It seems that bluesky will be the political left's version of twitter going forward. The same way truth social became a right-wing echo chamber from its inception. I see the world(the US in particular) drawing lines and further devolving online discourse in a time where what we need most is mutual understanding and respect.
I don't think think is entirely true, truth social was just MAGA echo-chamber, Bluesky has a much wider net - i see a lot of academia, tech, artists, environmentalists, a lot of small communities there - some have migrated completely over there
The elevator pitch for this service is indeed "X for leftists". This is why journalists are flocking to it, and speaking about it, despite it being totally irrelevant, just like X is.
I'd put it more like X but with open data, open APIs, and the ability to control your feed & collaboratively improve your experience with 3rd party feeds, moderations, and algorithms.
The left thing seems incredibly incidental. This feels like the first time the social networks are offering any serious tools for protection & shielding ourselves from wild content & algorithms, giving us the power to define our social network experience. The right could benefit just as much, build their own good experience. It would need to be built around something other than in your face razzing on people on the left though!
Agreed but all the CWD in US deer is making venison a risky proposition. What a world we’ve made, nothing is safe anymore. The fish are full of heavy metals, the animals full of prion diseases and the woods full of Lyme’s disease causing ticks.
Well the education system certainly needs attention and a refactoring. I don't think anyone can dispute that. The details of what the end goal looks like vary wildly based on who you talk to.
Manufactured outrage. Designed to entice clickbait farmers to spread the word. Gone are the days of blasting millions into a TV ad. No new age ad gets that attention anymore. Instead, the idea is to go viral.
What constitutional right to privacy from private parties? There’s no explicit constitutional right to privacy, and the constitution only binds the government.
Possibly the first amendment, "petition the government for redress of grievances". Privacy violation is not an explicitly enumerated grievance, but neither are most causes for civil litigation.
Also possibly not; it depends on the particulars and the judge.
You also have the right to litigate under common law, which does have a lot to do with the first amendment. Though granted, you are individually unlikely to prevail in that way. Like said, it depends on the particulars and the judge.
I'm not sure where this idea comes from. That clause is treated as the source of the right to access the civil litigation system; this is what "petitioning the government for redress of grievances" means. The right to sue the government itself doesn't meaningfully exist except as the government permits (sovereign immunity), and it was much later that this clause was read (IMO correctly but I'm just some dude) to cover non-litigation activities.
I think everyone has a sour taste left over from decades of half-baked laws written by politicians that don't understand the basics of the internet or technology in general.
With that said, I also don't understand the issues people are having with this.
I wonder how they deal with the (hopefully) constant abuse reports aimed at them from providers who are tired of their shady customers doing shady things from their IPs.
OK, I'll bite. How exactly are [US] domestic users of services supposed to prove they don't need to prove their identity?
EDIT: it reminds me of the Common Travel Area (between Ireland and of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), which has some glorious inconsistencies. For instance that nationals of Ireland and the UK travelling between those two countries do not need a passport, except when you take an international flight and rock up at IE/UK border control it's fairly hard to prove you are a national who doesn't need to provide a passport without having ... a passport (or equivalent ID).
Have you travelled between the UK and Ireland? You most definitely do not need a passport and do not need "equivalent ID". You can travel (by boat) with a student card, driving license, photographic travel pass (ie over-60s pass, young person rail pass), or photographic id from your work.
The check is very much "don't stop walking but hold your ID-looking thing in your hand so a nonchalant man can glance at it". You would attract very little attention with someone else's UK or Irish driving license, a bit more if you decided to test the waters with a weird form of ID.
Children can travel with a birth certificate (no photo).
You need more than this to get on an aeroplane, but that also applies to domestic flights in the UK.
If you get the boat and show eg. a Romanian student card, they might ask you where your passport is, somewhat reasonably since you would have needed it to travel to the UK or to Ireland. They would accept an ID card probably and might let you in with legit looking non-government ID.
