15 ms·

Yes, and a 13 year old should absolutely not use any of those services. Discord in particular has become known as “groomercord” for it’s open pedophilia.

holmesworcester 4y ago
I haven't read the bills yet but according to the article it applies to children under 18. 17-year-old me would have considered this draconian bullsh*t, for the same reasons I would now. (So does dad me, incidentally. My kid's messages have always been her business, not mine.)
- raincole 4y ago
  I'm sure many of us wouldn't have been a programmer if we hadn't had access to SO/Github around 17.
  - jay_kyburz 4y ago
    Now I feel old.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    Absolutely zero chance, SO was the only resource on the internet that had simple enough explanations for me when I started out programming at 11. I was making PRs to oss projects on Github and churning through Project Euler by 15. I literally owe my entire career to SO which is weird to say typing it out now.
    - folkrav 4y ago
      Reading these comments about people relying on SO - a site founded in 2008 - at age 11, doesn't make me feel any younger, and I'm not even that old (inching closer and closer to my mid-30s). I got into Linux and bash/Python scripting by following tutorials on random shady sites and reading official documentation and manpages. Let's just say it wasn't as seamless as Googling an issue and having a SO thread directly answer my question. Yes, I do realize I now sound like I just said "back in my day, we walked to school, uphill both ways".
      - Avicebron 4y ago
        Yea, it was actually wild when SO came out, because I'd been teaching myself lua pretty much independently, and by the time I got to high school, SO just barely on its way out and immediately everything was a lot easier. Old man yells at cloud, but kids these day won't even have to look at code, everything will be filtered through natural language.
      - raincole 4y ago
        "I feel old" on the internet can mean 15yo to 80yo, so you have all the right to feel old at mid-30s lol When I learned my second programming language (JavaScript), I asked most of my questions via a mailing list. It's quite weird trying to recall it... I almost forgot how mailing list work today.
      - Mezzie 4y ago
        Right? I learned through reading browser documentation in elementary school when CSS and JavaScript were implemented and then running to my dad or internet forums/chat rooms when I ran into topics or problems I didn't understand. None of us knew what we were doing. It was great.
      - tstrimple 4y ago
        Certainly you participated in related forums right? Before SO I was much more involved in online communities like https://gamedev.net/ https://gamedev.net/ which are also at risk due to this sort of bill.
        folkrav 4y ago
        I actually did not, for some reason. I was on a bunch of phpBB forums in high school, but none surrounding programming/tech. I was obsessed with music and gaming way more than IT stuff, back then. I initially learned programming more as a means to an end (my first scripts were to automate backups to an external drive, transfer stuff between Windows/Linux, that kind of stuff), and just generally for my own enjoyment, than a real plan to do anything with it. I don't even think I realized it was a potential career path before I was already out of high school lol
  - swader999 4y ago
    I'm sure our parents would have all let us sign up for a programming site. This bill still allows for that.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      Who will pay GitHub to not only install age validation but parental bypass (also with validation)? I don’t believe they even allow under-13 today due to COPA laws. Of course this focus on the age 13 is completely missing the point that the actual age gate is 17.
      - bdw5204 4y ago
        The good part about the COPPA law is that it's an IQ test. If you're under 13, you have to be smart enough to understand that it's a "don't ask don't tell" situation and know to keep quiet. I did when I was 10 and joined Yahoo (the most popular social media site at the time) so I could have a Geocities web site and play fantasy baseball. I'd suggest that teens in Utah just use a VPN but social media sites have been cracking down on VPN users for years and many of those sites now require phone number verification to sign up. This law illustrates yet another reason why that's a bad idea.
