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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

I've always been a bit extreme on this but I more than ever believe that it's insane that we consider that leaving teenagers with unsupervised internet access is reasonable.

Maybe I'm prude or naive but I remember vividly when I first saw a pornographic movie at like around 17. It really shook me at the time. I wasn't traumatized or anything but it made a strong impact on me.

These days I expect that most teens experience this at like 12yo on their smartphones. Last week I was linked a reddit video of some guy dying in absolutely gruesome circumstance due to an industrial accident. And then there's the constant influx of disinformation. Did you know that Hydroxychloroquine cures HIV? I saw a Youtube video claiming just that yesterday.

Leaving a kid on the internet is like living them on a shaddy part of town for hours at a time. I'm old enough that I only had internet at home when I turned 18, in hindsight I feel like I dodged a bullet.

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Just wondering, how old are you?

I'm 30, so myspace and Facebook showed up only once I was in high school, but everything you describe was still available on the web before social media. Shock sites were huge (goatse, tubgirl, etc), and I remember watching a beheading with a chainsaw by a Mexican cartel. And of course porn was around too.

The difference with social media is the "keeping up with the Joneses" except now it's your entire life, not just your literal neighbor. Way more damaging long term, since you actually know these people and can relate to them. Yeah the beheading was shocking, but I'm not hanging out with cartels regularly. Just a completely different thing.

There's a difference between something being available somewhere on the Internet (when Internet access was 56K from a desktop computer featuring prominently in your family room) and having it shared with you specifically to your smartphone.

I never get anything gore shared to me, but I think it's also because I wouldn't stay friends with anyone who sends me that. I think it's weird that, as a society, we're more OK with violence than sex.

Consider how many people saw the shooting of the Trump supporter storming the capitol or the killing of George Floyd. I can't imagine that level of exposure in 2005 or earlier. And this is just gore; we're not talking about sex (also, we don't have to choose between the two, so I don't understand the dichotomous argument).

You think more people saw the shooting of the Trump supporter or George Floyd than saw images from Desert Storm, 9-11, or school shootings? They are all horrible, but I have seen a lot worse stuff pre-2005 than after.

No, I'm not arguing that more people saw footage of those two incidents versus the universe of gore preceding 2005; rather, I'm arguing that gore is far more prevalent and accessible after 2005 than before. The images that we saw before were generally censored of gore--we saw night-vision imagery of bombs raining down on Baghdad, but we didn't see the actual death. Similarly, we saw the towers fall, but most of the actual death was censored (the worst I can recall were people falling from the towers from such a great distance that they appeared to be specs).

This. Im 29 and share the same experience.

And we can even go further back; have people checked, old black & white cartoon? Some of them are so blatantly propaganda/politica/visual horrific that they wouldn't even be aired for 15 y.o today. If you take a closer look, even Tom & Jerry is quite violent, and most Japanese animation that air on kids TV-channel back then also, very sexual.

And these things were airing on TV, broadcasting at a specific time and all you had to do as a kid was to push a couple of buttons to access it.

Well, in Spain I could see Bulma's breasts on manga an Shizuka one's as a dark joke in Doraemon. No one gave a shit, we have far worse real life problems in the 90's.

Of course there was always violence and sexual content on TV and elsewhere, but comparing Japanese anime and Tom and Jerry to stuff like https://www.reddit.com/r/DeadorVegetable/ (NSFL) or the hardcore porn you can find basically everywhere online is disingenuous. I don't think I'm very squeamish but there's stuff online that still profoundly disturbs me in my mid thirties. Meanwhile, and at the risk of bragging a little, I can watch any Tom and Jerry easily even late at night and still sleep soundly. Hardcore, I know.

You couldn't see the surveillance footage a guy being dismembered by a lathe or weird Japanese rape porn in 1080p by "pushing a couple of buttons" before the internet. Well, at least not where I grew up...

No one is comparing it, the other poster suggested completely restricting access to the internet because this content exists.

I have distinct memories of a website Defvac or Defecation Vacation. Morgue photos and other terrible content. This was between 1995 and 1998 I think?

