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.
The Brazilian government passed a law requiring age verification for every site categorized as 16+. It can't be self-declared, so companies usually resort to facial scans and ID verification. I DO NOT want photos of our Brazilian children going to foreign agents who are PROVEN to profit from and do God-knows-what with our biometric data. And the funniest part? The same law says 'regulation shall not, under any circumstances, authorize or result in the implementation of mass surveillance mechanisms,' but also mandates that these measures must be 'AUDITABLE.' In other words, someone needs access to that data. It’s all so stupid and incoherent.
People who are less tech-literate FIERCELY support the measure, and whenever someone opposes it, they claim that person supports digital child abuse...
Anyway... the responsibility of protection should come from the parents, not from companies that profit off your biometric data.
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?
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.
> 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.
I think the HN crowd is full of outliers. You folks are unrestricted internet success stories. Congrats! For every one of you there has to be 100 or 1000 gaming and social media addicts.
That being said, I’m in favour of parents doing the parenting, not the government.
This aspect of parenting is really hard. If your kid is 10 years old and all their classmates have Roblox, saying 'no' to your kid does isolate them socially, because all the other kids are talking about what they did in Roblox at school and play Roblox together after school. To make it worse, some primary schools even allow kids to play Roblox at school during breaks or the teachers make TikTok videos, making kids want to have Tik Tok as well (TikTok-teachers are a real phenomenon), etc. So, even when you are trying, it gets undermined by others. Trying to fight it is kind of pointless, because most other parents don't see the issue.
Same for e.g. instant messaging, it is basically Sophie's choice: you allow them into these addiction machines or you isolate them socially. It would be much easier if social media and certain types of addictive games were just not allowed under 16. Just like we don't sell cigarettes or alcohol to kids.
I also completely agree with the counterpoint that age verification on the internet is generally bad.
Luckily, some things can be done without grave privacy violations. E.g. where high schools 10-15 years ago would gloat about being iPad or laptop schools, more and more are completely banning smart phones and laptops during school time.
At any rate, it's perfectly possible to hold both views at the same time: social media and addictive games should be forbidden under 16 and the age verification initiatives are terrible for privacy.
Maybe we should just ban Facebook, TikTok, etc. no more addiction, no more age verification needed :).
Yeah you have a good point. I don't have kids so I didn't really think about this social pressure aspect.
I think if a perfect system existed that could gate websites behind age verification, without any privacy compromise and assure the user of this, I would support it. There are zero-knowledge proofs of course, but they're a black box, and the user still has to trust that the system has been implemented correctly. Unless mandated by law, companies have no incentive to build a perfectly private age verification system.
As someone who grew up without TV, I would say that it's fine to be a little bit isolated socially. You learn to develop real social skills and the time wasted playing Roblox can be better invested anyway.
I also had the same experience (not just with Internet - I had unfiltered access to basically any and all reading materials), and I felt that on the whole it was a massively positive experience for me. I feel really sad for all the children today who mostly grow up in much more closely controlled environments. I understand why parents do that, but I'm also not at all convinced that most parents actually know what is good for their kids - just believe that they do.
I am happy that I grew up in simpler times. I have to thank Linux Developer Resource CD-ROM sets, FreeBSD CD-ROM sets, etc. to make me a Unix fan, a programmer and technically literate. We lived in a small rural town in the north of The Netherlands, and the only way to access the internet was by using 25ct per minute dail-up, to which my parents said "no".
So instead every time I got a new Linux or FreeBSD CD-ROM set, I would go through all the documentation and try everything out, and read source code. I got Pascal and C books through the local library, where you had to order the book and usually wait two or three weeks.
But I also didn't have the omnipresent cameras (you could still do dumb stuff as a kid and not get filmed/photographed). No pressure to show a fake version of yourself on social media. No pressure to be always available through instant messaging.
I feel like it was the best time to be a kid. Access to information was relatively easy (albeit slower than on the internet), but without all the terrible downsides for kids. Without all the dopamine shots and highly addictive social media and games. Without the all-ways present tracking of your every move.
Though even the kids slightly after me probably still had a good time. Early 2000s, Internet access became more ubiquitous, but it still took almost 10 years for the worst of addictive websites, etc. to rise. I sure miss the early web.
I don't know which age you are but as a millenial, the internet we had during our teens was really different than what we have today. There was no real social network, no (or little) addictive patterns, conversations happened on Skype or MSN and on php forums. Even newer platforms like Reddit were very different than what they are now.
