Comment by lenerdenator

Comment by lenerdenator 4 days ago

309 replies

I say this as someone who was in high school as the first wave of social media sites (early Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, etc.) came up:

Just get rid of all of them. They're battery acid poured on the human psyche.

Or, at least, get rid of the centralized massive ones. If you have to combine your online interactions with people with the interactions you have with them in real life, you're better off, and that doesn't happen when social networks span the globe.

erentz 4 days ago

First, people say things like they can't not use Facebook because it has marketplace, etc. shows there has clearly been an issue of not enforcing any kind of anti-trust laws for the past 20 years since US v Microsoft in the browser wars days.

The FTC over the past four years has taken a turn here and is starting to do that work again, it's slow but it needs to continue.

Second, these companies behave as publishers without any of the responsibilities/liability. This has to stop. If you publish just a chronological feed that's one thing. But when you algorithmically decide what people see when, and now introduce your own AI bots into the mix, you're 100% a publisher and need to be legally responsible for it. That legislation needs to be updated to reflect this.

Third, much of the root issues stem from advertising. These companies are driven to get and keep as much of your attention as possible simply so they can sell that attention to advertisers. If we all paid for it, the design of these services would be different. I'm not sure how to tackle that but it seems a start is privacy legislation to prohibit user tracking and sale or sharing of personal data.

  • williamtrask 4 days ago

    Or just address the core element of advertising that creates the perverse incentive — the ability for an auction to determine what you see. Paying to be a part of a digital phonebook is fine. Recommending things is fine. But skewing your recommender against the highest bidder maybe not.

  • [removed] 4 days ago
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  • firefax 4 days ago

    I deleted my Facebook in 2016, and when I tried to create a new one they banned me as "inauthentic". I've seen people complain about the site demanding a government ID scan, but I'd have been willing to prove I am who I am if given the chance.

    Now I can't delete my Instagram, which I was using FB SSO for. They ocassionally send me marketing emails that I might want to engage with so and so's content.

    How, when you nuked my goddamn account for no reason?

    Anyways, if I had the money I'd short them -- they seem to be completely unconcerned with the few who'd consider giving them a second chance.

    As for Tik Tok, as with Telegram having it's servers in Russia, I think the real issue is the data is in control of the PRC, rather than whinings about "fake news" -- people have consumed supermarket check out drivel like the Weekly World News for years, it's just moved online.

    • jaypeg25 4 days ago

      Is this a common issue? I deleted mine around the same time. I recently moved to a small town where many of the restaurants and businesses use Facebook which kind of forced me back on. When I tried creating a new one the same thing happened, and there was no way of reversing this decision.

      • halper 4 days ago

        Same with me, who "needed" to join FB because that is the main communication platform for a leisure activity. Apparently I am a fake person.

      • patmorgan23 4 days ago

        Did you try signing up with a different email address,

    • [removed] 4 days ago
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    • rad_gruchalski 4 days ago

      If you deleted an account, how are they sending you emails? Are you in the EU?

      • firefax 4 days ago

        I am not in the EU. There's two accounts - FB and Insta. The same email was given to both.

beAbU 4 days ago

> Or, at least, get rid of the centralized massive ones.

Herein lies the rub. How do you decide what the threshold is? Who gets to decide what that threshold is, and how do you do it without inviting accusations of regulatory capture?

If you make it blanket all social networks, then things like discord and even public slack orgs will inadvertently become collateral damage. If you make it focussed on only a few large ones, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, then something else will pop up to take it's place. It'll become a game of whack-a-mole. Users are supposedly already migrating in droves to some other TikTok clone.

I'm not really sure what the solution is though. Regulate the shit out of it to the extent where it becomes a government-provided utility or something?

The reality is people want social media because they are addicted to it. Getting rid of social media will be like the war on drugs: completely ineffective. The danger here is that the drug is very easy to create, impossible to control and extremely lucrative.

  • conductr 4 days ago

    My passing thought is to prohibit advertising and user data monetization and it might solve itself.

    We also have regulations on usage, like truck drivers can only drive X hours a day, force some type of consumption limit the networks are required to enforce. We have similar laws regarding where, when, and how people can consume things like alcohol so could also do something like that. Some amount of it is ok, but as you say we’ve now learned it’s so addictive we need to force people into moderation of their consumption.

    • mrsilencedogood 4 days ago

      Honestly this is probably the most realistic solution. The only reason all the shit ragebait addictive content is so bad is because it drives ad revenue.

      I do think there's one exception/problem: youtube. While there's a lot of pregnant spiderman-elsa crap on it, there's also tons of historical, educational, investigative journalism, etc etc etc content there that strikes me as distinctly more valuable than literally anything that's ever existed on facebook, tiktok or even twitter.

      And in addition to the backlog, there's an economics problem. Having good, free, easy, available video hosting is a huge good. It's also ridiculously expensive (videos are big, and you have to render multiple qualities of them, and store them forever) and a hard engineering (network and software) problem (what tiny % of video upload constitutes 90% of the actual network traffic? but you also have to brace for videos from nobodies going viral and needing to be served to the entire globe).

      So how do you fund something like this? Normally I'd say, well, damn, this sounds like a utility. But given the political climate we're going into for the next 4 years, and the fact that even healthcare is privatized (well, the part of it that can generate a profit... unprofitable customers are of course pushed to the taxpayer)...

      • conductr 4 days ago

        I think we'd have to carefully define what a 'social network' is. In my opinion, YT is not a social network. The UGC parts of Amazon.com, like reviews, do not make it a social network either. YT is a broadcast / streaming service with some small layer of UGC (I say small because, honestly, if the entire comment section was eliminated I don't think anyone would miss it, it's meme worthy bad in most cases.)

        Or maybe it's just me and don't use it that way and others do? I subscribe to some things, watch a lot of videos mostly has a lurker and almost never even dip into the comments. I have exactly 0 connections with people I know on YT. It's more of a modern television channel than anything in my case.

      • rad_gruchalski 4 days ago

        Youtube ain’t a social network and you can watch all of it without an account.

    • dingnuts 4 days ago

      if the problem is advertising and data monetization, why am I so addicted to /this/ website?

      I have had a much harder time quitting Hacker News than I ever did quitting Facebook. I've been off Facebook for ten years yet I keep logging in to leave stupid comments here.

      Is that because of advertising and data monetization?

      • conductr 4 days ago

        Ads/monetization isn't necessarily the problem, but it enables Facebook to exist at the scale it does. If we're trying to reduce their scale or limit the size of the social network, it seems silly to fracture the entire market by breaking them up. You can simply cut off their revenues.

        And no, I don't think HN addiction is anything like FB addiction. This site is heavily moderated in comparison and the content is higher quality. It's a 'news' site with some respectable commentary that is so rare people like us keep coming back. There's a level of decency that's expected and required here. I could go on, lack of photos, videos, etc. The content is community driven via ranking versus an algorithm optimized for financial outcomes.... I also don't actually know any of you people so how is that a social network, it's a community forum at best. The almost absence of political stuff on HN helps a fair amount.

        Addiction itself isn't super bad. Addiction to harmful things is what's bad. I don't even know if I'm addicted to HN, sometimes I go weeks without coming here - but have mostly been here daily for many years. I enjoy it, it enriches my life, I feel it's a positive habit. Just because you take your dog for a walk every day, are you addicted to it? You could just let him out in the back yard? You do it because it's a healthy habit, for them and you.

      • [removed] 4 days ago
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      • johnisgood 4 days ago

        I do not see the correlation either, other than people buying stuff because an ad popped up, but that is not their primary reason for being on Facebook.

      • tshaddox 4 days ago

        I don't think "addictiveness" is really the problem. I've been "addicted" to Wikipedia for 20+ years too.

      • Funes- 4 days ago

        The voting system (everything it entails in terms of visual design) is addictive.

  • matthewdgreen 4 days ago

    Require human moderation. That naturally limits scale.

    • mmcdermott 4 days ago

      > Require human moderation. That naturally limits scale.

      Does it? Does a human need to examine everything posted? You can certainly send letters without them going through a human moderator. Only what is flagged by a scanner? What if nothing is flagged? What should be flagged?

      • rad_gruchalski 4 days ago

        > Does it? Does a human need to examine everything posted? You can certainly send letters without them going through a human moderator.

