6 ms·

I really want to sympathise with the author but this feels more like a one-sided rant piece than a constructive article. For example, in one paragraph they com

• Aurornis 10mo ago
  I agree. As a parent it feels hard to sympathize with someone who outsourced their child’s app usage selection to another company and didn’t even bother to check what apps were allowed first. I visited the Gabb site they linked to and “Communication with strangers” is clearly listed as one of the tags they put on apps allowed on the phone. You’re supposed to review them as a parent, not just assume that 100% of the nearly 1000 apps they allow are exactly to your preferences.
  • mjg2 10mo ago
    I agree. Parents in the 21st century need to realize the call is coming from inside the house: it's their obligation to protect their child. Unsupervised usage without full due-diligence will lead to incidents like what the blog author describes. The dilemma of online protection is a false crisis because parents would rather let their children play with fire than nurture their babies.
    • mothballed 10mo ago
      It's the parents obligation to educate their child. It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely. There were no trackers on cars when I started driving at 15 so my parents drove with me for a few months and after that I was on my own. There were no gun laws against kids having guns when I was 7 so my dad showed me how to use one safely and after that I was set loose upon the countryside armed on my own. There were no ridiculous negligent standards/laws on the book when I was young about it being wrong for a kid to spend all day going up/down a creek so my dad showed me what all the venomous snakes looked like and how to use a compass and after that I was on my own. I find disagreement with this new standard on parents. No, it's not the parents obligation to keep their child from ever making a horrible mistake. It's their obligation to educate them well and then set them loose with very few safeguards so they can actually slowly learn to be an adult. I am very much for showing kids how to use the internet responsibly, but I'm not of the opinion that parental controls are particularly desirable beyond an initial learning period.
      • ipython 10mo ago
        Thank you. I couldn’t have said it better.
      • mjg2 10mo ago
        > It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely. I disagree because children, despite how precocious and "old-soul"ed, are not wise compared to online predators. I appreciate your POV on allowing children to make their own mistakes; life is the best teacher. Yet, to make an analogy, a gun owner keeps their collection locked up not just for their protection but for their family's protection. Some lessons in life have steep prices and are one-way doors, and we should pass that hard-earned wisdom to the next generation without those costs.
        • wizzwizz4 10mo ago
          Children are not wise compared to online predators, but they will notice when things are getting fishy. Maybe that's after they've made their first few silly mistakes (maybe they've given the predator their home address, several photographs, all their friends' contact details, and the one password they use for everything), but they will notice before anything seriously bad happens. But just because they'll notice, that doesn't mean they'll take an appropriate action; and it doesn't mean they won't be convinced that actually, it's fine. The child needs to know that they can come to you for advice, and that there will be no repercussions if the situation is benign, even if they've broken the rules: the concrete threat of (even mild) parental punishment for rule-breaking will be more salient than a mild situational suspicion. "These are the rules, you are to follow the rules, breaking them would be foolish and breaking them in secret would be even more foolish, but they are always up for discussion, and if you do break them you can still come to me for advice without getting in trouble, and I'd much rather you tell me than that I find out on my own" is a principle that can be imparted to a child. You do actually have to tell it to them, though, in several different ways over a period of time, and you have to be consistent about it. Children aren't wise, but they are clever, they can spot patterns, and they'll tend to believe your actions over your words if the two conflict. You do not want to set up a situation where a predator can blackmail a child using the threat of your punishment. Parent, yes, but parent consistently enough and well enough that such threats are an obvious bluff that the child knows to ignore (and report to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465829), and going online can be as safe for your child as playing in the local neighbourhood. The rules for young children safely using the internet unsupervised would be extremely absurd for an adult: they include things like "do not use any search engines (ask me if you want a new website)" and "do not create accounts on services (without permission)". Young children must also be kept away from content aggregators, or anything with an automatic recommendation system (e.g. Pinterest, YouTube, modern news sites, Reddit, HN). But hyperlinks on proper webpages are perfectly safe: a child isn't going to end up anywhere they shouldn't by clicking on hyperlinks if they check the URLs first and avoid the places they aren't allowed, just like a child isn't going to end up anywhere they shouldn't, wandering the high street, if they know to avoid roads and building sites. You don't need to tell a 6-year-old "stay away from porn sites", just like you don't need to tell them "don't go in that sex shop", because (a) they won't find it; and (b) even if they do, there are more general rules ("never tell a computer system that you're over 13 if you're not, and ideally not even if you are") that'll prevent any harm from occurring. And just as you'd have conversations with a child about "where have you been?", and have them show you their favourite spots occasionally, you should also do so with unsupervised internet activity. Unsupervised does not mean ignored, after all.
