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Comment by kakacik | Hacker News Reader

You can't just push responsibility for the kids to the parents, where is the world going? This is madness.

The next thing you are going to claim kids from young age shouldn't have fully unlocked smart phones, shouldn't install any app and so on. Where is the end of this? Are you telling me parents should spend more time with kids, heck even be their role models although it is much harder compared to just giving up on them and let the glorious internet and various fashionate toxic tribes raise them? Blasphemy!!!

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Look, I have a two-year old. But I think it’s possible to do what you want without compromising the privacy of the user. I also don’t think it’s right to require every device to share information that makes my child a target for predators like Meta.

I totally agree with that sentiment but we can and should both have good parents and safe devices.

Where has a few decades of "safety" culture catering to the greater moron really brought us?

Seatbelts and helmets have saved countless lives

And tort law has saved hundreds of thousands of lives

a vague response to a vague rhethorical question:

a lot of safer morons? we all are the 'greater moron' in some area at some point, cmon

You mean ‘safe devices’ that don't let hostile actors know everything I'm doing, right?

Yes, no-one knew what I was doing on my Vic-20, you should try it

> we can and should both have good parents

but we always will have bad parents. So any legistlation needs to account for that. Otherwise those children with the worst parents have the greater digital abilities/opportunities/misfortunes.

I am rephrasing my statement then:

"we should have good parents and can and should safe devices"

"Can have good parents" is implying we control something that we don't. Kids with the worst parents will always be at a disadvantage.

Parents shouldn't beat or rape their kids yet many thousands do. Parents should teach their kids about sex yet we still have sex ed in schools. Parents shouldn't deprive their kids of an education yet a minority do for religious our personal reasons; we still have compulsory schooling. Parents shouldn't give cigarretes or alcohol to kids yet we still have laws to prevent their sale to minors.

I'm always unsure what your sort of argument seems to imply. Kids are not property of their parents and the state routinely makes decisions about children's welfare.

Kids are not property of the parents. Because with property rights comes responsibility.

And that's the catch-22 imposed on parents. Society wants to lord over the power as if the child is their property but none of the responsibility. Anything that went wrong is the parent's fault. It's always more and more requirements upon the parent, a nearly one way imposition of power where law or society says what you must do but of course you will bear all the costs. But by god you better not morally outrage someone or they'll have CPS up your ass.

It's largely the cheapest kind of concern. The kind where you mete out punishment out of a sense of smug moral superiority, but never lift a hand to help out for the endeavors you advocate for, only to push them into a sort of moral tragedy of the commons.

These laws only mete out punishment for people failing to obey, not actually provide support, it is essentially theatre of pretending to care about children. Theatre by the most evil of people, those that use kids as political props.

> Because with property rights comes responsibility

Response-ability. The ability to respond. Which you have, if you want it or not, for anything and everything you can respond to.

You see children on the streets getting beat up? Your response-ability. You see someone throwing garbage to the ground? Your response-ability.

What you DO with it, whether you act on it, or you deny to have it, doesn’t matter. It is purely the ability, the capacity to. And not responding is also a response. We typically share response-abilities with others around us who are similarly capable. Ownership doesn’t inherently come with increased response-ability. Power does.

Maybe you are confusing responsibility with (legal) liability?

See also: Duty to rescue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_to_rescue - at least as applied and lived in EU, LatAm, Africa; and some US states on paper

responsibility:

> "fact or condition of being responsible, accountable, or answerable," from 1780s.

and in the mid 1790s it meant "that for which one is responsible; a trust, duty, etc."

i am not sure where you're getting this "ability to respond" idea from. i understand the ideal, it just won't work with humans, unless we go back to being tribal.

The key point in the etymology is "that for which one is responsible" you have to actually be responsible for some "thing" to have any responsibility.

even "Response" comes from re- + Sponsor, which:

> The general sense of "one who binds himself to answer for another and be responsible for his conduct" is by 1670s.

i am not bound by anyone else on this planet, thanks very much.

> i understand the ideal, it just won't work with humans

I don’t consider it to be something that “works” or not, or an ideal, but as fact of reality. The moment you could act on something totally makes it your own responsibility to do so or not. Your action or inaction will have real world consequences. Whether you can or will be held accountable is independent from that, or what framework you apply to evaluate a “good” response.

We don’t have to agree on definitions of words but that’s not the point I’m making here, which is based on reality/fact/capability to react and respond to an external stimulus. And for those (re)actions you and only you are responsible, as a fact of life, whether you want that or not. Which is how those two definitions relate.

> The moment you could act on something totally makes it your own responsibility to do so or not

have you really, truly, thought this through? There's hundreds if not thousands of things I could act on right now. I'm not responsible for any of them.

is this like a corollary to "being heroic is being selfless and ignoring the consequences" or something? Is it a generalization of "stimulus/response"? "branching multiverses"?

what i am getting at here, is: is this a circular "you have a responsibility because you can act, therefore you can act because there is a responsibility", is it so generalized as to be meaningless? is it just a misrepresentation of "you can only control [are responsible for] your own actions"?

> There's hundreds if not thousands of things I could act on right now. I'm not responsible for any of them.

