281–290 of 580 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted. They'll have to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives. We all will. I guess I'm fine with not visiting any of these age-restricted sites. They're not the thing I would miss if the whole internet shut down. (In fact, there's precious little I would miss — maybe just archive.org?)
He said, on an online forum.
A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids. They love the idea of keeping people under 18 safe from the dangers of porn and mature games and other unclean things as well. Now governments around the world are acting in unison to happily give those people what they want, and people are suddenly confused and pissed that these laws mean you n…
Requiring photo IDs is not the only solution. Things don't have to be implemented that way. I can be both for privacy in this case and limits on social media. Australia already requires you to register for voting and other things, so the trivial solution here is: give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging. Essentially a signed timestamp + random number. > People who asked for social med…
There's zero difference. Either way, the government will have you monitoring your every single little comment online and having it forever tied to your person. And that'll have a chilling effect on individual liberties.
Completely banning all of YouTube feels like throwing out the baby—valuable educational content—with the bathwater—everything else. It seems more effective for YouTube to offer a dedicated educational platform, like education.youtube.com, with content filters built in. That way, students could access channels like 3blue1brown without exposure to unrelated or less appropriate content like MrBeast or Jubilee. Heck, I m…
As a parent (who also btw uses Google products every single effin day) I just can't agree. This is entirely Google's issue to fix. Yes, YouTube has amazing educational content. I'd really like to make it available for my kids to see. YouTube, however, makes it completely impossible to permanently filter/hide/disable the bane that is YouTube Shorts. I don't let my kids on TikTok not because it's Chinese, but because i…
This isn't a "real life" thing - it's not like there's a strip club with open windows next door to your house for your children to look into. We're talking about a computer/iPad/mobile phone - block YT at the DNS level or better yet, don't even give one to your kids. Problem solved.
Other people shouldn't have to be punished with breaches to their privacy because people can't manage their childs online time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People who asked for social media bans for kids got what they wanted. They'll have to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives. We all will. I guess I'm fine with not visiting any of these age-restricted sites. They're not the thing I would miss if the whole internet shut down. (In fact, there's precious little I would miss — maybe just archive.org?)
It's going to be every website. There will be no place they will stop. You think a forum like this one where it's conceivably possible someone in a bad category could interact with someone under the age of 16, however unlikely, won't be regulated? "But sir! The largest websites on the internet implement Government ID Age Check. Just federate with one of those, why are you complaining so much? Don't you want to protec…
I'm kind of a hard sell though because I think sometimes that life before there was an internet was preferable.
To be sure, like anyone, I can think of plenty of positives that the internet has brought. But as a net positive? I'm increasingly having my doubts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My gov id. I'm not saying that there's currently a registration online for voting, but that since you're required to register anyway, the system exists that can be extended to generating those tokens. And realistically, most people do have mygov id already.
> most people do have mygov id It was renamed myid, and less than half of all Australians use it. > no logging If you think that the AIC/NIC doesn't have its tentacles in there already, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Agreed, "myid" used to be called "mygovid".
But myid/mygovid is NOT mygov. I'm guessing the rename is likely because of that confusion.
mygov usage is high, 26 million accounts, according to [1] 2023 report.
Myid usage seems middling. 13 million according to [2] 2024 article.
Which platform to use for what and how I leave to you.
I don't want this. I don't want the government's aim for auditable provability of every item watched/interacted with in the name of "won't somebody think of the children!!!" level of authoritarianism.
There are plenty of households without kids. Why are they having to pay a privacy price?
[0] https://my.gov.au/en/about/help/digital-id
[1] https://my.gov.au/content/dam/mygov/documents/audit/response...
[2] https://www.ato.gov.au/media-centre/mygovid-being-renamed-my...
