[jacooper]

I was given unfiltered access to the internet at an early age, yet I found my self avoiding almost every pitfall in it

I still don't why or how to direct kids towards having this "internal compass" to avoid weird or dangerous stuff.

[Mezzie]

I was also (I got online at the age of 4 in 1993) and I think a lot of avoiding the pitfalls was being around adults in real life who understood how the internet worked. Not just my parents, but other adults as well. For example, I understood very young that there was a lot of overlap between people I talked to online and the awkward adult men I met at computer shows. I also got to listen to my mom's complaints about existing as a female geek in IRL geek spaces. It prevented me from putting internet people on a pedestal. I always knew we were all weirdos.

[joemazerino]

But when? The internet is much more dangerous now than it was in the late 90s.

[lilboiluvr69]

I'm not entirely sure I agree. I mean, maybe I do. I think one could argue that the internet is a lot more moderated in this day and age, but maybe you were referring more to the addictive and destructive effects of social media.

Do you care to elaborate?

[clnq]

Moderation seems to be best at getting rid of low-hanging fruit. There is much less easily accessible gore, shock and radical content online these days. But thanks to the very large scope of the internet, there's plenty of more insidious threats of the cultural (unsavory, doomer), physiological (dopamine-bombing scroll media, attention-grabbing content, personalized emotional manipulation by ads), and societal (dating/friendships moving online, echo-chambers, etc) nature.

Probably like the author of the comment you are responding to, I also grew up with the early pre-y2k internet. As a kid, I've seen some extremely disturbing thigns online that are burned into my memory until today. And yet they do not have as much impact on my life today as the terminally online society does.

It's hard to exactly quantify how our lives would be different if the internet never developed past it's 1990s state. But I feel strongly that they would be very different. Would my life be much different if I didn't see one or two unsavory images as a kid online? Probably not. Even when I was young, I had functional mental/emotional boundaries for that. On the other hand, as an adult, I still have to consciously stay away from doomscrolling because I know my brain has never evolved for that kind of abuse.

To sum up, moderation doesn't seem to target threats online that are actually dangerous. And they seem to have impacted our society tremendously from my perspective.

[kelipso]

It's so incredibly easy these days to go down some internet rabbit hole and end up with some extreme beliefs.

The popular thing on the news is of course grampa going right wing into facebook rabbit holes or whatever but that's just one example. Teens going left/right going down whatever rabbit holes, eating disorders, other political beliefs, body issues, need I go on. Your kid ends up in some discord group of strangers and sorry but you can pretty much forget about getting him or her back to reality. It's all the same mechanism.

Sure there are nice things too like hobbies but the internet is filled with the freaks and weirdos. They have nowhere else to go to. Why put your child in a pit with them?