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All it needs is a less tech savvy parent in the group and then their kid gets onto stuff and shares it with the others. And kids are pretty good at getting around the parental controls on devices too.

But I 100% agree it's far too early (you can argue that it's just never good for a teenager's developing brain, at any point, too). I teach sex ed as part of my extra duties and have to think really carefully about when and how to do pornography education - too early and you break the innocence of the ones with strict parents, too late and you've lost a lot of the potential to stop bad habits from developing. It's a really challenging area. I just don't think the absolute wild west approach currently going is tenable.

I think the responsibility has to lie at least partially on the websites profiting from it.

It definitely needs both parties contributing. As you say, parental locks aren’t foolproof, and kids are sneaky little buggers almost certainly more familiar with the tech than the parents in most circumstances.

Social Media and Prawn both need to ensure they’re actively enforcing the rules, beyond “are you of the right age, pls don’t lie k”.

And if a parent can’t manage to negotiate the parental lock and age restricted website security, frankly I question why they should be allowing their own children online.

It goes back to really basic online safety stuff. Like have the family computer in a family area - so whilst you’re not watching over their shoulder, it’s easier to monitor what sites they’re visiting and who they’re interacting with.

I’ve no kids of my own, nor do I intend to change that. But my best mate is Dad to four, three of which live away aways. Yet, when they were first exploring online? He was in the same chats or games. Not interfering. Not necessarily vetting, just…present. The online equivalent of a parent escorting kids to the park, and keeping a weather eye out whilst enjoying a coffee, possibly with the other parents.

Heck steam keeps asking me, whilst I'm logged in on the client, how old I am or such and I've been a bunch of different random ages because most age systems don't care so long as the year lands over 18.

Whilst I get the counter argument that people don't want to register with personal details on every website or put their personal details at risk, there has to be a happy middle ground where you can prove you're an adult and keep the kids out.

Of course then people counter-counter argue that if you're accessing stuff you shouldn't be hiding your identity and the cycle of arguments springs up and never ends

When logging into my pension, or even Twitch, I need to use Authenticator to prove it’s me - despite me only ever accessing such from my iPad.

Add that in. Then the kid needs to get past the parental filter (need the password), and then get the Authenticator code. Then log into bongo pages, and get another Authenticator code.

Want to switch Google Safe Search off? That should be another Authenticator.

Is all of this foolproof? No, absolutely not. But there’s no harm and much benefit in making things as difficult as possible for the kids to access stuff the parents don’t want them accessing.

Yeah, when I say child abuse I'm not trying to throw blame at an individual. It is largely a systemic problem that needs a systemic solution (or solutions).

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
When logging into my pension, or even Twitch, I need to use Authenticator to prove it’s me - despite me only ever accessing such from my iPad.

Add that in. Then the kid needs to get past the parental filter (need the password), and then get the Authenticator code. Then log into bongo pages, and get another Authenticator code.

Want to switch Google Safe Search off? That should be another Authenticator.

Is all of this foolproof? No, absolutely not. But there’s no harm and much benefit in making things as difficult as possible for the kids to access stuff the parents don’t want them accessing.

Thing is authenticators are specifically made to identify an individual, which is where a lot of people don't want to be identified when accessing certain "adult stuff". And we are well in an age where we know that even if they say they aren't data harvesting - they are data harvesting and just waiting to use it. Or the website isn't harvesting but the authenticator is and then someone buys/steals that data and lines it up with the websites and boom.

Honestly? Neglect is a form of child abuse. And if you’re taking no steps whatsoever to safeguard your children online, I’m interested in whether that crosses the line. Because whilst not quite the same as letting them play unsupervised on a busy road? The lack of observation and safeguarding online isn’t that different, because you’re still exposing them to needless risk.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Honestly? Neglect is a form of child abuse. And if you’re taking no steps whatsoever to safeguard your children online, I’m interested in whether that crosses the line. Because whilst not quite the same as letting them play unsupervised on a busy road? The lack of observation and safeguarding online isn’t that different, because you’re still exposing them to needless risk.

This is also a good point and its not the 90s any more; most parents now will have grown up with the internet in some form or another. Having child-versions of windows/internet/mobilephone apps and services could and should be a thing. Not just parental limits on the modem, but actual software limits that let parents monitor, restrict and oversee online use easily and without impeding adults doing what they want on their own.

It might be less what we need is authentication but more services setup to account for the fact that there are minors online and that they need almost a separate division of it. Kind of like how MMO games have "open FFA areas" and "noob intro" areas or PVE or the like.

25 years ago, when I worked in IT (good gravy I feel old!) at a high school, we had “Launcher”.

This was a programme selection pane, which presented instead of Windows’ Desktop. And it limited, school year by school year, and even class by class, exactly who could access what, and I think even with limited features.

