The thing is, what other option do I have?

As people who want to talk about words like "megabytes" or "megapixels" or "megaphones" or "Megaman" or "Megan" on Facebook are finding out.

Discord is only the next biggest canary in the coal mine. These regulations are going to force a lot more websites and apps to do this, too.

I wish these sorts of regulations had been written hand-in-hand with a more directly technically-minded approach. The world needs a better technical way to try to verify a person's estimated age cohort without a full ID check and/or AI-analyzed video face scan before we start regulating "every" website that may post "adult content" (however you choose to define that) starts to require such checks.

A family member had been sharing some photos they were taking, but only on Instagram.

So I signed up an account, verified via email and phone number. I wasn't initially able to find the family member's account. A week later after I got the spelling of their username right, Instagram popped up "Your account has been suspended". They then sent me an email saying I needed to take a photo of myself holding government ID, and a piece of paper with a hand-written code they supplied, plus a close-up photo of said government ID. No way was I supplying all that just to be able to browse some photos.

Discord tried to do it to me a few months ago but I refused, contacted support instead. Eventually they made it work but it took forever. Lucky for me I hate Discord so tried to avoid it anyway.

So like, their ideal vision of the world was "every man can treat women and kids this way, they belong to kitchen anyway".

But we have to decrypt everything to protect the kids.

Now that I think of it, I bet I could host a decent instance of some open-source alternative in a public cloud for around the same cost as what I paid for Nitro ($100 a year)...

Parental controls are fractured across every platform, they can’t enforce everything in one place, domain filtering isn’t practical, some sites (like YouTube) are needed for schoolwork and they include adult content intermingled with no sane way to bifurcate those. It’s also impossible to disable the forced short-form video push onto toddlers and teens.

Our main reason for using Zulip is that we work in a highly regulated space (healthcare) and would like to be able to safely talk about things. I suspect this sort of situation is a major motivator for Zulip adoption, so it’s weird that transit encryption was left as an afterthought.

This is not the case for slack or discord. I think having an awesome clean first impression would do wonders to sell what younare doing.

In most cases a lot more than simply "hanging out".

It's a push out.

That's fine. We'll take our attention elsewhere.

You, if you're not in the first group, can continue to use both to communicate with everyone, but some of them lose the ability to communicate with each other.

The ideal outcome is for everyone to stop using the intolerable thing and switch to a tolerable thing. That's even what often happens over time, but not always immediately. Probably do anything you can to make it happen faster.

What you do depends on where you're at - statistically, you'll go down the path of least resistance which is totally, totally fine.

I left Facebook, left Reddit (never really had a Twitter). This won't be different.

It's not like we haven't seen closed source applications become hostile to their users before. And it's not like we didn't warn people about it.

Compare Digg and slash. One completely died, the other has stuck with its formula and hasn't disappeared, but has just faded into irrelevance.

Occasionally in my free time I have been tinkering with a certificate-based solution that could fulfill this sort of need for age verification. It’s not the most robust idea but it’s simple enough using most of what we already have. Creating a minimal protocol which doesn’t share actual identifying information nor metadata of the site you’re accessing is trivial. If I can make an 80% solution in less than 100 hours of my free time then some groups with more money and intelligence could propose a dead-simple and easy-to-adopt solution just as easily.

We created the account from an Apple device, registering from her home cable modem IP, giving FB her cellphone number and ISP issued email address — all strong signals of consumer authenticity. But after she added five of her relatives within half an hour, her account was locked for suspicious activity.

There was an appeal button; she was asked to take a picture of her face from many angles and upload ID. She gave them everything they asked for, but when Facebook reviewed the appeal, they closed her account permanently.

Perhaps these constant restrictions will finally spur us to create our own spaces again Our own little groups that exist independent of the corpo-sphere.

The only reason ‘the way things used to be’ went away was because the new thing was convenient. Well, now it isn’t anymore. So let’s just go back to the old thing.

We have known this to be the case, for quite some time, yet majority of the public still thought that a convicted felon was good enough to be president.

Criminality among the rich and the politically connected is off the charts. It’s way beyond any group of immigrants for example that these same people are trying to demonize.

Chat control? Every single politician should have that on their phone.

Musk was hanging out with child sex trafficker and is allowing kids to create porn with grok on X.

I don't expect the masses to change their incomprehensible habits just because of this.

I suppose the silver lining is that they are putting the responsibility for age verification adults. Which imo is better than requiring everyone; kids get a free pass to the kids stuff...

Though, with AI being used I suspect it wouldn't pass any longer.

1 - Piles of parents too stupid or lazy to, well, parent the children they made;

2 - A very reasonable societal expectation that it shouldn't be easy for young kids to access, or even be exposed, to the worst dregs of the internet;

3 - Very different use cases (gaming, kids stuff, free/affordable slack for communities) all on the same platform;

4 - A pile of morons in legislatures who insist there's a magic highly private way to do all this, but (see Australia) refuse to lay out the actual method. It's a government-wide game of underwear gnomes.

If this is what it means for a parent to “do their job” then what do you propose happens to parents who are unwilling or unable to police their kids’ Discord account?

For this reason, I think we are seeing the beginning of the end of low-trust social media. They can’t tell if a user is a child or even a human. People will move to things like group chats because they don’t rely on sending your ID to a verification service in the Philippines.

you can say this, but it is not enforced, so this part of discussion is not really productive.

I see that you have a "community" tier that's free and doesn't restrict notifications, but it's not clear to me exactly what's involved in proving that we should qualify.

The Bluesky team talks about "credible exit", and Zulip has that in spades - which makes me not want to exit.

Thank you for the work you do. Hanging out in CZO watching the Zulip team work in public is inspiring!

I used it at my previous employer and after a month of hangringing from people- many did not desire to go back to what we had before. (though some people did say they wanted Slack for the emojis and “prettiness”).

Now I started in a new position and I’ve positioned Zulip (on prem) as the only viable solution since we’re shirking SaaS as a strategic move.

The people who followed me to the new place are quite glad of this, or at least thats what I am told.

So, thank you, sincerely.

Could you expand on this?

https://discourse.imfreedom.org/t/protocols-to-support/234/1...

May be this discord episode will have better outcome for the masses.

Discord is a good design, and should be replicated rapidly with mutations from competitors galore.

Musk being a Nazi made twitter lose big enough chunks of their community to start Bluesky. Not big enough to do any real damage to the platform, but it still provided critical mass to a fledgling app.

WhatsApp having a sketchy relationship with the US government boosted Signal.

Sooooo, what is a good discord replacement?

Today, though, no chance that happens. The current generation literally grew up with it, same for most of the other established social media apps. The concept of alternatives largely does not exist for them. And besides, they were probably already sending pictures of themselves and other personal data to each other through the app, so it's not like Discord doesn't already have all of that.

