I wish some of our leaders would be more forthcoming about the amount of foreign pressure their governments are under. We talk about the negative influence on social media and politics of countries we are not allied with often but there is an astonishing silence when it comes to the biggest player. There is a very real threat to local values and democracy.

I hate becoming the old person shaking their fist at the sky but the AI bros have just gone too far. I don't know why there isn't a bigger political and social movement against them. I would sign up in an instant to see their companies and practices regulated out of existence.

These companies don't have any imagination. Their management has no vision. They could not create anything new and wonderful if they tried. People like Fabrice do and we are all richer for it. If your asking about the practical use you are likely in the exploitative mindset which is understandable on HN. The hacker/geek mindset enjoys this for what it is.

There are too many demands on our attention and our wallets and most of us aren't getting more money or time. I cancelled all the family's streaming services in 2025. Everyone adapted. It turns out a lot of things we are told we need, we really don't. People lived without them as recently as a few years ago. A lot of the novelty of mobile, streaming, social media and weird tech nobody needs has worn off and the value has been eroded. There are so many better things to do and experience and you don't need to hand over your privacy or sign your soul away.

There was crypto coins but pyramid schemes have been around forever.

Why would anyone with a shred of awareness want to subscribe to any LLM service. Particularly a foreign one where that data could potentially end up in the hands of business competitors, political enemies, extortionists or others. That goes for all of the cloud really. Like WTF people. Why do you do this?

Companies have reduced staff prematurely on the promise of productivity improvements that have not occurred and lost customers to terrible customer service and declining product quality.

Many hardware launches are going to be delayed or not meet expectations which really is the tip of the iceberg.

The US/SK memory cartel understandably sold out for a massive short term windfall but they their long term decisions to limit supply have created a huge opportunity for China. I wouldn't be surprised if this will go down in the history books as the start of the exit for US/SK from the industry and the start of Chinese dominance.

The smart phone industry is likely to respond with an increasingly hostile anti-consumer approach as they try and lock customers into the cabins of the sinking ship. I expect cheap and cheerful Chinese budget phones aren't going anywhere.

I am happy for ram, cpu and storage to stall. I want a more robust and open phone which can take a fall and be updated long after the vendor loses interest. I expect to uninstall most of my apps rather than install new ones as I increasingly disconnect from an ever more distracting and worthless medium. I have cancelled nearly every subscription service in the last 12 months. And I have been deleting a lot of free accounts and apps. Its like doing a big cleanup. Surprisingly rewarding.

HN has felt like more than 50% AI industry promoting blog spam of little interest to me as a reader for some time. I am setting a budget of ten, no make it five, more posts here. Then I am out for good. Account deletion and no looking back.

These platforms need to be shut down and people with a conscience need to stop using them, regardless of their own positive experiences, to deny them the power of network effects and their impact on the vulnerable.

If people want to hide behind a language model or a fantasy animated avatar online for trivial purposes that is their free expression - though arguably using words and images created by others isn't really self expression at all. It is very reasonable for projects to require human authorship (perhaps tool assisted), human accountability and human civility

Youtube should have voluntarily removed shorts and the front page or made them available as a parental control to appease the regulator. When I wrote to the minister they used YouTube's addictive algorithms as justification for including them as social media which I do agree with.

We had curated kids logins with age restrictions, subscriptions, and ad free under premium and also youtube music with individual playlists they used for instrument practice etc. We had to shift music platform. I know we can replicate a lot of this with special apps and browser extensions but this was a single cross platform solution that was working for responsible parents. To be fair it is partly YouTube's fault for prioritizing Shorts and watch time over quality.

The law of unintended consequences will apply. The legislation has been written in such a way that there is some flexibility in the application and there are some safeguards but its not directly addressing some of the biggest social harms. It's primary purpose (despite the conspiracies) seems to be populism and being seen to do do something for the kiddies.

The much bigger social problem is gambling which is out of control here. The second, related problem, is the use of techniques and studies by the gambling industry in games and social media to increase engagement which is what is messing with peoples heads. The government does not dare to touch the gambling industry or stop algorithmic placement of content. This would cause immense damage to company profits and create lobbying pressure.

Unfortunately this legislation hasn't addressed any of my real concerns with social media (it's the algorithms and engagement farming) and it is creating new problems.