Given my job was to repair machines as and when the little sods broke them? That limiting software was golden.

Side note, we once played with some chip thing that would always restore software to a preset default upon reset. We let a carefully vetted selection of 6th Formers loose on those machines, and watching them utterly baffled as their worst achieved nothing was priceless. I left shortly after that test so I dunno if it was ever implemented on a wide scale.

 Overread wrote:


Thing is authenticators are specifically made to identify an individual, which is where a lot of people don't want to be identified when accessing certain "adult stuff". And we are well in an age where we know that even if they say they aren't data harvesting - they are data harvesting and just waiting to use it. Or the website isn't harvesting but the authenticator is and then someone buys/steals that data and lines it up with the websites and boom.

IMHO, it isn't so much that people don't want to be identified, it's that they dont want to be identified by [spouse, pastor, etc etc] in their personal life. It is extremely well known that the most popular adult content sites (YP and PH) collect statistics AND publish an annual report. It's where we get a LOT of the stats about, for instance, the rates of viewership in Utah being extremely high compared to rates in Nevada. Or, the entire fething bible belt is a cesspool of high traffic on those sites. Their annual report also publishes most popular search strings by state, etc. But. . . "so long as [significant person in my life] doesn't find out, it's OK"

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
When logging into my pension, or even Twitch, I need to use Authenticator to prove it’s me - despite me only ever accessing such from my iPad.

Add that in. Then the kid needs to get past the parental filter (need the password), and then get the Authenticator code. Then log into bongo pages, and get another Authenticator code.

Want to switch Google Safe Search off? That should be another Authenticator.

Is all of this foolproof? No, absolutely not. But there’s no harm and much benefit in making things as difficult as possible for the kids to access stuff the parents don’t want them accessing.

I mean, it would be nice if filters worked... But when I tried setting parental filters on my girls' iPads, they wound up not being able to access half of the apps they use for school.

So we just settled for manually keeping tabs on what they do online, and discussing with them what to do when something inappropriate happens.

US Surgeon General just wrote an article about putting warning labels on Social Media, especially for children under 13.

Saw an article recently about Gen Z buying "dumb phones" to get away from social media. All power to them. I hope more follow suit. I feel sorry for kids that have grown up drowning in social media. It can be nice to feel connected to the globe sometimes, other times it can feel like your soul is sucked away from you.

It's not necessarily "social media" that is a bad thing, there's nothing inherently wrong with it. The issue lies in people aiming to make money from other people's suffering or insecurities.

Indeed.

I count myself lucky that whilst I use the internet a lot, I was too old to rabbit hole when social media went bad. Idiots like Andrew Tate I mostly laugh at and pour scorn upon, and influencers don’t particularly influence me (I’m ad resistant, not immune).

I can’t imagine growing up with it, where school bullies can continue their cowardice and stupidity once your home.

 cuda1179 wrote:
It's the clickbait stories I hate the most. The (insert outrageous story here) with pic. Even if you want to read it it's NEVER in the article.

Same here. Total time wasters.

What I object to with click bait is such ads being intermingled with news stories on local news websites.

That’s just scummy, as it’s adding an air of singularly unearned credibility to whatever tripe they’re pushing.

In vaguely related news, I just got called a hobby tourist on Twitter for the first time today, which is providing no end of amusement for my morning...

 insaniak wrote:
In vaguely related news, I just got called a hobby tourist on Twitter for the first time today, which is providing no end of amusement for my morning...

What. . . . What does that even mean??

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

What. . . . What does that even mean??

To those striving to 'gatekeep' the hobby against any sort of change other than the ones they approve of, 'hobby tourist' was originally a label for someone with little or no actual interest in the hobby, participating in online discussion for the sole purpose of forcing diverse representation into said hobby (thus killing it, because all of the 'actual' fans are no longer interested in it after the addition of said representation supposedly turns it into something completely different from what it was) and then moving on to a different target.

Over time, it's become common for the term to be applied to anyone showing any support for increased representation in the hobby, with often ludicrous results. Several former GW studio employees (including Gary Chalk!) have been branded as 'tourists' in recent months, for example, as have some current Black Library authors.

Given that I've been collecting and playing 40K since 1993, various other games to lesser degrees over that time, and am currently, you know, involved in actually making a miniatures game, being called a hobby tourist is more than a little amusing. But also a sad sign of the state of online discussion of the hobby on social media at the moment.

I've been called a hobby tourist for wanting Guard & Skitarii to be treated as more than disposable meatsacks...

It's a term used more and more, I've found, to try to make someone's ideas be perceived as having no basis in the setting.

It’s basically shorthand for “Hi, I’m from an echo chamber and don’t actually understand what’s being discussed, so being unable to effectively engage you in discussion, I’m just gonna call you a term I also don’t properly understand, and have no capacity to back up”.