Unfortunately, internet evolved to become much more predatory and addictive, with platforms like Meta running world-scale ops that they know lead to addiction, depression, scam and sexual harassment.
I honestly would like to give my children the same experience of the internet as the one I had. Unfortunately I fear that it may not be possible anymore. That's not to say that we should run a surveillance experiment with everyone connected to the web.
I'm roughly the same as you in terms of information access, though whether I was a child is debatable; was 14 when I got my first dialup connection. My family wasn't tech-adjacent so it was me who pushed for it; the only control in place was the amount of time I'd spend there.
The only control I have in place on my son in terms of content is whether something is scary or if he won't be able to understand most of it, because arguably he's still too young for many things.
But once he's 12 I don't think I want to restrict most things in terms of content, and by 16 I personally don't care if he watches hardcore midget porn, as long as I have the chance to contextualise and explain the industry.
But.
What I'd rather control (or ban, even) is rather all ML-driven doomscrolling platforms and the "social media" that turned people no longer social. The Internet you and I grew up in no longer exists (or it's a small hidden fraction of it), and now it's a wasteland of engagement traps and corporate revenue directed dark patterns.
You and I learnt to separate wheat from chaff, research, deep dive, and what not. Internet is now, by and large, instant gratification loops and user tracking. I don't want my son (or myself, actually) pulled into that. Porn is literally healthier: you bust a nut and go on with your day, but I see some people wasting hours on end, reel-after-reel, with increasingly targeted ads shoved to their face. Hard pass on that.
Age control, if any, should lie in the hands of the parent/guardian. Make it by law a setting on the routers (new devices are <18 until admin approves them), or the ISPs for mobiles. I'm okay with that. Absolutely not on random third parties handling personal information filling the gap for every random website.
All of that leaving aside the fact that zero knowledge proofs solve this problem without sharing any sensitive information.
But of course, the corporations benefiting from this are not interested in pushing those, IMO reasonable, age controls.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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?
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.
However, I don't think the medical establishment will necessarily help. Or looking outside generally - this will probably only compound or defer the problem. You will have to deal with it yourself in the end. I believe everyone already has all they need in themselves to do this.
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.
Great. I started developing in the Docker era, and while I can see some flaws, it is one of the easiest, most reliable tools I constantly use. I can't imagine how people dealt with those problems before Docker
In countries where SMS isn't as widespread as it is in the US, the use of WhatsApp is much more common.
I live in one of those countries, and I don't think I've ever had to use it to communicate with someone on another continent. I think most of its use is simply local, for your community or friend group.
The downside for me is basically the lack of appeal for a non-tech user (like my parents) to voluntarily want to stop using an app they've been using for, what, 10-12 years? It’s not that big of a deal; everyone uses Instagram or Facebook (maybe)... WhatsApp is definitely going to make the process difficult, too.
Whatsapp is more popular in the US than you'd think. Probably due to a large immigrant population. I'm in several groups that use the channels feature to organize things like soccer, game nights etc. Most people with family abroad use Whatsapp, and that's a huge portion of the US.
I belong to two Toastmasters groups. One is majority non-immigrant American/caucasian, one is majority immigrant (from India, Pakistan, etc). The first one does club communication primarily via email. The second does club communication exclusively thru WhatsApp.
It's an interesting divide.
I do have some Caucasian friends who use WhatsApp. One stopped using it when FB purchased it, which I can respect. Most people I know in the states though just use iMessage or signal.
Here in EU even the 5 €/month phone plans have unlimited SMS. As soon as you want to talk to someone without Whatsapp, you need to figure out which other apps they're on. Completely useless compared to SMS
Have you considered that the EU isn't one country?
It is not unusual for there to be hosting or intermediate storage of images and other files, and from the phone you may tap a link or something to download/access that file, instead of having it automatically download and appear immediately, due to bandwidth and resource constraints.
In France, I'm "charged" for MMS, too. But that's actually considered "data", so it's deducted from the "internet" envelope which is quite generous (at least for my needs: I have multiple dozens of GB for under 10 € a month, of which I only ever went above 10 when backing up photos during a vacation with no wifi).
Yes, but there are also plenty of countries where mobile data or even smartphones aren't nearly as universal as they might be in the places where most people use whatsapp. There, people use mostly SMS and phone calls. Whatsapp and the like are the thing you use when SMS/calls would be too expensive, so international.
Both of these exist, as do middle grounds between them.
