Hacker News

Believe it or not many people actually read news and books on their phones.

I think there a lot of survivorship bias in this observation, where the thing you’re most likely to see people watching is the thing that’s most flashy.

> On a bus or train, barely one or two people are actually doing something other than watching something online.

I mean, what else should I be doing? Self-analyzing and staring in the window?

Do people really ignore family and do completely separate things on their devices right next to each other?? Usually when I'm next to someone, I'm using my device to look up things related to the conversation, just like how I'd use a search engine during an internet discussion. I can't imagine just sitting around watching shorts right next to someone during a family gathering.

They don't. They want to let people opt out of social media feeds for the same reason they currently let gamblers self-exclude[0].

Politicians do not believe that casinos are popular despite the gambling and they do not believe that social media is popular despite the feed. They want to protect the general public from addiction.

It's all fun and games when you download Tiktok. Then one day you're scrolling while your kid is in the pool, the lifeguard jumps in to save her, you realise you would have let your daughter die because you're addicted to watching dance videos on the fent rectangle, and you decide to quit.

[0] https://www.betstop.gov.au/

Before it was social “media” Facebook was a great way to see friends & families updates in a chronological way with very little clutter. Then people began soapboxing, then came the ads, then all the random “interests” they assign to you and it’s completely useless now.

TikTok, IG etc are a little different as they’re actually media streams but I wanted to say that about Facebook - give me what I want on Facebook and it would be a wonderful service.

Even if someone was crazy about facebook, there was a limited amount of content they could see from my friends, you'd be done watching everything in 10 minutes. The levels of addiction we see today on TikTok, IG, etc were not even possible.

Social media and other such things were gaining explosively popularity (and addiction) long before 'the algorithm' was even a thought. Even in the pre-social media age, newsgroups and other such social venues had a similar effect, but relatively low reach because it wasn't mainstream and there were some significant barriers to getting started.

I'd look at trends as well. There is a time when Facebook was hot and trendy, whereas now it's a place for people's parents and grandparents - while all the cool kids are on Instagram. I think it's safe to say that the shift there was more social than technological. Younger generations wanted their own thing.

And I'd see TikTok as being in the same vein there, especially as YouTube has gradually shifted away from being YouTube and more like CorpoTube. But there weren't any especially viable stateside competitors. The few that did exist basically just tried to be YouTube, but with less content and worse CDN networks.

Why not give people the option? They don’t all have to use it, but it means some can.

Someone measured that if a user is teenager boy, it will take Tik Tok 9 minutest to serve misogynistic content...

Every social media is popular because of the network effect. Even TikTok launched just under a decade ago, grew with help from China’s government and cultural isolation, and only became “mainstream” (in 2020) after already having hundreds of millions of users including celebrities like Justin Bieber.

These algorithms can be incredibly predatory towards people who engage with content they don't want to see, because they're optimizing for engagement, not enjoyment.

Engagement does not correlate with want. I know people who hated every second of their time on TikTok because it kept showing them only the most awful and traumatic shit, but for the same reason, they couldn't just leave because the reason it was traumatic was because they felt terribly guilty to leave it alone. They were shown all sorts of threats about how terrible of a person they'd be if they didn't like, share, comment, etc. and they were scared out of their mind into having to do it, and that only taught the algorithm to show them more -- to seek out only the worst, most horrible and awful and traumatic content to show them because that scared them the most and compelled them the most. It's awful, horrible, sure they shouldn't have been on TikTok at all (no one should), but it shouldn't have done that to them either

Maybe read the bill first before commenting.

The first social networks were actually social (ie relating to friends), algos came later, to better exploit attention for ads.

When twitter changed its feeds it had to force people into the new style feed by giving them a choice but wiping their choice every time they opened the app and forcing the algorithmic slop feed.

This is long overdue and I hope all countries adopt it. It should be the default and if people want to consume slop they will always have a choice to do so.

I came here expecting an apologia for the manipulative feeds of big tech, and found one at the top. If that’s not what you intended, perhaps consider that you’re acting as a useful idiot for them.

> Why do people (or at least politicians pretend to) believe that cigarettes are popular despite the content nicotine and not because of them? The reason Malboro blew up is because it gives you a surge of dopamine without having to do anything for it.

Yes - TikTok is popular, precicely because the algorithmic feeds are designed to be addictive. They show content, not because its good, not because its what you ask for, but because its exactly what will keep your eyes glued to the screen.

I would assume that the majority of users would prefer a Facebook experience that showed them just the friends and family they follow, and nothing else.

The answer/comeback is "popular with whom?"

Most of my crowd seem to have left them behind because they went from a tool where I could see what my people were up to, and maybe the odd update about a band or a business I was interested in, to "Here are 50 things you have no interest in and by the way I deprioritised what your actual friends post".

This happened so much that most of the actual friends wandered off, making those posts even rarer. There seems to be a de-networking effect.

Should government be legislating that social networks work the way I want? Very good question, probably not. Am I still happy with this change? Broadly yes.

Please don't start randomly prohibiting things because you dis-approve of those things.

