I'm sure many of us wouldn't have been a programmer if we hadn't had access to SO/Github around 17.
I'm sure many of us didn't have any access to StackOverflow and GitHub when we were around 17 years old, because StackOverflow and GitHub didn't exist yet. For several of us, git didn't exist yet. Heck, for some of us, the web didn't exist yet!
Kids these days...
It’s basically force-fed opinions at a global scale, how can that possibly be healthy? We can barely fathom how this media impacts adults as it stands. All this clear evidence aside, I feel like it’s obvious, how can the absence of these things do any measurable harm to kids?
As a parent do you not already have all the tools you need to ensure your children don't use tik Tok? From the light touch and mundane, using the built in features of the operating system (parental blockers and app timers are available on Android and IOS) to the heavy touch of not allowing your kid to have a smartphone.
Why do you want the government taking over this role for you? Maybe there's some parents who don't care if their children are on tik tok. Why should they follow the same parental strategy you have?
There are three general categories of parents on this, and to be clear, I don’t think any of these are bad parents: 1. Those who are extremely weary and tech savvy, like myself 2. Those who are weary but have no earthly idea how to set up these controls effectively. 3. Those who don’t give a f*all about it at all.
I tend to believe it’s just as bad but it’s about as misunderstood as tobacco used to be. The industry KNOWS it’s bad for kids, it’s been proven bad for kids but it’s peddled to them anyway.
All that aside, let’s just say hypothetically I wanted to manage this all myself and wanted the government out of it, sounds good in theory. The tooling around limiting inappropriate content is mind-blowingly inadequate. At the very least this should be mandatory and more concretely standardized. I’m not flatly against giving kids some access to it but it’s reached a point where my kids can’t even do their homework at all without full access to all of Youtube which by itself has loads of content not remotely appropriate for elementary school kids. Youtube kids is a joke.
It’s pretty frustrating as a parent to manage content restrictions for the 3-4 major browsers, search engines, youtube, messenging apps, iphones, macbook, windows app store, and so on. This could be a full time job. Then, the kids bring home a school provided chromebook or login to chrome with a school account which has no content restrictions at all and I have zero control over anyway. Honestly, parental controls in the current state is largely a waste of time.
I also think state sponsored content moderation should be used to restrict access to harmful online media as opposed to lumbering this task on individuals. As you've mentioned, some parents need this enforced upon them.
If we were talking about vaping, which is still highly unregulated and available for children to buy, I'm sure the majority would be in agreement about age restrictions. The fact that we're talking about preventing psychological addiction and trauma makes it harder for people to agree on the harmful effects of this type of content. It's simply not as visible as the huge plumes of oil-steam breathed out by every 12 year old in a bus stop these days.
However, I don't agree with the implementation of content moderation proposed by Utah state. It's totally unworkable and poorly thought through.
If you want to protect your kids from these things then you need to educate them and get them to enforce the rules themselves.
Case in point being that here in the UK it is illegal to market tobacco products at all (including to adults in this case). This also applies to politicians, prescriptions medicine and a bunch of other things. And IMO it’s often a good compromise that allows for harm reduction without outright banning something.
Maybe what we should focus on is more standardization, effectiveness of controls and requiring these trillion dollar companies to build parents one single pane of glass to monitor and control content for all platforms. May not even be feasible but it really just sounds like another engineering challenge that requires a major investment to get it done.
In the 90's most teens already had access to a primitive internet where they could chat with anyone in the world using BBS[1], which was not too different from a modern social network. Email was already a thing as well for some time, but probably became widespread at this time... by the late 90's the internet was already quite similar to today for geeks, except perhaps videos (and even high resolution pics) were not a thing due to the low speed of the net.
StackOverflow and GitHub only came around in the late 2000's, which is basically yesterday. Before them, there were similar sites as well (the infamous expertsexchange for SO, and SourceFourge for GH, for example) for quite some time, but they surely became very dominant in their areas.
As a side note, my first intern job was to make a localized ripoff of SO (within a team, of course). It was still a relatively shining new thing by the time.
We understood it. Not sure why you think we didn't.
Haha...I learned when the web was mainly AOL. MSN at the time had pretty good forums which helped a lot. But the main place I was learning programming from was books, but they were expensive - especially for a college kid. When I would run into problems I couldn't solve I would head to the book store with a pencil and paper and copy bits and pieces that I hoped would help. Then head back home and try again (talk about a long debug run loop). Luckily this was around the same time of the rise of big bookstores where they encouraged hanging out so no one ever questioned me.
Before StackOverflow it was PAINFUL. Staring at "Reached end of file while parsing" errors and wondering wtf that even means...
Then finding out after 5 hours that you missed a semicolon.
Oh, and forget rounded borders, what a f@#%king nightmare.
See also: survivorship bias.
I don’t believe they even allow under-13 today due to COPA laws.
Of course this focus on the age 13 is completely missing the point that the actual age gate is 17.
I'd suggest that teens in Utah just use a VPN but social media sites have been cracking down on VPN users for years and many of those sites now require phone number verification to sign up. This law illustrates yet another reason why that's a bad idea.
COPPA. COPA was the second attempt (after CDA, which was the first), COPPA was the third and the one that stuck.
But would the site let you sign up if even with parental permission if it had to do additional identification verification to identify that the permission was from your parent, and was liable for (1) actual damages if you got addicted [0] because of some element of their site design, and (2) huge ($250,000 per feature) penalties if they also didn’t do quarterly audits to identify, and within 30 days after identification eliminate, any feature which might addict you?
How many programming sites see minors in general, much less Utah minors specifically, as that important to their mission to take on the extra costs and risks this bill imposes on serving that population?
[0] Using an intentionally broad definition of addiction
I probably wouldn't be a programmer without sourceforge.
I was making PRs to oss projects on Github and churning through Project Euler by 15.
I literally owe my entire career to SO which is weird to say typing it out now.
Yes, I do realize I now sound like I just said "back in my day, we walked to school, uphill both ways".
Old man yells at cloud, but kids these day won't even have to look at code, everything will be filtered through natural language.
When I learned my second programming language (JavaScript), I asked most of my questions via a mailing list. It's quite weird trying to recall it... I almost forgot how mailing list work today.
For Github? 10(b)(i)(N), to the extent that source code files are “documents”.
For Stack Overflow? 10(b)(i)(J), which was probably written for LinkedIn specifically.