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- Hacker News
- 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”.
by demibabs - 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.
by Towaway69 - 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.
- 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.by repeekad
- 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-...
by shubhamjain - 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.
by Cider9986 - 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.by ricardobayes
- I read the first sentence and thought: what is the government of Albania doing in Australia?by agnishom
- Albanese is an Italian name, for the record
In Albania, Albania is called Shqipëria.
by fsckboy - Yep, I spent a hot minute puzzling over that sentenceby swiftcoder
- OMG, I've got it now
"Albanese" is the second name of the Australian Prime Minister
by oriettaxx - 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.by King-Aaron
- > 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.
by Nursie - 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.by tshapedrob
- 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.
by 8by3 - I don't know what I am looking at here?by colesantiago
- 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.
- Bingo. This is the path forward and solution to so many ills. IP needs a big rethink for the internet.by protocolture
- 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.
by blfr - 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.
by Nursie - > 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.
- 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.
by grey-area - 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.
- Why not give people the option? They don’t all have to use it, but it means some can.by tene80i
- 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.
by ssss11 - 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.
- 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.
by strken - 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.
by wewewedxfgdf