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

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

#441

Post by rudhdb773b » Sun, Feb 01, 2026, 8:24 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #413

rudhdb773b wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you also want the government to ban junk food and recreational drugs? What about unprotected premarital sex? I'd much rather live in a society with personal freedoms than a "healthier" one with government mandates on personal behavior.

Literally every society mandates tons of restrictions for children , because we understand that children aren't yet developed enough to be able to understand the full consequences of personal freedoms.

I agree that children need restrictions, but that's the role of their parents, not the government.

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

#442

Post by Arainach » Sun, Feb 01, 2026, 9:12 AM UTC

direwolf20 wrote: post #398

Arainach wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The legal landscape has also changed. 20 years ago I helped run a web forum, but with today's legal landscape - DMCA in the US, various different laws in the EU and other countries - I would never do so. The amount of liability on the host for user-created content is far too high.

You are shielded from liability if you respond to abuse reports.

In the US, maybe. In Europe, not necessarily. The UK's OFCOM regulations are particularly concerning.

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

#443

Post by bostik » Sun, Feb 01, 2026, 9:18 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #353

peyton wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a whole vibrant industry of people you can pay to market whatever you want on Reddit. They can’t all be competing for the same few popular subreddits. They must be differentiated by targeting niche subreddits.

There's about 138,000 active subreddits. I don't believe that this industry is targetting even a majority of them.

That number alone is a very good reason for the industry to target as much of it as they can / dare.

You say "sudreddit". Marketing teams say "self-selecting target segment".

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

#444

Post by q3k » Sun, Feb 01, 2026, 9:21 AM UTC

Tade0 wrote: post #109

beAbU wrote: post #41

Earlier 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…

My guess: grono.net :)

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

#445

Post by mna_ » Sun, Feb 01, 2026, 9:24 AM UTC

nephihaha wrote: post #263

Australia, France, soon the UK... All within a few months and they have the chutzpah to suggest they came up with this notion independently.

Are they suggesting that they came up with this notion independently? I can't speak for other countries but UK politicians who are for this say they're monitoring the Australian ban closely to see if it works, so it's clear they're not claiming they came up with this notion independently.

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

#446

Post by miroljub » Sun, Feb 01, 2026, 9:42 AM UTC

miki123211 wrote: post #386

embedding-shape wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> give subreddit moderators a fighting chance Moderators are part of the problem really, there are a handful of moderators holding the reins over all the popular subreddits, and "smaller" (even big ones) subreddits suffer from the same problem. As an example, r/MistralAI, r/LocalLLaMA, r/ChatGPT, r/OpenAI and r/grok are all run by the same person. The only survivable places on reddit left are the subreddits with smal…

There are two problems in computer science, accepting payments and naming things. Reddit's principal problem is that the first person to take r/foo is often a BDFL for foo for life, and no other subreddit about foo will ever be quite as recognizable. If we instead had subreddits with a numeric ID and a non-unique display name, that problem would be solved. Payments would also solve the spam problem, but many users wh…

Don't you understand that paying even one cent to Redeit (or any other social media) would completely deanonymise it?

So yeah, I'd rather live with spam than with whatever public online identities give any government.

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

#447

Post by miduil » Sun, Feb 01, 2026, 9:53 AM UTC

q3k wrote: post #444

Tade0 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My guess: grono.net :)

Yeah because soup.io (Blogspam Link today) simply lost its data because they didn't migrate and the hard drive crashed.

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

#448

Post by vjk800 » Sun, Feb 01, 2026, 9:56 AM 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…

The problem is not the whole of social media per se, it is the monetization mechanisms used in the social media platforms. I'd think it would be better to ban the addictive algorithms, although it would be difficult or impossible to define precisely what to ban then.

Hacker News is a sort of social media platform, but I would have no problem with my kids using it without any sort of restrictions. The same is not true for Tik Tok or even Facebook.

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

#449

Post by user34283 » Sun, Feb 01, 2026, 10:07 AM UTC

GCUMstlyHarmls wrote: post #393

arational wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lately the algorithm for the front page sorted by hot or best has been changed. You'd see mostly threads from subreddit you recently visited. So you no longer have control over what you don't get to see.

I use old.reddit on my desktop, new.reddit on my phone and new.reddit is constantly mashing in posts from a more niche "my-country" sub (eg: not the "main" /r/country) that's often got very baity posts (eg: guised "does anyone else hate immigrants??" posts). Same account, same behaviour, but the new site is really pushing "gross" stuff at me.

[flagged]

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

#450

Post by jwr » Sun, Feb 01, 2026, 10:08 AM 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…

> I don't care if I sound old and salty when I say this: I miss phpBB

I'll one-up this: I miss USENET.

I never understood how anyone could like phpBB, compared to USENET news readers, it was a chaotic mess. But USENET, that was great for discussing things.