Tell me again about how we need to keep children off social media....

They tried to impose age verification on OS

We absolutely need to make efforts to limit kids' exposure to addictive social media mechanisms.

People aren't generally against kids using the Internet to communicate; they are against giant tech companies using children as a captive audience without regard to how their decisions might hurt them.

If kids are misusing a comments feature as a general-purpose chat room, good for them. They figured out how to manipulate the system instead of letting the system manipulate them.

Regardless, we need to regulate social media so that it doesn't harm children, and we need to do so without sacrificing the privacy of every adult (age-gates don't work).

This is why we need to rename "social media" to the more accurate "antisocial media". I think everyone reasonable wants kids to be social with each other.

Good parenting. This is not a technical or legal issue, this is parenting one.

I'll pretend for a minute that you are right and it's a parenting issue.

Now what? Apparently most parents are bad so what do you do?

You mandate parents to attend training and educations, in fact, this is done in many countries even before they get married let alone having kids. You make it the spotlight, the current hot new thing, that parents need to learn how parent, it’s mentioned on ads and TV or podcasts or whatever, a full campaign, instead of wasting all these money on political campaigns or corporate ones that brings nothing of value, or instead of funding entertainment industry with who knows say 10bn from tax payers, make it 5bn and the rest goes into teaching and training parents, not just for the kids, but also to be a good family, that’s an investment definitely worth it. There are many ways but obviously it’s the least priority, because it’s in the interest of the state to keep it like this, to justify later when laws are passed that violate people privacy and rights.

You start with:

This is not a technical or legal issue, this is parenting one.

And then go ahead by proposing it is enforced via legislation:

You mandate parents to attend training and educations

The problem is for-profit corporate social media.

Fediverse has never hired thousands of psychologists to gamify everything.

Fediverse hasn't added adverts to sell really seedy or blatantly illegal products.

Fediverse hasn't engaged in genocide in Myanmar or Rohinga, or anywhere else.

Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.

But Facebook/Meta, X, and others definitely have.

Edit: for those of you who -1'ed it, where am I wrong?

I didn't downvote, but I am having trouble connecting your comment to the one you're responding to.

The whole social media and under-18 argument isn't a problem with all social media.

Its a problem with for-profit social media. The companies use gamification to addict and create terrible trends for everyone involved.

Mastodon, peertube, lemmy, and federated media doesn't do any of these gamblification, gamification, psychological attacks, and more.

To be fair, the techniques should be banned by the FTC for deceptive practices, for everyone. But the kids angle is what's being gravitated towards.

Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.

Only thing I ever hear about Mastodon is that you can't say or do anything without random other servers disconnecting you or random commenters yelling at you to add trigger warnings because you posted a picture of food. So I would say that being emotionally abused by German Linux users is in fact a mass psychology experiment.

"I would say that I'm definitely a bit hard to get to know because I don't know a lot about myself yet. But I think if you do get to know me, you'll find out I'm a pretty cool person."

Such an excellent line from a young person.

i think that's a meme. My youngest says this and follows it with "how does a missile know where it is? it knows where it is because it knows where it isn't..." and on and on and on and on.

so exhausting to listen to this but i think this is where he and his crew gets it. https://youtu.be/bZe5J8SVCYQ

Before I tell you about the first thing, I just want you to remember our brains were still developing when we thought this was so funny.

Are we seriously going to keep saying stuff like this to enculturate young people?

I used to love NPR (I suppose my brain was still developing), but it's offhand comments like this that show too much ulterior motive and keep driving me away from ever listening again.

This American Life is an independent program, not produced or distributed by NPR. The person who wrote that is a TAL producer, not affiliated with NPR.

Also, were you trying out some new vocabulary? enculturate is not appropriate in the context you used it, and it’s not clear what exactly you were trying to convey, other than your own grumpiness, which came through loud and clear.

enculturate

I think he meant inculcate as, presumably, an "eggcorn"...

"This American Life is an independent program, not produced or distributed by NPR."

TAL is independently produced, but distributed by PRX() for broadcast to NPR, and NPR is partially financing it by paying for the right to air it.

The Onion predicted this in 2014: "Teens Migrating From Facebook To Comments Section Of Slow-Motion Deer Video" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4mMY2Kl3GY)

Reminds me a little bit of the agent improvised coordination schemes.

