you mean, it's due to pollution by neurotoxic pesticides ?
who'd have thought !
*fucking geniuses*

230 prevents sites from being prosecuted. So, right now, they do b all moderation of any kind (except to eliminate speech for the other side).

Remove 230 and sites become liable for most of the abuses. Those sites don't have anything like the pockets of those abusing them. The sites have two options - risk a lot of lawsuits (as they're softer targets) or become "private" (which avoids any liability as nobody who would be bothered would be bothered spending money on them). Both of these deal with the issue - the first by getting rid of the abusers, the second by getting rid of the easily-swayed.

USENET predates 230.
Slashdot predates 230.
Hell, back then we also had Kuro5hin and Technocrat.

Post-230, we have X and Facebook trying to out-extreme each other, rampant fraud, corruption on an unimaginable scale, etc etc.

What has 230 ever done for us? (And I'm pretty sure we already had roads and aqueducts...)

I'd disagree.

Multiple examples of fraudulent coercion in elections, multiple examples of American plutocrats attempting to trigger armed insurrections in European nations, multiple "free speech" spaces that are "free speech" only if you're on the side that they support, and multiple suicides from cyberharassment, doxing, and swatting, along with a few murder-by-swatting events.

But very very very little evidence of any actual benefits. With a SNR that would look great on a punk album but is terrible for actually trying to get anything done, there is absolutely no meaningful evidence anyone has actually benefitted. Hell, take Slashdot. Has SNR gone up or down since this law? Slashdot is a lot older than 230 and I can tell you for a fact that SNR has dropped. That is NOT a benefit.

I wish I could say I'm surprised.

However, this has been a consistent pattern that goes back to the 1930s and I wouldn't raise an eyebrow if you corected that to the 1830s. Companies know that you make the most money by selling to both sides.

This will be great for Haiku, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD installs, there's not the remotest possibility there'll be binaries for these. Not because the software couldn't be ported, but because the sorts of people politicians hire to write software would never be able to figure out the installer.

I still can't get ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude to write a decent story or do an engineering design beyond basic complexity. They're all improving, but they're best thought of as brain-storming aids rather than actual development tools.

where the sun don't shine.

The Linux Foundation has always been kind of useless, but they're really outdoing themselves this time.

More like old vs new terribleness.

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.

+5 insightful analysis (I speak as a proud American of Indian origin who just got caught in the Indigo sh*tstorm, but would've agreed about this societal artifact even otherwise).

It's quaint that you think the United States is still a republic. It's a monarchy, and Trump's handlers are likely moving currently to make sure that when Vance succeeds him, that the Executive branch and a Congress that will be, through the use of naked force if necessary, remain filled with Republican paper tigers to complement the paper tigers in the Supreme Court, settles into the oligarchy the Framers always really intended it to be. The military will largely be used to recreate the American hemispheric hegemony. The National Guard and ICE will be used as foot soldiers within the US to "secure" elections.

The morons that elected that diseased wicked and demented man have destroyed whatever the hell America was. As a Canadian, I can only hope we can withstand this hemispheric dominance and the raiding of our natural resources to feed the perverse desires of the child molesters, rapists, racists and psychopaths that have already taken control of the US.

Doubtless, I will be downvoted by the remaining MAGA crowd here. You know, the guys that pretended they refused to vote Democrat because Bernie wasn't made leader, but are to a man a pack of Brown Shirts eagerly awaiting the time when they imagine they can take part in the defenestration of American society.

I have a combination of prescriptions that mean that I can't use contact lenses. I see quite a lot of people wearing glasses, and Zenni, Warby Parker, and the other online companies have said they sell a decent number of frames with plano lenses (meaning no prescription), presumably for people who want the look.

Eventually, you won't be able to tell. Someone will come in wearing glasses, and the tech is going to be too small and streamlined. There are also companies working on embedding augmented reality capabilities in contact lenses fed by tiny cameras placed just out of the field of vision. You'd be able to see them only in very specific circumstances. Power feed is a primary challenge right now, but it's probably not an unsolvable problem.