[techblueberry]

I find it relatively strange that over the past 30-40 years, we went from a world where most everything was intermediated by parents, and “adult” media was relatively well gatekept to this online Wild West where it seems almost any attempt to gatekeep is seen as a freedom violation.

Maybe this is why we need protocols over platforms? But like, kids shouldn’t be able to sign a ToS until they’re 18.

I have little sympathy for anything that limits people’s access to these biggest platforms. I’m also largely cynical to the idea that anyone’s doing any free speeching on meta or Twitter in the first place. If counter culture gets driven back to IRC, or gasp meatspace, then all the better.

[trueismywork]

The idea is of general purpose computing. In past, you could restrict access without restricting most freedoms. Today's world, restricting access means restricting access to a ggeneral purpose computer. And thats the biggest deal.

[pwg]

Cory Doctorow:

Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing

Jan 10, 2012

https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

The article does reflect the issue at the time (the media mafia's boogeyman "piracy") and the thought that to prevent piracy, users must be restricted from access to "general purpose computers".

[techblueberry]

Does it? If we had real control of our machines it doesn’t feel like this would be an issue.

[AJ007]

When I was a kid, they said don't meet strangers you talked to online. That was it. Sometimes it turned out poorly, but as it could anywhere. Perhaps on the internet it was less risky because the person you were talking to had no idea you were a kid or anything about you.

There were not apps that all of your friends in school used, and if you didn't use them you wouldn't be cool, but also the apps would push you or cause you to unwittingly share photos publicly while publishing your photos/videos globally to adults who for some reason use their app longer when they look at videos of kids.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding how things work here, I don't use Facebook or Instagram. I've never even seen Tiktok. I've never used LinkedIn. But when I read these stories about what is going on with Mark Zuckerberg and Meta it sounds like they were doing a lot of things they shouldn't be doing in a commercial context, period. If you aren't 18 you should still be able to talk to your friends without being spied on, but you sure as hell shouldn't be getting connected to random people adult or otherwise from all over the world because it's increasing the usage time of those adults on some app.

I think protocols are the way to go and will be what dominate in the post-AI era. Fuck the ads, the constantly changing UIs, the bait and switch, and now just add photo verification to the list. No thanks.

[iamnothere]

When I was a kid, most families that had a computer kept it in a common area. Same with the TV, for that matter.

Some families did not. Mine did not! But that was a decision that was up to individual families.

I don’t see why these decisions should be up to anyone but individual families. Period. If your kids are mature enough for unsupervised computer use, or if you don’t see it as a problem, that’s up to you as a parent. Same as if you feel comfortable taking your kids skeet shooting or rock climbing.

[bubblewand]

Attempting to manage this as a parent is hellish.

I can't speak for other parents, but some standards for parental controls—the presence of which and adherence to might be enforced by law, if need be, and need probably would be since none of this is stuff vendors couldn't have figured out on their own long ago if they cared to—we could leverage would be goddamn nice and is all I'd really want.

Especially as devices get more locked-down and it becomes hard to control stuff at the network level if you don't have root on the devices themselves, like... man, it's such a time-suck, and I'm 100% sure I'd be having to choose between "I guess we just don't have the Internet in this house" and "fuck it, I give up, go stumble on gore videos I guess" if I weren't a lot better at this stuff than the median parent. I feel for them, this stuff is entirely hopeless for 'em.

Like, my kids have Chromebooks from school. They pretty much have to bring them home. So now I have this extra physical item I can't administrate that I must police at night if I don't want them to stay up all night on trash-tier web games or something. So I'll block the devices at the network level at night, right? Easy fix! Nope, the fucking things rotate MAC addresses as an anti-tracking measure I guess. We have zero need for that feature (the number of times they're gonna use the things outside school and home over their whole school careers is going to be very small) but I'm not admin on those devices, so, stuck with it. So there's an extra hurdle to making that happen.

Repeat some other incredible frustration for every single thing. Oh look, AppleTV has a simple rating interface so I can at least make sure nothing too bad can get through if I mess something up. Great. Oh except almost nothing on the device except Apple's own software respects the setting, at all, just ignores it. You have to go dick around with every single service on there to lock them down, then hope it sticks through updates and other nonsense. Awesome, great feature that's actually totally useless because nobody cares about the users. Sigh.

Your options are go full-luddite, give up and leave them to the Internet gods, or take on this load of work and stress that our parents did not have.