That's the sea border. You can cross the land border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland without any form of ID at all, government-issued, photographic or otherwise. Lots of people do it every day by car or bus and it would not remotely occur to them to take ID with them.
So the Romanian student would have no problem travelling between London and Dublin without showing anything since they could get a boat Glasgow- Belfast and then get a bus to Dublin.
If this was your best example of governments lying and changing the rules, it's not a very good one (and is also kind of offensive to Irish and British people).
> You need more than this to get on an aeroplane, but that also applies to domestic flights in the UK.
Can you clarify what you mean by "more than this"?
I've travelled on many domestic flights within the UK, and ID is not routinely checked.
> If this was your best example of governments lying and changing the rules
Ouch.
The common travel area has its origins way back in 1923, the rules are clear, no-one is lying.
It's just that it's hard to prove you are entitled to its benefits without having an ID document with you that - if you're entitled - it says you don't have to have with you...
When did you last travel on a UK domestic flight? You definitely need government issued ID.
You are suggesting that having to show any photographic ID is the same as having to show a passport. That's obviously silly.
No one has to prove that "they are entitled to not show a passport" by showing British or Irish ID. This is a fantasy.
On the boat everyone, British, Irish or other, has to show ID of some kind. No one has to show a passport. At the land border no one has to show anything.
> When did you last travel on a UK domestic flight? You definitely need government issued ID
"a spokesperson for the CAA, said: “UK aviation security regulations do not require a passenger’s identity to be checked for security purposes prior to boarding a domestic flight, in the same way when travelling within the mainland on a train or bus. Any further requirement on behalf of the carrier to provide identification may be a condition of travel by the carrier itself.”"
You need government ID to get on a domestic flight in the UK. You also need government ID to get on a flight from the UK to Ireland.
As with the sea border and the land border, this completely invalidates your claim about what ID is required to travel between the UK and the Republic of Ireland.
You don't appear to have travelled between the UK and the Republic of Ireland, ever, or to have flown domestically in the UK since 9/11. You stated above that "they do not check ID on UK domestic flights", not "the CAA does not require ID but all airlines do". The first statement is untrue. Not sure why you are making stuff up in support of an urban legend about the UK/Irish border.
Even if there was a difference between the ID required to board a flight from the UK to the RoI and the ID required to board a UK domestic flight (there isn't - both require govt ID, not necessarily a passport), the situation at the boat and at the land border completely disproves your original claim.
KYC stands for Know Your Customer, and is a core regulation in banking. So we can pivot off that and work through what a bank does to verify your identity.
I signed up for a Mercury bank account a few months back for my Delaware corporation without talking to anyone, so I'll use that as a template.
I can't remember the exact steps, but tl;dr submit a passport photo / driver's license photo and a photo I take in the app itself. If it was a not-US passport, then they'd dig into a full verification, not just a quick manual check of "is that face the same as the passport/license, is the passport/license ID # valid, and are the photos edited"
True, I guess I wouldn't call it invading privacy, that's sounds a bit overwrought to me. Then banks invade my privacy, the DMV invades my privacy, etc. There's always tradeoffs, I respect people's concern about them, and I wish there was a gentler to say it.
> Then banks invade my privacy, the DMV invades my privacy, etc.
That is a reasonable and factually accurate statement.
> There's always tradeoffs, I respect people's concern about them, and I wish there was a gentler to say it.
The tradeoff here is astonishingly bad. Studies have shown that AML/KYC have an effectiveness of less than a fraction of one percent. They continue to proliferate because their largest costs fall on the users rather than the companies, so they're the thing that large corporations suggest as a "solution" when they're being pressured to do something. Because people have the perception that it will do some good, even though that perception is inaccurate.
In reality what they do is provide a means to satisfy "something must be done" in a way that dumps the costs on marginalized users instead of politicians and corporations.
