Reddit has been a cesspit of recycled pablum, populist image macros and low effort reply comments for more than a decade. Enthusiast subreddits are astroturfed to hell and back by people with a Shopify storefront and a dream trying to growth hack their way to a hockey stick. The low barrier to entry to each community means that this vapid culture eventually diffuses itself across subreddits that might otherwise be good. It's a postmodern toilet that flushes into its own tank.

I don't care if I sound old and salty when I say this: I miss phpBB and Invision forums. Even those are being bought up by marketing companies to sell ads and transformed with social media features... Xenforo (which everybody uses now) allows liking posts and supports Instagram-style content feeds.

Agree on how the platform’s have changed.

However, I don’t think Reddit is an exception. Popular is often filled with content that is driven by the feelings of fear and hate. Not something I’d like to continually expose kids or teens to.

> Modern social media is nothing like social media in early days

Indeed. I no longer call them social media. They have all become attention media platforms. I recently expressed my thoughts about this on my blog at <https://susam.net/attention-media-is-not-social-media.html>.

These days I typically resolve the domain names of these attention media platforms to 127.0.0.1 in my /etc/hosts file, so that I do not inadvertently end up visiting them by following a link somewhere else. I think there are very few true social media platforms remaining today, among which I visit only HN and Mastodon.

I wouldn't be surprised if Meta turned WhatsApp into a TikTok clone just to get around the restrictions. They know that banning WhatsApp for teenagers in Europe is almost impossible. I look at my kids, all their sports clubs and other extracurricular activities are organized through WhatsApp. I already had to block Youtube on their devices. I was alright with them watching a couple of long-form youtube videos every day, but now if I unblock Youtube all they do is watch Shorts, with no way to disable it.

>Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them. The content must either be addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the content doesn't matter at all.

"AI" is really no different. These social media bans should include "AI" too, for people under a certain age. I even see adults that don't understand the limits of "AI" and that it shouldn't be trusted blindly.

When did this start? IMHO it started with instagram. I remember back then there were multiple retro photo apps, insta was one of them, I had several on my phone and kept playing around with them (at the time apps felt like Christmas presents, each update exploring a device feature in creative ways).

I don't quite remember, but I don't think it was a social network then, I think you posted the photos in other networks, and then they made it into a social network and something strange happened. People started posting pictures of food and just general daily life stuff and I thought this was a small group of people who were a extroverts and just wanted to show off idk, they ate beautiful food.

Then something strange happened. This behavior started getting normalized, all other insta like apps disappeared and shortly after, it became necessary to have an instagram account.

I remember at the time I thought something was off, to this day I think I have posted a total of 10 instagram images, they still have the old filters, and stayed off of it since.

But it's been interesting watching it morph into this hydra that simply cannot be put down, to the point where it's more powerful than governments.

Reddit is plenty addictive in my experience, and I've heard the same from other people ranging from high school teachers to tradespeople.

I can relate to this. Early social media were forum sites, boards, irc, mailing lists and things like that.

Myspace and early Facebook were already a downgrade to classic chatrooms. I met with so many interesting people on chat in the early 2000s and have met with many offline as well. Multiple times I've travelled 6+ hours to participate in chat meetups with 20-50 others from the same chatroom.

Those were different times: Over 4 years, I've never received a d*ckpic or was target of stalking, harassment, abuse or scam. People were genuinely interested in each other, chat was not about building a personal brand and anonymity didn't make commenters psychos.

I'm not sure if ignorance was bliss, or times changed so much, but as an adult, I feel online communication has became a battlefield where I need to protect my sanity every time I interact with it. Rage bait, fake news, ads, bot farms, lies in a never ending flood. I wouldn't let my children to even try to live the same, uncontrolled online life I had.

> Probably even Reddit - which does have an algorithm to show specific content - is not as bad.

I'm surprised Reddit gets a pass or borderline pass in social media discussions.

In my experience working with kids, Reddit was the worst of the social media platforms for mental health. By far. The kids who were into Reddit were always spouting off information they got from Reddit and had soul-crushing amounts of cynicism about the world. On top of that, they had a chip on their shoulder about it all, believing that Reddit was a superior source of truth about the world.

The whole experience caught me off guard because going into this I mostly heard about the stereotypical social media dangers that get talked about, like boys following Andrew Tate and such. Instead the biggest problem was Redditors on a fast path to doomerism.

> Quality of the content doesn't matter at all

Exactly.

Engagement is prioritized over quality on most mediums. I find user generated content on social media absolutely abhorrent.

Thank goodness for hacker news. I can read something, share my views and in some cases, my views may be based on some weak intuition and I learn from polite correctness.

> Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them.

Agreed but you have this on many websites such as youtube. Is youtube the next to get banned here? I mean you can write comments to so it is kind of a social mediua setup as well.

> So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine.

I don't know. It sounds quite arbitrary to me.

Not that I have anything against chopping down the big platforms. They truly abuse many people.

> So it's probably fine to just block the big platforms. Forums or messengers (without ads and public channels) are probably fine.

Even better might be to just destroy the big platforms by breaking them up.

Tictoc, Instagram, Youtube shorts and in parts Linkedin are Digital Drugs. Similisr to smoking cigarettes or vaping.

Whats fascinating about thid is that we have managed to create a new class of drugs - that does not require physical substances to be added to our bodies...and works via visual stimulous only.

100%. Go on Facebook or Instagram today and you’re more likely to see viral videos than to see anything to do with your friends. It’s just a moth to flame.

Probably the online dating platforms are the same way. Someone actually finding their mate, and no longer needing the platform is counterproductive to their business model.

I wish the same would happen for games like Roblox. These games suffer from all the same problems social media does.

> Back then it was a platform to communicate with friends, and maybe even find new friends to meet up with.

Those still exist... and this ban will probably outlaw them for the people who need it the most.

> Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them.

Heard the same thing about video games, TV shows, D&D, texting and even youth novels.

There are a lot of big feelings about social media, but little data.

If the goal is to make social media "less addictive", the article in the OP does nothing to stop that. The article claims that social media affects youth mental health, but does the data actually back that up?

From the Guardian[1]:

> Social media time does not increase teenagers’ mental health problems – study

> Research finds no evidence heavier social media use or more gaming increases symptoms of anxiety or depression

> Screen time spent gaming or on social media does not cause mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale study.

> With ministers in the UK considering whether to follow Australia’s example by banning social media use for under-16s, the findings challenge concerns that long periods spent gaming or scrolling TikTok or Instagram are driving an increase in teenagers’ depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions.

> Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties to find out whether technology use genuinely predicted later mental health difficulties.

From Nature[2]:

> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health

From the Atlantic[3] with citations in the article:

> The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens, It may only make things worse.

> I am a developmental psychologist[], and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find[4] compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.

> Many other researchers have found the same[5]. In fact, a recent[6] study and a review of research[6] on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report[7] concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/candi...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-t...

[4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31929951/

[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00063-7#:~:text=G...

[6] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32734903/

[7] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27396/Highlights_...

reddit having tons of niche subreddits and the ability to sort them by best all time is one of my favorite ways to filter for higher-quality content. (i don't use the main feed much.)

The keyword here is monetization, it’s what ruined social media, among many other entertainment industries. If we somehow managed to ban monetization through social media or internet, you will notice how it will reset back to ol’ fun days.

I totally agreed with you, right up until the last paragraph. Reddit is among the worst communities on the internet.

Reddit is actually the worst of the bunch.

I've noticed comments on YouTube videos about politically controversial things in the US show incredibly obvious bot activity.

It’s not really social media at all and we should stop calling it that. I call them chum feeds or scrollers. There’s no social component. It’s just addictive short form infinite scroll brain rot.

Social media deserving of the name is almost dead. It’s not that profitable and the sites are expensive to run.

The medical and financial predators targeting elderly makes me wonder how to constrain it. The law doesn’t really help, short of having a court determine there’s some level of incapacity.

In theory the law doesn’t require victim cooperation. In practice, I’ve found local prosecutors won’t touch a case with an uncooperative victim. And most victims don’t cooperate whether out of humiliation or rejection pf the very idea they can be scammed. Because to them all scams are obvious, and only morons are scammed. They consistently lack imagination for the sophistication and manipulation component of scams, thinking it’s all about obviousness.

I’m sure it’s not only a case of “save the children”. Saving grandma’s retirement accounts is also important. The internet is a cesspool.

I remember when they saw what a certain game app was doing and were disgusted by it. Wild to me that those same people l̶a̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶ almost instantly chose to not only adopt the behavior but make it core functionality. It's way worse when you see the evil and STILL chose it.

The Australian 'social media' ban is only blocking specific platforms, so not really a social media ban. Lots of 'but what about' and 'kids will just' articles in the media, which didn't really address that forcing kids to move from a known toxic environment to a hopefully less toxic environment is at least a step in the right direction, even if not a silver bullet. There are certainly good reasons for kids to be on social media, but none of those reasons are valid when talking about Twitter. Youtube seems the hardest one to deal with, combining a great information resource with uncontrolled toxic comments and borderline illegal and harmful content.

