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Comment by darklion | Hacker News Reader

My guess is that because it's possible to access adult material, Apple requires a higher age rating on the App Store than Discord would like.

For instance, both the Reddit and Apollo apps are rated 17+. There's nothing "adult" about them, except that it can access adult subreddits.

So by banning adult channels, Discord is likely looking to drop the age rating on their app. A 12+ or 9+ would be more appealing and potentially allow them a broader audience, especially when trying to target the teen crowd which may have parental filters enabled on their phones.

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I think there's some misinformation in your replies about how this rating can be used.

As a parent, you can add screen time restrictions to your child's phone that prevent them from accessing apps that are above a certain rating. This is a very powerful feature, that's really hard (impossible?) to bypass without social engineering.

It's possible that discord is concerned enough with this so as to block out nsfw servers. Do they have a lot of teenagers on their platform?

Discord has a huge userbase of pre-teen and teenage gamers, so your explanation makes sense here.

I distinctly remember being able to find "adult content" at the age of 12. If I was 12 today I don't think Apple's iOS moderation would stop me either.

Aye but it helps Apple's stock ticker to block it

It's never about the actual thing haha. Americans (averaged and skewed by power) are really weird about sex

> It's never about the actual thing haha.

As a parent, it's 100% about the actual thing. Whatever the additional motivations are for Faceless Multinational Corporations to be thoughtful about it, I'm glad they are.

Before the cries of "censorship", this is about kids not stumbling about NSFW/NSFL content before they're equipped (by parents, educators, etc.) to deal with it. When they want to find it, they will be able to.

> this is about kids

But it's not just kids who use Discord (and other platforms). If you're concerned about kids accidentally discovering adult content, by all means add a parental control setting somewhere that hides any NSFW content. Then everyone else who is of legal age and equipped to deal with such content can, if they wish to do so.

I think this was brought up somewhere in a sibling thread. It would be great to have a more granular content restrictions framework that allowed for exactly this. But how to do this in a reliable, verifiable way sounds like a real challenge.

> If you're concerned about kids accidentally discovering adult content, by all means add a parental control setting somewhere that hides any NSFW content.

For sure! And thank you for the response — I just realized I must've skimmed over this very important detail (emphasis mine): "Additionally, all users on the iOS platform (including those aged 18+) will be blocked from joining AND ACCESSING NSFW servers."

Okay, that's stupid.

Have you considered not letting your children use the internet?

i've heard some weird stories from people just a little older than me who didn't have access to internet at the age of puberty.

Life of a teenager is much better with internet, including ability to access porn anytime, our predecessors were sharing erotic journals and other images with each other, just because they didn't know any better.

kids who have no interest in content like that shouldn't have unrestricted access to computers anyway, and if your child is old enough to manage his time playing games, he is old enough to figure out sex on his own the same way his parents did

I’m not sure what you’re suggesting, but FWIW my children are several years from being teenagers.

i'm simply talking about modern policies of guarding teenagers from porn, and how ridiculous they are

Ah, thanks for clarifying.

I think we'll probably have to agree to disagree that it's universally ridiculous to guard children from any kind of porn. As a parent, I'm trying to help the children I'm responsible for to develop informed, healthy attitudes about sex. Unfettered access to the deep end of the internet porn pool won't help me help them do that.

It looks better for parents, who probably will be monitoring.

Parents are generally both more worried than they should be and less equipped to act on their concerns than they need to be. In other words, it’s an annoying waste of time.

It's more about liability than deterrence.

It's not about stop. It's about showing that you tried. Do you think those "click yes if you're 18" are there to stop you? Nope, it's about protecting your ass in case some concerned patent starts complaining.

Sort of like official "I swear she was 18, officer".

more like "i swear she said she was 18"

Legitimate question: Could Discord produce two apps, e.g. "Discord Safe" and "Discord Unsafe", where the only differences are the age rating and whether the NSFW switch can be flipped? Is there anything in the rules prohibiting this?

A third party could do that, but not the same provider.

Can you clarify what you mean here? Is that a store policy?

Children would lie about their age and download NSFW-capable version awyway if both are first party.

... What are browsers rated?

17+, which is quite ridiculous of course—Safari is pre-installed and allows you to see the same websites as Chrome or Firefox

Non-Safari browsers (apparently) don’t and can’t respect iOS parental controls so of course they would be 17+.

I know you said "can't" but just to confirm, is there no iOS API to get parental control info to block stuff like this? If not, I wonder why Apple doesn't provide that option.

o/w, "Safari supports parental controls" argument is BS.

