481–490 of 503 posts
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> And use "localized" social media for the rest? How would this work exactly? How do you speak to people offline?
Sms? Signal and discord is more localized
Tell me: why are these algorithms suddenly okay when the victim turns 18? They are bad for everyone and if you’re willing to regulate them, make them illegal to be used on anyone.
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I feel like the core of the problem is that we don't as consumers have hardly any control over the software we run on our devices. People can and have written less addictive YouTube, Reddit, etc clients, but Google Play and Apple App Store don't allow them.
Google Play and Apple App Store don’t allow them because they are in breach with the YouTube service policy. If Google changed that policy the app stores would allow those apps. Otherwise your point completely stands of course!
And also it's one thing that the App Store doesn't allow YouTube Service Policy violators, but then it's a big issue that they don't allow sideloaded apps. It's only this locking down of our devices so they must go through the App Store that is indirectly enabling YouTube to have a shitty addictive UX IMO. If people had more control, YouTube would have to worry about not being too crappy or else other apps might take market share. Now that they have us all locked in thanks to App Store, they can extract much more attention/money from us than otherwise.
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So do you think the same logic applies to ISPs? Should they be reviewing all the content that they allow to transit their network and ban you if you try to evade their controls by using uncrackable encryption because if they mess up and allow you to distribute copyrighted or defamatory material they will be held liable? Remember that section 230 was originally enacted to protect them from liability.
No I don't think it applies to ISPs. They aren't involved in selecting or soliciting the content, or providing the sofware and platform that creates or distributes the content. They are "just pipes." Their purpose is to move bits.
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I think it's easier and safer to complain about everything than to actually have a nuanced and informed stance. Look at age verification: it's very easy and very safe to say "nobody sane would think that it is a good idea to force people to show their ID to every website they want to access, it will obviously leak the IDs, that is very bad!". While it is not wrong, it is manipulative: that is not the only way to impl…
But ironically exactly the people in the better place to influence that half-arsed implementation are those who comment here - instead of influencing said implementation. Somehow what we do ourselves at work is always good and nice and perfect (while what others do is brain-dead and pointless). Now okay you could say an engineer is too small to change politics, but how about 100 engineers? Thousands? If the whole pra…
For instance, there is a large consensus against ChatControl, agreeing on the fact that it's impossible to let the good guys decrypt arbitrary data without opening it to the bad guys. As a result, I don't think it's still a debate: the EU won't ask to weaken the encryption. Now an alternative to that is stuff like scanning the messages on the device (which technically does not break the encryption) and report them when it makes sense. There is a problem with that, too: in order to detect "illegal" content, someone has to decide what is illegal. And because it evolves, probably it's a list that can be updated remotely. And whoever controls that list has some surveillance power we may not want to give anyone (I know I don't).
It seems to me that this second issue took more time to get traction, but now engineers generally understand it. So if a politician asks, they can say "you can technically do that, but you are building a dangerous surveillance apparatus". It doesn't mean that the politicians won't want it, but at least they should understand the technical stance on it.
So for ChatControl, engineers seem to understand the problem, and the consequence of that is that ChatControl hasn't passed. At least not yet, and now I think those in favour have to convince enough people that building those surveillance tools is a good idea.
For age verification it's a lot different, IMO. There is a website dedicated to it: https://ageverification.dev/, explaining how they want it to be privacy preserving, which is technically possible. But still, there doesn't seem to be a large consensus about this (see the comments on HN). Many, many engineers keep saying "it is not technically possible", which is wrong. Maybe it is not desirable, which is a different debate. But it is technically possible.
What does that mean? Well for age verification, from what I see the "engineers community" is not credible at all. I can't get anything from it "as a community" other than "people yell many things, many of them being factually wrong". Many will say "not only it's not technically possible, but ON TOP OF THAT it is not desirable", but why would I listen to their second point when I can verify that the first one is already wrong?
It's always the same problem: not every opinion is worth the same. The opinion of an expert is worth more in their domain of expertise. So you can't just run a poll on HN and go with its result, right? In the case of age verification, for instance, it seems like the EU has been talking to actual experts, because https://ageverification.dev/ seems pretty good.
I feel like many engineers yell against it because they don't like the idea of age verification, not because it's technically bad. Which is a fair stance to have. But the honest way to defend it is by actually talking about why they think privacy-preserving age verification is a bad thing. Claiming that it is not technically possible is either uninformed (and therefore not credible) or manipulative, IMHO.
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> Nonetheless no one had chronological sort or raw vote count or whatever else in mind when they used the term "algorithm" here so pretending they did is obtuse and pedantic. No one until you it seems. > Cable TV is an example of something that no one is objecting to. @tencentshill's reference to cable TV originates from the question of whether Hacker News operates via algorithm and would be subject to the sweeping r…
I believe you are obtusely misinterpreting the other two commenters. The pedantry is your insistence on an overly zealous interpretation of the use of the word "algorithm" by @conception (well really it was @aurornis with the pedantry but you followed on). It's clear enough that the original wording was sloppy; forcing analysis of an unintended scenario isn't fruitful. > I'm speculating on what would happen if the in…
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Google Play and Apple App Store don’t allow them because they are in breach with the YouTube service policy. If Google changed that policy the app stores would allow those apps. Otherwise your point completely stands of course!
I guess I don't really get why is Apple App Store forced to disallow apps which violate the YouTube service policy? Surely that is an issue for the app developer and YouTube to sort out, why is the Apple App Store assuming an enforcement position? And also it's one thing that the App Store doesn't allow YouTube Service Policy violators, but then it's a big issue that they don't allow sideloaded apps. It's only this l…
AFAICT, there are no up front blockers to uploading an app that uses YouTube.
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Same as for the cigarette: it's a lot easier to regulate stuff for kids, because we as a society tend to agree that they need to be protected. Much harder to do with adults, because it is much less of a consensus.
> Much harder to do with adults, because it is much less of a consensus. It's because humans are motivated primarily by fear, not logic. The exact same moral panic was made about fuckin printed books. This is all hysteria, just like the TV is evil phase everyone went through. Proof of this is that nobody can even agree what social media is, let alone point to what's actually harmful about it
And we have even worse examples: it's depressing to see how many people "don't believe" in the principle of vaccination. One may be tempted to say "people don't have the time to become experts in every topic", but when you look at the energy people put into sharing their beliefs around those topics... clearly they would have the time to read a bit.
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I think you are just reflexively trying to argue your point without even thinking about it. 30 million tiktoks are posted by day. What do you mean your are going to allow "users to filter". This "regulation" will be trivially defeated by TikTok-Videos LLC uploading videos and TikTok-DataScience, providing the most popular filtering algo. At the end of the day, many children will simply default to using the best algor…
Wow clearly this a problem that can never be solved, better to not regulate these tech giants that have anti-democratic and anti-human beliefs. We're simply too powerless to regulate these entities!
Just like with GDPR, the tech giants will put their foot on the scale and continue to operate how they fit, and the smaller guys will die under a thousand paper cuts. I'd rather not add more regulation that cements Meta as the sole media platform of the internet.