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Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

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

#241

Post by Salgat »

gman83 wrote: post #137
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…

I wouldn't be surprised if Meta turned WhatsApp into a TikTok clone just to get around the restrictions. They know that banning WhatsApp for teenagers in Europe is almost impossible. I look at my kids, all their sports clubs and other extracurricular activities are organized through WhatsApp. I already had to block Youtube on their devices. I was alright with them watching a couple of long-form youtube videos every d…

The second a ban is announced everyone would just migrate to the next thing. That's the nice part of social media and communication apps, they're easy to migrate off of.

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

#242

Post by shevy-java »

Hmmmm. So I do understand some concerns here. On the other hand, I also absolutely hate all forms of censorship. I don't use any of these anti-social media myself (though, perhaps hacker news is declared social media? I also used to use reddit in the past, is that social media? Where are the boundaries of that term definition by the way?), but I still absolutely dislike state actors banning websites. I have no illusion about e. g. Zuckerberg and others here; see the recent news how Facebook tried to "hook" up young kids like a drug addict; Google via Youtube on the "swiping" of videos (that one is hard to resist ... I keep on scrolling down in the hope of finding better videos, fail, and eventually realise how I am wasting my time swiping ...). But even then ... I actually think I dislike censorship more than those anti-social websites that I am not even using anyway. This may be different for younger brains, so it is not that I am not understanding the rational behind. But still ... I can't get myself to want to like censorship either.

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

#243

Post by expedition32 »

pfdietz wrote: post #49
athrowaway3z wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very critical of all the schemes proposed but this is just a fundamental misconception on your part. > If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the worst of the Internet As with any disease, the impact heavily depends on virality. The worst the internet has to offer to children, is not the gore or porn for the few that look for it (usually individually). The worst it does to children is the attention…

"But think of the children" has always been the go-to excuse for tossing freedom out the window.

Children are the survival of the species our DNA wires us to to protect them.

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

#244

Post by shevy-java »

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…

> Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them.

Agreed but you have this on many websites such as youtube. Is youtube the next to get banned here? I mean you can write comments to so it is kind of a social mediua setup as well.

> So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine.

I don't know. It sounds quite arbitrary to me.

Not that I have anything against chopping down the big platforms. They truly abuse many people.

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

#245

Post by shevy-java »

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…

phpBB was quite nice, but you must remember that people used phpBB less and less over the years. Many phpBB style webforums are dead, and died before discourse etc... came about.

People's habits changed.

I do agree that things got worse in the last ~16 years or so.

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

#246

Post by shevy-java »

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.

But one problem on reddit were the mods. It was why I retired.

Bots and AI spam can be annoying but mods that lock you out of discussions are much worse.

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

#247

Post by shevy-java »

oliwarner wrote: post #193
cheeseface wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree on how the platform’s have changed. However, I don’t think Reddit is an exception. Popular is often filled with content that is driven by the feelings of fear and hate. Not something I’d like to continually expose kids or teens to.

I use old.reddit.com but I feel like I have complete control over what I see. It's new posts, I check them and then I leave. That's what I've lost on Facebook. It forces me to see things its algorithm thinks I like, but more often than not, it's things that make me want to argue. I don't have that on Reddit. Long may it last.

Funny that you use old.reddit.com. I used this too. I could not handle the new reddit - it was useless for me.

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

#248

Post by httpsterio »

shevy-java wrote: post #242

Hmmmm. So I do understand some concerns here. On the other hand, I also absolutely hate all forms of censorship. I don't use any of these anti-social media myself (though, perhaps hacker news is declared social media? I also used to use reddit in the past, is that social media? Where are the boundaries of that term definition by the way?), but I still absolutely dislike state actors banning websites. I have no illusi…

I wouldn't call it censorship. We don't allow kids to drink or smoke either, is that censorship? Gate keeping media thats possibly harmful for developing brains, when the users are possibly unable to make an informed decision for themselves, isn't inherently bad.

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

#249

Post by shevy-java »

Aurornis wrote: post #156
cheeseface wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree on how the platform’s have changed. However, I don’t think Reddit is an exception. Popular is often filled with content that is driven by the feelings of fear and hate. Not something I’d like to continually expose kids or teens to.

I agree completely about Reddit. It's a clickbait factory with a misinformation density that makes my Facebook feed look downright informative. I was an early Reddit user. It felt like there was a distinct shift when the site went from programming and news topics to being meme-heavy. Then again recently when they started recommending niche subreddits into everyone's feeds so that even the small subreddits couldn't co…

> It felt like there was a distinct shift

Yeah there definitely was a change in reddit, probably more than once. It changed indeed. To the worse, too.

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

#250

Post by thijson »

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…

Probably the online dating platforms are the same way. Someone actually finding their mate, and no longer needing the platform is counterproductive to their business model.
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