help to regulate this, and prevents at least lowers the harm.

I’d prefer similar to Doctorow, that governments simply make scraping and republishing (anything that anyone who consents can access) explicitly legal, then alternate frontends may appear with their own algorithms.

Bingo. This is the path forward and solution to so many ills. IP needs a big rethink for the internet.

Does that include the social networks themselves? Essentially forcing APIs again?

Forcing APIs maybe wouldn't be bad, but shouldn't be necessary. It would be hard to enforce and the company could release convoluted APIs, which would be harder to regulate. Meanwhile, scrapers can publish a decent API.

Yes this is the way, not another law to paper over the issues of prior law.

> Just as we have basic safety standards for cars, toys or food, the duty of care applies basic standards for the online products we use every day.

Aussie here. Great to see this. I don't think this goes far enough: I'd like to see addictive algorithms, content, and doomscrolling banned entirely. Not an option to see a different feed. Illegal. It's manipulative, hurts people, hurts children: make it illegal.

Please don't start randomly prohibiting things because you dis-approve of those things.

We have, at this point, over a 100 years of evidence showing that prohibition of psychoactive substances (alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, etc) doesn't actually do much to reduce consumption but do create an immense amount of suffering not just for anyone participating in the trade or consumption of those substances, but also anyone remotely connected to them - cf the immense violence perpetrated by drug cartels in the Americas, mostly because people living in the US seem to be in denial about their appetite for drugs.

So please, stop banning things you don't like, tax and regulate them instead. Use the tax proceeds to fund "social media rehab" clinics if you'd like.

Draconian "I don't like it, it gets banned" government wasn't a good idea in 15th century Spain, it's still not a good idea now. Let your fellow citizens make bad decisions, just ensure that the government is poised to profit from them.

Is there anything you think would be appropriate to prohibit?

things that directly harm other taxpayers - murder, physical violence, theft, false slander/reputational attacks...

prohibiting things that harm the individual should not be the role of government, IMO. Government, in the liberal/Enlightenment tradition, is there as a protector of your 'rights' to life, liberty, and property. While it has a duty to protect you from things which could harm you (eg junk food/sugary drinks), it also has a duty to let you do what you choose to do, even if it's 'bad' for you (eg eat junk food and drink sugary drinks).

Hence the compromise - you can smoke cigarettes and drink Coca-Cola, but the makers of cigarettes and soft drinks have to warn you beforehand, and the transaction may be more taxed than things like basic foods.

In countries with public health care and social security, harm to the individual is direct harm to other taxpayers. You must wear seat belts or wear bike helmets because the rest of us don't want to pay your rehabilitation bills.

My point (I'm the one you originally replied to) is that the effects of negative social media are on par with these things. Political violence, violence against minorities and specific genders, and worse. "Even" hurting the way children grow up and think should not be controversial to ban for children. Part of society's function is to protect kids as they grow.

I don't think likening it to Coca Cola, or even alcohol, is the same at all. And I did not ask to ban social media. I asked to ban harmful expressions of social media.

Thanks for your reply ^^

> the effects of negative social media are on par with these things. Political violence, violence against minorities and specific genders, and worse.

I hate to break it to you, "humans hurting each other over tribal distinctions" is not new. Look at literally all of world history. If you want a very well-documented example, look at the treatment of the descendants of former slaves in the southern United States 1865-1965. People don't need social media to start lynching each other.

> "Even" hurting the way children grow up and think should not be controversial to ban for children. Part of society's function is to protect kids as they grow.

Yes. Tax and regulate doesn't imply "unrestricted access".

Children are already 'protected by society' from alcohol, cigarettes, pornography, and a host of other things, I'm totally okay with Instagram/Reddit/et al. being "18+" as well. But there's a difference between "18+" and "illegal".

> I don't think likening it to Coca Cola, or even alcohol, is the same at all. And I did not ask to ban social media. I asked to ban harmful expressions of social media.

