Young people ignore social media age limits
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
When I was a 6th grader, I played Diablo II online. A player named "I-Dupe" told me he'd duplicate my items and give them to me. I thought he had a program to do this.
I gave him my items, and he left the game. My items were not duped; I was. I bawled, and ran downstairs and yelled to my parents. They offered consolation and advice ("be careful online"). But you can tell my parents couldn't ameliorate my hurt feelings.
If I could wave a magic wand, I'd turn this situation--wherein parents have to cope with the relationship between their kids and the web--to one where parents can do something about it. The ridicule I've seen in HN's comments just now demonstrates that age requirements don't work and appear disingenuous. I'm also skeptical of what someone from UK Safer Internet Centre said, "It's so important that we show children what other things they can do using digital technology that are engaging, creative and age-appropriate. It's about showing them what else it could be and inspiring them with that." When we make things for people "less" than us (young, less-tech-literate, etc), we often make something crappy[0].
[0] http://paulgraham.com/javacover.html relevant excerpt: Like the creators of sitcoms or junk food or package tours, Java's designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them.
This "smart people creating for people less than them" problem is exacerbated with students. You can convince almost any unemployed adult to learn Java by telling them it's profitable, even if they can detect condescension. But students are just as good at detecting condescension, and these "engaging, creative, and age-appropriate" tools are probably made to occupy students' time, not make them money.
And yes, online activities open up an avenue for bullying. So does pretty much everything. We should work on that aspect, of preparing children for it and also cracking down on it.
Perhaps a good step for AI chat bots would be monitoring online chat services and learning to detect bullying and taking actions: block all communication, warn a guardian, etc. Detecting harassment could be achievable long before real intelligence is achieved. And detection lets the child, the parent, or the service take many actions in response.
I'm reminded of all the people who had money with pirateat40 when his ponzi scheme disappeared... he claimed 7%/week returns and some people still believed him and sent him real money.
EDIT: In this way the internet provides a very useful social playground where practical damage was minimized but still real enough to be felt. I think this sort of learning is perfectly fine and should be encouraged more, not less. Better to learn how things really work yourself than to be constantly relying on someone else to shield you - you sure don't want to be an adult who still doesn't get it.
Children will get hurt, but they heal. You get a few scrapes and bruises while you're learning. Reasonable protections against catastrophe are important, but eliminating pain is a high bar to reach and it will come with a high cost. Not just a financial cost, either. It will cost children opportunities for excitement, joy and learning.
You learned two valuable lessons that day on Diablo. 1) don't be too trusting, 2) crying does not fix things in real life
I think kids should be exposed to experiences like that. They should be given guidance, not bans.
Take alcohol for instance: in Europe people start drinking very young (illegally). It's socially accepted as the norm that everyone knows happens. But for kids this is very hard to do of course.
As a result, college is a lot less ... shall we say exciting? By the time we have easy access to alcohol (money+legal) we already know how to treat it with some amount of respect.
> By the time we have easy access to alcohol (money+legal) we already know how to treat it with some amount of respect.
I would suggest that early illegal drinking is a dangerous thing. It works as you say for the majority, but for a sizeable minority it causes serious problems both then and in the future. Overall it is a bad risk/reward situation IMO.
Legal early drinking while young more reliably has the effect you describe in my experience though.
I don't know about elsewhere in Europe, but in the UK while it is illegal to sell alcohol directly to anyone under 18 under any circumstances, or those 18+ if you have any reason to believe they are buying in order to supply a minor except under specific conditions, you can (at your discretion) knowingly sell it to a "responsible adult" who is buying for a minor (IIRC the cut-off here is 14+) if the drink is part of a sit-down meal in a properly licensed premises. This covers having wine or beer with a meal in a restaurant. Furthermore, in your private residence you can give alcohol (again at your discretion) to anyone older than 5. The "at your discretion" part is vitally important here, it is the caveat through which the seller/giver is liable for prosecution under child protection laws if they are seen to allow anything that might be dangerous to a minor or get the "responsible adult" judgement wrong, and is also the caveat that allows the seller/giver to say "no" for any reason (which they do not have any legal obligation to explain, and if the customer gets angry about the situation that is adequate reason for refusal on its own in addition to any other considerations).
http://drinkingage.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0...
