Hacker News Reader

> Are we still worried about porn in 2023?

Every, and I mean every one of my male peers uses porn more often than he'd like...and at least a third of the women.

"Not worrying about it" in that context sounds like "conceding defeat," not like having overcome a problem such that it's no longer worth concern.

This might be a surprise to some, but the highly paid engineers who invented the internet did not have access to the internet when they were children. Correlation is not causation, and in this case I can't even imagine the causal link in your claim.

Also until extremely recently, almost no one saw adult material unless they found a magazine of utterly tame (by today's standards) printed nudity.

You can't become a highly paid engineer today with just books and punch cards. I don't know why any of that is relevant.

So porn is part of the issue? Really?

No one mentioned just a book and punch cards.

> So porn is part of the issue? Really?

Isn't that your claim? You needed access to sites your parents wouldn't have allowed to become the engineer you are today?

See my other comment below for a more detailed answer but: no, my claim is not that I needed porn to become the engineer I am today. But the level of restrictions proposed by the top level comment in this thread would have, and it seems blocking porn is a driving factor in those decisions.

Social media addiction, etc. can be helped by restricting time without restricting access.

What would you reply to the person here[1] who wishes they had restricted access instead of restricted time, because restricted time hindered them learning to code?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37357463

I thought I felt the same as you, but I have nieces and nephews who have a variety of "no screen time" to "screen is default" aged between 2 and 10. The online world is very different now to what it was when I explored it.

When I was 15, YouTube was music videos, shitty flash animations, and people doing bargain basement myth busters. Now it's content farms, conspiracy theories, cleverly crafted dopamine hits.

Similarly, online multiplayer games when I was 10-15 were warcraft 3, neverwinter nights and diablo 2. Compare those games to Roblox, Fortnite and co - it's just not the same (and I say this as someone who now works in this space).

I don't have a good answer, but the landscape has changed so wildly in the last decade that I thin it's incredibly naive to think that it's safe to allow unrestricted unmonitored access to devices.

> Are we still worried about porn in 2023?

I guess that the percentage of people who approve of their preteen children watching porn is still a rather small minority. In fact globally I'd bet the majority of adults don't even approve of themselves watching porn.

More broadly speaking, assuming we're roughly of the same generation, I'm not sure our parents' borderline neglectful approach to children (latchkey, ads at 10 PM to remind them we exist, not being let in the house during the day) is one that's worthy of emulation.

I'm a millennial, for context.

So much to unpack here.

These restrictions just don't make sense to me. I was a pretty reserved child, so I can't imagine getting over all the hurdles needed to grow as a person and foster my love for programming/tech:

- Asking for permission to read all the random Perl forums or IRC chats I stumbled upon just wouldn't be a thing I would have done.

- My parents probably wouldn't have understood what it all was and denied my request. Early on I probably wouldn't have even been able to explain why I needed that access.

- Remember installing linux for the first time? Sorry, not going to happen because the stalkerware doesn't work on linux.

- You want access to a website called "hacker news"?? No way! (HN wasn't really a thing I think back in my childhood but you get the idea).

-----

Second, I was a latchkey kid. Having two working parents is neglectful? What would have been the alternative?

And my point with the porn is that it's not worth locking everything down for fear that your child is going to see some boobs. It's not worth it, and it seems that it's the driving force or a lot of these restrictions.

> see some boobs

That's either a stupid or a dishonest description of the Internet pornography we're talking about here.

Please focus on the core message of my post rather than three words.

If you're so concerned with Internet pornography that you want to lock down your child's digital life and know every single thing they say and do, then so be it. We probably won't change each other's minds.

Why should an ISP know more about a child’s Internet activity than the parents?

For what it’s worth my personal philosophy would be trust, but verify. That necessarily entails some way to verify.

Furthermore, in many jurisdictions parents are civilly or even potentially criminally liable for their childrens’ activities. If you’re in one of those jurisdictions you have a duty to prevent your child from breaking the relevant laws or other rules.

> Why should an ISP know more about a child’s Internet activity than the parents?