That's true, you specifically said "I'd like to see addictive algorithms, content, and doomscrolling banned entirely"

but I feel like that definition basically bans all popular social media: 'addictive algorithms, content and doomscrolling' would describe basically the business model of all major ad-supported social media sites (Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok). Basically the entire 'web 2.0' business model is "have users create content, push the stuff that keeps people staring at the site the longest as much as possible so we can sell more ads".

And I don't believe that a blanket ban on Facebook/YouTube/et al. would be a net improvement.

Good points :) I think you and I likely largely agree, I just expressed myself poorly.

> I hate to break it to you, "humans hurting each other over tribal distinctions" is not new.

I know! But I have a hope in society, in our improvement as a species, that war and conflict grows less and less common. And I believe that should be a social aim.

> But there's a difference between "18+" and "illegal".

Right. Yes, I think I'd support 18+, but even for adults require the companies don't use addictive algorithms. That may seem inconsistent, but the reason is, gambling already exists. Addictive social media algorithms are new. It is much easier to prevent something new, than to deal with something millennia old. And I genuinely think wiser - that is, act to prevent it before it becomes something like gambling and alcohol.

> but I feel like that definition basically bans all popular social media

Yeah. It kinda does. But social media didn't require this in the past: it's developed it. So I feel it bans negative forms, not social media per se. But that said...

> And I don't believe that a blanket ban on Facebook/YouTube/et al. would be a net improvement.

This is a really interesting comment! Why? (Not saying I disagree, for Youtube at least. But I'm really curious about this.)

sorry for taking forever to reply ^^"

> I know! But I have a hope in society, in our improvement as a species, that war and conflict grows less and less common. And I believe that should be a social aim.

Generally agree with this, and when things look bad politically, I take comfort in looking back on life 300 years ago and celebrate that things have gotten better since then (the average French citizen now can read, write, and has access to universal health care, the average French citizen 300 years ago was a barely literate peasant).

> Right. Yes, I think I'd support 18+, but even for adults require the companies don't use addictive algorithms. That may seem inconsistent, but the reason is, gambling already exists. Addictive social media algorithms are new. It is much easier to prevent something new, than to deal with something millennia old. And I genuinely think wiser - that is, act to prevent it before it becomes something like gambling and alcohol.

> Yeah. It kinda does. But social media didn't require this in the past: it's developed it. So I feel it bans negative forms, not social media per se. But that said...

Hmm... I think focusing on the features may miss what is generally the root cause of addiction - the environment. Not sure if you're familiar with Rat Park

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

but I believe generally addiction issues are best solved via solving the environmental problem that leads people to becoming drug addicts, namely a lack of other ways to have fun, not by banning the 'addictive' activity, be it drugs, alcohol or gambling.

To use a personal example, when I was an edgy 16 year old back in the mid-late 2000s, I went on 4chan a lot. Arguably, I was addicted, given that my 4chan time got in the way of homework and sleep. Now ~2007 era 4chan did not have an algorithm that optimized for engagement and ad revenue. It did not have infinite scroll. The only thing it had was a high volume of users submitting content, but that was enough to keep me staring at 4chan instead of doing more important things.

A ban of "addictive algorithms and infinite scroll", which is similar to what you're proposing would not have blocked 4chan, or helped me live a healthier and more economically productive life.

However, I'm totally okay with taxing "addictive features". If the Aussie gov't wants to tell Meta "hey, we notice you do things like 'push teenage girls to suicide to sell more ads', so we're taking a cut of everything you make in Australia, which we will then use to enact various initiatives which help the mental (and physical) health of teenage girls", I think that's great.

Also relevant - I got on Facebook around the same time/age (~16, mid/late 2000s) I got on 4chan, and the latter has really been nothing but a positive presence in my life. Despite having moved between countries and continents, I have an easy way to find and reach people I've not seen in years, if not decades.

> This is a really interesting comment! Why? (Not saying I disagree, for Youtube at least. But I'm really curious about this.)

YouTube has become television 2.0. Basically everything bad that can be said about YouTube is "bad parts of cable television, amplified". However, it's a great way to learn basically anything.

Facebook/Instagram are really good tools to help small businesses find customers. I have a friend launching her personal coaching business right now, and Instagram is how she finds and stays in contact with customers.