I had to look up what "effective" means in this context, found a couple crypto blogs using it as a talking point citing a 2011 UN study, the study says less than <1% of money laundering proceeds are confiscated worldwide, nothing about the laws. Money laundering is defined as an estimate of any money from illegal activity, including tax evasion.
AML laws are completely ineffective. People can write long papers about why, but the underlying reason is simple. Money is fungible.
If Alice is selling heroin to Bob and the government knows this, they don't need AML laws to arrest them. If they don't know this, even if all of the financial records were 100% transparent and tied to the name on their birth certificates, they still wouldn't know this, because Alice and Bob would just claim the payment is for software licensing or personal grooming services or whatever they want to make up, and neither the bank nor the government has any way to know otherwise until they independently prove the underlying crime. Worse, Alice and Bob don't even have to pay each other. Bob can just buy whatever Alice asks him to with his money and then give that to Alice in exchange for the contraband. Then there is no financial transaction linking them at all.
The entire concept of it simply doesn't work. It's all cost and no benefit.
So what else did they pull off your phone? Location data, personal photos, personal files, wifi connections near by, microphone data, ongoing location data?
You don't understand the issues me as a blind person has with it? OK I have to upload a government ID every time I want to use an internet service. That's stupid. It's also considered a general warrant, and I thought we did away with those long ago.
What laws are you talking about? The Internet has grown a lot that’s largely because we have smart politicians and strong institutions. I really think the regulation of the Internet has been amazingly good.
For example: CAN-SPAM. If I want to send emails to a list, I have to burn $90 of my scarce dollars every year just for a PO box for the address at the bottom on the off chance someone sends a letter to unsubscribe. Unless I want to put my home address in every email, which I don't, and no one should. Unsubscribe links and highly effective spam filters were already completely standard when the law was passed in 2003. It doesn't matter if the email you send doesn't actually require it because every mailing list provider requires it.
The point is the rules are daft. A sensible rule would require a functioning unsubscribe process in the email, which every piece of software would then automate as an unsubscribe link. The actual rule requires people to be able to unsubscribe via a postal mailing address, which is unreasonable and ridiculous.
I'm just saying, your earlier comment would have been better without the sentence: "Unsubscribe links and highly effective spam filters were already completely standard when the law was passed in 2003."
The person you're replying to is not the person you're quoting.
But also, the people with unsubscribe links now but not in 2002 would still commonly send their messages from a consistent address, making it easy to block them if you wanted to, and making even primitive spam filters highly effective against them. Meanwhile the people who randomize their from address to prevent this are the people who still don't have a functioning unsubscribe link.
I just heard about this software today. Seeing that it was a one time purchase, I almost got out my wallet right then and there. Making it a subscription model would immediately turn me off.
I grew up as social media came into being(mid 2000s). When I was 13, I got Myspace. When I was 16, I got Facebook. It wasn't until well into college that I realized the impact social media had on my mental health. I would go further and say nobody until 18 should have social media, but that may be unrealistic in 2024.
I grew up with the birth of the internet and social media and I have the opposite feeling. I know that sound the old one monologue but I came from the time that social media were exclusively social and not a bunch of people creating content endlessly in the hope of making tons of money in the internet.
I used aol, Microsoft Messenger, Facebook and a very famous Google social media on my country, called Orkut. None of these gave me anxious to see what's happening or any negative thoughts. In fact In using the internet and social medja learned so many things, meet different people outside of my country and from other states and learned about other cultures and other languages.
All these years and I think the way that social media works is rotting people's brain: people barely pay attention on you because they are too busy seeing their timeline, people even use it on traffic and all of these people are adults that doesn't knew about social media until some years ago. Internet and Social media for children must be supervised and not restricted.
I understand where you’re coming from but these were not social media.
I used Orkut too. It was a place to talk to your real-life friends, join local communities and organize events. You didn’t develop a personal following or post selfies looking for approval.
Social media, as we have it today, allows individuals to broadcast their twisted mind to millions, and not via text - only cute pictures, memes, and 30-second clips. These are worlds apart.
