Solid-based data vaults are becoming a practical reality, offering a new model for sharing personal data that prioritizes user control, privacy, and transparency. Several initiatives in Belgium and the UK are already using Solid for practical solutions.
What a weird idea to isolate teens from a platform instead of regulating it. It’s like if children were forbidden to drink a soda at a bar because they also sell alcohol. Enforcing platform’s safety and educating users (young and old) would be much better to help everyone be healthy in a connected world.
> It’s like if children were forbidden to drink a soda at a bar because they also sell alcohol
The comparison is wrong.
It would be more "It is like if children were forbidden to be in a smoker room, just because they are not the one consuming".
Yes they should be forbidden, because they do not need to smoke themselves to feel the negative effects.
Even without "porn", "murdering/violence" or other controversial content that can be found on social medias, just the negative effects of doomscrolling on the brain are harmful enough.
Their is plenty of studies that describe the effect it has on attention span, memory and cognitive capacity of kids.
My comparison is about the alarmism and you are doing the same by equivaliting chatting with friends online to smoking which can give cancer.
We are ourselves now on a sort of social media platform which shows it’s possible to be responsible and use it wisely with a better design and more rules. Framing the decision in France like a fight against a nocive substance is lazy and avoid talking about nuanced regulation and digital literacy which are more effective approaches. There are studies showing that regulating adolescent social media use is better than a ban for example.
> There are studies showing that regulating adolescent social media use is better than a ban for example.
Not in disagreement. I believe that the ban is not even strictly applicable.
It will just lead to the redirection to a new platform that avoid the restrictions or any jurisdiction, which is worst.
The complete lack of will to tackle the problem by the main Mega networks (Meta, X, Tiktok, Snapchat, Telegram and even Youtube) is currently the main issues here.
For instance, enforcing a "report" to the consummer weekly with the effective time spend on scrolling to promote awareness and help to prevent addiction would already be a first good move. None of them implemented that effectively.
> It’s like if children were forbidden to drink a soda at a bar because they also sell alcohol.
Errr... there are quite a few places where children aren't allowed to enter a bar, or can only go to them with parents if the establishment also serves food.
> Enforcing platform’s safety and educating users (young and old) would be much better to help everyone
It's not 100% clear to me this is true, it may be that the way social media operates is just bad for developing brains. Maybe all brains....
It would be nice to have good evidence one way or another though.
There are many things that can be changed to make the platforms more suitable to younger users. Just banning it instead of searching for a good balance won’t help the next generation to understand the world and take a part in it.
There are so many ways the platforms can be changed but France decided they've tried nothing and they're all out of ideas.
Are there many things that could be changed without a) changing the fundamental nature of what social media is or b) keeping the harms that are being identified?
> Just banning it instead of searching for a good balance won’t help the next generation to understand the world and take a part in it.
I would dispute that you need to be anywhere near social media to take part in the world, in fact I'd go so far as to say it's the opposite. Social media is playing into isolation and anxiety for young people. Putting some distance between them and the social media companies is likely to be healthy.
Very off-topic, but war on drugs failed in NA, but is successful in East Asia. It really depends on government and how they handle it. I’m not American, but my understanding of war on drugs was also that it wasn’t just about drugs, might be wrong.
Yes, decriminalization and harm reduction seems to work in a few places where it has been implemented for ages now.
I mean, there are still many places in Europe where you can go to prison for years for smoking weed. The life ruined because you smoked an illegal plant in your own home.
Being discriminated against by the government sucks, and so does getting locked out of the main way the world communicates in the 21st century. I don't blame a 14 year old for not handling a violation of their rights in a mature manner.
Or, just hear me out, this is what a moral panic looks like on social media.
I'm going to be honest: I don't believe the story, it reads exactly like what someone who banned their kids from video games, TV or texting would say 20 years ago, even if the kid didn't have what everyone, including you, is assuming is an "addiction", despite being wholly unqualified to diagnose such a thing, let alone over the internet through a 2nd hand story lol.
To quote the top replies to that thread:
> Ironic that OP turns to social media for support because her kid’s access to said support has been removed.
And
> We need to remember that this is the societal structure of their world and it is also the only one they have ever known - then in a single evening, it was gone. But also, not for everyone; so injustice is now mixed in to the equation.
> She's going to need time to adjust and she's also going to need ways to stay in contact with her friends, because at the end of the day that is what she is upset about: the loss of social contact.
I'd examine why you're so willing to believe what you read on social media despite the lack of real data and evidence towards the claims you're accepting at face value.
> Or, just hear me out, this is what a moral panic looks like on social media.
Could be, could be, except moral panics are usually absent evidence, whereas here we have meta's own researchers discovering and attempting to suppress the knowledge that people become addicted -
Or evidence that "Company documents cited in the complaint described several Meta officials acknowledging the company designed its products to exploit shortcomings in youthful psychology" -
And legal opinions (the references on this one are good and contain further information on the poor mental health outcomes associated with youth social media use) -
Dismissing this as "moral panic" seems wrong with that background of well-grounded concern.
> To quote the top replies to that thread:
Those are neither the best nor the top replies, why did you feel the need to misrepresent that?
> I'd examine why you're so willing to believe what you read on social media despite the lack of real data and evidence towards the claims you're accepting at face value.
I'd examine why you're so keen to ignore the real data and evidence in favour of your moral panic theory.
It's certainly an interesting story. I'd still take it with a grain of salt, as often this kind of Reddit family story is closer to an exercise in creative writing than anything else, but that's besides the point.
I remember a communication by the World Health Organization that concluded that social media and video games are not addictive like drugs are, because they don't cause chemical withdrawal when immediately stopped. Maybe what this mother is actually witnessing is her daughter suddenly feeling socially excluded after having filled the void by social media until now?
