My Feed, My Way

Posted by dotcoma 8 hours ago

Comments

Comment by Vishal_Max 6 hours ago

The damage is already done for most people who already use it. Whenever I go to a restaurant and see friends, families, and couples together, I feel sad that instead of talking to each other, they’re all watching TikToks or reels. On a bus or train, barely one or two people are actually doing something other than watching something online.

At least, hopefully, this rule helps future generations. People’s brains are so addicted that they can’t even focus for 10 minutes straight. On top of that, I see moms giving their toddlers mobile phones while they eat or whenever they need to get something done. People should really start considering how social media affects us in the long term.

Comment by greggsy 4 hours ago

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

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

Comment by MarceliusK 1 hour ago

A phone is a pretty bad proxy for what someone is actually doing with their attention

Comment by account42 3 hours ago

Yes and public transport isn't exactly a great environment for interacting with your friends - either its already loud or you're going to annoy other passengers.

Comment by HNIsAds 50 minutes ago

People assume I’m on TikTok but I’m working. Dozens of client updates per day plus back and forth

Comment by f6v 5 hours ago

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

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

Comment by deathlock 4 hours ago

Read, knitting/crochet, sleep, listen to music, play games (eg. emulator + pokemon games), study, read a newspaper, do crosswords, play chess online, watch a movie, listen to a podcast, learn a language, talk to other non-scrolling people, and yes, you can also stare outside, daydream or self-analyze, or even do nothing. Just a few decades ago we had a lot of dead times, it's not that crazy to pass an hour without having anything to do.

Comment by account42 3 hours ago

A lot of those suggestions mean staring at a phone or smilar device and a bystander like ggp might not be able to tell them apart from looking at social media.

Comment by f6v 56 minutes ago

If only there was a device I could use to play games and listen to music at the same time.

Comment by jareklupinski 1 hour ago

> Self-analyzing and staring in the window

you say this like it's a negative thing :( have you tried it?

Comment by f6v 54 minutes ago

It just gets me how some people are telling me what to do in my free time in such a condescending way.

Comment by yoz-y 4 hours ago

Reading and conversing with a stranger? Maybe not every time but at least once in a while?

Comment by pasc1878 4 hours ago

I read but on my phone or ebook reader and have done so for nearly 20 years. Especially since mass market paperbacks were replaced by larger ones that do not fit in my pocket or bookshelves.

I am in England – It is considered very odd to talk to strangers on a train or bus

Comment by irjoe 2 hours ago

I would say it's pretty common to talk to strangers on the train in England. I could just be the "Northerner terrifying Londoners by saying Hello" though. I do know not to start a conversation with a stranger on the tube.

Comment by BoxOfRain 51 minutes ago

I think it depends on the train journey personally. I'd never dream of striking up a conversation on the Tube or a busy commuter line; personally I'm the definition of 'not a morning person' so I've no social battery to spare in those circumstances. On the other hand I quite like a chat when I'm not in a hurry or it's not the morning, makes the time go faster.

Mind you most of the talk seems to be along the lines of 'GWR couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery' these days.

Comment by cryptoz 4 hours ago

I treasure my memories of being on subways and busses and getting lost in thought while staring out the windows, yeah. I mean, people have done this for basically all of human history (okay walking or something, not on a train, but, yeah). It's not a bad thing to have some time with just your senses existing in the world.

Comment by marcelo-earth 4 hours ago

I mean, you're right. When I travel, I rarely use my phone or listen to music because everything is about discovering new things, and I love it

But when I'm home, on my way from home to the gym, I take the same route every day, and it can get boring sometimes

I'm also terrible at keeping my phone charged, so sometimes I end up alone with my thoughts anyway

Comment by greggsy 4 hours ago

Let people enjoy things.

Comment by amunozo 4 hours ago

Do you really enjoy doom scrolling? Because I don't, it is just addictive and makes me feel tired and sad most of the times, with infrequent sparks of joy.

Comment by greggsy 3 hours ago

Don’t do things you don’t enjoy.

Comment by amunozo 3 hours ago

They are really adictive and engaging, and they trick you into spending more time there. Nobody ever says "let's watch reels for 3h", but here we are.

