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I'm not sure why a person would want to let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common, if it's at all possible to avoid it. I'm gonna

I'm not sure why a person would want to let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common, if it's at all possible to avoid it. I'm gonna continue to run with "no social media", which has worked so far. They can message people they actually know IRL, somewhere without a feed full of crap from people they don't know. That's plenty. Like I can't think of any analogous place in physical space I'd let my kids hang out unsupervised, and the amount of time I intend to spend watching (supervising) them scrolling Insta or TikTok on anything like a regular basis is zero, and the likelihood of their choosing that as a thing they want to do if I'm otherwise available to do something fun with them is also probably somewhere around zero, which means... no social, since it ain't happening supervised. Like I also wouldn't take them to a bad part of town and leave them there for hours. Why would I do the digital equivalent? Even if we talk about it afterward... why? Maybe occasionally as a "here's how to spot shit" lesson but not enough that they'd need an account or anything.

indymike 10mo ago
> I'm not sure why a person would want to let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common, A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud) are committed by family and friends of the victims. Should we not leave our children with our family alone? The best move is to teach your children how to not be victimized. It is part of "being responsible for yourself". My parents taught me how to be safe in a bad neighborhood because sometimes you have to go there. They taught me how to pick good friends who wouldn't do bad things to me. They taught me how to spot the precursors to bad things. They let me hang out unsupervised. Because they taught me how to be responsible for myself. Why not teach your kids how to navigate the internet safely.
- phantasmish 10mo ago
  > A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud) are committed by family and friends of the victims. Should we not leave our children with our family alone? But I'm pretty sure that like 50+% of interactions with family aren't crime. > Why not teach your kids how to navigate the internet safely. No reason to involve any serious amount of time browsing feeds of shit in that. I don't make them roll around in poison ivy, either. Absofuckinglutely not more than once. Exactly how much exposure to something of approaching-zero value and significant harm do they need? I'm going with "just enough to notice it's one of those so they can run the other way". [EDIT] To put all my cards on the table, I think an extremely reasonable middle ground for Internet targeted ad networks and content-promoting algo-feed social networks would be to saddle them with an appropriate amount of liability for content they promote, which amount would surely be enough to put them all out of business. I see their feeds as the Internet equivalents of a crack house. I'm not gonna send my kids there—I'd rather see them gone, period. I will tell my kids what they are, and how and why such places might hurt them, in hopes they stay away. But I don't think some kind of "exposure therapy" or something is appropriate. The correct, moderate use of social media feeds is to avoid them entirely.
  - heavyset_go 10mo ago
    90% of all childhood sexual assaults are perpetrated by close family and friends[1]. If stranger danger is a motivating factor here, statistically, you should side-eye your close friends and family much, much more often and never leave them alone with your kids. > But I'm pretty sure that like 50+% of interactions with family aren't crime. You can say the same thing about social media interactions. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/child-abuse-neglect/about/about-child-sexual-abuse.html https://www.cdc.gov/child-abuse-neglect/about/about-child-se...
    - phantasmish 10mo ago
      You've misunderstood this conversation and/or are applying statistics extremely poorly. This is not serving whatever point you're trying to make, and is a distraction from productive discourse.
      - brailsafe 10mo ago
        I think you established too broad of a scope for discourse to be within the parameters you were hoping. Immediately upon reading your comment, I thought about the general overprotection and over-supervision of kids which leads parents to drive their kids everywhere, prevent them from learning to use the subway on their own, or even live in cities. But what I think you were getting at is more about smaller hypothetical physically analogous places, but it's hard to think about what those places are in real life without relying on assumptions that may be more likely to occur online than in any significant concentration in the real world. Imo, the most threatening place for kids to be in real life in terms of external factors, day to day, is around cars, bullies, bad actors within the family, and then maybe church/sports teams, but all of those are usually safe unless they're not, you can't realistically do anything productive about that without sacrificing their development as a human, except prepare them and guide them. Online, it's just a whole different beast, and I'd think it would be games and social media, anywhere a gaurd would be let down, but imo the greater threat isn't criminality as much as it is nearly every other aspect except basic chats.
