Surely the people with the power to ban the lot of social media don't have their own propaganda to shove down your throat. Surely they will only ban the bad ones where foreign agents spread dangerous ideas and keep the good ones where only upright citizens of their own country can talk about how great everything is.
How do you define social network, though? Is Facebook a social network, even though it includes a marketplace? Is HN a social network? Is Newgrounds a social network....? Seems difficult to stomp out effectively
Banning is not the way to go about things. India is always ban happy -> a competitive exam in a state? Take down internet in the whole state to curb cheating. Outright banning hard to deal with stuff sets a bad precedent.
Anonymity online seems the ultimate double edge sword. I prefer privacy over government prescribed safety.
You just can't let a government get this bad, and the set of rules and procedures you need to reign in a tyrant are pretty different from the ones you need to keep a system stable and functioning under normal operation.
Had a previous US administration thought that the US is a stable and functional democracy that can be entrusted with such a law, you will be in trouble.
So just give up because something is hard? Sounds like the tech industry and its never-ending quest for low-hanging fruit.
"We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas."
I think user 0x5FC3 correctly identifies the root of the issue, and any (if implemented) regulation should be based on the algorithmic serving, but I hold a firm belief that you cannot and should not try to outlaw math. From my first glance at this issue, it seems tricky
Delay delay delay and continue reap the profits in the meantime by making people talk in circles instead of addressing the problem. Let Q4 figure it out, just keep the Q2 gravy train rolling.
Also, nobody is trying to outlaw math. That's just a silly hyperbolic talking point.
HN is usually pretty good about brainstorming as a group on topics like these, and I value the insights of others.
I'm a SysAdmin. I'm not about to write the law, just trying to partake in the discussion
Also, the comment I referred to was quite literally talking about banning the use of algorithms to serve content. I'll ask you what that is, if it's not banning math?
No, but a good first step would be to widely acknowledge that the problem is hard. And thus is not solvable by a quick fix of a type "let's ban <something>". Otherwise we will keep trying quick fixes and local optimizations that will be just as quickly subverted by the deep pocketed incumbents.
You'd have a much larger number of targets which makes things somewhat more difficult for those looking to exploit them since they'd have to track down the various platforms and navigate a variety of systems each with their own rules and culture. Fewer of them would allow ads at all and none of them would match facebook in terms of being as easy to weaponize. "Pay us to attack this platform's userbase" is a core part of facebook's business model.
You'd also be much better off when the people maintaining the system are hobbyists because they actually care about the platform and moderation. That's a massive improvement over facebook which does as little as they possibly can, only enough to be able to claim that they do "something" at the next congressional hearing, while still making sure that they can actively censor what they want. Moderation on major social media platforms seem to frustrate the efforts of legitimate users more than spammers and scammers.
I'd put my money on "Randall, the over-worked sys admin" over the half-assed AI moderator bots employed by Musk and Zuckerberg
The government in the US will prevent others from immediately physically infringing on your rights, say to brew beer. So they’d help us online too even at the expense of corporate platforms right?
I assume you want FB and Insta banned. What about Reddit? YouTube? Hacker news? Discord? X? Dating apps? Snapchat? WhatsApp? iMessage? Gmail? Just curious where exactly you draw the line, and how you’d implement the ban.
I've been pushing for the under-14 ban, which is popular in almost every country with polling, and holy shit is it a pigpen to wade through.
In a perfect world, sure. In the real world, the political demand for a solution to this problem means we'll get a lot of crummy solutions.