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Comment by Waterfall | Hacker News Reader

As a kid, I was able to figure out limewire, Emule, torrents and I'm sure kids today will be able to download a free vpn or use similar tools I used as a preteen to figure out how to circumvent these pointless blocks. I started with free video samples and only moved onto methods by high school to get access to premium websites. As a human, our strength is not only the ability to do these things but to also teach others to do it. I was able to help my friends to get access as well. If one ape discovered fire it would die with them, but our ability to spread information, like a virus is what gives humanity intelligence. One kid like me at school is all it takes to make this stupid law useless.

Adult websites want brownie points and also don't like nonpayers, but mess with their revenue and you'll get a push back.

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A mistake many people do. Maybe there are people now wary of children being subjected to certain content on the net. They are forgetting at least three things:

They also were exposed and survived just fine

Their kids are probably going to be better with tech at some point.

The vast majority of pornographic content is available without being on the market which makes regulation nearly impossible. Yes, you can maybe attack the platforms hosting it, but I don't see this going anywhere. You would punish commercial distribution on push other content underground. Many in porn are already directly financed by their viewers.

Wasn't the Australia block circumvented within 24h by a ~14-year old kid?

Some people suggested to make brushing teeth illegal so that kids do it in secret in a dark corner.

I agree - for many of people(including teens) circumventing restrictions is part of the thrill.

That said I do think there has been an escalation of porn over the years. It's really apparent when you look at things from the 70s. Though apparently banning porn from cinemas shifted content to more "trashy" VHS/DVD/Online videos

I feel data-driven analytics has probably accelerated this, like a race to the bottom (pun unintended). Extremity probably drives engagement so the porn kids are exposed to today is much more extreme than what we may have been as up and coming internet users.

Like with certain drugs, I think it's perfectly possible to acknowledge the potential issues with excessive porn consumption (or with certain kinds of porn) while still thinking that it's not uniformly bad if consumed in moderation.

Yeah you're right. Just because I would never touch crystal meth doesn't mean I should therefore stand in the way of people using cannabis recreationally (or even medically).

So yeah I guess it comes back to education rather than prohibition...

But it is something like a person selling both weed and meth next to each other, without any communication or acknowledgement that one is significantly more likely to cause harm.

Maybe. I propose that it's a question of context.

If pot were legal, maybe people would be happy to get high on that at stop there. I think there are two issues at play, both going in the same direction.

1. If buying pot is going to carry the same risk as buying meth, and I can get higher for the same quantity of meth (I assume meth is more potent per unit of volume) it would make some sense for me to try to get meth, or at the very least to be interested when someone offers, especially if I'm not 100% sure when I'll be able to buy more pot.

2. There is also a question of trust. If the government says pot is as bad as meth (both schedule 1, I hear about big police operations taking down pot dealers, etc) they I might believe them. After all, what do I know? I just want to get high. So when I get to try some pot, see that I like it, see many people smoking pot without much harm, I figure I might as well try some meth. Especially given point 1 above.

Part of the problem is that the education is left to less reputable corners of the web.

There is quite a lot of anecdotal evidence of the damage that can be done by abuse of internet porn. I could add to that.

But we have those with credentials who have made a good career out of attacking the very notion that porn can be harmful or can be abused. I'm not saying it's shilling, it could just be success by contrarianism, but it's still rather invalidating.

If you are in a position where you think porn is doing you harm, it probably is. But one of the first things you find if you go down that path is that information tends to be on the extremes.

I would challenge even this framing. Amphetamines were widely used and abused between the 1940s and 1960s without social stigma. They are for sure a problematic class of chemicals, but I think the perception that they are uniquely dangerous is tied up in their present association with societal out groups, classism, and disdain for the rural poor, whereas cannabis has become accepted among the upper class.

You could make some arguments about relative health effects, but those just as easily apply to alcohol which we readily accept and consume in polite company.

In addition to classism, one of the consequences of the war on drugs is there's not much trustworthy data on drugs' relative impact. Nobody wants to teach high schoolers there are any safe drugs.

So I know people who smoke and drink without obviously destroying their lives. But if you asked me to rank those alongside meth, cocaine and chainsaw juggling for danger I've got nothing but guesswork.

OK I'm gonna challenge you on that. Amphetamine causes (even at low and occasional doses) insomnia, mania, extreme loss of appetite. When used for longer periods, it can cause disordered thinking, delusions, paranoia, invasion of Russia..

We already does millions of people in America at least with Adderall which is an amphetamines not molecularly very different from Methamphetamine. It turns out to be mostly safe for most people, whether it good for you or me to use is a different question.

Also linking amphetamines to Nazis in order to demonize users is just ridiculous.

My mother has had dental problems her whole life because of the 1950s fad of putting little kids on meth to lose weight.

What the hell?! Do you have a link or source on that? That sounds horrible :(

This was likely the brand:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obetrol

The primary mechanism for "meth mouth" and similar oral health issues are dry mouth and teeth clenching which can be caused by a number of stimulants including caffeine(at moderate to high doses of ~6 cups of coffee). The remedy for which seems to be drinking a lot of water.