Also, I don’t think your OnlyFans analogy holds up. My understanding is that their threat to ban porn was a stunt. A pretty effective one.

The problem is privacy activists and free speech activists (though there's some overlap between the two they aren't the same) oppose age verification by any means since it has the potential to infringe on both ever so slightly. Meanwhile age verification gates are being demanded and thrown up all over the Internet at a frightening pace. So we get only the maximal data collection solutions implemented by people who don't give a shit about privacy or free speech. And the mass surveillance cheerleaders egg them on.

If privacy and free speech activists understood that a proactive, privacy-preserving approach to age verification is the best outcome we'd be better off.

How does this impact you in any way?

What are your thoughts on Apple's approach? You still have to provide your birthdate to apple. But after that, it only only ever shares your age range with other companies that request it, not your birthdate.

Is it?

I don't think it is.

I truly don't believe that there's any possible way to verify someone's age without collecting ID from them.

Previously that was a checkbox or a line in their ToS saying "I'm over 18". Now that lawmakers are pushing to make that no longer sufficient, "AI face scanning" is the next step up.

I can't speak for every company, but I know with Facebook and Paypal, these requests generally are from automated systems and the chances of successfully reopening the account is well under 1%. The info you submit is not viewed by a human and the systems are mostly treated as a way to lighten the load on human support staff. They don't care if your account is reopened, they just want you to feel like you had a chance, did all you could, and then just give up.

I discovered this about 20 years ago dealing with Paypal. I happened to know someone who worked in Paypal engineering at the time. I had a well established account, a Paypal debit card, linked accounts, etc., everything you could need to feel good about an account.

Out of the blue it was suspended and I was sent into this system to send in verification documents. I gave everything it wanted. First it was ID, then a "utility bill" so I sent over my phone bill. That wasn't acceptable because it didn't prove I lived at my address for some reason, so I sent a natural gas bill. Even though that did have to be tied to a physical address (you can't deliver gas wirelessly!) I was asked for an electric bill. Then the lease. Then a bank statement. Every time I gave it pretty quickly. Then I was asked for a passport. I didn't have one. Suddenly that was the only thing that could unlock my account and as soon as they had the passport my account would be reopened. Nothing further would be done without a passport, not even communication.

I asked my friend to look into it. She said, "that's on purpose, that's the NoBot. It gets people out of support's hair." Turns out if you let unhappy customers complain to humans on the phone they will, so some exec decided to improve call center metrics by forcing customers into a system designed to keep them occupied until they gave up. You funneled people into it, and it would continue to reject their submissions with new reasons infinitely. It just went through a list of things to ask for, and when it found one you couldn't provide, suddenly that was the key and without it you were screwed.

Companies still do this today.

I feel very badly for your friend. Unfortunately, those completely benign actions look identical to a common identity theft pattern.

The normies already did this. They just did it on centralized platforms like Discord. Until their backs get broken we're not getting anywhere. (Although I may be being a little too cynical.)

But leaving is never free. There's a lot of gaming communities (especially niche subcommunities like emulation, speedrunning, modding, etc) that are mostly on Discord and not anywhere else. Many probably won't move. A lot of tribal knowledge will be lost as it's locked in these communities.

Heck, even some FOSS communities communicate mostly on Discord. I have more faith they will move. But not all.

And they have always organized society to make sure this is the case. It's not a wacky conspiracy theory. These are just the interests of the people who create and have most influence over tech, and these interests are shared in common amongst most elements of that class. So, this class, the capitalist class, will just plan (conspire) to make it necessary for you to participate.

Viewing tech in this way makes one see that the historic development of tech is not happenstance occurrence, just tech skipping along, unconsciously, into authoritarianism, but as tech being influenced by the interests of the people who have the most influence on its development: those who own it, who are often the same people who determine standards.

The internet was never a free form idea upon which everybody could sway, its a technology owned, controlled and influenced by those who produce it.

They WILL absolutely try to place social/state/labor functions behind this wall of authoritarianism. As they already have, and are currently doing with the growing ban on VPN usage, anti phone rooting measures, anti-"side loading", etc.

It should not be absurd to suggest that the people in power have used, are using, and will use power in their favor.

But instead of paying Instagram for reach, consider taking the same budget and spending it delivering samples and coupons to other local businesses mid/late morning. Bonus points if you make the coupons unique for each delivery so you can track which local businesses are your biggest fans. Office managers are generally receptive to this kind of cold call and you can leave a catering menu. Catering gigs can keep your kitchen busy during the off hours.

China’s qualifications for influencers thing is interesting by fundamentally doesn't address the power of social media publishers.

Imagining better systems before doing that is just a form of xkcd’s nerd sniping.

And the biggest challenge to representative government might well be that most people are terrible at engaging it productively. Voting is the bare minimum and most people don’t vote (let alone organize and lobby effectively). Some significant portion of those that do vote can’t correctly draw a line between policies they’d like and candidates who intend to work on delivering, and that’s before we get to the portion of the population that may not correctly anticipate policy outcomes or even really understand policy as a concept.

The system has actually been functioning surprisingly well considering, and as catastrophic as recent elections could be seen as, the outcome arguably represents a reasonable degree of fidelity to the input from the electorate.

If we still hold free and fair elections, the task of those who want representative government is to change enough of the electorate first.

Get involved with politics. Be part of politics. That is how freedom is earned & maintained.

Moo.

But not even worth that effort for this. Not a subscriber, but probably won't ever use it again, either.

Cesspit of AI-driven "validated" accounts for pushing propaganda.

It's the worst of both worlds.

This is a case where there's plenty of evidence that it's actual malice, not just incompetence. Leaving aside that this shouldn't be done at all, there is no desire to do this in a privacy-preserving way, because destroying anonymity and controlling online discourse is the point for governments, not the "unintentional" side effect to be avoided. "Think of the children" is just the excuse to get people to unknowingly buy in, just as it has been for generations.

https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2...

The main thing regards our double-entry API changelog system. Basically, the API documentation for individual endpoints, say https://zulip.com/api/get-user, natively cover for each endpoint all the changes relevant for that endpoint from https://zulip.com/api/changelog... and how to write nice code using feature level checks to support all server versions.

Nobody scales free, high-bandwidth services without some dark money support from feds or worse.

I've never been a regular user of Twitter, pre or post elon era, but a lot of people I follow in other ways used to be very active on there and discussions would often spill over into other venues. That still happens a bit, but much less than before.

Discord is even more niche than that. There's tons of IRC esque group chats of that's what you need. But a community: not so easy to replace.

Anyone have any experiences to share with moving their discussion groups from Discord to Groups.io?

That is prioritizing internal politics over the realities of their product. The Discord userbase is young. And it serves a variety of use cases / the same account can be used to access open source communities, coordinate video game time with friends, interact professionally, and have a supercharged group chat for close IRL friends.

