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?

Are you describing the difference between a social network and social media?

I don't know, what would be what?

Hn and reddit are kinda the same concept, it's just the scale of them making it different, or?

HN and Reddit are both social media. Both sites are largely populated by lurkers.

I'm not sure there's a good example of a social network site left.

Even sites and services that can be used for social networking are designed to make that difficult. For example, on Instagram you can choose to follow and interact with only people you actually know and keep your profile private. That would be social networking IMHO because it's mostly one-to-one or at least one-to-not very many. But Instagram insists on showing suggested posts. You can turn that off, but after 30 days they turn it back on.

> 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.