That said, it's obviously bad to give children diet drugs but that has no real bearing on how we treat recreational drug users who are adults.

>Extremity probably drives engagement so the porn kids are exposed to today is much more extreme than what we may have been as up and coming internet users.

The front page of any given tube site these days is professionals pretending to be step siblings and content produced by the pornographic equivalent of YouTubers and Instagram influencers. I feel like the extremity peaked ~10yr ago.

Mulling on your comment, the latter might actually be the next wave.

After too much "polished" content from Brazzers/BangBros/RealityKings which is really your McDonald's megacorp productions of porn having a decentralised authentic "team of 1" indy authentic production via Porntubers is probably the parallel evolution that we saw in Youtube.

Not sure, I haven't really studied or thought about this issue very much. Although porn is quite fascinating in its universality and scale.

It is so easy to encounter it, even accidentally. Things have improved a bit, but 3 yrs ago when I switched to DDG almost any image search with SafeSearch=off came with sudden unexpected nude or porn pics on page 2 or 3 almost regardless of the search term.

You mean you turned the safe search feature off, and you got unsafe results?

Sure, what can you expect, right? Imo not that any unrelated search yields porn. With google this never happened (actually I can't remember ever seeing porn images unexpectedly in ggl image search where I also had safe search off). It held me back recommending DDG to others. Though, as I said, things have improved a bit nowadays, and it happens less often.

I think I read it here on HN that google has/had an entire team dedicated to making sure you never ever got porn unless you were very specifically searching for it.

Try googling "index of".

There has been an escalation of porn compared to the 70s, but so has also every from of consumption and consumerism. What is not clear is if peoples ability to adapt and filter out the extreme aspects has also increased.

Violence in movies are also more extreme. As is violence in music, violence in news flows, and violence in the messages of peoples social communities.

I am also always aware that here in Sweden there was a significant difference in cultural values around both violence and sex compared to the US during the 70s-90s. Casual nudity and minor sexual references were seen as something funny and embarrassing rather than taboo, while violence was seen as twisting the mind of children. In the US it was the opposite, with violence being perfectly fine but anything hinting towards sex was something that would corrupt children. At the later part of the 90s the culture in Sweden copied that of the US, with English became in practice a second language, so I am always a bit weary of claims that images of sex and nudity will corrupt people, teens and even children, while illustrations and reference to violence are given a wide acceptances as innocent to anyone until studies has proven it guilty.

> There has been an escalation of porn compared to the 70s, but so has also every from of consumption and consumerism. What is not clear is if peoples ability to adapt and filter out the extreme aspects has also increased. Violence in movies are also more extreme. As is violence in music, violence in news flows, and violence in the messages of peoples social communities.

And yet, all across the OECD since ~1990 violent crime is down, teen pregnancy is down, and on and on and on. For all of the pearl clutching about the morality and decency of this stuff it doesn't seem to be ruining society.

There is likely other factors at play.

You can't really conclude that "this stuff" is harmless just looking at the tendencies. I agree though that I my pick for what is ruining society would be something else...

>For all of the pearl clutching about the morality and decency of this stuff it doesn't seem to be ruining society.

I won't blame free porn for this, but I mean have you looked at American society in recent months? It seems well on the path to being ruined.

I agree America looks that way, but how different are reality and news? For good and ill. I get the impression that the ratings-grabbing parts of news alternate between chest-thumping tribalism and nut-picking.

America is going to have by far the worst handling of the pandemic compared to similar western democracies. We had a real world test as a society and we failed. That isn't just the news fudging things to grab viewers.

I think that a lot of attempts to clean bloggosphere out of sexy content ended up pushing away soft erotica content and keeping more hadcore stuff.

It is easier to find hardcore bdsm with injuries and humiliation then soft porn or erotica.

During the late 90’s and early 00’s, there was already plenty of weird, extreme porn on the web. I think it might have been more of a step function between offline and online.

> They also were exposed and survived just fine

A lot didn't though. Exposure (regular or casual) to porn at a young age has some long lasting consequences. Survivorship bias. These things don't exist in a vacuum, they shape our culture.

> Their kids are probably going to be better with tech at some point.

Hmmm. I know it's from personal experience but I think the vast majority of kids don't care about tech. It's 2020. I already heard that as a kid in the 90's (you are all tech genius ! born with it !) and plenty of 20-30 are still as dumb with computers as my peers were back then.

Now, indeed, it's way easier to access porn these days than back then or even 15 years ago.

> Wasn't the Australia block circumvented within 24h by a ~14-year old kid?

That kid is an exception, not the norm.

Most will use some kind of solution recommended by their peers and that's how we end up with "streaming website" installing malwares all over the place. It's easier for people to click on a website to watch their shows than going to a torrent site (or whatever tech is used these days to share movies and tv shows).