A random thought: What if the filter back then (I’m 34) helped? Most of the people spending significant time online back then were some degree of nerd (I hope that classification doesn’t offend anyone). Nowadays, it’s everyone.

During the early years of the German equivalent of high school, most of my classmates would spend days without being online once.

Another big difference is constant availability. A decade ago, the moment you walked away from your computer the shock sites were memories. Twenty years ago, the moment you walked away from your phone most of the social drama were memories. The most that most of us do now is stuff it into our pockets.

Aside from the psychological differences with teens, we also have to consider that they aren't being exposed to this environment "in moderation". They don't really have the opportunity to think about their responses to it.

This, I believe, is the largest difference between today and twenty years ago.

That, and the pervasiveness of social media. Myspace, for example, was huge. But unlike today’s social media, maybe 25% of your AFK circles would hang out there, not 95% like today.

This is true. We didn't even have wifi in school until my last year there (2007-2008). If you wanted to use a computer you had to go to the library or be in a classroom that had a few in the back.

I'm only a couple of years older than you are. Some of my friends had internet at home well before me during high school, but I only got it when I moved after High School (my parents weren't so much anti-tech are completely outside of it).

So while I very well remember goatse, tubgirl and rotten.com, I only discovered those as an adult.

Also note that I wasn't singling out social media here. It's the web as a whole that seems very unsuited for a teenager without supervision, IMO.

I swear that beheading video is a form of generational anchor in the same way that the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 soundtrack is something a certain group (early millenial/late genx) is.

>Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 soundtrack

Ouch. Right in the nostalgia :)

Yeah its funny I feel like the "meme" internet for teenagers was way worse if shocking content is worse when I was young. There were so many NSFL websites too like stileproject, rotten, ogrish, etc. that everyone knew about and so much weird stuff on the pirating websites and gif sites back then that you don't really see anymore outside of the dark web.

I'm pretty convinced that just a "dumb" web 1.0 site of shocking content is way better for your mental health than a handful of giant corporations honing in on your psyche and exploiting the weaknesses of the human mind.

It is this weird balance because I owe literally everything I know about programming to unsupervised internet access: asking questions in IRC rooms, finding random programs on random websites, posting on obscure forums, etc.

I was able to find some wonderful communities, like the iPhone jailbreaking community on IRC, which completely changed my life and put me on the path I am on now. I was also on Twitter in the early days, too, which was the primary way that the iOS development community communicated. Facebook allowed me to connect with my high school robotics community, as well.

Communities like this existed before my time with Flash games, Neopets, MySpace, etc. and continue to this day, with the Minecraft modding community, Roblox game building community, etc.

But at the same time I also agree that social media has become incredibly toxic and addictive, and we don’t give anyone any tools to navigate it. I ultimately quit social media entirely, but my younger sister spends 3.5 hours a day on social media. I think this is a relatively new beast, and not inherent to the internet itself.

To strongman the OP, would your parents have stopped you from talking about programming on IRC if they had observed it? Would you stop your kids, if you observed them? Watching your kid's internet use doesn't mean not letting them use the internet, it means applying your developed adult discernment to judge between healthy and unhealthy uses.

I'm not OP, but it's not entirely about the content being viewed. A lot of unsupervised online access takes the form of large swathes of time.

Not every parent would necessarily want their child online for 3 - 5+ hours, especially doing things like participating in communities.

Not OP but I was in a similar situation. They certainly wouldn't have encouraged or would have stopped me from talking to strangers online. I understand why, you have to precautions against things like grooming, but on the internet and especially behind text no one knows if you're a 12 year old or a 22 year old with poor writing skills.

There's another side to this, though. Letting kids roam the internet can give ones who might otherwise be doomed to become misfits an opportunity to find community. Being a queer kid pre-Internet, for example, sucked, and the Web rolling out to households changed a lot of kids' lives. And we have a poor cultural memory of what that experience used to be like, because, before the rise of online communities, a big part of being queer - especially being a queer kid - was being subjected to systematic erasure.

