7 ms·

Still, I don't want to gate people based on age. Parents should at least be able to overwrite the age of their child, maybe selectively allow bypasses. My expe

by dadoum 3mo ago

Still, I don't want to gate people based on age. Parents should at least be able to overwrite the age of their child, maybe selectively allow bypasses. My experience with a computer would have been completely different if I was blocked from half of the internet. Especially when I see which kind of content gets blocked.

doginasuit 3mo ago
As a millennial-aged person I saw a fair amount of content I would not want the young people in my life to see, but it's probably not nearly as harmful as the non-age gated content that they will still have access to. There is a lot creepy youtube and tiktok content that isn't off limits but still unhealthy and my younger relatives are fascinated by it.
- echelon 3mo ago
  We need to stop this helicopter civilization bullshit. We're building 1984 to protect from god knows what imaginary harms. Stop putting plastic wrap around people's freedoms, liberty, and right to privacy.
  - countcol 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    - smilekzs 3mo ago
      The legal guardian is responsible for gatekeeping what their minor sees or does not see.
    - echelon 3mo ago
      I'd seen all the shock websites by age 12. Kids love to prank each other. None of this is a real harm. The real harms are the government being able to put a muzzle on speech, track who says what, and begin to cordon off areas of thought and expression. You might think it's a win that this is happening, but you won't be the one in charge and you won't have a say how it's used against you.
      - denkmoon 3mo ago
        Shock sites are materially different to the harm kids do to one another on social media.
        echelon 3mo ago
        > Shock sites are materially different to the harm kids do to one another This would be the "fixed" version of your comment. The social media bit is irrelevant. Kids have always been assholes to other kids. I took the school bus a few times, and the older neighborhood kids tried to chase me down, beat me, and piss on me. That was before the internet. You can't make up for other parents' bad parenting by trying to invent a system to bubble wrap all the kids. You teach your own kids to be strong in the face of adversity, to grow a thick skin, and to stand up for themselves.
        fwipsy 3mo ago
        Just because you survived it doesn't mean that it's "not real harm." I am sympathetic to privacy concerns, but the downsides also need to be taken seriously and mitigated where it's possible to do so without critically compromising privacy.
        echelon 3mo ago
        When privacy disappears, liberty soon follows. You are cheerleading the erosion of our freedom for a harm that you can't even quantify. Tax and fine Meta for selling to kids and the social media targeting them will disappear. That is the correct solution, and it is so ridiculously easy to implement. Instead we have insiders and lobbyists crawling out of the woodwork to suggest we place tracking of everyone's identities onto every internet ingress. That makes these companies even wealthier, but -- much worse -- it gives the government and people in power a new noose to hang us. One that they'll never give up once they obtain it. We'll have to sign in with social credits by the time I retire, and they'll revoke your access for wrongthink and send minders to your location to reeducate you. Think that's not real? It's happening right now in other countries. It is real, and it's coming if you help them pass the laws. STOP TRYING TO FORCE ID VERIFICATION OF ONLINE ACTIVITY. If you do this, you're the enemy of freedom.
  - Gigachad 3mo ago
    The harms of smartphones and social media are about as far from imaginary as it could get. The data is screaming at us. We will look back at handing kids phones with instagram like giving kids cigarettes and think wtf were we doing.
    - AngryData 3mo ago
      And I find that harm to be far less than the harm caused by identifying everybody all the time and censoring topics to people based on government provided tokens.
      - kelseyfrog 3mo ago
        Therapy and meditation is an effective remedy for this kind of suffering.
        brigandish 3mo ago
        A dystopian state?
    - echelon 3mo ago
