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I am appalled by all the supportive comments in this thread. Why are HN users so comfortable with authoritarian government? It’s about more than just online ga

• uncoder0 5y ago
  I feel like the last year of 'quarantine' for most of the Western world has made people more comfortable with authoritarian governments and actions. It's rather alarming how widespread and quickly this change in ideology has happened.
  • ezekg 5y ago
    It's crazy to me because I would have thought the last year or so would produce the opposite effect. But a fearful populace is a malleable populace, I guess.
  • lvs 5y ago
    The analogy doesn't hold. It's hard to say that video games are an acute crisis causing hundreds of thousands of deaths.
  • knownjorbist 5y ago
    This is comparing apples and oranges, frankly.
    • honkdaddy 5y ago
      I would say in both cases it's the government exhibiting control over its citizens lives under the notion that it's for their own protection. I think everyone has a point at which government control becomes tyranny. For some it's lockdowns during a pandemic, for others it's time-limits on video games. Seems like all apples, to me.
      • dlp211 5y ago
        Your kid playing videogames 12 hours a day has no impact on my life. You giving me Covid does. These situations are not the same and the complete lack of nuance on when government authority is good and needed, and when it is bad and harmful is...well, I don't have the word(s), perhaps disappointing. I don't get the desire to see everything as black and white and boil everything problem down to a slippery slope fallacy.
        • zarzavat 5y ago
          Authoritarianism often comes with a good reason, in a moment of crisis, such as war, ethnic tensions, etc. The problem is getting rid of it once the crisis abates. Power tends to work on a ratchet. If you are only looking for a cartoon villain and not, say, yourself, you might be caught flat footed when it arrives at your door.
          • knownjorbist 5y ago
            Okay, but this example doesn't really apply here as we've already seen what relatively limited restrictions were imposed rolled back across states and localities to varying degrees. It doesn't have to be so dramatic.
        • honkdaddy 5y ago
          One could absolutely argue that kids playing videogames 12h a day has an impact on your life, because if every kid spent their time that way, society would crumble in a generation because young people are choosing to play games instead of work. The topic in question was whether Covid restrictions has made people more comfortable with other authoritarian measures which are implemented to benefit society as a whole. I actually think it's a very apt point and I'm surprised you don't see the connection.
  • echelon 5y ago
    > I feel like the last year of 'quarantine' for most of the Western world has made people more comfortable with authoritarian governments and actions. Half of the US is up in arms about it, for better or worse. I think you'd have a hard time imposing anything on the US. The other half doesn't think immunizations are authoritarian, just science. Maybe 1% of the loud and attention grabbing people on either side of the isle wants to impose things on the other just for the sake of imposing them. So not exactly.
    • UnFleshedOne 5y ago
      That 1%, if they are loud enough, can move overton window for the whole society. Recall how fast vaccine passports moved from a crazy right wing conspiracy theory to an obvious and necessary measure. Last year is full of such examples.
      • 1270018080 5y ago
        I think you have it backwards. In the last year, vaccines passports (in other words, immunization records) went from an obvious and necessary measure to a crazy wight wing conspiracy theory.
        • honkdaddy 5y ago
          A year ago in my country, vaccine passports were very much a conspiracy theory, and back in 2020, our PM assured us they wouldn't be coming. [1] A year later, as the GP mentioned, this has instead become the standard to expect going forward. [2]. Exactly what they described has happened, something which was once considered an irrational fear of libertarians has become reality. [1] https://globalnews.ca/news/7576955/coronavirus-vaccine-passports-canada-trudeau/ https://globalnews.ca/news/7576955/coronavirus-vaccine-passp... [2] https://globalnews.ca/news/8104692/canada-getting-proof-of-vaccination-passport-for-international-travel/ https://globalnews.ca/news/8104692/canada-getting-proof-of-v...
  • anonporridge 5y ago
    Perhaps because we've all seen firsthand the reckless social irresponsibility of a massive segment of the population. Faced with this, it's not surprising to me that many people would see a more authoritarian government to be preferable to a laissez faire approach that requires the vast majority of individuals to make reasonably good choices for the collective and understand the wider implications of their behavior. It would be ironic if the right wing shrieking for 'freedom' ends up backlashing on all of us because they've simultaneously demonstrated that we're not mature enough to handle that level of freedom.
    • ryandrake 5y ago
      COVID has convinced me that a functioning society can’t just throw its hands up and exclusively rely on Nash Equilibrium to deal with all problems. If you rely on everyone being rational self-interest-optimizing actors, you’ll never solve problems that require voluntary collective, coordinated action. It just ends up as a giant game of prisoner’s dilemma with everyone choosing DEFECT.
      • TillE 5y ago
        Yeah, there's basically no way the pandemic is ever going to end without broad vaccine mandates. I would expect China to be one of the first countries to move in that direction, but we'll see.
