581–590 of 593 posts
Is it really so controversial to ban it entirely? We ban heroin and other hard drugs. I think most people are better off, and have a more nuanced view of reality if the only news they get is local. Or the updates from people they know always in person.
Compare it to marijuanna instead. Then it’s on the same level of controversy.
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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…
> Humans are not meant to not meant to? by whom? We live in houses, with artificial light, heating and air conditioning, having sex without risk of pregnancy or "god-forbid" sex with people who are not capable of being pregnant. So, what exactly are we not meant to do? There's a certain natural human nature but it's expressed through abtract virtue like justice, knowledge, safety, connection - this is the only accept…
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If WhatsApp got banned, all those groups would simply switch to Telegram or Signal or similar. It would be very easy.
But why does it always have to be a mobile app?
Almost all end–user devices are mobiles. When everyone had a desktop you made a desktop app. When everyone has a mobile you use a mobile app. When everyone has brain implants you'll make a brain implant app.
That's if you want to reach the most people. If you want to reach the much smaller community of people who oppose the current thing, you'll make a different type of app.
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I wouldn't be surprised if Meta turned WhatsApp into a TikTok clone just to get around the restrictions. They know that banning WhatsApp for teenagers in Europe is almost impossible. I look at my kids, all their sports clubs and other extracurricular activities are organized through WhatsApp. I already had to block Youtube on their devices. I was alright with them watching a couple of long-form youtube videos every d…
The second a ban is announced everyone would just migrate to the next thing. That's the nice part of social media and communication apps, they're easy to migrate off of.
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> I think the disturbing reality is these countries are wanting to control social media to control the population politically The current alternative is that unaccountable private interests control this, so some regulation in this regard seems reasonable to me. However, swapping private control for public control is only barely better. The best solution that I can think of is ending algorithmic feeds, and having subs…
I think moving algorithmic feeds out of section 230 would do the trick. Once you’re curating the feed, you’re no longer a neutral platform.
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…
> Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them. Agreed but you have this on many websites such as youtube. Is youtube the next to get banned here? I mean you can write comments to so it is kind of a social mediua setup as well. > So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine. I don't know.…
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 hint is in the name. In the early days they were social networks. The idea was to connect people. (The Facebook movie is called the Social Network…) Now they’re social media. The idea is to push messages to you but this time the message is coming from a person you know so you’re psychologically more inclined to believe it.
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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.
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> Humans are not meant to not meant to? by whom? We live in houses, with artificial light, heating and air conditioning, having sex without risk of pregnancy or "god-forbid" sex with people who are not capable of being pregnant. So, what exactly are we not meant to do? There's a certain natural human nature but it's expressed through abtract virtue like justice, knowledge, safety, connection - this is the only accept…
I don’t think you need to be an illuminated master to realize that the things that generally make humans unhappier are not things we are meant to do.
citation needed. Also there are plenty of things that make humans "generally unhappy" but we all agree are good like exercise or cleaning up your home. Even if happiness was a valid metric for human condition then blanket banning "social media for The only sound argument here is purely utilitarian "we suck at governing so let's do something easy and maybe it'll work". It has nothing to do with human nature other than that we naturally suck at organizing policy.