As mentioned above, Facebook can also act like a 'global phone book', enabling people who have lost touch due to circumstances (moving away) to get and stay in touch.

More generally, basically all the major social media platforms are popular because they give people who don't have a bunch of technical knowledge, who might not understand how to write up an HTML website, host it, and register a domain name, a platform to express themselves online.

A Facebook or Instagram profile is the internet's version of the Model T. It makes having an online presence accessible to the unwashed masses, and, being something of a techno-optimist, I believe creating a world where anyone can communicate with anyone will lead to what you called "our improvement as a species", and make "war and conflict" less common, because we'll be too busy arguing online to actually be killing each other :)

Does it harm other taxpayers if people are manipulated to believe that voting for Neofascists will make things better?

Social media addiction is definitely much more detrimental to society than drug addiction, imho. Drugs aren't used by foreign adversaries to sow discord and chaos. We should not treat drugs and social media the same.

I agree on your stance of 'tax and regulate' for drugs, but it should also be accompanied by heavy prevention efforts: people need to learn very early on how to have a healthy relationship with addictive things, whether it be gambling, alcohol, drugs, gaming, TV, or social media. This way they can protect themselves, in freedom.

The problem with social media is that it is very new, very broad, and in part quite innocent (just communication with friendly people). Even if we could magically update the education system to teach people how to not be manipulated by social media, we are way too late to prevent the terrible effects they are having in adults and seniors. We need a way to educate or protect those in a non-authoritarian way. Otherwise the slide developed societies find themselves in today will hit rock bottom again very soon.

> Social media addiction is definitely much more detrimental to society than drug addiction, imho. Drugs aren't used by foreign adversaries to sow discord and chaos. We should not treat drugs and social media the same.

If you'll forgive me doing the cliche HN "well actually"...

Well actually, FARC, revolutionary armed forces of Columbia, used cocaine traffic to fund their political activities.

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

> I agree on your stance of 'tax and regulate' for drugs, but it should also be accompanied by heavy prevention efforts: people need to learn very early on how to have a healthy relationship with addictive things, whether it be gambling, alcohol, drugs, gaming, TV, or social media. This way they can protect themselves, in freedom.

Agree with this, but I believe the "healthy relationship with addictive things" often comes from "a health life + environment", which can be facilitated with tax money from taxing addictive things.

> Even if we could magically update the education system to teach people how to not be manipulated by social media, we are way too late to prevent the terrible effects they are having in adults and seniors. We need a way to educate or protect those in a non-authoritarian way. Otherwise the slide developed societies find themselves in today will hit rock bottom again very soon.

One idea which I'd like to see attempted would be "government social media".

Rather than argue politics on Twitter and TikTok, have the government of $COUNTRY put that country's text of laws online, put the budget of the government online, and let people propose changes. Create an upvote/downvote mechanism like on HN and Reddit to filter through to proposed changes, have the government enact the most popular ones.

Why bitch about your president on Twitter when you can literally create a proposal to impeach them on your country's official social media site?

Make account creation dependent on showing a valid national ID, so each citizen has one profile, and therefore one 'vote' on each proposal (upvote or downvote), and see if that isn't a better system than "laws will be made by a guy you get to choose every couple years, basically without any input from you, while rich people will buy ads of social media sites to confuse you into voting for their preferred candidate".

"tax and regulate" isn't immune from second-order effects either. Set the tax high enough and you'll get smuggling gangs with all the same tendencies.

no, it's not a perfect system, but better.

Look at the alcohol market in the U.S.

Or even the tightly controlled Systembolaget [0] in Sweden, compared to the modern markets for cannabis and cocaine.

Tax and regulate lowers violence and increases tax revenue, outright prohibition/making it illegal increases violence and lowers tax revenue.

I do believe "sin prohibition" policies, for not just drugs but gambling, prostitution, etc, are one example of "low-hanging fruit", where there is a noticeably better option that is usually not implemented.