      Are you sure it's just kids? In dealing with the ills of social media, you do what you do with every other negative externality - you tax it. At least the parts of it you don't like. Designing privacy, freedom, and liberty destroying mechanisms is not the way. Big social wants these regulations to pass so that they can get better identity tracking for ads targeting. To them it doesn't matter if the tech ushers in 1984. It makes them more money.
      - Gigachad 3mo ago
        It's definitely not just kids. Social media is a lot like meth, we should at a bare minimum stop giving it to kids as soon as possible. And then come to realise it's bad for everyone and should be wound back.
        3mo ago
  - Balinares 3mo ago
    I have a hunch that the Epstein class is getting increasingly upset about the kids encountering ideas about what ought to be done about the Epstein class, and mostly are keen to see the next generation molded back into good little subservient laborers. It really isn't about the well-being of the kids.
  - PeterStuer 3mo ago
    "We" are building 1984 to make sure "We" stay in power of our EU Animal Farm.
    - krige 3mo ago
      EU? It's mostly happening elsewhere though. See: Australia. See: California. See: KIDS act. See: KOSA. Sounds like denial or tunnel vision.
      - PeterStuer 3mo ago
        Have you read the DSA?
- kentm 3mo ago
  Not that I want my kids looking at porn or violent content, but I’m far more concerned about man-o-sphere influencers than that other stuff.
  - pphysch 3mo ago
    Manosphere content is toxic and harmful but the hyperviolence and desensitisation of the former should not be downplayed. That's where the mass shooters evidently come from.
    - nearlyepic 3mo ago
      > That's where the mass shooters evidently come from. I mean, quite a few have come from proto-manosphere circles, too. Elliot Rodger comes to mind.
      - scotty79 3mo ago
        Given how large it is, I don't think it's a high stat. Especially compared with other subcultures. And we don't blame feminism for every instance where a man is killed by a man hating woman.
        tsimionescu 3mo ago
        > And we don't blame feminism for every instance where a man is killed by a man hating woman. The fact that this is basically unheard of, while incels shooting up schools is somewhat common, may explain why blame is often thrown at one movement and not the other.
        scotty79 3mo ago
        [flagged]
        tsimionescu 3mo ago
        So can you give an example of a crazed man-hating feminist woman engaging in a mass shooting? Or just of a woman engaging in a mass shooting (alone, not with a man) in the last, say, 10 years? 20 years? 50 years? Because I can definitely give you examples of incels doing this. Not a huge amount, mind you, but at least some.
- vasco 3mo ago
  If you saw a bunch of it and presumably are fine what does it matter then? Sure it might have been uncomfortable for a few days and you may not have understood right away but so what? That's almost every week as a kid. Seeing some titties is probably the least confusing.
  - anonzzzies 3mo ago
    Many uncles of friends (or fathers, who knows) had stacks of porn mags we knew where they were as 70s kids. When very young they were icky and after that we took them home. Who cares.
- giancarlostoro 3mo ago
  I was going to name drop one, but then I realized, I wouldn't want others on HN to wind up looking it up. Let's just say, you eventually see snuff films and the like. Not something any child should be exposed to, heck even as an adult, I want nothing to do with such things, but there it was, a random .mp4 someone shared, what do you do? Curiosity killed the innocence.
skybrian 3mo ago
Websites should have an easy way to check whether the connecting device has a child lock turned on. We don’t need to identify the person using the device at all. It should be up to parents to make sure their kids use device that are locked.
- IshKebab 3mo ago
  This is clearly the right way to do things. Just make devices have a forced choice for their age setting on initial setup, and expose that to apps and websites. Insane that they didn't even try this simple solution first. Yeah people will get around it, but they'll get around any solution.
  - tzs 3mo ago
    That’s what the California law does.
- kevincox 3mo ago
  Or even better, just let the website return a set of flags (like age_rating=18) in a header and let the user agent decide if it wants to show it, block it, ask for approval, ... Then the policy lives on the user agent.
Nevermark 3mo ago