Setting it to 18 is obviously pretty ridiculous. That's just going to continue the weird trend of infantilizing people by pushing back the age at which they learn to deal with things that require self control.
At 16 there are at least 2 years where parents have the ability to actually interfere and help bring any negative effects under control.
Do you know at what age people are able to properly deal with things that require self control? I believe that part of the brain doesn’t mature until early 20s. At 18 a person is legally an adult so 18 seems like a much more reasonable cutoff than 16.
People don't just start being able to deal with things that require self control at a specific age. It has to be taught. Even sex ed recognizes that, where it's far more effective to teach kids how to be safe during it rather than to teach them that they can do what they want after 18.
If you push off the learning to when the person can legally just do whatever they want, all you're doing is abdicating parental responsibility and setting the person up for addiction as an adult.
Yes people should be taught skills to deal with making good choices and learning self control. But we don’t give kids heroin as part of the lesson in learning self control. The biological imperative for sex is overwhelming and there’s not much we can do to stop it. There is a way to stop companies from enticing kids with social media addiction though.
There are some things society thinks people should not be allowed to be legally tempted with. Some people think one of those things is social media for people under a certain age.
It wasn’t absurd. It established that pretty much everyone agrees that government intervention is sometimes needed to protect people from their impulses. The idea that everyone (especially kids) can simply exercise self control when it comes things as addicting as social media is absurd.
Yes. There are some things so unhealthy that it is worthwhile to try to prevent people from using them. Heroin is one such substance in some peoples’ mind. Gambling is something that can be very addicting and destructive and as such society tries to keep kids from partaking in it. Similarly it is wise and worthwhile to keep kids off of social media.
We would give them heroin in a controlled manner if the consumption of heroin was the primary means of social interaction for the majority of adults. The heroin analogy is eye catching, but ultimately nothing more than idiotic "think of the children"-esque hyperbole.
We agree that giving kids access to heroin as a way to teach self control is idiotic. What we don't agree on is that social media in its current incarnation is heroin like. I think it is.
..heroin was the primary means of social interaction for the majority of adults..
We aren't talking about adults we are talking about kids. That the majority of adults use social media for social interaction is a separate problem and in no way indicates that we should subject kids to something as highly addicting and harmful as social media (in its current incarnation).
There are tons of studies that show that social media harmful to peoples' mental health. It is profoundly dumb for society to subject kids to it. In same way it is profoundly dumb to let drug companies advertise. People are easily manipulated and kids especially so.
You're forgetting that my argument is that by pushing the age of access to social media up to 18 (as the person I replied to proposed), we'd be pushing teaching social media 'literacy' to when parents lose the tools they have to teach their kids. If an 18 year old gets debilitatingly addicted to social media, the most they can do is threaten to kick them out, which I'm sure you can agree isn't really a solution, but if say, a 16 year old does that, the parents can take away their phone and forcibly disconnect them in various ways until they find a healthier balance.
While social media is addictive and unhealthy, it is the primary means of social interaction among adults, thus, just as we introduce high schoolers to adult things like driving, sex, job interviews, citing other's work etc through partial exposure to such things (eg junior driving permits, sex ed, mock interviews or relaxed punishments for academic dishonesty), we should be teaching kids how to have a healthy relationship with social media through limited exposure BEFORE they turn 18.
To this extent, I prefer one of the other suggestions in this post, that there should be two 'tiers' of social media, kids should still be allowed to access small platforms, and in particular, forums. Those are easier to monitor for parents and lack many of the ills of more 'modern' stream-of-consciousness style social media. As an additional point in favor of that approach, forums were pretty instrumental to my development of programming skills as an early teenager. Without the ability to participate on forums, my skills would've been considerably stunted.
… we'd be pushing teaching social media 'literacy' to when parents lose the tools they have to teach their kids.
There are ways of teaching said literacy without allowing unrestricted access to social media. Your last paragraph suggest one such way.