Really, for all trades usually controlled by violent criminals (so everything the Mafia/Yakuza/crime groups traditionally specialize in), I believe that the citizens of a given state will be happier if the trade is controlled by the state and not given over to criminals, which is functionally what "make it illegal" does.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systembolaget

I don't think it's at all obvious that a regulation-based approach could produce better outcomes than a prohibition-based approach. No doubt prohibition causes much violence and misery, but prohibition was a response to other great harms, most famously the condition of opium addicts.

Rather than rehash the arguments for and against, I would ask a meta-question: if the matter really were so clear, then why, over the last ~200 years, did every country introduce a prohibition-based stance, and why has no country switched to tax-and-regulate?

> if the matter really were so clear, then why, over the last ~200 years, did every country introduce a prohibition-based stance, and why has no country switched to tax-and-regulate?

First off, you do have countries switching over to tax-and-regulate, Canada, for example, some U.S. states, countries in Europe (Germany, Netherlands).

But to answer the question of countries going to prohibition-based instead of tax-and-regulate - off the top of my head

1) US-led world order + US deciding to ban a bunch of drugs for political reasons (I hear, from multiple sources that discriminating against Mexican immigrants was one reason cannabis was outlawed, Reagan and his whole 'War on Drugs' schtick...)

2) tradition - have you noticed that, also for the last ~200 years, basically all world leaders, from French presidents to the Emperor of Japan, will dress in the style of the English monarch George IV (and, more precisely, in the the style George IV copied from Beau Brummell)?

We ban drugs because that's what we're used to doing. Our leaders dress in suits because that's what we expect them to do.

3) naive ignorance - much as how, for hundreds if not thousands of years, "sacrifice a bull" was considered the state of the art in ensuring that there would be water for the crops, people growing up with no additional knowledge will often arrive at "ban it" as a logical way to handle a social ill, even if, as those who have suffered the negative consequences [0][1] know, "ban it" generally just makes the problem worse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuevo_Laredo

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_drug_war

Source [1] notes "Analysts estimate wholesale earnings from illicit drug sales range from $13.6 to $49.4 billion annually".

Not the illicit part. The market is there, even if outlawed. Dozens of billion of dollars per year, and if you tax-and-regulate, all of a sudden you've got billions in tax revenue to help you "respond to social harms, such as the condition of opium addicts".

BTW, Australia has shown the limits of sin taxation with our very high tobacco taxes. They got so high we induced a criminal black market in tobacco, that now is very hard to eradicate and is causing gang warfare, etc. Given we now have the crime anyway, maybe banning tobacco would have better outcomes than taxing it at this point.

As if this guy had the power to ban anything, you’re begging him not to?

Australia is and always has been a nanny state. It's cultural.

Why does "there's lots of evidence that shows this is harmful" get reduced to "You don't like it?"

I'm not taking a stance here. I'm just noticing the rhetorical move you made. There is lots of evidence that some of those things are harmful. Cocaine, gambling, and alcohol have all destroyed many lives.

I'm not in favor of banning those things, or banning social media for that matter.

It is intellectually dishonest to reduce the arguments for those things to "oh you just don't like them."

i hope they ban hacker news over there soon too

Also Australian, and I think there's something worth doing in this space, but I don't know how effective this Albo plan will be. Maybe there's an angle whereby an algorithmic sort (other than chronological, alphabetical, etc) loses liability protection somehow so the media companies are discouraged.

On Instagram, I can opt-out of "suggested content" but it reverts every 30 days or so. I would vastly prefer the default be that I have to opt-in every 30 days...

In 2023 the Australian Prime Minister Albanese was asked by Neil Mitchell on 3AW radio what he would do if he was "Dictator for a Day".

Albanese replied: "Ban social media".

Indeed.

ref: https://www.reddit.com/r/australian/comments/1gmakhz/anthony...

Red herring, you've linked to a conservative leaning sub community posting a source that is known to be generally inaccurate.

This is about legislation penalizing social media companies for shoving algorithmic slop down the throats of consumers.

But if we want to introduce political figures and their thoughts on social media; the traditional opposition party is lead by this man - someone willing to manipulate the public with social media.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/feb/12/fantastic-gr...