        Because those are two orthogonal things. You aren’t sending a letter to be displayed by everyone and their dog on this planet to see.

    • conductr 4 days ago

      It raises the cost of the service therefore the need of user data monetization, I feel like this would backfire. I’d limit the revenue via bans on ads and data monetization.

    • arccy 4 days ago

      great way to burn out people and scar them for life, look at all the stories of facebook moderators etc.

      • johnisgood 4 days ago

        Nah, they would use AI, and as such, would not really limit scale.

  • msabalau 4 days ago

    I was interpreting the poster as saying "you, yourself, the reader will be better off cutting this out of your life" in which case your questions are irrelevant.

    Of course, it is possible they meant to come up with a holistic plan for improving society in three short sentences, as your reply assumes.

    Which would, I suppose, indirectly make the case that social interactions online tend to be pointless and a little silly.

  • pmontra 4 days ago

    My social network is WhatsApp and Telegram: 1-to-1 messages and some groups where I usually know everybody in them. That's the threshold.

  • tshaddox 4 days ago

    Get rid of behavioral advertising. You'll find that most or all of the negative things people have in mind when they say "ban social media" go away.

  • TRiG_Ireland 4 days ago

    In the US, at least, a government-run social media site would be impossible to moderate, because of the First Amendment. It becomes a Nazi bar immediately.

nyarlathotep_ 4 days ago

> early Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, etc.

This was really a fun time and it was a whole new vista for interaction. It was really something to enter a new age.

That feeling didn't last long, but I still got value from Facebook until the early 2010s.

  • noboostforyou 4 days ago

    FB Marketplace is definitely the best way to buy and sell anything locally. Of course you will have to filter through the usual flakers and what not but that was always the case since craigslist days.

    But for actual social media? Burn it all down lol

    • The_Colonel 4 days ago

      Facebook groups is also a decent way to build communities.

      Honestly, Facebook without the push for reels / videos isn't that bad. (now you can crucify me)

      • EasyMark 4 days ago

        you can easily block those with extensions. that's what I do. I just use if for some local interest groups, marketplace, and messenger for some family/friends.

    • nyarlathotep_ 4 days ago

      People say that, but I've long since abandoned my FB account and sinkhole facebook domains. I miss CragisList for that. Used it a lot a decade ago.

    • teeray 4 days ago

      >FB Marketplace is definitely the best way to buy and sell anything locally

      I really wish they had some kind of auction component to deal with multiple interested parties / reduce flakers, but I imagine eBay has some crappy software patent that they wield with an iron fist.

      • Hasu 4 days ago

        > I really wish they had some kind of auction component to deal with multiple interested parties / reduce flakers, but I imagine eBay has some crappy software patent that they wield with an iron fist.

        Facebook Ads has auctions for selling ad slots. They have the technology, they just reserve it for their real customers.

    • tmpz22 4 days ago

      FB Marketplace is the best way to buy stolen goods cheaply - not sure about authentic goods.

      • EasyMark 4 days ago

        I have sold plenty things on there and none of them were stolen. I buy broken vintage electronics (60s, 70s, 80s) for cheap and resale them after I fix them. It's not a lot of money but it's a way to pass the time on a boring evening.

  • mrsilencedogood 4 days ago

    I remember so fondly coming home from high school and reading over my friends posts, curating the pins on my pin/cork board, messaging friends who would otherwise not be savvy enough to join MSN or IRC or yahoo messenger...

    Now I feel physical disgust when I look at the FB logo

vanillax 4 days ago

The real issue with Facebook is the inability to tune easily. One of the reasons I use Instagram and Threads is because I feel I can easily tune the algorithm with likes. I can keep up with my friends via stories. I dont need to post on my "wall" stupid stuff like the beer im drinking. Instagram + Stories feels like the best medium to see what my friends are upto with short stories and images. The explore feed can be tuned so I get content and threads fills the void on X and its terrible algorithms. I agree, "deleting" facebook or simple just leave it on deprecated mode and never use it besides market place is the best thing you can do. I dont give a crap what person's political view is and dont need to see a news feed based on triggers.

  • navbaker 4 days ago

    I love that I can have multiple profiles in IG and Threads, each tuned like you talked about for a specific interest of mine with no cross-pollination

giancarlostoro 4 days ago

I'm in favor of letting people pay for their own smaller instances, like something Facebook esque, and you can invite all your relatives. They can join your instance. But someone (or maybe its a group effort) has to pay for it. Zero ads, just friends and family.

I've thought about this a lot.

I don't think I'll ever build it (I have another idea in the works consuming all my time), but I'll go a step further and share my other thought on it:

The less they use it, the less they should pay for using it. So if your goal is to keep up with relatives via sharing photos / videos, you can do that, and bug right out. So now there's a financial incentive to use it less, but it serves its purpose, like email.

  • philote 4 days ago

    Smaller instance can become big. Say you set up a small instance and invite your family. Then family members want to invite their family, or friends, or whomever. How do you manage that?

    I think the answer is what we see with Mastodon, etc. and that's federated/distributed social networks.

    • tmpz22 4 days ago

      A restaurant can become big. Say you have a food critic showcase your restaurant and hundreds of people show up. How could we possibly deal with this problem without the aid of the smartest, most amazing, totally really smart, awesome at leet code, software engineers?

  • nprateem 4 days ago

    This won't help with the dopamine craving. Most peoples' actual friends can't produce enough content.

    The sooner we treat it as an addiction the faster we'll think of treatments.

joewhale 4 days ago

Idk Xanga was peak non toxic social media. Pretty much just blogging. I miss it.

  • soupfordummies 4 days ago

    Yeah that and LiveJournal. And then it just kept going down from there in terms of self-expression, effort, quality, personal, actually-SOCIAL-media, etc.

    "Social media" went from blogging and commenting with your friends and others to watching videos of ads interspersed with random memes and shit.

    Quite a slide.

coliveira 4 days ago

The problem is not the social network in itself, but the fact that companies are manipulating what you see to maximize the bad aspects of the network. Companies should have strict limits on the kind of algorithms they use to generate a feed.

  • le-mark 4 days ago

    Recently I’ve been imaging a world where social media algorithms were tuned to help people instead of “driving engagement” with ever more outrage bait. Oh you’re watching clips about machining and by your data profile you’re an uneducated adult? Here are some trade school, financial assistance, and self help links to nudge you toward a better life! What a world that would be.

    • prisenco 4 days ago

      Doesn't China's national TikTok equivalent do that?

      I'm fine with going back to 100% chronological feeds. Show events as they happen and don't put a hand on the scale.

      That's how social networks usually build their base then they switch to an algorithmic feed to satisfy advertisers once their user base is big enough.

    • [removed] 4 days ago
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mk89 4 days ago

basically go back to old SMF/php forums with maximum 100s of known people. I thought about this recently… It was really better times.

Even decentralized mastodon is too big and it makes it far too easy to post BS and hateful / unhealthy stuff. Plus there are far too many posts you can’t relate to or just don’t want to read („algorithm“ or not), without even mentioning the bubble effect, much worse there than on X to be honest.

Smaller communities which you can connect to /disconnect from plus a good combo of RSS feeds to get news. That’s probably it.

  • nameless912 4 days ago

    There's a strong part of me that thinks that a model not unlike BBSes with Fidonet might be the way to go. Everyone gets to have their own little bastion of the 'net that they control, filled with their own content (games, warez, text files, the good ol' shit) and global email/forums/chat provided in a decentralized way. When people are arseholes, you cut them off by blocking them from your server, and we all move on.

    I keep toying with building a modern version of that using some of the existing fediverse infrastructure, but I just don't have the time or attention span for it. Partially because my attention span was fried by Instagram.

  • krainboltgreene 4 days ago

    > basically go back to old SMF/php forums with maximum 100s of known people. I thought about this recently… It was really better times.

    I'm going to take a wild guess and assume this is how you grew up?

    • raincole 4 days ago

      It's simply a better model to connected online. I use present tense because the "better times" didn't really go away: it becomes Discord servers.

      The bad part, of course, is that Discord is owned by one single entity and not indexed like the open web is.

