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Comment by indymike | Hacker News Reader

> I'm not sure why a person would want to let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common,

A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud) are committed by family and friends of the victims. Should we not leave our children with our family alone?

The best move is to teach your children how to not be victimized. It is part of "being responsible for yourself". My parents taught me how to be safe in a bad neighborhood because sometimes you have to go there. They taught me how to pick good friends who wouldn't do bad things to me. They taught me how to spot the precursors to bad things. They let me hang out unsupervised. Because they taught me how to be responsible for myself. Why not teach your kids how to navigate the internet safely.

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> A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud) are committed by family and friends of the victims. Should we not leave our children with our family alone?

But I'm pretty sure that like 50+% of interactions with family aren't crime.

> Why not teach your kids how to navigate the internet safely.

No reason to involve any serious amount of time browsing feeds of shit in that. I don't make them roll around in poison ivy, either. Absofuckinglutely not more than once. Exactly how much exposure to something of approaching-zero value and significant harm do they need? I'm going with "just enough to notice it's one of those so they can run the other way".

[EDIT] To put all my cards on the table, I think an extremely reasonable middle ground for Internet targeted ad networks and content-promoting algo-feed social networks would be to saddle them with an appropriate amount of liability for content they promote, which amount would surely be enough to put them all out of business. I see their feeds as the Internet equivalents of a crack house. I'm not gonna send my kids there—I'd rather see them gone, period. I will tell my kids what they are, and how and why such places might hurt them, in hopes they stay away. But I don't think some kind of "exposure therapy" or something is appropriate. The correct, moderate use of social media feeds is to avoid them entirely.

90% of all childhood sexual assaults are perpetrated by close family and friends[1].

If stranger danger is a motivating factor here, statistically, you should side-eye your close friends and family much, much more often and never leave them alone with your kids.

> But I'm pretty sure that like 50+% of interactions with family aren't crime.

You can say the same thing about social media interactions.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/child-abuse-neglect/about/about-child-se...

You've misunderstood this conversation and/or are applying statistics extremely poorly. This is not serving whatever point you're trying to make, and is a distraction from productive discourse.

I think you established too broad of a scope for discourse to be within the parameters you were hoping.

Immediately upon reading your comment, I thought about the general overprotection and over-supervision of kids which leads parents to drive their kids everywhere, prevent them from learning to use the subway on their own, or even live in cities. But what I think you were getting at is more about smaller hypothetical physically analogous places, but it's hard to think about what those places are in real life without relying on assumptions that may be more likely to occur online than in any significant concentration in the real world.

Imo, the most threatening place for kids to be in real life in terms of external factors, day to day, is around cars, bullies, bad actors within the family, and then maybe church/sports teams, but all of those are usually safe unless they're not, you can't realistically do anything productive about that without sacrificing their development as a human, except prepare them and guide them.

Online, it's just a whole different beast, and I'd think it would be games and social media, anywhere a gaurd would be let down, but imo the greater threat isn't criminality as much as it is nearly every other aspect except basic chats.

Not really. You asserted that unknown people are dangerous, while most of the replies to you are is pointing out that there are serious classes of crimes where people your child knows well are the most likely to commit them. I think sometimes perception is not reality, and the greatest danger to your child isn't society as a whole. It's a lot closer to home than anyone wants to think.

> I don't make them roll around in poison ivy, either.

My parents taught me what poison ivy looks like so I did not roll in it.

Likewise teaching your kids what a skinner loop is and how scrolling a feed is putting yourself in a skinner loop is really surprisingly effective. Kids like having agency, when you show them that tiktok does things to take your control away they listen.

That sounds great in principle, but many parents are either not interested or present enough to do so, or themselves lack the skills for it.

And that's the root cause of many, many issues.

It's a pity so many of these issues get simply patched up through other means instead of properly addressing the real root cause.

If you have kids it is your responsibility. If you have kids and are not interested or present enough, this is literally the problem.

Again, you being right doesn’t change anything. This is the world we live in, and that means we need to work with what we have. Which includes inattentive parents.

So... what's the point. Outlawing being an inattentive parent doesn't fix that problem. I'm not sure human beings have found a fix for that that has optimal outcomes for the kids.

Well. A possible solution might be to limit the exposition to social media children have by creating a law, which is the topic of this thread?

This is wildly unpopular, for good reasons, but if I want to get a third dog I need to apply for and get a license from the council - they’ll come round, inspect my property and ensure that it’s adequate for a number of dogs, that it’s secure and my current pets are well treated before issuing it.

The disconnect between this and children seems wild to me. Why don’t we display the same amount of concern for children?

>"The best move is to teach your children how to not be victimized."

Your GP advocated world-building a child's physical environment to avoid digital - which is simply unrealistic for their later years as it is, and coddling them so nothing that could even potentially victimize them in the digital world would be able to reach them. So, genuinely: What's it gonna be?

Are you going to teach a child the real-world application and use cases for being responsible for themselves, not becoming victimized and carrying themselves well, and learning to act appropriate in an increasingly-digital world; or not?

Otherwise; saying you'll teach your kids real-world application for being responsible for themselves and not being victimized, and then not giving them a space to see the importance of those practices out of fear that they'll succumb to it, is having your cake and eating it, too.

Teaching your kid being street smart is only a band aid or cope as the younglings say these days.

Because the issue is:

- your street smartness is an outdated smartness

- there are multiple different types of assholes waiting to victimize someone that you don't know about

When the police, court, positive socioeconomic factors work only then do you for sure minimize the risk of your child being victimized.

The internet has open the floodgates to be a piece of shit and made it hard to do something about it.

Because if you live in the wild west it's a matter of when not if.

FYI “cope” is closer to “delusion used to help you cope with reality” rather than “superficial fix”

Also, I think that some strategies, such as “comfort asking a parent for help navigating a situation” are timeless defenses against strategies like blackmail. There are probably some street smarts that change and some that stay the same.

Well yes, street smart is both.

It's a temporary solution based on the delusion that you can't work on a systemic level to reduce criminal or thuggish behavior.

Ultimately I do think some form of self defense is good to know, but you can't expect it to be effective than situational.

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