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I might be being overly cynical here, but I think part of the problem is parents expect to give their kids the internet so they don't have to spend so much time

by 1dom 2mo ago

I might be being overly cynical here, but I think part of the problem is parents expect to give their kids the internet so they don't have to spend so much time/attention with them. I think this means any solution which involves active parent participation is going to get shunned by a vocal subset. I'm in my mid 30's. When I was very young I remember my Dad semi-regularly having to email or even fax off permission slips to websites aimed at kids before they would create an account for me.

forshaper 2mo ago
It's what I see happening. None of this would be a big deal if parents were present, but we give our attention to work & entertainment, and find it easier to continue doing that if the kids are also being entertained instead of playing, which caused problems in the physical world.
thewebguyd 2mo ago
> any solution which involves active parent participation is going to get shunned by a vocal subset Then we certainly shouldn't be passing laws mandating age verification. If parents want to abdicate their responsibility over their children, it's not the role of government to enshrine that abdication into law and take over the duty of parenting from them. If regulation is to be had, then it should take the form of mandating websites and services provide privacy preserving tools for parents to use, if they want to use them. If they don't, that's on them. Everyone else needn't suffer because a subset of the population has chosen to offload their responsibility into the government and web services.
DSMan195276 2mo ago
> I might be being overly cynical here, but I think part of the problem is parents expect to give their kids the internet so they don't have to spend so much time/attention with them. > I think this means any solution which involves active parent participation is going to get shunned by a vocal subset. I don't think that's a fair assessment personally, rather you've missed a key detail that things are significantly more complicated than they used to be, it's not just an 'effort' issue. There is no universal "user is age X" setting that applies to everything everywhere, rather everything has a different system and pretty much all of them are terrible in various different ways. I'm very tech savvy and I still struggled just to set up a Microsoft/XBox account for my daughter so that we could play some computer games together. Access to all the different age rating settings is spread across something like three different apps and websites and in my experience they don't even all work consistently. That experience is also not dissimilar from the experience with other types of accounts. For people I know who are less tech savvy it honestly doesn't matter how much time they put into it, eventually they give up and turn off age ratings because something isn't work and even if there's a solution it would take them hours to figure out. Point being, if the existing tools were much better I don't think we would be having this kind of conversation.
- antonvs 2mo ago
  Everything you describe is an argument for not trying to bake age verification in at a lower level - because all of those issues will become everyone’s problem, whether or not they’re parents, except they won’t be able to “turn off age ratings” any more, instead people will be fighting with systems that don’t recognize their ID document upload or whatever. That, in the end, will hopefully kill these idiotic attempts at dystopia enhancement, because when people discover that “think of the children” makes their day to day life more difficult, it’ll lose support.
- 1dom 2mo ago
  I don't mean to be confrontational, but the key detail you thought I missed, about it being complicated, was a fairly crucial part of my point that you've overlooked: My parents when I was young ended up having to figure out how to use digital cameras, scanners, printers, fax machines and then print, sign and sometimes even post off a letter for me to access one website which I wanted, which could take hours of their time in a process that took literally weeks. This was in the early 2000s, when scanners and digital cameras weren't exactly user friendly. They had to do this sometimes multiple times a month. Every website was different, there was no universal permission slip. But they did it. Eventually, they too got bored and gave up, or maybe I just grew out of it. Point being, the tools have always existed, and always felt inappropriate or convoluted, but my parents at least were happy to do it for their kids 20+ years ago. From what you're telling me, they're now a lot faster and easier to access and use. Even if the tools were made to take only a few minutes to setup, there would still be a vocal set of parents unintentionally arguing that everyone should suffer with overbearing ID tools so they can spend less time supervising their kids internet usage.
  - DSMan195276 2mo ago
    > Point being, the tools have always existed, and always felt inappropriate or convoluted, but my parents at least were happy to do it for their kids 20+ years ago. From what you're telling me, they're now a lot faster and easier to access and use. No they're not, the systems that exist today often don't even work and there's no alternative of "just mail a letter to Microsoft and they'll sort it out for you". "Faster" is also a frankly a silly point - it's not like your parents were waiting at the mailbox until the letter came in the mail, the important question is the amount of time actively spent dealing with these things.