I'm not sure how you balance those two things. My sense, though, is that the balance was better 20, 25 years ago, when the Internet had more small, individualized communities. Most of them have since been squashed by the rise of the social media oligopoly.

Before the internet we were passing video tapes/films, magazines, and prints around with porn and gore. Pre-teen me saw a lot of the kind of things you mention before the internet was a thing. The students at my school had pseudo-competitions for who could get the best porn/gore, earning kudos for the bloodiest gore or "hottest" porn. Often the lines would blur whens someone found scat or snuff but that's a different matter.

Later on in life, I think everyone knew "a guy" at work that had all kinds of taboo material. The Weird Eddies or Creepy Colins of the world had a black-market snatched from them when the internet got popular.

I’ve been saying that the internet was designed by engineers, for engineers. I don’t mean this literally, but in the sense that methodical, reasonable adults built out these systems without thinking about how the average person, let alone teenager, would be using it.

And at this point even a lot of engineers I know fall into the traps of addiction and echo chambers quite readily. I find of Tristan Harris’s “pointing supercharged AI at our brains” line to be accurate.

There's definitely some bad things I saw too soon on the internet but if I'd not had access at a young age to it and my own computer I absolutely would not be where I am currently. There are many bad influences, but in my case I'd take all of them for the things I learned in my journey. I'd prefer of course to find ways to minimize them but not by way of abstinence

>Leaving a kid on the internet is like living them on a shaddy part of town for hours at a time. I'm old enough that I only had internet at home when I turned 18, in hindsight I feel like I dodged a bullet.

I grew up with uneducated parents who are susceptible to believing bullshit peddled by cult leaders. I lived in their business, without access to other people since we lived in a business area with no other residents.

Access to the internet was the only way I was able to interact with educated adults, and I attribute it to as the main reason for my economic and social success as an adult.

There was also lots of gore/pornography/other explicit stuff, although social media was more limited to instant messengers and photo/video content of yourself was not a thing yet. But the upside was almost limitless with the access to all the information, experts, and ability to interact with someone you can learn something from.

Agreed. It's one thing to say that you don't want to shelter your child; totally reasonable, kids should be exposed to a wide variety of experiences. But by definition kids lack experience, and if you expose them to a distorted image of reality, then unless you make an effort to point out that distortion, then they will rightfully conflate the distorted reality with reality.

To use your example as an analogy, most porn with any production value at all will show a drastically distorted depiction of what sex is actually like. To be raised on a diet of unrealistic porn will not leave you merely ill-prepared for an actual sexual relationship, but will actively disillusion you when reality fails to match your expectations.

If you let your kids use social media, then you need to take steps to emphasize the hyperprocessed fiction that it represents.

On the flipside, there's increasingly more and more amateur porn. On pornhub, there are many couples making videos of themselves and getting millions of views, making a living off of this. What these people make is obviously still probably setting high expectations (good lighting, edited to cut out the awkward parts, etc), but IMO, there is a lot more amateur and realistic content out there, and it's what many people want to see. I think in the 70s, 80s and 90s porn used to be a lot more studio, and now the general trend is for more natural, less processed.

I first got access to porn when I was 12, but I heard the disclaimer, everyone told me it wasn't realistic, and I don't think it skewed my expectations too much. IMO humans learn and adapt. I don't think that porn is a threat, but I do wish there was more sex education, and maybe relationship coaching for teenagers... Teenagers need to be taught early to have realistic relationship expectations in general, how to approach someone respectfully and accept "no" for an answer, consent, etc.

It’s funny I went online in the 80s and had no supervision whatsoever. And it was pretty wild back then. I remember adults chatting with me when I was 10 and printing out and mailing me game manuals. Chat rooms with every kind of pornography and drug and explosive recipes. My parents would have been horrified and stopped it.

I survived, so maybe there are missing stories from people who didn’t. I learned lots of skills used every day for work and never did anything I’m ashamed or or criminal.

But with my own kids, I protect them more than I protected myself. I wonder about the paradox of whether I would have changed anything in my chaotic youth and whether I’m stunting my kids by sheltering them. But there’s YouTube videos of behedding that I don’t want to risk my kids’ mental health.