You are imagining that a solution for you will be deemed a solution for the political powers pushing for this. Or that being age-verified is the main danger of having age-verification. That would be nice! But if there isn't a safe market driven solution to age-verification, which provides anonymous, unsurveiled, age-attested site access, with no ability for the government to individual monitor, deny or revoke, then that is exactly what is going to get pushed on all of us. You don't defeat an enemy by not needing the manacles they are very motivated to force on everyone.. Increasingly: We adopt zero knowledge proofs, and other decentralized open-sourced hard-security technologies, and resolve seemingly-small, but not-going-away practical issues like age & porn, or empower and "trust" every weak politician, interest group and stranger on the internet to not use our lack of awareness and defense against us. Add AI to the mix, and the risk/damage of passivity becomes extreme.
nerdsniper 3mo ago
I hesitate to comment on these because hundreds of comments have already said it and I don't have anything new to add. - The age-gate should just be a setting on the device: either over 18 or under 18. Websites/apps should at most only be legally required to respect the device's assertions. - Devices should be controllable by parents: let the parents decide whether the child should be age-restricted or not. - Devices should have profiles so that you can let your kids use your own phone/laptop without messing up your stuff or getting into things they shouldn't. Historically parents have been allowed to rent R-rated movies for their kids with nudity and sex and violence even if the video store isn't supposed to rent it out to the kids directly. That was always considered okay. If I think my 16-year old is mature enough to watch some porn, that should be the parents' decision.
- tzs 3mo ago
  That’s pretty close to the California law.
delis-thumbs-7e 3mo ago
I do. I’m going to take a wild guess that you are an old head like me, male, and lived your youth in the wonderful internet free of commercialisation of human interaction, free to roam and find new cool things and people, a wonderful library of Alexandria to learn and spend time in. Discuss what the experience was/is to zoomers and younger, especially girls. Did you try to play a silly online game with your friends while being constantly harassed by 3-4 adult men? How many times someone offered you money (in form of “lootboxes”) to get nude pictures of you when you were severely underage? Or was on every site you visited an algorithm pushing on your face content about how you should embrace anorexia, start gambling on what Trump says on TV, use drugs, or simply do a suicide? Hey fellow unc’s, we really need to stop nostalgising on the computer childhood of our youth and listen to the kids (as well as a bunch of research on the topic) and face the fact that the internet of the friendly geeks and nerds of the yesterday does not exist anymore. Things have to change, if we want to have any kind of working society left whatsoever.
- finghin 3mo ago
  I completely agree with you, but what this shows is a momentous change in the landscape of the internet, facilitated by mass marketing, data collection, commercialisation and even financialisation of digital game assets. This is a huge shift that cannot be rectified by simple age filters. Being realistic about the problem requires being realistic about ill-conceived solutions with conspicuous benefits for commercial actors. Besides an array of largely static, non-interactive websites, there is no hard line between content that is suitable for young eyes and not.
- corroclaro 3mo ago
  A bit further up there's a really nice comment about how those studies are just garbage.
- tancop 3mo ago
  you said listen to the kids, but if you actually ask kids they will tell you they want a way to block predators and bullies. they want to restrict interactions with specific people or groups on their own terms because thats where all the real harm comes from. they do not want whole sites or categories of content to be blocked. and even if you think kids dont understand it enough to make that choice for themselves you should let parents do it. if a family thinks their kids can have unlimited access the government should let them. thats where the california bill comes in as the only reasonable option. it gives families a choice instead of forcing restrictions on everyone and theres no privacy problem because its using self reported age data that stays on device. and i know you might ask what about kids who secretly buy a unrestricted phone with their own money. i think at that point they deserve to have it.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