  • keyb0ardninja 5y ago
    This is exactly what F. A. Hayek warned us about in his book The Road to Serfdom.
    • trompetenaccoun 5y ago
      I don't know why this man has such a large following outside of economics. There are a lot of better analysis of how such oppressive systems form. I respect Hayek but The Road to Serfdom is a boring read.
  • 908B64B197 5y ago
    Australia seems to be rushing toward that future at an out of control pace.
    • AustinDev 5y ago
      My wife and I were actually considering moving there. We even started some of the paperwork but after seeing the absurdity of their covid measures We have decided against it for now.
      • theintern 5y ago
        What about their covid measures put you off? When for so much of the pandemic they were seen as absolute world leaders and were living as normal when the rest of us were in lockdowns?
        • majani 5y ago
          That's an opinion from your filter bubble. Try get some info from conservative and libertarian sources. The results may shock you.
        • ehvatum 5y ago
          I can describe my own objection to international travel to restrictive countries: Australia was a model for success, until a cab driver in Sydney contracted the delta variant. Much of the country is now in total lockdown, while the army patrols Sydney streets and daily COVID cases continue to rise exponentially, far exceeding any previous COVID outbreak in Australia. There is no ten billion dollar program to develop vaccines for new variants, no path to eradication, and no way out of the continuing crisis except to ignore it. Therefore, I expect that this situation of mandatory quarantines, mandatory vaccination proof, mandatory negative test result proof, and multiple new-variant outbreaks and lockdowns annually will continue until politically untenable, and I conclude that countries instituting hard lockdowns are not places where I want to live or travel, until they eventually reform.
          • 5y ago
  • staunch 5y ago
    Temporary and mild authoritarian measures during a once-in-a-century pandemic make complete sense, even to very libertarian people. The U.S. has a track record of such measures being temporary, such as the much more extreme measures taken during WW2. Comparing this kind of thing to what China is doing is drawing a false equivalency. There is no legitimate comparison to be made.
    • pageandrew 5y ago
      Temporary? We're a year and a half in, with no end in sight. If the vaccines weren't the end game, there is no end game. Indefinite public health authoritarianism. Mild? Australians can't travel more than 5km from their homes. For essential purposes only. Vaccinated Australians can only leave their homes for 2 hours a day (unvaxed 1 hour a day).
      • yupper32 5y ago
        > If the vaccines weren't the end game, there is no end game. Your argument is already flawed. We don't have vaccines available to everyone in the US yet.
      • nightfly 5y ago
        I mean, delta changed the math of how effective the vaccine was at preventing spread and mild illness. This is why the idea of a _novel_ coronavirus epidemic was bad, we had no idea where it was gonna go. In Oregon we were on a very bad trajectory in the last two weeks with hospitals full and "elective" medical procedures suspended in some areas (my family being directly effected by this), that is now being deflected a bit by the renewed mask mandate. And in America we're very fortunate with how easy access we have to vaccines, other places aren't as lucky so they have to enact harsher measures...
        • rootusrootus 5y ago
          This is all true, but at the same time, it is a legitimate question to ask 'when does this stop?' I think we can all agree that it can't last forever. But Kate Brown mandated masks even outdoors, and while her intentions may be pure, she didn't provide any metrics that she will use to decide the mandate can be dropped. We are past the 70% vaccination threshold she originally used. Even then, the metric was created well after the mandates, and I disagree with that. When we are going to put such rules in place they should be defined from the beginning as temporary or permanent, and in the case of the former should come with a definition for the end. A date, a set of metrics, something specific.
  • goostavos 5y ago
    I don't even know where people are coming from any more. Like literally everyone else in tech who knows how the sausage gets made, I'm appalled by the teams of Ph.Ds which exist solely to exploit the dopamine response of children. However, it never would have ever crossed my mind to jump from "here's a particular problem" to "the government should control how much of a specific activity your child can do at home"
    • ryan93 5y ago
      You make it sound a lot more scientific than it is.
      • eric-hu 5y ago
        Seconded. It doesn’t take a team of PhD’s to run A/B testing on features and variations that improve lift. Tie performance bonuses to improved engagement and sales, and you can motivate many non doctorates to find novel ways to make things addictive.
        • Jensson 5y ago
          Pretty sure Candy Crush has such a team of PhD's though. Not all games, but the big games definitely do. You can read about it here from their own page: https://careers.king.com/kingdom-news/data-at-king/ https://careers.king.com/kingdom-news/data-at-king/ > That experiment is typical of how we learn from data at King. We have about 150 people working in data roles, out of a total workforce of 2,000. They come from a range of backgrounds. Many are from the games industry, of course, but we also bring in lots of recruits straight from university. > These people will have just done their masters or PhD in a wide range of disciplines. Many of our team studied statistics, physics or computer science but we also have people who came from theoretical biology because work on DNA sequencing in that field has produced a lot of data-sophisticated people. Others are behavioural psychologists or behavioural economists. Now in the specific example they choose to highlight they saw that making the game less frustrating made people spend more money. However if making the game more frustrating turned out to make more money since users bought more powerups then they absolutely would do it.
