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Online age verification is the hill to die on

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Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#721

Post by doright »

cooper_ganglia wrote: post #211

THe government shouldn't be raising anyone's children, that's what parents are for. If you're a bad parent, your kids will get access to bad things and could become an adult failure. The future of your family and your legacy is up to you, not the government. We don't need age verification to restrict the social darwinism of raising children.

I wish I could upvote this more. What's never discussed is what would motivate a kid to doomscroll the unsupervised internet, often it's unaddressed stress or trauma. From experience, a turbulent childhood can cause lifelong issues that require sustained motivation on the part of the adult child to undo.

If one or both of your parents shut down your emotions all throughout your childhood, you have will likely have far bigger issues than anything an identity check can solve.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#722

Post by trinsic2 »

slg wrote: post #715
trinsic2 wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How am I not engaging with the root of the problem? I just see it differently than you. And thats ok. I dont think the problem is solved by id verification. This is the position I have been arguing all along and Im not seeing how my position is getting in the way of what you are talking about.

>How am I not engaging with the root of the problem? The root of the problem is child safety on the internet. >I dont think the problem is solved by id verification. This is the position I have been arguing all along I have advocated for child safety, but nowhere in any of these comments have I advocated for id verification. If you have been "arguing all along" against id verification, then you must be equating all c…

Ok I'm glad you found a satisfactory answer for yourself.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#723

Post by k33n »

domador wrote: post #568
k33n wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you wouldn’t make a political statement in a town hall setting where you’re going to show ID, then you probably shouldn’t say it on the internet. But keep in mind that these laws don’t result in your identity being public. They will ultimately result in the sites you’re posting on know that you’re an enumerated individual. The ultimate benefit as I see it is removing outsized leverage over public opinion by bottin…

As with many detractors of anonymity, it seems that you're assuming that the authorities and neighbors you'll deal with will always be virtuous, and not corrupt nor vindictive toward opponents. Maybe you'd like to expose the town's government's corruption or mismanagement at the town hall, but the town is run by a family with a lot of influence and power over everything that happens within the town. You live in the t…

I think you’re living in 2010, man. Public discourse in the digital town square is completely destroyed in 2026.

I attribute it mostly to bots, whether from corporate, state, or NGO activity. It’s almost impossible to tell what the organic consensus is on anything. Lies spread faster than ever, and it’s confusing the public enough that this is a very real crisis.

It’s nice that you suspect that botnets could be handled in some other hypothetical way. But in a technical sense, there’s not really a way to do that without enumerating real identity in some way.

There are a dozen ways to handle your “corrupt town” scenario without anonymity that are concrete and not at all hypothetical.

It’s plenty easy to silence you when you’re anonymous and speaking out. Just look at what Twitter and Facebook did. And look at what Reddit does every single day.

Anonymity will always exist in corners of the internet. But it does not belong in the mainstream, easily accessible parts that most people use.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#724

Post by k33n »

tardedmeme wrote: post #586
k33n wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want that. I'm tired of bots being half the internet traffic or more. It's driving the general public insane and anonymity on the internet has zero utility. If journalists need to send sensitive information, they'll always be able to use Tor.

I want to read your comment. But first, so I know I'm not dealing with a bot, what is your full name and address? Please upload a photo of your ID as well. Thanks.

That’s not how these laws work. Identity isn’t going to be provided to random users of a social media site.

But I’m not even anonymous here. My name is Mike Keen, and my address isn’t hard to find.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#725

Post by slg »

trinsic2 wrote: post #722
slg wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How am I not engaging with the root of the problem? The root of the problem is child safety on the internet. >I dont think the problem is solved by id verification. This is the position I have been arguing all along I have advocated for child safety, but nowhere in any of these comments have I advocated for id verification. If you have been "arguing all along" against id verification, then you must be equating all c…

Ok I'm glad you found a satisfactory answer for yourself.

You asked me "How am I not engaging with...", I gave you a response, and then you refuse to engage with that response. I guess your behavior confirming my accusation is as satisfactory of an answer as I could expect from you.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#726

Post by btilly »

numpad0 wrote: post #354
btilly wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People were wrong. We pay money online mostly through credit cards. Credit card transactions can be reversed. If children spend money on porn, those payments are likely to be reversed. This is really bad for the ability of the porn sites to continue receiving credit card payments, and continue making money. An age header is a trivial step that can reduce the odds of the adult site receiving payments that later get re…

There was a random comment here on HN few days back that adult contents have lower chargeback rates than everything else. So ig stop spreading hallucinatory misinformations?

