Had the same thought. Growing up in a small town (couple of hundred inhabitants), internet access early 2000's was a gift for teenage me. I joined web forums and discovered new interests (=web development which lead to my career), chatted with friends on msn, later played runescape and wow and met friends I later traveled countries to meet.

Of course, these things were different than the beasts today. Everything was more personal, smaller. No algorithms.

So not sure what I feel. Social media as we know it today is obviously bad (not just for teenagers). But maybe I'm just nostalgic for how it was.

But what about hn?

> YouTubed simply deactivated their social features? No comments

Youtube already decides to mark some videos as "for kids" which disables a quite a few features such as comments (I guess that makes sense), the ability to add the video to a playlist (what???), notifications (why???)

I don't know about Australia, but there's a page here detailing some of the sites that got shut down because of the OSA in the UK: https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/in_memoriam/

> I'm also curious if say TikTok and YouTubed simply deactivated their social features? No comments, DMs, and so on for example? Would they be allowed again?

The YouTube Kids apps and services are not included in the ban for this very reason, only the "adult" YouTube app and service. I imagine Google absolutely could create a YouTube "aussie edition" that could avoid the ban for the main service.

It looks like for now the ban is just limited to 10 apps. There's quite a few which are arguably worse that received an exception.

Fortnite?

Communication over a distance between people who don't know each other or one that doesn't have pre-approved format for it, like customer service... is a disaster in general.