In other words, Discord is the app where maladjusted early 20-something leaked classified data to impress his teenage friends. https://www.washingtonpost.com/discord-leaks/

Any decision that isn't along the Apple's hard privacy stance lines, "we'll protect user privacy" is prioritizing the discomfort of that decision over the user base / use case.

I could still tell because their profiles were sterile and had few normal comments or likes etc. Also a high school class has a very narrow age range. We recently landed a fatal blow by disallowing joins by "pages" and adding a few questions. A trickle continued but stopped recently.

The hamfisted false positive response you described is probably a result of the above.

Sometimes it works with the front camera on one smartphone but doesn’t with another (iPhone 17’s distortion), sometimes it recognizes your face on one day, but desperately fails to recognize you on another. I had to repeatedly record videos for it only to fail over and over again. Anything their system flags as suspicious, anything, will trigger the same video identification flow again, which effectively blocks your money in the account.

I’m closing my accounts with a couple of banks with these video id flows. Simply because it’s way too easy to lose access to my money in the account with them. If their QA is not good enough for this vital requirement, I don’t want to know how they treat other requirements. They simply outsourced the id verification to some third parties that are way too unreliable.

At least Facebook tells you that you are banned.

So I tried to sign up (and I already HAVE an active facebook account from high school, with hundreds of friends) and it wanted me to scan my face. I did it, which I regret, only to be told five days later that I am too suspicious. So here I am, still locked out of all this information lmao

On the other hand: It was kind of awful when even my dialup access would get screwed up because someone's IRC server got DDoS'd -- again -- and clogged up the pipes.

---

These days, the local ISPs are mostly gone. But the pipes are bigger -- it's easy for many of us to get gigabit+ connections at home. Unfortunately, the botnets are also bigger.

How do we get back to what we had?

I don't know ... around these parts (Santa Fe/ABQ) while Marketplace is very popular, Craigslist continues to be widely used for this, especially since an ever growing number of younger people are not on Facebook (either at all, or not regularly).

However, “think of the children” will always result in more restriction in western countries, not less. We are watching countries prove that it works to isolate from each other. Europe is not isolating from America in exactly the same way, but is isolating business processes from American services.

We are not on the cusp of the end of the internet, but the cliff sure seems in view to me.

And before everyone gets upset, tax serves two purposes; 1) control inflation (it in effect burns money that was issued when the govt previously paid for things), 2) disincentivises selected behaviours. and one side effect, when the govt runs a tax deficit it increases inflation, and of course the contrapositive is also true.

People ever rule through direct decisions or are enslaved into alien agendas on which they have no agency.

If this causes the extinction of the political lobbyist, I'm fine with that.

And the corrupt, bought politicians are the ones who would need to ratify it.

40 years ago you'd have more ideals, riots, and young-minded ideas.

Nowadays, our societies are old on average (especially the politically powerful).

Older people on average are more inclined to pick whatever solution they feel promises a bit more security.

It's all about the kids, unless, idk, you're rich enough?

Also, nitpick: it was neither a majority of the public, or a majority of the eligible voting population, or even a majority of the people who voted.

I think a really good first step, at least in the US, towards making our candidate selection better would be to mandate open primaries.

So, I suppose you shouldn't give your fake id (digital or physical) to a government officials. It also seems "obvious" that it's similarly unwise to give it to a bank. But you can do that to a random guy on AirBnB? A hotel? To a delivery service (Uber/Wolt/whatever)? Dicsord? Where is the line between a bank (a private commercial corporation) and Discord (a private commercial corporation)?

Telegram, Slack, Facebook, Team Speak, Reddit, GroupMe, nothing really offers the same feature set and ease of setup that Discord does.

It's not really about protecting them; people that claim this is the case are generally doing so to launder that hatred.

Sounds like you want https://matrix.org/

> Discord is a good design

Then the main, reference client https://element.io/ or https://fluffy.chat would work great for you.

... With the only caveat being that general experience of using Matrix is awful.

I second the other commenter's suggestion of using https://stoat.chat/ or as it used to be called: Revolt, which matches the "Opensource Discord" requirement perfectly.

People will migrate, some will stay, and it will just be yet another noise machine they have to check in the list of snapchat, instagram, tiktok, reddit, twitter, twitch, discord, group texts, marco polo, tinder, hinge, roblox, minecraft servers, email, whatsapp and telegram, and slack/teams for work.

Absolutely exhausting to be honest.

If they view you as unstable, unreliable, or adversely motivated, they will look for alternatives to at minimum diversify. It’s their livelihood.

We should not accept the Overton window shifting here, and say "well, if we do it to ourselves, in a privacy-preserving way, that's less bad".

It’s not “slightly”. They’ll start with claiming to protect people under 18 from obviously problematic content — porn, grooming, etc.

It won’t stop there. The scope creep will extend to expressing or reading “incorrect” or “dangerous” views.

They’ll probably call some of it “hate speech”, but hate speech is whatever the people in power say it is; on X, “cisgender” is designated as a slur and gets your post censored.

The slippery slope fallacy is only a fallacy if the slope isn’t slippery — “think of the children” is a wedge bad actors are once again trying to use to open the floodgates of censorship.

They don’t even need to target adults; if you control what children can see and express, you have enormous control over all future generations of voters.

This can of course be done government by government, but that isn't scalable for a global company.

The thing is, most of discords users are in countries which haven't yet passed laws that ban children from using apps like discord. If they were privacy focused they could do this only where the law requires it, like Australia.

There is a stark difference between enabling choice or compelling it.

Somehow in the last 15 years, we have completely lost sight of agency-based ethics as a founding and fundamental principle of western liberalism.

This has been replaced with harm-based ethics. Harm has no fixed definition. There is no stopping rule — when will we have eradicated enough harm? It’s declared by fiat by whoever has the means to compel and coerce — and harm inherent in that enforcement are ignored.

But assuming it has to be a private solution, you could do the same thing but make it a non-profit. Then at least _new_ services you wish to use don't need to collect your ID.

The problem isn't the platform, it's getting a critical mass of users. Until everyone is using it, nobody is.

Saying that companies should face some level of responsibility for their products is the dangerous move. That’s part of why the Internet has barely been regulated.

>nobody should escape the consequences of using that voice to peddle bullshit.

We can already do that without needing ID stored on servers. Blame lazy enforcement with an incentive to retain even bad customers.

>> nobody should escape the consequences

There are no consequences whatsoever for this.

My understanding is that Campfire hasn't been actively developed for ~10 years (https://once.com/campfire/changelog shows some minor fixes after the OSS launch; their GitHub has no 2026 commits). There are no mobile apps. It is not an actively maintained Discord alternative.

