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Comment by loxdalen | Hacker News Reader

Realistically, kids are on the Internet.

I don't know when you were born, but my relationship to the Internet started probably around the time I was 7 or 8. My school had computers with Internet, there were two computers at home. My parents could have limited my Internet use but they couldn't have stopped me. There is not a guard standing by every computer stopping me from being Online if I am under 18 years of age.

I still don't think Omegle is at fault, but we have to assume kids are on the Internet.

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I've been on the internet since I was about 10 years old (I estimate). My parents knew (and understood) maybe 10% of what I did on there. As a minor, I did multiple criminal things online, some of them successful, others not so much. If I was a kid in 2023, I probably would've been arrested at some point in time.

Because of what I know about the internet and because I know what kids will do with unlimited access, I think much of this burden should be with the parents. For every successful Omegle taken down, 3 more unknown ones will pop up. But major platforms like TikTok are also massive sources of grooming and parents happily give their 10 year olds a smart phone.

As long as parents are never held accountable for their kids online behavior and the blame is put on service providers, this will only get worse. I know many examples of parents who track their kids' phones because they're scared something will happen to them in the real world. Meanwhile, these same parents pay no attention at all to where their kids venture in the online world, let alone with who. Parents need to be educated on this, fast.

I've been on the internet since I was a similar age. I even obeyed all my parents' instructions (e.g. no using Google, no social media), but it's really only me being a certain kind of person – and a little luck – that kept me in any way resembling safe. Those rules, as stated to me, were absolutely not sufficient (e.g. I used Bing, and joined forums, and booted into QuickWeb to play The Fancy Pants Adventures because that wasn't disabling the filter). No way were my parents capable of policing my activity.

I, uh, mostly kept my parents in the loop, I guess? But they had to intervene and fix my messes on more than one occasion, and those were all things I hadn't told them about (some of which I even realised were big deals before they blew up). I'm quite lucky that none of that stuff's come back to bite me yet. (I don't think any of it was criminal, but that's pure serendipity: I had zero idea what the laws surrounding internet activity were, and I could easily have made an enemy of multiple governments without even knowing I should probably ask my parents about this cool new programming idea I had.)

The places I frequent these days are all safe for the kind of child I was, but the internet is much, much bigger than that – and, I suspect, more hostile than it was. I have no illusions that I could provide good, useful guidelines to a ten-year-old today.

> But major platforms like TikTok are also massive sources of grooming and parents happily give their 10 year olds a smart phone.

I've never used TikTok, but I find myself scrolling through Instagram reels quite often. It's so addicting. Recently, I've been seeing some extreme gore: people being lit on fire, bones snapping, fatal car accidents, sexually explicit content (cheating, etc.), etc.

It's gotten to the point of me no longer wanting to watch those reels - they're very, very dark and depressing. If children are seeing this stuff as well, that's a major problem.

You can tell Instagram not to show you those kinds of videos. It takes persistence, but it really helps clean up your feed.

I volunteer in my local public school in the US. The sad fact is that stable family structure, by any definition, is collapsing and that kids are suffering. The percentage of kids in grade school who have an absent, incarcerated, addicted, mentally unhealthy, or generally dysfunctional parent is off the charts.

Parents who are unable to give their kids the tools they need to avoid getting shunted into special education on account of their behavior are in no position to supervise their online activity.

I make a habit of looking up kids parents on FB - it generally tracks that the worse the kids behavior and educational outlook, the greater the parent’s (singular in most cases) social media presence. I’m no longer surprised when I find a mother’s Onlyfans link, FFS.

Where I live a full 1/3 of 1st graders are in a special education track. All the research points to the impact of the home and family on these outcomes.

Tl;dr many parents are incapable of the rational parenting you suggest.

> I’m no longer surprised when I find a mother’s Onlyfans link, FFS.

It's far more likely that lower income is the reason for poor parenting than "mom has an onlyfans".

There is no _one_ reason, and I don't present that particular phenomenon as a causal factor but as a symptom of the greater problem - which certainly includes poverty but is even more closely aligned to the opioid epidemic.

All this is in the context of asking parents to provide their children the guidance required to avoid child-inappropriate content.

My point stands: a large and growing contingent of parents lack the stability/ability/support required to even keep their children's behavior within acceptable boundaries. It's a fool's errand to think keeping kids away from bad actors on the internet can be added to their plate.

Are you suggesting that the internet keeping bad actors away is not a fool’s errand? Everything you say is correct but entirely irrelevant.

There's a lot of money to be made in this industry.

There was a local university student in UQAM who made the news a few years ago and she publicly bragged she was earning a million a year.

Not everyone is going to be a top earner like this, but don't be delusional that it's only an option for lowest income individuals.

There was an implication that they didn't fulfill parenting duties in part because their job was onlyfans.

If they were making a lot of money, and not as poor, there is a higher chance their parenting duties were fulfilled.

I misinterpreted parent's post underlying message then, fault on me.

There's certainly a strong link about kids doing bad in school and the housing quality and home atmosphere.

They sure are, but we can argue they shouldn't, or that they should be supervised.

Not that it's going to happen. Too many people slap a device in front of their kids with an unlimited data plan and no supervision.

It's a hard problem to solve, probably as unsolvable as any other wide-scale problem.

you'll grant however that when we were young, it was more of an unknown wild west. Parents didn't know what to make of it or fear, there was generally more freedom afforded. We were the first generation with stupid-easy access to pirated pornography. No one had any idea of health concerns, at best you heard a blanket moral stance that didn't convince anyone.

I think today parents have access to far better means of regulating access, should they so choose, and they're more conscious of it. I'm not saying it's fool-proof, but the overhead is enough to dissuade kids from spending too much time and getting into trouble.

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