Probably the same reason why other browsers can't use adblock addons while Safari can or why other browsers had crippled JavaScript performance until recently. Apple is afraid of losing Safari market share, so they're making preferential treatment to it whenever possible.

You can put parental controls in place to block adult sites with safari.

Yes, but parents can turn on content filtering within iOS onto Safari, as well as allow or block websites individually. Other browsers do not implement this filtering.

I’m pretty sure they do because they’re using the system webview.

Last I knew there was only one browser for iOS (Safari) which can neither be removed nor replaced, just reskinned. If that's still the case, it would be pointless to even give it a rating.

EDIT: Getting downvoted. Is this incorrect?

I haven't personally downvoted you, but I would assume it's for one of two reasons:

1) The distinction if browsers ship their own engine or just embed system provided WebKit is ultimately irrelevant to the question at hand. I can go on the App Store and download "Chrome" or "Firefox" and use those applications to access websites.

2) Browsers do have age ratings on the App Store. It's 17+.

Firefox is 17+ on App store

Firefox, Firefox Focus, Chrome, Opera, Edge, Duck Duck Go, Brave (all reskins of Safari, essentially) are all rated 17+, which is nuts, but consistent with this policy at least.

But the pre-installed Safari is okay? All browsers on iOS are just Safari skins, so why isn't iOS as a whole rated 17+? All those web filters for adult content don't work. You might not be able to access pornhub but there are millions of other websites with pornography.

> But the pre-installed Safari is okay? All browsers on iOS are just Safari skins, so why isn't iOS as a whole rated 17+?

Wow. That's an excellent and very telling point.

What is the point of IOS's endless restrictions and censorship of free speech?

Is the point really to protect users from exercising their own intelligence or guarding their own kids, or is it to protect users from alternatives to Apple's own products?

It's kinda like Gatekeeper on Mac OS; you cannot (easily) install apps that aren't from the App Store. Was this only to protect you from malware? Really?

It's like all of these restrictions have a dual purpose on Mac OS: the stated reason, and an unstated reason: to increase Apple's control over you.

I'm actually surprised that Apple even allows web browsers at all, or third party mail apps, or anything that lets people access things outside their walled garden.

Safari can block adult websites.

By design, only Safari can block adult websites on IOS.

Not so, if you download chrome and enable parental controls with the adult content lock, it will block the adult sites.

Please don't pretend to be surprised about that when the last decade has been all about the iPhone and its pervasive and elegant access to literally millions of sources of content that is "outside Apple's walled garden".

It's not credible.

> Please don't pretend ... It's not credible.

That's rather impolite. And I'm absolute surprised that Apple hasn't already eliminated the real web -- just like AOL and Microsoft (tried to subvert with MSN and IE), because full and unrestricted access to the web is full of negatives for Apple's business model.

> the last decade has been all about the iPhone and its pervasive and elegant access to literally millions of sources of content that is "outside Apple's walled garden".

No idea what this means. Are you talking about how the iPhone provides "pervasive and elegant access" to.. the web?

Well, just to answer the question very directly, iOS as a whole isn't rated 17+ because it can't be. Obviously. It's not an app, it's not present in the App Store, and it has no age rating. So that takes care of that.

Any app with "Unrestricted Web Access" gets a 17+ rating.

Couldn't they publish two versions of the app, a 12+ that cannot access NSFW servers and 17+ that does?

Is there a reason not to split the app into SFW and full versions? I am surprised I haven't seen this in other places, but it seems like the right solution here.

There is: discoverability. If you search in the App Store you’re going to find those two versions and then they’ll have to prominently explain “this is the version of the app you can look at porn with” and “this is the kid-safe version”. They’d probably choose different wording, but that would be the message. And you don’t want to advertise adult content on your platform in any way, that just doesn’t end well.

It's also highly questionable Apple would let a "full" version in the store tbh, as it's only purpose would be NSFW servers.

Would't that make internet browsers like Safari and Chrome 18+ as well? Or any content provider (Spotify, Netflix, iMessage, etc.) in general? If not, it seems like a double standard.

Maybe Apple needs a granular content rating framework that platform apps can apply internally rather than the rating being entirely an umbrella policy.

So next apple will make safari 17+ because I could use it to acces pornographic content?

Are web browsers 17+?

Because sometimes, people just need help answering simple questions: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefox-private-safe-browser/i...

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