And the newer wonderkid of the media is engaged in widespread slopaganda: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-11/foreign-fake-news-pau...

But he DID say it, right?

Or are you saying that because it's Reddit/The Daily Mail, he DIDN'T say it?

What are you talking about?

It's widely quoted and well known he said it so where are you coming from.

No, it's your source; you prove your claims.

I'll give you a hint though - the article doesn't even quote him, it just puts out a spicy headline.

What he actually said and the context:

"Ban social media. Keyboard warriors can anonymously say anything at all. Without any fear.", with regard to a misinformation bill.

Considering the sources deliberately stripped everything of context and you've repeated it without checking, would you say we have a misinformation problem with media in general, or social media?

Here is the exact clip:

https://video.reclaimthenet.org/articles/albanese-dictator-s...

the context doesn't appear to change the key facts here? he did say it, he meant it, and the context provided by the OP (he was asked what he'd do if he were dictator for a day) is accurate?

I have no interest at all in defending whatever place the claim may have come from but this doesnt seem to change anything

I read the first sentence and thought: what is the government of Albania doing in Australia?

OMG, I've got it now

"Albanese" is the second name of the Australian Prime Minister

Yep, I spent a hot minute puzzling over that sentence

Albanese is an Italian name, for the record

In Albania, Albania is called Shqipëria.

I was thinking albanese were the people of Albania (I know it's albanian, but got confuse for a moment)

LOL, I was wondering too what Albania had to do with all this, not being familiar with the australian prime minister name.

Brilliant! I really hope they get it through, and I’ll be interested to see what impact it has on screen time app sales in the region.

I don't think this goes nearly far enough, and is another example of our government latching onto a juicy trending topic and doing the bare minimum to make a positive sounding news byte out of. This should be an opt-in model for algorithmically driven content, infinite scrolling, etc. An opt out model just feels like they're compromising for the benefit of industry lobbyists on the issue.

> another example of our government latching onto a juicy trending topic and doing the bare minimum

Say it ain't so!

For those not following Australian politics, this is the theme of our times. Find a big issue that people want something done about, half-arse it and bow to corporate interests instead of taking decisive action. The big one recently has been gambling advertising. The government commissioned a report that came to the well-argued conclusion that, as the biggest gamblers in the world per capita, Australia really should ban gambling advertising. It's pervasive, offensive and way too normalised.

There appeared to be cross party support for the proposal, and widespread public support. Easy win for the party in power.

The current government sat on it for a couple of years and then came back with a watered down proposal to cap the amount it could be on tv and try to restrict it during times kids might be watching. Way to miss an open goal Albo.

The whole political charade is just getting me so angry, the thin veil of "government working for the people" rhetoric has completely fallen away to expose how directly corporate interests translate into Australian government policy.

Majority of Australians supported changes in how the resource sector is taxed - the government openly met with industry lobbyists right before the budget and just said lol no.

They went to a local byelection and their candidate was a gas lobbyist they parachuted in from a different electorate.

The gambling thing, what a joke.

The social media ban for kids that immediately turned out to be pushed by pro media lobbyists.

The military spending. My word.

They don't even try to hide it anymore, and Labor were meant to be the quasi-progressive-left option in the uniparty system. Now I view them to be equally as corrupt as the Liberal party, leaving the Greens as the only viable option in politics here. And they can never get anywhere due to the way political donations/funding is set up, along with the vested interests owning the media narrative. No one even bothers to read their policy documents because old Rupert Murdoch has their opinion covered for them.

Gah. It's nearly beer time I think.

>Majority of Australians supported changes in how the resource sector is taxed - the government openly met with industry lobbyists right before the budget and just said lol no.

The government consulted with key stakeholders before the budget? Say it ain't so! The lobbyists in question will be people with a Government Relations role, their whole job is to be the middlemen between the corporation and the government.

The main argument was calling for gas to be taxed more. This completely ignores reality of most gas being under contract until at least 2030, the government could not increase tax on this resource without breaking contracts. Hardly a wise decision. While they could increase it for future contracts, is this really the correct choice? We're trying to transition away from gas and other fossil fuels, why would we instead tie our tax revenue even closer to these resources?

