Tell me again about how we need to keep children off social media....

We absolutely need to make efforts to limit kids' exposure to addictive social media mechanisms.

People aren't generally against kids using the Internet to communicate; they are against giant tech companies using children as a captive audience without regard to how their decisions might hurt them.

If kids are misusing a comments feature as a general-purpose chat room, good for them. They figured out how to manipulate the system instead of letting the system manipulate them.

Regardless, we need to regulate social media so that it doesn't harm children, and we need to do so without sacrificing the privacy of every adult (age-gates don't work).

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pteraspidomorph 3 hours ago | parent [-]

This is why we need to rename "social media" to the more accurate "antisocial media". I think everyone reasonable wants kids to be social with each other.

	▲	iAMkenough 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, the Trump approach of renaming things to resolve complex problems has a lot of merit to it.

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catlikesshrimp 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They tried to impose age verification on OS

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nekusar 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem is for-profit corporate social media.

Fediverse has never hired thousands of psychologists to gamify everything.

Fediverse hasn't added adverts to sell really seedy or blatantly illegal products.

Fediverse hasn't engaged in genocide in Myanmar or Rohinga, or anywhere else.

Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.

But Facebook/Meta, X, and others definitely have.

Edit: for those of you who -1'ed it, where am I wrong?

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criddell 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The biggest node in the fediverse is run by Meta.

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opan 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree with your post overall, but it's worth noting that most frontends for fedi are still based on Twitter, Instagram, etc. You get similar dark UX patterns like infinite scrolling in feeds or displaying like counts on posts. It's also hard to not copy these things now because they're so normalized. If you intentionally designed the frontend differently, people may just dismiss it as weird and different.

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astrange 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.

Only thing I ever hear about Mastodon is that you can't say or do anything without random other servers disconnecting you or random commenters yelling at you to add trigger warnings because you posted a picture of food. So I would say that being emotionally abused by German Linux users is in fact a mass psychology experiment.

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BeetleB 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I didn't downvote, but I am having trouble connecting your comment to the one you're responding to.

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nekusar 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The whole social media and under-18 argument isn't a problem with all social media.

Its a problem with for-profit social media. The companies use gamification to addict and create terrible trends for everyone involved.

Mastodon, peertube, lemmy, and federated media doesn't do any of these gamblification, gamification, psychological attacks, and more.

To be fair, the techniques should be banned by the FTC for deceptive practices, for everyone. But the kids angle is what's being gravitated towards.

	▲	BeetleB 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It was bad for kids even in the BBS days.[1] The things you mentioned merely made it worse. Put another way, it's as bad as your kids texting with random strangers. I know in the last decade the focus has been on all the big tech addiction mechanisms, but people were warning against them well before those came into play. [1] It was also great for some kids in those days. That doesn't take away from the risks.

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jmye 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

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tamimio 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Good parenting. This is not a technical or legal issue, this is parenting one.

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criddell 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I'll pretend for a minute that you are right and it's a parenting issue.

Now what? Apparently most parents are bad so what do you do?

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tamimio 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You mandate parents to attend training and educations, in fact, this is done in many countries even before they get married let alone having kids. You make it the spotlight, the current hot new thing, that parents need to learn how parent, it’s mentioned on ads and TV or podcasts or whatever, a full campaign, instead of wasting all these money on political campaigns or corporate ones that brings nothing of value, or instead of funding entertainment industry with who knows say 10bn from tax payers, make it 5bn and the rest goes into teaching and training parents, not just for the kids, but also to be a good family, that’s an investment definitely worth it. There are many ways but obviously it’s the least priority, because it’s in the interest of the state to keep it like this, to justify later when laws are passed that violate people privacy and rights.

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cobbzilla 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> You mandate parents to attend training and educations

Do you advance to struggle sessions and incarceration for noncompliant parents?

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BeetleB 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You start with:

> This is not a technical or legal issue, this is parenting one.

And then go ahead by proposing it is enforced via legislation:

> You mandate parents to attend training and educations

	▲	tamimio 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, if you wanna go with legal mandates, possible, but the mandate I mentioned up there more of social mandate, a social responsibility. And for the other replies above as I can’t reply to all, sessions can be done on parents pace online, this is not the 90s anymore, or through employments, or other means, and not participating for example can result on losing the family benefits they collect from the tax dollar. Again, these are just examples on top of my head, but the point in here that this should be the parents/custodian responsibility, if they lack knowledge or training, they get it, if they don’t want to, they get penalized, but it’s in noway the state to decide if your kids open the PC/phone at night or access this service or not.

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bethekidyouwant 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

lmao or what?