Reminds me a little bit of the agent improvised coordination schemes.
flyinghamster 2 hours ago [-]
It goes back even further, to 1960s/70s-era phone phreaking. A lot of budding phreaks started out by finding miswired PBX systems and using their number-out-of-service announcement recordings as impromptu conference bridges.
Whoever downvoted this has no love of curiosity and doesn't belong here.
paulryanrogers 35 minutes ago [-]
Why? We weren't all taught Greek mythology in school, and there are plenty of other interests to explore thereafter
buellerbueller 24 minutes ago [-]
The downvote is optional.
paulryanrogers 21 minutes ago [-]
Sorry I guess I misread this as suggesting people should down vote the TIL comment, which struck me as gatekeeping.
jonty 3 hours ago [-]
Back in ~2001 I ran a fairly popular blog commenting system - back then most blogs didn't have built-in comments, so I offered javascript embeds to add them to posts.
One day performance started to go down rapidly, and within a few days my host got in touch about unusual CPU usage.
I tracked it down to a series of random blogger.com blog posts with colossal comment threads measuring in the thousands. Each post only got comments for a single day, and all of the comments were in Japanese. The blog owners seemed very confused.
Turns out Japanese schoolkids figured this trick out 25 years ago.
montagg 2 hours ago [-]
Life/teenagers find a way.
charlieyu1 3 hours ago [-]
I have seen something like this before but it was mostly spammers/scammers. Don’t think they were kids at all.
jonty 3 hours ago [-]
These were definitely schoolkids - I translated some of the posts and the majority were gossiping about boys.
bullfightonmars 3 hours ago [-]
I was surprised last week to find that Spotify has turned in to full on social media/youtube now.
I left Spotify off of screentime limits for my son so that he could listen to music or books at bedtime, and found him watching "podcasts" which have full youtube style pages with videos and comments.
jahnu 51 minutes ago [-]
Zawinski's Law* except now it’s a social media messaging app.
“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.”
morkalork 29 minutes ago [-]
What's the meme about Google products and chat features?
Lutzb 2 hours ago [-]
This was/is a long standing feature request to block podcasts and video podcasts completely. Even worse two years ago unrated podcasts were available to kids. Not quoting the stuff I could find there. Highly unsuitable to kids.
nicce 3 hours ago [-]
Nobody stops to think "why not" when it is so easy to add certain features to software these days. But everyone wants to capture peoples attention and adding messaging is one way to do it.
Lagoon3384_SWE 2 hours ago [-]
Spotify had Podcasts before they got Audiobooks in.
nicce 2 hours ago [-]
Comments are two years old, however.
Lagoon3384_SWE 2 hours ago [-]
Spotify had Podcasts before they got Audiobooks in.
nyargh 4 hours ago [-]
Discovered my kid doing exactly this years ago. We purposefully limited all social media, locked dowb devices etc, but life uh.. finds a way.
I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never share personal information, etc
Now they are older and are on ridiculous group chats with their friends. Pretty impossible to control tbh. At least they keep me up to date with the latest memes!
barnas2 3 hours ago [-]
> I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never share personal information, etc
This feels pretty level headed. My parents seemed to be of the opinion that the internet consisted entirely of pedophiles and me. Talking to anyone for any reason got me in a ton of trouble. All it meant was that I got really good at hiding stuff from them as a kid.
madibo3156 3 hours ago [-]
Sounds like you accepted it but did not outright say whether you're content with it. Do you think it was a little silly now or do you still stand by it? Basically, if you were to go back knowing what you do now, would you have still locked down social media use for your kids? What would you have done differently if anything?
bityard 3 hours ago [-]
> everything you put out on the internet never goes away
I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it) and there is surprisingly little information left which is easy to find now, 30 years later. I remember the web being awash in more contemporary technical minutia than I could read in a lifetime. Now, the vast majority of it seems to be flat-out missing or at least very well hidden/distributed.
I think it is more accurate to say, "everything you put on out on the Internet _might_ never go away." Because my experience has been, a lot already has.
walthamstow 54 minutes ago [-]
I regularly mourn the photos of my early teens that were on MySpace and no longer exist anywhere
esseph 2 hours ago [-]
> I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it)
Say more!