>Exposure (regular or casual) to porn at a young age has some long lasting consequences. Survivorship bias.

[citation needed]

Fair enough, I thought about changing `can` to `may` but I forgot it wouldn't fly on HN ^^.

> Research into associations between use or non-use of condoms and consumption of pornography among adolescents varies. Some studies found that the use of pornography was associated with non-condom use for both gay (Arrington-Sanders et al., 2015) and heterosexual (Braun-Courville & Rojas, 2009; Luder et al., 2011) male adolescents, yet was not the case for female adolescents (Luder et al., 2011). One study from the Netherlands, which asked adolescents about their sexual practices and pornography use repeatedly over time, did not find an association between pornography use and condomless sex (Peter & Valkenburg, 2011c). These associations may differ depending on the content of pornographies they consume, particularly between gay and heterosexual male adolescents, as gay pornography has a much higher rate of condom use (condomless sex represents a substantial minority of gay pornographies) than heterosexual pornography (condomless sex is the overwhelming majority of content). In addition, the relative cultural context of sexuality education and condom use is also important here (i.e., in the Netherlands sexuality education is more comprehensive and attentive to issues of gender and consent in general than in Australia, see Bell, 2009).

https://aifs.gov.au/publications/effects-pornography-childre... and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6352245/

I let you follow the trails from there, just stay away from netnanny like and sexual addicts support websites as they are promoting a very specific agenda and framing things in a certain way.

So your evidence for the "lasting consequences" of pornography is that there are some studies indicating a correlation to a reduction in condom usage. This indicates to me a need for better sex education.

This doesn't justify the ominous phrase "some long lasting consequences".

If porn had no consequences then there wouldn't be a need for better sex education.

If you disagree with the fact that not using a condom can have long lasting consequences (as in getting pregnant or getting an std) then I don't think we should debate the subject any longer.

This is disingenuous.

> If porn had no consequences then there wouldn't be a need for better sex education.

This is ridiculous. We'd need comprehensive sex education whether or not anyone watches porn. Before porn was trivially available online, teenagers still had plenty of sex. Sexual consent was still widely misunderstood too (and still is).

Of course pregnancy is a long lasting consequence, but if it is addressed by a program we need even without porn, it's irrelevant to porn.

> Exposure (regular or casual) to porn at a young age has some long lasting consequences.

If all you had in mind was condom usage and pregnancy, this is a bizarre choice of phrasing.

> This is ridiculous. We'd need comprehensive sex education whether or not anyone watches porn.

I don't follow. Of course sex ed is need and I believe it should be updated to take porn into account (if it's not already there).

> If all you had in mind was condom usage and pregnancy, this is a bizarre choice of phrasing.

Of course not, but I can't go around citing every publications or experts under the sun that points to cultural changes and implications on the children's upbringing.

Now I believe the debate is wrongly framed from the beginning. Children aren't teenagers, some culture have varying definitions for children, teenagers, adults, etc. and “porn” is way too generic (softcore, bdsm, gonzo, mutilation, etc.) to encompass the whole situation. Saying it's fine for children to watch porn won't fly when you hear about some kind of porn some people are consuming.

AFAIC I believe parents should take care to protect children from porn watching/accident, explain things sooner than previous generations (this is a change brought in by the total availability of porn content) did. There should be a mention in sex education about porn and how and why it paints some very specific sexual intercourse behaviour in specific ways and why it's not necessarily what's expected from a partner, etc.

I do agree and believe a government filter won't have any meaningful impact though.

We should acknowledge it's not a widely studied field, especially as exposing minors to hardcode pornography is not legal in most places. Having any evidence of studied effect is already pretty good in my book.

Outside of this specific question, current pornography landscape is already controversial regarding its effect on society regarding exploitation of the actors, gender bias projection affecting a range of fields including rape trials.

If adults can be ill affected by current porn production, is it a stretch to apply the same conclusion to children ? I'd argue it should at least be vetted as appropriate, the criteria for that being left to the parents.

Social bullshit around private life is much more destructive there. I once bought an antiseptic and the cashier gave me a weird look. Guess why. Because as an antiseptic one of its uses was treatment of STDs and the cashier obviously knew it.

Wouldn't the solution here be encouraging condom use in heterosexual pornography! The cat is out of the bag, so to speak.

Everytime it gets on the table you have a strong backlash from the industry though.

I think the burden of proof should be the other way around. The desire for sex is one of the most fundamental instincts that we have. Who can really say that their first sexual encounters don't stick with them for life? Internet porn is a radical shift in how young people are experiencing sex during important developmental years. Why wouldn't it have a long lasting effect?

No, there have been claims for decades about the harms of pornography. There should be enough evidence for detractors against pornography consumption to use. The burden is proof is on them.

You can personally believe in mythical consequences, but it's not a good enough reason to write sweeping laws at the cost of infocalypse.

Have you looked at Pompei? Honestly between that and "fertility relics" not having access to pornography may be the unhealthy anomally.

