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I don't like age verification. However I'm not concerned about it. The internet needs new spaces that are more decentralized and less in bed with governments.
by zarzavat 4mo ago
I don't like age verification. However I'm not concerned about it.
The internet needs new spaces that are more decentralized and less in bed with governments.
We already lost our freedom when we agreed to move from IRC to Discord, from phpBB to Reddit, etc.
The teenagers who are blocked from mainstream social media will deliver us new free online spaces that are better than what they're blocked from.
- Gigachad 4mo agoWhat we need is more personal spaces. Less feeds, more small group chats with people you actually know. I'm totally fine with destroying Reddit/Twitter/etc
- tancop 4mo agoi want more feeds than centralized services can ever have. on bluesky youre not limited to fyp and following you can install literally hundreds of options. almost all of them are open source and self hostable. theres a place for group chats and tight communities but we also need global spaces where you can reach anyone. you cant promote your new album or start organizing a union or share some really good pics with the world if all you have is individual servers.
- ligne 4mo agoReddit and Twitter can buy their way out of those problems (hell, they can buy their way out of trouble for literally generating sexual abuse content). What makes you think they'll be affected more than the operator of a little Mastodon server do the same?
- pibaker 4mo agoWhat happens when federal agents kick down your front door because you ran a free range mom and pop BBS that did not comply with latest ID verification requirements? Big companies will benefit the most from these regulations. It's just good ol regulatory capture. They will have the most resources to comply with the laws. They have a captive audience that will be more willing to give up their personal info when asked — keep in mind Facebook and instagram is widely used for business. It is your small time forum admin who would rather shut down his hobbyist online community that never made him any money anyway than to ask for IDs. We have already seen stories of websites shutting down due to existing UK regulations. Curiously, all small, personal operations, not the kind of corporate social media they tell you the laws are meant to target.
- zarzavat 4mo agoIt seems unlikely that running a website without age verification will be illegal across the entire planet.
- vasco 4mo agoIt seemed unlikely to me that cookie banners would be a thing across the whole internet if nothing else because no website operators would put them in. How wrong was I. All they need to do is popularize the idea of "if your website doesn't do X, it'll place lower on google" and people will do anything. My websites still don't have cookie banners and the police still hasn't come to my house. And the websites uses cookies like every other website always did.
- microgpt 4mo agoCookie banners aren't across the whole internet.
- Nursie 4mo agoYou really only need the banners if you're doing privacy-impinging things. Much like the GDPR notices that a small industry of 'compliance' product companies sold seemingly to everyone as necessary, they aren't if you're only using cookies for functional reasons and not tracking people. Unfortunately that leads to lower margins for advertisers and we can't have that.
- CalRobert 4mo agoIronically 99% of them don’t meet legal requirements. They serve no purpose.
- hdgvhicv 4mo agoThe purpose is to make people think laws like gdpr are bad for people, rather than bad for the surveillance industry.
- pibaker 4mo ago
- rockskon 4mo agoSuch spaces will never scale if there's widespread legal prohibitions. It is foolish to assume we can innovate our way around the law as opposed to talking with lawmakers to oppose the law before it gets on the books.
- fyredge 4mo agoAnd they absolutely should not scale. Scaling is the root cause of all social media ills. If all you see are the 100 people nearest to you, the village idiot will not be able to spread his gospel so easily
- rockskon 4mo agoThe social media you don't want will continue to scale.
- fyredge 4mo agoRight, and therefore we regulate them
- rockskon 4mo agoAnd what sort of regulations did you have in mind that don't primarily punish the users?
- fyredge 4mo agoOnes that prevent the scaling itself: No algorithmic recommendation. No mixing between known users (friends, followers etc.), recommended users (swipe feed) and advertised content. No publication of user content. It's social media, not global media. I posit that these points will be enough to curtail most of social media ills. Don't allow recommendation of slop and there will be a similar reduction in production. There will still be the village idiot that shares slop content, but their reach is limited since they have to actively persuade people to their message, rather than be recommended for being psychologically stimulating.
- gigel82 4mo agoYou do realize the next step is ISP-level tagging of traffic? And VPNs are already being outlawed in much of the western world. Unless you expect the teenagers to run underground mesh radio networks and risk FCC's hammer (real jailtime), it's just wishful thinking.
- kulahan 4mo agoI don’t expect teenagers to do anything but largely be harmed by the internet.
- iamnothere 4mo agoTeens will just pass around micro SD cards full of memes, warez, and porn, like kids did in the old days with floppy disks. Finding creative ways around restrictions is pretty much the definition of being a teenager.
- kjshsh123 4mo agoThat sounds like mistaken optimism due to a mistaken interpretation of the invisible hand. Mandating age verification and the inevitable implementation requirements are bad for freedom. Behaviour changes and innovations will mitigate some of the negatives, but bad things are bad.
- vasco 4mo agoThis is like saying you're not concerned about war because people will notice war is bad and stop doing it. It's not a smart position to hold that bad things are good because they may bring on reversals.
- pineapple_opus 4mo agoThey already have started right ? Like example - bluesky (bsky.social)
- marcus_holmes 4mo agoNope, they just break the law: https://www.bmj.com/content/393/bmj-2026-363695 https://www.bmj.com/content/393/bmj-2026-363695 > Conclusions: Despite the intent of the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 to delay access to social media platforms and reduce the potential for online harms, little evidence was found of immediate substantive reductions in reported social media use by adolescents under 16 years. We are training teenagers that laws are stupid and can be circumvented easily and without consequences. As well as continuing to subject them to the harms of social media, only now without any means of monitoring them or holding the social media companies responsible.
- tompagenet2 4mo agoThe law doesn't make it a crime for children to access social media, but for the companies that provided it to allow that child to access it.
- Havoc 4mo agoThe only thing teenagers are delivering is doomscrolling addiction. Seems improper me that the revert to something like irc en mass