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Comment by James_K | Hacker News Reader

Regulating porn is just stupid. It's never going to work and I don't get its objectives. Porn probably has a negative effect on children, but much less than something like TikTok. I could at least see the sense in banning children from the entire internet or limiting their access in some way (preferable implemented by ISPs rather than individual websites), but trying to specifically stop them from seeing naked people is pointless. Parents can easily control which parts of the internet their kids have access to, and much more effectively than the state can with the added bonus that it doesn't affect people without kids.

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I can easily block TikTok because it has little informational value. Youtube on the other hand is a serious and important learning resource and I would not want to block it for my kid.

At the same time, offering Youtube Shorts in the same service under the same domain is like "cabinet next to their bed with cigarettes, snickers bars, and painkiller pills" as a sibling comment aptly put it.

I wonder if there’s a chrome/FF extension to block shorts… just delete the whole element as soon as it hits the DOM. If not, someone please make one! I guess this could just be a tampermonkey script, even…

It blows my mind that they’re willing to pollute their brand and value for such a clearly awful, addictive feature. So short sighted. If anyone here is still a Google employee, I implore you: leave. Your talents could be used so much better when directed by people who are a little less greedy

https://unhook.app/

YOU SAVED ME

Thanks for sharing. I wish this could hide all Shorts though. They still show in search and on the subscription pages though

I used to work there and this kind of thing is why I left. Google lost their moral compass years ago. The greed I saw from top to bottom was baffling. People earning $200k already, who spent all their time figuring out how to get the next promotion (and thus inventing stupid unnecessary and uninteresting projects) rather than trying to find actually fulfilling-to-the-employee or useful-to-the-enterprise-or-the-user work.

You already make a ton of money and have a ton of status, why not enjoy it and find work that is actually fulfilling to you and/or useful to the user and/or failing that at least useful to the shareholders if nothing else. But no, they were conditioned to seek achievement blindly and without any moral or other introspection.

I could not stand it. I spent years regretting not holding my nose longer for the sake of being able to buy a house and so forth.... but I've made my peace with it. Since then I've had the opportunity to see how harmful Google's attempts to make money are to children (they are the new Joe Camel) and now I no longer have regrets at all. It's one thing to manipulate and exploit adults who should know better, but to target children is just the worst kind of low.

Very interesting perspective, thanks for the insight! Seriously.

I recently quit Google, thus the preachy tone above lol - it’s an emotional topic. Ultimately I wanted to prove to myself that I could cut it as a “big tech” software engineer, but the whole corporate structure and purpose was unbelievably anxiety and shame inducing. Probably an overreaction but hey, us engineers are a fragile bunch…

I was in ads, so it was the front line of the insanity: thousands of truly kind, smart people were pampered in brand new Science-Fiction buildings on NASA Ames land (kagi “Google Bayview Campus”) with the finest food, gyms, tech, transportation, everything. They talked all day about modernizing ads and pleasing customers and powering the Free and Open Internet, and never about politics. And promotions, as you said. Meanwhile:

- we were surrounded by an army of underpaid contract workers because the engineers refuse to collectively organize with them,

- desperate pleas from organizations I trust to stop [LATEST_GOOGLE_3PC_REPLACEMENT_PROPOSAL] because it would destroy the internet were hitting the top of hacker news every few weeks,

- lawsuits are landing from the DoJ for illegal business practices with quite shocking screenshots of internal slides, and

- The legal manipulation culture runs so deep that employees get regular training on why they need to tag everything as “attorney client communications” even if there’s no attorneys involved (something tells me that “”loophole”” isn’t gonna last long).

Such a weird, jarring experience. I’m still living off Google savings so haven’t quite hit the “miss the paycheck” stage for real, not looking forward to that! Hopefully someone finds this emotional rant illuminative.

I use a combination of:

- https://letsblock.it/ and Ublock Origin

- The Unhook plugin for Firefox

- Blocking channels on my YouTube account when I see something inappropriate

- Adguard Home also blocks certain channels

to try to moderate the YouTube content for my kids. It's not perfect, but it does get rid of a lot of garbage (like YouTube Shorts).

My 6 year olds class were given a chromebook with youtube installed just as an app, zero filtering, zero adimn controls from our end.

It's like no one in the loop: teachers, IT providers, local / government procurement, big tech companies, etc thought to ask themselves if it was a good idea for kids to roam unrestricted on a site where anyone can post anything.