    • supersanity 4 days ago

      I did, and it truly was better. Threaded forums are far better at facilitating complex discussions, organizing information, and making the information accessible. Today, most communication is happening inside the walled gardens of Facebook, Discord, etc. That information is effectively being lost rather than being neatly organized and easily searchable.

    • mk89 4 days ago

      Kind of, yeah.

      IRC, simple php forums, no TLS, easy stuff. Nowadays we're full of technology and very poor content. In no way can mastodon (mentioning because it's the defacto decentralized social media) solve that problem. It's really easy to post stuff that shouldn't be posted.

      On the other hand, crappy looking forums, slow internet connection, you really had to take the time to think about what to say and mainly why say it in the first place. It was more about the content than about quantity.

  • pishpash 4 days ago

    Just put a propagation delay on the information, like the physical world. Human socialization is evolved to handle the physical world.

  • jghn 4 days ago

    > go back to old SMF/php forums

    Some of us are old enough to remember when those were already the enshitification stage, and would prefer to go back to usenet

    • BryantD 4 days ago

      "Eternal September" was a more serious problem than we knew.

    • mk89 4 days ago

      Ahahah I believe you! Some forums were really bad. :)

raincole 4 days ago

The more you ban, the more "centralized" and "massive" the platforms you don't ban get. Unless you literally ban everything.

One has to be extremely naive to think Google (youtube) lobbyists didn't play a role in this Tiktok ban.

InDubioProRubio 4 days ago

You can not because the money invested into this is to large. Same with AI - half of which is used to build a personal cheerleader/ hype-train for everyone using those apps now.

If you want to end that, you need to actively sabotage it, by creating fake users who eat resources for not add-revenue. Feeding crack to children has to become economically unviable for the world to change.

tempworkac 4 days ago

why? you don't have to use them. should HN be banned?

  • lm28469 4 days ago

    This is the level 0 of reasoning about these topics...

    We live in organised societies, nobody is forcing you to do crack but people doing crack will definitely lower the experience of everyone they interact with (and more given the burden on shared goods like healthcare, infrastructures, &c.), that's why we collectively decided that crack shouldn't be sold to 13 years old kids.

    Now of course this is very flawed and we'll always have things slipping through the cracks (alcohol, tobacco, junk food, &c.), but unless you want to live in a mad max type of world you have to accept some level of regulation, and that level of regulation, in a working society, should be determined through politics

    If tiktok is crack, HN is honey. One becomes problematic much quicker than the other, when you see a kid spending 5 hours a day on HN hit me up

    • refurb 4 days ago

      This is not an actual argument because you can make it about anything.

      Like to ski? Your injuries have a societal cost.

      Like to cook? Your inefficient use of energy costs society.

      If you can use an argument for anything it’s not a very convincing argument.

      • lm28469 4 days ago

        Cool, you can use the argument I was replying to for everything too. I guess we're back to square one then.

        If you think skiing and cooking have as much of a negative impact as social media as on entire generation of kids I doubt we'll find common ground to go further, usually it requires a bit of good faith

      • TeaBrain 3 days ago

        >This is not an actual argument because you can make it about anything.

        >Like to ski? Your injuries have a societal cost.

        >Like to cook? Your inefficient use of energy costs society.

        This assumes that fairly standard activities are imposing the societal cost you are attributing to them. For most individuals who perform these activities, they are not producing an outsized societal cost, which is the delineation the parent comment was making. The parent comment used an example of something that from their point of view has a negative societal cost in the base case. Your examples are not similar as they are not referring to the base case of simply performing the activities, but only to the relatively uncommon tail end outcomes.

      • intended 4 days ago

        yeah, that makes sense. Everything has a cost, TANSTAFL.

        This is the second philopsiphical point of economics. Everything is a choice between costs.

        Im curious how else you would put it?

    • voidfunc 4 days ago

      Won't someone think of the Children!!!?

      Social media is just the demon of the day. In the 80s it was that damn rock music ruining our kids and in the 90s it was violent video games and rap.

      Every generation has their "this thing is corrupting the youth" moment.

      • phist_mcgee 4 days ago

        I don't recall violent video games and rap music influencing elections.

      • lm28469 4 days ago

        Yeah sure, Socrates was worried about books too... now if you can't see the difference between rock music and kids spending 5+ hours a day doomscrolling I think we'll have a hard time discussing anything. Feel free to share the studies showing the negative effects of books and rock music on kids by the way, because there are plenty of these when it comes to social media, especially the doomscrolling type.

        Following your logic everything new has to be desirable, that's a tough position to defend imho. Just because new trends were incorrectly criticised in the past doesn't mean every new trend is good until the heat death of the universe, logic 101

  • trosi 4 days ago

    Teens don't get addicted to Hacker News

    • rwyinuse 4 days ago

      Almost any form of media can be addicting. Kids these days might watch TikTok, but my worst addiction since young age has been reading online news.

      Once I got diagnosed with ADHD and tried stimulant medicine, I noticed that the time I spend reading news, social media and playing games dropped dramatically. So, effectively all these activities have been nothing more than drugs for my dysfunctional brain. When my brain isn't deficient in dopamine, I seem to automatically spend most of my time on something more useful. Probably wouldn't be writing this if my meds weren't wearing off at this time of day.

      • lm28469 4 days ago

        HN is too slow for that, if you spend the time kids spend on tiktok every day here you'll get bored to death.

        • EasyMark 4 days ago

          yep tiktak has far more serotonin spikes per "next item" per unit time than hackernews.

      • grahamj 4 days ago

        Meanwhile I’m reading this while I should be coding

    • ipsum2 4 days ago

      Speak for yourself. I've been using hacker news since high school, 10+ years ago and haven't been able to stop.

    • Kiro 4 days ago

      HN is the most addictive social media I've ever used.

    • 1718627440 4 days ago

      Not a teen since recently, but got to know it earlier, so ... untrue.

    • scarecrowbob 4 days ago

      It has a built in timer to prevent folks from using it too often.

  • zzzeek 4 days ago

    hacker news has a lot of ideological community problems but HN is not "massively centralized", it's just a narrow window into the US tech scene with a relatively small community of people.

    I think there's a great argument that says the first amendment is not a suicide pact. The social media environment right now is having an unprecedented destructive effect on US democracy. I think TikTok is right there as a key player in spreading weapons-grade, state-sponsored mush to younger people.

    • refurb 4 days ago

      I recall similar arguments about the printing press.

      “But the masses will be able to access the scripture without guidance! Society will crumble!”

      • intended 4 days ago

        You know, I think lots of us on HN, can at least be the people who can and should go to next levels of this discussion.

        So yes - we should definitely agree that all new technology for publishing (publishing? COntent creation?) result in issues of free speech.

        I will say that each of these, have had different issues, and that from Radio onwards, we are dealing with several issues (side effects ?) that become more intense with each new media developed.

        I'll jump to the end, but Social media is definitely different from the printing press.

        We certainly get new and improved benefits, such as the distribution of publishing power to individuals.

        At the same time, we are getting issues with an abundance of content, that people need content to be eye catching, in order to gain an audience.

        Theres also a tendency for networks to consolidate over time, so at the start of the radio era, or TV era, you have a bunch of cable networks, then over time they start collapsing into larger groups, which are better able to survive.

        Fully admit that these are highly generalized, I am just thinking of what others can chime in with.

      • daveguy 4 days ago

        To be fair, scripture doesn't actively change to increase obsessive engagement at the expense of all else.

      • BryantD 4 days ago

        Not entirely inaccurate! Martin Luther's 95 Theses propagated from Germany to England in a matter of weeks, thanks to the printing press. I think society got better but it sure did change a lot.

      • zzzeek 4 days ago

        the government of China is a hostile adversary and they dont just spread gobs of misinformation and pro-CCP propaganda on TikTok, they also heavily censor topics the CCP does not like. This is not about free expression so much as where the public square should take place. Having the US public square take place in a tightly controlled, deceptive environment controlled by our worst enemy presents an existential risk to the US.

        think of the printing press as invented and controlled by your worst enemy and only printing what it deems to be acceptable.

    • whimsicalism 4 days ago

      every generation thinks they’re the first to argue that there are negative effects of free expression.

      • TheOtherHobbes 4 days ago

        It's not free expression when someone else chooses what everyone sees.