        htag 4y ago
        Looking back on my youth, I think these age verification check boxes were my earliest disregard for authority. I understood the checkboxes were there because there was a law that wanted to prevent me from accessing an online service. I thought the law was stupid, and after contemplating it for days decided to ignore it.
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        > I don’t believe they even allow under-13 today due to COPA laws. COPPA. COPA was the second attempt (after CDA, which was the first), COPPA was the third and the one that stuck.
    - judge2020 4y ago
      You underestimate how hard it might be to get your parent to sign some weird consent form from a "github" site, especially if it asks for a picture of the parent's ID (to ensure the kid isn't accepting the terms on their own behalf).
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    GitHub is not being banned. Neither is SO.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      What part of the bill provides them an exception?
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        >What part of the bill provides them an exception? For Github? 10(b)(i)(N), to the extent that source code files are “documents”. For Stack Overflow? 10(b)(i)(J), which was probably written for LinkedIn specifically.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - RockRobotRock 4y ago
    Reddit is also an incredible resource for niche, constructive topics like learning how to build a computer. You could draw the line anywhere you want for social media.
    - chickencatsoup 4y ago
      I mean, this is why it's a common thing to append reddit.com to your google searchs nowadays. Seeing how others solved problems or getting a feel for their opinions on certain things is actually super useful.
  - nkrisc 4y ago
    So that's why I didn't become a professional programmer. SO and Github hadn't been invented yet when I was 17.
    - Godel_unicode 4y ago
      You’re thinking about it wrong. How many people that you knew when you were 17 would have become programmers if the current resources existed. See also: survivorship bias.
  - cesarb 4y ago
    > I'm sure many of us wouldn't have been a programmer if we hadn't had access to SO/Github around 17. I'm sure many of us didn't have any access to StackOverflow and GitHub when we were around 17 years old, because StackOverflow and GitHub didn't exist yet. For several of us, git didn't exist yet. Heck, for some of us, the web didn't exist yet! Kids these days...
    - shaunxcode 4y ago
      I remember having to send an email to the admin of sourceforge for permission to have a project and thus CVS access. "Please sir may I contribute to open source?"
    - McSwag 4y ago
      I’m kind of surprised but also not surprised in the outrage over the “draconian bulls*t.” The problem I have as a parent is that I can see it causing real social damage to adults around me, my own kids, and kids around my kids. Anti-social behavior, Disrespect for authority, extreme violence is easy to see and normalized (stuff that would normally be considered traumatic), wokeness and anti-wokeness is normalized (must we all have such strong opinions?). I’m talking behavior way more at extreme ends of the polarized spectrum and at earlier ages than what I grew up around. It’s basically force-fed opinions at a global scale, how can that possibly be healthy? We can barely fathom how this media impacts adults as it stands. All this clear evidence aside, I feel like it’s obvious, how can the absence of these things do any measurable harm to kids?
      - komali2 4y ago
