Age Verification

[PATHFINDER]

Huge pushes for age verification on the Internet recently. I thought this backfiring on adults (everyone loses privacy, not just kids) would lead people to reconsider their positions, but apparently not. "I have nothing against age verification, but this implementation is wrong..." etc

I'm just mourning for an Internet I used to know when I was a kid. When Teen Baby Diaper Lovers (TBDLs) were so common, they had an entire forum and subreddit, for example. I feel like a lot of them grew up and are now pulling up the ladder behind them.

... And Discord, if teens love the protection so much, why do you make it so hard to escape it? Why are people to desperate to disable the "safety protections"? Could it be because they don't actually want them in the first place? For anyone (teen or adult) whom actually want to avoid NSFW content, they would just opt in to it by themselves...

No, it's not for protection. It's just for control.

[Not Forever]

I agree, and it’s annoying how people see it positively. It feels to me like a way to shirk responsibility, as if the minors themselves are the problem. I’ve heard people cheerfully say that communities will be healthier without minors.

But for me, there’s also the rhetoric about how harmful social media is. It’s like seeing adults as smokers who keep cigarettes away from their children. They don’t care about their own health, but they’re there taking cigarette packs away from their kids. Because, let’s remember, this rhetoric that social media ruins lives is mostly spread by social media itself.

[Learning to undeny]

For me, social media should vanish from Earth. Restricting minors' usage would be a step in the right direction if it was done in a privacy-respecting way. Unfortunately, we are accepting to be monitored to "protect children", instead of fighting against evil social media.

I find the comparison to cigarettes quite appropriate. Cigarettes should not be manufactured, not just age-restricted. Of course, the issue would then be to avoid an underground market, but that's the spirit at least.

[Not Forever]

For me, social media should vanish from Earth. Restricting minors' usage would be a step in the right direction if it was done in a privacy-respecting way. Unfortunately, we are accepting to be monitored to "protect children", instead of fighting against evil social media.

I find the comparison to cigarettes quite appropriate. Cigarettes should not be manufactured, not just age-restricted. Of course, the issue would then be to avoid an underground market, but that's the spirit at least.

But are social media really the problem?
I mean, first of all, what is a social medium? A social medium is a place where users interact with each other, where they can create content and build a community. This forum counts as social media, Discord counts as social media, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok count as social media. They are a feature of Web 2.0.

Considering social media as a problem is like saying that having a place where users interact with each other, where they can publish their own content and form a community (so basically discussing content itself), is inherently harmful—like cigarette smoke.

Sociality has its downsides, but does it really make sense to consider social interaction as negative?

PS: I’m not against smoking; I believe a person should have the right to smoke if they want to. Just like I’m not against alcohol or anything else, I think the state shouldn’t interfere with what a citizen wants or doesn’t want to do. At most, it should regulate things to provide transparency to the citizen about what they’re engaging in. In other words, returning to the social media discussion, social media itself is not the problem; it’s the underlying algorithms that could be regulated. And if the real problem is the algorithms, then those should be criticized, and transparency should be demanded.

[Learning to undeny]

But are social media really the problem?
I mean, first of all, what is a social medium? A social medium is a place where users interact with each other, where they can create content and build a community. This forum counts as social media, Discord counts as social media, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok count as social media. They are a feature of Web 2.0.

OK, I wanted to refer to the large social media (X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, tumblr, reddit...) with their algorithms, and not to every place where users interact. Sorry for the confusion. Do the new measures also apply to forums? If so, I was not aware of this.

PS: I’m not against smoking; I believe a person should have the right to smoke if they want to. Just like I’m not against alcohol or anything else, I think the state shouldn’t interfere with what a citizen wants or doesn’t want to do.

Comparing this world to a hypothetical one where tobacco doesn't exist, I would rather choose that one, given that the existence of tobacco doesn't really imply more freedom. If I wouldn't support the eradication of tobacco overnight, it's simply because that's impossible (plus other factors such as people who already have the habit or economic consequences), but I don't think it would be a bad thing or decrease our freedom. With these algorithms it's the same thing, but it seems more plausible to eradicate them.