> Exposure (regular or casual) to porn at a young age has some long lasting consequences. Survivorship bias. These things don't exist in a vacuum, they shape our culture.

The same could be said for Facebook or vaping or mobile phones in general. New forms of stimulating the brain always have interesting side effects. If we knee-jerk banned this kind of stuff because it’s unknown and might be dangerous, we’d still be living in the dark ages.

I think that the GP comment that kids are smart enough to get porn stands. Kids are social, so even if one kid isn’t technically inclined, some of their friends will be. I recall that access to porn was a bragging point amongst my friend groups in mid 1990s, before Internet porn was even that common.

If you are a parent and you have Internet access you are straight-up naive if you think anything the government can do will “protect” your child from online porn. Just get over it.

> The same could be said for Facebook or vaping or mobile phones in general. New forms of stimulating the brain always have interesting side effects. If we knee-jerk banned this kind of stuff because it’s unknown and might be dangerous, we’d still be living in the dark ages.

Well... the same is said about Facebook and mobile phones (attention economy, media addiction, etc.) and vaping carries long lasting consequences if you use nicotine and or other substances.

We are far past the point of knee-jerk reactions regarding mobile phones and facebook usage.

> I think that the GP comment that kids are smart enough to get porn stands. Kids are social, so even if one kid isn’t technically inclined, some of their friends will be. I recall that access to porn was a bragging point amongst my friend groups in mid 1990s, before Internet porn was even that common.

Which makes it harder to type pornsomething.com into a browser. So not "kids" but "one of them". And his methods might not be the safest/easiest (see my comment about pirate streaming website).

> If you are a parent and you have Internet access you are straight-up naive if you think anything the government can do will “protect” your child from online porn. Just get over it.

You are calling me naive and claiming I believe the government will protect child from porn and that I support the whole thing. All things that are wrong. Then you proceed to tell me to get over something I am not endorsing or promoting.

That's uncalled for.

I’m actually not calling you anything, my statement was a general statement regarding the efficacy of government regulations on Internet speech as a means of “protecting children” which always end up being 100% ineffective and 100% disingenuous. I apologize if it came off as a personal attack; that was not my intent.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocal...

Okay, I did took it personally but I shouldn't have.

The average Joe today can't even type facebook.com in the address bar, let alone anything else. One day Chrome will remove the address bar and few will notice.

Currently telegram is becoming place for movies and porn.

How many people will switch from porn sites to curated collections of porn on file sharing networks or from friends?

Absolutely none, people will just use a VPN or TOR.

Before that they'll use simpler methods. Twitter and Reddit have all the categories you'd ever need. And they won't get blocked / filtered for technical reasons.

For the purpose of access to porn, paying for a VPN is quite similar to paying for a porn site account: not a popular choice, even if it makes sense.

> They also were exposed and survived just fine

That remains to be seen really. Internet porn is a completely different thing to finding a porn mag in a bush one day. The kids who have grown up with easily accessible internet porn are only just reaching maturity. We already know that birth rates are decreasing, sperm rates are decreasing, impotence in young, health men is increasing, single mothers are increasing. It doesn't bode well.

Speaking from experience I think access to internet porn is hugely damaging for young men. Men are naturally polygamous and want to mate with as many women as possible. Porn provides a simulation of that but with instant gratification and no concern for feelings of another person and all that stuff that comes along with a real relationship. Many men are finding that having sex with a single woman of average attractiveness just doesn't cut it.

But I have no idea what to do about it barring maybe a full Butlerian Jihad style expunction.

"Many men are finding that having sex with a single woman of average attractiveness just doesn't cut it."

Given that ~30% of young men are sexless and only ~15% of young women are sexless in the previous year, that just reeks of 3d wave feminism bullshit.

Just as men are polyamorous, women are hypergamous, but nobody dares try to limit that.

If we want normal birthrates and normal involvment from young men, we should: eliminate tax havens, tax, tax and tax some more owning more than one house, eliminate education borrowing, have affordable/public healthcare and education.

Have a hard, data driven look of the population self-sustainability of cities, and tax cities that benefit from influx of population, and use that money to develop areas that have higher birth rates.

Both suggestions from both of you don't fit with my observations at all. People that do actually found families are overwhelmingly faithful in monogamous relationships, complete penguin style with house, dog and kids. Yes, yes, of course every second couple has a secret BDSM-basement and countless affairs... or maybe not. I think the evolutionary explanation we often hear are mostly horseshit to be honest and wouldn't even make sense since humans need decades to mature.

The only trend I see is that people not married by 30 mostly aren't going to do it later and in many cases the men and women don't even want a relationship anymore. The sudden decision of settling down after having countless relationships is certainly a lifestyle lie to yourself and others. Just accept that marriage might not be for you, which is completely fine. Contrary to popular belief there is no pope forcing you to marry anyone. Some say there is societal pressure, but your mom and dad aren't society.

Maybe these impressions actually do stem from porn although I don't really believe that either. Lifestyle choice seem to be primarily influenced by class and education. Maybe porn consumption is too, but I doubt it.