        Regardless of your ethical stance on the subject, it would be a good exercise to consider who you're ok with determining what kind of content your children can view. Allowing a government to step in to pass laws like this is a draconian step too far. As a parent do you not already have all the tools you need to ensure your children don't use tik Tok? From the light touch and mundane, using the built in features of the operating system (parental blockers and app timers are available on Android and IOS) to the heavy touch of not allowing your kid to have a smartphone. Why do you want the government taking over this role for you? Maybe there's some parents who don't care if their children are on tik tok. Why should they follow the same parental strategy you have?
  - bawolff 4y ago
    Oh i feel so old. I probably wouldn't be a programmer without sourceforge.
    - spiralx 4y ago
      I probably wouldn't be a programmer without ordering floppy disks full of random source code by post from software-by-post catalogues - one letter to ask for a catalogue, get the catalogue in the post, send them a letter with your order and a cheque and receive a bunch of disks a week later...
  - LouisSayers 4y ago
    You have no idea. Before StackOverflow it was PAINFUL. Staring at "Reached end of file while parsing" errors and wondering wtf that even means... Then finding out after 5 hours that you missed a semicolon. Oh, and forget rounded borders, what a f@#%king nightmare.
    - raincole 4y ago
      Oh I have a lot of ideas. I started learning programming before Stackoverflow got traction. Plus I'm not a native speaker and by the time I didn't really speak English at all. So I practically needed to learn what "Reached end of file while parsing" means in plain English, then tried to find out that I had missed a semicolon :'(
  - datavirtue 4y ago
    Hmmm...all I had was a blank screen and a Byte article.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > 17-year-old me would have considered this draconian bullsht, for the same reasons I would now. If anyone thinks that this bill is going to keep 17 year olds from accessing everything from Reddit to GitHub, they are going to be very disappointed. It's kind of wild to see so much of these comments insisting that anyone under the age of 18 be locked up and prevented from accessing basic internet sites and* encouraging laws that would force every site to implement strict ID verification just to use it. Did everyone just forget what it was like to grow up with draconian content blockers at school preventing you from getting to benign information on the internet?
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    I don't think people instituting such laws are young enough to remember contet blockers at school.
  - easrng 4y ago
    > draconian content blockers most school content blockers were pretty easily bypassed in my experience. i was in school relatively recently, my highschool had fortinet which sucked (sni blocking + blocks a bunch of protocols), but tor still got through if i used a bridge. i probably could've used a vpn but tor was easier. before highschool there wasn't anything more than dns filtering (and briefly http host blocking but not sni blocking) which was bypassed by approximately everyone (who wanted to bypass it). most people used random vpn apps, i changed dns, both worked fine.
- decremental 4y ago
  > My kid's messages have always been her business, not mine This is such a hilariously bad take. No wonder kids are so screwed up with parents having an attitude like that.
  - throwayyy479087 4y ago
    Agreed. It’s not even a take it’s just a concerning statement. They should care.
falcolas 4y ago
The bill explicitly calls out “Utah minors”. That is, everyone in Utah under 18.
shadowgovt 4y ago
Agreed. Hacker News had a good run. I'm going to miss it when it's decided that tracking enough PII on its users to be compliant with this law (and the ones that will follow) is more trouble than it's worth to Y-Combinator, but so it goes. The open forum era was a grand experiment, and the experiment is winding down.
- 14 4y ago
  Can you not just vpn in to Canada with me for the time being? I mean hopefully they don’t implement it site wide for all regions I can’t imagine them doing that.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    I'm not sure how VPN'ing to Canada helps.
    - 14 4y ago