    • SoftTalker 10mo ago
      No, we've always had effective societal gatekeeping on what kids can access. Cigarettes, liquor, porn, R-rated movies, all had general barriers to access for kids in the pre-internet world. Parents could rely on most store clerks not selling alcohol, tobacco, or adult magazines to a child. Parents did not have to hover over everything their child did. Was it perfect, of course not, but it worked fairly well and didn't require constant monitoring. You could let your kids go to the mall and be fairly sure that they would not be let in to an R-rated movie. They could ride their bikes to a convenience store and the worst thing they could buy was candy. With online accounts and apps, everything needs review and permission. Every. Single. Thing. That is the main complaint in TFA. He wants a single device level setting so that he doesn't have to constantly vet everything. This is precisely why many parents support age verification laws for social media and adult sites. Tech companies could have solved this on their terms but they just punted it to "parents" with an insane level of complexity, and the parents don't like it.
      • soperj 10mo ago
        and then they reset the settings regularly and you have to redo it.
      • eikenberry 10mo ago
        > No, we've always had effective societal gatekeeping on what kids can access. Isn't there still a very simple one, hardware access. If the child doesn't have a smart phone of their own or computer in their bedroom then they cannot use them to get online unsupervised. This is about as simple on/off as you can get and very easy to moderate.
        • Yossarrian22 10mo ago
          Until the school assigns online homework, homework that takes 3 hours a night
          • eikenberry 10mo ago
            I didn't say no computer/internet access. They could do their homework on a computer in a common room.
  • JeremyNT 10mo ago
    My daughter has always used a normal low end Android phone with the default parental controls. She only installs what I whitelist. It's really not that much effort. Honestly, maybe the Gabb Phone marketing is lulling users into a false sense of security. If you still have to do the same legwork as the default Android experience, what's the point of their devices?
    • stackskipton 10mo ago
      It is, they denied WhatsApp and Discord in their app stores for good reason but allowed GroupMe? That's a choice and not what I would call a good one.
• 123sereusername 10mo ago
  [dead]
• vorpalhex 10mo ago
  The issue is that the kid wants to play a game with his friends. So that is "online" in the sense that it uses the internet.. but it isn't the same as a web browser, or an open store of every online app. I run game servers for my nephew. I know he only adds his friends and I can keep a loose eye on them. I don't care if his friends talk about boobs or make penis jokes (they're 14), I only care that there aren't any predators. This is a clear and meaningful distinction and it doesn't sound supported.
  • Ukv 10mo ago
    > The issue is that the kid wants to play a game with his friends [...] This is a clear and meaningful distinction and it doesn't sound supported. Clear how it could restrict to friends-only when connecting directly to another Nintendo Switch user, but a bit murky how it'd make that determination in cases like Minecraft where the client is connecting to a cross-platform user-hosted game server that is not associated with any Nintendo/Microsoft account. Could work if you have the parents manually whitelist specific server IPs, as they could with router/firewall, though not sure if "could you whitelist 209.216.230.207 please?" would present a meaningful choice in most cases.
    • andrewaylett 10mo ago
      Specifically for Minecraft, Realms works for this: I subscribe, I allow my children and friends to access our instance via gamer tag. Users on the same network can access each others' worlds, at least between XBox and Android, so multi-device in the same building works too.