The odds of random porn purchases being reversed are very different than the odds of random porn purchases by 14 year olds getting reversed.

Source, I have a number of friends who worked on the web side of online porn a long time ago.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#727

Post by arduanika »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #237
arduanika wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not! > How would it read? Sounds like you don't really care for this idea, so maybe just have Claude write it for you.

On the contrary. Just curious what you had in mind.

What he had in mind. I have no clue what the suggestion was.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#728

Post by xp84 »

hirvi74 wrote: post #691
xp84 wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you might be a big believer in cultural relativism and that nothing can be right or wrong, so this may be unsuccessful, but many of us do believe that it’s harmful to the normal development of children to be exposed to certain types of content. It is mostly about maturity. A five-year-old who sees explicit sexual acts performed on a screen is going to be curious about it and be interested in trying it.…

I appreciate your well thought out response, and I apologize for the length of my response: As to whether I believe in cultural relativism depends on the level of abstraction we are discussing. I believe there is no way to logically prove that something is morally right or wrong in a similar manner to how a mathematical concept can be proven from pure logic alone. But this fact does not often influence my beliefs in…

> if a child is exposed to comedic content, will that child become funnier?

Yes, of course they will. But you do make a good point that 'playing CoD leading to kids wanting to shoot people with real guns' isn't proven, but most parents I know still do not want their kindergarteners playing realistic violent games. As a parent, we are mainly looking for the ability to choose to introduce more adult themes like violence only when we can tell that the child's maturity level is sufficient to understand the morality involved. Shooting Nazis in a video game is fun, but they should first understand why we can't shoot that asshole who makes fun of them at school, or that hardass math teacher, or their annoying little brother.

> Understanding consent is irrelevant. Children legally and morally (as determined by my culture) cannot consent to any sexual activity

We agree there, but set aside this legal definition to understand my point better. If two 12-year-olds fool around with each other, willingly, I'm not that shocked and I don't think it's likely going to cause any real harm in most cases. On the other hand, if a kid (whether 5 or 8 or 12 or 14) forces another child into an act, that's worse. And the less mature, the less likely they understand the severity of that act and its impact on the victim. An immature brain might think that forcing themselves on a cousin or something is no more severe of an offense than borrowing their pokemon cards without asking.

> If the harm of exposure of sexual material to youth is so damaging, then should parents not also be held to such civil and criminal punishments?

As far as I know, in my country, if a kid says at school "My daddy showed me this cool website called PornHub" that school is 100% calling 'Child Protective Services' and the parents will 100% be investigated on suspicion of grooming and abuse because like I said, it's illegal to show such materials to children in most or all states.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#729

Post by pocksuppet »

Nursie wrote: post #610
lynx97 wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. I submit we are solving the wrong problem. Just establishing age vertification doesn't magically make these vast amounts of bad parents good parents. There is a ton of other things they can and will fail at, which their kids have to absorb. If we really cared about those kids, we'd have to reconsider a lot of things. And I know what I am talking about, had to grow up with an undiagnosed ADHS+anciety mother. It…

No argument here, I'm not saying they're right to demand that age verification is brought in to protect kids, or that we should give up privacy etc etc. But coming at it from the angle that "It was never about protecting kids!" is itself incorrect and unhelpful to the debate.

It can be true that kids need to be protected, this (or some variation of it) is a good way to protect kids, therefore it's going to pass, and nefarious interests found a way to insert themselves into the process and piggyback off the efforts to increase real protection of real kids in order to also spy on the kids.

If you want to reject the nefarious actors you have to separate them from the other goals that are reasonable and sorely needed. If you treat it as a whole package, you'll fail because those other goals are too important not to try to achieve, and the package is going to get passed. If you separate them, we can advocate for the pretty sensible California-style law where it's a flag on your user account that root can change, instead of the utterly insane New-York-style law where you have to scan your face every time you open your phone.

Re: Online age verification is the hill to die on

#730

Post by bdangubic »

traderj0e wrote: post #699
bdangubic wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without overwhelming support like that. this is 1,000,000% not accurate. there are things that vast majority of people support that are never going to happen (e.g. universal background check for gun purchases) and there are things that ruling party easily gets through that are wildly unpopular.

I said it's hard to ban something without support, not that it's easy to ban with support. Not to mention, gun background checks are more controversial than you're making them out to be, in fact this is an example I would use. Even if more than 50% like the idea of a background check, not so many will trust the implementation, and not everyone will vote.

you should look this up, the percentage of support is closer to 100% than 50% (84-90%) - about as great of a support as it is humanly possible and yet………
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