151–160 of 176 posts
W Social felt extremely shady since their first advertisement on HN. Also, for all their talk about human verification, I have 6 accounts under different names :)
The name is terrible too.
Not sure that's really a thing outside the USA. And as far as I heard that reference, it was always pronunced "Dubya" not "Double-You"
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EU had more money than China yet shipped fewer dominant software platforms
China doesn't allow foreign social media on their territory at all. US had one for a short time, then panicked and forced them to sell. EU can neither buy American platforms, nor does it want to build a great firewall of Europe, so it's trying to find other ways to get in control
Oh yes they are. Just more stealthily via ID doxing age verification and speech censorship regulations.
> Europe already has an ATproto social network - Eurosky - run by a non-profit foundation - Modal - that is building everything in the open, with full transparency, sharing all the steps in their development roadmap: And weirdly, there was never a peep about this in the press - while the W Social launch was on national news and a bunch of high-profile EU politicians immediately joined. What's going on here?
So there’s no chance a politician or marketer or anyone who has commerce as their primary motivation will spend any effort promoting it
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Super shady. The german public broadcaster gave them a 5 minute feature on yesterdays evening news, that felt more like a paid ad than journalism. The report made it sound like it is some kind of semi-official EU-endorsed project, but its just... a closed source, for-profit social network? I guess the folks behind it are just well connected in Brussels. Thank you but no thank you.
> The report made it sound like it is some kind of semi-official EU-endorsed project, but its just... a closed source, for-profit social network? This is so stupid. It’s really like truth social. Having a private company with closed source pretending to be open and sovereign (whatever that means), adding ID verification by scanning your passport, it’s like.. gasoline for conspiracy theories. They’re so incredibly ton…
What more do you expect from German and EU leadership?
>Just skip the extra steps of putting social media makeup on a centralized mouthpiece, and make it an official EU site with broadcast only comms. Like public announcements and the like.
Yeah but then nobody would ever read it. Which is why EU leaders want to coerce private platforms that are already highly successful with the public be their mouthpieces.
Germany's own government had dozens of meetings in secret with Google in order to discuss censorship. https://dailysceptic.org/2026/06/08/google-met-top-german-go...
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And it works as smoothly for people on other app servers?
What does “people on other app servers” mean? That’s not a thing. App servers are aggregators. You can use any to read the network. Here’s a post I wrote, as seen via Bluesky aggregator: https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov/post/3mol3gyikac2d A second later, I could see the same post via the Blacksky community aggregator: https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:fpruhuo22xkm5o7tt... Here’s the same post on pdsls wh…
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China doesn't allow foreign social media on their territory at all. US had one for a short time, then panicked and forced them to sell. EU can neither buy American platforms, nor does it want to build a great firewall of Europe, so it's trying to find other ways to get in control
> nor does it want to build a great firewall of Europe Oh yes they are. Just more stealthily via ID doxing age verification and speech censorship regulations.
The first country to introduce it was Australia, which is only related to Europe by participating in Eurovision
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> nor does it want to build a great firewall of Europe Oh yes they are. Just more stealthily via ID doxing age verification and speech censorship regulations.
That's a huge stretch. Age verification is a worrying, but a wordwide trend, several US states introduced it as well. The first country to introduce it was Australia, which is only related to Europe by participating in Eurovision
It isn't.
> but a wordwide trend
And that's supposed to make it ... FINE?
LIke "Hey, the entire world is becoming an authoritarian surveillance state, what do you expect the EU to do? NOT do it?"
YES! That's what I expect. I don't want the EU becoming China but with a blue flag.
Another social network with 0 network effect and is dead on arrival. Now being closed makes it far worse than Bluesky and no better than a prototype pre-production version of Threads; with 0 users. From [0] > W Social unveiled at the WEF That's everything I need to know. [0] https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/germany-news/german-ceo-l...
Careful, you'll be branded a conspiracy theorist if you notice WEF involvement as dangerous.