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I think the difference is that the parents of today are _you_. _They_ grew up with unrestricted internet access, because their parents didn't.

I think that pornography is poison and my parents didn't know that I had access to it. "Not my kid!", they said. But my generation says, "It's every. single. kid."

> Has anybody tried an alternative like teaching children about the actual dangers, how to recognize manipulation, etc?

Another poison is alcohol. Some people think that letting their kids access alcohol in their house is reasonable. I think it is better to wait until your brain is more developed before trying alcohol. First experiences with alcohol at a later age tends to enable people to have a less worse relationship with alcohol.

> Or pretend to be a stranger and try to befriend them, seeing if they fall for it?

That seems like a great way to destroy any trust in you your child might have.

The internet has changed incredibly in the last two decades, and has almost nothing in common with the internet of two decades ago. Predators of all varieties are everywhere; many of them are billion-dollar companies. Scams are everywhere.

Getting scammed in RuneScape is probably a good learning experience, but is RuneScape still the only game that's like the old experience of RuneScape? That and Minecraft I suppose, but you can't really filter out servers in Minecraft.

Yes, the internet has changed that much.

https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-for-kids-videos-problems...

Lots of people are in this thread saying "ah, just tell your children not to get groomed / not to watch disturbing content". They're kids. They are going to disobey their parents. There's no one here arguing we don't need to teach kids these things. But, like how when you're learning to drive you start in a parking lot with a crappy car, we need a way to make a relatively safe place for them to learn. Parental controls are currently failing to do that.

Furthermore, where you and I and median commenter on HN might be an engaged, attentive parent, there's lots of parents out there who are not. Having a good, easy-to-setup version of these controls that a less engaged parent will actually turn on would make a positive impact on those children who aren't receiving the teaching you suggest.