Stoat is early in development. For example, https://github.com/stoatchat/stoatchat has 1421 commits, compared with 68K for https://github.com/zulip/zulip/. I wish them luck! It's really important that we have multiple independent efforts.

https://www.rocket.chat/ and https://mattermost.com/ are open-core military contractors these days. You'll see what I mean if you visit their websites. But like Zulip, they are full-featured team chat systems, and if the parts of their system that are OSS work for your organization, they're certainly valid options.

Finally there is Matrix/Element. They have an inspiring vision and similar values to mine, and I'd recommend checking it out. Element/Matrix is built on an ambitious distributed consensus protocol with an E2EE option, which provides capabilities Zulip don't have but also adds complexity. Zulip is focused on just doing team chat really well, and does not support more than ~100K users in an instance. Hopefully will have a lot more resources now, thanks to Current Events. I wish the Element team the very best of luck!

----------------------------------------

Overall, Zulip's focus has always been on making a delightful chat experience, especially when you have multiple conversations happening at the same time. We aren't trying to build a clone, but instead the best possible experience for having lots of possibly complex conversations. So there will be some differences from what you're used to.

But critically, we spend a very large amount of our time relentlessly fixing micro-interactions that annoy us or are reported to us. If you read #design, #issues, and #feedback in https://zulip.com/development-community/, you'll get an idea of how we work.

So while there's some features we don't have that are present in other products, and we don't have dozens of designers on staff to do cool end-of-year animated reports like Discord does, you can expect few bugs and a lot of interaction design polish.

-----------------------------------------

The one mistake that I think a lot of folks make in evaluating options is focusing on buzzwords like E2EE without thinking through their threat model. E2EE doesn't add much practical security over self-hosting for many threat models, and it comes with significant usability trade-offs. And some current E2EE systems don't actually protect against a malicious server, say because they only protect message content, not metadata like who has access to what... just against raiding the server's disk.

(For example, WhatsApp has E2EE for message content, but I expect Meta's databases know everyone who's had a conversation with me on WhatsApp and the precise timestamps and approximate lengths of every message I've sent or received on the platform. And apparently some keyboard apps send what you're typing to remote servers!).

That is exactly example that parent posted about. Not every fb user is addicted to it, and has used it for long time.

I hope for it to happen in my country, with local companies and developers competing to create the new social networks. The current arrangement fine foreign entities too much power.

https://reddit.com/appeal

That would hurt billionaires in America, so I'm not too worried about that gaining traction in my country. Even if it ultimately becomes the next superpower regime.

More relevantly, I wonder of such restrictions would impede the First Amendment even if they did want to try.

Except for the fact that, without first solving the problem you responded to, yours is impossible to solve

PACs are just groups that do advocacy of some sort. Some do things like advise congress people on legislation they'd like passed, some run ads to campaign for positions or candidates, some advocate for movements.

What they're not supposed to be doing is directly coordinating with a candidate, or running ads just for a candidate. But that's a line that has been continually fuzzed.

An example of a good PAC might be something like the HRC (human rights commission) that campaigns for LGBTQ rights.

We the people actually have a relatively high amount of power in our states and communities. We just don't use it. The real solution is to convince the masses to pay attention, which is harder today than it ever was.

The government generated most of those too. As technology became more capable they utilized it more but that doesn't mean they were standing around with their hands in their pockets prior to that.

> Nowadays, our societies are old on average

Do they have an unfair access to technology? If not then does this actually have any impact?

> Older people on average are more inclined to pick whatever solution they feel promises a bit more security.

In your experience perhaps. I doubt the reliability of this logic.

It's about control and monitoring of civilians. And creating a dragnet to ensnare any new politicians and business leaders.

Freedom of speech is insufficient. We need freedom of privacy and from monitoring and tracking.

A lot of these things are normalized already, but requiring IDs is not and I don't want to see it become normalized.

Ultimately, they are free to do what they like (or perhaps being unnecessarily pressured by various govts) and I am free to leave the service.

The whole thing is security theater designed to conceal the fact that child security is not the objective, it's the justification.

I’d love to have my kids in relatively small, intimate online spaces where I can’t necessarily assume they will be perfect (nor do I want them to be - they deserve to have some room to learn to navigate problems for themselves) but I can at least assume they won’t be overwhelmed by the impossibility of successfully navigating life in a globalized fishbowl. But if there’s one thing late stage capitalism abhor, it’s a self-contained community of real humans from which the powers that be can’t extract “value”.

In fact its worse. Every site must also implement this security check. Or everyone must agree to just use sites and services that follow this policy. Otherwise anyone can just use another, often 'less safe' website.

Also, why should I need to identify myself at all ? I used to use IRC for the better part of my life, I still do infact. So to have to Identify myself by sending my ID to a random company is insulting to me.

Matrix works analogously; if you use the Element app from the App Store or Play Store, then you're using Element's push notification server, even if your Matrix homeserver is self-hosted. It's possible that Element allows their server to be used gratis in situations where Zulip charges a fee, I don't know their policies or anything, but in principle Matrix still leaves you exactly as dependent on a third party's goodwill unless you make your friends install a privately distributed mobile app.

Zulip IIUC does not restrict self-hosting of any feature that's technically possible to self-host.

my experience is exact opposite

Kind of like if each slack thread discussion had a title and was discoverable from the left sidebar and didn’t get in the way of the other threads.

I’m sorry to be that guy but it’s “handwringing” - twisting your hand like you wring your clothes until you agree

Piggy back off of an existing community that has already built trust -- for instance, build a forum for a local activity that often attracts 10+ years of participation and involves equipment. Your board will become the best place for users (who already trust one another) to swap used gear, discuss local venue closures, etc. Adopt moderation metrics that sustain your community (don't let bullies and spammers spoil everyone's experience.)

In 10 years, you can completely replace larger platforms as the community of choice.

I think you are confusing cost inflation with an increase in the money supply. The way the US government funds deficit spending is not by increasing money supply (though it could) but by issuing debt in the form of US Treasury bonds. That is a transfer of money from bond investors to the government. No new money is made. This is distinct from the way that banks issue loans which is by creating new money in the form of credit (but that credit money gets "burned" as loan principal is paid back). So federal taxes do not actually control inflation in the way you are describing. Since federal deficit spending is not financed by increasing the money supply, it can only cause price inflation if it increases aggregate demand over the current productive capacity of the economy. An example would be paying more for healthcare subsidies when there's a shortage of doctors. Or subsidizing demand for housing with more mortgage subsidies when there's a housing shortage. Taxes could also increase inflation if they have the effect of reducing supply of some goods or services (like tariffs do).

Edit: I want to mention that the Federal Reserve can and does increase money supply by buying US Treasury Bonds from banks (converting the asset into cash reserves). There are various reasons why they do this but overall it's done with their dual mandate in mind: control inflation and minimize unemployment.

1. No, it's not "easier" because it's hard-if-not-impossible to accurately and objectively judge the present-value of many types of assets. Even the case most-familiar to working-class folks, property taxes, nobody really likes/trusts the outcome.

