Age verification proposals are often presented as a simple tradeoff: sacrifice a little privacy to better safeguard children online. But that framing overlooks a more fundamental question. What happens to people who cannot verify their age at all?
Is anything outside of reference material and news on the internet really worth visiting? I wasn’t really missing anything before social media became a thing. It’s just people arguing.
Everything has moved onto the internet so you can’t compare the 1990’s with today. Government services, businesses, there aren’t phone books anymore, you can’t find phone numbers of businesses without it. Products aren’t carried in stores anymore, or only at exorbitant prices because everyone buys them online. To just name a few things.
How do you think reference material and news gets written and distributed?
Reference material is often wikis or git repositories, which legally and technically are social media, so if you want those to exist, you want social media to exist.
News isn’t by itself social media, but social media helps significantly with following and discovering it. I get most of mine through Mastodon and Lemmy.
Is anything outside of reference material and news on the internet really worth visiting? I wasn’t really missing anything before social media became a thing. It’s just people arguing.
Everything has moved onto the internet so you can’t compare the 1990’s with today. Government services, businesses, there aren’t phone books anymore, you can’t find phone numbers of businesses without it. Products aren’t carried in stores anymore, or only at exorbitant prices because everyone buys them online. To just name a few things.
How do you think reference material and news gets written and distributed?
Reference material is often wikis or git repositories, which legally and technically are social media, so if you want those to exist, you want social media to exist.
News isn’t by itself social media, but social media helps significantly with following and discovering it. I get most of mine through Mastodon and Lemmy.