And as the digital world increasingly invades and influences our realities and experiences the importance of not only serving the common denominator gets more important, not less.
In my opinion it is about making the online world safer for advertisers. The advertisers are the real customers of the internet - users are just the product.
The evolution of the internet is being increasingly driven by profit seeking and most common way people try to monetize the internet is through advertising. That is primarily what drives censorship and moderation - a need to protect the advertiser's brands.
The old internet that so many people are pining for in this thread comes from a time before big ad-tech. All the old schools forums, newsgroups etc didn't care about making a buck - heck most of them probably ran at a loss. All of that was eaten by social media, there was a transition away from internet communities, to for profit businesses instead.
If you are a parent weary of an internet riddled with porn, traffickers, drugs, or other dangerous things. I believe it is on the parent to filter whats acceptable content for their kid to watch and not the website administrators to moderate whats acceptable. Its baffling to me that people see it the other way around. The latter is certainly easier and the parent can come up with all sorts of excuse why they cant find the time to do that given how hard life is and how it gets in the way, but at the end of the day. Who knows what's best for you or your family than yourself?
IRL we outsource some roles of the parent to the community. I send children out into parts of the real world confident that they won’t have shown magazines of animal torture or have abuse screamed at them because they are female or gay. The internet is an important part of our cultural space and it’s not ok for children not to be able to use it.
I know plenty of parents who give a smart phone with complete control to the teen on what app or content they can see, and are shocked to find out to where on the internet they find their kid. Parents need to take some accountability for what their kids do. Shocking right?
I should note on the other hand that I don't understand why pornography is such a proeminent issue in these discussions. As a teenager, I definitely consumed porn (as I suspect the vast majority have) and no damage has come to me.
There are reddit groups above 1 million members who feel porn has interrupted their life and incubated as an addiction because of early and excessive teenage use. The field is not studied well but there are certainly many many others that feel different than what you wrote, me included.
>>> The only possible option I see is to become a helicopter parent.
I dunno I think the main issue is you see this as a black and white issue. No good discussion can come when you always see the different side as the most extreme option.