[iamnothere]

I agree that it should be easier. We’re on a frigging VC website. Shouldn’t there be a huge market opportunity here for parental control systems? Why is this not a problem that anyone is going after?

I’m also surprised that “family monitoring” stalkerware companies like Life360 haven’t expanded into this market.

[bubblewand]

You have to make everyone abide by them, for it to not-suck. At a minimum, software and service providers would have to respect settings client agents tell them they have (as in the AppleTV case, it's bordering on pointless for platforms to even have them if most vendors ignore them)

That'd probably be enough (plus something for school devices in particular to let parents set stricter settings during non-school hours, without having full admin rights on the devices) to do a ton of good, but it's not a startup, it's a protocol and maybe a law.

The startup version would probably try to capture that as some kind of one-stop-shop web portal.

[iamnothere]

I would think that as a platform like this grows, they would be able to build relationships with OS and service vendors to manage parental control settings via API. After all, this would take a lot of public pressure off of the individual vendors, especially for social/gaming/media platforms.

It doesn’t have to be perfect, just decent.

[TiredOfLife]

> Shouldn’t there be a huge market opportunity here for parental control systems?

It's so huge that it has been built into every operating system for years

[fennecbutt]

>Shouldn’t there be a huge market opportunity here for parental control systems

Requires parents to be invested and unlike the OP (appreciate you btw) many parents are not.

No money/use in it unless people actually care enough to invest personal effort into it (which they don't, hence forcing solutions that fuck everybody over, like UK requiring id for adult websites).

[bluescrn]

> Attempting to manage this as a parent is hellish.

Doesn't matter what you do as a parent so long as kids are allowed smartphones at school.

You can set up perfect filtering for your own kids, but that won't help when some other kid brings in a device loaded up with the most shocking content they could find on some unfiltered home connection.

[techblueberry]

When I was a kid 5 gigantic companies didn’t basically control the whole internet.

Skeet shooting isn’t in every pocket, school, library, Best Buy kiosk. Etc. Maybe if the phones were open source and I truly had the capability to control access this would make sense but the currently available tools are obviously toothless in a way meant to ensure that your u feel like your in control.

I’m not really scared about what my kids might do or see. If the internet was still countercultural and not everything was fucking force fed to you by gigantic billionaire mega corps it would be fine. But there should be some friction.

[fyredge]

Because they are harmful. The worry is not online use, but online addiction. We don't just allow parents to regulate what drugs their children consume (medicinal), we trust medical practitioners for the correct dosage. Similarly, social media regulation should be done to achieve the same effect.

The failings of individual families have far reaching consequences beyond their own homes, especially in non collectivist societies that mostly put themselves above all others.

[iamnothere]

Medical practitioners actually don’t typically administer drugs to kids. They prescribe a dose, but it’s up to the parents to administer the drugs.

You’re basically saying that non-collectivist societies should become collectivist. No thanks!

[hedora]

There’s definitely an inversion going on, where all the predators (individuals and corporations) target parts of the internet designed for children, and the kid’s platforms created financial incentives for themselves that mean the worst content bubbles to the top.

I thought youtube kids was sketchy as hell until I discovered the current state of “educational” online games.

[bubblewand]

I'd never have guessed it'd be the case, but the number of "educational" games has exploded since I was a kid, while I'm not sure the rate of new ones that are any good at educating (not proportion, actual count) is even as high as it was in the '90s. It's kind of amazing. It appears that, for some reason, the market's way bigger but being any good isn't a useful differentiator for the purposes of sorting out who gets money. I mean you expect that to be the case with ad-supported, but paid edutainment games are like that too. It's so weird, my kids have been around for the golden age of the App Store and beyond, and there's been vanishingly little in the way of good edutainment games that entire time. A few, but it's so very few.

[hedora]

As I understand it, Sierra acquired most of the educational software outfits, and then was acquired for stock by a company that had been propped up by securities fraud.

Here’s the story of the acquisition that killed the company:

https://www.filfre.net/2025/04/the-end-of-sierra-as-we-knew-...

That site probably has the story of the educational software consolidation somewhere.

[b00ty4breakfast]

as personally identifying information becomes more and more central to modern life, the risk of that info being leaked or stolen becomes even greater. And, given the global nature of the internet, having that info on some server that is connected to the rest of the internet increases that risk further still.