Polygamous men are just alpha males, obviously not all men are alpha, they just have broader visibility.

"I think the evolutionary explanation we often hear are mostly horseshit to be honest and wouldn't even make sense since humans need decades to mature."

There is overwhelming evidence for those explanations, both scientifically, anecdotally and empirically -- just take an average looking 25 year old male and make him ask 100 random women on the street if they would like to have sex with him and I guarantee, there will be 0 willing women.

Then take an average looking 25 year old woman and make her ask 100 men if they want to have sex with her, and I also guarantee, 80+ men will be willing to do so right then and there(not in public, obviously).

In any culture, in any country.

Nothing you've said contradicts what I said. Male polygamy and female hypergamy go hand in hand. These two strategies evolved together. You can't have one without the other.

Many of the 30% of sexless men have voluntarily withdrawn from the game for various reasons. Being able to satisfy their urges at home is a big one. This withdrawal just allows polygamy/hypergamy to enter society again. This is, after all, the natural order of things. Marriage and monogamy were just human inventions.

I think you've got cause and effect backwards.

Men are withdrawing because they are not being selected by women. Freed from social pressures that used to act as a brake on hypergamy, women are following their natural instinct to pursue the top 10-20% of men.

Unfortunately, taken to its natural conclusion this leaves a huge chunk of people unhappy. Lower status men are sexless and unloved, and most women are unsatisfied because there aren't enough high status men to go around.

Excessive porn use is a symptom of this, not the cause.

>Given that ~30% of young men are sexless

Wouldn't this be an argument in GP's favour?

Only if you thought the problem were that the standards of young men are too high.

I'd wager the problems are more related to self-confidence, the ease in which you can avoid social interactions, and the root issue that you don't get laid as a man until you learn how to approach and talk to women. Some men never even learn how.

The simple economics of sex (men having to pursue women, women being the selectors, just like in the rest of the animal kingdom) explains most of it.

90% of the men who lack confidence, lack confidence for a good reason.

Surely if it was just about confidence in itself, evolution and sexual selection would have made all men super confident by now.

The truth is men are mostly obsolete and worthless by the standard values that have been in place since the discovery of agriculture -- phisical labor is a lot less valuable thanks to mecanization and automation, the police, professional army, social wellfare have taken away a big chunk of what made men valuable before.

Are you sure all of these trends aren't better explained by rock'n'roll or rap music, violent video games, "chemicals", too much/not enough meat in the diet or linguistic change? Because I'm sure I can find some reactionary who is.

Their kids are probably going to be better with tech at some point.

Are they? Just because a kid uses snapchat and their iphones a lot doesn't meant they're technically savy.

Really, what distinguish a technical person from a "normal" person is a certain fearlessness when it comes to technology.

Well, true that certain systems hinder you in becoming proficient with software, even if these are called "accessibility features".

But if there is a goal I am sure they will get crafty pretty quickly.

Agreed. We all grew up with books but few of us know anything about printing and binding.

I've seen exactly that fearlessness with my six-year old twins when they get a hold of my phone or iPad. They've found features I didn't even know existed. They also are really adaptable. My wife, who is used to using either her iPad or her surface for computing has, despite a much longer span of using mouse/trackpad driven selection, developed a hard to break habit of tapping the screen on my MacBook. My kids, when we switched them to the MacBook for their virtual class meetings, adapted to using the trackpad without a moment's hesitation. They were also infinitely better than any of my co-workers have been about muting/unmuting themselves appropriately during videoconferences, as have their classmates. They're just learning to read still but once they've unlocked that achievement, I can only imagine what they'll be capable of doing.

Hijacking the thread to say: make sure they've got access to something with exposed innards. Windows is enough of a patched-together mess that it's a good candidate (I'd argue it's better (more messy) now than it was when I cut my teeth on it), but a 'nix with systemd, a web server or a low-voltage electronics kit would do nicely.

> Their kids are probably going to be better with tech at some point.

For all the anecdotes about kids overcoming this or that technical, majority of kids has astonishingly little knowledge.

But kids pass information around when there's motivation. When I was in high school, I didn't have a computer or access to BBS sites, but I had friends who did and that's how, for example, I ended up with an 800 number I could use to make free long distance calls and a binder full of Apple ][ software.

> They also were exposed and survived just fine

Most people also survived driving without a seatbelt before it became illegal.

Just because something is not dangerous or damaging in 100% of cases does not mean it’s not problematic or should not be made slightly less convenient to access. That prevention is not 100% effective also does not mean it will have 0 positive effect.

I’m still against age filters like this though, because they tend to also block access to legitimate sex education and info about HBT issues that can be life saving for teenagers.

Nobody is subjected to anything online. You choose what you receive.

Actually, there's a really good example that disproves this in this video on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

That doesn't disprove it. A random link on the internet is understood to be Schrödinger's Porn. A random link to YouTube, on the other hand, is a much more family-friendly Schrödinger's RickRoll.