        Threads is notorious for de-boosting posts with external links. This is a deliberate choice which filters facts and external references out of the conversation.

        Or you can just delay the feed of posters you don't like. They arrive at every debate a day late, while your favourites go through immediately. And to more people.

        And so on.

        There's nothing free about any of this. It's covert behaviour and sentiment modification.

        With a newspaper you get an editorial angle, so you can choose it if you want it.

        Social media pretends to be a neutral conduit. But it's carefully curated and manipulated, and you don't know how or why.

    • suraci 4 days ago

      TBO, TikTok and Twitter are far more diverse than HN, which is merely an echo chamber, only slightly better than a subreddit.

      Although I like HN more than TikTok, it's so funny

      • AlexandrB 4 days ago

        What matters is not the diversity of the overall userbase but the diversity of what gets shown to you. From my (limited) experience TikTok is hyper-targeted and will narrow in on your interests/biases quickly and keep you in that bubble.

        HN (and reddit) generally lacks this hyper-targeting. Obviously, just the act of going to HN is selecting for a certain cross-section of opinions, but once you're there what you see is determined by the community and not by your own personal preferences.

      • jkestner 4 days ago

        "Echo chamber" is a tautology by this point. What's bad about a narrower focus? It's good to cross pollinate on occasion but you're not going to ever get to deep discussions when you have the same arguments over and over with people who share little common ground. I don't come to HN to read what flat earthers think about that gorgeous photo of the Earth's curve taken by an astronaut, and I can have productive disagreements with other technologists.

        • suraci 4 days ago

          > I can have productive disagreements with other technologists

          Only for tech topics

          Things went ugly(but fun!) for political/geopolitical topics, 'unpopular' opinions will be grayed out, opinions survived coalesced into the essence of the Anglo-Saxon spirit

    • tempworkac 4 days ago

      but HN is centralized, so you agree if HN exceeds some arbitrary amount of users it should be banned? how ridiculous. tiktok is not any better or worse than facebook, youtube, or the mainstream media.

      • lenerdenator 4 days ago

        Hell, I'd make that arbitrary amount 300.

        That's about the number of social connections the human brain is really meant to handle.

      • spencerflem 4 days ago

        Its worse for the US Govt in that they cannot secretly ask them to control what gets seen

EasyMark 4 days ago

That can't happen, the 1st amendment protects us from that sort of overreach with lots of precedence coming before it. What can happen is severe penalties for companies and adults who allow minors to get on social media. That is the sort of regulation that can happen if the USA Congress really wants to do something. They can also regulate foreign propaganda sneaking like with TikTok, there is precedence for it. Also severe penalties and jailtime for threats (terrorism, personal) done online, they should be taken seriously and tracked down and prosecuted as if the threat was made against me if I was standing on a street corner.

redactd 4 days ago

The literal terminology we use to refer to them directly correlates with their slide. They were "Social Networks" and were all about the network effect of having a connection to people IRL reflected online. That meant you could also go additional links out. They are now "Social Media" and they are largely just one-to-many platforms for media. They have completely crowded out most of the original benefit of being a social network.

intended 4 days ago

The early waves of most communities is 'better'. Strangely this is really consistent, even if you've been on sites quite a bit.

One of the rules of moderation I believe in, is that the workload depends on the nature of the people in your community.

Oh, so communities follow the rules of subculture founding and decline ???

So there should be a point where things that were not cool, become cool again?

eunos 4 days ago

For all complains of the toxicity of the platforms. For now, the contents over there are written by your fellow human (maybe AI in a few years). Just focussing on platform closure for me indicates that we resigned from fixing our fellow folks.

  • nullc 4 days ago

    But it's not the "folks" that are the factor, generally. The mechanisms of many major social media platforms actively amplify the worst aspects of the worst people, while suppressing the best parts of the best.

    Someone put the microphone too close to the speaker. As the feedback rings our ears someone reaches out for the power switch. Do you call out "but the start of the feedback was the music from the band, turning it off won't fix the band"? :)

    • eunos 4 days ago

      Assuming that social media is an evolution of traditional media.

      The traditional media loves to chase negative news (If it bleeds, it leads) and we let that happen (muh free speech!). So it is logical that social media amplified the negativity of society, coupled with algorithms evolution and instant broadcasting the impact is amplified.

      Fck around and find out I guess.

      • codr7 4 days ago

        Yep, I'm very careful what kind of content I feed my subconscious these days.

        Watching news is like begging for nightmares, and most of it's made up anyways.

  • RiverCrochet 4 days ago

    > we resigned from fixing our fellow folks

    We have. It's A) too expensive, and B) we can't agree on what "fixed" looks like. "Think of the children" type scare-legislation is going to fill this void.

VyseofArcadia 4 days ago

I feel like the actual big difference between social media when we were in high school (hello age cohort pal) and social media now is the algorithmic feed. There was a time when you'd have a couple dozen friends on Facebook, who were people you actually know in real life, and you'd check Facebook, read you feed in chronological order, and then reach the end. Like with email.

The algorithmic feed, in addition to time spent on social media, has also intensified online discourse in a way that I believe to be harmful to society. What people see now is not the most recent things their friends were posting, no matter how banal, but whatever it is that the algorithm judges most engaging. Truth doesn't matter. Now the conspiracy theories and weird new age shit that your one hippy friend posted constantly have an audience. That kind of thing is engaging, so it floats to the top.

I'd be perfectly fine with just banning social media altogether. Never before in history has the value of a barrier to entry to publishing something been more apparent. But as a compromise, I would accept banning the algorithmic feed.

  • Rooster61 4 days ago

    > I feel like the actual big difference between social media when we were in high school (hello age cohort pal) and social media now is the algorithmic feed.

    Bringo.

    The day Facebook implemented the feed as the main page rather than the original homepage was the day social media went sideways. It's little more than a Skinner box with a bright candy coating and it has just gotten more egregious over time. It's right on the tin, "Feed".

    I'd be interested to see how much R&D budget has gone into hiring persons in the field of psychology to tweak the dopamine treadmill over time.

    • JohnMakin 4 days ago

      I distinctly remember when the chronological timeline was done away with, people were extremely pissed.

      • chatmasta 4 days ago

        I remember the day they introduced the chronological newsfeed! People were pissed about that. Nobody wanted a list of all their wall posts to be published to everyone who could see them.

        Prior to newsfeed, FB was obviously an N-N platform, but the interactions were more 1-1. You used the network to find and connect, but you interacted with individuals (on their wall). The newsfeed tipped the focus toward 1-N interactions, and direct messages solidified that (no more wall posts).

      • evanelias 4 days ago

        I believe GP is comparing pre-feed and post-feed days, not chrono feed vs algo feed.

        For its first few years, Facebook had no feed at all.

        • Rooster61 4 days ago

          You are correct, but the introduction of the algorithm is indeed just as if not as significant as the introduction of the feed

    • grahamj 4 days ago

      > It's right on the tin, "Feed"

      +5 Insightful

  • fullshark 4 days ago

    Treat algorithmic feeds as "publications" by machines. Treat these social media companies as publishers and allow them to be sued for libel, with damage amounts based on reach.

    If there's no algorithmic feed and the company is truly just a self publishing utility then keep the section 230 protections

    • horsawlarway 4 days ago

      Yup, I absolutely don't understand how they're able to get away with choosing material to promote and then not call themselves publishers.

      They're acting as editors for a publication. Hold them accountable like the publication companies they are.

      Want to continue getting safe-harbor exemptions for user submitted content? No fucking algorithmically chosen feeds.

      • kmeisthax 4 days ago

        CDA 230 was written specifically to overturn a defamation ruling that held online platforms responsible for content; this was specifically a result of Jordan Belfort - the Wolf of Wall Street - suing to censor negative opinions of his fraudulent investment offerings.

        Prior to that lawsuit, the existing law regarding defamation was that you could hold a newspaper accountable for what they had printed, but not the newsstand selling the newspaper. The courts in the Jordan Belfort cases decided to categorize online services based on their moderation policy: if you published literally anything sent to you, you were the newsstand[0]; if you decided not to publish certain things then you were a newspaper.

        In case it isn't obvious, this is an unacceptable legal precedent for running any sort of online service. The only services that you could legally run would either be the most free-wheeling; or the most censurious, where everything either has to be pre-checked by a team of lawyers for risk and only a small amount of speech ever gets published, or everything gets published, including spam and bullshit.