I don't really understand why Youtube won't let me create a profile, on my paid family account that I'm paying $29 NZD a month for, which lets me whitelist channels. I'm happy for my kids to have free access to certain channels on youtube, but the mind numbing shorts, and shit they find on random channels just does my head in. And it seems to be getting worse, I'm not sure if its that they are getting older and able…
It's pretty clear to me that Youtube shoving endless low quality content towards kids is their intended business model. It's what drives the most engagement. It's why they don't let you permanently disable YouTube Shorts. It's why they don't let you block channels easily any more. Or dislike videos. They're AB testing themselves into a low quality slop firehose. There's some truly great content on the platform, some…
A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids. They love the idea of keeping people under 18 safe from the dangers of porn and mature games and other unclean things as well. Now governments around the world are acting in unison to happily give those people what they want, and people are suddenly confused and pissed that these laws mean you n…
Requiring photo IDs is not the only solution. Things don't have to be implemented that way. I can be both for privacy in this case and limits on social media. Australia already requires you to register for voting and other things, so the trivial solution here is: give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging. Essentially a signed timestamp + random number. > People who asked for social med…
Awful idea.
This gives the government the power to deny you access to mass communication by deciding that you're no longer allowed to verify with these platforms.
"Been protesting the wrong things? Been talking about the wrong war crimes? Been advocating for the wrong LGBT policies? Failed to pay child support? Failed to pay back-taxes? Sorry you're no longer eligible for authenticating with social media services. You're too dangerous."
That is not beyond the pale for the Australian government.
You're also at the mercy of them to actually adhere to the "no logging" part, with absolutely no mechanism to verify that. And it can be changed at any time, in targeted ways, again with no way for you to know.
A better idea would be to sell anonymous age verification cards at adult stores, liquor stores, tobacco stores, etc. Paid in cash. An even better idea is to not do any of this and spend the money on a campaign to educate parents and institutions on how to use existing parental controls.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Requiring photo IDs is not the only solution. Things don't have to be implemented that way. I can be both for privacy in this case and limits on social media. Australia already requires you to register for voting and other things, so the trivial solution here is: give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging. Essentially a signed timestamp + random number. > People who asked for social med…
So instead of using a photo ID so that everything is logged, register your every interaction online with the government directly. The government which also has your photo ID on record. There's zero difference. Either way, the government will have you monitoring your every single little comment online and having it forever tied to your person. And that'll have a chilling effect on individual liberties.
Not just register, but ask permission for and give the government a veto on.
A couple months ago, I saw people everywhere online (including HN) saying they love the idea of social media bans for kids. They love the idea of keeping people under 18 safe from the dangers of porn and mature games and other unclean things as well. Now governments around the world are acting in unison to happily give those people what they want, and people are suddenly confused and pissed that these laws mean you n…
When I mentioned that any attempt at identifying users to access or write content is a trojan horse for a wide surveillance yet HN users downvoted and flagged such comments and were zealously supportive of "prottecct kidz" In the late 90s and early 2000s we as teenagers had access to unfiltered internet and unregulated. The harm to us were largely moral fanaticism, this was when they also tried to ban video games bec…
The internet was somewhat social in the 90's and early 2000's.
The institutions largely being affected here did not exist then.
I don't really understand why Youtube won't let me create a profile, on my paid family account that I'm paying $29 NZD a month for, which lets me whitelist channels. I'm happy for my kids to have free access to certain channels on youtube, but the mind numbing shorts, and shit they find on random channels just does my head in. And it seems to be getting worse, I'm not sure if its that they are getting older and able…
> I don't really understand why Youtube won't let me create a profile, on my paid family account that I'm paying $29 NZD a month for, which lets me whitelist channels The answer is to this question is always: it is too niche a product feature for a giant corporation to prioritize. This product would require constant work to keep in sync as UIs and features change. It would be one more feature to regression test again…
Having been at a company that tried this: The number of poorly-behaved or outright abusive clients is a huge problem. Having a client become popular with a small group of people and then receive some update that turned it into a DDoS machine because someone made a mistake in a loop or forgot to sleep after an error was a frequent occurrence.
The secondary problem is that when it breaks, the customers blame the company providing the service, not the team providing the client. The volume of support requests due to third party clients became unbearable.
These days there’s also a problem of scraping and botting. The more open the API, the more abuse you get. You can’t have security through obscurity be your only protection, but having a closed API makes a huge difference even though the bad actors can technically constantly reverse engineer it if they really want. In practice, they get tired and can’t keep up.
I doubt this will be a popular anecdote on HN, but after walking the walk I understand why this idealistic concept is much harder in reality.