My name is Gordo

@munin DPRK as in North Korea? As in it will be extremely subservient so it can stay, or as in it will leak secrets to foreign powers/competitors?

@manlycoffee @Hiltibrant I definitely do agree with their premise though. Social media is the worst kind of brain rot, and hellish for neural reward pathways especially—but not only—for still developing brains. I might feel more like there was a conversation to be had about efficacy if I thought that it was just misguided rather than entirely disingenuous policy. [Huge tangent incoming] Personally, I'm even more offended by legislation requiring age verification on operating systems. It does a pretty good job of illustrating just how technologically inept the people with the power to write legislation can be. It's why we were putting teenagers in jail for playing with phones in the 80s, or why people were receiving terrifying legal demands from companies that don't sell products or services but just collect patents and write threatening demand letters in the 2000s and 2010s, and why farmers can't repair their farming equipment (or why anybody can't repair most anything these days without being real ghetto about it) or (depending on the brand; purchase wisely) you can't buy a cheap ink cartridge without harvesting a chip off of the old one and manufacturers can get away with selling 3mL of ink in a big fancy shell for $55 a pop, and […] (I could do this all day, but I'll spare you lol). I definitely lost my own point there, but basically: it makes me uncomfortable to have somebody deciding what a $1000+ box I just bought will and won't do for me, and you can be sure that as soon as they can get away with changing that age field into actual third-party verification, they will, and that is an extremely unsettling future (as if the present wasn't already unsettling enough).

@Hiltibrant @manlycoffee The other difference is that you can't take the ethanol out of liquor or the THC out of cannabis (well you can, but that defeats the purpose for the vast majority of users in both cases). Social media doesn't need to be the way it is, but another lesson we keep having to learn the hard way (which is why it's also currently 1929 in the ol' yadda yadda) is that businesses will go right up to the line, and maybe even quite a bit past it, so you have to regulate if you don't want them dumping PCBs in your local kiddy pool.

@Hiltibrant @manlycoffee Yeah but showing a physical ID card to a teller is a very different proposal than the dystopian (and entirely ineffective) age verification systems. Kids have been bypassing web restrictions since time immemorial. How do you think we went to Newgrounds on school computers 15 or 20 years ago, because they let us? We just brought Firefox Portable onthumb drives, or went through proxies. None of this has anything to do with protecting children. Politicians have been using that line to have their way forever, and they get away with it because it's a different set of parents each time and humanity collectively has a short memory (which is why it's currently 1939 again in the ol' US of A).

@stefan My feelings are a complicated mixture of remembering a better time when the young internet expanded my worldview in every dimension and made me the person I am today, and the recognition that those days are long gone and never coming back and we'd be far better off right now without the past decade and a half (ish) of shinternet that replaced them.