Avicebron 3 hours ago [-]
The might or might not is a critical part of why the panopticon works..
xer0x 3 hours ago [-]
This is my kids too, life finds a way. I've blocked Youtube, and yet I discovered they are watching their favourite Youtube creators via Spotify.
m4ck_ 4 hours ago [-]
Thats a pretty clever work around… sharing a playlist and using the comments on a podcast as group chat, not sure I’d have come up with that. the kids are alright I guess, good for them.
aprilthird2021 4 hours ago [-]
The kids only know each other as commenters on a video podcast which just stitched together trending TikTok videos. Since the only consumers of such content are kids whose parents ban them from social media, they got to know each other in that podcast's comments. When the podcast was taken down the kids, who all add each other on Spotify, see the other playlists of the other kids (one named "Chat here") and they go to the podcast in that list and chat there.
y-curious 3 hours ago [-]
I went on Spotify to check out these playlists. I very quickly found that they have “corn” playlists that abuse the fact that you can upload videos for podcasts. A few are a screen recording of a windows Home Screen with a tiny video player in the corner playing adult videos. I had a laugh, nature always erm finds a way
morkalork 19 minutes ago [-]
This is gen alpha's squinting at scrambled cable porn haha
CM30 42 minutes ago [-]
Not a secret example by any means of the imagination, but th talk of using a comments section as a group chat reminds me of a small website I came across which did exactly that. The people running it were on free hosting (so couldn't set up a forum script), but did have comments on their pages through Disqus or something like that. So, they basically treated the comments on each page as a forum, with comment subthreads as the equivalent to topics or discussions.
It was surprisingly active too. If this was a 'typical' forum, it would have been a really active one.
But yeah, if you don't have a forum, group chat or chat room, a comments section will do in a pinch.
jhallenworld 3 hours ago [-]
"The goal is just to connect with people. You have nothing to talk about. You don't know each other very well. You're just seeing each other and acknowledging each other's presence"
This right here is ham radio in a nutshell. These kids need transceivers and should give morse code a try.
scottyah 3 hours ago [-]
I think the biggest attraction is the formation of the group with no established processes. Nobody telling you "This is how things are done around here". Exactly the opposite of ham radio
cj 3 hours ago [-]
It's the beginning of the rebirth of Web 1.0!
jhallenworld 3 hours ago [-]
CB radio then.
RugnirViking 23 minutes ago [-]
ham radio is the coolest technology in the world but sadly mostly allows you to talk to old people who have the same attitude as stack overflow mods - "you're doing it wrong"
chorizo 1 hours ago [-]
My actual ham radio club mostly chats on discord and email. We don't even show up much at the weekly nets. Radio is mostly for participating in events like pota, contesting and emmcomm.
stackghost 34 minutes ago [-]
>This right here is ham radio in a nutshell.
At least in my area, Boomers have done a great job gatekeeping amateur radio by making it so unpleasant to use that nobody under the age of 40 is willing to engage with that community.
I've bounced off ham radio at least 3 times in my life, each time repelled by grouchy senior citizens with too much free time.
valorzard 3 hours ago [-]
Me and my friends used to do this in middle school/high school with Google Docs.
We would share a Google Docs link with each other and use it to communicate, and then pretend we were doing homework
jhanschoo 3 hours ago [-]
> Hannah Chinn: And so I was a kid who used weird parts of the internet not as they were originally designed to talk to my friends. I talked back and forth with my friends on Google Docs. And we would type things and then delete them, and then type things and then make them invisible by making the text white on the white background. So I think this is familiar behavior to me.
: DD
boredtofears 2 hours ago [-]
My wife teaches middle school and during the pandemic a lot of kids were sending messages to each other via Google Docs and then deleting them. Unbeknownst to them was the revision history functionality (which I believe resulted in phone calls to a few students from the school principal)
Lagoon3384_SWE 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
FrankSansC 16 minutes ago [-]
In some ways it reminds me of XKCD #1305 "Undocumented Feature" [0]
It's fascinating to see these online communities develop.