I feel like the paradise I envisioned after reading Heilein and Dickson and Stephenson is here now and I hate it. Now spend my time in the digital Galt’s Gulch.

I had certainly viewed my first dirty magazine long before the age of 17, as well as seen my share of violent movies and video games. When does this end? When cursing around anyone under the age of 18 becomes illegal?

The issue with the internet as is currently is more about societal pressure. Every device for the last umpteen years has come with parental controls that include filtering out NSFW-esque material. If your position is that platforms such as FB should also include these sorts of parental controls I agree, but if your position is that we should restrict kids access to the internet as a whole because they might see a boob, then I wholeheartedly disagree.

I was 12, I self learned how to google properly, write html, css and photoshop, how to avoid online scams and advertisements, eventually this self learning grew into teaching myself PHP, SQL, how to build computers, setup arch linux into a LAMP server on my own VPS. Unsupervised internet was not all bad. I probably would have avoided internet time if I was being watched by my parents. Lol

Eh. Responsible consumption of media isn't something we're magically endowed with when we turn 18. It's a skill like any other. Obviously there's a point at which children are too underdeveloped to be responsible about media consumption, but teenagers aren't idiots. If a youtube video is feeding them bullshit, they'll usually be able to tell. Not all teenagers are that savvy, mind you, but we've learned in recent years that not all adults are either.

Screens are a legit drug, and unfortunately I'm a user. It's worse for kids growing up into this, at least when I was a child screen time was limited by the kid show time slots, ofc its available 24/7, several firehoses worth at all times. Not a lot of available resources to combat this, except individual efforts Im afraid.

Quick note: It's not the kids that are fooled about Hydroxychloroquine, it's the adults. If you're taking away juniors Internet, you need to take away your parents' connections too...

Any advice on reasonable alternatives these days?

> I've always been a bit extreme on this but I more than ever believe that it's insane that we consider that leaving teenagers with unsupervised internet access is reasonable.

I grew up on the internet. I first connected with I was 11. I was first online by myself soon thereafter. I practiced writing on the internet while hanging out on the internet. I made friends on the internet. I made mistakes on the internet. I lost friends on the internet. I learned about Linux and programming on the internet. I got a job on the internet. All of this happened before I was 16. There is an old joke, one that I took to heart as a child, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog". On the internet, nobody knew (or at least cared) that I wasn't an adult. People accepted my patches, took my advice, flamed my half-baked ideas, and overall treated me as an equal.

As a young adult I started internet companies over the internet with business partners I met on the internet. I met love interests on the internet. I found new music leading to concerts, festivals, and road trips on the internet. I learned about Magic: the Gathering strategy, met a lot of friends, and coordinated cross-continent travel over the internet with people I had only interacted with via IRC.

> Maybe I'm prude or naive but I remember vividly when I first saw a pornographic movie at like around 17. It really shook me at the time. I wasn't traumatized or anything but it made a strong impact on me.

People are different. Maybe I'm a degenerate. I grew up watching The Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead. In middle school, friends would trade porno mags. A friend had the premium cable channels with "Skin-a-max" (Cinemax) playing late nights. When I first got online (at 11 years old), I had two priorities: porn and learning how to hack like I saw in some movies (Wargames, Ferris Bueler's Day Off).

Finding porn was easy since the "filters" were mostly someone who largely didn't care configuring a default search engine or maybe a DNS blacklist. Once I knew "search engine", finding more search engines that weren't filtered was easy. A couple queries about how filtering works and I knew enough to configure a different DNS resolver. It's not like I went looking for Pokemon tips and found hardcore XXX action.

In trying to learn about hacking, I stumbled onto ESR's "Hacker Howto". I took it to heart, printed it out, and pasted sections on my bedroom wall. "The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved. No problem should ever have to be solved twice. Boredom and drudgery are evil. Freedom is good. Attitude is no substitute for competence." I kept this as a mantra. I took the "Basic Hacking Skills" section as a formula. Python, C, Lisp, Perl, Java. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Learn to use a *nix? Done. I never was especially good at red team offensive security, but "how to hack" put into a search bar changed my life for the better.