>They went to a local byelection and their candidate was a gas lobbyist they parachuted in from a different electorate.

Yep, pretty tone-deaf. Not really the fault of the federal Labor govt however, this was just a classic WA Labor move, the state most beholden to these interests.

I agree with your other points. Military spending is screwed for either party, we're beholden to the US in this case.

Perhaps the goal was never about the average Australian people and none was missed.

So many of us were hopeful with this government a few years back.

Disappointing would be an understatement to describe what we have now and none of the alternatives look any better.

It is now beer time.

Ha, East Coast I’m guessing, it’s only just turned beer o’clock here in WA ;)

Although at least partly that’s due to late meetings with people in countries further west still.

Right direction to move in, but probably won’t do much.

“Drug dealers are now required to give their customers the option to purchase salad instead of cocaine”.

That’s at least a choice.

The USA has a choice between two parties - democrat or republican. China only has one party, Russian has (in principle) one party and North Korea only has one dictator.

So if these places got a second party or dictator, it would be a 50% improvement.

The war on drugs was a failure, and the most successful cases (other than harsh punishments while avoiding massive drug use in the first place, like Singapore) involve legalization.

> The war on drugs was a failure

Continues to be. It’s not over; it has been going on for over half a century, and counting.

How was it that Toby Ziegler (The West Wing) put it? “Since it never ends and no one ever wins, maybe we should stop calling it a war”?

> with draft legislation for the Digital Duty of Care released today for targeted consultation.

I hope it won’t be “community consultation” like they did with the AABill… that time where the Australian government ignored everyone in the community except for a handful of lobby groups. You know… that time where people filed FOI Requests about the AABill and not a single request was responded to.

Forget politics people… you all have zero sway. The laws have already been written by The Inner Party, and they’re just drip feeding them to us over time so that we don’t notice the sudden shifting of the Overton Window to serfdom

Wouldn't the better way be is to make social media open? i.e. anyone can generate their own algorithm or chose from others who created them. I see that the social media companies could implement these requirements in the worse possible way to ensure that they opt right back in to "choose to opt in to having their default feed include personalised content recommended by the algorithm"

It's unclear whether this legislation will require giving users the choice of the sort order. That's one of the tricks exploitative social networks use, selective prioritization of ragebait and other content that encourages "engagement". If you have the choice of strict chronological order, that removes a lot of the hold the networks have over you.

What about the option for a chronological feed for _all_ users regardless of age

The state AGs' settlement with Meta requires the company to provide users under a certain age with an option to choose a chronological feed

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.41...

Social media companies cannot claim it is more work to provide this option unless they can prove their time-wasting algorithms require less CPU and memory than standard UNIX logging or sort

The information these companies publish does not even belong to them

They rearrange it in manipulative ways that waste everyone's time, or worse (measurable harm)

The first rule reduces platform power. The second potentially requires platforms to build even larger classification and moderation systems. I'm very much in favor of the first, but I don't think they belong under the same conceptual umbrella.

I read the article but I don't understand the two "rules" you're referring to? Can you state them?

1) Force platforms to let you turn off algorithmic feeds

2) Keep undesirable content out of feeds entirely for under-18s

I talked about this in my blog post [1]. I didn't expect regulators to pay attention to the issue anytime soon—let alone move against it. So kudos to the Australian government. Enough with the free-speech and free-market rhetoric: algorithmic feeds are actively poisoning our minds and should be regulated as strictly as possible.

> The issue is that much of the problematic content doesn’t violate any law but still is poison that shouldn’t be on anyone’s feed. The easiest example is painting feminism as some evil propaganda against men, and how women’s place in the kitchen is natural order of things. Such views have gained steam in the recent times purely because of social media (algorithms).

> The ideal regulation would be to ban or heavily regulate algorithmic feeds. If you don’t follow someone, or a page, or an interest, there’s no reason for you to get that stuff on your timeline. Only things that should be shown is what you explicitly choose. And if it does, it should be easy enough to nuke it from your timeline.