Previously, your local dirty movie theater might ask for ID before selling you tickets to Debbie Does Dallas and they might even keep a copy on file for later reference. Assuming that the underpaid usher didn't just glance at the DOB, that copy likely goes into a filing cabinet in the back of the building. That's not necessarily safe, but the opportunity for that being stolen and sold is minuscule compared to today. Even if it were on a computer database somewhere, the internet of 30-40 years ago, inasmuch as it existed, was not the behemoth that it is today.

[themafia]

Isn't the entire point of the ToS to make it legal to sell your personal information? Primarily to increase programmatic ad revenue?

Maybe we should just end advertising targeting anyone under 18. I wonder if by removing the financial incentive the problem would mostly sort itself out.

[bubblewand]

At least outlawing user-targeted advertising and most of the related data collection & selling (for things like credit cards and magazines, too, shouldn't limit it to just things like social media) would fix an absolute ton of problems, or at least improve them a lot, including this one.

I'm not sure it's a total solution but it'd likely help, and there are plenty of other reasons to do it.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

They want their cake and to eat it too. They want the internet to be used for everything for everyone because of money but that also means children, teens, elderly, and non-technical normies.

[torginus]

For all the extensive list of my character defects, I'm pretty sure none can be attributed to me having seen Robocop at 5 years old.

[techblueberry]

I’m not sure if you meant this in support of my argument, but this is in fact, a cornerstone of my argument. Kids should be watching robocop and not force-fed Zuckerberg approved AI slop.

[bilegeek]

> where it seems almost any attempt to gatekeep is seen as a freedom violation

1.) Because it always seems to have an outsized impact on adults. Then the predators get away with it because the platforms DGAF (for example, Discord has had a MASSIVE problem with illegality for YEARS, with boatloads of reports and evidence that was blatantly ignored, and yet NOW they need your ID?) And any gate design that COULD work without PII won't be implemented because data is too juicy.

> Maybe this is why we need protocols over platforms?

> If counter culture gets driven back to IRC, or gasp meatspace, then all the better.

2.) Yes on both counts. But protocols need to be decentralized, massively scalable, available across every platform including phones, and normie-grade easy-to-use (not everybody, and it's getting better now, but lots of devs tend to give up here, like it's a binary choice between a lobotomized barely-functioning bloated Fisher-Price app and a fully-functioning lean app with awful UI. Shockingly difficult, as I discovered trying to program, but both possible and necessary.) But as for meatspace...

> we went from a world where most everything was intermediated by parents

3.) If anything, the world is intermediated by parents like never before.[1] Not everywhere, not everybody, but enough freedom of movement and gathering has been lost by children and teens that it is killing meatspace. This CANNOT be ignored if you want to address online problems. The internet, awful as it can be, is the only "free" place left to roam for many.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945114

[techblueberry]

Necessity is the mother of invention, kick all the kids off the internet, and let them drive their parents crazy until they let them out.

I remember when I was younger there was consternation about people believing AOL was the internet. Now we’ve basically all settled into the walled garden.

I really don’t know that there’s any more baby to throw out with the bath water.

[bilegeek]

Until

* CPS gets called?

* cops harass them again?

* the malls and many other places kick them out

* (at least for most of the USA) zoning laws and public transit issues are all fixed?

You cannot let individual families, even individual kids/teens, shoulder this burden alone. If your local malls, cops, and nosy neighbors have already clearly shown that they DO NOT want free-range kids in practice, would you risk the breakup of your family and bankruptcy from legal fees alone? (Assuming there's no community support, because a functional community wouldn't have this problem.) Kudos if so, but most people won't risk it if the chance of success is too low.

[techblueberry]

I’m feeling very William Wallace, you make take our lives but you’ll never take our freedom. We cannot keep saying well the laws are insane so we’ll just let Zuck force feed them mindless crap and advertisements. Yes, people need to become more active in their communities to fight this bullshit.

[michaelt]

> I’m also largely cynical to the idea that anyone’s doing any free speeching on meta or Twitter in the first place. If counter culture gets driven back to IRC, or gasp meatspace, then all the better.

The thing is, any speech controls imposed on Facebook and Twitter will probably be imposed on all services - including IRC.

And while Facebook and Twitter are capable of compliance and have bottomless pockets to implement it, IRC isn't and doesn't.

[techblueberry]

Necessity is the mother of invention.