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Comment by unquietwiki | Hacker News Reader

I think stuff like this, is trying to recreate a world that doesn't exist anymore. With whom, are you gonna go play in the woods with, that haven't already been bulldozed into housing and strip malls? Do you need to watch YouTube only on a parent's TV that's logged in, even for homework help? Some kids start working at 14 or 15: they can be trusted to work somewhere outside of home, but not online? What about Steam games? What about any games? What about hobby & fan forums, that have nothing to do with "grooming" or grabbing eyeballs? What's next, an Internet license?

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The YouTube situation is the biggest self-own in Australia's implementation. Previously kids under 16 could have an account under a parent's Family, and there are full parental controls and monitoring. Now kids can't have these accounts, so they can only access youtube without signing in. Meaning zero parental controls and monitoring. Oh and have you seen what youtube looks like when you're not logged in!?

Give parents control over parenting.

Fully agree. I have no issues with the social media laws as they don't impact my family at all except for YouTube. Accounts under Family Link control should have been allowed as they are overseen by an 18+ parent.

Youtube should have voluntarily removed shorts and the front page or made them available as a parental control to appease the regulator. When I wrote to the minister they used YouTube's addictive algorithms as justification for including them as social media which I do agree with.

We had curated kids logins with age restrictions, subscriptions, and ad free under premium and also youtube music with individual playlists they used for instrument practice etc. We had to shift music platform. I know we can replicate a lot of this with special apps and browser extensions but this was a single cross platform solution that was working for responsible parents. To be fair it is partly YouTube's fault for prioritizing Shorts and watch time over quality.

Fully agree, responsible parents should not allow their kids (including teenagers) to use Shorts or TikTok. It is a shame that YouTube does not support blocking that crap. It is obvious "Don't be evil" is not Google's motto anymore.

For YouTube, in the case of Shorts, parents can now limit or block them altogether.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/14/youtube-now-has-a-way-for-...

Can I prevent shorts from showing up for me?

You can create two Google accounts and parental control yourself. You can also use ublock or other browser addons, and of course, NewPipe. Youtube should have more settings for this, it's clearly going down the drain, but it's not like you can do nothing.

Honestly, it's one of the reasons I don't want to pay for Youtube Red, why would I pay for "no ads", when I still feel like I'm the product, because of my complete lack of control over the algorithm and user experience.

> We had to shift music platform. I know we can replicate a lot of this ...

As far as practical solutions go a cheap VPS and a wireguard connection should let you continue with business as usual. From the perspective of YouTube maybe you moved to NZ or something.

> they used YouTube's addictive algorithms as justification for including them as social media

Did they provide YouTube the option of swapping out those algorithms to be exempted from the new law? It seems like this law was perhaps not a bad idea but the execution poorly thought out.

I won't be chasing an increasingly shitty online experience. I imported chromecasts before they were ever released here and had them connected via vpn to a US vps before services like Netflix went global. The pricing and content were really good value back then. Increasingly the relationship with big companies feels abusive. We are moving more towards self hosting, using physical media and changing lifestyle. Disconnecting isn't so bad.

> Youtube should have voluntarily removed shorts and the front page or made them available as a parental control to appease the regulator.

I honestly don't "get" the hate for YouTube Shorts:

While I clearly do prefer long-form videos on YouTube, in my Shorts feed I see videos that are, well, simply more short-form (admittedly because of the short length they are often more "shallow", but for sure not below some level that I would find annoying or unacceptable (and I think I am fast with such strong judgements)). So, at least judging from my Shorts feed, I can barely see any video that I would consider to be objectionable if I were a parent. It is quite possible that the YouTube algorithm detected very fast that I belong to a demographic that is not interested in particular kinds of videos that are perhaps common on YouTube Shorts and thus simply does not show them to me in my Shorts feed, so I am simply not aware of them.

So, seriously: why the huge hate for YouTube Shorts in particular concerning parenting?

for kids, who are never exposed to youtube. I would assume there is a higher chance of them getting addicted to shorts.