by dadoum 3mo ago

doginasuit 3mo ago

As a millennial-aged person I saw a fair amount of content I would not want the young people in my life to see, but it's probably not nearly as harmful as the non-age gated content that they will still have access to. There is a lot creepy youtube and tiktok content that isn't off limits but still unhealthy and my younger relatives are fascinated by it.

echelon 3mo ago
We need to stop this helicopter civilization bullshit. We're building 1984 to protect from god knows what imaginary harms. Stop putting plastic wrap around people's freedoms, liberty, and right to privacy.
- countcol 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - smilekzs 3mo ago
    The legal guardian is responsible for gatekeeping what their minor sees or does not see.
  - echelon 3mo ago
    I'd seen all the shock websites by age 12. Kids love to prank each other. None of this is a real harm. The real harms are the government being able to put a muzzle on speech, track who says what, and begin to cordon off areas of thought and expression. You might think it's a win that this is happening, but you won't be the one in charge and you won't have a say how it's used against you.
    - denkmoon 3mo ago
      Shock sites are materially different to the harm kids do to one another on social media.
      - echelon 3mo ago
        > Shock sites are materially different to the harm kids do to one another This would be the "fixed" version of your comment. The social media bit is irrelevant. Kids have always been assholes to other kids. I took the school bus a few times, and the older neighborhood kids tried to chase me down, beat me, and piss on me. That was before the internet. You can't make up for other parents' bad parenting by trying to invent a system to bubble wrap all the kids. You teach your own kids to be strong in the face of adversity, to grow a thick skin, and to stand up for themselves.
        fwipsy 3mo ago
        Just because you survived it doesn't mean that it's "not real harm." I am sympathetic to privacy concerns, but the downsides also need to be taken seriously and mitigated where it's possible to do so without critically compromising privacy.
        echelon 3mo ago
        When privacy disappears, liberty soon follows. You are cheerleading the erosion of our freedom for a harm that you can't even quantify. Tax and fine Meta for selling to kids and the social media targeting them will disappear. That is the correct solution, and it is so ridiculously easy to implement. Instead we have insiders and lobbyists crawling out of the woodwork to suggest we place tracking of everyone's identities onto every internet ingress. That makes these companies even wealthier, but -- much worse -- it gives the government and people in power a new noose to hang us. One that they'll never give up once they obtain it. We'll have to sign in with social credits by the time I retire, and they'll revoke your access for wrongthink and send minders to your location to reeducate you. Think that's not real? It's happening right now in other countries. It is real, and it's coming if you help them pass the laws. STOP TRYING TO FORCE ID VERIFICATION OF ONLINE ACTIVITY. If you do this, you're the enemy of freedom.
- Gigachad 3mo ago
  The harms of smartphones and social media are about as far from imaginary as it could get. The data is screaming at us. We will look back at handing kids phones with instagram like giving kids cigarettes and think wtf were we doing.
  - AngryData 3mo ago
    And I find that harm to be far less than the harm caused by identifying everybody all the time and censoring topics to people based on government provided tokens.
    - kelseyfrog 3mo ago
      Therapy and meditation is an effective remedy for this kind of suffering.
      - brigandish 3mo ago
        A dystopian state?
  - echelon 3mo ago
    Are you sure it's just kids? In dealing with the ills of social media, you do what you do with every other negative externality - you tax it. At least the parts of it you don't like. Designing privacy, freedom, and liberty destroying mechanisms is not the way. Big social wants these regulations to pass so that they can get better identity tracking for ads targeting. To them it doesn't matter if the tech ushers in 1984. It makes them more money.
    - Gigachad 3mo ago
      It's definitely not just kids. Social media is a lot like meth, we should at a bare minimum stop giving it to kids as soon as possible. And then come to realise it's bad for everyone and should be wound back.
      - 3mo ago
- Balinares 3mo ago
  I have a hunch that the Epstein class is getting increasingly upset about the kids encountering ideas about what ought to be done about the Epstein class, and mostly are keen to see the next generation molded back into good little subservient laborers. It really isn't about the well-being of the kids.
- PeterStuer 3mo ago
  "We" are building 1984 to make sure "We" stay in power of our EU Animal Farm.
  - krige 3mo ago
    EU? It's mostly happening elsewhere though. See: Australia. See: California. See: KIDS act. See: KOSA. Sounds like denial or tunnel vision.
    - PeterStuer 3mo ago
      Have you read the DSA?
kentm 3mo ago
Not that I want my kids looking at porn or violent content, but I’m far more concerned about man-o-sphere influencers than that other stuff.
- pphysch 3mo ago
  Manosphere content is toxic and harmful but the hyperviolence and desensitisation of the former should not be downplayed. That's where the mass shooters evidently come from.
  - nearlyepic 3mo ago
    > That's where the mass shooters evidently come from. I mean, quite a few have come from proto-manosphere circles, too. Elliot Rodger comes to mind.
    - scotty79 3mo ago
      Given how large it is, I don't think it's a high stat. Especially compared with other subcultures. And we don't blame feminism for every instance where a man is killed by a man hating woman.
      - tsimionescu 3mo ago
        > And we don't blame feminism for every instance where a man is killed by a man hating woman. The fact that this is basically unheard of, while incels shooting up schools is somewhat common, may explain why blame is often thrown at one movement and not the other.
        scotty79 3mo ago
        [flagged]
        tsimionescu 3mo ago
        So can you give an example of a crazed man-hating feminist woman engaging in a mass shooting? Or just of a woman engaging in a mass shooting (alone, not with a man) in the last, say, 10 years? 20 years? 50 years? Because I can definitely give you examples of incels doing this. Not a huge amount, mind you, but at least some.
vasco 3mo ago
If you saw a bunch of it and presumably are fine what does it matter then? Sure it might have been uncomfortable for a few days and you may not have understood right away but so what? That's almost every week as a kid. Seeing some titties is probably the least confusing.
- anonzzzies 3mo ago
  Many uncles of friends (or fathers, who knows) had stacks of porn mags we knew where they were as 70s kids. When very young they were icky and after that we took them home. Who cares.
giancarlostoro 3mo ago
I was going to name drop one, but then I realized, I wouldn't want others on HN to wind up looking it up. Let's just say, you eventually see snuff films and the like. Not something any child should be exposed to, heck even as an adult, I want nothing to do with such things, but there it was, a random .mp4 someone shared, what do you do? Curiosity killed the innocence.

skybrian 3mo ago

Websites should have an easy way to check whether the connecting device has a child lock turned on. We don’t need to identify the person using the device at all. It should be up to parents to make sure their kids use device that are locked.

