Devil's advocate: what is the difference between "social media" and a website very much like this one? When can I look forward to having to give a DNA test to read HN?
My own website has a bulletin board that offers a personalized list of messages after you login: whatever threads you have not yet read. And so do many other websites of this style. So this cannot be a differentiating aspect.
Not intentionally - but in the past I did have advertisements to finance it , which I had to stop since that is enough under a lot of jurisprudence to qualify as running a for-profit, which usually means less leniency from judges.
So it is advertisements where we should draw the line -- websites with advertisements should require age checks?
Why did you cherry pick advertisments from my reply and run with that?
It clearly isn't just a singular data point that is a True or False that would include a site in the ban.
Perhaps it should be, "If I had a 12 year old daughter, do I want her to have easy access to pornography, self harm material and the ability to receive private messages from a 45 year old registered sex offender?"
I get your point - "Where is the line in the sand?" and it's a valid point but no need to argue in bad faith.
> Perhaps it should be, "If I had a 12 year old daughter, do I want her to have easy access to pornography, self harm material and the ability to receive private messages from a 45 year old registered sex offender?"
If parents are concerned about this, why let them on the Internet? Why not use parental control systems? Why not teach your children healthy sex education, how to deal with their feelings, and to tell old creeps to fuck off?
Because it is the ad network that I chose 30 years ago that was doing any of the types of tracking you mention. In fact, all of the ad networks from 30 years ago would be considered as doing "teen tracking" today. I do not know how you can do tracking without doing teen tracking, barring precisely I troducing age verification on every single website. And I also do not know if there is any network out there doing advertisements without tracking -- certainly none of the major local news websites use it.
I do think the "wont somebody think of the children" arguments are in bad faith though, and I say this as a father.
These 80yo lawmakers have kids and grandkids and advisers. They know how social media works.
They hate social media because it gives people the power to talk in public about them with near impunity. They want to go back to the old days when if you wrote a letter to the newspaper about potential corruption or wrongdoing among the "more equal animals" you'd get pulled over for a light out whenever you went through that town for the next 20yr.
>If you think you have even near impunity on social media, I have a bridge to sell you. Even a town to go with it.
I specifically said "near" impunity. If you do something bad enough they'll come after you but even then if your gripes are legitimate that's likely to amplify it.
Surely you're not honestly claiming that there is not a significant practical difference between modern internet criticism and the old ways when messaging that could reach the broad public was far thoroughly gated by people and things that had more stake in the power structure.
I wouldn’t say it was gated. More like it was costly. And people having the means to do so was a very small set and prone to agree with the status quo.
But even now, a lot of messages are lost on the internet. And the internet is only decentralized for messages propagation, not for access.
For the record, that is exactly my point . I do not want yet another sword of Damocles for websites, even less if it depends on the mood of a clueless judge.
From a definition standpoint, hn is a social media site. From a legislation standpoint, it's not nearly popular (infamous?) enough to legislate (the mentioned sites have had enough negative coverage to manufacturer consent for this invasion of privacy: cyber bullying, destructive challenges, etc.)
When it is, and when your local government becomes sufficiently captured by the user surveillance industrial complex, you will need real world verification here.
Social media typically implies a website where users are sharing self-created content. If a website with comments counts a social media, than all web2.0 is social media and there's practically no distinction between the web and social media.
A blog that has a comments section is primarily still a blog, it just has a secondary social media feature attached.
In the case of HN, most people are here for the comments section and frequently don't even read the article, so it's primarily a social media site with a news aggregator feature.
I used it to follow some functional programming discussions that had chosen it as it's main bulletin board, as did many other software projects. (I am not a fan of Reddit, which is why it is of paramount importance to me to be able to continue to browse it without an account.)
But fine: if you think Reddit deserves the cut, please let me know why you think this site does not deserve it. Or why Discord (also used by a lot of software projects, to my annoyance ) does not deserve it. In a way that a "80 year old judge which hates computers" can understand.
We should have kept to mailing lists, as I said many times.
Reddit has pockets of sanity, but as a whole it is insane. The same is true of Instagram, TikTok, X, etc.
If Hacker News doesn't improve its moderation (especially of fascist propaganda) I do think it should go the same way. HN openly flaunts the fact that it only follows American law - e.g. the fact that it completely ignores GDPR. It wouldn't happen until HN got big enough to make some politician pay attention though, and HN is kept relatively small by design.
Reddit is a cesspool of bots reposting the best performing images and rage bait of the last 5 years ad nauseam, that and porn makes up the bulk of the traffic. So yes, again, there is nothing in common between reddit and hn
I read several subreddits and see nearly no images, nearly no rage bait (probably less than on Hacker News, in fact), and exactly no porn. My daily Reddit experience is so close to Hacker News that I've been known to forget which one I'm on.
Reddit still has the capacity to show you what you're actually looking for. It still lets you find content by interest, rather than by personalities. It still keeps replies together, still lets you order by time easily, and doesn't stick too much random crap in the middle (none if you use a decent ad blocker). It handles long form content well and doesn't try to force everything to be a sound bite that you have to click on to see more. It's still convenient to use it that way, and most users probably do use it that way.
Compare to, say, Youtube, which fight you ever step of the way if you try not to be drowned in a disordered flood of some combination of what a computer guesses you might want and what it's most profitable for the site for you to see (including what will keep you on the site), with your only control being which "influencers" you uprank by "subscribing" to them.
> Reddit still has the capacity to show you what you're actually looking for.
Reddit has the capacity to manipulate minors and groom them into believing all kind of sick "fictions", endorsed by the admins. It should absolutely be banned for minors.