      - indymike 10mo ago
- 9dev 10mo ago
  That sounds great in principle, but many parents are either not interested or present enough to do so, or themselves lack the skills for it.
  - arkey 10mo ago
    And that's the root cause of many, many issues. It's a pity so many of these issues get simply patched up through other means instead of properly addressing the real root cause.
  - indymike 10mo ago
    If you have kids it is your responsibility. If you have kids and are not interested or present enough, this is literally the problem.
    - 9dev 10mo ago
      Again, you being right doesn’t change anything. This is the world we live in, and that means we need to work with what we have. Which includes inattentive parents.
      - indymike 10mo ago
        So... what's the point. Outlawing being an inattentive parent doesn't fix that problem. I'm not sure human beings have found a fix for that that has optimal outcomes for the kids.
        9dev 10mo ago
        Well. A possible solution might be to limit the exposition to social media children have by creating a law, which is the topic of this thread?
        InvertedRhodium 10mo ago
        This is wildly unpopular, for good reasons, but if I want to get a third dog I need to apply for and get a license from the council - they’ll come round, inspect my property and ensure that it’s adequate for a number of dogs, that it’s secure and my current pets are well treated before issuing it. The disconnect between this and children seems wild to me. Why don’t we display the same amount of concern for children?
- HaZeust 10mo ago
  >"The best move is to teach your children how to not be victimized." Your GP advocated world-building a child's physical environment to avoid digital - which is simply unrealistic for their later years as it is, and coddling them so nothing that could even potentially victimize them in the digital world would be able to reach them. So, genuinely: What's it gonna be? Are you going to teach a child the real-world application and use cases for being responsible for themselves, not becoming victimized and carrying themselves well, and learning to act appropriate in an increasingly-digital world; or not? Otherwise; saying you'll teach your kids real-world application for being responsible for themselves and not being victimized, and then not giving them a space to see the importance of those practices out of fear that they'll succumb to it, is having your cake and eating it, too.
- 0dayz 10mo ago
  Teaching your kid being street smart is only a band aid or cope as the younglings say these days. Because the issue is: - your street smartness is an outdated smartness - there are multiple different types of assholes waiting to victimize someone that you don't know about When the police, court, positive socioeconomic factors work only then do you for sure minimize the risk of your child being victimized. The internet has open the floodgates to be a piece of shit and made it hard to do something about it. Because if you live in the wild west it's a matter of when not if.
  - tennysont 10mo ago
    FYI “cope” is closer to “delusion used to help you cope with reality” rather than “superficial fix” Also, I think that some strategies, such as “comfort asking a parent for help navigating a situation” are timeless defenses against strategies like blackmail. There are probably some street smarts that change and some that stay the same.
    - 0dayz 10mo ago
      Well yes, street smart is both. It's a temporary solution based on the delusion that you can't work on a systemic level to reduce criminal or thuggish behavior. Ultimately I do think some form of self defense is good to know, but you can't expect it to be effective than situational.
makeitdouble 10mo ago
> let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common, if it's at all possible to avoid it. You're talking about cutting kids from all online services, including multiplayer games and community wikis. It also means your kid has no experience of online interactions with strangers, basically no SNS literacy, which also sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me.
- phantasmish 10mo ago
  > You're talking about cutting kids from > all online services Not even close? I don’t know how you got that. > including multiplayer games Nah. My kids play plenty of multiplayer games. Local’s fine, online with people they know is fine, online in games with no or extremely limited communication is fine (Nintendo consoles are good for those) > community wikis Are community game wikis hotbeds of scams, predation, and astroturf rage-bait influence campaigns? I’ve read them much of my life (if we also count Gamefaqs) and never noticed this.
  - makeitdouble 10mo ago