      This is a Utah law and for now I don’t think most companies will implement it site wide but rather just comply with state laws. So vpn into Canada would not trigger the age verification.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        That won't be sufficient for companies to comply with the law. The way Utah's law is structured it is incumbent upon the company to determine whether a user is a Utah citizen or not. I haven't seen anything to suggest the courts will decide that a simple IP address filter is sufficient to be considered compliant.
eru 4y ago
Why should a 13 year old not use GitHub?
- swader999 4y ago
  They still can with parental permission.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    If Github wasn’t confident that (10)(b)(i)(N) excluded them from coverage, they probably wouldn’t allow Utah minors to use the site at all (and the same would be true of any other covered or potentially covered site) because, even if they are allowed parental access, of the civil penalty and actual damages for “causing addiction” (under the statute’s non-clinical definition of “addiction”), only the civil penalty portion of which is avoidable with costly quarterly audits. It is a whole bunch of dumbass liability that can be almost entirely mitigated by excluding Utah minors, and if that does economic and developmental harm to Utah, that’s not the sites’ problem.
redeeman 4y ago
I agree, and along that same logic we should also be extremely concerned about what the local libraries are up to.
hackernewds 4y ago
What about YouTube? Lots of educational material there. Fits all of the points.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  There is YouTube for kids which is meant to be more stripped down.
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    Meant to be, sure. Ends up being this weird blend of "disturbing kid crack" videos that you really shouldn't leave a child unattended with. The whole "Peppa Pig Drinks Bleach" stuff was only the shallow end of the darkness of the stuff generally tossed in the "Elsagate" category. There is no "safe" way for a... oh, 2-7 year old, I'll be nice, to use the internet unattended. I've seen an awful lot of it out and about.
  - tstrimple 4y ago
    I've found YouTube kids content to be significantly worse than general YouTube content. Not to say that there isn't a lot of content inappropriate for kids on YouTube, but the Kids version is explicitly designed to target kids with addictive content. The advertisers targeting children for their products is brutal on YouTube Kids. Since pushing my kids onto the full YouTube, they are consuming better content.
thot_experiment 4y ago
90%+ of the useful interactions I have with other humans working on interesting problems is through Discord these days. If I have an issue with a library, or run into a tough to solve physics problem, basically anything where I might want to talk to someone more knowledgeable or experienced than me the answer is hop on a discord server and ask. It's absolutely asinine to deny this resource to kids. At least we're teaching kids the basics of computer security by forcing them to circumvent these restrictions, and I have full faith than they will. Most kids are much more technologically literate than someone who would unironically type "groomercord".
alex_lav 4y ago
By who? Source?
deadbolt 4y ago
> Discord in particular has become known as “groomercord” Nobody without sufficient brain-rot (ironically likely caused by social media) would call it that.
thfuran 4y ago
Known to whom? I've never seen it called that.
jquery 4y ago
I've never heard it called "groomercord", ever. A google search for that term doesn't find anything, either. I dunno where you're finding all this discord pedophilia, is this a self-report?
- Temporarily21 4y ago
  I have heard Discord mentioned a few times on CP catcher https://m.youtube.com/@CPCatcher https://m.youtube.com/@CPCatcher
wincy 4y ago
Discord is where my friend runs his youth DM games where he carves out a safe space for teens to dip their feet into playing D&D and having healthy interactions with adults on his discord server. We keep it PG-13 and it’s fun. I’ve been giving a kid pointers on AI art generation. It’d be sad if all them got run off because of hysteria about them being “groomed”.
encryptluks2 4y ago
[dead]