2. We don't tax work, we tax income, because actual transactions between people with "skin in the game" are harder to fake. The extent to which wages are preferred as a subset of income is separate from the wealth-vs-income split.

(although in a UK context, it's looking highly likely that we'll have a "changing of the guard" in the next election with both Reform and Green party making significant inroads at the expense of the more established Conservative and Labour parties)

It’s nigh impossible to invent a system that truly formalizes collective will with the goal of optimizing for everyone’s best long-term interests, minimizing unhappiness.

It takes only a brief glimpse of the real world and its most wealthy to recognize that an abundance of virtue is not what's reflected in reality. In fact, the benevolence Carnegie describes, serves as a smoke screen for cruelty, degenerate acts, and the slaughterhouse of the soul. We've sold out every moral for a bait and switch and it's well past time to reneg on the social contract.

1. https://www.carnegie.org/about/our-history/gospelofwealth/

To me they have the classic problem as with non-profits: “If we solve the problem we cease to have a cause to exist.”

Taking a look at what’s been accomplished this past year, it’s a lot of token Executive Orders on renaming things, a token deportation effort, no material change on mass legal immigration, nothing happening on the voter ID front.

It’s just theater until they lose out in the midterms and they to rally their base again in 2028 to “Save America” or “Keep It Great” or whatever hokum.

Democrats will undo it all when the pendulum shifts.

* Jan 6 was a fedsurrection, and also simultaneously all innocent people that needed pardoning (Pardoning the feds?)

* World Liberty Financial receiving billions selling out American interests worldwide? Never heard of this but Burisma was worse!

* The Raffensperger call was no big deal there were attorneys on that call. Trump's personal (now disbarred) attorneys, of course, not there to represent America's interests but how's that the big deal?

* Also who's Raffensperger? But did you see those boxes under the table! What do you mean the clip is longer than 6 seconds that's all I saw on the infinity scrolling apps.

The decision was quite literally between a known criminal and already even at the time known to be likely pedophile (and now it's basically a fact) and someone who is none of that.

I don't know if this will personally affect any servers I use since they're not obviously adult, but I assume the slope will be slippery and if they're doing a faceID system now it will only get worse. Article says "analyze a user’s video selfie, which Discord says never leaves the user’s device"

...are they really going to implement a facial recognition algo in the browser, or is this a "download our app or fuck off" situation? I'm guessing the latter.

Apart from the open voice channels, what Discord features is Slack actually lacking? (and huddles can sub-in for voice channels much of the time)

Guessing they probably just ran some rudimentary OCR on the image to compare the name and DOB. I modified the actual license# as well as the picture.

Ah yes, the famous conservative talking point of "well yeah, my side is bad, but your side is just as bad".

From a pure performance standard across economy and quality of life, its pretty clear that Democratic policies always end up as net positive, while conservative policies may seem good in the short term but allways end up bad long term. But to see this you have to understand politics, and understand the effects aren't always immediate. However, the situation this time around is way simpler.

Basically in 2016, you could be excused for voting for Trump. Things were going well enough that mattered, Hilary was not the best candidate, and maybe a little mix up needed to happen. In 2020, if you voted for Trump, you are absolutely clueless about politics and have no idea what is actually good for the country, but at least its all political reasons.

In 2024, it wasn't about politics - it was a choice between either allowing a convicted felon who tried to overthrow US government (with Supreme Courts saying he did nothing wrong mind you) back into a position of power, or not. As it turns out 7/10 people who either voted for trump or didn't vote are ok with the rich and elite getting away with what they want.

So generally when people act surprised about anything that happens in regards to Einstein or any other things that Trump will do, like interfere with elections and possibly go for third term, just remember that those people don't actually care. This is what they want.

The "legal" line is usually around fraud - trying to obtain some financial gain by providing false information. There is nothing to gain by giving a fake ID to discord - but it probably violates some rules around unathorized access to computer systems.

Taxes raise inflation as they increase the production costs. If you tax too much wealthy people, they will leave, and take their capital away to invest it elsewhere. This as a result will lead to inflation due to lack of available capital for production.

(Incidentally, this is also the incantation that will cause its primary maintainer to show up in the comment thread and tell me that I’m not using their seemingly annual complete new client rewrite that fixes all of the problems and makes it perfect now.)

But it's the non-government entities you really need to be worried about. There are plenty of brokers buying up this data, making up assertions/predictions about the data, then selling it along downstream to secondary vendors who just blindly accept the data as true.

These are how people online get doxxed. It's not the government or FBI, it's these brokers who mine/buy data from sites/credit bureaus/local governments, link them across various social media, then build out profiles of individuals that they then sell to anyone with a big enough check book.

I've looked into these vendors before and their profiles on people are often wrong on several dimensions. So you don't want to do anything that's going to increase their ability to map you across the internet, because that's just going to improve their ability to identify you, while still selling lies about your personality.

Your example confuses the locus of control. The platform is making the choice and relies on user inaction rather than action. Users as a whole basically always descend gradients, and if they like / are addicted to the service, they'll descend with enough momentum to carry them over one-time friction like an ID check. The null hypothesis is they continue using the service. For it to be an "if everyone just" answer, it would be "if everyone just decided to stop using these extremely sticky services" because that is the de facto choice they are presented with. And it similarly suffers from an "if everyone just" lack of plausible mechanism.

The point of calling out non-solutions masquerading as solutions is to keep people's energy focused on possible but unstated solutions, rather than spending time blaming people for behavior largely determined by myriad immovable circumstances.

Nope. On iOS the flow is:

1. Generate a "push token" on the device (with the user's approval).

2. Send this token to your server.

3. Now you can send notifications to the device via this token. Your server needs to authenticate itself with Apple, and this requires an Apple account. But it's not linked to an individual app.

The situation is different on Android. Google went out of their way to make it impossible to customize `google-services.json` at runtime. So the built-in "easy" flow won't work. But notification ultimately work using veeeeery obfuscated remote procedure calls to Google Play Services and you can run them manually. I need to do a write-up about this....

But also, critically, if you want to, you can drop back to the "show me everything sequentially" view. Threads hide discussions away - which is good when you want to focus on something else, but bad when you can't remember where a discussion was.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/harangui...

I'm also gonna be that guy - hand wringing is a stereotype of an expression of distress, not coercion. You're thinking of the idiom "twisting someone's arm".

Another banking app has failed to identify me a couple of times (I attribute it to iPhone 17’s front camera distortion) and fell back to the snail mail id code as a 2nd factor. It arrived only several business days later. Instead of just letting me use my own 2nd factor such as a TOTP device or a physical security key. But maybe there are some legal requirements for that flow, I’m out of the loop.