Comment by edu 4 hours ago

The problem with being always online is not “not-enjoying” but stopping to think. People are getting used to be feed what they need to think constantly (from politics to product reviews) and then their critical thinking skills atrophy.

Moreover, I’m not sure if being on social media is something “enjoyable” anymore, and it’s more like smoking tobacco where it becomes necessary but is not enjoyed.

Comment by dotcoma 4 hours ago

Thinking. Taking notes, ideally on a piece of paper. Relaxing. Talking to strangers. And yes, self-analysing. Staring in the window, maybe not so much.

Comment by itake 4 hours ago

its ok to just be bored. that was life in the 90s for me

Comment by LoganDark 4 hours ago

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

Comment by epihelix 2 hours ago

Not in my family or extended family. But you can see examples of this all the time when eating out. So many young couples sit at a table at a restaurant, get out their phones and scroll away, occasionally showing their partner something they enjoyed. It's rare to see them talk more than a few words on what is presumably a date night.

Comment by brainwad 47 minutes ago

Well, I don't watch shorts... but I do open my phone and read HN sometimes, when I don't want to actively participate in the (current) conversation. Which also shows that "curated" feeds will not solve this particular problem of interesting content on phones distracting one from boring family and friends.

Comment by xnorswap 3 hours ago

There isn't any need to "look things up related to the conversation", and if that is seen as acceptable then that itself is a sign of how things have changed, and how addicted we all are to information.

Comment by martin- 2 hours ago

Instead of spending 45 minuter discussing back and forth whether Tim Burton is still alive, we can take five seconds to look it up, and then move on to more interesting topics.

Comment by LoganDark 3 hours ago

I dunno, to me it feels kind of like pulling a book off the shelf to double-check something from there. It's just, you know, digital instead. It's definitely something that's been acceptable to some kinds of people even before devices, but of course it's not for everybody. Some people prefer to say "I'm not sure", leave the conversation, and then come back later (or not) after they've studied up. Some people prefer not to have their conversational partners dwelling on details by digging into books during conversation. I personally like to get to the bottom of details on the spot, but that's probably my ADHD. (potentially also other things too)

Comment by MarceliusK 1 hour ago

[flagged]

Comment by blfr 7 hours ago

Why do people (or at least politicians pretend to) believe that social networks are popular despite the content algos and not because of them? The reason Tik Tok blew up is because it shows you what you want to see without you twiddling with a dozen dials.

Maybe giving people what they want is not great for them. I am ok with this argument. But then "giving people control" won't change anything. Vast majority of users would rather put up with shocking (to me) levels of annoyance and expense just not to configure/fix anything themselves.

Comment by strken 6 hours ago

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

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

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

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

Comment by ssss11 6 hours ago

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

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

Comment by blfr 6 hours ago

I cannot relate to liking Facebook because I never did in any of its eras but once upon a time newspaper was a competitive information technology. People would read them on the subway and at the beach. I did this, I am old enough to remember "saving" articles to read when I took a magazine into the sauna.

The same happened to algo-less social media sites.

Comment by mig1 4 hours ago

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

Comment by tene80i 7 hours ago

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

Comment by King-Aaron 6 hours ago

Because the people most severely impacted don't understand that they are being severely impacted.

Comment by tene80i 6 hours ago

Sure, there’s an argument for improving the default too. I was just replying to what I thought was someone saying “it doesn’t matter, most people won’t use it, give up”

Comment by King-Aaron 5 hours ago

Fair enough. I legitimately hate people who do that - gaslighting people into not wanting change. I don't even understand what drives that mentality half the time.

Comment by somenameforme 6 hours ago

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

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

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

Comment by yoz-y 4 hours ago

Facebook is for parents and grandparents and honestly it’s pretty good at it.

No other place is as convenient to form small communities.

Comment by gitowiec 6 hours ago

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

Comment by dbspin 2 hours ago

The thing that doesn't get written about is that precisely the same situation occurs for women. Decentering men is equivalent to MGTOW. The torrent of misandrist content on social media utterly dwarfs the amount of 'red pill' / manosphere or similar content. It's mainstream in a way outright misogynistic content hasn't been for decades. Worse still, it's almost impossible to have this discussion without the immediate repost of 'but actually men are terrible', or some other such nonsense.