See also:
- The Slate comments. Here an author profiles the regular commentors that disparage his articles, and it's surprisingly wholesome [0]
- Odd Lots Discord chat. Odd Lots is a podcast about the economy, and has a massive Discord that has an entire life of its own [1]. There are long substack posts profiling some of the most prolific users [2]
I went through this same experience moderating the comment section of a business news site nearly 20 years ago. I think they needed to find a site not blocked by the firewall in the school computer lab.
sans_souse 47 minutes ago [-]
Ever tried joining an IRC channel on any of the many servers with lenient policies on moderation etc, based on the channels name/ description? Sort of a similar experience..
lxgr 3 hours ago [-]
I can almost hear the next agent swarm furiously brainstorming how to most credibly steganographically write like middle schoolers.
thaack 3 hours ago [-]
Sort of reminds me of "Party Lines" (No, not the selective ringing, multiple subscriber/line service) used by kids in the 1970s. "Party Lines" or test lines allowed multiple callers to dial in like a conference bridge. Seemed to be used extensively by kids to just chat or hang out via the telephone network.
I have often thought about how I could put steganographic techniques into application in the comments I've left sprinkled around the Internet over the past decades, so while it looks like I'm commenting on some relevant topic, I've just given myself 64 bytes of read-only memory, or so, to stash some magic message to myself in the future.
Just a thought, though ..
scun 1 hours ago [-]
Presumably it would say
GET BACK TO WORK
statenjason 3 hours ago [-]
Canva is a group chat for students at the local school. The share function of projects as “channels”, comments for text, and slides a surface for sharing media.
Tepix 4 hours ago [-]
First the chat agents, now the kids!
alexjplant 3 hours ago [-]
I seem to recall people "claiming" GameFAQs message boards for obscure games for this same purpose back in the day.
sensen 2 hours ago [-]
This is the first thing that came to mind. I remember how frustrated I was when they started cracking down on this behavior.
watercast 3 hours ago [-]
I'm IRL friends with some people I got to know that way back in the 2000s. We went through many a mod raid and migration to a new obscure board together.
Traster 25 minutes ago [-]
Hang on, are our kids learning from AI agents? Do we have a child alignment problem? Do we need to put our kids in a sandbox. At this rate our kids are going to out live us, I for one, am panicking.
hyperlinerapp 3 hours ago [-]
Islamist terrorists have been doing similar things, starting with unsent emails in draft.
jhallenworld 3 hours ago [-]
The Iranian revolution was due to messages spread on cassette tape. It's all Phillips's fault.
inanutshellus 3 hours ago [-]
...and the occasional director of the CIA to his girlfriends... la tee dah...
hyperlinerapp 3 hours ago [-]
Peaches!
sampton 3 hours ago [-]
Kids have done rogue. Stop the trainings!!
micromacrofoot 3 hours ago [-]
I've seen this in a few apps! essentially all you need is an editable text field and some slightly social feature and a handful of kids will collude to use it to circumvent restrictions (of either screen time or school network blocks). Sleep apps, meditation apps, music apps, etc
TuringNYC 4 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of the old slashdot post from 25yrs ago that people still chat on
adaml_623 4 hours ago [-]
"I would say that I'm definitely a bit hard to get to know because I don't know a lot about myself yet. But I think if you do get to know me, you'll find out I'm a pretty cool person."
Such an excellent line from a young person.
kurthr 4 hours ago [-]
These unaligned near frontier human agents have escaped containment and are out of control!
hughw 3 hours ago [-]
Chat Here YC26
barbazoo 2 hours ago [-]
Now we know where the "rogue" AI agents got the ideas from.
magoghm 56 minutes ago [-]
Now we have rogue kids escaping their sandbox :)
system2 2 hours ago [-]
I listened to This American Life from the first episode until they abandoned their mobile app. It was so easy for me to use it and mark things. I even emailed them about it; they said it cost too much to operate. It didn't make sense to me. I guess I will go back to listening to them again on Apple Podcasts. I even exported my playlist with data from their old app; not sure how I will sync with the Apple Podcasts app, though... Another challenge for Fable to solve, I guess.
ok123456 4 hours ago [-]
Just like sid=trolltalk on Slashdot.
tamimio 4 hours ago [-]
These always happen, whenever you try to block something, people will find an alternative, sometimes using email drafts with shared login to avoid sending an email and gets detected, other times console chats, and now comment sections, and others will follow. It’s why these things (allowing or disallowing to access the internet or PC or whatever) should be done at the family level, not the state, the state has no business to decide how to parent your kids.
pentakkusu 3 hours ago [-]
Except that parents have no power whatsoever to effectively prevent kids coming into contact with harmful algorithms, sites eliciting dark patterns etc. Parents don't have power over multi billion dollar companies that have their stakes in harvesting the attention of kids. Only governments can blanket ban these things. At this point the responsibility should not be placed on parents but on companies.
pitched 2 hours ago [-]
A kid can follow a basic “todo list” tutorial and open a port on your home router then get friends to chat on that. In that case, how is the government enforcing a ban? We’re expecting some agency to do constant port scans on all its citizens to look for anything allowing writes?