• murph-almighty 5y ago
  Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. Actually though this is a fucking big brother atrocity of a policy that people will inevitably circumvent and the government will pick and choose when to enforce.
  • godelski 5y ago
    Except the people aren't our enemy. We're worried about an authoritarian government harming our friends.
    • teawrecks 5y ago
      The CCP is the one making the mistake, not the people. No one said it was the people.
      • godelski 5y ago
        It is easy to read the above comment that way. Often people confuse governments with people. Americans vs American Government. Chinese vs CCP. Etc. We should be clear about the distinction because certain factions have a vested interest in promoting this.
        • keyb0ardninja 5y ago
          It's better to give the other person the benefit of doubt, and in case of confusion to ask for clarification rather than making the more uncharitable interpretation of the possible interpretations and thereby questioning the morality of the other person.
          • godelski 5y ago
            > It's better to give the other person the benefit of doubt I fully agree with this and actively encourage this behavior, but we also need to be careful with our words because 1) we're in a time that we're discouraging this kind of practice and 2) as stated above there are factions actively promoting confusion about this specific subject matter (specifically ones relevant to this conversation). I would love if we could all argue in good faith and give the benefit of the doubt, but it should not be a working assumption.
• beaunative 5y ago
  Governments are always about control, that's why they exist, the question is, to what extent?
• aero-glide2 5y ago
  Some people don't like this move personally, but at the same time appreciate diversity of value systems around the world. Its a hedge. If the whole world followed the same value system, a systemic flaw could result in much disaster.
  • yumraj 5y ago
    So the whole country of 1.3-1.4B people has the same value system? This is more like the CCP imposing its value system on them.
  • thomastjeffery 5y ago
    By that same argument, it would be better not to have all of China forced to follow the same "value system", yet that is exactly what authoritarian policy like this intends.
• onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  I'm not in favor at all - but it doesn't seem like a massive overstep. I honestly don't see what the big difference is between online games and weed. It doesn't really seem off-brand for governments these days to be making these kinds of decisions. I mean, if they decided to make coffee illegal for kids - yeah, that seems dumb, right? But is that REALLY that big of a difference than making tobacco illegal? I just don't see a huge difference with online gaming.
  • teawrecks 5y ago
    Is this...are you being serious?
  • t-writescode 5y ago
    So, in the US, we have freedom to assemble and associate with other people. Some people are turning to VR Chat and MMOs to congregate. This is especially a thing during a pandemic when we can't physically come together to do things. Video games aren't all mindless watching of bibs and bobs and dodads and shinies. They're often organized groups of social activity.
• yuy910616 5y ago
  I'm glad I have certain inalienable rights, but I'm also happy to see the authoritarian government experiment continue. There is a chance that liberal government is the most effective government, ever - the so-called end of history argument, but let's not forget the shot heard around the world was fired less than 250 years ago. Benevolent dictatorship could still work - especially today. Look at Singapore, look at China - lifting millions and billions of people out of poverty is an achievement that shouldn't be denied because they're an authoritarian government.
  • president 5y ago
    > lifting millions and billions of people out of poverty is an achievement that shouldn't be denied This is an oft-repeated propaganda talking point. Their system created their poverty in the first place. Not sure breaking something then fixing it again is much of an achievement. Not to mention, the Chinese government changed the definition of what constituted poverty in order to make that claim. I really don't care about the US vs China war because I think the US has already lost but it is quite annoying to hear people repeat propaganda.
    • yuy910616 5y ago
      It's a fairly valid argument imo. The idea that liberal ideals is the best way to organize markets is good - but you can't just ignore the outliers. If it was easy to fixing it - every country that has been colonized should be at least middle income by now right?
• jdavis703 5y ago
  This isn’t any more authoritarian than the US banning alcohol and cannabis for people under 21. At least China is allowing kids to do a little bit of gaming. Meanwhile in the US young adults and children are outright forbidden from intoxicating substances (as opposed to many European countries where teens can buy low-alcohol beverages.)
  • jackconsidine 5y ago
    Weed is illegal in China and they do have a drinking age there, albeit 18 not 21, so this seems like a false equivalency.
    • beaunative 5y ago
      Drinking age in China exist only on paper, and it doesn't exist for most people. If you call the police in China for drinkning age violation, they would probably think you are insane. Hardly can be said in the US.