There's a very old fashioned 'battle of the sexes' being pushed by algorithmic content, and it's having visible toxic effects on the capacity of people to socialise, form relationships, engage in social reproduction and function normally in society. There's a vast torrent of such poison aimed at both men and women. Pretending it's only occurring to men, or that only men are being radicalised, is refusing to engage with the problem.

The comments section of literally every mainstream video on instagram reels, tiktok and the like that in any way touches on gender, masculinity, femininity etc - isn't dominated by misogynistic comments and hasn't been for years. But rather thousands of 'not all men, but always a man', 'yaas goddess', 'men aren't lonely enough', and countless other shibboleths.

The normalisation of FLINTA only spaces (and accommodation) and the like offline has brought these dynamics into the real world in ways that further isolate and dehumanise.

Comment by stavros 1 hour ago

This has always been my issue with these causes that claim to promote equality. If your way of promoting equality and inclusion excludes a whole gender, you're doing something wrong.

Comment by blfr 6 hours ago

I was a teenage boy in the 90s and "girls are stupid" is definitely not a Tik Tok original. Yeah, yeah, scale matters but this is not in fact the first generation to discover sex differences or vices.

Comment by latexr 5 hours ago

You are massively underrepresenting the situation. This is not “girls have cooties”, this is full-on women bashing. This is calling all women subhuman whores who don’t deserve respect. For crying out loud, there are massive “influencers” out there whose whole job is to degrade women online. You might’ve heard of a couple of wildly popular brothers who have just been arrested for literal human trafficking who forced women to be cam girls while making money publicly bragging about it, and those guys are (again, publicly) connected to the president of the USA.

Let’s please not pretend this is even comparable to the 90s. Scale is a quality of its own, and the scale of the current situation, both in severity and reach, is very different.

Comment by blfr 5 hours ago

Yeah, it has gone further. You wouldn't hear "kill all men" at a uni in the 90s either. But I am not convinced that this is social media because hardline feminism predates it significantly.

Comment by drewstiff 4 hours ago

But could it be that formerly unrealistic levels of exposure has normalised these things that always existed, and now they are mainstream and affecting kids __due to social media__ ?

Comment by latexr 3 hours ago

Bingo. And algorithmic social media feeds reward fringe opinions—the more hateful the better—because those drive “engagement” which translates to attention, fame, money. Which means people are incentivised to be as controversial as possible. They don’t even have to fully believe what they preach, they just have to ensure they can enrage a large enough number of people. Which in turn brings the people who really believe those things out of the woodwork and the slime ball of hate gets bigger and rolls faster.

Social media as a technology isn’t necessarily the root cause of all those problems. But it is the medium by which those were allowed and incentivised to proliferate at an ever increasing pace.

Comment by 5 hours ago

Comment by armchairhacker 6 hours ago

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

Comment by grey-area 6 hours ago

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

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

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

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

Comment by dalemhurley 4 hours ago

Maybe read the bill first before commenting.

Comment by legostormtroopr 6 hours ago

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

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

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

Comment by Nursie 7 hours ago

The answer/comeback is "popular with whom?"

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

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

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

Comment by AlienRobot 2 hours ago

Kind of ridiculous, isn't it? Personally I think recommendation algorithms should be more powerful, customizable, and transparent. Currently they just make too many assumptions about the user without providing mechanisms to directly assign positive and negative weights to categories of content, which is what makes them unusable as a tool.

Comment by LoganDark 3 hours ago

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

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

Comment by armchairhacker 7 hours ago

I’d prefer similar to Doctorow, that governments simply make scraping and republishing (anything that anyone who consents can access) explicitly legal, then alternate frontends may appear with their own algorithms.

Comment by xtiansimon 2 hours ago

Does that include the social networks themselves? Essentially forcing APIs again?

Comment by protocolture 7 hours ago

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

Comment by vintagedave 3 hours ago

> Just as we have basic safety standards for cars, toys or food, the duty of care applies basic standards for the online products we use every day.

Aussie here. Great to see this. I don't think this goes far enough: I'd like to see addictive algorithms, content, and doomscrolling banned entirely. Not an option to see a different feed. Illegal. It's manipulative, hurts people, hurts children: make it illegal.

