Welp, let’s just keep screwing over anyone who doesn’t fit society’s mold of who is acceptable. Particularly queer kids, neurodivergent kids, disabled kids, etc.
What does this have to do with social networks ban?
Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media
271–280 of 593 posts
Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media
#272Open Internet dying in front of our very eyes. Let's not forget that social media are just one of the many scapegoats tried over the past decade in hopes of pushing this idea forwards. And while there's no denying that today's social media have gotten destructive, they're still only a scapegoat; no attempt is being made here to bring them back to their original, non-malicious shape. Is the social media hate really so…
> no attempt is being made here to bring them back to their original, non-malicious shape.
Social networks can revert back to original form any minute, nobody’s stopping them.
> Is the social media hate really so powerful that, channeled carefully, it can overshadow free speech?
Bots giving platform to schizos and fringe radicals is a freedom of speech?
Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media
#273Modern 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…
The craziest thing about Reddit for me is how most communities forbid "self-promotion." To me that sounds like a thing only admins would want because it keeps users on the site/app, but this is enforced by moderators for some reason and a lot of drama has occurred over banning creators over these silly rules.
It's a place that originally was a link-sharing platform, where you literally can't share a link to your own website on any subreddit. At least not if you are honest about it. It's okay if you pretend you aren't associated to it.
Reddit has become essentially watermarked videos posted by people pretending they aren't the creator of the video, twitter screenshots with 10 likes posted by people pretending they aren't the user who tweeted the tweet, and links to news websites posted by users whose only activity on reddit seems to be posting the same link to 5 different subreddits as if it was their job, because it probably is.
Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media
#274Earlier 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.
It’s what news made by reputable sources is for.
Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Social media" doesn't just mean Facebook right? It includes sites like Hacker News, yeah?
No, HN is more like a forum. It doesn’t have dark patterns and addictive engineering built in, even if it could itself be addictive. There ‘s been functionality built in to limit time spent on HN for a long time. Look at noprocrast setting for example. Even if HN could be seen as social media it’s not in the same category of destructive social media a la Facebook/Instagram/Tiktok
The relative lack of dark patterns is true, but the more distinguishing feature is that HN is boring to the majority of people, and isn't destructive because not using it doesn't make you excluded from society, and hence it has little leverage on the users. If HN pulls the enshittification trick, a much bigger portion of people will just stop using it.
I'll try to convert it into a metric: measure the number of involuntary users via the comments saying "I hate this website". You rarely see people here saying HN is bad to the point of being a net negative on them, for example, but this is true of all normie sites, including reddit.
Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media
#276Earlier 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…
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.
What really killed phpBB and that generation of boards was mostly the sketchy codebases they ran off.
The code was rife with vulnerabilities, so the boards needed constant patching (which was a non-trivial that sometimes killed the database). If you didn't patch on time, a script inevitably dropped by, exploited the software, dumped all credentials, and nuked the database.
Those old forums were not built with the adversarial nature of the 2010s internet in mind. Boards were dropping like flies a few years there. Most simply never recovered.
Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean as of 2011 over half the native women are obese [1]. I don’t know what to make of it other than that’s a lot. Dr. Anne Becker may be really into preserving traditional Fijian culture or whatever but it sounds like some of the local girls don’t want to anymore. [1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26201444/
The introduction of body shaming media vs. actually improving obesity rates is pretty poorly correlated. Introducing anorexia, bulimia, and now bigorexia to a population is probably neutral or net negative. If it wasn’t, you would have expected those rates to decline after the introduction of media informing people.
I don't know, it works in Japan.
Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
> With classic chatrooms (or a random vBulletin forums, if you wish) you would meet somebody online, then you would become friends over time and then you meet them in real life. I did that too. And it was usually themed around a specific hobby or activity, which would naturally turn into offline, real-world activity. almost as if it was a conduit to connecting real people with real interests, who would seek out commu…
Man I miss the days when forums were hopping. They all really had their own "character," too, often informed by whatever interest group they were catering to. It feels like by including everything on one site, Reddit et al just end up as a bland "soup." But they're so useful by the sheer mass of population that they end up drowning out everything else.
I even made friends on various forums. Hard to imagine these days
Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you referring to MySpace? My highschool band had tracks and videos of live performances in the school hall on there that is forever lost and I'm still bitter about it.
I am not referring to MySpace. It was a local-to-my-country social network which was outcompeted by another local-to-my-country social network, which in turn gave way to Facebook. I was aware of the existence of MySpace at the time, but it never had mainstream adoption locally. We also had not one but two mainstream messaging apps and hardly anyone was using MSN. Come to think of it, Facebook killed a lot of that hom…
Early Facebook was inferior to local social networks in many ways. The real killer feature was convincing people to de-anonymize themselves on the internet.
Re: Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media
#280Modern 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 totally agreed with you, right up until the last paragraph. Reddit is among the worst communities on the internet.