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Microsoft’s family thing is better but still not good. Simple things like adding more time or allowing purchases or adding funds with gift cards routinely fail
by monkpit 3y ago
Microsoft’s family thing is better but still not good. Simple things like adding more time or allowing purchases or adding funds with gift cards routinely fail with meaningless errors along the lines of “failed”. Or worse, a success message but there was a failure and the action doesn’t actually take effect.
The moral here is all parental controls are crap because they don’t directly drive revenue. (Yes, you can say “but I would prefer to use a service with better controls, which drives adoption”, but let’s be honest - we are a minority there). Nobody’s getting promoted for making the best parental control suite.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoSure, and for ad-revenue driven companies like Google and Meta having good parental controls actually harms their business instead of improving on it. The incentives are all wrong. That, and parents only have kids of the age that this is of relevance for, for maybe 4, 5, 6 years. So you're targeting a feature not only for a small segment, but one that is transient. And if you screw it up, there's all sorts of potential for liability. You have to be careful about what you promise, etc. etc. All the more reason why the answer probably comes down to: gov't regulation instead of expecting them to do this voluntarily.