Not to mention the constant barrage of video advertising in the classroom.

Bonkers.

You should try https://newpipe.net/

It's not about regulating porn, it's about regulating what you can think about. This has been a 'feature' of the US for quite some time, create lists of your political enemies and the 'naughty' things they do so you can use them against them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism 2.0

you won't beat us in that regard. The article is a bit biased but the examples are real(uk). https://care.org.uk/news/2023/08/the-new-thought-police

Please, McCarthy is old hat.

Here's a Survey of WorldWide Censorship, specifically the chapter on internet[0] to get you up-to-date. There's also the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) [1] which deals more with infrastructure blocks.

There's also the more subtle kind, called "fact-checking" which on the surface does a very good job shielding us from the conspiracy theorists[2]. Don't misunderstand, on the surface this is a noble task, but it is still a filter of information that you did not employ yourself, and one that you have no means of controlling or influencing. You will only see what they left out: If you are not accepted by these gate-keepers you are silently excluded by most big media outlets. Here are eg. the organizations that Facebook trust to fact-check[3]

There's a really large machinery operating worldwide these days. Or, specifically, a whole lot of different machines. I'm not saying this to spead FUD, just FYI.

[0] https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-irtf-pearg-censorship-...

[1] https://explorer.ooni.org/findings

[2] The European Fact-Checking Standards Network (just one example): https://efcsn.com/

[3] https://www.facebook.com/formedia/mjp/programs/third-party-f...

>Parents can easily control which parts of the internet their kids have access to

I'm not sure that this is true. It doesn't sound true.

Most ISPs have a fairly effective child safety mode. Combined with one of those parental protection apps, you can probably prevent your own child from seeing anything you don't want them to.

Please spell this out for me.

I'm a very tech savvy individual, and as a parent who has spent hours and hours navigating the murk of disparate parental control systems, it is clear to me that what you say is only true if you commit to preventing your child from having access to anything at all.

Worst of all, children have friends!

In other words, you must lock them in a closet and deprive them of access to sunlight itself to accomplish what you say.

So instead we lock the adults and block access to adults for things that are intended for adults?

I totally fail to see how you got that from my comment.

Either the children or the adults will need to overcome hurdles to access porn. I believe the parent is suggesting that if we have to pick who faces the hurdles, it should be the children (and their parents) not the adults legally deciding to surf porn.

I don't have a position on that, and there's not one implied by my comment, which is why I am unsure why the commenter assumes one.

I'm afraid the only way to introduce children is by whitelisting. Service by service, website by website, video by video. Giving them a smartphone with WiFi is like filling cabinet next to their bed with cigarettes, snickers bars, and painkiller pills.

I agree somewhat. Ideally, the internet wouldn't be addictive at all, and hence wouldn't be an issue for children or adults. A whitelist seems reasonable for the current state of the internet, but I can't think of anything beyond Wikipedia that you could put on it. That said, you still run into the more fundamental issue of what exactly is adult content? Violence, gore, and gambling certainly, though I'm not sure casinos should be legal at all. But I struggle to justify it for porn. It's probably more healthy for children to have access to some kind of pornography.

I did not limit internet access for my children, past certain age. Instead, my children asked me to protect them from disturbing content sometimes. (So I did, setting up an age filter on YouTube.)

Most of the time, unless you yourself don't eat snickers bars non-stop while chain-smoking, your children won't, too. Children do what their parents do, not what their parents tell them to do.

That might actually be the lesser evil here. There could be a new category of "kid-friendly" devices which require parental unlock to (temporarily) access the open Internet, either in general or outside of a government-approved whitelist. Such a whitelist might include things like YouTube Kids, kid-friendly subsets of app stores / package repositories, reputable news sources, informational and educational sources, and filtered versions of search engines.

Then there's the enforcement model to consider. Maybe it's just an option consumers have available for purchase at their own discretion. Or maybe vendors would be banned from knowingly selling non-kid-friendly devices to minors, and/or parents would be banned from allowing their kids to own non-kid-friendly devices.

If this is the direction society wants to go in, it shouldn't impose on anyone other than parents and children. Current legislation and proposals narrowly target one specific use case (porn), and do so in a kludgy way that's effectively just banning its use without a VPN. Instead, this approach would provide a general framework for filtering kids' interaction with technology.