>A random link to YouTube, on the other hand, is a much more family-friendly Schrödinger's RickRoll.

Except when it's not. The only way to find out is to open the box. Er, I mean click the link.

Others may be people that somehow 'peeked in that box' enough times they didn't want to do it again and their local memory has stored the URL and associated it with a negative outcome. URL shortener's totally destroy that learnt ability.

There's kind of a reason people came up with the term "risky click of the day" and now there's 'NSFL' (Not Safe For Life), which is extremely worrying.

Anyway, I got upvoted which means it still worked, and I got to legitimitely rickroll someone on HN and they appreciated the lesson. Woohoo.

One of the problems with the software engineers solution to these kinds of problems is that create a plugin that checks whether the url resolves to the rickroll video or not. The problem is definitely solved, but now the computer/browser is slower for everyday use. Also the problem is still easily recreatable at a different level of abstraction. (e.g. aforementioned URL shorteners or copying the rickroll video to another location) <-- this is the really hard problem to solve and we haven't even used encryption yet.

When it reaches the level of the politicians 'protect the children' where its about votes and appearing to do the right thing but none of the people understand the implementation problems and we discuss the absurdity of it on HN.

You do however get to be technically correct. It's not a proof. It's more like circumstantial evidence in experiential form.

You’re focused just on those looking to circumvent these blocks knowingly. Where there’s a will, there is a way, no doubt. I recently had an elementary-grade child stumble upon pornhub through a google search. I am ultimately responsible for this, and we now have more than one content filtering service in place, including one we pay for.

I don’t think it is too much to ask to have those who want to view this content to be the ones who have to jump through hoops.

I’m not that old, and the ease of access to adult content is much greater than when I was my childrens’ ages. The fact that it is so easy now and that technology is so ingrained in their everyday lives makes it that much more important to creat safe spaces for them.

My hypothesis is just that they don't want to legalize selling pornography to teenagers, because teenagers are so horny that they'd become a big market for porn (sort of like they're a big market for casual-mobile gacha games) and then pornographers would start making porn targeted at teenagers. Which, uh.

Do you know what porn today is like? There's so much of it and a lot of it is highly stimulating, full of interesting and unattainable-in-real-life kinks. Maybe you were exposed, but it was not likely as accessible as it is for kids/people now. Unless you have experienced the pit of despair, going through porn addiction, it's easy to think that people are going to survive it fine just like we did.

A lot of people can enjoy a healthy amount of porn and then move on from it because they were able to get a real life partner or something. Many are destroyed by it, because they have no other option and simply go downhill from there.

But it's true, you can't just ban it either. That's definitely what I'm not asking for.

I have a porn addiction since I was 14, not really fine.

https://pmohackbook.org/

This helped me.

The amount and type of porn available now is completely different from what we grew up with, there’s no comparison at all.

Does a greater amount of more varied type somehow make it more damaging?

I should point out that very explicit pornographic content that is now taboo in our society including bestiality, incest, and so on has existed for thousands of years. I'd much rather my kids be looking at pornhub than some of the things the Greeks and Romans were making...

What “exists” is not very relevant, the difference is that when i was a kid you’d have to steal a magazine from a shop and it would have a bunch of photos of naked women, sometimes having sex. Now endless amounts of porn is available at the click of a button, of course that’s much worse.

"They also were exposed and survived just fine"

That's true and all but I wouldn't downplay the devastating effects of pornography addiction during adolescence through college and into adult life and how this unfettered all-access pass to sexual media can start to effect your social life and education negatively when your prefrontal cortex is constantly lit up to get that sweet dopamine fix from moving pixels on a screen.

Why go out into the real world and put in the work to be rewarded in the flesh when you can get 10x the novelty and fantasy of anything you desire at the click of a button? (generally speaking). Our brains never evolved to handle the onslaught of readily available hyper-pleasurable vices (e.g. drugs, alcohol, social media likes, porn, etc) that create positive, self-reinforcing neural pathways for addiction that are extremely hard to extinguish on your own and offer you an escape from reality and discomfort.

Not saying everyone experiences this, but it seems irresponsible to let young kids create and reinforce these addiction pathways in their reward centers of their brain before their brain and pre-frontal cortex is fully developed in their 20's. I know I struggle with this stuff from an early age after stumbling on magazines and VHS cassettes at a too young age to understand what this was doing to my young brain now looking back, the hooks have set in deep.

There's plenty of scientific evidence to suggest that porn is not that great : https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/relevant-research-and-articl...

I actually think that porn can have a detrimental effect on people, not permanent, but also not always the best. Will government regulation fix it? No. Kids now are having less sex, they are more isolated, and males are now having way less sex in general, so what fills in the place? Porn. If you get rid of porn and not have any changes in society, they will not magically go away.

If you or a loved one has a problem with porn: https://pmohackbook.org/

The teeth brushing thing is funny there was an onion video that said smoking is gay. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82x9pzHkHK4

Adult websites want brownie points and also don't like nonpayers, but mess with their revenue and you'll get a push back.