    > Nintendo For online gaming, that's 5ish game lines ? Then Splatoon communities are pretty active, with third party tournaments, discord channels especially during fest flourish. Private matches are a pretty core component of getting good at the game in team events, and Nintendo rightfully limits how much it wants to deal with that side of things. As a result, if your kid gets into the game, they'll be looking at that from the sideline while other kids get a lot more support. > game wikis In general any wikis that allows for limited scope communication, like a discussion between two users in some obscure thread where only the two will be notified of updates, is ripe for abuse. Then game wikis are where kids will be found. While moderation teams are usually doing a stellar job, it's a cat and mouse game with utterly motivated attackers and highly valuable targets. So stuff will happen. That kind of stuff won't surface outside of very egregious incidents, but working in an adjacent field to gaming communities, it's definitely a thing.
    - phantasmish 10mo ago
ncruces 10mo ago
> They can message people they actually know IRL, somewhere without a feed full of crap from people they don't know. Just how do you think they get introduced to TikTok? What do you think gets posted in the school class WhatsApp group chat? My kids' WhatsApp group chats are mostly a torrent of sharing idiotic TikToks, YouTube Shorts, and celebrity Instagrams. Which my kids can't watch… until they're savvy enough to bypass my restrictions. Until then, they'll watch it in school, on their friends' phones - little consolation there. And when that pauses, they just have stupid sticker wars, and the kind of impolite banter (often misogynist/homophobic in nature, definitely not age appropriate) that may well have been par for the course when I was their age, but that I would never have committed to in writing, in essentially a public space. Not to mention the almost bullying. The mere suggestion by my kid (on my advice) that a separate space was created to discuss actually important stuff, like forgotten homework assignments, test dates, etc, was met with incredulity and laughter by peers (the almost bullying). Kids teach their peers how to act. Peers have way more influence than their parents. We need a majority of kids to understand TikTok/etc are bad for them.
- phantasmish 10mo ago
  Ah, the inevitable "meh, give up, it's hopeless" post, to go along with the "why don't parents do their fucking job and leave us alone?" posts. No thread on HN related to parenting and technology is complete without a healthy dose of both sorts of post. Sorry, I'm trying to do my fucking job, as others demand.
  - intended 10mo ago
    I dont think that comment materially undermined your position, if anything it supported it?
    - ncruces 10mo ago
      Exactly. My kid has a smartphone but no data plan; no social media; can't take it to school. When I did that, I was the annoying one, who they fought every inch of the way. When the school banned phones in the playground, I was suddenly one of the first to get it right, in their eyes. I'm trying to do my job too. But we need certain rules to be consistent throughout our society. Even if they will be broken, it matters that the rules are there and we can agree to them.
Gigachad 10mo ago
What I’m seeing in Australia is most parents know it’s bad, and want their kids off social media. But it’s a Herculean task when the social media companies have such a grip on their kids and when all the other kids have it. It’s the same story with banning phones in schools. Everyone knows it’s the right thing to do but individual parents or teachers don’t have the power to do it alone.
- heresie-dabord 10mo ago
  > the social media companies have such a grip on their kids We are talking about US companies in particular. Everything that was being done to try to mitigate the vileness and toxicity has been forcefully rescinded in the name of US profiteering. There is only one viable option, and that it for countries that reject poisonous US social media to choose/identify/build a better platform that is safe for children, safe for news and information, and safe for society and for Democracy itself.
  - IMTDb 10mo ago
    I know few countries that reject poisonous US social media in favor of better platform that is safe for children, safe for news and information, and safe for society and for Democracy itself: the peoples democracy of North Korea, the democratic republic of Iran, the not authoritarian society of Russia, etc I see tremendous correlation between restriction of access to some websites and straight up dictatorship that pretend to protect it's population from the evils of foreign influences.
    - buellerbueller 10mo ago
      Perhaps you have the causality reversed, friendo?
  - BlueTemplar 10mo ago
    Them being platforms is most of the issue. Protocols (like Mastodon or PeerTube), not platforms.
- 10mo ago
zelphirkalt 10mo ago
The issue is, that many people think social media like TikTok and FB and so on are good and that they are letting their children "participate in modern life" or something like that. They are utterly uninformed about these things, or so media brainwashed themselves, that they will fight you to the teeth standing up for things like FB. I had that happening. I explained to someone, that FB is a criminal company, that's spying on everyone and everything they do, and just had that 5 billion sum to pay for mishandling personal data. But do you think that that person would come to their senses? Nope, ofc not. They argued on and on about how it is a force of good and whatnot.