        To make things worse, there is also standing precedent in Mavrix v. LiveJournal regarding DMCA safe harbor[1] that the use of human curation or moderation strips you of your copyright safe harbor. The only thing DMCA 512 protects is machine-generated feeds (algorithmic or chronological).

        So let's be clear: removing CDA 230 safe harbor from a feature of social media you don't like doesn't mean that feature goes away. It means that feature gets more and more censored by the whims of whatever private citizens decide to sue that day. The social media companies are not going to get rid of algorithmic feeds unless you explicitly say "no algorithmic feeds", because those feeds make the product more addictive, which is how they make money.

        The "slop trough" design of social media is optimal for profit because of a few factors; notably the fact that social media companies have monopolistic control over the client software people use. Even browser extensions intended to hide unwanted content on Facebook have to endure legal threats, because Facebook does not want you using their service as anything other than a slop trough.

        So if you want to kill algorithmic feeds, what you want to do is kill Facebook's control over Facebook. That means you want legal protections for third-party API clients, antitrust scrutiny on all social media platforms, and legally mandated interoperability so that when a social media platform decides to turn into a slop trough, anyone so interested can just jump ship to another platform without losing access to their existing friends.

        [0] Ignore the fact that this is not how newsstands work. You can't go to any newsstand, put your zine on it, and demand they sell it or face defamation risk.

  • _huayra_ 4 days ago

    Algorithmic feeds are wonderful, but unfortunately their goals as implemented today do not align with anyone's best interest except shareholders.

    I don't have tiktok, but I used to watch a lot of YouTube suggestions. I finally took the app off my devices and used a suggestion-blocking browser extension. I could only find stuff that I actively searched for. After a few months, I took a peek at suggestions and it was actually great: pretty much only videos I was legitimately interested in, steering me towards useful tiny channels, etc. I still keep it blocked, but check it once daily just in case.

    The problem is that algorithmic feeds want you to just keep watching and will absolutely probe all of your "weaknesses" to keep doing so. Instead of trying to support you, it says "how can we break this guy/girl down so s/he keeps watching...".

    Until the feeds say "I'm sorry Dave, I can't serve you another video. You should go outside and enjoy the day", then it should be treated more as a weapon aimed at one's brain by a billion or trillion-dollar corporation than a tool.

  • nyarlathotep_ 4 days ago

    > I feel like the actual big difference between social media when we were in high school (hello age cohort pal) and social media now is the algorithmic feed.

    More than that too, my recollection is that those early social media sites were considered "separate" from the real world. It'd be seen as odd to take it "seriously" in the early days.

    The big change I noticed was when my (our?) cohort started graduating college and started sanitizing their Facebooks and embracing "professionalism" on the then nascent LinkedIn. I distinctly remember being shocked at that, and the implicit possibility that employers would "care" about your Facebook posts.

    How far we've fallen.

misiti3780 4 days ago

They 100% are - I fantasize about world in which they dont exist.

recroad 4 days ago

[flagged]

  • Workaccount2 4 days ago

    Let me lay out how this works:

    The US occupies a new office downtown. China wants eyes on a specific room, and the choice spot for monitoring it is someone else's apartment. This person happens to own a bakery also in town, and it sort of seems like the apartment is a reach for them as it is.

    Now in your feed you get a short showing some egregious findings in the food from this bakery. More like this crop up from the mystical algorithmic abyss. You won't go there anymore. Their reviews tank and business falls. Mind you those posts were organic, tiktok just stifled good reviews and put the bad ones on blast.

    6 months later the apartment is on the market, and not a single person in town "has ever seen CCP propaganda on tiktok".

    This is the overwhelmingly main reason why Tiktok is getting banned.

    • recroad 3 days ago

      Wow, this is a whole new level of China otherization and it leads to many bad things, and you don't have to look beyond the past 100 years to find many examples (even Chinese ones).

      Maybe consider that it's being banned because it makes it harder to control the political narrative and discourse in society when people have access to information. I think Chomsky put it best: there are many ways of population control, in the old Soviet Union it used to be the boot. In "democracy" it's controlling information and the Overton Window and TikTok breaks that completely. A great example is the Israel's assault on Palestine. Has this been covered anywhere where you watch news in even remotely the most honest way? Don't think so. Is it on TikTok? I think you know the answer.

      I'd also say to single out TikTok and the Chinese while ignoring Meta and Google (why not ban them?) is very questionable if you really care about the scenario you described.

    • 05 4 days ago

      Might as well ban electricity in case the Chinese manage to use it to do bad things, same (insane) logic applies.

    • krainboltgreene 4 days ago

      While your scenario might make for an interesting Tom Clancy novel there's no evidence any of that is happening and no one involved in this ban with any authority is arguing that this is something they're worried about.

      • Aunche 4 days ago

        I agree that their example is absurd, but China has definitely used social media accounts to influence opinions on Hong Kong, Xinjiang etc. American social media companies cooperate with investigations and flagging of this propaganda. On the other hand, TikTok is almost certainly being pressured by the CCP to promote it and obfuscate any investigations.

    • nprateem 4 days ago

      You might want to get your paranoia checked out. I'm not even going to bother asking for the many sources that support your overwhelming reason.

      • Workaccount2 4 days ago

        Russia had Bernie Bros and Magatards brawling with each other at pre-planned rallys across the street from one another. And they didn't even have access to the facebook algo.

    • felbane 4 days ago

      Devil's advocate: Can this not also happen on literally any other social network? Can this kind of shit not also be initiated by domestic agents, or agents of allied nations, or even just some bored haxor group with a penchant for chaos?

      If what you said is the primary reason for banning TikTok (bad actors can do bad things), it's also a valid reason to ban literally every social network, or possibly even all user-generated content on the internet.

      • Workaccount2 4 days ago

        On non CCP controlled platforms, they cannot chose what stories to "organically" promote and who to promote them too. Most people have no concept of the 99% of posts to social media that never get traction.

        They can still kind of do it, but it requires a lot of work to fool other companies algo's into artificially promoting what you want. Much easier to just call up Bytedance and say "We need everyone in this area seeing this tiktok tomorrow".

      • jerf 4 days ago

        To your first paragraph, yes, across the board, and yes to more scenarios than you even laid out here.

        To the second, you misunderstand the issue the US government has here. It is not that the social network is compromised and can be manipulated to any number of uses by an external authority. It is that it is compromised and can be manipulated to any number of uses by an external authority that they are enemies with.

        Whether you consider them your enemy, whether they consider you theirs, whether you think that China really is or is not an enemy of the US government, and whether you consider the US government your enemy or not is all irrelevant to the point at hand, as interesting as they may be in other contexts; this is about the beliefs of the US government.

        China has similar concerns and has already taken numerous similar steps, and it's equally not any sort of hypocrisy or anything because the principle they operate under is not about the existence of control, but who has the control.

  • twoodfin 4 days ago

    All that is great, except for the part where the algorithms that collect your reactions to content and then choose new content for you in a feedback loop—which as you point out, can produce valuable effects as well as harmful ones—are a black box under some approximation of direct control by the CCP.

    • ElevenLathe 4 days ago

      And it would be better if "the algorithm" were under control of some unelected managers in a billion dollar company owned by finance capital?

    • Eextra953 4 days ago

      I keep seeing this stated as a reason for banning tt but I've yet to see any evidence. During the supreme courts oral argument last week they referred to a sealed appendix with more info, when they were passing the legislation they also referred to secret evidence that Americans can't see. I don't want to give in to conspiratorial thinking but if its as bad as they claim then we as the public have a right to see the evidence and decide for ourselves.

      • lenerdenator 4 days ago

        Evidence as to CCP control? Or evidence to another thing?

        Because something that is very important to understand about China, or any other totalitarian regime, is that the people in charge don't let something like TikTok happen without having a fairly good grip on the people running it. That's just authoritarianism 101.

      • Workaccount2 4 days ago

        I laid out in another comment how this works, but the gist of it is that the CCP can use the populace as dumb actors to achieve their goals.

        China has secret agents they need to move through an area. Why not have an asian hate awareness rally in that area at the same time?