> 2) “Social media” lumps together very different things: - messaging friends, hobby groups, learning communities, identity-affirming support - infinite-scroll algorithmic feeds + targeted ads + push notifications + autoplay People in this thread are mostly describing the second category (“attention media”). If that’s the problem, regulate that layer.

I think you're not focussing on the "media" half of social media to differentiate some of that stuff.

> "messaging friends, hobby groups, learning communities, identity-affirming support"

Those things are all social but I don't see the media.

Once again I am hoping for a ban on _smart_phones. Not laptops. Not tablets (although those could get tricky I admit). Not dumb phones. Details will need to be worked out (like smart watches or future VR devices). Maybe a combination of:

- SIM - large enough screen or video playback capability - camera

Easier to democratise enforcement (report and fine) and you don’t need to rely on the very platforms you are trying to restrict.

Teens can still talk online. Social media is an obvious poison and we shouldn't give kids access to it.

Are you referring to MySpace?

My highschool band had tracks and videos of live performances in the school hall on there that is forever lost and I'm still bitter about it.

A couple of decades ago, a politically active family I knew was grooming their child to be a future Prime Minister. While the poor kid had amazing privilege that other kids could only dream of, one strict rule was no Facebook or similar. Not even appearing on friends feeds (friends in a similar social strata, so workable). They could see that nobody would be getting elected to positions of power with such a documented past. Now days you of course hire someone to maintain a fake profile.

> technical failure during migration

Showing my age when the first thing that came to mind was ' but ma.gnolia was more of a social bookmarking...'

> If there's no profit to be made in servicing said demographic and a law requesting at least end user 'agreement' that they are an adult, this should be sufficient.

Is it still advertising if an "influencer" takes money on the down low to sip a Pepsi not too obviously in the middle of a video?

Is it still advertising if an attractive and young person provides news that happens to be colored in a way that supports the narratives of a particular political faction?

Is it still advertising if you can't prove that a foreign power encouraged a popular yoga enthusiast or makeup artist to post some whispered ideas that weaken citizens' faith in your institutions? Does that foreign power ever care about profit?

Advertising and propaganda love to explore the grey spaces around definitions, so your bans will end up being a whack-a-mole game. Cutting off kids with an ID check is much easier. Implementing age verification the Apple way would even protect privacy by simply registering whether Apple can attest that the user is over or under the age limit, without handing the ID over to third parties.

Who decides whether an ad is targeting children or not?

I’m not playing devil’s advocate, I’m curious what the SOTA is for ad moderation. I’m sure it’s relatively easy to tell a kid’s toy ad from adult ones like alcohol, but how do you differentiate toy ads targeting parents vs toy ads targeting kids?

Instead of banning social media for teenagers, regulate it in ways that actively reduce addictive design.

For example: after 15 minutes of short-form content, show an unskippable timer every third video, displaying today’s, this week’s, and total watch time. The same principle should apply to endless scrolling, make usage visible and interruptible.

Base it on actual screen time. This would protect teenagers and benefit adults.

Any kind of zero knowledge verification should be ok.

But with minors it often goes a long way to just make the law. It’s a good instruction to parents who should be able to control this. Laws on bike helmets for minors are followed nearly 100% not because they are enforced by authorities but because the law gives parents guidance.

There is still a financial incentive to loop in teenagers that would stay on a platform and spend money there later.

Why not device-side headers? Kids' devices should always include a header saying "I'm a kid, don't show me adult content.

You can tell these proposals are made in bad faith because we can do age verification in an anonymous way using zero-knowledge proofs but regulators demand linkable IDs instead.

It's not about protecting the kids. It's about managing the public's information diet. The latter is not a legitimate function of any state.

I disagree, we should have age verification but maybe it can be done in a mostly anonymous way like a central arbiter of identity from the government or something.

Without age verification this is obviously an unenforceable ban... I think Finland already has schemes for age verification.

I am an Australian Instagram user in my 30s. When setting up my profile a few years ago I set the birthday to some fake date near my real age. At no point, including when the ban went live, was I ever asked to prove my age through any means. Nobody I know has either (noting that everyone I've asked is an adult).

There is an alternative: prohibit smart phones for youth. They can possess simple phones.

Good, less people will waste their lives talking to bots and other low value activities

Agreed. I think we need to ban addictive dark patterns on ALL platforms for ALL ages.

110%.

No website of any kind should require IDV unless banking. It is a tool that will be used for censorship, removal of access to information, destruction of freedom of speech, erosion of privacy, and attacks on political opponents.

We need anonymity, ephemerality, and public square free speech.