indymike 10mo ago

> I'm not sure why a person would want to let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common, A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud) are committed by family and friends of the victims. Should we not leave our children with our family alone? The best move is to teach your children how to not be victimized. It is part of "being responsible for yourself". My parents taught me how to be safe in a bad neighborhood because sometimes you have to go there. They taught me how to pick good friends who wouldn't do bad things to me. They taught me how to spot the precursors to bad things. They let me hang out unsupervised. Because they taught me how to be responsible for myself. Why not teach your kids how to navigate the internet safely.

phantasmish 10mo ago
> A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud) are committed by family and friends of the victims. Should we not leave our children with our family alone? But I'm pretty sure that like 50+% of interactions with family aren't crime. > Why not teach your kids how to navigate the internet safely. No reason to involve any serious amount of time browsing feeds of shit in that. I don't make them roll around in poison ivy, either. Absofuckinglutely not more than once. Exactly how much exposure to something of approaching-zero value and significant harm do they need? I'm going with "just enough to notice it's one of those so they can run the other way". [EDIT] To put all my cards on the table, I think an extremely reasonable middle ground for Internet targeted ad networks and content-promoting algo-feed social networks would be to saddle them with an appropriate amount of liability for content they promote, which amount would surely be enough to put them all out of business. I see their feeds as the Internet equivalents of a crack house. I'm not gonna send my kids there—I'd rather see them gone, period. I will tell my kids what they are, and how and why such places might hurt them, in hopes they stay away. But I don't think some kind of "exposure therapy" or something is appropriate. The correct, moderate use of social media feeds is to avoid them entirely.
- heavyset_go 10mo ago
  90% of all childhood sexual assaults are perpetrated by close family and friends[1]. If stranger danger is a motivating factor here, statistically, you should side-eye your close friends and family much, much more often and never leave them alone with your kids. > But I'm pretty sure that like 50+% of interactions with family aren't crime. You can say the same thing about social media interactions. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/child-abuse-neglect/about/about-child-sexual-abuse.html https://www.cdc.gov/child-abuse-neglect/about/about-child-se...
  - phantasmish 10mo ago
    You've misunderstood this conversation and/or are applying statistics extremely poorly. This is not serving whatever point you're trying to make, and is a distraction from productive discourse.
    - brailsafe 10mo ago
      I think you established too broad of a scope for discourse to be within the parameters you were hoping. Immediately upon reading your comment, I thought about the general overprotection and over-supervision of kids which leads parents to drive their kids everywhere, prevent them from learning to use the subway on their own, or even live in cities. But what I think you were getting at is more about smaller hypothetical physically analogous places, but it's hard to think about what those places are in real life without relying on assumptions that may be more likely to occur online than in any significant concentration in the real world. Imo, the most threatening place for kids to be in real life in terms of external factors, day to day, is around cars, bullies, bad actors within the family, and then maybe church/sports teams, but all of those are usually safe unless they're not, you can't realistically do anything productive about that without sacrificing their development as a human, except prepare them and guide them. Online, it's just a whole different beast, and I'd think it would be games and social media, anywhere a gaurd would be let down, but imo the greater threat isn't criminality as much as it is nearly every other aspect except basic chats.
    - indymike 10mo ago
9dev 10mo ago
That sounds great in principle, but many parents are either not interested or present enough to do so, or themselves lack the skills for it.
- arkey 10mo ago
  And that's the root cause of many, many issues. It's a pity so many of these issues get simply patched up through other means instead of properly addressing the real root cause.
- indymike 10mo ago
  If you have kids it is your responsibility. If you have kids and are not interested or present enough, this is literally the problem.
  - 9dev 10mo ago
    Again, you being right doesn’t change anything. This is the world we live in, and that means we need to work with what we have. Which includes inattentive parents.
    - indymike 10mo ago
      So... what's the point. Outlawing being an inattentive parent doesn't fix that problem. I'm not sure human beings have found a fix for that that has optimal outcomes for the kids.
      - 9dev 10mo ago
        Well. A possible solution might be to limit the exposition to social media children have by creating a law, which is the topic of this thread?
      - InvertedRhodium 10mo ago
        This is wildly unpopular, for good reasons, but if I want to get a third dog I need to apply for and get a license from the council - they’ll come round, inspect my property and ensure that it’s adequate for a number of dogs, that it’s secure and my current pets are well treated before issuing it. The disconnect between this and children seems wild to me. Why don’t we display the same amount of concern for children?
HaZeust 10mo ago
>"The best move is to teach your children how to not be victimized." Your GP advocated world-building a child's physical environment to avoid digital - which is simply unrealistic for their later years as it is, and coddling them so nothing that could even potentially victimize them in the digital world would be able to reach them. So, genuinely: What's it gonna be? Are you going to teach a child the real-world application and use cases for being responsible for themselves, not becoming victimized and carrying themselves well, and learning to act appropriate in an increasingly-digital world; or not? Otherwise; saying you'll teach your kids real-world application for being responsible for themselves and not being victimized, and then not giving them a space to see the importance of those practices out of fear that they'll succumb to it, is having your cake and eating it, too.
0dayz 10mo ago
Teaching your kid being street smart is only a band aid or cope as the younglings say these days. Because the issue is: - your street smartness is an outdated smartness - there are multiple different types of assholes waiting to victimize someone that you don't know about When the police, court, positive socioeconomic factors work only then do you for sure minimize the risk of your child being victimized. The internet has open the floodgates to be a piece of shit and made it hard to do something about it. Because if you live in the wild west it's a matter of when not if.
- tennysont 10mo ago
  FYI “cope” is closer to “delusion used to help you cope with reality” rather than “superficial fix” Also, I think that some strategies, such as “comfort asking a parent for help navigating a situation” are timeless defenses against strategies like blackmail. There are probably some street smarts that change and some that stay the same.
  - 0dayz 10mo ago
    Well yes, street smart is both. It's a temporary solution based on the delusion that you can't work on a systemic level to reduce criminal or thuggish behavior. Ultimately I do think some form of self defense is good to know, but you can't expect it to be effective than situational.

