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Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

blog.ericgoldman.org

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Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#71

Post by manicdee »

thethirdone wrote: post #48
manicdee wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet here I am deliberately avoiding the features that Minnesota wants to ban. There is nothing hamfisted and misguided about this, the point is simply to ban the social media equivalent of casinos where the entire point of certain features is to stop you leaving by distracting you from the rest of your life.

Do you think HN would be banned for minors according to this law? I think it would, and I don't think HNs algorithm for ranking is abusive or toxic at all.

Minors would end up seeing the same “sort by new” version of the site that everyone who sorts by new instead of hot/rising/popular/etc will see.

Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#72

Post by djbebs »

basisword wrote: post #53
joshstrange wrote: post #5

Anyone voting for this is clearly not fit to hold their position. Aside from the stupidity of thinking this is enforceable, it's hamfisted and misguided. When they propose such open-ended legislation there should be an ability for an outside party to make every single one of them fill out a survey of "Would this be allowed/disallowed under the new law?" with a bunch of examples. If the people who voted for it don't h…

>> When they propose such open-ended legislation there should be an ability for an outside party to make every single one of them fill out a survey of "Would this be allowed/disallowed under the new law?" You claim the lawmakers are too stupid to understand how tech works, but you're completely failing to understand how the law works. It's rarely (if ever) black and white. It's the job of the courts to interpret and…

The fact that it's not black and white is the problem.

Above all law should be predictable a priori

Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#73

Post by uoaei »

xwdv wrote: post #66
warning26 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite the opposite actually -- the goal is to make it less appealing. Social media is designed to be addictive and prey on base psychological impulses.

So people find non-chronological feeds and suggested content appealing? I thought people were always saying they hated these features.

The tiny fraction of people who comment on HN say that. It is folly to believe this place represents public opinion.

Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#74

Post by zdragnar »

warning26 wrote: post #54
thethirdone wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think HN would be banned for minors according to this law? I think it would, and I don't think HNs algorithm for ranking is abusive or toxic at all.

This is a valid point -- HN's algorithm is one of the few that is good at discouraging flamewars without being explicitly chronological.

Eh, I think credit for that goes to dang and the community. Flamewars definitely start up now and then but moderation stamps many out.

Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#75

Post by veilrap »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #17
JohnWhigham wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny thing is that I guarantee a lot of the parents in support of dumb shit like this lose their minds at sexual education classes in public schools. Just shows that most people don't have the IQ necessary to be competent parents.

Which do you prefer? 1) We should have school districts teaching _Republican_ ideals because the local schools support it. 2) We should have school districts teaching _Democrat_ ideals because the local schools support it. 3) No to both 1 and 2. You simply can't have it both ways, therefore the reasonable option is to say no to both.

The problem with this is that Republicans in power today equate things like evolution with Democrat ideals.

When facts get labeled as bias it's impossible to remove both from the classroom and still have a functional classroom.

Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#76

Post by ben_w »

xwdv wrote: post #66
warning26 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite the opposite actually -- the goal is to make it less appealing. Social media is designed to be addictive and prey on base psychological impulses.

So people find non-chronological feeds and suggested content appealing? I thought people were always saying they hated these features.

Compelling != appealing.

I can’t risk going near “idle” genre games, because even the ones I hate I find incredibly compelling.

Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#77

Post by gorwell »

encoderer wrote: post #33

Two things are true: 1. this bill is trash, it couldn’t be enforced, it’s pandering. 2. Social media as it has existed for the last 5-10 years is harmful for teenagers. Instagram is making teens depressed and suicidal. TikTok videos have people celebrating mental illness like Tourette’s and has brainwashed impressionable kids into believing they too have tics or multiple personalities or Tourette’s. Something needs t…

It may or may not be pandering. The cultural and corporate elites have been increasingly exercising control over speech on the internet the past few years, and now we have a Ministry of Truth in the government.

More top down control is the natural progression of what we're already seeing.

Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#78

Post by ben_w »

listless wrote: post #61
xwdv wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want this exactly? Fixing the problems with social media so it becomes more appealing to use… so that you end up using it more? Why not just go outside?

Fixing the problem would just be removing the RT / Share button. That’s it. Then we would all use it less because it wouldn’t be that interesting at all.

That may help, but I suspect it will not be enough. Perhaps limiting people to mutual relationships (can’t follow without a follow back) and a maximum following/followers count of 256 to avoid parasocial relationships? (Only semi joking)

Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#79

Post by mikkergp »

chomp wrote: post #13

>The bill would eliminate minors’ access to any algorithmically generated navigation aids, such as “top content” and “hot items” lists. It would also eliminate home pages that are algorithmically organized, whether personalized to individual users or not, which would be replaced by a list of items presented chronologically (presumably in reverse chronological order if allowed because chronological order prioritizes t…

Does this include Spotify playlists?

YouTube entirely organized chronologically seems like a nightmare too. What about sites that offer study aids?

I guess it means all of Reddit would be organized by ‘new’? Hacker news too

Edit: Etsy and even you could argue Amazon have UGC as well.

Re: Minnesota Wants to Ban Under-18s from User-Generated Content Services

#80

Post by aasasd »

> the bill only applies to social media platforms with more that 1M “account holders” (defined as people who access a “social media account,” an undefined term) “operating in Minnesota.”

I'm always baffled by these nonsensical and arbitrary cutoffs. Obviously the proper approach is to define a function, either linear or logarithmic. In this case it's a reverse proportion: if you serve 500000 people in Minnesota, you are allowed to have 50% of Minnesota's youths on the platform, with 900000 people it's 10%, something like that. One could also have the age as a parameter of the relation, again to avoid the stupid cutoffs where the eighteenth birthday suddenly turns a person into an enlightened adult.

Hard zero at 1M also sounds random. I'd say the optimal function would be a reverse geometric progression tied to Minnesota's population and approaching zero teens at infinite Minnesotan accounts—or rather, one teen so there's no bogus fractional value.

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