Comment by achenet 3 hours ago

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

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

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

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

Comment by brainwad 41 minutes ago

Australia is and always has been a nanny state. It's cultural.

Comment by jl6 2 hours ago

"tax and regulate" isn't immune from second-order effects either. Set the tax high enough and you'll get smuggling gangs with all the same tendencies.

Comment by achenet 2 hours ago

no, it's not a perfect system, but better.

Look at the alcohol market in the U.S.

Or even the tightly controlled Systembolaget [0] in Sweden, compared to the modern markets for cannabis and cocaine.

Tax and regulate lowers violence and increases tax revenue, outright prohibition/making it illegal increases violence and lowers tax revenue.

I do believe "sin prohibition" policies, for not just drugs but gambling, prostitution, etc, are one example of "low-hanging fruit", where there is a noticeably better option that is usually not implemented.

Really, for all trades usually controlled by violent criminals (so everything the Mafia/Yakuza/crime groups traditionally specialize in), I believe that the citizens of a given state will be happier if the trade is controlled by the state and not given over to criminals, which is functionally what "make it illegal" does.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systembolaget

Comment by brainwad 32 minutes ago

BTW, Australia has shown the limits of sin taxation with our very high tobacco taxes. They got so high we induced a criminal black market in tobacco, that now is very hard to eradicate and is causing gang warfare, etc. Given we now have the crime anyway, maybe banning tobacco would have better outcomes than taxing it at this point.

Comment by jl6 1 hour ago

I don't think it's at all obvious that a regulation-based approach could produce better outcomes than a prohibition-based approach. No doubt prohibition causes much violence and misery, but prohibition was a response to other great harms, most famously the condition of opium addicts.

Rather than rehash the arguments for and against, I would ask a meta-question: if the matter really were so clear, then why, over the last ~200 years, did every country introduce a prohibition-based stance, and why has no country switched to tax-and-regulate?

Comment by alehlopeh 1 hour ago

As if this guy had the power to ban anything, you’re begging him not to?

Comment by suddenlybananas 3 hours ago

Is there anything you think would be appropriate to prohibit?

Comment by achenet 2 hours ago

things that directly harm other taxpayers - murder, physical violence, theft, false slander/reputational attacks...

prohibiting things that harm the individual should not be the role of government, IMO. Government, in the liberal/Enlightenment tradition, is there as a protector of your 'rights' to life, liberty, and property. While it has a duty to protect you from things which could harm you (eg junk food/sugary drinks), it also has a duty to let you do what you choose to do, even if it's 'bad' for you (eg eat junk food and drink sugary drinks).

Hence the compromise - you can smoke cigarettes and drink Coca-Cola, but the makers of cigarettes and soft drinks have to warn you beforehand, and the transaction may be more taxed than things like basic foods.

Comment by vintagedave 20 minutes ago

My point (I'm the one you originally replied to) is that the effects of negative social media are on par with these things. Political violence, violence against minorities and specific genders, and worse. "Even" hurting the way children grow up and think should not be controversial to ban for children. Part of society's function is to protect kids as they grow.

I don't think likening it to Coca Cola, or even alcohol, is the same at all. And I did not ask to ban social media. I asked to ban harmful expressions of social media.

Comment by stubish 1 hour ago

In countries with public health care and social security, harm to the individual is direct harm to other taxpayers. You must wear seat belts or wear bike helmets because the rest of us don't want to pay your rehabilitation bills.

Comment by wewewedxfgdf 6 hours ago

In 2023 the Australian Prime Minister Albanese was asked by Neil Mitchell on 3AW radio what he would do if he was "Dictator for a Day".

Albanese replied: "Ban social media".

Indeed.

ref: https://www.reddit.com/r/australian/comments/1gmakhz/anthony...

Comment by florkbork 6 hours ago

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

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

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

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

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

Comment by wewewedxfgdf 6 hours ago

But he DID say it, right?

Or are you saying that because it's Reddit/The Daily Mail, he DIDN'T say it?

What are you talking about?

It's widely quoted and well known he said it so where are you coming from.

Comment by florkbork 4 hours ago

No, it's your source; you prove your claims.

