[intended]

HN is the builder side of the conversation, and in my experience, few safety people congregate here.

The safety side of tech is a PTSD inducing shit show. Governments are more than happy to champion age verification laws, because parents, around the world, are clamoring for anything to pump the breaks on the social media experiment.

Society outside of HN is quite tired of Tech, and I despair of figuring out a way to make this clear to the commentariat.

[ang_cire]

Social media is old hat now.

As someone on the "safety side of tech", social media is being exploited to increase surveillance and government control precisely because its actual social influence is heavily on the wane, and capital is happy to sacrifice what's left to increase the profits of the expanding public/private tech surveillance industry (with "protect the children" controls on social media like age verification being the usual backdoor route it always is).

Society may be growing tired of Tech, but governments aren't, and in fact they're heavily expanding their back channel reliance on not-traditionally-military Tech as an extension of their Defense spending.

[intended]

Cyber security has the maturity that trust and safety hopes to achieve at some point.

Social media was being exploited from inception. Palantir had sales documents for sock puppet management software back in the PHP era.

I don’t disagree that Government is interested in tech, but I will push back on the dismissal of child safety that is inherent in your comment, intended or not.

For all that some people in the firm may have tried to do the right thing, Social media firms have created bad outcomes for children, and executives were briefed on the harms they were going to cause.

This is the dismissal that concerns me, because it ends up miscalculating the level of anger and unhappiness amongst the voting populace, and therefore the political will to pass regulation to reign tech in.

[dofm]

> Society outside of HN is quite tired of Tech, and I despair of figuring out a way to make this clear to the commentariat.

I don't think anyone in tech is really truly engaging with how quickly the shine has come off the tech industry. Except maybe Apple, who even so still have some work to do.

[malfist]

Technology and science is the intersection that is supposed to make our lives better, easier, more prosperous. The last decade or two what marvelous technology has came from silicon valley that hasn't served primarily the billionaire class and made life worse for the common people.

The yoke of silicon valley is feeling heavy. People might just throw it off.