(It's an interesting mix, including Massachusetts and Texas)
A good deal more let parents give their kids a drink at home.
I guess social attitudes contribute at least as much to college age binge drinking as legal regimes.
Of course, but just to be clear : crying is an essential mechanism to recognize, manage and cope with emotions. Children should be allowed to cry.
But while crying helps, it doesn't solve.
At least not outside your immediate social circle. And even inside, only in passing as a request for help and support. Eventually you have to do something, or decide you don't care enough to solve the problem.
Children (maybe people in general?) should learn that doing is better than crying. In the case of Diablo, parents might do better to ask "So what are you going to do now? How are you rebuilding your character? Can you do it faster now that you have experience?" than to say "Oh you poor baby, that bully was super mean to you!"
One is empowering. The other is victimizing. Important difference.
If I could wave a magic wand, I wouldn't change a thing. It was the first time I learned that not everyone could be trusted all the time, and it seems to me it was a pretty good time and place to learn it. Just how far off would you want to push that inevitable lesson?
It also had me learn not to blindly trust strangers (with my hard earned loot).
Exactly the same thing happened to me. Diablo II, around 6th grade, asking someone to dupe an item, he gave me his items, I left the game, he was upset. If I could wave a magic wand, I wouldn't change a thing.
I am reading the article and wondering why didn't they ask how many of these kids were actually bullying or trolling others online.
I was devastated at the time, but now I can look back on it and laugh. It was just a game and it definitely taught me some hard lessons about trusting people online. (And also some lessons about how creative people can be in exploiting weaknesses of a system.)
They already can do something about it. They can actually teach their children how the world works, how to react to various situations, why blindly believing strangers is a bad idea, and maybe even (gasp) limit what their children are permitted to access on the internet! Shocking ideas, I know.
It is not a government's job to raise children - nor should it ever be.
This is a great observation of a problem that extends throughout silicon valley. There is a fundamental problem with the way we design products that enables this "condescension," as you aptly put it. The problem is that "product people" design an "experience" for the nebulous "user". Instead of realizing that each user is also a person, with real experiences and a brain outside of the app, the designers fall into the trap of only thinking of each user within the context of their own app. The product designers ignore any experience that the user has outside of their own product, resulting in design choices that convey a tone of condescension to the user.
As you observe, this problem is particularly evident in education. The top offenders:
- Coding bootcamps
- "Learn to code" websites like codecademy
These products are not much different from the "guru" industry that peddles real estate and affiliate marketing eBooks to the "get rich quick" crowd. Someone searching "how to make money fast" is engaged in a slightly less sophisticated mindset than someone searching "how to learn to code fast," but the same psychological impetus leads to both searches. As a result, an entire industry has emerged to prey on those learning to code.
Personally, I learned to code through a combination of online tutorials and rudimentary reverse engineering. How does this website work? What powers this website? How can I replicate this? Oh cool, a tutorial... let me finish this PHP membership system and then add my own features!
I maintain this is still the best way to learn to code. Taking things apart and building small projects is the fastest learning method. The tutorials were all free and very raw. They came from different sources that all presented different opinions and frameworks for thinking about programming. I had to read between the lines. I had to think critically. There was no mindless interactive IDE simulator to click through. I only had the real world: a text editor, a hosted server to FTP my PHP files to, and a web browser. It was trial by fire.
Sure, coding bootcamps and codecademy have taught lots of people to "code"... but at what cost? What experiences have these people missed by learning through a structured, opinionated curriculum filtered through a product team? Has this method of learning created irreconcilable gaps in their understanding of programming?
You learned a valuable life lesson. If anything getting ripped off online and learning this lesson was safer than getting ripped off in a dark alley over some magic beans.
If they had done something, what would you have learned? If I cry hard enough, everything gets fixed? That leads to uselessness.