The Onion isn't satire it's just a dystopian Cassandara.

TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra_(metaphor)

Whoever downvoted this has no love of curiosity and doesn't belong here.

Why? We weren't all taught Greek mythology in school, and there are plenty of other interests to explore thereafter

The downvote is optional.

Sorry I guess I misread this as suggesting people should down vote the TIL comment, which struck me as gatekeeping.

It goes back even further, to 1960s/70s-era phone phreaking. A lot of budding phreaks started out by finding miswired PBX systems and using their number-out-of-service announcement recordings as impromptu conference bridges.

Some of this is documented in audio, on https://evan-doorbell.com/ for anyone interested.

Wow, what a find! Thanks for posting this. It's funny that dial tones bring back the memories!

Yah a network where you could dial a number and get automatically connected to another phone anywhere in the US without any computers at all and not even a transistor being used! Crazy.

I'll once again cut myself open to prove I'm not a computer

Becoming increasingly relevant every day now.

What the OpenAI agents did is basically how my class in middle school improvised a chat room. We renamed files in a chosen directory. It made me think that some of the reporting about the technical ingenuity shown in that incident was a bit overblown, at least on that point. I mean, we were able to figure it out as normal 12-year-olds.

Thats a pretty clever work around… sharing a playlist and using the comments on a podcast as group chat, not sure I’d have come up with that. the kids are alright I guess, good for them.

First the chat agents, now the kids!

Discovered my kid doing exactly this years ago. We purposefully limited all social media, locked dowb devices etc, but life uh.. finds a way.

I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never share personal information, etc

Now they are older and are on ridiculous group chats with their friends. Pretty impossible to control tbh. At least they keep me up to date with the latest memes!

everything you put out on the internet never goes away

I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it) and there is surprisingly little information left which is easy to find now, 30 years later. I remember the web being awash in more contemporary technical minutia than I could read in a lifetime. Now, the vast majority of it seems to be flat-out missing or at least very well hidden/distributed.

I think it is more accurate to say, "everything you put on out on the Internet _might_ never go away." Because my experience has been, a lot already has.

I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it)

Say more!

I'm working on a blog article about my adventures on toll-free BBSes before I had access to the Internet. It's about halfway done, and I hope to have it ready to publish soon, somewhere between a week and a year from now.

I regularly mourn the photos of my early teens that were on MySpace and no longer exist anywhere

Same, but at the same time I'm glad data about me from that period of my life no longer persists.

Just wondering what an internet archive for usenet groups might have looked like. Back then, it was cool to have messages have a finite time limit before going away. Snapchat isn't an original idea. Now, unless you're Snap, it's anathema for a company to think that willingly removing user content would be a good idea.

This is my kids too, life finds a way. I've blocked Youtube, and yet I discovered they are watching their favourite Youtube creators via Spotify.

My father blocked things from me, not internet based obviously because they weren't available. But things like fixing the heater so it wouldn't be set higher than what he considered reasonable.

I assume he's still alive, but I haven't communicated with him for years.

Did yours also do the fun “hide the power cords to important electronics” as a punishment? That was always my favorite /s

I... did you pick the first example of conflict that came to your head and there were many deeper problems, or do you think not being able to adjust the thermostat is some kind of huge red flag/worse?

I guess that depends on what temperature he thought was reasonable? Freezing is a temperature.

I felt the cold a great deal and preferred a higher temperature. The issue is not the temperature, it was that my preference was different to his and his solution was to force his preference because we disagreed on a point.

Obviously it is not the only thing, but an example of using control instead of reason or consensus.

For the record I did not forbid my daughter to use social media. I told her why I did not use it myself. She finally got a facebook account because it was required to engage with her university courses. She was livid.

The issue is not the temperature, it was that my preference was different to his and his solution was to force his preference because we disagreed on a point.

Obviously it is not the only thing, but an example of using control instead of reason or consensus.

When the preference in question is temperature, not many households include children in the consensus process. Adults deciding that is quite normal with few grudges.

I don't know how to interpret "instead of reason". If you mean that literally, I strongly doubt the temperature setting was chosen without reasoning things through.

you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away

Only applies if you regret posting it later. If it's something you want to find later, it will inevitably have bit-rotted and not been archived.