So there’s a whole range between passkey-is-enough on one end and outsourced video id or snail mail for 2nd factor on the other. The latter can of course be misused to siphon as much personal information as possible out of you, even linking and scraping your other banking accounts for consumer profiling - designed as a requisite part of the authentication/authorization flow.

The supreme court is majority activist judges. Why cant new judges undo the old activist judges wrongly decided law? Why are the other new judges suddenly activists?

Also because taxing income (or other cash) is disinflationary. Taxing assets is inflationary because it forces sales.

It costs money to run for office. Before Citizens United, it was hard, limited, traceable donations, from individuals. No corporations, no soft money, no legal dark money. Now money has flooded in, with far less accountability.

We all know that 10 million Ys maybe not sold for $10 billion dollars but it gives you enough leverage to buy a social network and name it Y

Instead general elections are theaters were all that is voted is which clown is going to have a blank check.

The USA is very corrupt, true. But getting rid of the "huge administration" and burning tax receipts is not going to solve that. How could it?

One of the roles of the state in a modern society should be to ensure no one is left behind to starve, wither and freeze amongst the incredible resources we (as a society) have accumulated.

That takes administration. That takes resources. That is what your taxes should be used for.

I agree that far too much is used to give aid to the powerful, but the solution to that should not be to condemn the weak.

Burning taxes and de-funding the administration is exactly that: condemning the weak.

Most people don't care that much about the economy, they make up their minds based on other issues, then find a way to rationalize the state of the economy with that choice after the fact.

https://www.project2025.observer/

Don't worry - it's still there under the orange makeup. jk; I think you may have misspelled "collar"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_ph...

This is the infamous call where Trump, according to the recorded tapes, tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election results by demanding that Raffensperger "find 11,780 votes".

And that's the thing, these policies are always loose and will be abused.

- M rated game? Okay, it's adult only now. Sure.

- Emulators? Well they can play adult stuff. Now they just happen to add friction on something that is convenient for billionaire studios.

- LGBT content? Well you're talking about sexuality. Of course you need to be an adult. Here let's take face scans and totally not be a sitting duck for any malicious parties looking to identify traditionally disenfranchised people

The escalation is fairly obvious at this point. We've seen it happen in real time.

Not having a correct photo or license number didn't really mean anything to them if their OCR didn't have any half-decent verification that would look at the fields where that information was expected to be, anyway.

All one has to do is point at San Francisco as this us provably false. Dems have been in charge their for decades and it's arguably not working.

You say this like it’s a bad thing.

Soatok covered it very well here: https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol...

I'm quite sure most of these issues were fixed by now, but the fundamental issues remain, at least in this federation.

- Underage people who do not have the emotional maturity to deal with digital public spaces

- Emotional manipulation through "algorithmic" timelines (chronological or bust)

- Waves of unwanted interactions

Social media seems like it can be a positive tool to me. I would love to be able to continue to use it as I am. I do think there is a conflict of interest issue between the mental health of the people that use social media, and for-profit corporations that provide social media services. Regulating social media in a sane way has become difficult due to how much financial sway social media companies have on legislation, but it's an important fight to fight.

[0] I have a thread on my bsky account with a bunch of group photos, if you're interested it shouldn't be hard to find. I'm not linking it because I'm not interested in people engaging in it from here.

I propose passing laws that make parents who let their kids on social media pay fines and risk having social media sites blocked by their ISP rather than just making all adults have to get an "internet license".

I'm sorry but I don't buy this. We have been parenting forever, parents get burnt out. That doesn't mean you just ignore what your kids are doing.

It's your responsibility to be their guardians, not the government.

And by then you have to worry about money to upkeep the platform. You sell off or sell out your users, and the cycle repeats. Even for the most well meaning people, it comes down to the fact that scaling such communication isn't free.

We hear all these stories of eccentric billionaires going all out on their hobbies. Why do we have no eccentric FOSS people who donate to keep such stuff FOSS?

You can easily get within 10% of the "real" value on most assets. And, in particular, assets like stock have a built in ticker to tell you their exact current value.

This sort of evaluation happens all the time privately. For example, car insurance companies have gotten extremely good at evaluating the value of a car to determine when to simply total it.

The only thing that really makes it tricky is hidden assets or assets with no market value.

The likes of the richest people, who I think most of the "tax wealth" people are thinking of, have the majority of their wealth in equity. It's easy to tax the majority of their wealth.

This does not need to be a perfect system to be very effective at generating revenue and redistributing wealth.

Personally I think ideal set up is a system which grants quite a of power to a small handful of people, but makes it very easy for those people to be removed. This is typically the model that works best in business and other cooperative pursuits anyway.

Throwing more people in the room with different opinions will ensure significant decisions can almost never made. Any policy too far to the right or too far to left will be watered down. The result is that you'll be led by centrists who can't really change anything and anything they do change will be disliked by everyone.

The real solution though is for the legislative branch to not be beholden to those same people and be able to quickly and effectively close tax loopholes as they are discovered.

Also the term "asset" exists and is used in accounting

For example in the US, the executive order is a massive problem. Citizens united as well. And for all democracies the natural appeal of strongman politics is a huge problem.

Every attempt at government overreach really needs to be questioned. I don't say rejected, just questioned. How will it be used by future powers? Is the tradeoff worth it? Can it be temporary? Do we even have a way to claw it back if it turns out to be detrimental? Is it too subtle and nuanced that the majority will miss seeing it? etc.

This sounds like a 2-party government problem, not a tax problem. Plenty of countries do just fine spending that money to provide healthcare, unemployment, etc to their citizenry. Only really seems to be the US that views this as a negative

In today's era those expectations do not exist. The public-facing, gilded age palaces, which by their public nature tend to enforce good behavior by forcing them to physically interact with the society they profited from, have been replaced by private, gated bunkers behind tall hedges blurred out on Google Maps. The wealthy wear jeans and hoodies to "blend in" or appear common, when they are very much not. A rail tycoon in a 10X beaver tophat might offer a beggar something on the street. A tech mogul in a hoody might not even get solicited.

Income tax - and broadly speaking many other changes to the social contract between upper and lower classes, like the bureaucratization of welfare - has not just allowed but incentivized the wealthy to shirk the responsibilities of old, and outsource their morality to a (corrupt, as many have pointed out) government. And it's not good. There is no honor in giving anymore.

> Unequally or unjustly, perhaps, as these laws sometimes operate, and imperfect as they appear to the Idealist, they are, nevertheless, like the highest type of man, the best and most valuable of all that humanity has yet accomplished.

Or (to shorten it a bit): "These laws (of capitalism) [...] are nevertheless [..] the best and most valuable of all that humanity has yet accomplished". So this is only an unlimited belief in the virtues of capitalism, not in the virtues of rich people.

From the introduction:

> Carnegie believed in giving wealth away during one’s lifetime, and this essay includes one of his most famous quotes, “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.” Carnegie’s message continues to resonate with and inspire leaders and philanthropists around the world.