Governments should instead regulate what these companies can do. How they advertise. Engagement algorithms. Stop internal efforts to target kids. Etc.

Disallow advertising to kids. Turn off ads on children's accounts if the user is predicted or self reports as a kid. Turn off the algorithm for kids.

Social media's entire income model is finding out who you are to advertise more accurately. Facebook knows your age down to the day, and if they ask for ID this is them taking even more data.

IMHO the main point of these schemes is to make it hard for adults to use social media somewhat-anonyously. So the government can more easily identify those posting 'prohibited speech'.

If there was a legitimate drive to protect kids from the worst of the Internet, there'd have been more of a crackdown on porn, gore, etc long before social media became such a big problem. And smartphones would have never been allowed in schools.

Finland has a whole national ID system, all interlinked. They aren't going to be scanning faces to implement this stuff here - and anyway the government here already knows what you look like.

"Social media" doesn't just mean Facebook right? It includes sites like Hacker News, yeah?

You are describing 4chan

Do you not see the irony of posting this on a social media site (hacker news), given you're one of the users?

I guess self-hatred is one of the motivating vectors of authoritarianism.

Would you also secretly like it if daddy government was always watching you on camera and triggered your shock collar every time you reached for a candy bar?

By creating 'rules' for social media based on what's good and bad instead of banning it altogether you end up creating loopholes instead. Even in the case we instead first discuss what is "ass" we will probably end up having a debate instead of getting anything done for another 10 years. I'm on team, just get shit done.

I’d say status quo is before social media as that’s where most childhoods have happened. Targeting children with social media is definitely a new thing and still an experiment since those poor souls that had their lives surveilled by Meta are just coming of age and we’re just learning about the damages.

The fact that you're the only one calling this out is quite frankly alarming.

It's one of the most authoritarian statements I've ever heard from a western government. And just because its the trendy moral panic of the day, everybody is cheering it on.

Anything where we allow people free will is by definition an "uncontrolled human experiment" and the basis of any free society.

Should we also end the "uncontrolled human experiment" of allowing people to have private money and make their own purchase decisions? Should we end the "uncontrolled human experiment" of allowing people to select their own romantic partners?

> no attempt is being made here to bring them back to their original, non-malicious shape.

Social networks can revert back to original form any minute, nobody’s stopping them.

> Is the social media hate really so powerful that, channeled carefully, it can overshadow free speech?

Bots giving platform to schizos and fringe radicals is a freedom of speech?

Has anyone ever argued that children should have full access to the entire internet?

Seems like a horribly bad idea.

Ranking might be deterministic but it’s never free from bias.

I remember reading the Montreal Gazette as a kid, with their lopsided takes on various issues (local and international) as a result of their "organic local" writers. The local talk radio (CJAD) was worse.

I much prefer Youtube videos and international media from multiple viewpoints to that world.

Social media is not a hard drug.

Compare it to marijuanna instead. Then it’s on the same level of controversy.

You are downvoted, but you are totally right. Humans are not meant to cry daily over stuff that happens half a world away, or be exposed to a thousand new strangers every day. But thanks to internet, your mom and aunt can have an endless fuel to their various anxieties and your daughter can have eating disorders comparing herself to celebrities.

Bring a pre-internet pre-24/7 TV person to present day and they’ll spot the problem straight away. Amusing Ourselves To Death was written in reaction to the societal changes brought by the TV. What about the impact of Internet news, and Facebook, and Tiktok?

There's still a double digit percentage of parents that oppose the ban. The only way to make a ban work without parental support is requiring a video camera to be running constantly doing facial verification while the app is running, completely unfeasible.

Eventually group SMS would still function well for this, no? Shared email lists barring that. This seems like a race to the bottom.

On the bright side, if every big SNS required ID verification, and majority would stop using it, then they would die it. Win for a humanity, no?

>the writing is on the wall that social media's are numbered, well at least its in current form

There's enough of us devs that absolutely fucking hate the idea of governments controlling how people communicate that the next stage of social media will probably be a decentralised system that's extremely difficult to shut down. Unless every government devolves into full on China-style authoritarianism with deep packet inspection, a national firewall and ubiquitous surveillance, there's no way to stop a well designed distributed social media platform. There just hasn't been enough incentive yet for people to build one.

I think Surveillance Globalism would be a more apt description. Which is a hundred times scarier since its coming from the government, multiple governments around the world simultaneously, and its about control rather than making money off you.

No, they’ll probably just follow Australia’s lead[1] of: default allow; algorithmic age estimation; account suspend; ID to unblock. Chill.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyp9d3ddqyo.amp

Horse. Barn. Gone.

What does this have to do with social networks ban?