  • skystarman 5y ago
    Alcohol has been scientifically proven to cause long-term health consequences to children. It is also an incredibly addictive and dangerous substance that often results in lifetime debilitation, cancers, and other deadly diseases. This is not in any way similar to video games. This entire thread seems to be overrun with Tankies or CCP bots.
• birbs 5y ago
  Just because an authoritarian government made a decision doesn’t necessarily mean the decision was authoritarian. In the U.S., it’s somehow become popular opinion that the government shouldn’t do anything. Without the ability to make coordinated decisions, the U.S. has predictably fallen behind on a wide variety of metrics (income equality, health care, education, mass transit, etc.) You should reflect on why you view a government making a decision for the health of its citizens as a bad thing.
  • sergiomattei 5y ago
    But this is authoritarian. Why should the government control how I manage my time? I'm pretty sure this site would be pretty outraged if the government decided we could only code 3 hours a week. And please don't use the "but coding is constructive!1!" argument. A good use of time is defined by whoever spends it, not whatever someone else's idea of wasting time is. As a case in point, playing hours of Splitgate has kept me sane during the pandemic as a college student locked in a room for 1.8 years. I meet on Discord with friends and discuss topics while playing. I've made more friends gaming than physically in the past year. That's pretty constructive if you ask me.
    • yuy910616 5y ago
      People can't be left to their own accord.
      • ericmay 5y ago
        If you believe this then surely you'd want less government since you can't leave these people to their own accord and also making decisions.
        • yuy910616 5y ago
          there is a strong correlation between strong government and higher GDP. Weak economies are weak because of corrupt and weak government. So that would be my case for government action - collectively or through a good dictator. Your logic seems good but is removed from history and reality.
• jpambrun 5y ago
  Alcohol pretty much universally prohibited for minors and nobody calls that authoritarian. Governments have responsibility for the wellbeing of citizen, even against themselves (mandatory seatbelts comes to mind). Meanwhile, gaming addiction can also be very destructive.
  • coding123 5y ago
    I was about to reply with something opposing your thought and then realized other countries don't have an age limit and they don't have a billion underage kids dying of alcohol. If anything that probably happens more in the states where there is an age limit.
    • luckylion 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age I mean, yes, "other countries" don't have age limits, but it's pretty rare and it's overwhelmingly not what you'd call successful or stable countries.
      • sbarre 5y ago
        You don't consider Europe stable or successful?
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
        • finiteseries 5y ago
          You don’t consider an age minimum of 18 to purchase alcohol an age limit? The link they posted even has a pretty picture within of the areas without age limits. They’re all mostly in Africa, Vietnam has a shout at stable and successful though.
          • chrisco255 5y ago
• 908B64B197 5y ago
  > Why are HN users so comfortable with authoritarian government? Organic users or paid ones? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
  • dang 5y ago
    "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• actacntact 5y ago
  Really? I can't name a democratic government that doesn't restrict/ban things they consider harmful to minors. If the CCP or Sweden or whomever else has come to the conclusion that the "excessive modern online gaming" is tantamount to gambling, it's a reflection on their values / evaluations (or even just the differing characteristics of popular games in their country), not the relative reach/control exhibited by their governmental system. > It’s about more than just online games. It’s about control. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Politics and governance is about compromise and deciding where to draw lines, not slippery-slope absolutism about vague ideals and fervent dogmas that are all-too-easily impinged. > I’m sure the great firewall is perfectly fine as well? If you can't differentiate between "control of information and discourse across the entire population" and "control of how long (not even 'whether or not') minors can play online videogames" that's your problem.
  • rank0 5y ago
    Nowhere else in the non-authoritarian world has any regulation remotely like this. This is not the same as age limits on alcohol or cigarettes or gambling. They are limiting a leisure activity to a specific “CCP approved” window complete with a real-id and facial recognition tracking system. This is a horrendous infringement on personal liberty. No human should ever have to endure government mandates over such trivial parts of their lives “for the greater good”. This tactic is used by the likes of the Taliban who banned painting, music, sports etc. I mentioned the great firewall to illustrate what Chinas real goals here are: total and absolute control over their citizens. The CCP restricts access to free information, political dissent, and freedom of religion. These are new laws being introduced which would make it illegal for a teenager to play ONLINE CHESS on a Wednesday. How is this not overreach? If the dark software patterns were really the issue they would just make the loot boxes and micro purchases illegal. It’s 100% about power.
• thomastjeffery 5y ago
  Naturally, most of the comments here are expressing dissent to yours, simply because there is more to be said on that perspective. Most of the people who agree with you simply upvote your comment and move on.
  • dorgo 5y ago
    >Naturally, most of the comments here are expressing dissent to yours, simply because there is more to be said on that perspective. I think HN crowd is more prone to question their own believes and playing devil's advocate to just bashing on authoritative regimes. It is a blessing and a curse.
