I'm stunned when people can't reason about a tradeoff between two principles because they assigned infinite weight to one of them.

Police state=bad. Industrial scale drug addiction in kids=also bad. Some compromise must be made.

The slippery slope arguments do nothing. People are trying to solve this problem; trying to scare them with other problems they may have later--which they can solve separately!--is just irrelevant noise.

Over time it's become harder and harder to deny how bad some aspects of the internet are for people, especially for young people. Whether it's right or wrong it's not shocking that people are more willing than ever to entertain the idea of internet restrictions.

OG internet was not swarming with multibillion dollar predators ready to exploit every single psychological trick to manipulate you for profit. If you can solve this, i welcome the OG internet to be free and open place to share ideas. Let me know your suggestions.

It doesn't surprise me at all. At least in the US, both major political parties fully embrace censorship and a police state. Sure the disagree on the details, but they agree pretty universally on the direction.

Because it’s a lesser evil, at least in the UK, which has a reasonably well functioning government and society.

As much as it pains me, I’d rather have that than the brain rot being forced on young kids. And you can argue all you want about “parental control”, but there are too many parents who don’t care, plus peer pressure is a real thing.

I also think that at that age all the social media sites are a net negative.

>Is anyone else as stunned as I am by how many posters on tech websites have suddenly gone full anti-free-internet and embracing the police state?

There is certainly an angle where people are fed up with the current state of things.

But generally speaking, the overall HN has been trending towards anti-free-internet and embracing the police state for a long time. I am pretty sure people can run an LLM on HN comments over the years.

Why do you think we lost free internet right now? In my opinion we lost it when all corporations switched to mass surveilance. Now we just stop pretending that social media corporations are not responsible for anything.

There are very likely people who's work is to shill... Also here... If not influencing editors of entire sites even. But they are only needed until it becomes full though crime to even think outside of newspeak ;)

As an engineer, I tend to view solutions in terms of tradeoffs and not absolutes. 20 years ago the free and open internet was great. Now I think we’ve gone too far. And more to the point, I think freedom is protected by regulation, not by handing decisions over to whatever billionaire won a cage match.

This is the gen-x part of my xennial talking, but I can’t help but feel like something has been lost when nothing is transgressive anymore. Some people look back and say how can a gen x’er who fought against censorship be so pro censorship now.

A lot of people say this is dumb because teenagers will figure out a way to bypass it. Good! That’s what teenagers are supposed to do. I think there’s a sort of weird like - there’s something distopian about Elon Musk putting his stamp of approval on using edgy racial slurs on social media. If you’re young and want to make edgy jokes. It’s supposed to be transgressive! It’s _not_ supposed to get Elon Musk’s stamp of approval.

I don’t want to send anyone to jail for bypassing these laws or saying the wrong thing. It’s a hard needle to thread, but we need a code of conduct so people can make a choice to break it. So people can create alternate websites to the big social media companies. We need institutions without so much power so they can be jailbroken. And government is just plainly not the only powerful institution I fear.

Let's look at an actual case study of a police state.

I think we can agree that a state-controlled paramilitary force executing a political opponent in broad daylight, on camera, is pretty far along the "police state" spectrum, right? This kind of thing is entirely incompatible with freedom, and should be a wake up call for the civil society to weed out anything that led to that, root and branch.

Enter the execution of Alex Pretti. Days after it happened, it transformed into yet another partisan issue, a topic for discussion, something that can possibly be justified. Effectively, it was normalised on the social and classic media. Media that, in the US, are pretty "free" [].

Negative freedoms are insufficient to stop a police state. What stops the police state is political engagement and regulation, and that requires a more nuanced understanding than just "either free of regulation or embracing the police state".

: …for moneyed interests to control and influence. For all their problems, I'd argue that BBC is substantially freer than say Fox News.

> Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit

Reddit is a cesspool and an example of how we're in a post-peak internet like the OP says. If you actually browse Reddit the way the vast majority of people do now (i.e. not Old Reddit that masks the decline), it's crazy engagement-farming patterns everywhere, and not much of a community any more when many comments are hidden by default.

Most people today just like to fire off one-sentence comments; if you seek substantial discussion, you'll often now stand out as a weirdo on the spectrum, and may even draw downvotes and "lol wall of text bro" comments.

Yes, I follow close-knit little subs off the main page. There has been a flow of users away to WhatsApp groups, of all things -- it's that bad.