holmesworcester 4y ago

I haven't read the bills yet but according to the article it applies to children under 18. 17-year-old me would have considered this draconian bullsh*t, for the same reasons I would now. (So does dad me, incidentally. My kid's messages have always been her business, not mine.)

raincole 4y ago
I'm sure many of us wouldn't have been a programmer if we hadn't had access to SO/Github around 17.
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  Now I feel old.
- Spivak 4y ago
  Absolutely zero chance, SO was the only resource on the internet that had simple enough explanations for me when I started out programming at 11. I was making PRs to oss projects on Github and churning through Project Euler by 15. I literally owe my entire career to SO which is weird to say typing it out now.
  - folkrav 4y ago
    Reading these comments about people relying on SO - a site founded in 2008 - at age 11, doesn't make me feel any younger, and I'm not even that old (inching closer and closer to my mid-30s). I got into Linux and bash/Python scripting by following tutorials on random shady sites and reading official documentation and manpages. Let's just say it wasn't as seamless as Googling an issue and having a SO thread directly answer my question. Yes, I do realize I now sound like I just said "back in my day, we walked to school, uphill both ways".
    - Avicebron 4y ago
      Yea, it was actually wild when SO came out, because I'd been teaching myself lua pretty much independently, and by the time I got to high school, SO just barely on its way out and immediately everything was a lot easier. Old man yells at cloud, but kids these day won't even have to look at code, everything will be filtered through natural language.
    - raincole 4y ago
      "I feel old" on the internet can mean 15yo to 80yo, so you have all the right to feel old at mid-30s lol When I learned my second programming language (JavaScript), I asked most of my questions via a mailing list. It's quite weird trying to recall it... I almost forgot how mailing list work today.
    - Mezzie 4y ago
      Right? I learned through reading browser documentation in elementary school when CSS and JavaScript were implemented and then running to my dad or internet forums/chat rooms when I ran into topics or problems I didn't understand. None of us knew what we were doing. It was great.
    - tstrimple 4y ago
      Certainly you participated in related forums right? Before SO I was much more involved in online communities like https://gamedev.net/ https://gamedev.net/ which are also at risk due to this sort of bill.
      - folkrav 4y ago
        I actually did not, for some reason. I was on a bunch of phpBB forums in high school, but none surrounding programming/tech. I was obsessed with music and gaming way more than IT stuff, back then. I initially learned programming more as a means to an end (my first scripts were to automate backups to an external drive, transfer stuff between Windows/Linux, that kind of stuff), and just generally for my own enjoyment, than a real plan to do anything with it. I don't even think I realized it was a potential career path before I was already out of high school lol
- swader999 4y ago
  I'm sure our parents would have all let us sign up for a programming site. This bill still allows for that.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    Who will pay GitHub to not only install age validation but parental bypass (also with validation)? I don’t believe they even allow under-13 today due to COPA laws. Of course this focus on the age 13 is completely missing the point that the actual age gate is 17.
    - bdw5204 4y ago
      The good part about the COPPA law is that it's an IQ test. If you're under 13, you have to be smart enough to understand that it's a "don't ask don't tell" situation and know to keep quiet. I did when I was 10 and joined Yahoo (the most popular social media site at the time) so I could have a Geocities web site and play fantasy baseball. I'd suggest that teens in Utah just use a VPN but social media sites have been cracking down on VPN users for years and many of those sites now require phone number verification to sign up. This law illustrates yet another reason why that's a bad idea.
      - htag 4y ago
        Looking back on my youth, I think these age verification check boxes were my earliest disregard for authority. I understood the checkboxes were there because there was a law that wanted to prevent me from accessing an online service. I thought the law was stupid, and after contemplating it for days decided to ignore it.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > I don’t believe they even allow under-13 today due to COPA laws. COPPA. COPA was the second attempt (after CDA, which was the first), COPPA was the third and the one that stuck.
  - judge2020 4y ago
    You underestimate how hard it might be to get your parent to sign some weird consent form from a "github" site, especially if it asks for a picture of the parent's ID (to ensure the kid isn't accepting the terms on their own behalf).
- hackernewds 4y ago
  GitHub is not being banned. Neither is SO.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    What part of the bill provides them an exception?
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      >What part of the bill provides them an exception? For Github? 10(b)(i)(N), to the extent that source code files are “documents”. For Stack Overflow? 10(b)(i)(J), which was probably written for LinkedIn specifically.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- RockRobotRock 4y ago
  Reddit is also an incredible resource for niche, constructive topics like learning how to build a computer. You could draw the line anywhere you want for social media.