There's basically one company that runs all the major porn sites (Mindgeek). That company was going to be provider of the age verification system the UK government looked in to that's now been scrapped. The company also sells a VPN for circumventing blockers including the age verification systems. It's really a brilliant three-sided-market business.

The problem is that a lot people expect porn to be free now, because there are so many free videos it's enough for all but the most dedicate porn watcher. This move has nothing do with "protecting children" and everything to do with the porn industry realising that they've given their product away for so long that the best way they can make money now is by lobbying governments to make people pay again.

Idk, but assume they could also make a good buck from selling the data they collect?

Well similarly, I can access BBC iPlayer from outside the U.K. too. It takes reconnecting to a VPN several times and streaming over a patchy connection, but I can do it. Does that make the BBC's geolocking pointless? No, because most people can't and even I am discouraged to do it because the experience is such a hassle.

And in this case even the kids who can access porn: making it difficult enough that their 12 year old selves can't but their 15 year old selves can is a success. Or making it something they can plan out, but not do in the spur of the moment is also a success.

People on HN always seem to misunderstand the point of these measures.

They're not there to make it impossible for anyone under the age of 18 to ever see pornographic content. They exist to make sure that porn isn't pushed at children who don't want to see it. It wasn't that long ago that pornographic ads were common on some ad networks or in email spam. It's this accidental stumbling upon porn that the measures aim to stop.

The blocks are always described in the strongest possible terms by the politicians pushing them because:

1) It makes the public think politicians are taking strong action against poor behaviour

2) It gives the politicians a stronger bargaining position: implement good voluntary age restrictions or we'll put in place a stupid filter.

Where is porn pushed onto anyone in the internet now? I don't think I seen anything remotely porn-like without looking for it.

Quite common if you were to watch a movie online for free. Not on Amazon Prime or Netflix of course, but not all movies that I am interested in is available on Netflix, Amazon Prime in my region.

You mean those streaming sites, where the page is 3/4 advertisements? Yeah, I image those have porn ads, but adblock helps there too.

I also do not see them being the kind of sites to comply with something like this.

Streaming is cancer, block all streaming sites, especially Netflix.

Don't see what's wrong with streaming per se. Of course, this is assuming you can cache it if you want to watch it multiple times – which you can't if you have certain kinds of DRM.

Is it merely coincidental that the sites where you're most likely to find pornographic advertisements happen to be websites for pirating media? Which aspect of these websites are politicians truly clutching their pearls over? The part about morality and kids, or the part about media corporations and money?

To the cynic in me, the answer is obvious.

My opinion as a father of two: Putting up roadblocks to accessing these materials is good. Some things really are damaging to young minds.

However, I'm not stupid. At some point they will get exposed to this stuff and if my children put in the effort to learn how to bypass those roadblocks, then great, at least they learned something in the process.

If you make chocolate milk just a little harder to reach, kids at scale will be reaching for it less, and we're just talking about chocolate milk. You make returning your product just a few minutes harder and fewer people will be getting their money back.

I mean, before the internet kids were generally not allowed to buy porn, and yet I remember we managed to get VHS, games, magazines, and even erotic comics as minors.

Interestingly, it seems if one politician discovers fire, it would die with them.

Surely, by now, one politician has learned how technology works and has started the process of teaching others?

Your assumption relies on politicians working cooperatively rather than as sock puppets for whichever interest has the most "donations".

Some politicians, like some journalists, have integrity. There are high pressures on both to not have integrity, and yet they persist.

Umm. In fact, most adult site revenue comes from non-payers, they view ads and help keep that count up. If they are allowing Chinese traffic (and most do), they'll take anything.

In most countries pornography is restricted to people over 18 by law.

This was not too difficult to enforce when access was mostly in person, but it has become difficult now that access is mostly online.

If society agrees that young people below a certain age should not have access to pornography then it is reasonable, even necessary, to try to implement ways to enforce that restriction online.

Alcohol and cigarettes are restricted to people above 18/21 in most places. Yet somehow I see 14-15 year olds drinking and smoking (even weed, which is illegal).

I think I first saw a porn magazine before I was 10.

Where there's a will, there's a way. You can't use technology for this, because there will always be a will, so they'll ALWAYS find a way.

The point is that proportion of young adults that will access to porn will change from 100% to ~25%. Of course people will find a way, but the question is how much effort will they put in before they give up. If the effort barrier is too high, you will cull off some people - the purpose of this legislation.

Why would it change? It's not like officially not being able buy alcohol stops anyone who wants to drink from drinking. We can pretend that this is the biggest danger that people under 18 face, but let's be real, much worse things can happen to them, than watching porn.

This shouldn't be solved at the government level, but at the family level. By parents talking to kids.

Also, unless they implement something like the PRC's firewall, it will a 100% be an inept solution that's easy to get around.