They shouldn't. Fight the ISPs.

> For what it’s worth my personal philosophy would be trust, but verify. That necessarily entails some way to verify.

Again, trust what? Do all roads lead to porn?

> Furthermore, in many jurisdictions parents are civilly or even potentially criminally liable for their childrens’ activities. If you’re in one of those jurisdictions you have a duty to prevent your child from breaking the relevant laws or other rules.

Really grasping at straws here. What laws are you worried your child will break that would reasonably reach the level you're worried about?

> Again, trust what?

Trust that they aren’t harming themselves or others. The Internet is an extremely powerful tool and all powerful tools are potentially dangerous.

The pen is mightier than the sword and the Internet is to the pen as the sword is to the thermonuclear bomb.

>> I'm not sure our parents' borderline neglectful approach to children (latchkey, ads at 10 PM to remind them we exist, not being let in the house during the day) is one that's worthy of emulation

Latchkey is a little after I grew up, mid Gen X, I think the premise is that these kids with working parents would run home alone and lock themselves inside in terror because some kid somewhere got abducted and it made the news. I don't know what statistics there are around it, but that's my memory of the phrase latchkey. I don't remember locking the door when I was a kid, we didn't live in a great neighborhood.

But I was a beneficiary of the borderline neglectful approach to children, and I'm certainly glad I grew up that way. I got kicked out of a bar for the first time when I was 10 or 11, and when I was 14, I would go to hardcore punk shows a hundred miles from home and my mom had no idea where I was. "I'm sleeping over at Joe's house tonight". Maybe "Joe" existed, maybe he didn't, but either way, I am at a show learning how to stage dive.

So it's weird reading how closely people watch their kids these days, and I'm not criticizing, people raise their kids how they raise their kids, none of my business. But I am reminded of one friend whose house I stayed at a couple times, he actually had two parents, if you can believe that, and they monitored everything he did, asked him questions about everything, listened to his answers, and he had to ask for permission for everything. On one hand I could tell he was lucky he had parents who cared about him and wanted the best for him, but I also remember feeling so, so sorry for him.

> Because I had none of that, I'm a software engineer making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. In no world would I be where I am today with those limitations.

You've commented plenty throughout your replies. But this bit uses very concrete, casual language. I'm not sure how you could possibly know such a thing and therefore write the statement you wrote. So much of your success as a hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars engineer is luck, timing, and other things that are not so clear in nature.

I otherwise agree with most of what you wrote.

I mostly agree with you, or at least I think you're providing important pushback that needs to be considered. Porn is largely a weird religious boogeyman, and scary stranger kidnapping stories seem to be a form of lucrative fear porn to attract conspiracy minded types. My access to the internet as a teen fueled my curiosity and computer technology exploration in a way that was crucial for where I've ended up today. I actually installed a keylogger to get the internet password that my parents guarded, and I've never regretted it. Blanket luddite rules for kids seem to me to be lazy at best.

That being said, here are some of the things I worry about:

- The internet is no longer a niche playground for nerds, and much of it has become a mainstream entertainment megahub, very highly cultivated for your bland engagement. When I was growing up, I had to constantly fiddle with and troubleshot several layers of software in order to explore, interact with friends online, and play games. It was almost like a barrier to entry. These days, I'm not entirely sure I would have fiddled with anything and might have just skipped to the gaming & media consumption part. After all, it just works now, and the media is more engaging than ever. There seem to be fewer incentives for learning and creativity.

- I'm more concerned about bad behavior modeling than I am about the moral panic nonsense. I want to make sure that whatever personalities my kids are having a social/parasocial relationship with aren't encouraging trollish and abusive behavior.

- I'm also concerned about misinformation. Most people generally are very bad at gauging the trustworthiness of information online. Ironically even the people who cry the most about how media distorts your worldview tend to have that exact problem. I want to teach my kids critical thinking and how to evaluate information based on several important criteria. This will have to be an involved process, and I want to be able to contextualize heavy sources of misinformation while they're being exposed to it.

None of these problems are well addressed with a luddite approach, but they do need careful attention.