  - chickencatsoup 4y ago
    I mean, this is why it's a common thing to append reddit.com to your google searchs nowadays. Seeing how others solved problems or getting a feel for their opinions on certain things is actually super useful.
- nkrisc 4y ago
  So that's why I didn't become a professional programmer. SO and Github hadn't been invented yet when I was 17.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    You’re thinking about it wrong. How many people that you knew when you were 17 would have become programmers if the current resources existed. See also: survivorship bias.
- cesarb 4y ago
  > I'm sure many of us wouldn't have been a programmer if we hadn't had access to SO/Github around 17. I'm sure many of us didn't have any access to StackOverflow and GitHub when we were around 17 years old, because StackOverflow and GitHub didn't exist yet. For several of us, git didn't exist yet. Heck, for some of us, the web didn't exist yet! Kids these days...
  - shaunxcode 4y ago
    I remember having to send an email to the admin of sourceforge for permission to have a project and thus CVS access. "Please sir may I contribute to open source?"
  - McSwag 4y ago
    I’m kind of surprised but also not surprised in the outrage over the “draconian bulls*t.” The problem I have as a parent is that I can see it causing real social damage to adults around me, my own kids, and kids around my kids. Anti-social behavior, Disrespect for authority, extreme violence is easy to see and normalized (stuff that would normally be considered traumatic), wokeness and anti-wokeness is normalized (must we all have such strong opinions?). I’m talking behavior way more at extreme ends of the polarized spectrum and at earlier ages than what I grew up around. It’s basically force-fed opinions at a global scale, how can that possibly be healthy? We can barely fathom how this media impacts adults as it stands. All this clear evidence aside, I feel like it’s obvious, how can the absence of these things do any measurable harm to kids?
    - komali2 4y ago
      Regardless of your ethical stance on the subject, it would be a good exercise to consider who you're ok with determining what kind of content your children can view. Allowing a government to step in to pass laws like this is a draconian step too far. As a parent do you not already have all the tools you need to ensure your children don't use tik Tok? From the light touch and mundane, using the built in features of the operating system (parental blockers and app timers are available on Android and IOS) to the heavy touch of not allowing your kid to have a smartphone. Why do you want the government taking over this role for you? Maybe there's some parents who don't care if their children are on tik tok. Why should they follow the same parental strategy you have?
- bawolff 4y ago
  Oh i feel so old. I probably wouldn't be a programmer without sourceforge.
  - spiralx 4y ago
    I probably wouldn't be a programmer without ordering floppy disks full of random source code by post from software-by-post catalogues - one letter to ask for a catalogue, get the catalogue in the post, send them a letter with your order and a cheque and receive a bunch of disks a week later...
- LouisSayers 4y ago
  You have no idea. Before StackOverflow it was PAINFUL. Staring at "Reached end of file while parsing" errors and wondering wtf that even means... Then finding out after 5 hours that you missed a semicolon. Oh, and forget rounded borders, what a f@#%king nightmare.
  - raincole 4y ago
    Oh I have a lot of ideas. I started learning programming before Stackoverflow got traction. Plus I'm not a native speaker and by the time I didn't really speak English at all. So I practically needed to learn what "Reached end of file while parsing" means in plain English, then tried to find out that I had missed a semicolon :'(
- datavirtue 4y ago
  Hmmm...all I had was a blank screen and a Byte article.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> 17-year-old me would have considered this draconian bullsht, for the same reasons I would now. If anyone thinks that this bill is going to keep 17 year olds from accessing everything from Reddit to GitHub, they are going to be very disappointed. It's kind of wild to see so much of these comments insisting that anyone under the age of 18 be locked up and prevented from accessing basic internet sites and* encouraging laws that would force every site to implement strict ID verification just to use it. Did everyone just forget what it was like to grow up with draconian content blockers at school preventing you from getting to benign information on the internet?
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  I don't think people instituting such laws are young enough to remember contet blockers at school.
- easrng 4y ago
  > draconian content blockers most school content blockers were pretty easily bypassed in my experience. i was in school relatively recently, my highschool had fortinet which sucked (sni blocking + blocks a bunch of protocols), but tor still got through if i used a bridge. i probably could've used a vpn but tor was easier. before highschool there wasn't anything more than dns filtering (and briefly http host blocking but not sni blocking) which was bypassed by approximately everyone (who wanted to bypass it). most people used random vpn apps, i changed dns, both worked fine.
decremental 4y ago
> My kid's messages have always been her business, not mine This is such a hilariously bad take. No wonder kids are so screwed up with parents having an attitude like that.
- throwayyy479087 4y ago
  Agreed. It’s not even a take it’s just a concerning statement. They should care.