It’s not an all or nothing type situation. I think it’s clear the essence of what is being discussed with the Florida law is that kids shouldn’t be granted unrestricted access to social media and those companies should be required to enforce access rules to people under a certain age.
When people say "the brain is still developing until you're 25" it means "your brain is noticeably worse at learning after the age of 25". Noting that, should people learn self-control in the presence of social media before 25, or after 25?
> When people say "the brain is still developing until you're 25" it means "your brain is noticeably worse at learning after the age of 25".
No, it means that your prefrontal cortex—which is involved in a wide range of higher-order cognitive functions (planning, decision making, working memory, personality expression, moderating social behavior, risk processing)—is still developing, so until it does fully develop (colloquially at age 25, but it can vary per individual), you may lack those skills because you physically lack the plumbing for them to be present:
> They also found important clues to brain function. For instance, a 2016 study found that when faced with negative emotion, 18- to 21-year-olds had brain activity in the prefrontal cortices that looked more like that of younger teenagers than that of people over 21. Alexandra Cohen, the lead author of that study and now a neuroscientist at Emory University, said the scientific consensus is that brain development continues into people’s 20s.
My Dad taught me how to play video games when I was around 6. By “taught”, I mean he just let me play, but enforced a rule that I’d have to stop playing if I couldn’t hold an attentive and emotionally appropriate conversation with him while I was playing Ninntendo.
This was hard for me! I had a natural instinct to tunnel vision into the game and not hear anything anyone was saying to me. I’d also get upset at the game and get angry in my conversations.
Training this into me at a young age really helped my emotional regulation and ability to socialize around / during games and not get too sucked into them. This was especially important because I was quite ADHD and that adds a lot of emotional disregulation.
I believe the part of the brian that deals with impulse control isn’t fully developed until early 20s.
We don’t willingly and willfully let kids have access to alcohol and heroin. By your reasoning it seems like we should so that they can learn self control.
I mean a lot of Europe has fairly low age limits for purchasing alcohol, and even lower for drinking it in private.
I believe 16-year olds can still buy wine and beer at the grocery stores in Denmark. I’ve heard it’s fairly common for 14-year olds to drink at home in the UK - though the 14-to-16 range may be delaying on average since ~2010.
I don’t believe many countries allow adults access to heroin. I believe prohibition does more harm here due to lack of quality control and testing but reasonable minds could disagree.
Age of first exposure is a fairly open question across the globe. Everyone is experimenting with whats best and whats tolerable.
We agree then that limiting access to alcohol is appropriate at some age level. Different countries do it at different ages. What is optimal is society dependent.
I gather then that we are in agreement that limiting access to social media is appropriate at some age level. We perhaps disagree at what age that ought to occur.
At 25 the brain is no longer plastic enough to learn self regulation. So if you wait till then to give people the chance to make mistakes you end up with a whole lot of women-children who can't function at all. The whole point is that you need to let people make mistakes so they can learn from them while they still can.
Saying that you have to wait to be an adult to make adult decisions is like saying that we shouldn't expose anyone under 3 to language since they can't speak.
I would sit on facebook, refreshing and doom scrolling endlessly. When fb messenger came out I was monitoring facebook messenger when it first came out to see who was online. I was always a pretty lonely kid, and I thought social media would connect me with people. It didn't really.
This reminds me of sitting around on AOL Instant Messenger, summer afternoons pre-2000.
Facebook came out when I was in college, and I resisted for one semester; then if felt "inevitable" [that I join] since almost all classmates were on thefacebook.
----
At present, I do not carry a cell phone nor use email [it is heavenly, a rare gift]. When somebody is more than ten minutes late for a planned meetup, I depart.
No they won’t, they’ll get hit with the dreaded “racist hiring practices” accusations. China knows this, and they exploit it. If tomorrow Google announced a ban on hiring any Russian nationals the HN comments and the media would by and large applaud such a move, by contrast.