I'll give you a hint though - the article doesn't even quote him, it just puts out a spicy headline.

What he actually said and the context:

"Ban social media. Keyboard warriors can anonymously say anything at all. Without any fear.", with regard to a misinformation bill.

Considering the sources deliberately stripped everything of context and you've repeated it without checking, would you say we have a misinformation problem with media in general, or social media?

Comment by wewewedxfgdf 3 hours ago

Here is the exact clip:

https://video.reclaimthenet.org/articles/albanese-dictator-s...

Comment by MarceliusK 1 hour ago

The first rule reduces platform power. The second potentially requires platforms to build even larger classification and moderation systems. I'm very much in favor of the first, but I don't think they belong under the same conceptual umbrella.

Comment by jackb4040 1 hour ago

I read the article but I don't understand the two "rules" you're referring to? Can you state them?

Comment by stewx 1 hour ago

1) Force platforms to let you turn off algorithmic feeds

2) Keep undesirable content out of feeds entirely for under-18s

Comment by agnishom 8 hours ago

I read the first sentence and thought: what is the government of Albania doing in Australia?

Comment by oriettaxx 7 hours ago

OMG, I've got it now

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

Comment by swiftcoder 7 hours ago

Yep, I spent a hot minute puzzling over that sentence

Comment by fsckboy 7 hours ago

Albanese is an Italian name, for the record

In Albania, Albania is called Shqipëria.

Comment by brospars 4 hours ago

I was thinking albanese were the people of Albania (I know it's albanian, but got confuse for a moment)

Comment by brospars 4 hours ago

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

Comment by tshapedrob 7 hours ago

Brilliant! I really hope they get it through, and I’ll be interested to see what impact it has on screen time app sales in the region.

Comment by King-Aaron 6 hours ago

I don't think this goes nearly far enough, and is another example of our government latching onto a juicy trending topic and doing the bare minimum to make a positive sounding news byte out of. This should be an opt-in model for algorithmically driven content, infinite scrolling, etc. An opt out model just feels like they're compromising for the benefit of industry lobbyists on the issue.

Comment by Nursie 6 hours ago

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

Say it ain't so!

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

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

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

Comment by King-Aaron 6 hours ago

The whole political charade is just getting me so angry, the thin veil of "government working for the people" rhetoric has completely fallen away to expose how directly corporate interests translate into Australian government policy.

Majority of Australians supported changes in how the resource sector is taxed - the government openly met with industry lobbyists right before the budget and just said lol no.

They went to a local byelection and their candidate was a gas lobbyist they parachuted in from a different electorate.

The gambling thing, what a joke.

The social media ban for kids that immediately turned out to be pushed by pro media lobbyists.

The military spending. My word.

They don't even try to hide it anymore, and Labor were meant to be the quasi-progressive-left option in the uniparty system. Now I view them to be equally as corrupt as the Liberal party, leaving the Greens as the only viable option in politics here. And they can never get anywhere due to the way political donations/funding is set up, along with the vested interests owning the media narrative. No one even bothers to read their policy documents because old Rupert Murdoch has their opinion covered for them.

Gah. It's nearly beer time I think.

Comment by russelg 3 hours ago

>Majority of Australians supported changes in how the resource sector is taxed - the government openly met with industry lobbyists right before the budget and just said lol no.

The government consulted with key stakeholders before the budget? Say it ain't so! The lobbyists in question will be people with a Government Relations role, their whole job is to be the middlemen between the corporation and the government.

The main argument was calling for gas to be taxed more. This completely ignores reality of most gas being under contract until at least 2030, the government could not increase tax on this resource without breaking contracts. Hardly a wise decision. While they could increase it for future contracts, is this really the correct choice? We're trying to transition away from gas and other fossil fuels, why would we instead tie our tax revenue even closer to these resources?

>They went to a local byelection and their candidate was a gas lobbyist they parachuted in from a different electorate.

Yep, pretty tone-deaf. Not really the fault of the federal Labor govt however, this was just a classic WA Labor move, the state most beholden to these interests.

I agree with your other points. Military spending is screwed for either party, we're beholden to the US in this case.

Comment by applescence071a 6 hours ago

Perhaps the goal was never about the average Australian people and none was missed.