I really wonder what Carnegie would think about his successors dismantling USAID?

People under 18 are the largest disenfranchised block of citizens.

Are we not tired yet of the various versions of the Reaganomics boogieman? When are we going to grow out of trickle down economics mentality?

The more we resist turning this into a state-sided solution which provides a service to private companies with a YES/NO age verification, the more likely your data is going to be given to botton-of-the-barrel third party private companies.

I'm genuinely curious what the argument is against state-run privacy focused age verification is here. We already protect real life adult spaces with IDs. You hand your ID to a random store clerk who scans it with a random device when you want to buy alcohol or cigarettes.

What makes these social media platforms special that they have entirely different rules?

I will say, if they came for small privately-hosted communities, I can understand the cause for alarm. But so far it appears to be limited to massive misinformation machines.

You do understand the difference?

I wish I could edit my post because a lot of people had the same misconception when I first wrote it.

If you don't use Discord as a source of "nsfw" content you can comfortably ignore these requirements. I do realize there are some communities that may fare a lot worse than my gaming / software dev interests, and may be falsely claimed "nsfw" just for their existence. Which yeah, that absolutely sucks.

I mean it, the tech illiteracy of gen Z/alpha is out of this world, I did not expect a generation that grew up with technology to be so inept, but here we are. But they grew up with a 4x4 grid of app icons, not with a PC.

I think I already said that in my original post.

> We should not accept the Overton window shifting here

Great! Let's say you and I refuse to accept it. How do we keep Discord from demanding passports or selfies? How can we get France[1] or Finland[2] to roll back age restrictions on social media?

You'll never convince a majority of voters in democracies that nothing online should be age-restricted. These are the people that the enemies of anonymity and free speech are counting on to advance their agenda.

At the same time a majority of voters is currently quite content with the state of age verification for access to tobacco and alcohol. Both its strictness (or lack thereof) and privacy preservation (almost perfect).

I'm not saying my proposal is the one that should be adopted. I honestly don't care which idea gets picked and I don't want anything from it. But it's a virtual guarantee that in the absence of a competing good-enough, privacy-preserving implementation, only the most privacy-invasive idea will be implemented.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46776272

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46838417

Perhaps collecting everyone's messages, social links, scanning their faces, and then adding ID data in for "ground truth" is the real interest here?

A subtle but important distinction

I expected all of them to have become Discord channels at this point.

Can we normalize “it takes a village” again? After all, we do let bars and liquor stores get a slap on the wrist for selling to minors. If you let a child into an adult movie theater you’d be in jail. Why do we pretend we don’t live in a world with laws and standard conduct the second we connect to a modem?

Pretending that's what the anti-social media stance is, is hilariously dishonest.

Anyone pretending there is any anonymity and privacy to protect on the internet, right now, has their head in the sand, especially if they use social media.

Does tiktok have good intentions keeping your hooked all day on end?

So don't scale. There is a sweet spot where a few $2 classifieds (e.g, for motor vehicles) will sustain your operating costs, and the high-trust environment keeps moderation efforts/costs low, while the total target audience is too small for most bad actors to bother with.

You buy 1 BTC at $60k in 2024. In 2025 it’s valued at $100k, so you pay taxes on $40k gain.

Now it’s 2026 and you finally decide to sell the BTC for the original price of $60k.

Except you’ve paid taxes on $40k in paper gains that disappeared before you sold the asset.

How do we solve that?

(Replace “bitcoin” with “startup stock option” if you really want to illustrate the problem - imagine having to pay taxes on stock options you decide to never exercise)

How? What is the difference between "stock" and "inventory"?

More importantly, it's a powerful political spin used to justify often heinous actions. People want to protect kids.

There are different kinds of wealthy people. Some built their wealth through talent and luck. Some inherited it. Some gained it through state cronyism and clientelism.

Some own scarce assets (like real estate). Others created new assets (e.g., startup founders).

You can dislike Elon Musk, but his owning a large stake in Tesla doesn’t make others poorer. That’s not true of a landlord who corners housing supply in a city.

Wealth taxes are essentially revenge taxes without a clear objective. France tried one for years. It was costly to administer, riddled with exemptions, encouraged avoidance instead of productivity, and sustained an industry of tax specialists. The revenue was largely recycled into clientelist spending, sometimes increasing the wealth of the same elites (e.g., via housing subsidies).

If the goal is to curb land hoarding, implement a land value tax. If it’s to reduce dynastic concentration, tax large single-heir inheritances more heavily and lower the rate when estates are widely divided. If it’s to reduce cronyism, cut state spending, simplify regulation, and strengthen competition.

Make META a criminal organization. Put Zuckerberg behind bars.

Going back a bit further yet, I also miss local BBSs. Some were popular while many others were not. Almost all of them regardless of popularity were a labor of love: Very few BBS sysops ever recovered what was spent to start the thing up and keep it going and it was not, broadly speaking, an inexpensive hobby. It was a mosey-losing operation.

But since long-distance telephone calls were billed by the minute, the systems were geographically-bound by the financial disincentives of far-away users. This made for tight, local communities (often with small dozens of semi-active users, and sometimes even hundreds!) and pretty effectively kept the idea of global domination-style growth off of the table.

So, again: The constraints shaped it to be how it was.

What kinds of constraints might form a path towards to this kind of small success today, in 2026, while there are giants like Meta stomping around?

How does that work when a house is used as collateral on a loan? Or artwork?

The loans are just a symptom, the problem is in the Estate Tax, and those loans are being used as a tool to wait out the clock and then dodge dynastic taxes entirely.

Remove the final loophole, and they'll stop playing weird games to get there all on their own. Plus it'll be way less-disruptive to everyone involves in regular loans for regular reasons.

I think this is an inherent human problem that prevents us from overcoming it... history has proven that the more equal everyone is, and the less individual ownership they have, the lazier and more bored they get.

Look at the previous attempts at socialism... people stop caring when there's no goal to work towards, they can't all be doing the same thing and just be happy, because humans are naturally competitive. We desire things other people don't have, like possessions, money, or power.

Is that something you believe?

Build and promote alternatives that don't.

> How can we get France[1] or Finland[2] to roll back age restrictions on social media?

Host services elsewhere, and ignore claims that a country's laws extend beyond its borders.

The most complex concept they can understand is mail/post attachment or capcut, but then this is it. 10 minutes later they will download phone flashlight app that requires Google services for app delivery.

Shocking.

I ended up with refusing to help with anything related to technology in any other way than pointing to help/manual/search engines and asking questions.

There isn't a single politician I could vote for that could improve this situation. Even if there was, they would just get swept away by the ocean of people who actually believe in this "think of the children" narrative.

