Frequent, Intense Mature and Suggestive Themes | Hacker News Reader

Frequent, Intense Mature and Suggestive Themes

marco.org

Uneven enforcement and a lack of transparency are (to my mind) the two leading causes of a perception of unfairness. If Apple is going to continue with a relatively low level of transparency (which seems to be almost a given, considering its corporate culture to date), it is even more beholden than most to try to stamp out uneven enforcement.

While the lack of transparency is a leading cause to the perception of unfairness, I'd say the uneven enforcement is actually unfair.

As long as you can submit apps and not be able to fairly accurately predict how it will be rated it won't just be seemingly unfair, it will be unfair.

Every rating system is like this. Censorship is arbitrary. Check out the MPAA giving an R to Bully, a documentary about high school bullying targeted at high schoolers. Well, not anymore.

I couldn't agree more with Marco. The App Store rating system is confusing and down right ineffective. It consistently hurts developers and does little to help consumers. Apple really needs to bring some clarity and common sense into the rating system.

"You never know who could be lurking on ping". Classic. This should also apply to FaceTime, Messages, phone calls and text messaging right?

I am fairly certain that nobody lurks on Ping. They don't even visit for sightseeing.

Yeah, it's essentially meaningless to give content ratings for apps that can access the entire web. If you're a parent, you either do or do not think your kid can cope with all user-generated content from outside the walled garden. Which suggests a business opportunity for whitelisting sufficiently heavily moderated services for fundie parents.

This exists. It's called proxy filtering.

But does it exist in an easy-to-use app that a non-techno-geek parent can understand and hand to their child confident that the kid can then visit the "safe" (and only the safe) parts of the web? If not, then creating said app is a business opportunity. Parents would pay for it.

Yes and no. It's relatively easy to set up an HTTP proxy (and I can think of several ways it could be made plug-and-play for non-geek parents). However, enforcing the use of the proxy on the client is basically impossible. Mandatory group policies come close, but if the kid can get admin they can just turn it off (and lets face it, they've got physical access to the client, if not the proxy server).

Probably won't stop parents paying for it, though :)

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