Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media • Hacker News Board

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#221

Post by SauntSolaire » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 9:32 PM UTC

alexjplant wrote: post #210

andix wrote: post #98

Modern social media is nothing like social media in early days (myspace, early Facebook and even early Instagram). Back then it was a platform to communicate with friends, and maybe even find new friends to meet up with. Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them. The content must either be addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the content doesn't matt…

Reddit has been a cesspit of recycled pablum, populist image macros and low effort reply comments for more than a decade. Enthusiast subreddits are astroturfed to hell and back by people with a Shopify storefront and a dream trying to growth hack their way to a hockey stick. The low barrier to entry to each community means that this vapid culture eventually diffuses itself across subreddits that might otherwise be go…

Agreed. I wish they would consider charging a small fee (~$1) to create an account. That alone would cut down on all the AI spam and give subreddit moderators a fighting chance.

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#222

Post by hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 9:32 PM UTC

donatj wrote: post #220

Do people under the age of sixty even use traditional social media anymore? Do we have actual stats? I am in my late thirties so surely out of touch, but am friends with people in their mid twenties and frankly I don't know anyone who spends any significant time on anything other than TikTok. I guess you could call TikTok "social media", but it wouldn't fit my old person definition. I think pretty much everyone below…

>I think pretty much everyone below the age of 60 is aware that Facebook/Instagram/etc is just slop now.

Sorry, but to me you just revealed you don't speak to many women.

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#223

Post by Aerbil313 » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 9:33 PM UTC

logicchains wrote: post #86

Aerbil313 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are downvoted, but you are totally right. Humans are not meant to cry daily over stuff that happens half a world away, or be exposed to a thousand new strangers every day. But thanks to internet, your mom and aunt can have an endless fuel to their various anxieties and your daughter can have eating disorders comparing herself to celebrities. Bring a pre-internet pre-24/7 TV person to present day and they’ll spot…

>You are downvoted, but you are totally right. Humans are not meant to cry daily over stuff that happens half a world away You mean humans are not meant to learn about the atrocities their government is funding half a world away.

No, governments are not meant to be able to fund atrocities half a world away. Just as your body is not meant to sit at a chair and your eyes are not meant to look at a distance of 50cm for 8 hours a day.

The entire current human existence right now is at odds with human biology and psychology. One has to swim against the current just to be physically, mentally and spiritually healthy.

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#224

Post by slumberlust » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 9:36 PM UTC

SauntSolaire wrote: post #221

alexjplant wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has been a cesspit of recycled pablum, populist image macros and low effort reply comments for more than a decade. Enthusiast subreddits are astroturfed to hell and back by people with a Shopify storefront and a dream trying to growth hack their way to a hockey stick. The low barrier to entry to each community means that this vapid culture eventually diffuses itself across subreddits that might otherwise be go…

Agreed. I wish they would consider charging a small fee (~$1) to create an account. That alone would cut down on all the AI spam and give subreddit moderators a fighting chance.

Reddit could pay the mods. Let us not act like spam accounts are undesirable for the lil piggy. MAU doesn't differentiate between real and fake users.

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#225

Post by figassis » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 9:37 PM UTC

andix wrote: post #98

Modern social media is nothing like social media in early days (myspace, early Facebook and even early Instagram). Back then it was a platform to communicate with friends, and maybe even find new friends to meet up with. Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them. The content must either be addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the content doesn't matt…

When did this start? IMHO it started with instagram. I remember back then there were multiple retro photo apps, insta was one of them, I had several on my phone and kept playing around with them (at the time apps felt like Christmas presents, each update exploring a device feature in creative ways).

I don't quite remember, but I don't think it was a social network then, I think you posted the photos in other networks, and then they made it into a social network and something strange happened. People started posting pictures of food and just general daily life stuff and I thought this was a small group of people who were a extroverts and just wanted to show off idk, they ate beautiful food.

Then something strange happened. This behavior started getting normalized, all other insta like apps disappeared and shortly after, it became necessary to have an instagram account.

I remember at the time I thought something was off, to this day I think I have posted a total of 10 instagram images, they still have the old filters, and stayed off of it since.

But it's been interesting watching it morph into this hydra that simply cannot be put down, to the point where it's more powerful than governments.

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#226

Post by viktorcode » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 9:40 PM UTC

lm28469 wrote: post #127

bilsbie wrote: post #95

Noble goal but it ends up being a defacto internet license. All ages need to show id to use sites and services.

Good, less people will waste their lives talking to bots and other low value activities

I expect more kids will switch to playing more games on their phones with their friends. Whoever thinks the kids will instead put down their phones and starting go out more often has lost touch with reality.

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#227

Post by hn_user_9876 » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 9:40 PM UTC

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Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#228

Post by pembrook » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 9:41 PM UTC

digiown wrote: post #11

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

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

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

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

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#229

Post by pibaker » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 9:42 PM UTC

dyauspitr wrote: post #213

Aurornis wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like a central arbiter of identity from the government or something This comes up in every ID thread on Hacker News, usually with suggestion that we do it via zero-knowledge cryptographic primitives However, all of those proposals miss the point. These ID verification laws aren't simply designed to confirm that someone has access to an >= 18yo ID. They are identity verification to try to confirm that the person pre…

These ID verification laws aren't simply designed to confirm that someone has access to an >= 18yo ID. They are identity verification to try to confirm that the person presenting the ID is the same person who is using the site. This makes no sense. This is exactly like asking someone older to buy you beer. Will there be rule breakers? Sure but they will be in the overwhelming minority.

In other words, total death of anonymity on the internet.

Don't you love having your government name tied to every single word you say online, forever, potentially publicly accessible if someone configured mongodb wrong?

Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

#230

Post by holly01 » Sat, Jan 31, 2026, 9:43 PM UTC

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #181

whyenot wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find particularly bad about Reddit is the platform is specifically designed to amplify group think and silence competing opinions. All it takes is five more downvotes than upvotes and a comment will lose visibility. It can turn subreddits into little bubbles where like-minded people upvote each other and almost never have to see dissenting opinions. That may not be a big deal on a gardening subreddit, but it c…

Hot take: a voting system (and generally any move toward ranking content rather than displaying it chronologically) will inevitably rot any social media platform. Just a question of time.

When I used 4chan the lack of voting made engaging with the actual substance of a post much easier. This was something observed by many other posters I talked to. This is going to sound wishy-washy, but my theory is that the brain is so attuned to socially trying to figure out the in-group or who is in the wrong that putting a number that signals social agreement on a statement will immediately stimulate the more primal social pathways in your brain before you can even think.

Of course 4chan isn’t a great system for meaningful discussions, the system skews conversations towards outrage and shock. But reddits short, quippy, in-group signaling post style that is encouraged by their voting system seems to be absolute worst way to interact with other people. HN also has this problem to an extent, but it’s properly modded and most people here seem to be not be living through their phones so it isn’t nearly as extreme as reddit (or twitter, I never use twitter but people seem miserable in a similar way to reddit users).