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I grew up on an internet community that railed against age restrictions for video games and content blockers for children. Bypassing school content blockers was

I grew up on an internet community that railed against age restrictions for video games and content blockers for children. Bypassing school content blockers was a perennial favorite topic. I have to admit it’s surreal to see proposals like this on some of those same sites that advocated for freedom and deferring to parental choice: > Require age verification by law and ban kids from using it. We ban kids from alcohol we should ban them from this. It’s also surreal to see that totalitarian governments like China are doing almost exactly this (see recent video gaming bans for under-18s) with a negative reaction from HN and tech communities, but for some reason the same restrictions are championed for social media. I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that HN and online tech communities are getting older. We can imagine ourselves playing video games as kids, but social media is a new, scary foreign concept that we need to protect the children from. I have to wonder if the whole anti-social-media trend will play out like the anti-violent video game protests of the 90s: A flurry of “think of the children” arguments and political non-action that ultimately fizzles out when the new generation grows up and takes over the discourse, having growing up with social media and turned out just fine.

dntrkv 5y ago
I'm with you, though, I have a fairly controversial opinion on FB and social media in general. I think Facebook is just the result you get when the general public participates in online discourse. I believe the algorithms may in some cases magnify certain discussions that many deem "dangerous," but mostly, it's just that people have zero empathy when conversing online. If you've seen Parks and Rec, the scenes from the town hall meetings are basically Facebook. You have one person complaining about some inane thing nobody cares about, another complaining about undesirable people in their neighborhood, another spouting off conspiracies, etc. Back in the early days of the internet, most of the people participating in online discussion were nerds. This fact alone made the discourse more manageable since most forums focused on discussions around specific topics. Of course, there was always the "General Discussion" parts of any forum which suffered similar problems to what we see on FB. The difference was, the forums were heavily moderated. I'm sure many here have stories about some authoritarian mod that banned them just for having a different opinion. Facebook on the other hand, isn't moderated much. If you start a flame war on FB, there is no one there to ban you. In the earlier days of the internet, you would get banned pretty quickly if you veered too far from the acceptable level of discourse. Shit, look at forums with little moderation, they are 1000x worse than FB or any social media app. There is no algorithm that made 4chan the cesspit that it is (was?). Personally, I think FB's approach has been pretty hands-off, and I think this is the correct choice for their platform. It seems, what everyone wants (this "whistleblower" included) is for the ideas they don't like to be moderated. The internet has shown us what "the other side" really thinks, and we don't like it.
- harpersealtako 5y ago
  >Shit, look at forums with little moderation, they are 1000x worse than FB or any social media app. There is no algorithm that made 4chan the cesspit that it is (was?). This isn't really the case. 4chan is pretty heavily moderated, it just has different strategies than most forums, e.g. quarantining toxic or off-topic opinions in containment boards rather than having all content in a single centralized feed. The site has plenty of rules and ban-able offenses, and each board has their own rules and ban-able offenses on top of that -- and then there's board-level etiquette which can cause a post to get ignored or not, and even thread-level etiquette for whether your post within a recurring general thread will get replies or not, all of which can be described as moderation in some form. Site culture as a whole tends to be more prickly than most due to total anonymity, chronological (rather than vote-based) post ordering, and inherited countercultural origins, rather than any lack of moderation.
fighterpilot 5y ago
Video games are a flawed analogy because the evidence that video games are harmful for kids (except in situations of extreme addiction) is far more flimsy than the evidence for social media's widespread harms to kids. If you're for the alcohol age limits but against the same for social media I'd ask why the difference.

dntrkv 5y ago

I'm with you, though, I have a fairly controversial opinion on FB and social media in general. I think Facebook is just the result you get when the general public participates in online discourse. I believe the algorithms may in some cases magnify certain discussions that many deem "dangerous," but mostly, it's just that people have zero empathy when conversing online. If you've seen Parks and Rec, the scenes from the town hall meetings are basically Facebook. You have one person complaining about some inane thing nobody cares about, another complaining about undesirable people in their neighborhood, another spouting off conspiracies, etc. Back in the early days of the internet, most of the people participating in online discussion were nerds. This fact alone made the discourse more manageable since most forums focused on discussions around specific topics. Of course, there was always the "General Discussion" parts of any forum which suffered similar problems to what we see on FB. The difference was, the forums were heavily moderated. I'm sure many here have stories about some authoritarian mod that banned them just for having a different opinion. Facebook on the other hand, isn't moderated much. If you start a flame war on FB, there is no one there to ban you. In the earlier days of the internet, you would get banned pretty quickly if you veered too far from the acceptable level of discourse. Shit, look at forums with little moderation, they are 1000x worse than FB or any social media app. There is no algorithm that made 4chan the cesspit that it is (was?). Personally, I think FB's approach has been pretty hands-off, and I think this is the correct choice for their platform. It seems, what everyone wants (this "whistleblower" included) is for the ideas they don't like to be moderated. The internet has shown us what "the other side" really thinks, and we don't like it.

harpersealtako 5y ago
>Shit, look at forums with little moderation, they are 1000x worse than FB or any social media app. There is no algorithm that made 4chan the cesspit that it is (was?). This isn't really the case. 4chan is pretty heavily moderated, it just has different strategies than most forums, e.g. quarantining toxic or off-topic opinions in containment boards rather than having all content in a single centralized feed. The site has plenty of rules and ban-able offenses, and each board has their own rules and ban-able offenses on top of that -- and then there's board-level etiquette which can cause a post to get ignored or not, and even thread-level etiquette for whether your post within a recurring general thread will get replies or not, all of which can be described as moderation in some form. Site culture as a whole tends to be more prickly than most due to total anonymity, chronological (rather than vote-based) post ordering, and inherited countercultural origins, rather than any lack of moderation.

fighterpilot 5y ago

Video games are a flawed analogy because the evidence that video games are harmful for kids (except in situations of extreme addiction) is far more flimsy than the evidence for social media's widespread harms to kids. If you're for the alcohol age limits but against the same for social media I'd ask why the difference.