For example, some states might use it to ban social media and AI chatbots for children, at least in their current forms. I could imagine an alternative AI chatbot service being allowed which shared the history with parents and teachers, so as to deter cheating, and to provide an opportunity for human adults to add context or corrections to any misinformation. I could also imagine allowing more limited social networks that segregated schools or classes into their own private bubbles, wiped content at the end of each school year, blocked posting images/videos without parental approval, used uncomplicated news feed algorithms, and gave teachers and staff reddit-style moderation power.

Personally, I'm not sure how much I like this, vs simply leaving the parenting to parents. Maybe it would be less bad than alternatives, but it's also dangerously close to a ban on general-purpose computing[1]. We'd have to remain vigilant to ensure that governments didn't use it as a foothold to start cracking down on adults' use of computers and the Internet in the future.

1: https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

You must not be a parent. A non technically savvy parent really has very limited control. Even a technically savvy parent can control the devices they buy for their children only, on the wifi network they pay for for their own home, only.

This leaves them totally exposed if school gives them a chromebook or anytime they're in range of another open network.

Besides, the effects of this content are society wide. You can be the one parent who keeps your kids away from dangerous content, but if all their friends don't, they will be influenced by them.

> Parents can easily control which parts of the internet their kids have access to,

Oh, that said, the specific technical way they want to implement this is awful. Making or even allowing individual porn sites to administer the ID system is horrible. Have they never heard of Oauth? There should be a "adultidcheck.gov" type central government service that handles this.

Friendly reminder that prior to the popularization of the internet 20-30 years ago, there was absolutely no equivalent situation where you could have the kind of anonymity the internet provides. It is not any kind of natural right. If you wanted to send or receive information it had to be done in some physical way, so your identity could not really be hidden. Privacy, yes, anonymity, no.

Laws like this really don't address anything then. Children will continue to find and circulate "dangerous content."

As a mid-thirties millennial, I saw the transition. Kids shared paper pornography in the 90s, and had access to the most extreme and anonymous version of the early internet. I don't think either inflicted the kind of widespread harm mass surveillance proponents would suggest.

> Friendly reminder that prior to the popularization of the internet 20-30 years ago, there was absolutely no equivalent situation where you could have the kind of anonymity the internet provides.

It also wasn't possible for every action and thought a person had to be monitored by governments and corporations. We've gone way too far in our assault on privacy and desperately need to claw rights back.

I can't believe that this seems to be such a minority perspective.

I find it horrifying how many people seem to default assume that censoring is a good thing.

The internet may be harmful but it's not just a few explicit sites that you need to worry about. It's the whole thing. Either teach your kids to make good decisions or block them from the internet in full. There isn't a middle ground that works really. We are absolutely rocketing towards the worst kind of dystopia and it seems like a lot of people are on board with it.

I for one welcome our new overlords. /s

> Friendly reminder that prior to the popularization of the internet 20-30 years ago, there was absolutely no equivalent situation where you could have the kind of anonymity the internet provides. It is not any kind of natural right. If you wanted to send or receive information it had to be done in some physical way, so your identity could not really be hidden.

What? You could buy books/magazines with cash. There were literally laws preventing porn rental shops from keeping records on their customers. No one had any idea what you watched on your television or listened to on the radio. There were (are) ham radios. You could record your own tapes, print your own magazines/pamphlets/books, put up your own flyers/posters. There are analytics on every single one of the modern equivalents of these things now, in fact I think you probably have to admit the point of the web has become to add analytics to stuff for advertising.

The era we're living in now is the least private, least anonymous era ever, it just doesn't feel that way because there's a huge inequality in who we're exposed to. In other words, some people argue that in village or tenement life there wasn't a lot of privacy, but that was maybe 40 people knowing when you had sex. Anyone with your smartwatch data has that info now, which a lot more than 40 people; they just don't live anywhere near you (well, probably not anyway).

  Parents can easily control which parts of the internet their kids have access to

Citation needed - I think most American kids (sorry Ireland) are pretty much unrestricted on the internet by their tweens, since most parents buy them smartphones but don’t know how to do meaningful browser lockdowns.

Re:”naked people”, I think that’s doing disservice to the proponents of these controls (who I vehemently disagree with, ofc); the modern porn landscape has problems with non-consensual videos (see: Pornhub & GDP), extreme content (violence, CNC), and really harmful stereotypes about gender roles. It’s much more than just “healthy human sexuality” as many people on here seem to assume.