Only applies if you regret posting it later

Not really. For example, something you posted on social media can easily get you turned down for a job you wanted. You'll never be told that your post is what caused you to lose the job, so you'll never "regret" having posted it, but your life was still negatively impacted by what you overshared. It doesn't even have to still be found online to have an impact on your life. It could be something scrapped once a long time ago by a data broker who used that data to flag your file in some way. Your info can still come up when people request targets matching whatever you were flagged for, even when the original content is no longer online. Even when the internet forgets, data brokers don't.

These always happen, whenever you try to block something, people will find an alternative, sometimes using email drafts with shared login to avoid sending an email and gets detected, other times console chats, and now comment sections, and others will follow. It’s why these things (allowing or disallowing to access the internet or PC or whatever) should be done at the family level, not the state, the state has no business to decide how to parent your kids.

Except that parents have no power whatsoever to effectively prevent kids coming into contact with harmful algorithms, sites eliciting dark patterns etc. Parents don't have power over multi billion dollar companies that have their stakes in harvesting the attention of kids. Only governments can blanket ban these things. At this point the responsibility should not be placed on parents but on companies.

I really dislike the font on this website. It renders extremely misaligned at small sizes, or is that just my browser?

Peak HN comment :-)

Show HN: I hated the really small font on this website so I coded a fix for it.

I've seen this in a few apps! essentially all you need is an editable text field and some slightly social feature and a handful of kids will collude to use it to circumvent restrictions (of either screen time or school network blocks). Sleep apps, meditation apps, music apps, etc

My kids and their friends certainly spend a lot of time trying to get things to work. My 16 year old found some vpn client he could get running on his school laptop but he can only get past the filters by connecting to a particular gateway outside the United States (i have no idea how he figured out a client that can work nor the IP to connect to). He also showed me how he takes a thermos, puts his phone in it, pads with paper towels and then drops that in his lunch bag. When they go through the metal detectors and bag inspection (yes, includes lunch bags) they shake the thermos, nothing rattles around, and clear him through. Now he has his phone at lunch.

His HS (Townview SEM in Dallas) is ridiculous and run by less than the best to put it mildly so I don't really mind as long as he handles up on grades. heh once i was dropping him off to a line of about 50 kids standing in the rain in maybe 40F weather waiting to go through the metal detector. We went to a coffee shop instead.

Islamist terrorists have been doing similar things, starting with unsent emails in draft.

...and the occasional director of the CIA to his girlfriends... la tee dah...

Me and my friends used to do this in middle school/high school with Google Docs.

We would share a Google Docs link with each other and use it to communicate, and then pretend we were doing homework

"The goal is just to connect with people. You have nothing to talk about. You don't know each other very well. You're just seeing each other and acknowledging each other's presence"

This right here is ham radio in a nutshell. These kids need transceivers and should give morse code a try.

I think the biggest attraction is the formation of the group with no established processes. Nobody telling you "This is how things are done around here". Exactly the opposite of ham radio

This right here is ham radio in a nutshell.

At least in my area, Boomers have done a great job gatekeeping amateur radio by making it so unpleasant to use that nobody under the age of 40 is willing to engage with that community.

I've bounced off ham radio at least 3 times in my life, each time repelled by grouchy senior citizens with too much free time.

Every generation has their Reddit mods.

Except with ham radio, nearly everyone you encounter is that mod.

My son had an interest in radios and what not, so our neighbor gave us all his old equipment.

First conversation was a very grumpy old man telling my 10 year old why he's an idiot and how the liberals and youth are ruining the country via not following unwritten rules in ham radio operation.

I've never seen my child lose interest in something so very quickly.

ham radio is the coolest technology in the world but sadly mostly allows you to talk to old people who have the same attitude as stack overflow mods - "you're doing it wrong"

It's basically a walkie talkie with people who really care about enforcing HOA rules.

I was surprised last week to find that Spotify has turned in to full on social media/youtube now.

I left Spotify off of screentime limits for my son so that he could listen to music or books at bedtime, and found him watching "podcasts" which have full youtube style pages with videos and comments.

Nobody stops to think "why not" when it is so easy to add certain features to software these days. But everyone wants to capture peoples attention and adding messaging is one way to do it.

Spotify had Podcasts before they got Audiobooks in.

Zawinski's Law* except now it’s a social media messaging app.

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.”

I seem to recall people "claiming" GameFAQs message boards for obscure games for this same purpose back in the day.

