4 ms·

The government isn't helping you, they just pushed every child in Australia to un-moderated and decentralised social networks. Complete free for alls. 4chan, M

• nostrebored 10mo ago
  This idea that regulation fails to destroy industries is farcical. Most examples of “failed regulation” like American prohibition were runaway successes as public policy. Whether it is good or desirable is a different question. The idea that someone is going to make an engaging experience on a “decentralized” network is honestly a bit silly to me. The market potential of this business is low. Decentralized networks with much larger incentives have failed to capture critical mass. There will be side effects, but social media has been so ridiculously corrosive to the welfare of teenagers that I can’t imagine a ban would be worse.
  • johnnyanmac 10mo ago
    >Most examples of “failed regulation” like American prohibition were runaway successes as public policy. You pick one of the worst examples? Prohibition drove a black market for spirits . the 21st amendment repealed it because the government missed out on hundreds of thousands in taxes. The reason to make the law and repeal it were both awful. The lessons learned were all wrong. It's just awful all around (and I speak as someone that doesn't really drink much).
    • nostrebored 10mo ago
      Yeah, this is absolutely one post hoc interpretation of it. The black market for spirits absolutely pales in comparison to public health and legal data, which conclusively show that second order effects of drinking like liver disease, public intoxication, and domestic violence plummeted. This prohibition era retcon is a way to justify the fact that people like to drink and there were many people who stood to make money on re-legalization. Which is why I said the question of it being a good thing is different. I encourage you to look at the data, as someone who also enjoys to drink. Government bans are surprisingly effective in most developed countries.
      • johnnyanmac 10mo ago
        "success" can be viewed in different lenses. In your lens of "did it make America healthier", sure. I wouldn't be surprised. My lens is "did America actually learn anything valuable from this period?". And all I see is "We The Government are fine poisoning our citizens as long as we profit from it". A lesson that passed on to cigarettes, then hard drugs, then fast food (which persists to this day), and now with social media. Then The Government wonders why no one trusts them to do the right thing. In that lens, I'd say prohibition and its downstream effects on how to regulate in general was absolutely awful and damning.
        • nostrebored 10mo ago
          That’s a fair interpretation! I meant in terms of the stated goals of the Prohibitionist movement. I imagine they would agree with both of us (and be very angry about it)
        • JoshTriplett 10mo ago
          > poisoning our citizens *allowing our citizens to make their own choices about what they consume
          • komali2 10mo ago
            Is that what happened with cigarettes? Remember how pervasive cigarette ads used to be? Human behavior is variable and can be influenced, even against our best interest. At what point do we acknowledge advertising as a form of psychological attack that causes people to do harmful things they wouldn't otherwise do? The government's role in this imo shouldn't be to allow corporations to try to convince people to hurt themselves and then to sell them things to hurt themselves with, but then turn around and restrict people's rights to slow down the self harm. Rather I believe the government should seek to annihilate corporations that try to harm the population. Is not the implicit relationship between corporations, people, and government, such that corporations want to be allowed to exploit a population for profit in return for some nominal good, and the government allows that only so long as the good outweighs the harm? Why not?
  • AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
    > The idea that someone is going to make an engaging experience on a “decentralized” network is honestly a bit silly to me. The market potential of this business is low. Decentralized networks with much larger incentives have failed to capture critical mass. When decentralized networks win, they often win so big that they become invisible. AOL is dead, the web isn't. Email, the global telephone network, the internet itself, these are all decentralized networks. The hardest part of doing this for social media is actually discovery. It's easier to show people an "engaging" feed when your algorithm has access to the full firehose to select from. But that doesn't mean doing it in a decentralized way is impossible, and if you pass a law that drives people away from centralized services, the incentive to do it goes up.
  • api 10mo ago
    The “engaging experience” is the entire problem. The fact that it’s harder to do addiction engineering on a decentralized network is a feature.
  • mx7zysuj4xew 10mo ago
    Aaannd then the mask came off, proving you were a moralistic authoritarian. I suppose you support cartels destabilizing entire nation-states with billions of criminal funds too
• ryan_lane 10mo ago
  What social networks are these? If they aren't complying with the law, they can (and should be) blocked. You're also missing what folks keep saying: the network effect isn't there. It needs to be popular enough that there's social pressure to be there. If it's that large, it's going to be large enough to be on the radar and then be under enforcement. Slippery-slope arguments, for the most part, exist to fear monger folks away from change, even when the argument itself is non-sensical.
  • johnnyanmac 10mo ago
    >What social networks are these? well for one: I find it humorous how this law has an exception for Roblox. That really speaks to how up to date lawmakers are on the situation (or worse: how easy it was for Roblox to pay them off). I don't see how it's a slippery slope when the corruption is before our very eyes.
    • iamnothere 10mo ago
      Roblox AND DISCORD. Somehow YouTube is considered “dangerous” though.
      • Popeyes 10mo ago
        YouTube is just a content hose though and it does not care what it shows you, you can go down some dark routes with YouTube just by letting it play.
      • anakaine 10mo ago
        YouTube didn’t make it through because of how it actively pushes alpha male crap at teenage boys. The Tate brothers and others who push the whole toxic masculinity, man are superior, men must protect women even from themselves, to be a man you must be able to fight, men are owed a position of power and women should be subservient, etc. It was a very strong feature in the early debate, and something educators put in as part of their submission as being an extremely noticeable shift for young men, and those same young men quite consistently stating the same content they viewed. YouTube’s tendency to push extreme rabbit holes and funnel towards extremism and conservatism in young men is what led to them being included.
• stackghost 10mo ago
  As others have mentioned it's the critical mass and the algorithmically-addicting dopamine treadmills that are the problem this law seeks to address.