I think the only workable solution is a) better parental controls by default on the client level, and b) better educated and supported children. Children are smart, they know sex exists, and they know it’s something they don’t care at all about - they can be our allies in this fight.

If this move is to prevent teenagers with a motive from accessing porn, then: HA

> I think most American kids (sorry Ireland) are pretty much unrestricted on the internet by their tweens, since most parents buy them smartphones but don’t know how to do meaningful browser lockdowns.

It’s actually pretty hard to do lockdowns because there’s been so much consolidation. Many parents can turn on the built in controls, but then they face problems like “do you block YouTube entirely, even though their homework will include links to things like videos from NIH hosted there?”

The big problem isn’t that kids could innocently find sexual content but also that grownups will try to trick them into engaging with things for a variety of reasons. This is different from letting your kid have free rein of the public library because the library didn’t have some guy recruiting for a political movement putting books in the children’s section and the librarians wouldn’t let that creepy dude hang out there.

This came up at a school party recently where multiple parents of first graders were talking about how quickly YouTube will go from auto playing LEGO and Minecraft videos to some pretty unhinged stuff.

> but then they face problems like “do you block YouTube entirely, even though their homework will include links to things like videos from NIH hosted there?”

Tell kids to create list of URLs. Download the videos. They've just learned copy/paste, about existence of URLs, and concept of remote and local. Now they're hackers!

Sure, but then you’re in the business of having to add many exceptions on an ongoing basis. That’s why I wish we had more decentralization - it’d be trivial for parents to, say, whitelist *.gov with the knowledge that they’re not going to find porn there. Doing the same on YouTube is a much harder problem.

One time I ran into a subdomain of cjcc.ga.gov, via google results, that was hosting porn (it's on the internet archive too - vicspublic).

At the time I couldn't even find abuse/webmaster contact info to report it to get it fixed. They were serving porn for months.

> The big problem isn’t that kids could innocently find sexual content but also that grownups will try to trick them into engaging with things for a variety of reasons. This is different from letting your kid have free rein of the public library because the library didn’t have some guy recruiting for a political movement putting books in the children’s section and the librarians wouldn’t let that creepy dude hang out there.

You’d be surprised.

I would in the library field so, no. I know public librarians have to deal with weirdos but they’re a LOT more willing to do so than YouTube. It probably has something to do with how much better funded they are than Google…

> the modern porn landscape has problems with non-consensual videos (see: Pornhub & GDP), extreme content (violence, CNC), and really harmful stereotypes about gender roles. It’s much more than just “healthy human sexuality” as many people on here seem to assume.

I suppose children should have access to a better quality of porn. The stuff we have now is probably harmful to watchers of all ages in varying degrees. That said, I don't think society will ever be liberal enough to have a kids section on porn sites.

> better parental controls by default on the client level

Having parental controls on by default would be a reasonable solution to this issue.

> they know it’s something they don’t care at all about

Is this a typo? Children go on porn sites because they want to watch porn. That's why I did it. If children didn't want to watch porn, they wouldn't. I don't think the sex itself is something they need protecting from. Just the addictive qualities that are present in both porn sites and the wider internet.

> better educated and supported children

Better educated and supported parents would also help.

Very well said on all points. Re:”children don’t care”, I was mostly referencing adolescents when I said children —- during and after puberty is a totally different matter. At that point, I agree they need to be protected just like everyone else is protected - against general harmful patterns, and with very little direct government intervention. There’s no way the government can realistically stop teenagers from accessing porn, unless this guy gets his Porn Selfie initiative passed, I guess…

Scary times in Europe! Of course American conservatives could easily pick up this issue at random any midterm cycle now, assuming we continue having midterm elections.

What do you think about the constant surveillance on children/teens by their own parents and the long term psychological trauma it may leave behind from knowingly being monitored 24/7?

Children used to go out, do things, come home. Now children have zero privacy. Into the teen years, they can't get into trouble, learn, socialize, etc. They just sit at home because their parents are constantly watching their GPS location and reading their texts.

Is porn worse than the damage done by the mistrust?

I wasn't supervised 24/7 but didn't have access to porn 24/7 in a second either, lads shared some old magazines someone nicked from a father most likely. It sure did need a bit more effort to get a playboy from your corner store.

My daughter came home from the playground where 10 year old guys showed her hardcore anal porn from mobile because it's funny.

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