        Nobody attending that rally would have any idea they are acting as decoy agents. None would report seeing CCP propaganda on tiktok.

        • bjourne 4 days ago

          Maybe you're the dumb actor posting on behalf of American tech moguls?

      • SubiculumCode 4 days ago

        Think of it this way:

        "TikTok would rather shut itself off from the U.S. market than divest its ownership from the CCP.

        That is not the action of a rational corporation and really tells you who calls the shots at TikTok."

    • snapcaster 4 days ago

      Should I feel better or worse about it being the CCP instead of a tiny group of billionaires? From where I'm standing the cabal of tech billionaires appear to be a bigger threat to me as a normal american. Do you think this is naive?

      • wesapien 4 days ago

        I agree. It's the same class of people that helped China become the world's factory that is now saying what it has always been. These are the same people that is still running America.

  • lenerdenator 4 days ago

    > Most of all, it’s so ironic that in America, which is supposed to be the bastion of free speech, is banning something that is so valuable for many people. This sort of confirms what I had feared for a few years now: that Americans don’t really want to be free or have free speech.

    What in the law, exactly, would prevent the things you discussed from being spoken about on another online platform?

    • JumpCrisscross 4 days ago

      > What in the law, exactly, would prevent the things you discussed from being spoken about on another online platform?

      Let me expand this: what in the law prevents someone from going to TikTok.com and seeing the same content?

      The ban is on (a) apps in the app stores and (b) hosting by American companies. It’s not sanctioning TikTok à la Huawei.

      • lossolo 4 days ago

        In May 2019, the U.S. government placed Huawei on the Entity List, which restricted American companies from doing business with it without a special license. This included Google, which meant Huawei lost access to the licensed version of Android and key Google services, including the Google Play Store. As a result, Huawei could no longer pre-install Google apps like Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, and other essential services that many users in Western markets rely on. Huawei was once a strong competitor in Europe challenging Apple, Samsung, and other manufacturers. It effectively limited Huawei's competitiveness in Western markets and diminished its momentum when it was at the peak of its challenge to Apple and Samsung. The same will happen with TikTok in the U.S. Under the umbrella of national security, competition is being sidelined.

    • phatfish 4 days ago

      Until two police officers come and frogmarch you to the back of a car when you are saying something the government doesn't like there is free speech.

      Most people are just annoyed their social media addiction is being interrupted when they moan about account bans, or app bans in this case.

      • lenerdenator 4 days ago

        Hell, even some of the "restrictions" on free speech that are legitimately on the books in the US aren't actually enforced.

        Get a ham radio license and use profanity when you transmit. Seriously. Do it. Odds are, the FCC does nothing. The thing they do when they do catch you is send you a letter saying "please don't do that".

  • throwawaymaths 4 days ago

    > Most of all, it’s so ironic that in America, which is supposed to be the bastion of free speech, is banning something that is so valuable for many people

    1. There's plenty of speech you can't say (fraud, libel), so speech is believe it or not regulated.

    2. This isn't about free speech per se, it's about the right of a company to exist. the government has broad leeway to regulate which entities do or don't have the right to have limited liability. if TikTok were a unincorporated business entity and the owners were liable for lawsuit the story would be different.

    3. the government forcing a sale is individual free speech maximalist position in this situation, because the users of the platform can still have their free speech. if tiktok doesn't take the deal, then the "loss of free speech" is on them, not the government.

    4. America, which is supposed to be a bastion of free commerce, forced the sale of Merck away from germany (there is still a german merck with the same name). this is no different.

  • HWR_14 4 days ago

    Are you sure that the "historical knowledge of many concepts" isn't a CCP slanted version of history? Or whatever suits the CCPs current interests? As a trivial example, do you think you are getting an unbiased view on Tiananmen Square or whether the US should back Taiwan in a war?

  • EasyMark 4 days ago

    they aren't banning it. They gave tiktok an out -- sell to an American company or non adversarial country, if ByteDance doesn't bite on that, then that's on them.

  • Rooster61 4 days ago

    That may be the case for you, but that's by definition anecdotal. I personally have seen the content consumed by a number of kids, and the amount of dubious at best information on the platform is absolutely rampant, and younger kids don't yet have a filter to know the bad from the good. Parental oversight can help, of course, but from my own observations, parents aren't for the most part monitoring what their kids are consuming.

    Of course, my take is likewise anecdotal, and you may take it for what you will. That said, boiling the entirety of the American sentiment to fear of a "threat to their core" is disingenuous. Criticism of the effects of the app are as valid as its merits, regardless of what conclusions you draw based on your "fears".

    • frumper 4 days ago

      This isn't banning dubious information. I only have to look at what my mom sends me videos about from Facebook.

      • Rooster61 4 days ago

        No, it's not, nor did I state that it is. It is, though, making it more difficult for something I find detrimental to the development of kids to proliferate.

        You, as an adult receiving that video, have the (hopefully) developed sense of what is accurate information or not, as well as the time to gestate on the content of that video and apply critical thinking. You can delete the video and move on with your life.

        Tik Tok sends 15 seconds worth of such information, good or bad, and doubles down on detected interest, leaving little to no time to process before moving on to the next clip which is likely tailored towards the first clip's subject. Couple that with the suggestibility and naivete of children, and you end up with reinforcement of thin, poorly informed opinions based on information that may or may not even be remotely accurate.

        The idea of banning all dubious information is a strawman.

  • thesuitonym 4 days ago

    >Americans don’t really want to be free or have free speech.

    Americans love free speech. American oligarchs hate it.

  • 015a 4 days ago

    [flagged]

    • dang 4 days ago

      Posting like this will get you banned here.

      If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

      Edit: I took a quick look at your recent comment history and it seems just fine (other than https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42713605, also in this thread). If you'd please post like that and not like this, that would be good.

      • 015a 4 days ago

        Its not ok to over-moderate against jokes, especially when you can't even point to the guideline that was broken here (though, I'm sure you could take any comment from anyone and find at least one guideline that was broken. Every comment in this thread could be banned for "political or ideological battle") (emphasis again on the word "guide" in "guideline"; are these bannable rules, or are they guidelines?)

        The voting system exists and works more than well enough to bury bad comments. That's why my comment up there is at -4; it was bad. Problem is solved.

    • snapcaster 4 days ago

      [flagged]

  • onlyrealcuzzo 4 days ago

    Free Speech != freedom to do literally anything.

    We don't even have free speech, btw.

    You can't yell FIRE in crowded rooms with impunity, you can't say untrue things about people that harm their businesses or put their lives in danger with impunity, etc.

    The idea that our politicians should not be allowed to ban something being owned by a foreign company (especially when our companies aren't allowed to operate in said country, especially when we don't exactly have friendly relations with said country) - is, IMO, absurd.

    • feyman_r 4 days ago

      To the post indicating shouting fire is legal - I believe the parent’s intent is to indicate there are consequences to it. From the article —

      >> The act of shouting "fire" when there are no reasonable grounds for believing one exists is not in itself a crime, and nor would it be rendered a crime merely by having been carried out inside a theatre, crowded or otherwise. However, if it causes a stampede and someone is killed as a result, then the act could amount to a crime, such as involuntary manslaughter, assuming the other elements of that crime are made out.

    • gjsman-1000 4 days ago
      • onlyrealcuzzo 4 days ago

        It is SOMETIMES legal, which means that it is in the other times illegal.

        • gjsman-1000 4 days ago

          Not necessarily that either. You’ll only possibly receive a charge if your conduct was intentionally misleading with purpose to harm. Yelling “fire” in a theater while in a Gen Z crowd (“this is fire”) or while listening to Metallica (“Fight fire with fire”) isn’t going to get a charge either, even if it possibly causes a stampede. The crime therefore could be accomplished with far more alternative words than just “fire.”

          The point is: Legal experts unanimously agree this analogy is terrible and should never be used. The Supreme Court also thought so, completely overturning the case it originated from just several years later.

bparsons 4 days ago

I think 90% of the negative social impacts would go away if they just did reverse chronological, opt-in news feed.

The black box algorithms are the problem.

INTPenis 4 days ago

First wave? You must have missed yahoo groups.

And of course someone will reply to this and mention usenet.

madeofpalk 4 days ago

What are you actually saying? The government should make these websites illegal?