makeitdouble 10mo ago

> let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common, if it's at all possible to avoid it. You're talking about cutting kids from all online services, including multiplayer games and community wikis. It also means your kid has no experience of online interactions with strangers, basically no SNS literacy, which also sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me.

phantasmish 10mo ago
> You're talking about cutting kids from > all online services Not even close? I don’t know how you got that. > including multiplayer games Nah. My kids play plenty of multiplayer games. Local’s fine, online with people they know is fine, online in games with no or extremely limited communication is fine (Nintendo consoles are good for those) > community wikis Are community game wikis hotbeds of scams, predation, and astroturf rage-bait influence campaigns? I’ve read them much of my life (if we also count Gamefaqs) and never noticed this.
- makeitdouble 10mo ago
  > Nintendo For online gaming, that's 5ish game lines ? Then Splatoon communities are pretty active, with third party tournaments, discord channels especially during fest flourish. Private matches are a pretty core component of getting good at the game in team events, and Nintendo rightfully limits how much it wants to deal with that side of things. As a result, if your kid gets into the game, they'll be looking at that from the sideline while other kids get a lot more support. > game wikis In general any wikis that allows for limited scope communication, like a discussion between two users in some obscure thread where only the two will be notified of updates, is ripe for abuse. Then game wikis are where kids will be found. While moderation teams are usually doing a stellar job, it's a cat and mouse game with utterly motivated attackers and highly valuable targets. So stuff will happen. That kind of stuff won't surface outside of very egregious incidents, but working in an adjacent field to gaming communities, it's definitely a thing.
  - phantasmish 10mo ago