falcolas 4y ago

The bill explicitly calls out “Utah minors”. That is, everyone in Utah under 18.

shadowgovt 4y ago

Agreed. Hacker News had a good run. I'm going to miss it when it's decided that tracking enough PII on its users to be compliant with this law (and the ones that will follow) is more trouble than it's worth to Y-Combinator, but so it goes. The open forum era was a grand experiment, and the experiment is winding down.

14 4y ago
Can you not just vpn in to Canada with me for the time being? I mean hopefully they don’t implement it site wide for all regions I can’t imagine them doing that.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  I'm not sure how VPN'ing to Canada helps.
  - 14 4y ago
    This is a Utah law and for now I don’t think most companies will implement it site wide but rather just comply with state laws. So vpn into Canada would not trigger the age verification.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      That won't be sufficient for companies to comply with the law. The way Utah's law is structured it is incumbent upon the company to determine whether a user is a Utah citizen or not. I haven't seen anything to suggest the courts will decide that a simple IP address filter is sufficient to be considered compliant.

eru 4y ago

Why should a 13 year old not use GitHub?

swader999 4y ago
They still can with parental permission.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  If Github wasn’t confident that (10)(b)(i)(N) excluded them from coverage, they probably wouldn’t allow Utah minors to use the site at all (and the same would be true of any other covered or potentially covered site) because, even if they are allowed parental access, of the civil penalty and actual damages for “causing addiction” (under the statute’s non-clinical definition of “addiction”), only the civil penalty portion of which is avoidable with costly quarterly audits. It is a whole bunch of dumbass liability that can be almost entirely mitigated by excluding Utah minors, and if that does economic and developmental harm to Utah, that’s not the sites’ problem.

redeeman 4y ago

I agree, and along that same logic we should also be extremely concerned about what the local libraries are up to.

hackernewds 4y ago

What about YouTube? Lots of educational material there. Fits all of the points.

Gigachad 4y ago
There is YouTube for kids which is meant to be more stripped down.
- Syonyk 4y ago
  Meant to be, sure. Ends up being this weird blend of "disturbing kid crack" videos that you really shouldn't leave a child unattended with. The whole "Peppa Pig Drinks Bleach" stuff was only the shallow end of the darkness of the stuff generally tossed in the "Elsagate" category. There is no "safe" way for a... oh, 2-7 year old, I'll be nice, to use the internet unattended. I've seen an awful lot of it out and about.
- tstrimple 4y ago
  I've found YouTube kids content to be significantly worse than general YouTube content. Not to say that there isn't a lot of content inappropriate for kids on YouTube, but the Kids version is explicitly designed to target kids with addictive content. The advertisers targeting children for their products is brutal on YouTube Kids. Since pushing my kids onto the full YouTube, they are consuming better content.

thot_experiment 4y ago

90%+ of the useful interactions I have with other humans working on interesting problems is through Discord these days. If I have an issue with a library, or run into a tough to solve physics problem, basically anything where I might want to talk to someone more knowledgeable or experienced than me the answer is hop on a discord server and ask. It's absolutely asinine to deny this resource to kids. At least we're teaching kids the basics of computer security by forcing them to circumvent these restrictions, and I have full faith than they will. Most kids are much more technologically literate than someone who would unironically type "groomercord".

alex_lav 4y ago

By who? Source?

deadbolt 4y ago

> Discord in particular has become known as “groomercord” Nobody without sufficient brain-rot (ironically likely caused by social media) would call it that.

thfuran 4y ago

Known to whom? I've never seen it called that.

jquery 4y ago

I've never heard it called "groomercord", ever. A google search for that term doesn't find anything, either. I dunno where you're finding all this discord pedophilia, is this a self-report?

Temporarily21 4y ago
I have heard Discord mentioned a few times on CP catcher https://m.youtube.com/@CPCatcher https://m.youtube.com/@CPCatcher

wincy 4y ago

Discord is where my friend runs his youth DM games where he carves out a safe space for teens to dip their feet into playing D&D and having healthy interactions with adults on his discord server. We keep it PG-13 and it’s fun. I’ve been giving a kid pointers on AI art generation. It’d be sad if all them got run off because of hysteria about them being “groomed”.

encryptluks2 4y ago

[dead]