> I have no issues with the social media laws as they don't impact my family

This is probably the most common reason for why our society is in the shitters wrt. laws. I find it problematic that people only care after they have been shown they are affected. Look at any anti-privacy laws. No one cares until they get thrown into jail for posting memes online.

Honestly. I am totally unable to understand that mindset, even if I may not actively work against everything because of limitations of time and energy

> Give parents control over parenting.

The problem isn't lack of control, it's the lazy attitude from parents who're shocked that they have to actually do their own job of raising their progeny.

They'd rather abdicate that responsibility to the government, who in turn love the idea because it means more control.

Well put

It's both. Saying "the problem" is the parents, implying there's one problem and that's it, is ridiculous. There's a lot of factors that go into why raising a good, caring, strong, self sufficient child is difficult.

We see this same type of argument from the "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps; if you weren't lazy you'd succeed" crowd. It's a stupid argument there, and it's just as stupid here. The world is complicated, and working to improve things from multiple angles is good, and improves the changes of success; for everyone.

> 5 years ago one parent's income was enough

> now both parents working

> barely enough to keep up with expenses and chores

> child has no allowance to go out

> very limited spaces to go out for free

> live in a poorer area where safe and nice places that are free require a chaperone

> child's friends in the same socioeconomic group all have similar situation

> computers provide accessible distraction during parents' only few minutes of downtime during the day

> are parents lazy?

People aren't forced to have kids though.. If they don't really want them or can't accomodate them in their lives just don't have any. I've never had any because I don't want to give up my freedom and relaxation either.

And one income hasn't been enough for much longer than 5 years. Especially in housing.

I see a lot of people around me that seem to pretty much hate having kids and they probably did it just because of social/family pressure or something. They always treat them like a nuisance and fob them off with a tablet. Really, just don't have them then. The world is already so overpopulated which is one of the causes of tension (migration, fighting over resources, climate/pollution).

I would argue that evolution’s primary driving force is not something so easily resisted. It is literally a person’s only purpose when you strip everything else away. I would be careful to handwave away another person’s desire to have children.

5 years ago single income households were feasible for a subset of the population. Yes that subset has been decreasing for a while. But the last 5 years or so have eroded it so much more.

And pointing at struggling children/parents as the source of society’s ills is a low blow. When there are individual humans who have accumulated so much resources that they can feed an entire country for a few days at a single thought and _still_ have enough left over to live comfortably. You are looking at the wrong place to blame, in my opinion.

I'm not pointing at them as a source of society's ills. I don't think society (as in socially) is ill at all, except for conservatives that are trying to tell us how to live our lives.

I do think the human population as-is is unsustainably big though but I'm not blaming individuals for it. And luckily enough the population growth seems to be plateauing anyway. I think it would be great if we shrink by half or so, life would be a lot easier. Yes, the wealth distribution is a massive issue too, but decreasing this will actually make things worse. All these ultra-rich are just sitting on their money. They have as much money as say 100.000 normal people but they are not buying 100.000x as many things. In fact I often wonder why they care so much about accumulating ever more wealth if they already have so much more than they could ever spend in a lifetime.

But once all the poor people in China and India will want to have a big house, a car etc like us then we will really have a resource problem.

But for me having kids is not a purpose at all. Perhaps that colours my ease with which I dismiss it. I just know several parents that mainly talk about their kids in a dismissive/nuisance way and I wonder why they ever bothered to have them in the first place.

> It is literally a person’s only purpose when you strip everything else away.

And then you strip that away too, leaving us with our true purpose at the core of everything else - to simply exist. To live and then to die. That is our true purpose.

Having children is one of the most basic human instincts, and honestly it's kind of disgusting how you dismiss many parents as obviously hating their kids. Do we complain sometimes? Yes, parenting is hard.

Do you feel the same way about restrictions to gambling and drug access? Why not just let the parents parent.

A stronger solution is a combination of both approaches.

When not signed in, you get no videos at all, just a "Sign In To Confirm You're Not A Bot" screen.