I think many men today have their brains altered from watching too much excessive porn. Fetishes develop and normal healthy relationships become problematic due to performance issues. There are many worse thing than porn, yes, but to be healthy well rounded adult, it does not help (at least excessive). Family can help, but some topics are taboo in many families, especially when man ego is in question. If you could not statisfy your wife, would you speak with your mother for help?

Yes, you can say it should start from young age, but both parents are at work and kids are left with high-speed internet and tablets. They react positively to porn and can get addicted - its a single click away. Hard to prevent that, eh.

I think we will witness the true effect of porn on males mind in future.

I generally agree with you about the effects of porn, especially on children, it definitely had an effect on me.

But, this kind of age verification bullshit will not help anyone. The politicians will be able to say they did something, and the parents will feel that they don't have to worry about this, making their children even more vulnerable.

I think porn addiction, and its effects are a societal issue, that can not be solved by legislation, only by making it a non-taboo topic, and talking about inside the family.

Edit, ps: your replies are marked as dead for some reason when you make them, and I had to vouch for it before being able to reply.

I share your concerns. However I have a hard time believing that politicians who claim to also share these concerns are being sincere.

If it were 100% -> 25% I could see the value/justification. Even if it were 100% -> 90% there's value there. But these restrictions will not have any impact whatsoever. Anyone who wants access will have it regardless of age verification measures.

I remember when cigarette vending machines were banned. I'm sure it had 0.000000 (repeating of course) percent effect on the availability of cigarettes to kids who were motivated to get them. Same with alcohol regulations. Same with weed. Anyone with even an ounce of motivation can and will bypass.

Your reply is a strawman.

I wrote that if there is a legal restriction on pornography (or cigarettes, or alcohol, or whatever) then it is reasonable to make efforts to enforce that restriction.

There is no enforcement that is 100% effective and some people always find a way to break the law. That's another issue and arguing on this is a strawman argument to my point.

It is absolutely impossible to enforce. The internet certainly makes it easier for kids, but such age barriers are only a minor inconvenience really.

Officially 18+ video games and movies can also be only accessed by adults, yet in my school a 13 years old kid literally ran a black market for horror movies and games like Call of Duty. It won't be any different for porn even if the government goes as far with blocking as the CCP.

> If society agrees that young people below a certain age should not have access to pornography then it is reasonable, even necessary, to try to implement ways to enforce that restriction online.

I think you're skipping a step here. It was reasonable when everyone involved was in the same jurisdiction and bound by the same laws.

Now that's just fundamentally not true. The question is, is this feasible today? If it is not feasible, I have a hard time calling it reasonable.

I am not skipping a step. On the contrary I start from the start: Society does not want that young people access pornography.

This is the starting point and everyone seems to ignore it and to immediately jump to strawman arguments about the feasibility of absolute enforceability.

If the starting point holds, then it is reasonable to try to enforce that restriction.

Only then does the issue of the feasibility become relevant.

Enforcement is always a balance between cost and benefit and is never 100% effective for anything. This is not an argument.

It is feasible to implement effective measures to enforce age restrictions online. The degree of effectiveness depends on how far we're willing to go. I think at the moment the aim is to discourage a significant enough portion of the people, knowing full well that the most motivated will find a way around it.

> is the starting point and everyone seems to ignore it and to immediately jump to strawman arguments about the feasibility of absolute enforceability.

That does seem like the natural progression (save for the strawman part).

Have desire to do something -> evaluate feasibility -> if it's feasible do it.

Perhaps that's not as standard of a flow as I originally thought. That would actually explain a number of laws on the books now that I think about it.

Note the word 'absolute'.

The 'argument' seems to be that there is not point enforcing the law because it is not feasible to enforce it absolutely.

This logic is obviously fallacious as is reducing enforcement to absolute enforcement.

I also find it disappointing that I was flagged for pointing this out. Strawman arguments are very common. Sometimes they are not used consciously but it is useful to call a cat a cat.

> The 'argument' seems to be that there is not point enforcing the law because it is not feasible to enforce it absolutely.

My argument was more that it is stupid and undermines the credibility of the government to pass laws that it cannot enforce. It's that they were passed in the first place that bothers me personally. I'm not holding anything against someone whose job it it to enforce the law having to enforce a stupid law.

We already saw this with the pirate bay, you can't block information. In fact, the harder you try, the funnier it is for people to find ways around it.

There's also the question of profit -

currently, people of all ages can easily access commercial pornography which then profits from the activity (either through advertising revenue or overt sales).

So in effect, due to not requiring and not enforcing age restrictions, pornographers are profiting from distributing pornography to minors, which is a crime and should be a crime.

Even if this fails to block access by minors, it will certainly to a much larger extent block the ability of pornographers to profit from illegally distributing adult content to them, and with that, the potential incentive to market to them and the attendant cultural knock-on effects this situation creates.

The way you word this is kind of problematic. I very much doubt the guys at pornhub are slouching on their throne of evil, drinking from a chalice of deceit, while scheming how to reach all the kids for increased profit.

In China porn is illegal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_China Its freely available.

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