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I was a kid with unrestricted, unsupervised internet access, and it definitely affected many things in my life. If I happen to have a child in the future, they

• deadbabe 7mo ago
  What did it affect in your life? Ultimately something with affect a kid’s life.
  • hei-lima 7mo ago
    I mean... access to adult content at that age is really, really bad. It really messed up my brain. Gore videos, chatting with adults, etc. But I learned many good things, too. It's a double-edged sword.
    • ivanjermakov 7mo ago
      I don't see how this "child protection" enforcement would help in case of small obscure websites with porn and gore? No way their admins gonna comply. I doubt ISPs would go that far to DNS whitelist compliant websites only.
      • hei-lima 7mo ago
        I never said this would help... in fact, I’m against this kind of measure, at least the way it’s being done. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Brazilian ISPs are forced to block this sort of thing (just look at what happened with Twitter (X) the year before last).
      • gzread 7mo ago
        Does the admin of the small website hypothetically agree that they don't want to show gore to children?
        • Aurornis 7mo ago
          The admins of sites like that DGAF about anything or anyone. They enjoy the chaos and shock. If you expect admins of edgelord websites to respect the laws of different countries or even care about kids, I suggest checking out 4Chan’s response to various attempts to regulate them.
    • grvdrm 7mo ago
      Messed up how?
    • udhottuhao 7mo ago
      As a kid, I know that it is pretty easy to avoid those websites(because I do).
      • hei-lima 7mo ago
        Congrats. Keep it that way.
    • amatecha 7mo ago
      For me, it didn't mess up my brain at all, it showed me a much broader range of what humanity really is, which is exactly what I wanted to understand at that time. I understood the depravity humans will exact upon others, or those they see as lesser (such as the treatment of animals, or prisoners, "the enemy" whoever/whatever that may be). I also saw unfiltered sharing of valuable knowledge, science, tech stuff, software, games, music, culture... The uncensored internet taught me more than I could ever have been taught in school, and I'll be forever grateful for that. It didn't take me long to understand that I could generally hate no ethnicity or people or country, and the people who do are manipulated by their government or other powerful figures in their life (or disproportionately swayed by experiences in their life). Humans are pretty much all the same, we all have far far more in common than we do differences. I have a stronger perspective of this than my immediate ancestors (demonstrated over and over throughout my life) and I do credit my exposure to the open internet for a huge amount of that. There is one huge and problematic difference now, though: the uncensored internet of the 90's is nothing like the disinformation-saturated internet of today.
    • sneak 7mo ago
      What did it do to mess up your brain? What were the lasting negative effects?
    • SarahC_ 7mo ago
      Seeing people squish at a young age - and I am not being flippant here - helped reduce my teen "I'm immortal! I'm unstoppable!" phase. I saw very quickly that what separates a live person from a very deceased flat person was a moment of sillyness/forgetfullness/stupidity. "I didn't SUSPECT that is even possible to happen to a person!" - "We're....fragile?!" - "Ah, bike helmet... I think they're REALLY GOOD idea...." PSA's just aren't listened to by teenagers. But something that's real - that happened, with the security camera timestamp in the corner... kids learn safety.
      • Nursie 7mo ago
        > helped reduce my teen "I'm immortal! I'm unstoppable!" phase. I mean, is that good? Isn’t another way of looking at that to say that it poisoned an innocent time and left you aware and afraid of death when you might otherwise have been enjoying the end of your childhood without that burden? In general parents might want their kids to be a little more mindful, but not grow up too soon.
        • imtringued 7mo ago
          Not to mention that this could create perpetually morbidly afraid individuals. Yeah now they know they might die, but they also know they will die. Cool. What now? You might have a kid thinking that they are going to die tomorrow, for the next 70 years.
• poly2it 7mo ago
  I guess the opposite case might not be as interesting to many, but I achieved basically unfiltered internet access as a child, and it has been immensely helpful for me as a person. Everything I am today -- a programmer, technically literate, a founder of a startup with momentum, I am because I had freedom and autonomy as a child (which was not granted to me, rather achieved by me). Many of the people of my age who grew up with strict controls and supervisory parents seem kind of lost and uninformed to me, now that they are turning into adults. I feel this narrative is surprisingly rarely heard on HN, but I cannot be the only one?
  • cedws 7mo ago
    I think the same for me, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be in my career if I had been restricted to an hour a day on a filtered iPad. But I also think the internet has more potential for harm now. Widespread social media makes it easy for predators. YouTube actively incentivises content creators to produce brain numbing shit instead of the more amateur and educational content I was exposed to. Instagram creates vicious dopamine hooks that children have no mental defense against. Also sorry to sound egotistical but I think I was an outlier that drifted into doing educational things, many or most kids will spend every moment they get just playing video games. That being said, I’m in favour of parents doing the parenting, not the government.