I agree with you in spirit , however nobody was taught how to raise their kids in an age of incessant hyperstimulation , and people in general don't go out of their way to learn things properly

For that, we have to give control over clients to consumers. In the model of the past the company provides the client and so the client is accountable to the company not the consumer. Only the web browser has ever come close to changing that, but there's not many of us left still fighting for third party clients, even on the web

> Now kids can't have these accounts, so they can only access youtube without signing in. Meaning zero parental controls and monitoring

This sounds like a device-control problem. Banning social media and then regulating devices in school should go a long way towards defusing the challenge.

Even with anonymous log-in, the new status quo is a release from algorithmic targeting. (If YouTube is building shadow profiles and knowingly serving under-16-year olds, that can be fixed with enforcement.) I suspect this group of kids will grow up fitter despite the reduced opportunities for helicopter parenting. There are lots of parents who never try, or try and fail, to control and monitor their kids’ online activities. Way more than those who effectively do so.

Huh? I’ve never understood this, and coincidentally it’s a talking point constantly pushed by Google in Australia.

If they could use YouTube without signing in now, they could do so before.

The whole argument is utterly nonsensical.

In my 40s now, I can recall dozens of "we should..." statements from myself and others. Typically, these statements were driven by some personal mishap, and the statement is basically forgotten (because it was never a big deal to begin with). But occasionally, some well-read/educated (often with a philosophical bias) will allow a small complaint to consume them, forcing them to write extensively about it, while the world continues to change at increasing speed.

But there's a huge market for this kind of writing: it's all the other people that have similar thoughts but not the time to actually write it.

> What's next, an Internet license?

That’s exactly my concern here. Trying to solve a problem with good intent by proposing solutions that hurt the overall environment.

> What about Steam games? What about any games?

I wouldn't mind restricting access for children to certain types of games such as those with gambling (surprise) mechanics. It's a clear example of harmful media that is at least in some cases exclusively engineered and marketed towards children.

The preponderance of evidence, much of it from Meta's own internal communications, indicates that social media harms teens, and especially girls, in ways ranging from sleep deprivation to eating disorders to anxiety to depression to sexual grooming to suicide. Many of us adults see it as a moral duty to try to stop this, though YMMV (your morals may vary). Kids did homework before YouTube; and yes it is reasonable to propose that a teen can babysit outside their home yet not be exposed to hardcore porn on X, etc.

Your argument seems to be a false choice between "either kids play in the woods or they play online in toxic social media hellscapes". Yes it is tragic that some components of a great childhood are impossible now for so many children. But this doesn't imply we must now let them play with guns and matches and razorblades.

I have a friend who works with lots of young people whom she routinely tries to get to come to organized events but they often can't make it because they're attending the funerals of friends who've committed suicide. It's almost unbelievable how bad it is. This genie absolutely must be put back in the bottle by any means possible, and society is trying to figure out how.

[Edit: removed reference to whataboutism]

"Whataboutism" (if it even counts as a fallacy) isn't when somebody refutes an argument you support.

I personally don't believe you have ANY evidence. More plausibly you are acting as a "useful idiot" for traditional media.

Now that Australia has banned social media, are you going to admit you were wrong? Or just double down and ban phones? If something is "unbelievable" then you better have good evidence for believing it, not just narratives.

I'm not sure I follow; are you disputing that social media cause harm to mental health, and particularly in teenagers?

Meta knows that deactivating Facebook causes "lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison"[1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

You say people did homework before YouTube, that is true; however for me I used YouTube to learn a huge amount outside of school, for example programming. I am vastly a better person for having access to YouTube pre-16 due to the amount of educational content, it is the single best way to learn stuff outside of school when you don't have much money due to being young. I genuinely would know a lot less about many, many topics if I didn't have YouTube before I was 16, and realising that has put me off the idea of a social media ban for children entirely. Although in my head YouTube was/is different to social media; I am not using YouTube to be social unlike how e.g. Instagram may be used.

To me YouTube is more comparable to if TV contained anything you were interested in or wanted to learn about, on demand, for free, and accessible to anyone than it is to social media and therefore maybe shouldn't be grouped with them.

Moral "imperatives" and "think of the children" are major red flags. The genie is not going back in the bottle - technology only moves forward. The answer is simply education - both for children and parents. This is a multi-generational effort but humanity will adapt.