  • nextlevelwizard 5y ago
    Actually refreshing to see comments arguing instead of just downvotes for wrong think
• boomboomsubban 5y ago
  How is limiting the amount of time a Chinese child can play online games worse than barring me from buying Diablo as a teenager? If people are acting comfortable with authoritarian government, it's because we grew up under a quite similar one.
  • Aerroon 5y ago
    In practice there weren't tools around to actually stop you from getting and playing D2 when you were a teenager. There are now. I do agree with you that a lot of rules on kids even in our "free countries" were hypocritical and didn't actually work.
  • runawaybottle 5y ago
    Taliban just banned music recently, again. There are two topics here, one is authoritarianism and the other is parenting. Kids shouldn’t be playing games 5 hours a day and looking up to streamers. The government shouldn’t be involved in this. I think the larger threat of gaming in today’s society is that we have a situation where the standards have gone up dramatically for everyone to be an average mediocre person. You will have to do something serious if you want a real career in the future. You will have to be social and socially astute to navigate social networks (pretty much as early as 10). The pressure is much higher at a much younger age, and chronic gaming is going to be the goto escape. We don’t have a reasonable enough society where gaming can just be an innocuous past time. It’s going to be a hideout for people growing up under the enormous pressure of this new world. I expect drug use, and prescription medication use to be going up on exactly the same curve.
  • teawrecks 5y ago
    Buying is completely different from playing.
    • boomboomsubban 5y ago
      So the outrage is that they let children spend their money on something they then can't fully use? As barring buying prevented me from playing as well. I'm against that but don't see it as overly authoritarian.
• woofie11 5y ago
  I'm no more or less comfortable with authoritarian government than I am with an authoritarian market-based corporatocracy. Odds are that you are under an NDA which limits your freedom of speech. Odds are that if you refused to sign one, you couldn't afford a mortgage in a place with a lot of tech. Odds are you will sign more NDAs so your kids can keep going to the same school. The freedom of no regulation is an illusion. Companies will keep making what sells, even if it's bad for you. Without regulation, video games will become more and more addicting. Without regulation, companies will keep running advertising, even if ads harm culture and the overall economy. To manage all of this, we need a better system. I, for one, am excited about countries trying something different. The CCP seems to be implementing a lot of measures which stand to increase overall quality-of-life, from limiting stress on kids, to workforce stress, to limiting unhealthy activities. I'd like to see how that plays out. As a footnote, I'd even be excited about a fundamentalist Muslim government in Afghanistan, if it wasn't expansionary, and if people were free to emigrate if it was't working for them.
  • skystarman 5y ago
    I'm not sure a country that commits cultural genocide and sent a million or more Muslim Uighurs into reeducation camps is where you should be looking for a "better system". Forced sterilization, forced labor... Or a country that has no freedom of the press, savagely beats or murders political dissidents, will take away your job and livelihood if you dare question CCP orthodoxy... The fact that you think is somehow morally equivalent to an NDA is just absolutely astonishing.
    • mcdonje 5y ago
      What's astonishing is how thoroughly you missed their point.
      • skystarman 5y ago
        OP was quite clear there NDAs and authoritarian, genocidal, CCP are morally equivalent. Not sure how you missed that. Tankie is also really EXCITED about Muslim fundamentalist Afghanistan!
• Ajedi32 5y ago
  Yep, the policy itself isn't necessarily an issue, but the fact that it's being imposed by the government is a huge problem. (Especially since it's not even a democratically elected government. Taxation without representation and all that.) If a parent instituted the exact same policy for their kids I would have no problem with that.
  • treebot 5y ago
    If it were imposed by a democratically elected government, would it still be a problem?
    • chickenpotpie 5y ago
      Yes but a smaller one
      • dimgl 5y ago
        The correct answer is no, it'd still be a massive problem
        • chickenpotpie 5y ago
          Please reread what the question was and what I said. You have the question backwards.
    • Ajedi32 5y ago
      Yes, in my opinion. If a law like this were passed in the United States I'd be vocally campaigning to get the law repealed and the people who voted for it replaced in the next election. Sadly, the Chinese people don't have that option, which only makes the situation that much worse.
      • maccolgan 5y ago
        I'm placing my bet on the fact that vast majority of Chinese people probably support this, and that's fair.
• madrox 5y ago
  To play devil's advocate for a moment, is this different from age-gating we do anywhere else on the internet? We require you to be 18 or over to look at adult sites or view particularly edgy stuff on youtube. Is the difference just that there's an implicit wink going on because it relies on the user being honest about their age? I'm sure if we had a real ID system like China in place, laws would mandate its use given US attitudes about porn and gore.
  • a1369209993 5y ago
    There is no difference; it's evil and needs to die.
• cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  I'm not in favour of governments doing this. But I have to admit I will relish the opportunity to tell my (11 year old) son about this around the dinner table tonight (after he spent the whole day hiding inside playing Terraria and Minecraft) And I wish as a parent I had the actual ability to enforce such a limit myself (maybe not so drastic). But the battle would be intense, futile, and conflict ridden. It's been tried. The government has no business doing this, but there's something to be said for community / cultural standards and leadership. Parents in our society are on their own, fighting a tide of digital "addiction" without supports. And in fact key pillars of our kind of society (that is, corporations) are working to encourage screen time, rather than the other way around. A year of COVID isolation has made it so much worse, too. I wonder what the outcome of this policy will be and if it will make China's youth more competitive and their society healthier. Or if it will be a total an abject failure and laughed at in a couple generations (most likely).
  • jumelles 5y ago
    "You see my son, these children with limited human rights..."
    • adamdusty 5y ago
      It's a human right to play online video games?
      • cmrdporcupine 5y ago
        Our amazing world where video games are a human right, but health care and housing are not.
  • jpgvm 5y ago
    China has as pretty scary high success rate with policies often deemed "doomed to fail" by the outside world. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if it's highly successful at cutting down on game addiction (which is a problem you easily carry into adulthood). Worth mentioning they aren't banning children playing games outside these hours. They are only restricting access to online games. Namely multiplayer games like Honor of Kings. If a parent is happy for their child to play other games that don't require online services they are free to do that.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• powerapple 5y ago
  A good policy is a good policy, a bad policy is a bad policy, how hard to think this way. People are not talking about great firewall. So next time when people talking about election in US, I should say "killing Iraqis is perfectly fine as well"?
• YinLuck- 5y ago
  The sitting president was removed from the de-facto public forum, but you're whining about minors getting their video game time restricted? Authoritarian government is already here. You just missed it because you're on the side of the devil.
• xster 5y ago
  I'd also be careful with the labels based just around the flavor of authoritarianism you're used to for all your life. FWIW, drinking age is generally customary rather than codified in practice in China, as is public drinking.
• ip26 5y ago
  It’s about more than just online games. It’s about control Isn't this more likely to provoke the opposite? Addictive time-wasters are an aid to authoritarian government. Assuming this policy is effectively enforced, Chinese youth suddenly have a lot more free time on their hands.
  • solatic 5y ago
    > Addictive time-wasters are an aid to authoritarian government. They're an aid to control; however, the government has interests apart from control. If the government feels that it has sufficient control, but worries about economic output, it may prioritize economics over control. Ultimately government needs to achieve both.
• minusSeven 5y ago
  People don't care about what China does inside China as opposed to what it does outside.
• Revenant-15 5y ago
  Honestly, I wish I could delete at least half the comments here, including yours. It's as if the moment somebody mentions "government", the majority of HN that is American goes "bu-bu-but it's authoritarian!!!!" and cries about freedom. It's ridiculous. The CCP is an authoritarian government. Yes. Is this being proposed in the US? No. Why all the whining and insane amount of pearl-clutching then? Frankly, I was hoping to see more discussion about the (potential) effects of (excessive) gaming or the potential/unforeseen consequences of the ban, but apparently people here seem to go braindead the moment China, government or freedom is mentioned. It feels like I'm back on Facebook or Reddit again. Has the level of discourse really become that much worse on HN over the years?
  • president 5y ago
    > Honestly, I wish I could delete at least half the comments here, including yours. It sounds like if you had your way, you'd be quite the authoritarian. Do you hear yourself? > The CCP is an authoritarian government. Yes. Is this being proposed in the US? No. Why all the whining and insane amount of pearl-clutching then? Vaccine passports and mandated lockdown and vaccines without informed consent are bringing us closer to authoritarianism than we ever have before. > Has the level of discourse really become that much worse on HN over the years? So in response you create a meta post complaining about others complaining about authoritarianism?
    • Revenant-15 5y ago
      > It sounds like if you had your way, you'd be quite the authoritarian. Do you hear yourself? So every forum that has mods to moderate the posts that are made is "authoritarian"? Do you listen to yourself? It's not authoritarian to ensure a certain level of quality or level of discourse. And what's going on in these comments does not meet any reasonable bar.
• president 5y ago
  Most people assume governments are benevolent. The rest are bots and/or promoting a political agenda.
• sk2020 5y ago
  I’ve skimmed the comments with the same dismay until I read yours. The lack of concern about using coercive force to control how people dispose of their leisure time is disturbing to say the least. Maybe that over a billion people out there who are living with the same freedom as inmates in a minimum security prison in the US should be a more pressing issue than the nuances of the normative value of video games. It does seem like there has been a lot of news lately about curious social engineering policies coming out of China. I wonder if the politburo suspects trouble.