    • gabriela_c 7mo ago
      > Also sorry to sound egotistical but I think I was an outlier that drifted into doing educational things, many or most kids will spend every moment they get just playing video games. I am in the same predicament as both of you, having grown up with unfiltered internet access, and not wanting it to have went any other way (I love my life, actually!) There is a condescending tendency when people hear what I said above, to tell me that I am an outlier, or, God forbid, a "genius", and other equally worrying conclusions regarding my character. I agree that, today, there are millions more ways that children can fall for objectively negative things, that have been completely, and intentfully engineered to be terrible in a way which can be exploited for profit. But also, I simply think that, with enough access to mind-numbing content, for long enough... people will simply realize that, actually, they don't want that. At least, not just that. Adults are not a good term for comparision in the matter of less aggressive addictions, like with social media, because they already have lives they want to escape, with responsibilities and whatnot. These are not scientifically sourced claims, but, in my experience, children have a lot more time, energy, curiosity, and will/intent to create, for one reason or another, and they have been doing those things since time immemorial. This is just a consequence of having access to ~the entirety of all human knowledge at their fingertips, with no restrictions, and with an incredible amount of free time at their disposal.
• matheusmoreira 7mo ago
  [dead]
• verisimi 7mo ago
  > I was a kid with unrestricted, unsupervised internet access, and it definitely affected many things in my life. If I happen to have a child in the future, they won't go through that. I've heard this a few times, but what was so bad? And, sorry to break it you, reality has some bad bits to it - do you think being ignorant of these is useful, or that it just sets you up for a bigger fall? Why do you think removing independence (nannying) from another human being is the answer? Would you want to be nannied for ever, by corporations and governments?
  • 2duct 7mo ago
    To me the question is more who is going to nanny me, and ideally its myself (the mature option), but in my experience starting as a child and going into adulthood, mental health can break this down to where people can't nanny/take care of themselves. In that case, the question at hand is: who is going to protect you from yourself? The state? Your family? Your friends? Oftentimes the answer is "nobody". There's just nobody you can rely on to get the level of care you require. There are lots of arguments like Bowling Alone for how the breakdown of community has contributed to this separate issue. In my view, by constructing and supporting legislation like this, people are implicitly admitting that parents, teachers, schools, communities, and all the rest are failing at their job of keeping moderation local and raising the next generation. But the thing is, unfortunately this is a true statement in too many cases, including mine. My parents failed to parent me well enough, and my counselors were either instrumental in my own trauma or failed to address my issues soon enough, and as such I developed a sex addiction in adolescence fueled by persistent ongoing stress from my upbringing that I continue to seek treatment for to this day. Could content moderation laws have cured my parents' narcissism? Nope. Could they have prevented me from needing to act out to relieve the stress of my early relational trauma? Nope. Could they have helped match me with more competent therapists? Nope. Could they have caused me to go to rehab for alcohol abuse instead of porn? Maybe. For all his statements I disagree with, I subscribe to Gabor Mate's view that traumatized individuals are compelled to be addicted to something. At that point, there are a lot of things to become addicted to other than the ones you can content moderate, given the (false) assumption that it's possible moderate enough of it. Pornography was necessary but not sufficient for me to have it that bad coming out of childhood. Early exposure to it was only incidental. My upbringing was far more significant a cause in this. But unlike which websites I was allowed to visit as a child, a 100% chance of having emotionally involved parents isn't something you can legislate into existence. What I feel isn't being talked about enough in this discussion is that this implicit realization that the world just sucks sometimes leads to justification that someone else needs to step in to protect children's fragile minds if the formerly trusted institutions aren't. The big option left is the platforms and systems hosting the tech themselves so they're targeted instead. My opinion? If your parents aren't able to raise you to be free of significant trauma spawning "hungry ghosts" that you will need to turn to your unfettered internet access to feed, whether TikTok or LiveLeak or elsewhere, lest you are bombarded by stress every waking moment... then the situation was hopeless to begin with. You can't fix that problem with laws. You should have just had better parents, as awful as that sounds. And because of nothing more than bad luck, you're just going to have to unpack that problem with the healthcare system for years/decades, because there's not much else we know of that can meaningfully address childhood trauma that severe.
• sjducb 7mo ago
  Making parents control devices is too much. People do what’s “normal” right now normal is to give unrestricted access to kids when they’re 10 or 11. It takes incredible conviction and force of will to keep your kids off the phone till they’re 16. Fewer than 1% of parents manage it. The problem is that the teenager wants a thing that everyone else has and it’s hard to keep saying no. I think internet connected smartphones should be illegal for kids under 16 to own or use. It’s a tough sell tho.
• egorfine 7mo ago
  All my kids had and have unfiltered internet access. The oldest being 32 and the youngest being 12. All fine. The dangers of access to unfiltered information are certainly real but not worthy of constant worry.