I waited until after school and then beat the crap out of him until he admitted what he had done and got my watch back. It was my fault for being that naive. It was his fault for flaunting my naiveté in my face.
When this law was first introduced, a site that I used heavily as a minor required me to get a permission form signed and faxed by my parents before they'd unlock my account -- while I actually got them to do this, it would have been faster and easier to create a new account with a fake age.
I think these laws need to be revamped, although because they only affect kids they're not really on anyone's radar (in the US, the deteriorating and underfunded school system is a more pressing problem). Companies end up tracking kids anyway through their parents, whether it's the "35-year-old female using Angry Birds" (actually their mother handing their phone to their kid on a train) or having your parents upload your baby photos to Facebook hours after your birth.
http://www.theonion.com/article/i-am-under-18-button-clicked...
But, you know what else puts youth at risk for bullying? Going outside. Going to school. Being different. Liking things other kids don't like. Being gay. Being black. Being asian. Etc..
Random trolls on the internet can do orders of magnitude less psychological damage to a kid than their actual peers can by excluding them from activities in the real world and making the state-mandated 9-5 they go to an experience they dread.
This sort of dominance behavior is likely a human evolutionary constant, but so are a lot of behaviors we've as a society decided are no longer acceptable. What will actually stop bullying is enforcing, across society and consistently in front of children, that it isn't acceptable to hurt other people to benefit yourself.
I'm sure virtually every educator knows this, because they're usually trained in child psychology. So if you see an "educator" saying that the thing we really need is an "internet safe zone" "for the children" you should know where their loyalties really lie.
Yes, sorry. I thought people would read the article before commenting, and it seems a few people didn't bother doing that.
Or heck, how completely non effective COPPA is on internet forums. Seriously, the amount of people who care about it is maybe... 0.1% of the population?
And practically speaking, you will never avoid this. Any form of tick box or date of birth verification is faked in seconds, any credit card details will just be taken from a parent or friend's account. Just like real life really. If a kid can't buy something on their own, their parents will probably just buy it for them.
As for the claims of bullying and stuff... well sure. At least social media has a way of dealing with the issue (by banning accounts, blocking people from contacting each other, etc). That's ten times more effective than anything a school would ever do, especially given how the latter often just make the situation even worse by uneven enforcement and victim blaming.
And hey, it's at least easier to ignore bullies online than in the real world.
For sites that actually care about this sort of thing and aren't doing the legal minimum?
[i.e. Take a 500 word sample from the user over their initial posts, test it against SMOG to see if it meets a minimum grade level. Test it against a machine learning tool to see if it estimates reasonable age. If it doesn't pass, disable the account and ask for ID and/or parental consent form]
So, instead, embed some text in your ToS and pretend to act shocked whenever confronted with direct evidence that people aren't complying with the ToS.
It's the same for porn. An "are you 18?" page isn't going to stop anyone, but it shifts the blame from the publisher to the consumer.
That makes no sense, considering that someone under 18 is not able to enter into any contract (with the publisher) in most jurisdictions. compare: It would not be enough to ask "are you of legal age?" before serving alcohol to someone. Proof is required.
"As a general rule, a minor is not bound by contracts he makes, though the adult party whom he contracts with is"
It's not a contract being form, it's the company in question performing the minimum viable verification to protect themselves from liability.
Correct. And yet, somehow, it's industry practice. That's my point.
On Reddit, for instance, I saw a discussion in /politics (by many, many users at the time) about why a 13 year old can still be just as mature and smart as someone over 18.
I'm in my mid 30s and the only reason anyone would say this is if they are close to that age or they want to have sex with someone that age (and justify it).
A 13 year old can be just as mature and smart as someone 18+, the reason the law exists is because it isn't the case nearly all of the time, and there's no simple way of judging on a case by case situation, so it's better to protect the 99(.9?)% of 13 year olds who need protecting.
This doesn't justify any adult having sex with a 13 year old, regardless.
I only ask because a 13 year old cannot possibly have the experience, knowedge, or wisdom to be as smart as an average 18 year old.
Unless of course, the 18 year old is really stupid or has some sort of disability.