This lacks hindsight. Whatever you subjectively dislike about Reddit will certainly apply here, if not today then tomorrow. If you want proof, check out Slashdot.
Open a new account on both platforms and tell me what you see. Let a 12 years old browse both platform and tell me how they behave, how long they browse, what they look at
Where are the ads on hackernews ? The fake posts which are onlyfan hooks ? The images/videos ? The infinite scroll? &c.
I do not see any of that on Reddit either. In fact the overlap between Reddit and HNs frontpages is striking (without an account). Are you sure you are looking at the same front-page?
Eh, with user links, user commentary, profiles and votes HN is "basically the same" on several key aspects and there is quite a bit of demographic overlap. It's just reached a very different equilibrium as to what goes on here due to the 2nd and 3rd tier aspects that are different.
Take two cesspools (I'm not gonna pass up the chance to use the analogy, sorry not sorry). Assume they are both serving the same quantity and quality of people. Feed one a bunch of inorganic matter, laundry bleach and only the finest most heavy duty multi-ply shit tickets. Feed the other nothing that shouldn't go down a drain, no bleach and Scott 1-ply. The latter will perform way better and go way longer between needing service despite the only differences being minor differences that don't even matter in system design.
> Eh, with user links, user commentary, profiles and votes HN is "basically the same"
Create a new account on both platform and check what you get by default... Another test you can do is let a 12 years old roam reddit and hackernews freely, I can guarantee you the results will not be "basically the same", they won't even be remotely similar in any way, shape or form
Does HN spread Fake News? Facebook and Youtube do.
Do you feel bad after using HN? Insta and Facebook it happens.
Does HN collect data to specify marketing? Every other Social Media do.
This is hard to define in laws so e.g. the EU chooses to force concrete measures from the social media pages.
Give me an example of websites on HN, which spread fake news by purpose and it was allowed by the mods even they knew the news / artice / website was spreading fake news.
You have quite an unatenable position (you really think there have never been outright wrong headlines on HN?). Even this very article is (being very generous) clickbait.
Yes? Even newspapers do that. You have never had Gell-Mann when reading something here outside mainstream topics of interest? (e.g. almost anything from outside the US, or health related).
Is this really the criteria you want to use to decide whether to require age checks for a website?
> the EU chooses to force concrete measures from the social media pages.
This just sidesteps the issue of how a website ends up in the list. Today, Reddit. Tomorrow, Discord. Then Github. Eventually, HN.
My news is almost outside of the US as I am not American. (wow this should be sent to r/USDefaultism). So let's say like this: I do read a lot outside of "American mainstream media".
Most good working journalist try to verify claim and statements. This is the opposite to Fake News, Clickbait and Russian state propaganda spread in Social Media because its their business model.
Social media has the power to ruin a child’s life by letting them publish self incriminating information. A normal website is a primarily read only interaction. Prohibit child generated content and let kids view websites.
Because there is real observable harm to kids from those websites that there isn’t from HN?
It’s like asking why you prevent kids from buying alcohol but don’t stop them from buying fruit juice.
There is a lot of writing on what makes “social media” particularly more harmful, and its addictive nature etc, but again, we don’t need to necessarily get into the cause and knowing it’s harmful should be sufficient.
HN is social media, and if you look at the implementation of the Australian law it's more political than anything else. They banned X but did not list BlueSky, which has an ongoing pedophilia problem. This has nothing to do with protecting kids from social media it's just political maneuvering, like banning children from reading the epoch times but not the NYT
insisting, against an overwhelming amount of irrefutable evidence to the contrary, that states like Australia and France are benevolent toward their citizens, does indeed make one a bootlicker.
was persecuting COVID dissidents "russian spam suppression"? are government-mandated backdoors "search warrants"?
Yeah pretty much. We know Russia was behind a whole lot of the pro-infection movement. Ostriching that fact doesn't make it stop being true. They've been doing stuff like this since the communist days, so they're very good at it now.
To find out what the difference is under this specific draft legislation we'd have to look at its text. I have no idea how to find copies of draft French legislation and I don't read French.
To give an idea of how such laws might approach it, the recent New York Law requiring social media sites to display mental health warnings was written to cover sites with addictive feeds. Here's how it defined those:
> "Addictive feed" shall mean a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, or a portion thereof, in which multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users of a website, online service, online application, or mobile application, either concurrently or sequentially, are recommended, selected, or prioritized for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information associated with the user or the user's device, unless any of the following conditions are met, alone or in combination with one another:
> (a) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on information that is not persistently associated with the user or user's device, and does not concern the user's previous interactions with media generated or shared by other users;
> (b) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is based on user-selected privacy or accessibility settings, or technical information concerning the user's device;
> (c) the user expressly and unambiguously requested the specific media, media by the author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed to, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (d) the user expressly and unambiguously requested that specific media, media by a specified author, creator, or poster of media the user has subscribed to, or media shared by users to a page or group the user has subscribed to pursuant to paragraph (c) of this subdivision, be blocked, prioritized or deprioritized for display, provided that the media is not recommended, selected, or prioritized for display based, in whole or in part, on other information associated with the user or the user's device that is not otherwise permissible under this subdivision;
> (e) the media are direct and private communications;
> (f) the media are recommended, selected, or prioritized only in response to a specific search inquiry by the user;
(> g) the media recommended, selected, or prioritized for display is exclusively next in a pre-existing sequence from the same author, creator, poster, or source; or
> (h) the recommendation, prioritization, or selection is necessary to comply with the provisions of this article and any regulations promulgated pursuant to this article.