I'm in only one WhatsApp group with someone local, everyone else in my chats is from abroad. Yet I'm from a country with dirt cheap data and nearly universal smartphone ownership. People just don't use WA here for whatever reason. But drive an hour across the border and suddenly everyone is on WhatsApp.
depends where; in France you can get unlimited SMS/MMS/calls, plus 350Go of data, for 20€/month [0]. it's surprising the market hasn't developed likewise in other (European) countries; I (genuinely) wonder why − perhaps legal issues of some sort?
edit: okay, sending MMS isn't always free, depends on the countries[1]. still free for USA, Europe, Canada, etc.
I think it’s more historical at this point. 20 years ago SMS was expensive in Europe as we had cheap plans and expensive calls/texts vs US which had expensive plans but free calls/texts. That made things like WhatsApp take off in Europe while Americans would just SMS.
(Although most Americans have iPhones so just transparently avoid SMS for most of their conversations.)
There is no in the EU here. I had unlimited SMS in a sub 20€ plan more than a decade ago in France. I now have unlimited sms, unlimited calls and unlimited data in a sub 15€ plan.
I still only use WhatsApp because it’s a lot better than sms.
All the B2C services I work with are sending SMS to my phone. Not RCS, not iMessage: they are sending SMS messages.
All the MFA providers, such as Twilio and Okta, are sending SMS.
All the political campaign spammers are sending SMS.
All the reminders for appointments and bills are sending SMS.
All the notifications for apps where Push isn't good enough: they're sending SMS.
If user-to-user communication is using iMessage then that is fine. I have noticed that only about 2 of my human contacts use RCS, and at least 2 of them are using iPhones and not Androids for it. So that's some anecdata for ya!
It all depends on age group in my experience. My friends all a bit older than me prefer Messenger for everything. My friends all younger than me prefer Discord. I think my parents and their generation use iMessage, but I use WhatsApp with them. My generation used to use snapchat a lot, I think, but I never got on that boat.
That's interesting; I have and use discord myself (owner of a 300+ member server for my WoW guild), but I've never really considered it a messaging app in the same way I do iMessage, WhatsApp, and so on. I think because everyone is pseudo anonymous, it's more like social media to me. Plus I've got the phone numbers and iMessage groups for close friends I've made over discord.
Given its popularity among gamers of all nationalities, I wonder where discord stacks up in relation to the EU's DMA?
Discord is popping up as shadow IT in some places. Because of all the server admin stuff (bot APIs, Github bots, pretty advanced RBAC etc), it's basically "Slack but for free, and without the annoying SSO."
That sounds like my personal hell lol. Slack for free without the SSO, sure, but also Slack with constant annoying Nitro upsells and flashy gamer bullshit.
(I just really don't like Discord and I'm bitter that it's what my guild de facto has to use because it's what gamers have standardized on.)
Being pseudonymous doesn't prevent you from using it to contact people you actually know offline. I used Steam to talk with my group members about a project in college a couple times. Other times I used Google chat/talk/whatever it was called at the time (embedded in the browser inbox). I had a flip phone at the time, so pretty much anything I could use on desktop was easier.
I just mean I've never thought to put it in the same category as iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. Like if the EU is going to regulate messaging apps, I wouldn't have thought to lump Discord or Steam chat in there with those other ones. But, honestly, why shouldn't they?
Yeah I hate SMS. I don't want my carrier to be involved in the content of my communications. Also I normally use the computer when at home, no point using a tiny mobile device obviously.
I don't use Google or Apple accounts either so RCS is out too. WhatsApp is meta now unfortunately but for historical reasons there's no avoiding it here.
I use WhatsApp and Telegram pretty much exclusively (telegram more for group chats)
The Brazilian government passed a law requiring age verification for every site categorized as 16+. It can't be self-declared, so companies usually resort to facial scans and ID verification. I DO NOT want photos of our Brazilian children going to foreign agents who are PROVEN to profit from and do God-knows-what with our biometric data. And the funniest part? The same law says 'regulation shall not, under any circumstances, authorize or result in the implementation of mass surveillance mechanisms,' but also mandates that these measures must be 'AUDITABLE.' In other words, someone needs access to that data. It’s all so stupid and incoherent.
People who are less tech-literate FIERCELY support the measure, and whenever someone opposes it, they claim that person supports digital child abuse...
Anyway... the responsibility of protection should come from the parents, not from companies that profit off your biometric data.
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