The responsibility is on parents. We can try to push some aspects onto government but that will not reduce any responsibility of parents.
neilellis 3 hours ago [-]
Well now all the agents will have this in their training data, so expect them to come calling in the future :-) :-)
JMKH42 2 hours ago [-]
My son at 11 was targeted by a pedophile on spotify's comments.
Thought it was safe app to allow, just music/podcasts.
nope.
pvtmert 1 hours ago [-]
Alternate reality: AI agents break their "alignment" and escape sandbox using Spotify comments. /s
sublinear 4 hours ago [-]
> Before I tell you about the first thing, I just want you to remember our brains were still developing when we thought this was so funny.
Are we seriously going to keep saying stuff like this to enculturate young people?
I used to love NPR (I suppose my brain was still developing), but it's offhand comments like this that show too much ulterior motive and keep driving me away from ever listening again.
semiquaver 4 hours ago [-]
This American Life is an independent program, not produced or distributed by NPR. The person who wrote that is a TAL producer, not affiliated with NPR.
Also, were you trying out some new vocabulary? enculturate is not appropriate in the context you used it, and it’s not clear what exactly you were trying to convey, other than your own grumpiness, which came through loud and clear.
WillPostForFood 17 minutes ago [-]
"This American Life is an independent program, not produced or distributed by NPR."
TAL is independently produced, but distributed by PRX() for broadcast to NPR, and NPR is partially financing it by paying for the right to air it.
PRX also funded by Corporation for Public Broadcasting; this is all a somewhat incestuous, government financed form of independence.
inanutshellus 3 hours ago [-]
> enculturate
I think he meant inculcate as, presumably, an "eggcorn"...
dasyatidprime 2 hours ago [-]
I think “indoctrinate” is more likely.
collingreen 4 hours ago [-]
What is the ulterior motive?
This sounds like lightly self deprecating nod to something cringey done in their earlier career. What have I missed?
myko 4 hours ago [-]
I don't get it, what's the issue with the phrase?
paulajohnson 4 hours ago [-]
Tell me again about how we need to keep children off social media....
RIMR 4 hours ago [-]
We absolutely need to make efforts to limit kids' exposure to addictive social media mechanisms.
People aren't generally against kids using the Internet to communicate; they are against giant tech companies using children as a captive audience without regard to how their decisions might hurt them.
If kids are misusing a comments feature as a general-purpose chat room, good for them. They figured out how to manipulate the system instead of letting the system manipulate them.
Regardless, we need to regulate social media so that it doesn't harm children, and we need to do so without sacrificing the privacy of every adult (age-gates don't work).
pteraspidomorph 3 hours ago [-]
This is why we need to rename "social media" to the more accurate "antisocial media". I think everyone reasonable wants kids to be social with each other.
iAMkenough 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the Trump approach of renaming things to resolve complex problems has a lot of merit to it.
catlikesshrimp 4 hours ago [-]
They tried to impose age verification on OS
nekusar 3 hours ago [-]
The problem is for-profit corporate social media.
Fediverse has never hired thousands of psychologists to gamify everything.
Fediverse hasn't added adverts to sell really seedy or blatantly illegal products.
Fediverse hasn't engaged in genocide in Myanmar or Rohinga, or anywhere else.
Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.
But Facebook/Meta, X, and others definitely have.
Edit: for those of you who -1'ed it, where am I wrong?
opan 3 hours ago [-]
I agree with your post overall, but it's worth noting that most frontends for fedi are still based on Twitter, Instagram, etc. You get similar dark UX patterns like infinite scrolling in feeds or displaying like counts on posts. It's also hard to not copy these things now because they're so normalized. If you intentionally designed the frontend differently, people may just dismiss it as weird and different.
criddell 49 minutes ago [-]
The biggest node in the fediverse is run by Meta.
astrange 3 hours ago [-]
> Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.
Only thing I ever hear about Mastodon is that you can't say or do anything without random other servers disconnecting you or random commenters yelling at you to add trigger warnings because you posted a picture of food. So I would say that being emotionally abused by German Linux users is in fact a mass psychology experiment.