Throwing bans at the problem is not the answer. Legislation is almost never the answer. As many have highlighted this will be twisted into even worse control over human thought.

The problem is simply algorithmic feeds. They are just as destructive for adults and society at large. Maybe there can be some general regulation or tooling in this space, however society really needs to arrive at this itself. Governance originates from society not the other way around. If you need governance to enforce your societal "fix" something is wrong with it.

You can not anticipate the next technological impact - and they _are_ coming. Throwing shit at the wall in the form of law is only going to make things worse for that next change. Education and upbringing has to be much more experimental and adaptive.

The answer is get better at parenting - nobody wants to hear that but that really is it. Look how people bemoan the education system these days. If you trust anyone in education it is a total disaster. Everyone wants an easy fix and the economy places no value on time spent in these pursuits. You can't paper over that with naive laws, trying to do so is only going to make things much worse, both because undoing stupid shit is hard and it ignores the real problems.

There is only so much better parenting can do against giant companies with tons of money and teams of psychologists and engineers designing products to maximally exploit "vulnerabilities" in human minds in order to modify their beliefs, emotions, and behaviors.

> Some kids start working at 14 or 15: they can be trusted to work somewhere outside of home, but not online?

It’s not just the kids, but stalkers and criminals. There’s a reason full driving and drinking age is 18.

Wait, did I misread and the article is suggesting banning the whole internet for under-16?

It's a great pity all your woods have been bulldozed.

However the world of woods, wide open spaces, kids with power tools, kids walking for hours with friends and dogs circuiting the beach, caves, forrests and fields very much still exists in many places across the globe.

Kids working for themselves down in the shed making things they can sell for money at a swap meet or market happens here all the time and is a controlled risk - they wear PPE, have knowledge of readily apparent risks and aren't being stalked and crept up on by a netwok of bot assisted groomers.

... and just where are they going to learn these skills?

Right here.

Got welders, maps, legs (useful for walking), ropes, furnaces, hand tools, old cars, old workstations, soldering irons, a kitchen, gardens, paddocks, saddle making tools, radio towers, .. you know, regular house in the country from the 1930s kind of stuff.

As I mentioned, this world still exists.

I have been building a library for some time as well, and am ready to learn and teach once my child is ready. Frankly, the internet experience when I was young vs now is crazy. For me, it was dial up with some forums and RuneScape open, chatting via texts in game with my buddies who were considered long distance even though we all went to the same church. The pauses in loading gave time to think up good discussion, and playing things took patience. Now everything wants your attention scattered everywhere, and is flashing in your face. I love having ad blockers because of that. Social media has done nothing good for our world I feel like. Yes, connecting is nice but when you are fed things off of not your actual interest or easily searchable same results but instead whatever drives engagement for ads I like to stay well away.

Yeah, suburbia and even the inner-city in the West has parks, trails and rec centres. If anything, the real fantasy is the idea that kids couldn't engage with something outside. Kids are addicted to each other, social media is just a useful vector when helicopter parents don't permit you to leave the property, except for structured organised activity I.e. expensive league sports

>I think stuff like this, is trying to recreate a world that doesn't exist anymore

And that's fine. We should build the world as we want it to be, not accept whatever shit our era gives us.

This includes changes to some things to how they were in the past (if they were better) and changes to other things to how we envision the future.

I don't think it's about recreating a world that doesn't exist anymore. It's about limiting exposure of stuff to minds that simply aren't ready for it. The implementation falls short in a number of ways but I kinda get it and I think it's something we as a society will have to take seriously in coming years.

For example, Australia blocks Youtube (like you say) but doesn't block Roblox. That's wild.

For Youtube in particular, I think it'd be sufficient to have child accounts under their parents (as they did and still have elsewhere) that limited certain videos but also, disallowing commenting and probably even reading comments.

A big thing we need to do is shut down Internet gambling and, more importantly, the precursors to gambling, which is anything that promotes the same addictive behavior. That includes all those "free" gotcha games that aren't really games. They're daily chores with random rewards and paid boosts to induce addictive behavior.