    • awakeasleep 10mo ago
      Console minecraft does not allow connecting to self hosted 3rd party servers
  • beasthacker 10mo ago
    Yes, this is exactly the distinction I was struggling to articulate. “Online” has collapsed into a single bucket that includes friends-only play, strangers, stores, chat, downloads, etc. What I want (and what you’re describing with running servers) is a way to scope online access: friends-only communication, no discovery, no stores, no strangers. The frustrating part is that many platforms either (a) force these things to come as a bundle, so saying “yes” to playing with friends implicitly says “yes” to a much larger surface area; or (b) make the unbundling process so complex that well-meaning parents fail and exhausted parents give up. jonathaneunice put the incentives behind this more sharply than I did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465547
• floundy 10mo ago
  I’m assuming the author was thinking Minecraft with the kid’s friends would be Peer2Peer or something. I doubt Switch has the power to host a Minecraft server, but I might be wrong. See Smash, which is entirely Peer2Peer for the main gameplay, but requires a Switch Online membership to play for… what exactly? Hosting a database of player ratings and using it for matchmaking? There’s probably one server rack on each continent running the entirety of Smash online.
• xg15 10mo ago
  Not a child, but I have a Switch myself and I held off for a long time getting a membership. Of course you can do it, but the Switch will put up lots of passive aggressive roadblocks where it will let you know that you could use this additional feature in the game now if you just had a membership. There are also unreasonable restrictions, like not being able to play user-created maps in Mario Maker unless you have a membership.
• natnatenathan 10mo ago
  Part of the point is that you cannot use it without it being online. This is a big difference between the Switch and Switch 2.
  • exitb 10mo ago
    In what sense? I have a Switch 2 without NSO and it does not allow online play. It also, in the default configuration, needs to authenticate before even entering the online shop. In that scope, it doesn’t even need to have any parental controls.
• PaulHoule 10mo ago
  Generally I worry about online gaming. I played a lot of Titanfall back in the day and had a lot of reservations about talking with other people's kids. Nothing really bad happened, and I had a lot of fun, but it was creepy. I kinda enjoy that the matchmaker rooms in Beat Saber only allow you to emote with large body gestures and not say anything or even make hand gestures. I enjoy acting like a cartoon character to honor and recognize the other players (like choosing the song that I really hate because another player has asked for it five times in a row) and not getting involved in the mean bullshit you get in games like League of Legends. (It's fun to be in a private room with 2 or more players too where you can chat but then you are talking with people you picked which in my case are nice people) My son and his friend created a new game called "the kick game" inside a certain online game where the real game was to trick the other players into kicking out other players that they didn't like or wanted to bully -- frequently the victims didn't understand the rules of this game at all. On Roblox they would find racist games where you cut down thousands of Zulu, just awful stuff. Not to say I haven't had a good time with serious League players who communicate on Discord and have a positive team but I think communication features and UGC are often a disaster in games.
• iamnothere 10mo ago
  Yes, this parent seems to assume that all parents want the same restrictions. The reason that managing this stuff is complicated is that you actually have to think about what restrictions you want (if any), understand the implications, and then set options to achieve those restrictions. A surprising number of people aren’t willing to do that! They would rather tell companies “parent my children correctly” and then sue as soon as the company’s vision of “safety” doesn’t line up with their own. In a country where you have parents with wildly different ideas about what constitutes “safety”, I have no idea why anyone thinks it is possible to set a single standard for this.
• VladVladikoff 10mo ago
  I appreciated it for the tone and rage. I’m not so concerned with the actual technology being discussed here, but rather the overwhelming exhaustion that we are all subjected to in managing our household devices. Not just parental controls, but privacy and ad blocking, or self hosting, etc. it all takes so much work and effort that we rarely have the time for i. Our already exhausting lives. I feel the rant perfectly captured that feeling. It was a worthy post.