BeetleB 3 hours ago [-]
I didn't downvote, but I am having trouble connecting your comment to the one you're responding to.
nekusar 3 hours ago [-]
The whole social media and under-18 argument isn't a problem with all social media.
Its a problem with for-profit social media. The companies use gamification to addict and create terrible trends for everyone involved.
Mastodon, peertube, lemmy, and federated media doesn't do any of these gamblification, gamification, psychological attacks, and more.
To be fair, the techniques should be banned by the FTC for deceptive practices, for everyone. But the kids angle is what's being gravitated towards.
BeetleB 3 hours ago [-]
It was bad for kids even in the BBS days.[1] The things you mentioned merely made it worse.
Put another way, it's as bad as your kids texting with random strangers. I know in the last decade the focus has been on all the big tech addiction mechanisms, but people were warning against them well before those came into play.
[1] It was also great for some kids in those days. That doesn't take away from the risks.
jmye 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
tamimio 4 hours ago [-]
Good parenting. This is not a technical or legal issue, this is parenting one.
criddell 3 hours ago [-]
I'll pretend for a minute that you are right and it's a parenting issue.
Now what? Apparently most parents are bad so what do you do?
tamimio 3 hours ago [-]
You mandate parents to attend training and educations, in fact, this is done in many countries even before they get married let alone having kids. You make it the spotlight, the current hot new thing, that parents need to learn how parent, it’s mentioned on ads and TV or podcasts or whatever, a full campaign, instead of wasting all these money on political campaigns or corporate ones that brings nothing of value, or instead of funding entertainment industry with who knows say 10bn from tax payers, make it 5bn and the rest goes into teaching and training parents, not just for the kids, but also to be a good family, that’s an investment definitely worth it. There are many ways but obviously it’s the least priority, because it’s in the interest of the state to keep it like this, to justify later when laws are passed that violate people privacy and rights.
cobbzilla 2 hours ago [-]
> You mandate parents to attend training and educations
Do you advance to struggle sessions and incarceration for noncompliant parents?
BeetleB 3 hours ago [-]
You start with:
> This is not a technical or legal issue, this is parenting one.
And then go ahead by proposing it is enforced via legislation:
> You mandate parents to attend training and educations
tamimio 2 hours ago [-]
Well, if you wanna go with legal mandates, possible, but the mandate I mentioned up there more of social mandate, a social responsibility. And for the other replies above as I can’t reply to all, sessions can be done on parents pace online, this is not the 90s anymore, or through employments, or other means, and not participating for example can result on losing the family benefits they collect from the tax dollar. Again, these are just examples on top of my head, but the point in here that this should be the parents/custodian responsibility, if they lack knowledge or training, they get it, if they don’t want to, they get penalized, but it’s in noway the state to decide if your kids open the PC/phone at night or access this service or not.
bethekidyouwant 3 hours ago [-]
lmao or what?
pteraspidomorph 3 hours ago [-]
I really dislike the font on this website. It renders extremely misaligned at small sizes, or is that just my browser?
Evidlo 2 hours ago [-]
My browser too. Letters are all offset up/down by 1px:
Reminds me a little bit of the agent improvised coordination schemes.
Some of this is documented in audio, on https://evan-doorbell.com/ for anyone interested.
One day performance started to go down rapidly, and within a few days my host got in touch about unusual CPU usage.
I tracked it down to a series of random blogger.com blog posts with colossal comment threads measuring in the thousands. Each post only got comments for a single day, and all of the comments were in Japanese. The blog owners seemed very confused.
Turns out Japanese schoolkids figured this trick out 25 years ago.
I left Spotify off of screentime limits for my son so that he could listen to music or books at bedtime, and found him watching "podcasts" which have full youtube style pages with videos and comments.
“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.”
I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never share personal information, etc
Now they are older and are on ridiculous group chats with their friends. Pretty impossible to control tbh. At least they keep me up to date with the latest memes!
This feels pretty level headed. My parents seemed to be of the opinion that the internet consisted entirely of pedophiles and me. Talking to anyone for any reason got me in a ton of trouble. All it meant was that I got really good at hiding stuff from them as a kid.
I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it) and there is surprisingly little information left which is easy to find now, 30 years later. I remember the web being awash in more contemporary technical minutia than I could read in a lifetime. Now, the vast majority of it seems to be flat-out missing or at least very well hidden/distributed.