  • toxik 5y ago
    A lot of these people would much rather live in what you disparagingly call a minimum security prison than the comparative anarchy of what we call freedom. Freedom to get stabbed if I don’t give the junkie my belongings. I don’t think well of the CCP for many reasons but please, this is a very superficial understanding of China on display. It seems more well suited to Soviet about half a century ago.
• make3 5y ago
  you can be supportive of a policy without being supportive of the type of government that runs it. I'm for it if it was done in a democratic way.
• em500 5y ago
  I have a feeling that there is a bit of subtle manipulation by the framing going on here. The current Reuters article title that I get is "Three hours a week: Play time's over for China's young video gamers", but the submission's title is "China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week". This conjures images of Chinese police raiding homes and punishing children or parents who are caught gaming too long. But getting closer to the source (http://www.news.cn/english/2021-08/30/c_1310157673.htm http://www.news.cn/english/2021-08/30/c_1310157673.htm), the regulation appears to be exclusively targetting the amount of on-line gaming services that companies are allowed to offer to minors. This doesn't any seem different in principle to various Western regulations attempting limit ads[1] or pornography[2] to children. Granted, some people in the West also consider these as examples authoritarian government overreach. But my guess is that a some people's reactions are driven substantially by the specific story framing (and of course, China), more than by principled reasoning. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulations_on_children%27s_television_programming_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulations_on_children%27s_te... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Uni...
  • perlgeek 5y ago
    It's not just limiting to three hours a week, but to three particular hours a week. Feels even more Draconian to me.
    • toxik 5y ago
      Imagine the thundering herd problems you experience when all of your users have the same three hour time slots.
      • user123456780 5y ago
        I'd like this to be honest (from an infrastructure point of view). If the time is known for an influx of traffic I can prepare for that. I currently look after a system which gets random spikes of traffic thats critical to serve. Which means I more or less need to run a huge amount of redundant servers 24 hours a day incase there is a spike at 2am. We have horizontal scaling but our traffic has little lead time.
• throwawayswede 5y ago
  It's not the support that I find appalling, this is fine in a free-speech society, but the issue i have with modern HN is that any sort criticism of censorship as an act regardless of the content or who's the person on the receiving end gets a tremendous amount of downvotes (almost instantly), which makes me think that the majority of people here (or those who read comments) believe that censorship is OK depending on the topic. For example: censoring Alex Jones is OK no matter what the context is, but censoring criticism of North Korea is not ok. So they clearly understand the concept, they just choose to apply it selectively and think that's fine. This varies depending on the person and the circles the go in. Almost every single comment I make with that sentiment gets instant downvoted or flagged.
• tshaddox 5y ago
  Here in the United States, minors aren't allowed in bars for even 1 hour per week! Is the difference here the "amount of authoritarianism," or simply the types of things each country believes are harmful enough for minors that they ought to be banned or restricted?
• aaron695 5y ago
  > I am appalled by all the supportive comments in this thread. Why are HN users so comfortable with authoritarian government? Because not everyone here is a knee jerk racist is why. Just most. Children in all countries have restrictions. The firewall has nothing to do with this. Unless you want to relate it to the actual Chinese policy document? What's the authoritarian reason for limiting homework in this?
• alienalp 5y ago
  "Under-18s" are already in control of their parent so their parents can force such rule and allowed to do so. So this one is not really comparable with great firewall. For example in my country parents can't chose to not send their kids to school. This one is in same category with that. Obviously it is ridicules to common sense though it is also sound pretty normal thing for a government like China to do.
• slumpt_ 5y ago
  HN has often had a decent contingent of first-generation Chinese immigrants / present Chinese citizens that are happy to defend policies that really don’t make sense in a framework defined with Western values. I’m not surprised. Sad? A bit. It normalizes authoritarianism. But what are you going to do? I want to live in a globalized society and internet, and China is a huge portion of that, despite their best efforts to insulate their citizens from the world.