I’m yet to be called it myself, but kinda looking forward to when it seemingly inevitably happens.

I would like to be a hobby tourist. Rather than this massive time sink I could visit for a weekend. Perhaps that's why this place exists
https://www.wargameshc.co.uk/

 Kanluwen wrote:
I've been called a hobby tourist for wanting Guard & Skitarii to be treated as more than disposable meatsacks...

It's a term used more and more, I've found, to try to make someone's ideas be perceived as having no basis in the setting.

So just like any other ad hominem. I usually just reply to people saying stuff like that with "so, no actual arguments then? Ok." Or something along those lines.
Often leads to rather amusing meltdowns.

Bran Dawri wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:
I've been called a hobby tourist for wanting Guard & Skitarii to be treated as more than disposable meatsacks...

It's a term used more and more, I've found, to try to make someone's ideas be perceived as having no basis in the setting.

So just like any other ad hominem. I usually just reply to people saying stuff like that with "so, no actual arguments then? Ok." Or something along those lines.
Often leads to rather amusing meltdowns.

Some people have no defense/arguments, so all they can resort to is personal attacks.

Anyone else finding that Youtube has become a roulette game if you post a comment?

It seems to be about a 1/3rd chance that a comment gets silently deleted, without rhyme or reason (I find you can often get the same comment to stick with the exact same text if you repost it a couple more times). Meanwhile bot comment trains selling crypto or other dodgy financial scams are rife even on fairly niche channels.

Youtube comments have long been a bit of a cesspit, but they are becoming actually unreadable with the mix of spam and deleted messages making for nonsensical comment threads with missing context.

Even if the system simply told you why a comment was deleted would be an improvement...

I'm still raging that FB keeps setting itself to "show most relevant" instead of "show all comments" every single time you click to read the comments.

Esp since its concept of "relevant" is NOT actually all that useful and the only way you know its dropping messages is because of the total message counter




Also it wouldn't surprise me if multi-spamming the same message gets you flagged by auto-mods to have messaged removed at random in the first place as a spam protection method.

Oh, I've only posted the same message multiple times since I noticed a significant chunk of messages were disappearing to test it. I didn't do it prior to messages being deleted at a high rate. If anything, it suggests spam is better tolerated

Based on comments by other users, there has been a lot of annoyance at this change to Youtube comments recently, it isn't just me.

Wouldn't know about Facebook, I've not used it for anything other than messenger and Marketplace in about 5 years, it was already rubbish then. Marketplace also sucks as an interface but it is great for cheap household goods and I've recently moved house and need random gak like a secondhand wallpaper steamer... Basically I tolerate it for the financial incentives.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh, the comments deletion also pushes people away from doing reasoned posts with effort, because why bother if it has a high chance of deletion? It is really pushing towards more drivel in comments rather than discussion.

I see a lot of posts along the lines of:
"I wrote a long comment but it got deleted for some reason so whatever/I mostly agree/I disagree but now you will never know why or get the nuance".

 Overread wrote:
I'm still raging that FB keeps setting itself to "show most relevant" instead of "show all comments" every single time you click to read the comments.

Esp since its concept of "relevant" is NOT actually all that useful and the only way you know its dropping messages is because of the total message counter

Yeah, that's annoying. Twitter has also decided to horn in on the action, with seemingly random posts on a thread being hidden behind a 'probable spam' tag that you have to click to show the messages. The messages flashed never seem to be the actual spam, though, so I have no idea what criteria it is using.

If it’s Twitter, probably something Musk doesn’t agree with.

Because freeze peach.

 insaniak wrote:

 Overread wrote:
I'm still raging that FB keeps setting itself to "show most relevant" instead of "show all comments" every single time you click to read the comments.

Esp since its concept of "relevant" is NOT actually all that useful and the only way you know its dropping messages is because of the total message counter

Yeah, that's annoying. Twitter has also decided to horn in on the action, with seemingly random posts on a thread being hidden behind a 'probable spam' tag that you have to click to show the messages. The messages flashed never seem to be the actual spam, though, so I have no idea what criteria it is using.

The problem is likely that a lot of spam accounts will be hijacked accounts or ones that are setup for later spam. So they post a bunch of totally regular posts and then deliver spam; so when the auto-mod is built its being built both on actual spam posts and on normal posts that the spammer created. With the system likely unable to tell the difference between a real post and a spam post. So it ends up flagging regular posts as well.

It's honestly an area that AI "Might eventually one day" actually be half good at dealing with. Though even then the critical flaw that bots/AI have is the complete lack of contextual understanding of what its reading. It's a very very powerful parroting system, but it doesn't have any real comprehension