We have, at this point, over a 100 years of evidence showing that prohibition of psychoactive substances (alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, etc) doesn't actually do much to reduce consumption but do create an immense amount of suffering not just for anyone participating in the trade or consumption of those substances, but also anyone remotely connected to them - cf the immense violence perpetrated by drug cartels in the Americas, mostly because people living in the US seem to be in denial about their appetite for drugs.

So please, stop banning things you don't like, tax and regulate them instead. Use the tax proceeds to fund "social media rehab" clinics if you'd like.

Draconian "I don't like it, it gets banned" government wasn't a good idea in 15th century Spain, it's still not a good idea now. Let your fellow citizens make bad decisions, just ensure that the government is poised to profit from them.

Bingo. This is the path forward and solution to so many ills. IP needs a big rethink for the internet.

Red herring, you've linked to a conservative leaning sub community posting a source that is known to be generally inaccurate.

This is about legislation penalizing social media companies for shoving algorithmic slop down the throats of consumers.

But if we want to introduce political figures and their thoughts on social media; the traditional opposition party is lead by this man - someone willing to manipulate the public with social media.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/feb/12/fantastic-gr...

And the newer wonderkid of the media is engaged in widespread slopaganda: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-11/foreign-fake-news-pau...

OMG, I've got it now

"Albanese" is the second name of the Australian Prime Minister

LOL, I was wondering too what Albania had to do with all this, not being familiar with the australian prime minister name.

Albanese is an Italian name, for the record

In Albania, Albania is called Shqipëria.

Yep, I spent a hot minute puzzling over that sentence

> another example of our government latching onto a juicy trending topic and doing the bare minimum

Say it ain't so!

For those not following Australian politics, this is the theme of our times. Find a big issue that people want something done about, half-arse it and bow to corporate interests instead of taking decisive action. The big one recently has been gambling advertising. The government commissioned a report that came to the well-argued conclusion that, as the biggest gamblers in the world per capita, Australia really should ban gambling advertising. It's pervasive, offensive and way too normalised.

There appeared to be cross party support for the proposal, and widespread public support. Easy win for the party in power.

The current government sat on it for a couple of years and then came back with a watered down proposal to cap the amount it could be on tv and try to restrict it during times kids might be watching. Way to miss an open goal Albo.

That’s at least a choice.

The USA has a choice between two parties - democrat or republican. China only has one party, Russian has (in principle) one party and North Korea only has one dictator.

So if these places got a second party or dictator, it would be a 50% improvement.

The war on drugs was a failure, and the most successful cases (other than harsh punishments while avoiding massive drug use in the first place, like Singapore) involve legalization.

Indeed,

Thats part of the premise, we don't need to invent new technologies when email/rss are already self curated / federated.

The missing piece is discovery.

Which is why in addition to allowing you to aggregate internal/external feeds into one place, each instance also shares each external feed its users have subscribed too, and each user can share who they read (like a blog roll).

I don't know what I am looking at here?

No you can't, I just tried it.

I deleted all of my history and "paused" history tracking. Then I reloaded https://www.youtube.com.

My expectation: A feed of the pages I'm subscribed to.

My experience: A blank page which just says "Your watch history is off / You can change your setting at any time to get the latest videos tailored to you. [Learn more] / [Update Settings]".

Hilariously, it is exactly the same - in glorious 4K - on the YouTube app on my TV.

This is deliberately fucked in order force users into the algorithm.

> You can already do this on youtube by not allowing history.

And what a bliss that is! I love it how YouTube thinks it’s punishing me by turning off the home page recommendations if you disable history (it didn’t always do that) while it’s in fact a favour. In my country (and I assume most/every country), the default home feed is such a cesspool of vomit-inducing clickbait garbage that it boils my blood to even glance at it.

> That's great however after seeing their feed being empty people will switch back.

But yes, I have no illusion that everyone shares my aversion. Removing control from the companies will hopefully have some impact, though.

Maybe he's right, but there are way more issues with Bluesky that affect user retention. For example the app seems to love logging users out if they have intermittent Internet or are using a VPN, or just because the app feels like it. It's an insane bug or security stance.

Meanwhile, Setlog is gaining popularity in east Asia, which definitely indicates there is some demand for friend-only social media. I think many Discord users are basically using Discord like that too. Giving users the choice is the right move.

I have been trying to trick it into turning off for ages.

I wouldnt be surprised if most people opt back in. But its better than an outright ban.

> * Alternatively, American govt takes the position of "American companies don't have to follow the laws of random countries just because they accept IP packets from those countries". American companies eliminate their official business presence in onerous legal regimes but keep serving users there

Why would they do that? If they can't have a local business presence then they can't book local advertisers.

Which directly cuts any revenue they would get from the enterprise.

None of these companies need to have local business presences: they do because otherwise you can't get revenue from users in that nationality.

> American internet companies start to make the judgement that supporting EU/ANZ countries with difficult legal/tax requirements is a net cost and stop doing it, just IP-blocking those countries for the lowest legal risk

Productivity spikes, youth mental health issues trend downwards and the nutcase right-wing parties struggle to maintain momentum.

Can we have this please? Pretty please?