by 1dom 2mo ago

forshaper 2mo ago

It's what I see happening. None of this would be a big deal if parents were present, but we give our attention to work & entertainment, and find it easier to continue doing that if the kids are also being entertained instead of playing, which caused problems in the physical world.

thewebguyd 2mo ago

> any solution which involves active parent participation is going to get shunned by a vocal subset Then we certainly shouldn't be passing laws mandating age verification. If parents want to abdicate their responsibility over their children, it's not the role of government to enshrine that abdication into law and take over the duty of parenting from them. If regulation is to be had, then it should take the form of mandating websites and services provide privacy preserving tools for parents to use, if they want to use them. If they don't, that's on them. Everyone else needn't suffer because a subset of the population has chosen to offload their responsibility into the government and web services.

DSMan195276 2mo ago

> I might be being overly cynical here, but I think part of the problem is parents expect to give their kids the internet so they don't have to spend so much time/attention with them. > I think this means any solution which involves active parent participation is going to get shunned by a vocal subset. I don't think that's a fair assessment personally, rather you've missed a key detail that things are significantly more complicated than they used to be, it's not just an 'effort' issue. There is no universal "user is age X" setting that applies to everything everywhere, rather everything has a different system and pretty much all of them are terrible in various different ways. I'm very tech savvy and I still struggled just to set up a Microsoft/XBox account for my daughter so that we could play some computer games together. Access to all the different age rating settings is spread across something like three different apps and websites and in my experience they don't even all work consistently. That experience is also not dissimilar from the experience with other types of accounts. For people I know who are less tech savvy it honestly doesn't matter how much time they put into it, eventually they give up and turn off age ratings because something isn't work and even if there's a solution it would take them hours to figure out. Point being, if the existing tools were much better I don't think we would be having this kind of conversation.

antonvs 2mo ago
Everything you describe is an argument for not trying to bake age verification in at a lower level - because all of those issues will become everyone’s problem, whether or not they’re parents, except they won’t be able to “turn off age ratings” any more, instead people will be fighting with systems that don’t recognize their ID document upload or whatever. That, in the end, will hopefully kill these idiotic attempts at dystopia enhancement, because when people discover that “think of the children” makes their day to day life more difficult, it’ll lose support.
1dom 2mo ago
I don't mean to be confrontational, but the key detail you thought I missed, about it being complicated, was a fairly crucial part of my point that you've overlooked: My parents when I was young ended up having to figure out how to use digital cameras, scanners, printers, fax machines and then print, sign and sometimes even post off a letter for me to access one website which I wanted, which could take hours of their time in a process that took literally weeks. This was in the early 2000s, when scanners and digital cameras weren't exactly user friendly. They had to do this sometimes multiple times a month. Every website was different, there was no universal permission slip. But they did it. Eventually, they too got bored and gave up, or maybe I just grew out of it. Point being, the tools have always existed, and always felt inappropriate or convoluted, but my parents at least were happy to do it for their kids 20+ years ago. From what you're telling me, they're now a lot faster and easier to access and use. Even if the tools were made to take only a few minutes to setup, there would still be a vocal set of parents unintentionally arguing that everyone should suffer with overbearing ID tools so they can spend less time supervising their kids internet usage.
- DSMan195276 2mo ago
  > Point being, the tools have always existed, and always felt inappropriate or convoluted, but my parents at least were happy to do it for their kids 20+ years ago. From what you're telling me, they're now a lot faster and easier to access and use. No they're not, the systems that exist today often don't even work and there's no alternative of "just mail a letter to Microsoft and they'll sort it out for you". "Faster" is also a frankly a silly point - it's not like your parents were waiting at the mailbox until the letter came in the mail, the important question is the amount of time actively spent dealing with these things.