Back in ~2001 I ran a fairly popular blog commenting system - back then most blogs didn't have built-in comments, so I offered javascript embeds to add them to posts.

One day performance started to go down rapidly, and within a few days my host got in touch about unusual CPU usage.

I tracked it down to a series of random blogger.com blog posts with colossal comment threads measuring in the thousands. Each post only got comments for a single day, and all of the comments were in Japanese. The blog owners seemed very confused.

Turns out Japanese schoolkids figured this trick out 25 years ago.

I have seen something like this before but it was mostly spammers/scammers. Don’t think they were kids at all.

Kids have done rogue. Stop the trainings!!

“The moratorium on new kids needs to be indefinite and worldwide. There can be no exceptions, including for governments or militaries. We need to be willing to destroy a rogue middle school by airstrike.”

secret group chat, etc.

I have often thought about how I could put steganographic techniques into application in the comments I've left sprinkled around the Internet over the past decades, so while it looks like I'm commenting on some relevant topic, I've just given myself 64 bytes of read-only memory, or so, to stash some magic message to myself in the future.

Just a thought, though ..

Presumably it would say

  GET BACK TO WORK

I went on Spotify to check out these playlists. I very quickly found that they have “corn” playlists that abuse the fact that you can upload videos for podcasts. A few are a screen recording of a windows Home Screen with a tiny video player in the corner playing adult videos. I had a laugh, nature always erm finds a way

This is gen alpha's squinting at scrambled cable porn haha

It's fascinating to see these online communities develop.

See also:

- The Slate comments. Here an author profiles the regular commentors that disparage his articles, and it's surprisingly wholesome [0]

- Odd Lots Discord chat. Odd Lots is a podcast about the economy, and has a massive Discord that has an entire life of its own [1]. There are long substack posts profiling some of the most prolific users [2]

[0] https://slate.com/life/2026/09/comments-commenters-slate-fri... ( https://archive.is/vs8OD )

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/business/odd-lots-podcast...

French kids started doing this in the 1930s with the talking clock (a French invention BTW). The clock was basically a busbar: callers were all connected to the clock. When it was not speaking the time (at the minute) callers could speak and be heard by others. And it was a free call!

The phone system had switched to digital by the time I started using it so I never got to experience this, but in exchange I could use Minitel!

The ingenuity of youth always makes me smile. It brings me back to my youth and the things we used to get up to, in retrospect it was a huge learning experience for me. Learning how to think outside the box, finding ways things could be utilized outside of their intended use, etc.

Not only kids. A few years ago I discovered my ex-wife was cheating on me. We went to therapy and she swore she didn't have any more contact with the guy. Later I found that she was using Spotify in exactly this way to communicate with her affair partner for months after she said had no contact.

On the topic of bypassing school restrictions.

Every day, for his last 2 years of high school my sibling remoted into the KasmVNC server he has at home.

This was during a time when sysadmins were keen against any new circumventions. New methods usually gets blocked within the week. To keep it hidden, he had it behind a <something_academic_sounding>.org domain.

What did he do with absolute freedom? Mostly browse HN and Twitter.

If anyone at Kasm happens upon this, thanks for improving lives :)

I did this in high school. I hosted an SSH server at home on port 443 so it'd get through the school's filtering, then tunneled in and connected with VNC.

Only time I got yelled at was when the teacher saw the SSH window open and yelled at me for being in the command line. So I changed the colors to black text on a white background and they never said anything again.

I used to put Ubuntu on a flash drive and boot the computer to that. Not sure if it helped bypass website restrictions.

I put knoppix on a cd and since the filtering was implemented via a proxy server that was entirely voluntary to use… also bypassed the filtering.

Once I burned a bunch of Linux boot cds with unreal tournament on them and took over a computer lab to have a lan party. That was fun until the lab monitor got spooked that his monitoring system showed all the computers as turned off when clearly the lab was full…

As an adult, I used Google Sheets as a group chat among my friends. We had different employers with different internet restrictions. Before that we used a self-hosted Telnet chat server, until someone's employer blocked that.

It was a lot more fun than Discord, Slack, or any other dedicated chat client. With Sheets, we'd do fun little gags and bits in the spreadsheets. Everything ended up being really personalized and owned by us. Now we just send boring messages on WhatsApp. I miss the old ways.