ncruces 10mo ago

> They can message people they actually know IRL, somewhere without a feed full of crap from people they don't know. Just how do you think they get introduced to TikTok? What do you think gets posted in the school class WhatsApp group chat? My kids' WhatsApp group chats are mostly a torrent of sharing idiotic TikToks, YouTube Shorts, and celebrity Instagrams. Which my kids can't watch… until they're savvy enough to bypass my restrictions. Until then, they'll watch it in school, on their friends' phones - little consolation there. And when that pauses, they just have stupid sticker wars, and the kind of impolite banter (often misogynist/homophobic in nature, definitely not age appropriate) that may well have been par for the course when I was their age, but that I would never have committed to in writing, in essentially a public space. Not to mention the almost bullying. The mere suggestion by my kid (on my advice) that a separate space was created to discuss actually important stuff, like forgotten homework assignments, test dates, etc, was met with incredulity and laughter by peers (the almost bullying). Kids teach their peers how to act. Peers have way more influence than their parents. We need a majority of kids to understand TikTok/etc are bad for them.

phantasmish 10mo ago
Ah, the inevitable "meh, give up, it's hopeless" post, to go along with the "why don't parents do their fucking job and leave us alone?" posts. No thread on HN related to parenting and technology is complete without a healthy dose of both sorts of post. Sorry, I'm trying to do my fucking job, as others demand.
- intended 10mo ago
  I dont think that comment materially undermined your position, if anything it supported it?
  - ncruces 10mo ago
    Exactly. My kid has a smartphone but no data plan; no social media; can't take it to school. When I did that, I was the annoying one, who they fought every inch of the way. When the school banned phones in the playground, I was suddenly one of the first to get it right, in their eyes. I'm trying to do my job too. But we need certain rules to be consistent throughout our society. Even if they will be broken, it matters that the rules are there and we can agree to them.

Gigachad 10mo ago

What I’m seeing in Australia is most parents know it’s bad, and want their kids off social media. But it’s a Herculean task when the social media companies have such a grip on their kids and when all the other kids have it. It’s the same story with banning phones in schools. Everyone knows it’s the right thing to do but individual parents or teachers don’t have the power to do it alone.

heresie-dabord 10mo ago
> the social media companies have such a grip on their kids We are talking about US companies in particular. Everything that was being done to try to mitigate the vileness and toxicity has been forcefully rescinded in the name of US profiteering. There is only one viable option, and that it for countries that reject poisonous US social media to choose/identify/build a better platform that is safe for children, safe for news and information, and safe for society and for Democracy itself.
- IMTDb 10mo ago
  I know few countries that reject poisonous US social media in favor of better platform that is safe for children, safe for news and information, and safe for society and for Democracy itself: the peoples democracy of North Korea, the democratic republic of Iran, the not authoritarian society of Russia, etc I see tremendous correlation between restriction of access to some websites and straight up dictatorship that pretend to protect it's population from the evils of foreign influences.
  - buellerbueller 10mo ago
    Perhaps you have the causality reversed, friendo?
- BlueTemplar 10mo ago
  Them being platforms is most of the issue. Protocols (like Mastodon or PeerTube), not platforms.
10mo ago

zelphirkalt 10mo ago

The issue is, that many people think social media like TikTok and FB and so on are good and that they are letting their children "participate in modern life" or something like that. They are utterly uninformed about these things, or so media brainwashed themselves, that they will fight you to the teeth standing up for things like FB. I had that happening. I explained to someone, that FB is a criminal company, that's spying on everyone and everything they do, and just had that 5 billion sum to pay for mishandling personal data. But do you think that that person would come to their senses? Nope, ofc not. They argued on and on about how it is a force of good and whatnot.