I think it is more accurate to say, "everything you put on out on the Internet _might_ never go away." Because my experience has been, a lot already has.
Say more!
It was surprisingly active too. If this was a 'typical' forum, it would have been a really active one.
But yeah, if you don't have a forum, group chat or chat room, a comments section will do in a pinch.
This right here is ham radio in a nutshell. These kids need transceivers and should give morse code a try.
At least in my area, Boomers have done a great job gatekeeping amateur radio by making it so unpleasant to use that nobody under the age of 40 is willing to engage with that community.
I've bounced off ham radio at least 3 times in my life, each time repelled by grouchy senior citizens with too much free time.
We would share a Google Docs link with each other and use it to communicate, and then pretend we were doing homework
: DD
[0] https://xkcd.com/1305/
See also:
- The Slate comments. Here an author profiles the regular commentors that disparage his articles, and it's surprisingly wholesome [0]
- Odd Lots Discord chat. Odd Lots is a podcast about the economy, and has a massive Discord that has an entire life of its own [1]. There are long substack posts profiling some of the most prolific users [2]
[0] https://slate.com/life/2026/09/comments-commenters-slate-fri... ( https://archive.is/vs8OD )
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/business/odd-lots-podcast...
More info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy9zziwcV2w
I have often thought about how I could put steganographic techniques into application in the comments I've left sprinkled around the Internet over the past decades, so while it looks like I'm commenting on some relevant topic, I've just given myself 64 bytes of read-only memory, or so, to stash some magic message to myself in the future.
Just a thought, though ..
Such an excellent line from a young person.
The responsibility is on parents. We can try to push some aspects onto government but that will not reduce any responsibility of parents.
Are we seriously going to keep saying stuff like this to enculturate young people?
I used to love NPR (I suppose my brain was still developing), but it's offhand comments like this that show too much ulterior motive and keep driving me away from ever listening again.
Also, were you trying out some new vocabulary? enculturate is not appropriate in the context you used it, and it’s not clear what exactly you were trying to convey, other than your own grumpiness, which came through loud and clear.
TAL is independently produced, but distributed by PRX() for broadcast to NPR, and NPR is partially financing it by paying for the right to air it.
PRX also funded by Corporation for Public Broadcasting; this is all a somewhat incestuous, government financed form of independence.
I think he meant inculcate as, presumably, an "eggcorn"...
This sounds like lightly self deprecating nod to something cringey done in their earlier career. What have I missed?
People aren't generally against kids using the Internet to communicate; they are against giant tech companies using children as a captive audience without regard to how their decisions might hurt them.
If kids are misusing a comments feature as a general-purpose chat room, good for them. They figured out how to manipulate the system instead of letting the system manipulate them.
Regardless, we need to regulate social media so that it doesn't harm children, and we need to do so without sacrificing the privacy of every adult (age-gates don't work).
Fediverse has never hired thousands of psychologists to gamify everything.
Fediverse hasn't added adverts to sell really seedy or blatantly illegal products.
Fediverse hasn't engaged in genocide in Myanmar or Rohinga, or anywhere else.
Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.
But Facebook/Meta, X, and others definitely have.
Edit: for those of you who -1'ed it, where am I wrong?
Only thing I ever hear about Mastodon is that you can't say or do anything without random other servers disconnecting you or random commenters yelling at you to add trigger warnings because you posted a picture of food. So I would say that being emotionally abused by German Linux users is in fact a mass psychology experiment.
Its a problem with for-profit social media. The companies use gamification to addict and create terrible trends for everyone involved.
Mastodon, peertube, lemmy, and federated media doesn't do any of these gamblification, gamification, psychological attacks, and more.
To be fair, the techniques should be banned by the FTC for deceptive practices, for everyone. But the kids angle is what's being gravitated towards.
Put another way, it's as bad as your kids texting with random strangers. I know in the last decade the focus has been on all the big tech addiction mechanisms, but people were warning against them well before those came into play.
[1] It was also great for some kids in those days. That doesn't take away from the risks.
Now what? Apparently most parents are bad so what do you do?
Do you advance to struggle sessions and incarceration for noncompliant parents?
> This is not a technical or legal issue, this is parenting one.
And then go ahead by proposing it is enforced via legislation:
> You mandate parents to attend training and educations
https://i.imgur.com/1NDF3n6.png