Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online

That's because we're hackers and we're too cool to be bothered with pesky politics. /s

On a more serious note: HN tries hard to stay in its lane, but there are quite a few people on here that are engaging in political activism, but that every now and then make a (sometimes even useful) tech comment to avoid the activism ban hammer.

Personally I don't really see the difference between 'curious conversation' vs 'click bait' and 'rage bait'. Examples abound, but the balance as it is struck right now picks a reasonable median between 400 hour work weeks for the people involved and some kind of manageable work/life balance. It works, but barely and it is still worth reading but I find myself getting more and more cynical reading HN. Oh, and of course we really don't do humor.

And some people here really do care about both privacy and freedom, and some people are not absolutists but rather see that there are reasonable limits to both of these. Another thing to remember is that HN is global, you're going to find a predominantly English speaking audience here but so many people around the world manage to express themselves reasonably well in English that you will find all kinds of cultures represented here, including ones that have entirely different ideas on subjects such as freedom and privacy. And then there are the tech bros who want freedom and privacy for themselves and less of both of those for the rest of us.

And we could call this way… zero-knowledge proof! :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof

I bet we could even get a major phone OS vendor to support such a thing…

https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-id...

There was a NYT article a couple weeks ago about Chinese morality police doing mass arrests of erotica authors,

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/world/asia/china-boys-lov... ("Chinese Police Detain Dozens of Writers Over Gay Erotic Online Novels") [note article contains large images of erotica novel covers]

But you'd *expect* that of the PRC; the US, wow, has it ever fallen fast and fallen hard.

So, while I agree that this feels foreign and wrong to me as someone who has experienced "The Internet" for so long, I can't help but wonder if we can separate that from how the offline world works.

I'm asking this in good faith.

Given that:

1. The Internet is not an optional subscription service today the way it was in 1995. Every kid and adult has 1,000 opportunities to get online including on the multiple devices every one of their peers owns, which a single set of parents has no control over. So "Just keep them off the Internet/control their devices" seems like a silly "Just" instruction.

2. The Internet is nearly infinite. The author of this editorial says "then install a content blocker on your kids’ devices and add my site to it". This is a silly argument since the whole point is that no one has ever heard of him/her and it's obviously impossible for a filter (let's just assume filters can't be bypassed) can "just" enumerate every inappropriate site even if it employed a full-time staff who did nothing but add new sites to the list all day long.

So given all of that, how do we justify how the Internet must operate on different rules than the offline world does? One can't open a "Free adult library" downtown and allow any child to wander in and check out books showing super explicit porn. I'd have to check IDs and do my best to keep kids out. It also seems like it would be gross to do so. If you agree with that, why should the Internet operate on different rules?

I'd also like to separate the logistics from the morality here. If you believe it's hard to do it without satisfying privacy concerns, totally true! But then the focus should be on finding a good privacy-respecting solution, not just arguing for the status quo.

What sites/communities keep up with things like this more actively? I’d love to read them too. Drop a link!