  - Not understanding that a dead battery means it won’t turn on
  - Trying to use them without an internet connection
  - “The screen won’t work” when trying to non-touchscreen models like a tablet
  - “I can’t see my stuff” when using the guest mode rather than their login, or when they used a PC and they couldn’t see the docs icon on their desktop

There’s a mountain of issues along those lines we ran into, and it was honestly frightening to watch.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/our-blessed-homeland-their-ba...

More seriously, I have seen similar exchanges many times on this social media where one party tries to exempt what is clearly a social media from his anti-social media agenda because he finds it personally more palatable. Usually he tries to exempt Reddit or HN but in this case it is Bluesky, which has the same features as Twitter ten years ago and is notorious for being always politically charged. It makes me think whatever criticisms he may have against social media are actually less about social media but about people he does not like being on social media. Like a driver complaining about all the other cars causing a congestion while he sits in his own car.

But fear not, because our blessed regulators (totally different from their tyrannical censors) will save us from the Big Bad. Never mind when Nepal blocked WhatsApp in its social media ban or when UK came after Wikipedia!

Very possible. I'm on Tildes and its invite only structure prevents the infamous Eternal September effect. It also means that it's nearing a decade and is very much not going to compete with other forums as a platform.

I'm perfectly fine with that. But that doesn't seem to be what people en masse want. They want to connect with all their friends and family, and discover new ones through specialized communities. On a scale of a billion people, that's hard to manage. And if no one principled fills that void, the unprincipled will.

>What kinds of constraints might form a path towards to this kind of small success today, in 2026, while there are giants like Meta stomping around?

Plenty of methods for that, centralized or decentralized. It's less a matter of "do we have the technology/ingenuity" and more "can it defeat the massive network effects?"

Having everyone pay in is one strategy. But we have 30 years of people used to free and open mass communication. How many will give that up for proper freedoms and protection from state actors?

Heck, it almost always seems like people give up freedoms whenever push comes to shove, no matter the industry or timeline.

But of course success is relative to some cultural values. We could just as well wonder about success and failure in implementation of any political system.

The most remarkable trait of humans is cognitive plasticity, so determining any natural tendency that would be more inate than acquired is just a game of pretending there are hypothetical humans living out of any cultural influence that would still exhibit predominent behavioral traits.

Competition is a social construct. There are people out there whose biggest concern is keeping focus on enjoying what they are, freeing their attention from the illusion of possession, avoiding any financial/material bounds they can and staying away of contingent hierarchical servitudes.

They are also many people who holds desires for both of these perspectives, or any interpolation/extrapolation that they can suggest.

Like a pragmatic meritocracy. We accept that there will be cheaters, and we won't catch or stop them all, but we have some hard limits. Do we care if you stop working so hard once you hit $1b? Maybe we'd even prefer that you did stop working (against societies interest!)?

This wouldn't even remotely resemble the communism bugaboo. It's basically saying, yes greed can be good, but at some point it gets ridiculous.

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/15-years-after-c...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health...

You're shooting the messenger.

I'm not saying this issue doesn't exist. But I want to reframe it as the low bar for using tech dropping through the floor. Previously, you had to have at least somewhat of an idea for what you're doing, but nowadays most people who don't care about tech are reliant on using the "grandma school of thought" in memorizing basic patterns and relationships without having a bigger model of what's going on. This mostly affects newer generations and older people who only started using technology recently, because this strategy didn't fly in the past. But technical literacy is falling for everyone.

But the absence of the low bar doesn't mean that everyone's chasing it. In high school, I was surrounded by peers who were interested in tech, sometimes being far better than me. The average level of understanding was pretty alright. In university, lots of people did just fine. I know countless people my age who are highly skilled in computer science. We're not in the majority, but there's plenty of us. I'm tired of it always being framed as an issue stemming from some kind of unique lack of personal responsibility and low intelligence, complete with applying stereotypes to hundreds of millions of people. Every average user will optimize actually understanding anything out of their brain if given an opportunity, it's just that that opportunity had only appeared fairly recently.

> why don't you make a separate account for your sibling

> I don't know how to make an email

> but you needed an email for your account

> yeah, I just use my school email

By that time my age as a young teen I knew how to make new accounts and research what I didn't know. And I'm not sure of its my place to help them create an email without knowledge from their parents.

There still is push back, so I won't say this is a losing battle. I'll keep fighting regardless.

>Keep some alternate contacts for friends at least

They know where to reach me. Whether they care enough to go outside their gardens to talk is another matter.

In ~media~, you have a few specialized ~creators~, and doom scrollers.

Compare Lunarstorm anno 2000 and instagram 2026.

It's useful to have words that distinguish major classes of activity online, even if several types are combined on a given platform. "Messaging", "Chat Rooms", "Streaming", "Forums", "Social Networking", and "Social Media" are all different things. You can quibble about what constitutes the edges of the definitions but they all have different key activities they enable.

If you lump everything together, you fail to understand the necessary nuances to identify the problems let alone solve them.

The key to understanding any given social platform is to understand the proportion of which activity that platform enables. This tells you things like the incentives, constraints, externalities, etc of the platform. Different designs have different effects.

I can understand what this means in the context of visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok. (Slight quibble on TT in that a number of very large creators there record from their cars, kitchens, or otherwise do not employ specialized production.)

In any case, what does "specialized creators" mean in the context of (primarily) text-based platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook? Does that mean they are not social media?

> On a network, people interact with each other.

On any platform that would be considered social media by any definition, popular posts serve as a place for people to interact with each other. They are more ephemeral than a subreddit, but they serve the same function.

I am honestly not trying to troll, I just don't understand the distinction.

What I find hilariously objectionable is pretending that bluesky is somehow better than all the social medias out there. It's not. It was founded by jack dorsey and copied the UI and features of old Twitter. Its main selling point is "twitter but no Elon musk" and is, from my perspective, almost exclusively inhabited by politically antagonized people seeking a refuge which then resulted in US politics sucking the air out of everything else on that platform.

Can people forge constructive relationships on bluesky? I am sure they do, but they can also do it on X, Reddit, Facebook or whatever "bad" social media out there.

Meanwhile, HN would be closer to media. It technically has a few personalities, and one default feed to doom scroll.

Eat the rich is a good mantra and banner, but not an action plan. Here in America we have at most 3 years of this left and at median 1 year (with a huge nebulous cloud based on the reaction to trying to seize power). There's a lot we can do to build up to the ultimate mantra.

US $12k

Germany $8k

UK $6k

Medicaid + Medicare is 22% of all US federal spending. Defense is 13%.

Note that "social" (as in social interaction with people you know) in "social networking" is a requirement, while it is not in "social media". You may as well call it "parasocial media" since that is the way most people use it most of the time.

Thus 'social media' is primarily based on content, while 'social networking' is primarily based on social connection and interaction.

This lives in opposition to the people who own the websites/apps goals. So it won't happen.