I feel like you only picked the parts from my comment you cited and then decided to ignore the rest. I specifically explained WHY I am in favor of those aspects you question.

Yes, it is what I want. Would it be, in an ideal world? No. But we don't live in that world, we live in reality. You only focus on the positive aspects of the internet and frame it that way. Try this one instead:

Do you not realize that you are being brainwashed by billionaires? Companies abuse your mind, track your behavior, collect your data, all to exploit you. They want to you to become addicted, to waste your entire life consuming their content, to become antisocial and alone.

This is our current reality. So, yes, if the cost is that the goverment knows who I am while browsing to remove all of that from our lives again, it would be what I want.

The internet as it is sucks in no uncertain terms.

While I dislike some of those regulations, I have no will to fight for the status quo.

> Do people not realize that they're going after Reddit, YouTube, and other sites, too?

Consider that I have a profound hatred for both YouTube and Reddit.

Why should I care?

Because we've been conditioned to believe that every good thing harbors a dark and sinister secret, that every attempt at improving our situation contains a fatal flaw.

It's a narrative trope, not real life. Come back to reality. It's what Omelas was trying to convey.

The posters account is 89 days old, it's a shill.

Why shocked? When the internet got popular and the normies started flooding in the culture of the internet changed.

I’m more shocked in how authoritarian so-called “liberals” have gotten in the last 3 decades. I have to specify I’m a “classical” liberal now in order to not appear as if I desire a police state.

> The internet I grew up on was all about freedom and resisting the police state.

I grew up on that internet too (the freedom part). Do you really believe it is the same internet now?

Gone are the days when one could run their own mail server now because Apple or Google or Microsoft can suddenly deem it as "untrustworthy" or "suspicious" (based on some algorithm) and all your email will end up in spam. IRC and newsgroups have been hijacked by centralised Messengers and Social Media firms run by BigTech. They can ban you on these platforms for no reasons, without much recourse, holding your digital life hostage. Last year, I learnt that the much vaunted "free speech" no longer exists online - I have to fight and waste time with everyone - from the moderators to the platform "community managers" - to publish any factual pro-palestine or anti-Israli-right posts because these are being heavily censored on all western platforms (and unfortunately all English language communities are western platforms). Election manipulations by foreign platforms are also another danger every sovereign nations now faces.

> How did people become so naive to believe that this will benefit them?

So I wouldn't say that people are being "naive". We don't want to live in an "echo chamber" controlled by western or Chinese BigTech corporates and their ideas of techno-fascism. Not to mention that we really cannot ignore any more the societal and political impact of some of these platforms - Facebook / Whatsapp are responsible for causing many social unrest around the world and even genocide (How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho... ).

The negative psychological impact of social media addiction is so obvious even in adults. So imagine how much worse it is on kids / teens - it truly would be irresponsible to not regulate it.

> That the regulations are only going to impact kids who use the “bad sites” and not start reaching for your group chat rooms and your social news sites, too?

Oh, very true! That is something to be very wary of. And the answer to that is to also fight for stronger privacy regulations and prevent government overreach. Not trust the government or the corporates to behave.

Here, you will have to understand and accept that unlike in America, where mistrust of government is inherent in the political structure (the US Presidential system favoured a weak central government because the makers were distrustful of a powerful Federal government) is very much in contrast to other parts of the world. Europeans expect and have more trust in their governments to regulate some aspects of their society, while the rest of the world prefers a "strong" Central government (and thus it is expected that the government will regulate many aspects of society). That is something fundamentally different vis American politics vs the rest of the world, that perhaps befuddles Americans.

In a democracy though, I don't see anything wrong in "trusting" your government more than local or foreign corporates (or even a foreign country - for all the talk about how America stood for "free speech", my experience with American / western owned platforms censoring my political ideas and beliefs has made me increasingly cynical if they ever truly believe in democratic values; so yeah - I guess you could also say that all this is also perhaps a backlash to current western politics).

> You think it's a good idea to force us all to produce ID to watch YouTube videos or read a post on Reddit? This is what you want?

No, I want more. I want us to not be able to use these sites at all.

The modern internet has become a cesspool. There’s some good stuff here and there but it’s not worth the overly negative downsides. Reddit is mostly bots. YouTube is becoming clickbait slop. Social Media platforms are ruining society.

We need an alternative to the internet. Not long ago, we did not have all these things and it was one of the best times to be alive.