Ask HN: Am I Crazy for Cheering on Social Media Controls?

I'm no fan of current forms of social media, but let me ask you a question: do communicate or coordinate with others using any apps owned by Meta, Alphabet or Apple? For me, 100% of my connections communicate through these apps. If the law allowed communication and organization through these apps to be controlled by politicians, and some untrustworthy politicians gained power (far fetched, I know, that's never happened /s), they could easily control everyone and prevent any dissent or competition. What would my recourse be?

You argue that social media should be controlled. I can concede that point. The question is, who has control over it? If it's a politician or government, no thanks. If it's me, or you, or any adult or parent controlling it for themselves or their children, yes, by all means.

As far as I'm concerned, media, _in general_, can burn.

I visited my daughter at the hospital yesterday and her roommate's TV was tuned to a 24/24 news channel that seemed entirely focused on countering Russian disinformation and propaganda with… their local variants. The excitement of all those talking heads at the prospect of a nuclear arm wrestling was palpable. An interesting contrast with their audience's general inability to do anything constructive with all that "information".

If you want to limit the use of social media by minors using legislation, the only effective means these days is with some form of credit card requirement, or state issued ID. Either of these are a cost and risk to utilize. The net effect will be a poor tax which centralizes power among those who can afford pay the tax.

I myself don't have extra money to give Twitter, for example... and thus its utility for me is going to take a huge hit as the new rules take effect.

Social media isn't bad... social media moderated by AI to maximize engagement (and thus profit) is downright evil.

You see social media as only bad... but you post on HN. HN is social media too, you know.

There is good that we want to keep. But you're right that there are also bad effects. In some peoples' lives, the bad outweighs the good by a large amount. It would be really cool if we could fix the bad effects without removing the good...

There's an alternative theory about why Social Media sucks I'd like to ask OP their opinion about. It might sound a little elitist or exclusionary, but it rings true for me.

Why does Social Media suck? Maybe it's not because we don't have the right commercial entities running it. Maybe it's not because we don't have the right government rules regulating speech on it. Is the real problem with Social Media (and modern technology like idiot-proof cell-phones) that it's now possible for every low-IQ idiot out there to provide their (almost always) useless opinions to more people than the qualities of their ideas merit?

To make a long conversation short, most people are not that bright and have no serious useful ideas to add to any discussion outside of personal discussions about family and friends. When it comes to political discussions as an example, most people can (at best) parrot slogans they hear from politicians. Yet the Internet is flooded with political opinions anyway.

Why was the Internet a haven around say 2003? It's because most dumb people didn't have a computer with Internet access yet and it wasn't accessible to the average person. The Internet was great only when the idiots of the world weren't on it. You didn't need complicated rules or structures when the average online user was a smarter person.

4chan (despite whatever flaws it has) is still relatively good for some types of discussions because the immediately unintuitive UI makes it relatively inaccessible for dumb people.

HackerNews is relatively good because while the UI is pretty good, the culture and topics discussed make it inaccessible to dumb people.

Is this accessibility the real issue with Social Media and the Internet in general?

Censorship: bad. Fewer normies on the internet and computers: good.

Aside from that flippant line there is nothing wrong with being an accelerationist. If you think something is happening or going to happen then it is fine to make it happen faster and harder.

Something else governments should ban: smartphones. They won't even consider it since they'd lose that surveillance apparatus.

"I only see social media as a bad thing for humanity."

Only? That is some black and white thinking.