I like tiktok. I scroll for a bit in the morning and watch some funny videos. Who are you to say that's immoral and shouldn't happen?

  • spokaneplumb 4 days ago

    The government’s banned owning media with too much reach before, placing limits on audience size per owner.

    We no longer know how to actually govern the country, but it used to be entirely possible.

p3rls 4 days ago

Whoa there bro didn't you see Zuckeberg's latest podcast, he built facebook to bring people together! He paid good money for that corporate beastie boy makeover too-- show some damn respect.

ixtli 4 days ago

I think around here people will all agree with you, the problem is that in practice this isn't at any level about cleaning up peoples experience of each other. it's economic protectionism injected with yellow-scare nonsense reminiscent of the 20th century. they're gleefully making the large ones worse while closing down anything which doesn't benefit US oligarchs

palata 4 days ago

I understand your point, but I don't think it works like that for teenagers. Teenagers need to connect. They will go where the others go, because that's exactly what matters to them.

It's not that they deliberately want the addiction. The addiction is a consequence of it, but they go to TikTok because their peers are on TikTok.

  • lenerdenator 4 days ago

    They can connect in person. Like they did exclusively up until the mid 00s.

    I think peers is also a strange word to use. When I joined Facebook in 2007 you were more-or-less sorted by where you went to high school. You connected with people you knew.

    I'm sure that still exists on some level, but social media is now about driving engagement with people who pay these companies to get eyeballs. An influencer isn't your peer. It's like considering Billy Mays (may he rest in peace) your peer in 2007. No, he's a dude who sold you Oxy-Clean, but he was on TV a lot.

    • throw2827374 4 days ago

      I was bullied in high school because I was so different.

      I was also a new kid so it was hard to join an existing clique in a small town.

      Online groups saved me. It not only let me stay in contact with my old friends, but also let me meet new people with similar interest so I didn't feel so alone.

      • sampullman 4 days ago

        Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. have mostly killed off the places where online groups formed when I was a kid.

      • shlant 4 days ago

        I don't think your story is uncommon especially for people who had trouble fitting in, however I would bet that places like facebook or instagram were not where you found your online groups. More likely to have been forums or online games. Very different environments and consequences.

      • marcosdumay 4 days ago

        Facebook is not "online groups", and it is known to statistically lead teenagers into higher rates of suicide.

    • ThatMedicIsASpy 4 days ago

      Connect in person as a teen when everything is designed around cars and stuff a lot more expensive. Where cops arrested for you for loitering. Where people see kids going home from school as 'they're up to no good'. A lot of the past locations are gone and no longer accessible for todays youth. Even fast food places want you gone as fast as possible.

    • palata 4 days ago

      > social media is now about driving engagement with people who pay these companies to get eyeballs

      That's what it is, but that's not how teenagers perceive it, I think.

      I see it like this: if all your friends watch the news everyday and spend a lot of time talking about it, you will end up watching the news as well. To connect.

      If all your friends watch a lot of sport and meet for that, you may well end up learning to enjoy sport as well.

      If all your friends know the trends on TikTok and talk about it...

  • dailykoder 4 days ago

    >Teenagers need to connect.

    But not in a tiktok-way. They have more than enough social contacts when they go to school. No one need tiktok.

    • kayodelycaon 4 days ago

      I went to a school with over 1,200 students and still had no friends. Kids can be extremely cruel to their neurodivergent peers. I wasn’t able to learn social skills until university .

      Things would have been a lot different if I had access to the internet.

      • don_neufeld 4 days ago

        I’m sorry to hear that happened to you.

        Unfortunately, the data about mental health outcomes of teens who consume social media is not positive, so I’m not sure things would have been better.

      • hammock 4 days ago

        Xanga allowed kids to connect and be social that otherwise weren’t able to in high school. But do we want to raise a society of Xanga kids, or do we want to solve the root problems why they couldn’t be social in the first place?

        (Or am I asking the same exact question two different ways, a distinction without a difference?)

    • cmrdporcupine 4 days ago

      > They have more than enough social contacts when they go to school.

      If you ever found yourself being the "weird kid" in a small town high school, you might see it different.

      • SpicyLemonZest 4 days ago

        I found myself being the "weird kid", and I'm glad I had the Internet in general, but I'm also glad the Internet wasn't yet advanced enough to seem like a complete replacement for in-person socialization. I knew I was missing something by playing Runescape instead of talking to people, knowing that drove me to forge in-person connections when I did have the opportunity, and the fact that I had to actively engage with the Internet instead of passively scroll through it gave me at least some baseline for doing that.

        • cmrdporcupine 4 days ago

          Yes, I generally agree. As a parent of teens I think this as well.

          But social media isn't the cause of alienation. It's a symptom.

    • palata 4 days ago

      > No one need tiktok.

      And we should not underestimate teenagers: if they have something better to do than swiping on TikTok, they do it. Parents must help them have better things to do.

      But still, if all their friends know and talk about the TikTok trends, they will feel disconnected if they have no clue. That's how I meant that they "need" it. They need to "connect" as in having the same references as their friends.

      • cj 4 days ago

        That’s kind of like telling parents that they should tell their kids to eat their vegetables when sitting next to McDonalds.

  • lolinder 4 days ago

    So if theoretically you ban addictive social media platforms and prevent the formation of any platform with more than a million users, then yes, teenagers will go where their peers go, but that will not necessarily be where teenagers on the other side of the country go. It will also not necessarily be a destructive algorithm-oriented social network designed to maximize time spent viewing ads.

    My friend group had a phpBB forum back in the day. I spent hours on there because I liked hanging out with that group of friends, not because it was profitable for some megacorp.

    • shlant 4 days ago

      yea I don't think people are grasping how different places like Myspace or forums or online games are compared to modern social media.

  • lm28469 4 days ago

    How do you explain the children/teenager loneliness spike since ~2008-2010 if these things are the pinnacle of connection ?

    • palata 4 days ago

      I didn't want to imply that those things are the pinnacle of connection.

      I rather wanted to say that it's easier said than done. You can't just tell teenagers "stop using social media, it's bad for you". Because if their peers use social media, then they need to use social media as well.

      I'm all for removing social media altogether.

jmyeet 4 days ago

This is a trite (and arguably silly) comment bordering on neo-Luddism. The genie is out of the bottle. There's really no going back.

Worse, it's treating symptoms as the problem. We, as a society, deify hyper-individualism. This is to such an extreme that people actually in completely and utterly selfish ways are glorified and celebrated because "freedom".

Social media happened after we destroyed community and any sense of collectivism. Unhealthy social media habits are a consequence of that. They didn't cause it.

Where once you needed just one job to live, you now need 5. Every aspect of our lives is financialized. We spend 30 years working to the bone to pay for a house that cost 1/10th what it did 30 years ago. The high costs of housing have destroyed all the so-called "third places".

Federating services does nothing to the core problem here. I find HN's obsession with federation, which literally solves zero problems for users and creates a bunch of problems, bizarre and out-of-touch.

The problem is capitalism.

  • ajmurmann 4 days ago

    What practical alternative do you propose to capitalism?

supriyo-biswas 4 days ago

This is how you end up with the UK's Online Safety Act. And personally, I'd prefer to have international networks where you can get exposed to different opinions; my life would be in an objectively worse place if I had only had the opinions of the people of my country to go off of.

quelup 4 days ago

There's a lot of issues with social media - I don't think anyone denies that. But not everyone thinks like the HN crew. What about the millions of users who actually enjoy FB and use it to connect with friends and family? To pretend that use case doesn't exist seems naive and biased. There's a reason these companies are so big - some people actually like them. Maybe they're the naive ones and we need to save them from themselves, but I don't think it's that black and white.

  • vineyardmike 4 days ago

    I want to respect the user here, but also they need to be saved.

    The companies are big because they’re advertising machines with intense targeting abilities, which makes for a great place for advertisers to spend money.

    Plenty of people enjoy Facebook, and plenty of people enjoy drugs and gambling and all sorts of destructive behaviors that many nations regulate. I think we can recognize that it can be fun and have utility, while still being dangerous or problematic.

    If you had to convince people to pay for Facebook as a subscription, would people use it the same way? Would they still find utility there? Would they prefer a competitor?