[Not Forever]

OK, I wanted to refer to the large social media (X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, tumblr, reddit...) with their algorithms, and not to every place where users interact. Sorry for the confusion. Do the new measures also apply to forums? If so, I was not aware of this.

I understood that you were referring to those, but my main point is more about defining what a social media platform actually is and what people truly dislike about it. Setting aside the issue of algorithms, often what people really dislike is that other people have certain interests or talk about certain topics.

For example, I’m someone who is critical of “social media feminism.” I don’t like what I see as its conspiratorial narrative, etc. Because of that, I could say that I don’t like social media, since I see people parroting arguments that I believe are wrong. But they’re wrong to me. Someone else might think the same about the topics I’m interested in, including my own criticism. So then I wonder: are social media platforms the problem, or are we pointing the finger at them simply because they distance people from our ideal way of thinking?

You can see this, for example, in the dispute between X and Bluesky. Two factions each think the other platform should be shut down, even though they basically function in the same way—just because they see them as representing groups of thought they don’t like.

Are conspiratorial rhetorics the real problem? In the past, anti-vaccine theories were promoted through print media, with cartoons showing people mutating after getting a shot.

So for me, before saying that social media are the problem, we need to define what the actual problem being denounced is—and whether social media really are the issue, whether it’s truly their algorithms, and so on. Even if we’re just talking about someone who spends all their time watching videos, in the end it’s just a slightly different form of television. Is TikTok inherently worse than YouTube? Is YouTube inherently worse than television?

I’m not sure if I’m managing to get my point across.

[Adge]

I remember the days when the internet used to have forums before it became apps and after that, possibly everything becoming AI assuming section 230 of the CDA gets repealed. RIP Golden Age of the internet (1969-1995). Before cloudshit took over, before the CDA was passed when the government decided to regulate it, back when it was pure chaos. Emails took days to deliver, sometimes got lost and it was server-based, not cloud. The first web browser wasn't launched until 1994 with Nexus browser for Nextstep OS. Prior they used hyperlink interfaces. FUN FACT: the internet was originally designed to survive despite zero infrastructure. Also, back in the 90s when piracy was real big, somehow people were pirating games online back then. The first microprocessor wasn't invented until the early 1970s, prior computers used discrete transistor logic and not integrated circuits. They had minicomputers before the micro revolution and at the beginning of the microcomputer revolution, computers were bought at radio shack in assembly kits, took months to build and ISPs were real expensive. You didn't start seeing fully assembled computers being sold until the 1980s with the Commodore 64 and others. People mostly used library computers for internet. Because of bandwidth limits, DDOSing wasn't common as it is now, and most peope used BBS in the 1980s until the World Wide Web started in 1989. People used acoustic couplers in the 1960s-80s before dial-up. It was all over POTS. Before the .com explosion, a URL would look like "http://www.greenplants//" instead of "greenplants.com". It was completely decentralized. You had Ask Jeeves and all that other good stuff. You didn't have bitminers, fake sites, or any other bullshit back then. And Bill Clinton is a bastard.

[Learning to undeny]

So for me, before saying that social media are the problem, we need to define what the actual problem being denounced is—and whether social media really are the issue, whether it’s truly their algorithms, and so on. Even if we’re just talking about someone who spends all their time watching videos, in the end it’s just a slightly different form of television. Is TikTok inherently worse than YouTube? Is YouTube inherently worse than television?

In my opinion, the problem that should be addressed is centralization of social media. A few big companies control what you can see, censor at will, create addictive algorithms, decide how to monetise "content creators" (thus dictating what they are allowed to do), shadow-ban dissenters, and so on. In this regard, TV is no better: it's even more centralized and a few companies decide the information you recieve. But there are unique problems when this happens to social media.

If social media was decentralized and FLOSS (maybe like the fediverse), there would be a lot of discourse that I would not like to see. There would still be risks, since everyone can be on the internet. But at least a wider variety of interests would be represented, not only those of large corporations, and the user would have more freedom as to what they want to see. Social media could be designed with the well-being of people in mind.

A different issue is that the proliferation of social media has been to the detriment of real-life groups. However, I'm not sure if this should be attacked. There is no denying of the benefits that they have brought, by making us less reliant on the newspapers and TV for information.