Australia's social media ban for children takes effect in world first

Re:Australia's social media ban for children takes effect in... by rhines on Wednesday December 10, 2025 @02:39PM (#46222557)

Social media is no longer social - it's just media. At least for most people anyway. The average user, and probably kids even more so, are just scrolling through.

If you're posting as well, or at least commenting on stuff and having discussions with people you know (even if you just know them online), I think that's fine. Like forums, or being in group chats with friends on Facebook, or sharing photos you take with a specific community.

It's when you're only consuming (like scrolling TikTok or Instagram), or when your comments are written for the algorithm rather than for actual discussion (like on Reddit, or even Hackernews to an extent), that social media is an issue.

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Re:Australia's social media ban for children takes effect in... by Tom1380 on Thursday December 11, 2025 @05:32AM (#46229738)

What is meant by writing comments for the algorithm?

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Re:Australia's social media ban for children takes effect in... by rhines on Monday December 15, 2025 @09:42AM (#46275156)

Or upvotes might be a better example, at least for Reddit/Hackernews. But the idea being that the comments are sorted based on some algorithm, whether than be popularity or something else, and commenters are trying to optimize for that. In traditional forums where comments are sorted linearly and it's more about having a discussion with others, but when comments are surfaced by other metrics then it's less about the discussion and more about gaming those metrics.

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