[1]: https://shubhamjain.co/2026/02/25/algorithmic-feeds-need-to-...

With Facebook, people reported not being able to see their spouses' posts. They were "Married" on Facebook, but the feed just shoved things into their faces they didn't want. It would even edit posts when you went to their pages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719)

Facebook already has a "friends only" feed - https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr. It's the only thing I still use, and unfortunately it's cluttered with events that people I knew 15 years ago are going to this weekend, but it's waaaay better than the default feed which is just a slop cannon.

That's great however after seeing their feed being empty people will switch back. You can already do this on youtube by not allowing history.

No you can't, I just tried it.

I deleted all of my history and "paused" history tracking. Then I reloaded https://www.youtube.com.

My expectation: A feed of the pages I'm subscribed to.

My experience: A blank page which just says "Your watch history is off / You can change your setting at any time to get the latest videos tailored to you. [Learn more] / [Update Settings]".

Hilariously, it is exactly the same - in glorious 4K - on the YouTube app on my TV.

This is deliberately fucked in order force users into the algorithm.

> You can already do this on youtube by not allowing history.

And what a bliss that is! I love it how YouTube thinks it’s punishing me by turning off the home page recommendations if you disable history (it didn’t always do that) while it’s in fact a favour. In my country (and I assume most/every country), the default home feed is such a cesspool of vomit-inducing clickbait garbage that it boils my blood to even glance at it.

> That's great however after seeing their feed being empty people will switch back.

But yes, I have no illusion that everyone shares my aversion. Removing control from the companies will hopefully have some impact, though.

> Users can choose to opt in to having their default feed include personalised content recommended by the algorithm. Alternatively, users can opt out of personally recommended content in their default feed and see the friends and creators they choose to follow.

Does that mean they are giving platforms the choice of what’s going to be the default? That doesn’t seem like a wise plan.

> users can opt out of personally recommended content in their default feed and see the friends and creators they choose to follow.

This is huge. This would put turn (eg) Facebook back into what it used to be: a social network where you just see the people you know and follow.

Can't imagine Meta et al will accommodate this willingly.

Or just use https://tuhat.net,

>> 1K organic users in the last three months, ,with no marketing budget, and no VC funding.

- Chronological feed of local posts + external RSS feeds in one place

- Email newsletters / RSS

- Journaling feature

- Book log / reviews

- No Algorithms

- No like button

Opensource if you want to spin up your own instance.

I don't know what I am looking at here?

Ha, fair. The home page is a global feed of all users, limited to one post per day per user.

One of many potential solutions to an alternative to todays social media – like substack, but without the shitty sides of social media.

This reminds me of the YouTube creator Technology Connections trying to engage with people on bluesky, which already provides feed customization and even lets you write code to build your own feed algorithms. He loosely coined the term "algorithmic complacency" to explain how users didn't like bluesky specifically because they had to explicitly choose who or what they wanted to follow, his fear being that especially young people would rather be served slop than decide for themselves what content they want to see.

https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA

Maybe he's right, but there are way more issues with Bluesky that affect user retention. For example the app seems to love logging users out if they have intermittent Internet or are using a VPN, or just because the app feels like it. It's an insane bug or security stance.

Meanwhile, Setlog is gaining popularity in east Asia, which definitely indicates there is some demand for friend-only social media. I think many Discord users are basically using Discord like that too. Giving users the choice is the right move.

With RSS I already do feeds my way.

Indeed,

Thats part of the premise, we don't need to invent new technologies when email/rss are already self curated / federated.

The missing piece is discovery.

Which is why in addition to allowing you to aggregate internal/external feeds into one place, each instance also shares each external feed its users have subscribed too, and each user can share who they read (like a blog roll).

I reckon a good idea would be to force Bluesky levels of feed customization, with a choice of blocklists.

Theres alot of stuff turning up in my feeds lately that i'd rather not see.

What is the problem to filter your feed without Bluesky?

Bluesky has blocklists out of the box. You can block hate speech and other problematic content.

No such feature in the other socials. Open the feed, you could see toxic content from an account you never followed thanks to the algorithm...