So many of us were hopeful with this government a few years back.

Disappointing would be an understatement to describe what we have now and none of the alternatives look any better.

It is now beer time.

Comment by Nursie 35 minutes ago

Ha, East Coast I’m guessing, it’s only just turned beer o’clock here in WA ;)

Although at least partly that’s due to late meetings with people in countries further west still.

Comment by demibabs 8 hours ago

Right direction to move in, but probably won’t do much.

“Drug dealers are now required to give their customers the option to purchase salad instead of cocaine”.

Comment by Towaway69 7 hours ago

That’s at least a choice.

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

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

Comment by armchairhacker 7 hours ago

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

Comment by latexr 5 hours ago

> The war on drugs was a failure

Continues to be. It’s not over; it has been going on for over half a century, and counting.

How was it that Toby Ziegler (The West Wing) put it? “Since it never ends and no one ever wins, maybe we should stop calling it a war”?

Comment by fmajid 5 hours ago

It's unclear whether this legislation will require giving users the choice of the sort order. That's one of the tricks exploitative social networks use, selective prioritization of ragebait and other content that encourages "engagement". If you have the choice of strict chronological order, that removes a lot of the hold the networks have over you.

Comment by pizzly 5 hours ago

Wouldn't the better way be is to make social media open? i.e. anyone can generate their own algorithm or chose from others who created them. I see that the social media companies could implement these requirements in the worse possible way to ensure that they opt right back in to "choose to opt in to having their default feed include personalised content recommended by the algorithm"

Comment by xtiansimon 2 hours ago

I imagine we’re talking about air and water pollution. So my question is, How is the social feed going to be tested for these standards? I can’t imagine it.

Comment by shubhamjain 7 hours ago

I talked about this in my blog post [1]. I didn't expect regulators to pay attention to the issue anytime soon—let alone move against it. So kudos to the Australian government. Enough with the free-speech and free-market rhetoric: algorithmic feeds are actively poisoning our minds and should be regulated as strictly as possible.

> The issue is that much of the problematic content doesn’t violate any law but still is poison that shouldn’t be on anyone’s feed. The easiest example is painting feminism as some evil propaganda against men, and how women’s place in the kitchen is natural order of things. Such views have gained steam in the recent times purely because of social media (algorithms).

> The ideal regulation would be to ban or heavily regulate algorithmic feeds. If you don’t follow someone, or a page, or an interest, there’s no reason for you to get that stuff on your timeline. Only things that should be shown is what you explicitly choose. And if it does, it should be easy enough to nuke it from your timeline.

[1]: https://shubhamjain.co/2026/02/25/algorithmic-feeds-need-to-...

Comment by ricardobayes 7 hours ago

That's great however after seeing their feed being empty people will switch back. You can already do this on youtube by not allowing history.

Comment by denismi 5 hours ago

No you can't, I just tried it.

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

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

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

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

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

Comment by 6 hours ago

Comment by latexr 5 hours ago

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

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

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

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

Comment by rambambram 6 hours ago

With RSS I already do feeds my way.

Comment by 8by3 5 hours ago

Indeed,

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

The missing piece is discovery.

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

Comment by 8by3 6 hours ago

Or just use https://tuhat.net,

>> 1K organic users in the last three months, ,with no marketing budget, and no VC funding.

- Chronological feed of local posts + external RSS feeds in one place

- Email newsletters / RSS

- Journaling feature

- Book log / reviews

- No Algorithms

- No like button

Opensource if you want to spin up your own instance.

Comment by colesantiago 6 hours ago

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

Comment by 8by3 5 hours ago

Ha, fair. The home page is a global feed of all users, limited to one post per day per user.

One of many potential solutions to an alternative to todays social media – like substack, but without the shitty sides of social media.

Comment by repeekad 7 hours ago

This reminds me of the YouTube creator Technology Connections trying to engage with people on bluesky, which already provides feed customization and even lets you write code to build your own feed algorithms. He loosely coined the term "algorithmic complacency" to explain how users didn't like bluesky specifically because they had to explicitly choose who or what they wanted to follow, his fear being that especially young people would rather be served slop than decide for themselves what content they want to see.

https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA

Comment by cyberrock 5 hours ago

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

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

Comment by Cider9986 6 hours ago

This is a pro-consumer action. Good for Australia.

