I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me that what should actually be done is regulation of the algorithms.

It’s incredible that social media companies can basically give free crack to people and not have to disclose the recipe…at bare minimum behind closed doors to an ombudsman.

YouTube's parent controls allowed me to set "age appropriate content" sort of(my kids are older) disabled comments, remove ads with premium. But they never allowed me to remove shorts or recommendations either for myself or my kids because they want the addiction dial set to 11. The government have made a mess of things but the companies are far from innocent. It's a shame the govt went after age verification instead of consumer rights to disable all the crap. Very poorly advised. Big tech will come out of this stronger and more evil and will work out ways to target vulnerable people without logins.

Yeah don't get me wrong, I 100% support the stated intent of the ban. It's just a terrible method to go about it. Facebook is known to have commissioned internal studies about the psychological effects of changes to their algorithm, and then when those studies show the change causes harm, but also produce a little more profit, they go with the profit every time. Why don't we make that illegal?

If we have to do age-gating, why not require it to be done in a privacy-preserving way, such as parental controls, zero-knowledge proofs, or blind signatures? Parental controls would, in fact, be by far the easiest for everyone involved, and the only information that would actually need to flow is from the parent to their kids' devices, and then the devices reporting "yes, this is a child" or "no, this is not a child".

The answer is: because the government didn't care. It didn't want to actually fix the problem. It didn't want to listen to experts' opinions or consider the broader public's concerns. It wanted to win some quick easy PR. That's why submissions into the legislation were open for just one day, and why Parliament didn't even take the time to consider the small number of submissions that were able to be made in that limited window. A government that is acting seriously in response to a chronic threat (I can make some exception for quick responses into sudden, unexpected, acute crises) does not behave in this way. Ever. Good legislation takes time, and this sort of hurried response only indicates that it knew it was doing the wrong thing, and wanted to minimise the amount of time it was exposed to criticism.

Oh, I loaded up the page previously before your edit. Regarding the edit, not only will it prevent kids accessing community, but it may also drive them into darker, more unregulated parts of the Web. Similar to how porn bans (whether outright bans or stricter age-gating) only really affect Pornhub—probably the most well-regulated and "safe" porn site out there. Block that, and you'll get people going to sketchy Russian sites where they might encounter much, much more terrible stuff.

yeah I get the noble cause and all that shit..but a government body should never mandate what is or isn't a "dangerous influence" on its population. Ever

This law doesn't actually change that, necessarily. It applies to "social media", and not to "chat" applications. As such, Discord is apparently not included (though I'd argue it really should be, under the letter of the law, because it straddles the line between chat and social, but in my experience it sits mostly on the social side of the line), and apps like What's App, Messenger, and Signal are definitely exempt. The law also doesn't actually require deanonymisation. Just reasonable steps to demonstrate they are old enough.

You can see how AZ has chosen to go about complying. Other sites might comply just by looking at the age of an account, or usage patterns (e.g., accounts that have talked about jobs, taxes, and home ownership might be presumed to be older, while accounts that talk about Roblox are assumed under age). Or they might use the identifying options of facial recognition and government ID, but through an intermediary so the site itself never traces your account to your real ID. Indeed, this last option is arguably how it should have been required to be done—using blind signatures or zero-knowledge proofs involving trusted age verifiers—with methods that could identify the person directly being banned.

Why resist?

fwiw I just DMed a link to this comment as my age verification. I don't think Lodion is being too strict about it. Just DM a story about some cultural touchstone from your childhood and you'll probably be fine. No real need to go elsewhere.

If you do decide to move elsewhere though, Piefed sounds pretty good these days. I'd probably avoid quokk.au (even though it would actually be my first choice otherwise). Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin are pretty much the entirety of the threadiverse as far as I'm aware, though I'm not sure how feature rich Mbin is and I'd probably avoid it on that ground.

Holy shit, I didn't realise Juice Media went back that far! I think I first discovered them about 5 years ago, and it seemed like it was pretty new at the time. I had no idea until your comment that 10 years ago they had a series old enough to wrap up gracefully.

You'll need to let the mods or admins know your concern there. It's got nothing to do with me.