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Comment by movedx | Hacker News Reader

An eleven year old shouldn't be uploading content to YouTube. An eleven year old doesn't understand the second or third order consequences of their actions when they upload a video of themselves, along with their friends, trying on bikinis in their bedrooms.

If you're under 16, your content, and the uploading of it, should be supervised. Why are we letting our children run free on the Internet? You wouldn't let them run free on a highway and the Internet is just as dangerous but in different ways.

I believe YouTube need to implement a system of age verification for content creators. 16+ minimum if you ask me. If the parents do the uploading, whelp, you found your issue (if any arise)

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My 10-15 year old self would hate you. Most of what I even remember about being that age from my involvement in various online communities. I didn't have many friends at school so I talked to people in games and chat instead. To suggest that my parents should have to be there to "supervise" me is absurd. To some extent they tried to do this, and I resented it and I'm certain that it did no good at all. Not least because sanitizing access to the internet is impossible and if I wanted to get past a restriction of any kind I found a way.

Your kids talk to each other at school without parents going over their conversations to make sure everything is kosher. Interacting online isn't any different, as long as they know not to give out their physical location publicly or to strangers. Even more so these days, kids are digital natives. Cutting them off from the network is like giving them a lobotomy. They'll be well behaved, obedient, sessile outcasts.

Anyway, interacting online is so little like running free on the highway that it's difficult to even find a foothold to frame a counter-argument. It's a non sequitur.

> Interacting online isn't any different

Except a school is a (mostly) sealed environment. The Internet is not. Anyone can join the conversation online. Not just anyone can walk into a school classroom and pretend to be a teenager to social engineer a young girl.

> Cutting them off from the network is like giving them a lobotomy.

I didn't say cut them off.

If I didn't have independence on the internet starting the age of 14, I wouldn't be who I am today. I did many things I would not have been comfortable doing under supervision, and many of those contributed greatly to my long term personal and professional growth.

> I believe YouTube need to implement a system of age verification for content creators. 16+ minimum if you ask me. If the parents do the uploading, whelp, you found your issue (if any arise)

I strongly oppose this nonsense. Should I have insert my "age verification identifier" or "drink from the verification can" every time I want to do something on the Internet to prove I am of legal age? If you can't control your kids, you shouldn't have kids. Most children under sixteen have legal guardians. If you are a legal guardian, you are responsible for your children. People get up in arms when we say it takes a village to raise a child but then they turn around and make these absurd demands. You can't have it both ways!

> If you can't control your kids, you shouldn't have kids.

Where on Amazon can I buy whatever bubble you were raised in?

the affluence section

You can't be serious. Internet = Highway? Then most of us would be dead. Do you realize that most of us have been on the internet "unsupervised" much younger than 16? Your kid has a far greater chance of running into a pedo at school or getting on their way to school than on the internet.

I hope people like you don't have kids because I can't imagine the type of stunted and poorly adjusted children you'd raise. Sure warn the kids of the dangers of the internet, but my god who the hell equates children on the internet with children on the highway.

> I hope people like you don't have kids because I can't imagine the type of stunted and poorly adjusted children you'd raise

What a horrible thing to say to another person.

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