> These days I expect that most teens experience this at like 12yo on their smartphones. Last week I was linked a reddit video of some guy dying in absolutely gruesome circumstance due to an industrial accident. And then there's the constant influx of disinformation. Did you know that Hydroxychloroquine cures HIV? I saw a Youtube video claiming just that yesterday.

At least in my day, we learned skepticism early on the internet. Everyone can be an asshole and most accounts would troll you. Getting razzed for your naivete in a chat room or message board was a rite of passage. Bullshit comes in a lot of flavors, and some people needed to taste the rainbow and while others were quicker on the pickup.

I could never deny others the chance to gain what I have gained by restricting their ability to access the internet.

As far as I can tell, the group that seems to be the most influenced by the sea of disinformation is the people who grew up when that wasn't how the world worked. I see far more of the middle aged/elderly crowd getting sucked into conspiracy nonsense than younger.

I think among people who grew up with the internet, there's less assumption that things are true just because someone said or wrote them. People can and do lie constantly on the internet and without evidence it's not necessarily worth believing.

That there's some "news" outlet just blatantly lying and making things up, even if it looks to be made "professionally" is not surprising to a younger person.

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For personal anectdata:

I'm late 20s and had virtually unsupervised internet access and my own personal computer from about age 8 or so, as my father brought home old parts from work and let me tinker/assemble something, and they didn't watch me too closely. (early DSL adoption meant I wasn't limited for long by speeds, either).

I pirated and played all the violent games, I downloaded lots of porn, and while I was never into "shock"/watching real death/gore, the nature of the internet was such that you were going to run across plenty of it if you spent enough time browsing, I certainly saw a lot.

I turned out to be a fine, reasonably well-adjusted adult, as did most of the friends I know who grew up similarly.

I don't know all the details of their sex lives, but I'm not aware of any winding up with unrealistic expectations from porn. Always seemed like an action movie. Exciting, but not "real".

Most of the shock stuff felt like it just made me more cautious. "That guy got one whack in the head and he died!" was a better argument against getting in a fight than the threat of parental/school punishment is. Same regarding a lot of other potential teenage risk-taking behavior, like reckless driving or getting exceptionally drunk. Watch enough people die or ruin their lives at something and you're a lot more cautious about it.

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To be clear, I'm not suggesting that it's a net positive for kids to view those things at a young age. I'm just not sure that the harm is as large or uniform as people making moral panic claims often make, either.

Also, something like a third of people lose their virginity before 16 (although it's declining) and the median age is ~17 in the US. A lot of your peers were having real-life sex when you ran across porn for the first time. Worrying about them watching porn when plenty of them are having sex.....I don't know it makes much sense at that point.

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Looking back on that time, I'm primarily concerned with how easily I was talking with random strangers in great depth than the content I was watching. While there are some internet friends from old forums and chatrooms I've kept in touch with for 15-20 years now, that I could get to know random strangers like that as a preteen obviously had potential risks. Worked out well for me and I found great communities and interests, but still.

I agree that kids shouldn’t use the internet unsupervised, but what is the alternative? We were all 15 once. It is 100% impossible to stop kids from using the internet if they want to. So what’s the alternative?

Active and available parenting, ideally starting long before the teen years where they no longer want to take advice from their parents.

Saying that it's 100% impossible to stop kids from using the internet is as true as saying that it's 100% impossible to stop kids from trying alcohol. But there's a difference between a kid getting drunk once at a party and a kid being a habitual, daily alcoholic.

As a parent you want to guide them towards healthy ways to engage with things that could otherwise destroy them in excess. Social media in moderation is fine. Social media in excess isn't, and that's where a lot of parents have left their kids (because even they don't know how to use it in moderation; society hasn't caught up yet).

> Active and available parenting, ideally starting long before the teen years where they no longer want to take advice from their parents.

This, 1000 times this. Also, leaving kids completely without supervision or using screen time/smartphones to babysit them it's easy but it's just like tech-debt and really any other form of debt. You will pay the consequences 10x during their teen years.

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