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Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

mullvad.net

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Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#281

Post by davkan »

9rx wrote: post #190
davkan wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah there’s no getting around that kind of thing. My parents would unplug the router at night and take the power cable so i found another device in the house with the same cable and plugged it in. But my sister never did that so at least it worked for half of us. I’m all for sane best efforts for restricting children’s access to mind warping materials online if the consequences on the overall internet are minimal wh…

> The problem [...] is addiction. Is it? Only around 10% of the population will develop an addiction (of any kind). About the same rate as the population who live chronic sedentary lifestyles, which comes with equally (or maybe even worse) health and social consequences. Where is the regulation that forces you to prove you are of a certain age to sit on the couch? This seems like a lot of effort for something that im…

I would hazard a guess that much higher percentage than 10% of the population thinks that they themselves are on social media more than they’d like to be, whether thats addiction or not idk.

You’re probably right though, i don’t think 10 year olds should be on social media in any capacity. Why? Partially because they can easily get addicted sure, but also because really any amount of interaction with these platforms is bad for them because they are monstrous mind warping engagement machines.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#283

Post by cdrnsf »

palata wrote: post #162
cdrnsf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And having the state do it is better?

The state mandates laws that say we cannot sell guns to kids. Is that a bad idea? Would you rather let the parents deal with that?

I'd like parents to parent and develop a relationship with their kids. Comparing the internet to guns is a stretch.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#284

Post by palata »

cdrnsf wrote: post #283
palata wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The state mandates laws that say we cannot sell guns to kids. Is that a bad idea? Would you rather let the parents deal with that?

I'd like parents to parent and develop a relationship with their kids. Comparing the internet to guns is a stretch.

My point was that having the state regulate stuff is not always a bad idea.

The problem for many parents is that all the other kids have it. It's not always easy to develop a relationship with your kid to convince them that they don't need to conform and have friends.

So I can imagine that many parent would be relieved if access to social media was slightly more complicated, such that maybe it would be more normal to not have access to social media.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#285

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

subscribed wrote: post #173
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve configured my browser to disable certain tech like webgl, I get infinite captchad by google. Using vanilla chrome works fine. It might not be full blown attestation but it’s not great. Fuck you google for ever thinking infinite captchas are acceptable.

"might as well abuse this tosser to train the AI a bit. Free compute and classification, hey!" - or so, I guess. They immediately know they'll never get you through :)

Good luck, I don’t know whether the slight line in the adjacent square is part of the traffic light and sometimes I just say fuck it and click random squares.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#286

Post by 9rx »

davkan wrote: post #281
9rx wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem [...] is addiction. Is it? Only around 10% of the population will develop an addiction (of any kind). About the same rate as the population who live chronic sedentary lifestyles, which comes with equally (or maybe even worse) health and social consequences. Where is the regulation that forces you to prove you are of a certain age to sit on the couch? This seems like a lot of effort for something that im…

I would hazard a guess that much higher percentage than 10% of the population thinks that they themselves are on social media more than they’d like to be, whether thats addiction or not idk. You’re probably right though, i don’t think 10 year olds should be on social media in any capacity. Why? Partially because they can easily get addicted sure, but also because really any amount of interaction with these platforms…

> they are monstrous mind warping engagement machines.

No doubt kids will choose social media over cleaning their room. Would they choose social media over going outside to play, if society still allowed them to do that?

The "boob tube", so given the derogatory nickname due to the perception of much the same idea you present, may not have been able to take the warping engagement to the same extreme, but during its prime also didn't really capture the youth attention because the youth had better things to do, like disappear into the woods until nightfall. TV use has always been dominated by older people who, through things like failing health, have lost the ability to do anything better.

True addiction or not, it is worth noting that addiction doesn't happen overnight. One needs repeated exposure to develop the necessary neural pathways. This is why addiction shows up much more commonly in obviously tough environments. People use a device as an escape from their situation, which feeds the mechanisms necessary to develop an addiction. Social media is most certainly engineered to tick the "this is enjoyable" box, but that alone isn't enough to develop a problem. There needs to be something that sees someone want to use social media above all else on a regular basis and, as you point out, it is very likely that much more than 10% of the population don't actually find social media to be all that enjoyable; just more enjoyable than taking out the trash.

So, maybe we can reframe this as: All this work to continue to keep up not wanting to see kids without a metaphorical helicopter constantly over their heads as a result of an imagined boogieman that was invented in the past? Seems like a horribly misaligned effort.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#287

Post by platevoltage »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #79

Back to the internet's peer-to-peer roots. Many protocols besides the www The www became infested with so-called "tech" companies acting as intermediaries (middlemen) Lots of folks making money from surveillance ad system on the www. Oversized, unmanageable websites calling themselves "platforms" The www is an ad network. Not a great place for non-commercial activity Fortunately, the internet is more than the www. Th…

I have to admit, I'm kind of looking forward to what comes after the inevitable death of the www.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#288

Post by reaperducer »

armchairhacker wrote: post #146

Age verification is fine , at least in theory. It’s the implementations that are bad. More and more people agree that kids shouldn’t be on modern social media, including me. But most people also agree that mass surveillance is dangerous. The solution is to propose ways to block kids from modern social media (that actually works) without mass surveillance. Better parental controls, more parental education, and site-sp…

Age verification is fine, at least in theory. It’s the implementations that are bad.

I sometimes wonder what HN would be like with age verification.

Re: Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?

#290

Post by OsrsNeedsf2P »

palata wrote: post #181
Animats wrote: post #5

So, to post something in 2027: - You have to have an approved browser. - It has to be installed on an approved platform, Google or Apple, for which you have a valid account. - You have to have an account on the posting platform. - You have to get past moderation on the posting platform. That's without age verification.

I totally agree with that, and all those points scare me a lot more than privacy-preserving age verification.

They all started with something as innocuous as privacy preserving age verification
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