Apps like Stake need to be completely removed from the App stores.

I also think Fanduel and DraftKings should be illegal. I'm even leery on young people playing fantasy draft games, even for no money, because it's a gambling pipeline.

Oh and putting your children on the Internet as like a Youtube family? That should be illegal.

Algorithmic feeds in general I think are bad but particularly for young people. Because they're designed to induce addiction and "engagement".

I think phones will soon be good enough (if they're not already) to do background age verifications to make sure the user is of appropriate age via the camera and processed locally (to avoid uploading pictures of minors). At some point I think we'll see that integrated into major platforms.

The point of restrictions isn't to be perfect. It's to create a barrier that makes things more difficult. In years past we did this by, say, only showing more adult content on TV after certain times. Could kids stay up late to watch it? Or tape it once VCRs became coomon? Of course. But it helped.

Just like gambling. Requiring someone to physically go to a casino reduced harm compared to just opening their phone wherever they are. It's a bit like having to go to the store to get ice cream or alcohol or whatever your vice vs just having it in your house or even getting it delivered.

I think we as a society need more barriers.

I agree with pretty much everything you said.

> Algorithmic feeds in general I think are bad but particularly for young people.

Just young people? Have you noticed the trend of political discourse more or less globally? Social media certainly assisted in bringing much government abuse and corruption to light over the past couple decades but I feel it has also had severe negative impacts on civil discourse surrounding contentious topics. Not that things were great to begin with of course.

> I think phones will soon be good enough

No! Absolutely not! Please do not provide authoritarian tech companies with legitimate excuses to lock down the computing devices that we supposedly own! Society has already gone in an extremely dangerous direction there and badly needs to course correct.

// A big thing we need to do is shut down...anything that promotes the same addictive behavior.

Oh great, we're back to the 'destroy the pinball machines' faux-moral outrage. If it wasn't gacha-gaming it would be Coin Pusher machines, or Pinball, or Arcade Machines, or POGs, or Pokemon, or cigarette/bubblegum card collecting or...

//I also think Fanduel and DraftKings should be illegal. I'm even leery on young people playing fantasy draft games, even for no money, because it's a gambling pipeline.

Moral hand-wringing masquerading as ethics. As often attributed to Twayne, "Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it"

//Algorithmic feeds in general I think are bad but particularly for young people. Because they're designed to induce addiction and "engagement".

Ones designed to sell toys, services, or adspace (such as it ever was). Whereas for people of the age of majority (and particularly those in retirement) those same algorithms dictate elections and, increasingly, what constitutes political or domestic 'reality'. I know which I'd prioritise addressing.

//I think phones will soon be good enough (if they're not already) to do background age verifications to make sure the user is of appropriate age via the camera and processed locally

They currently can't do this at emigration points - see the amount of asylum seekers claiming to be unaccompanied children with no birth certs whose claimed age can't be disputed:

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/social-affairs/2024/08/27...

With the best will in the world, and the resources and governance policies of a governmental agency tasked with this specific action, it fails constantly. As such, outsourcing it to the tender mercies of Silicon Valley VCs via some App and SaaS solution is farcical.

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/nearly-200-asylum-seek...

//I think we as a society need more barriers.

I think those with the least restraint and control are the loudest to request their current privileges to be stripped away at a societal level, lest they indulge to the point of detriment.

That's something I hadn't thought about actually, if YouTube is being included, that was utterly invaluable for me for my school exams (before and after 16). I thought I wouldn't really have been missing anything with a ban on social media under 16 as I never really used it much anyway, but I had always excluded YouTube from "social media" in my head due to the sheer value of it for education.

My life would've been significantly worse and more importantly I would know a lot less about a lot of topics if I didn't have access to YouTube from age 13+.

Yes yes yes yes yes?

It’s weird that something completely normal like 20 years ago is “weird” today.

I might even make it 18 when you’re old enough to sign a EULA. When did something completely normal become weird?

“What’s next, an internet license?”

Oh please god, yes.

You’re own argument about kids not being allowed to play in the woods in the more seems to play into this idea we should just accept a dystopian world.

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