I imagine we’re talking about air and water pollution. So my question is, How is the social feed going to be tested for these standards? I can’t imagine it.

This is a pro-consumer action. Good for Australia.

Identity verification is anti-consumer. Instagram in Australia offers either ID or video selfie to prove you are over 16.

Heavy handed regulation that I 100% support. The externalities are too big to hand wave away.

Interesting scenarios that could happen in next few years

* American internet companies start to make the judgement that supporting EU/ANZ countries with difficult legal/tax requirements is a net cost and stop doing it, just IP-blocking those countries for the lowest legal risk

* Alternatively, American govt takes the position of "American companies don't have to follow the laws of random countries just because they accept IP packets from those countries". American companies eliminate their official business presence in onerous legal regimes but keep serving users there

* If above happens, this forces the resolution of the question "how does internet jurisdiction work across borders if USA doesn't play along", and a plausible answer is that internet messages start to be treated like physical imports and nation-level internet censorship moves under the purview of customs agencies

The globally routable internet is a very special and valuable thing, but it's a historical aberration and I suspect not very stable long-term. Even today, with the internet way more locked down than 20 years ago, it's still extremely libertarian compared to almost any other economically significant venue. In equilibrium, the state will demand its cut

> American internet companies start to make the judgement that supporting EU/ANZ countries with difficult legal/tax requirements is a net cost and stop doing it, just IP-blocking those countries for the lowest legal risk

Productivity spikes, youth mental health issues trend downwards and the nutcase right-wing parties struggle to maintain momentum.

Can we have this please? Pretty please?

> * Alternatively, American govt takes the position of "American companies don't have to follow the laws of random countries just because they accept IP packets from those countries". American companies eliminate their official business presence in onerous legal regimes but keep serving users there

Why would they do that? If they can't have a local business presence then they can't book local advertisers.

Which directly cuts any revenue they would get from the enterprise.

None of these companies need to have local business presences: they do because otherwise you can't get revenue from users in that nationality.

They could still book global advertisers, in particular other foreign companies that also pulled out of the relevant jurisdictions.

But they already do that. They have local presences because they need it to get local ad dollars and trade locally.

You don't need a total solution to have an influence: it's a saturated market where you're only as good as quarterly growth figures.

Yes, but the value of local presence is only the marginal value of the local advertisers over foreign ones. It's not all the revenue from the country, and it can be possible to be not worth having a local presence but still worth operating from offshore.

This is going to get about 0% uptake. People's preferences, as revealed by their behavior, align with the algorithmic feeds. That's the whole point of an algorithmic feed.

I think this is a nice idea, but three koala dollars says that in a year we find out most Australians switched back to the dopamine feed after a day or two. Nice to have the choice, though.

I have been trying to trick it into turning off for ages.

I wouldnt be surprised if most people opt back in. But its better than an outright ban.

I would probably start using Facebook again if I could get a consistent, strictly chronological feed of friends’ updates.

You can. There's a friends tab

4chan doesn't use any manipulative algorithms and all its feeds are time based, just saying.

Oddly, 4chan is also the only place where 2 extremely opposed sides can and regularly do interact and debate - even if a large proportion of that traffic is bot farms.

for a moment, I thought the Albanese Administration was promoting RSS feeds.

"The Albanese Government is taking the next step following its world leading social media age ban to ensure Australians have more choice online...." - Me thinking "What the heck? What Albanese government has to do with Australians? Are they under the occupation? Albanian occupation?!"

The feed options sound good in principle, although I expect the implementation to be deliberately hobbled. I've tried Facebook's existing (well hidden) chronological feed and it turns out there's so much spam in local groups that I found it unusable.

The bigger issue is the toxic "papers please" identity verification will result in a lot fewer "Australians" on the internet, who will now show up from various VPN endpoint countries, so presumably won't get the algorithm option.

Nowadays you can filter out spam from your feed if you can roughly formulate what you want to see there (or DON'T want to see) E.g I filter my RSS feed using a small tool I built for myself. It doesn't support Facebook, but maybe you can find it useful: https://knoless.app

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