    I have a facebook account from my college days, but I don’t use it and neither does most of my network. My parents, despite being deeply suspicious and tech-savvy have started using it more and more to “connect” with family. In reality, I’ve seen their usage and it’s mostly generic groups and memes and similar stuff. I suspect that most people experience the same reality, and respectfully, I think society can survive without that.

    To postulate, I think there are a million “better” ways to connect with friends and family, but I also think that there’s no one App that can do everything for everyone. My extended family bought a dozen smart picture frames, and everyone adds photos to a joint account we all share, and that has replaced a social feed for pics of kids/grandkids. I think people would be better served finding what works for them and letting it be bespoke to their family/friends.

sneak 4 days ago

Please stop advocating for censorship and authoritarianism.

This is the USA, we don’t do that here. (Except when we do, as in this terrible case, but it’s not what we are about.)

If you don’t like them, don’t use them. Don’t force other people to share your views and opinions. We like social media and choose every day to continue to use it.

App bans are simply state censorship, nothing more. It’s a real shame we don’t have methods of sideloading to bypass such idiocy on the part of the USG and the chokepoints at Apple and Google.

At least tiktok.com will still work.

  • zeroonetwothree 4 days ago

    What content is being censored? Creators are free to post their videos on other platforms.

    Also note that the law doesn’t force TikTok to shut down, it requires divestment. The fact that they choose not to divest says a lot about how they view the platform.

    • LawrenceKerr 4 days ago

      The comment they are replying to suggests taking down all the major social media networks by government force ("Just get rid of all of them").

      Arguably, even if you are not prohibiting the content itself, if you take away the means for your content to spread far & wide, that's the same as censorship.

      I find this quite disturbing.

  • VMG 4 days ago

    I read it as a personal recommendation to delete the apps, not as an appeal to ban them for everybody

jstummbillig 4 days ago

> They're battery acid poured on the human psyche.

At least as far as kids are concerned, current evidence does not readily support this common believe.

Sabine Hossenfelder writes: "The idea that social media causes children mental health distress is plausible, but unfortunately it isn’t true. Trouble is, if you read what the press has written about it, you wouldn’t know. Scientists have described it as a “moral panic” that isn’t backed by data, which has been promoted most prominently by one man: Jonathan Haidt."

Video for more insight, if you are interested: https://youtu.be/V95Vg2pVlo0

  • GeoAtreides 4 days ago

    Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist, she's not an expert on mental health. She might be right, she might be wrong, but she isn't a source of truth.

    The chart with the number of suicides for children going up is not a moral panic, but a grim reality.

    • noboostforyou 4 days ago

      > she's not an expert on mental health. She might be right, she might be wrong, but she isn't a source of truth.

      It's FB but for the purpose of studying effects of social media on mental health it should suffice:

      https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...

      https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/14/facebook-...

      https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-internal-report-sho...

      https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/how-social-medias-toxic-conten...

    • zeroonetwothree 4 days ago

      Suicides were higher in the 1980s than now. I’m pretty sure we didn’t have any apps back then.

    • xNeil 4 days ago

      The moral panic is social media being the reason for the suicides going up, not the fact that suicides are going up in itself.

    • jstummbillig 4 days ago

      And correlation is not causation. If you disagree with her interpretation (it's mostly just presentation, really) of the data, feel free to be specific. Attacking the person is, as always, bad form and lame.

      • GeoAtreides 4 days ago

        I haven't attacked Sabine, it was OP who used her as some some sort of authority in children mental health.

    • NoGravitas 4 days ago

      Right, but correlation does not equal causation. Kids are also increasingly aware that they live in a neoliberal hellworld, and their chances of maintaining the lifestyles their parents and grandparents had are slim to none.

      • grapesodaaaaa 4 days ago

        I’m losing family members to conspiracy theory YouTube channels.

        The crackpots had a greater barrier to transmit back in the day. They had to get an FCC license or know someone with a radio station. Even then reach was limited unless you could reach a deal to transmit nationwide.

        I personally believe our brains are primed on some level to buy into this stuff. It’s very hard to overcome.

        • noboostforyou 4 days ago

          I agree completely, social media is essentially a dopamine addiction. Steve Jobs had an apt quote regarding what you said "our brains are primed on some level to buy into this stuff."

          > When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.

  • mola 4 days ago

    So Hossenfelder is now a psychiatrist and a sociologist?

    bah, I really dislike "scientist influencers". She isn't versed in the subject, she's no better than Haidt.

    • zorked 4 days ago

      From that point of view, the press and journalism should not exist.

    • zeroonetwothree 4 days ago

      “Sociologist” is more of an anti-qualification. In any case let’s not rely on appeals to authority. I think we are intelligent enough to judge the evidence ourselves.

    • stronglikedan 4 days ago

      No, but she doesn't have to be in this context. She's a very capable critical thinker who knows how to do very thorough research, which is all someone has to be to determine that there is, in fact, no data to support the claims.

      • in3d 4 days ago

        She’s not a capable critical thinker, quite the opposite, in fact. Completely unimpressive.

  • tedivm 4 days ago

    They might not be causing literally mental health issues, but they're certainly radicalizing a lot of young folks into some really toxic behaviors and beliefs.

  • persedes 4 days ago

    I don't really want to watch a video, but do you have a write up somewhere? The last rebuttal I've read (I think from the books that kill podcast) basically dismissed Haidts claims by saying that the increase in anxiety related disorders was due to increased self reporting. And the podcast seems to have ignored the graph on the next page in Haidts book, which showed a correlated increase in emergency room admissions due to anxiety related disorders.

  • lc9er 4 days ago

    > Sabine Hossenfelder

    Why would a physicist's opinion on mental health carry any weight?

  • paulddraper 4 days ago

    What is causing the record level of mental health disorders in children?

    • llm_nerd 4 days ago

      In 1990 there were zero identified exoplants. Now there are 4000+. It isn't that there is the creation of lots of new planets, but that we started looking for them in earnest, and had the means to identify them.

      Being diagnosed is the likely reason there is an explosion in mental health disorders. We go to lengths to apply a diagnostic label on every child. The massive variation in humans means that a huge portion are going to fall to the sides of the curve on all sorts of gradients. Older HNers will remember having a wide variety of kids among their cohorts, with "nerds", depressives, the hyperactive, the super driven and focused, and the manic depressives, etc, but likely zero were actually diagnosed in any way. Now you could apply a diagnoses on literally all of them.

      This isn't judgmental, and it's good to know what people are dealing with, and to offer treatment or medication where possible.

    • Jean-Papoulos 4 days ago

      Actually getting kids tested for them.

    • Gormo 4 days ago

      Are children actually experiencing mental health disorders at a higher rate, or are we just classifying pre-existing variations in personality as behavior as mental health disorders at a higher rate?

      • stevenAthompson 4 days ago

        The DSM used to break mental health disorders down into what it called the multi-axial system. Axis 1 being the least impacting diseases, and axis 5 the most severe. At some point we had so many disorders that more than 50% of the population was seen to have Axis 1 or higher mental health disorders. This meant that more of the population was regarded as mentally ill than were considered "healthy."

        Rather than accept that >50% of the population being classified as mentally ill might be a sign we were thinking about things in a backwards way they just got rid of the multi-axial system in DSM 5.

        Problem solved.

      • aqme28 4 days ago

        I agree with your skepticism on this, but youth suicide rates have been steadily climbing. Unless we were misclassifying suicide, it seems like there is a rising mental health crisis.

    • ta_011525 4 days ago

      [flagged]

      • tokioyoyo 4 days ago

        All fairly US specific problems, but the problem with the youth is global. The biggest common factor among kids worldwide is prevalence of phones and social media in their lives.

      • voidUpdate 4 days ago

        > The social championing and normalization of transgenderism (literally a disorder)

        The "disorder" is gender dysphoria. The "cure" for that is being able to live as your chosen gender, eg being transgender. People aren't trying to "spread" it anyway, what gave you that idea? All the trans people I've met haven't been trying to convince other people to be trans, they're giving people advice when they need it. You cant make someone transgender just by trying to convince them they are if they aren't

        • Rooster61 4 days ago

          In my experience, most are terrified to make the change but do it anyways. A non trivial number of the general populace will loathe you on sight the second that change is made publicly. That'd scare me, too