Identity verification is anti-consumer. Instagram in Australia offers either ID or video selfie to prove you are over 16.

Comment by RobotToaster 7 hours ago

The feed options sound good in principle, although I expect the implementation to be deliberately hobbled. I've tried Facebook's existing (well hidden) chronological feed and it turns out there's so much spam in local groups that I found it unusable.

The bigger issue is the toxic "papers please" identity verification will result in a lot fewer "Australians" on the internet, who will now show up from various VPN endpoint countries, so presumably won't get the algorithm option.

Comment by jiaosdjf 4 hours ago

4chan doesn't use any manipulative algorithms and all its feeds are time based, just saying.

Oddly, 4chan is also the only place where 2 extremely opposed sides can and regularly do interact and debate - even if a large proportion of that traffic is bot farms.

Comment by gitowiec 6 hours ago

"The Albanese Government is taking the next step following its world leading social media age ban to ensure Australians have more choice online...." - Me thinking "What the heck? What Albanese government has to do with Australians? Are they under the occupation? Albanian occupation?!"

Comment by alfiedotwtf 3 hours ago

> with draft legislation for the Digital Duty of Care released today for targeted consultation.

I hope it won’t be “community consultation” like they did with the AABill… that time where the Australian government ignored everyone in the community except for a handful of lobby groups. You know… that time where people filed FOI Requests about the AABill and not a single request was responded to.

Forget politics people… you all have zero sway. The laws have already been written by The Inner Party, and they’re just drip feeding them to us over time so that we don’t notice the sudden shifting of the Overton Window to serfdom

Comment by pknerd 8 hours ago

for a moment, I thought the Albanese Administration was promoting RSS feeds.

Comment by petesergeant 8 hours ago

I think this is a nice idea, but three koala dollars says that in a year we find out most Australians switched back to the dopamine feed after a day or two. Nice to have the choice, though.

Comment by protocolture 8 hours ago

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

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

Comment by petesergeant 8 hours ago

I would probably start using Facebook again if I could get a consistent, strictly chronological feed of friends’ updates.

Comment by aprilthird2021 8 hours ago

You can. There's a friends tab

Comment by latexr 5 hours ago

> Users can choose to opt in to having their default feed include personalised content recommended by the algorithm. Alternatively, users can opt out of personally recommended content in their default feed and see the friends and creators they choose to follow.

Does that mean they are giving platforms the choice of what’s going to be the default? That doesn’t seem like a wise plan.

Comment by alex1138 6 hours ago

With Facebook, people reported not being able to see their spouses' posts. They were "Married" on Facebook, but the feed just shoved things into their faces they didn't want. It would even edit posts when you went to their pages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719)

Comment by brainwad 36 minutes ago

Facebook already has a "friends only" feed. It's the only thing I still use, and unfortunately it's cluttered with events that people I knew 15 years ago are going to this weekend, but it's waaaay better than the default feed which is just a slop cannon.

Comment by aussieguy1234 7 hours ago

I reckon a good idea would be to force Bluesky levels of feed customization, with a choice of blocklists.

Theres alot of stuff turning up in my feeds lately that i'd rather not see.

Comment by quotemstr 4 hours ago

This is going to get about 0% uptake. People's preferences, as revealed by their behavior, align with the algorithmic feeds. That's the whole point of an algorithmic feed.

Comment by wyager 7 hours ago

Interesting scenarios that could happen in next few years

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

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

* If above happens, this forces the resolution of the question "how does internet jurisdiction work across borders if USA doesn't play along", and a plausible answer is that internet messages start to be treated like physical imports and nation-level internet censorship moves under the purview of customs agencies

The globally routable internet is a very special and valuable thing, but it's a historical aberration and I suspect not very stable long-term. Even today, with the internet way more locked down than 20 years ago, it's still extremely libertarian compared to almost any other economically significant venue. In equilibrium, the state will demand its cut

Comment by XorNot 6 hours ago

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

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

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

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

Comment by brainwad 39 minutes ago

They could still book global advertisers, in particular other foreign companies that also pulled out of the relevant jurisdictions.

Comment by Nursie 6 hours ago

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

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