Where exactly the line is between 'withdrawal' and anxiety caused by a sudden, non-voluntary change in habits, I'm not sure, but I'd say that the one looks very like a symptom of the other.
If we're willing to admit gambling to the list of things that can be addictive, then I'm not sure why other dopamine-related compulsive activities shouldn't be treated the same. Restlessness is well known as a gambling withdrawal symptom.
I'm not sure that "everything that people do out of habit" is a reasonable summation of the category we're talking about. Perhaps I misworded my post above.
Gambling is known to be addictive and causes some symptoms of withdrawal when stopped suddenly, even though it is not a chemical dependency and doesn't involve introducing a chemical into the body.
So if we allow that one chemical-free activity can be addictive, I don't see a particular reason that we should exclude the possibility of other things working that way too.
I'm not saying the other poster is wrong that it could be "her daughter suddenly feeling socially excluded after having filled the void by social media", but I think it would be wrong to exclude the possibility that the removal of the dopamine rollercoaster of social media is causing anxiety directly in the way halting gambling does. And the description certainly comes across as someone who is going through a form of withdrawal - it's familiar to me as an ex smoker.
I acknowledge his expertise in literature. I find his approach to non-fiction sometimes less insightful and note a recent shift toward following popular book trends but it’s still great to see his videos.
You clearly did not live in the world of watching two teens on computers in the same room hold two entirely different conversations out-loud and over AIM.
Yeah that was my point, it doesn't matter if it's left or right, because the only ideology Meta et-al speak, is USD, so they will kiss the ring of whoever is in power at the present moment in EU, far left or far right. Same how many of them also kissed the ring of the CCP or Saudi Arabia while flying the pride flag in the west.
They don't really care about those ideologies they preach, they just virtue signal however needed in order to appease the mobs and governments in power so they can be allowed to extract wealth.
I'm just pointing out hypocrisy and double standard of politics. The left is no more righteous than the right as they both want the same thing when it comes to social media, see the social media and big tech censorship of the Biden administration[1][2][3], to control the narrative in their favor as control over social media means the difference between winning and losing the next elections.
But of course you are unable to objectively see such non partisan issues, so you can only resort to calling everyone who has a different option than you on the left's actions as "defending" the right wing.
Just as with most parts of the EU (imo both it's strength and it's weakness) there is some complexity and bureaucracy involved with founding out the political spectrum of MEPs. You can research the EU political groups and the political alliances and the corresponding positions on these Wikipedia pages.
Nonsense since the 2024 European Parliament that has a big far-right wing. The EPP has already broken down a lot of progressive green policies with help of the far right [1], the "cordon sanitaire" is now broken.
A change in attitudes is not enough. Structural change is needed to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, the population is unable to achieve results.
The population is achieving results. Most of these results are occurring in China, which has begun an unimaginably huge deployment of renewables and nuclear. Europe is also making progress. The rest of Asia will go next, and then (as it develops industrially) so will Africa. Even parts of North America will quickly electrify: for example, Canada just agreed to reduce tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6% from 100%.
Our ecological goals are to make biosphere damage scarce, but our economic practices aim to make scarce things plentiful. We need something to balance out the effects of scarcity-based economics.
In the very fun board game ‘Evolution : Climate’ you “breed” animals designed to survive the climate conditions on the board. One strategy is to switch to breeding ‘carnivores’ that then can feast on the creations of other players. They downside tho is that once other players evolve their animals to have carnivore protections (fight back, scales, protective shells etc) the carnivores start to quickly starve and that player must quickly change out of this eat everything strategy back to a more sustainable strategy.
In a similar way I think what works is to push back against growth only and growth at all costs approaches and back practises and models and communities that are working in other ways.
The trouble is, when I receive my paycheck, it just comes as "dollars". I don't know whether my employer got them by providing services to communities which are working in other ways, or whether they come from more nefarious behavior--and I have no way to refuse one sort but accept the other.
The kind of community action you're describing happens, but we need to find ways to help it scale.
I am not equipped to give an opinion on that either way. I’m just saying that building a successful business is independent of the accuracy of your ideology.
I think this is partly true. Raising the necessary funds, hiring enough of the right people and become sufficiently visible to get "mindshare" are all important factors in building a successful business. It is a lot harder to do these things if your ideology is out of step with what is considered mainstream.
I think it's taking things too literally and pointedly ignoring the subtext while unintended or not having subtext of their own.
feels like sophistry
the article connects the two, so they are not orthonogonal either:
> But even as things got noisy in public, Masad met eerie silence professionally. “My calendar was suddenly empty, because I was talking about Palestine,” he said. “Replit was not a hot company anymore. We did a layoff. And at the same time, a lot of my friends were no longer my friends. I was no longer invited to parties.”
> Potential partnerships dried up. Masad became a frequent topic in pro-Israel tech groupchats, a source said, where some investors accused him of being antisemitic.
> A Replit investor who requested anonymity to speak candidly told me Masad’s public persona has been “really challenging,” and he’s had to defend the founder in investor circles. I asked if Masad had lost business because of his views. “I’m sure the answer is yes,” the investor said.
It's fascinating to read how Hacker News helped make Replit successful. I hope everyone will try this tool! I wonder if Masad still scrolls here nowadays.
Yep. Seems like he posts a bit more thoughtfully with deliberation ever since the "suing my intern over a weekend project" debacle.
Having other close friends from Jordan, it's not surprising that he's outspoken on the topic of Israeli occupation - it's very difficult to spend a significant amount of time in the affected regions and not come away with a very strong opinion.
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