[dTal]

It's a really good analogy.

HN is fairly equivocal on the concept of walled gardens as a safety measure, despite the lack of accountability. There's some consensus that it's perfectly fine for e.g. Apple to prevent you from installing something outside the app store, or to put up major hurdles to installing anything unsigned on MacOS, because Grandma and Grandpa can't be trusted not to do something silly and get pwned. "It's not a hacker device!" is the usual refrain.

Yet the consequences of having your brain be pwned are so much worse. There are people who believe the Earth is flat and that vaccines cause autism; some of these beliefs can cost lives. Maybe YouTube shouldn't be a "hacker platform" either, but a place where people can watch videos without fear of being led down a rabbit hole.

[smaryjerry]

At some point you have to trust adults and allow them to make mistakes. I get protecting children from bad information but adults should be trusted with their own lives. We should trust them to have a basic level of comprehension and logic by a certain age. If they don’t we need to revamp the education system, not cater to the lowest common denominator.

[pas]

It doesn't have much to do with age.

It's the same problem as the "both sides" approach to anything [0] ("my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge").

This inherently just moves the problem to decide who's informed (or equivalently what's the required level of "informedness").

Many jurisdictions routinely suspend people's voting rights. Due process and all. Of course when it comes to giving them back after they've served their sentence the process somehow slows down. So I'm fully aware of the downsides of this.

I'm not advocating for doing that to any concrete group of people, I'm advocating for working on this problem. It's not the first time this has come up in history, nor the last.

The long term solution is education. Yes. Is there even a short-term solution? Maybe not. However I'm interested in the details of best arguments for and against.

And I'm not convinced at all that just because someone is older than X years they now have to be "trusted". After all we should protect elderly people from bad information too, they seem to live their second childhood.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGArqoF0TpQ

[8note]

That's to say that adults don't need antivirus software, nor password requirements, etc.

By virtue of being adults, they must always be making the right decisions and thus can never be hacked