• graderjs 5y ago
  I'm encouraged by how many people say they have mixed feelings about this. Hopefully that's an indication that they're able to see news from China outside of the monopolar propaganda view--that everything that the CPC does is evil; Or authoritarianism is evil per se--that's so common in the West (not that HN exclusively represents the West it does not but its anglophone nature correlated with its silicon valley roots severely biased it towards that type of thinking and perspective). I think people recognize the efficiency--that they, China can actually pull something like this off; if they mandate that they're going to restrict this then it doesn't get mired in debate and bogged down in Parliament to eventually passes as a watered down concession representing everybody's possible interest group; rather if they say they're going to do something they just go ahead and they execute on that--and I think people can admire that. And certainly probably nobody else in the world can do this at that kind of scale. So I think ultimately that sets China up for great success by evolving a system of government because they can afford to run the experiments. Other countries they can't afford to run the experiments: first off, they don't have the data or the scale to do so; second they don't have the ability to do so; and third they're not able to conjure the political will to be able to run an experiment. But if China wants to run an experiment and figure out if this policy is going to work or what the effects are going to be--if it's going to help or not--they can afford to do that and they can iterate quickly. And that's what they do. So in the long term China has a better, more scientific approach to figuring out a system of governance for their people. and this is not some slap dash theory I'm just pulling out of thin air and predicting what the future of China would look like in some fantasy: this is how the CPC have run things for the last 70 years. Contrast with the West and liberal Democratic systems we have in the West: because we cannot move so quickly, we have to--to some extent--assume what we're doing is right prima facie and so a lot of our rhetoric reflects that. Our political rhetoric about ourselves reflects our sense of moral or procedural superiority to the rest of the world. we constantly remind ourselves you know of the superiority of our system even while acknowledging its flaws. instead of being able to implement policies, at scale, and collect data and move quickly we commission studies, and design intricate theories, and funnel money to think tanks, and often these policy manufacturing initiatives are partisan dalliances with foregone conclusions serving the interests of some of the number of competing groups. But we cannot iterate as quickly are effectively as China can. But interestingly there's no real reason why we can't. If you consider the scale of our so-called Western civilization stretching from the EU to all of the anglophone world and even South America we should be able to run policy experiments. But consistently we do not. So we fret away the hours theorizing, debating and raising ginormous elections while the world keeps on turning. so ultimately in the long game even if we started out ahead with a better system--even if--China is going to be able to create a better system in the long term because they can run more experiments more quickly, more efficiently, with bigger scale and they're going to have bigger data. so they can iterate more quickly they can analyze the bigger data that they have and they can come up with the optimal policies to drive their nation and their people forward. one danger for the West is as China gets deeper into that approach the choices they make are going to seem more and more perplexing to people in the west because the choices are based on a set of assumptions and knowledge that we simply don't have in the west: because we haven't been able to run those experiments we don't have the benefit of that experience. so we're not going to understand China or how they make these choices. and I think that's dangerous for the West politically because we'll fall further behind but it's also dangerous you know culturally and individually because there'll be an increasing empathy Gap between people from different systems which will I suppose in the online world get reduced to a binary polarization of zero nuance and zero understanding which we see the beginnings of today very clearly. so China is playing a high-risk high reward strategy to some extent. (And it's funny because I think there's a stereotype in the west where people often think of Chinese as very risk averse people. But if you look at the way that China has run its government it's calculating but they take a lot of risks. And you want to push that stereotype further you know a lot of Chinese people start businesses so I feel that stereotype is wrong: the Chinese culture embraces risk.) If it's not clear what I'm talking about with the term experiments here, it's policy experiments. We are not able to run policy experiments in the west because everything gets bogged down; we can't execute on a plan and the short-term need to appeal to the lowest common denominator and people's sentimental or emotional nature or to their amygdala--their fear--this kind of pragmatic political necessity in our Western liberal Democratic systems distorts the discourse and the issues of democratic politics away from something substantial and towards something that's pretty ephemeral, often insubstantial and even petty. What kind of future are we creating for ourselves and for our culture and for the legions of people who have sacrificed throughout our history with this kind of behavior? And I think this abuse of our position is especially egregious when compounded with the lack of empathy and understanding towards the different system that the Chinese are doing when if we could look at it clearly I think we would have much to learn. At least much to give us pause and reflect about our own flaws but instead what you see happening is people look at this different system and instead of reflecting on themselves, they puff themselves up with--an almost seemingly reactionary or even compensatory-- pride about how good their own is, using some fabricated pretense of the evil bogeyman Other and how righteous they are themselves. you might dismiss this as simply the reaction of the common person but that reaction is very important in politics and that drives the discourse and ultimately constrains the thinking and the policy of the nations that comprise the west. So China can afford to run the experiments and they can afford to think long-term. So who's going to win in like 200 years? it doesn't have to come down to a military conflict. they just have to win at everything else. And then who's going to be the more likely primary aggressor? The side that's on top or the side that's embittered and feeling their foregone place in the world has been stolen and with the history of amassing enormous military power and utilizing it sometimes seemingly haphazardly? I think the Western system really has to evolve if we are really going to back up our grandiose self-important rhetoric and self-congratulatory triumphal political narratives about ourselves with real results. And I think the core of that is our governance system. It has to be flexible enough to prosecute our interest in a changing world we can't outsource that adaptability solely to the military because while necessary it overly constrains our strategy. We need a flexible government as the core of everything. that's one thing that I've learned by watching and thinking about China over the last 10 years. And I think in order to start doing that there needs to be a correction to the narrative of how Western culture thinks about and talks about china. That's what I'm trying to achieve with this comment: contribute to that correction.
• missingrib 5y ago
  HN users are extremely contrarian.