IshKebab 3mo ago
This is clearly the right way to do things. Just make devices have a forced choice for their age setting on initial setup, and expose that to apps and websites. Insane that they didn't even try this simple solution first. Yeah people will get around it, but they'll get around any solution.
- tzs 3mo ago
  That’s what the California law does.
kevincox 3mo ago
Or even better, just let the website return a set of flags (like age_rating=18) in a header and let the user agent decide if it wants to show it, block it, ask for approval, ... Then the policy lives on the user agent.

Nevermark 3mo ago

You are imagining that a solution for you will be deemed a solution for the political powers pushing for this. Or that being age-verified is the main danger of having age-verification. That would be nice! But if there isn't a safe market driven solution to age-verification, which provides anonymous, unsurveiled, age-attested site access, with no ability for the government to individual monitor, deny or revoke, then that is exactly what is going to get pushed on all of us. You don't defeat an enemy by not needing the manacles they are very motivated to force on everyone.. Increasingly: We adopt zero knowledge proofs, and other decentralized open-sourced hard-security technologies, and resolve seemingly-small, but not-going-away practical issues like age & porn, or empower and "trust" every weak politician, interest group and stranger on the internet to not use our lack of awareness and defense against us. Add AI to the mix, and the risk/damage of passivity becomes extreme.

nerdsniper 3mo ago

I hesitate to comment on these because hundreds of comments have already said it and I don't have anything new to add. - The age-gate should just be a setting on the device: either over 18 or under 18. Websites/apps should at most only be legally required to respect the device's assertions. - Devices should be controllable by parents: let the parents decide whether the child should be age-restricted or not. - Devices should have profiles so that you can let your kids use your own phone/laptop without messing up your stuff or getting into things they shouldn't. Historically parents have been allowed to rent R-rated movies for their kids with nudity and sex and violence even if the video store isn't supposed to rent it out to the kids directly. That was always considered okay. If I think my 16-year old is mature enough to watch some porn, that should be the parents' decision.

tzs 3mo ago
That’s pretty close to the California law.

delis-thumbs-7e 3mo ago

I do. I’m going to take a wild guess that you are an old head like me, male, and lived your youth in the wonderful internet free of commercialisation of human interaction, free to roam and find new cool things and people, a wonderful library of Alexandria to learn and spend time in. Discuss what the experience was/is to zoomers and younger, especially girls. Did you try to play a silly online game with your friends while being constantly harassed by 3-4 adult men? How many times someone offered you money (in form of “lootboxes”) to get nude pictures of you when you were severely underage? Or was on every site you visited an algorithm pushing on your face content about how you should embrace anorexia, start gambling on what Trump says on TV, use drugs, or simply do a suicide? Hey fellow unc’s, we really need to stop nostalgising on the computer childhood of our youth and listen to the kids (as well as a bunch of research on the topic) and face the fact that the internet of the friendly geeks and nerds of the yesterday does not exist anymore. Things have to change, if we want to have any kind of working society left whatsoever.

finghin 3mo ago
I completely agree with you, but what this shows is a momentous change in the landscape of the internet, facilitated by mass marketing, data collection, commercialisation and even financialisation of digital game assets. This is a huge shift that cannot be rectified by simple age filters. Being realistic about the problem requires being realistic about ill-conceived solutions with conspicuous benefits for commercial actors. Besides an array of largely static, non-interactive websites, there is no hard line between content that is suitable for young eyes and not.
corroclaro 3mo ago
A bit further up there's a really nice comment about how those studies are just garbage.
tancop 3mo ago
you said listen to the kids, but if you actually ask kids they will tell you they want a way to block predators and bullies. they want to restrict interactions with specific people or groups on their own terms because thats where all the real harm comes from. they do not want whole sites or categories of content to be blocked. and even if you think kids dont understand it enough to make that choice for themselves you should let parents do it. if a family thinks their kids can have unlimited access the government should let them. thats where the california bill comes in as the only reasonable option. it gives families a choice instead of forcing restrictions on everyone and theres no privacy problem because its using self reported age data that stays on device. and i know you might ask what about kids who secretly buy a unrestricted phone with their own money. i think at that point they deserve to have it.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]