In my eyes, you are! In the classical definition, you will at least have to answer/be held accountable for all of that by your later self. Other people invoke external judges but the internal one is typically the toughest of all.

     I am more afraid of the God in me than the god you pray to nightly. —- Jason Molina

Then again, you seem to see it something negative (guilt/blame perhaps), whereas I see it as something that makes me aware of my power, my total sphere of potential influence on the world, and the inherent value of my actions and my existence. To me it is empowering. And for me it’s not about selflessness either, but the opposite. I am responsible to make the best out of my situation, based purely on my own values. It doesn’t get more selfish than that. And again, this is not some moral preaching to me, but simply stating the obvious: Nobody but me is responsible for how I act and how I set my priorities.

Say, a person dies of hunger in India. I am responsible for his death. As much (or as little) as anyone else that was able/capable to stop it from happening. We have that shared responsibility. And this is not an “ideal” or “tribal thinking”. To me, it’s just fact. Physical reality.

If you see a child drowning in a pool in front of you and you do not act, are you responsible for not saving it? I say yes. Now, what difference does it make it you see it happening, or just know about it, and you had the power to stop it? Would it make a difference if you closed your eyes, deliberately, to not see the child drowning that you know is right there in front of you, or would you still be responsible for not saving it but rather looking away? Does it change your responsibility whether you look, or you don’t look, or is it rather the knowing that makes a difference? If you think distance makes a difference, does this mean you running away from the drowning child makes you less responsible than looking right at it?

this reminds me of, and i mean this unsneeringly, partially of "... the only thing God didn't know, you see, was what it was like to not exist. so, smithereens ... a lot of stuff about probability and religious pennies ... so we're all God's Debris, experiencing."

I may have muddied it.

i think i understand what you mean.

:-)

Where is that quote from? Scott Adams? I admit that I didn’t read any of his philosophy, and Scott Alexander’s eulogy doesn’t really inspire me to do so.

Yeah, a short book by him, when i got it i didn't know it was that Scott Adams. It's not mind-bending or anything; I just thought a parallel when i read your decision matrix.

It really isn't as simple as "Just be a better parent". To use my nephews as an example, my sisters take good care to make sure there's no device usage at home. They've got dumb phones, my sisters don't use their smartphones around the kids either unless it's to take a call, TV/screen time is extremely limited (1h on Saturdays). The older one (12) has an iPhone with parental controls on and tuned to the max, no Youtube or anything like that, and I (the techie in the family) made sure to set it up so it's not easy to circumvent the blocks either.

Y'know what happens instead? Their friends have unfettered access to smartphones, so my nephews see all the idiotic brainrotting shit on youtube shorts anyways. If not at home, they'll see all the crap we're blocking at school from their friends anyways. Hell, they could just go to the library and access the free public computers there if they wanted to! So my sisters who are responsible and do everything correctly, still suffer, and like any reasonable parent don't want to go to the extreme of locking their children up in cages and not letting them outside of the house.

There's a reason we don't legislate alcohol and tobacco sales to the same tune of "Just police your kids 24/7 and keep them under lock and key", we instead realize that we can't (or, shouldn't) supervise kids 24/7 day in and day out, and have society-wide rules that forces everyone to not sell booze to anyone underage.

Similarly, one of your nephews has a friend with parents that don’t lock their liquor cabinet, which means despite all the laws not allowing sales of alcohol to minors, they still have access to it.

I think what your sisters are doing is fine—they’re sending a signal to their kids that this stuff isn’t “good” and though they’ll undoubtedly encounter it in the world, they’re now going to be inherently biased a certain way. And that’s kinda the best you can hope for.

> Similarly, one of your nephews has a friend with parents that don’t lock their liquor cabinet, which means despite all the laws not allowing sales of alcohol to minors, they still have access to it.

Funnily enough that's how I ended up getting drunk the first time, a friend stole some liquor from their parent's liquor cabinet :p We both ended up in a lot of trouble over it, him more than me obviously.

But that's sort of the point as well, if they go down that route then it's easier to catch them and it's easier to punish them for their actions. It's also much more obvious that what they're doing is the wrong thing because it involves a lot of sneaking around, deception and even stealing from your own parents. It makes kids less willing to do it in the first place (unless you're a dumbass like my friend and I).

With something like a smartphone, your parents might not let you have one but every single other kid around you has one, so at that point it only becomes an arbitrary rule that your parents imposed on you, and not a wider rule that everyone has to adhere to. If we treated smartphones for children similarly to how we treat alcohol or tobacco, the parents would have a much easier time enforcing these rules.

> ...they’re now going to be inherently biased a certain way

Or they could go the complete opposite way as well. I mean it's the most common trope/facet of being a kid, that stage of rebellion against your parents and their rules. You still have that with things like alcohol and tobacco of course, but at that point it becomes rebellion against society et al which is a bigger deal and harder hurdle to get over than rebelling against your parents and their rules.

I don’t understand why this sentiment keeps coming up when it’s clear parents are expected to do more than ever now.

Are you going to sit here and tell me your parents were aware of every time you touched a computer or turned on the TV? They vetted everything you consumed? It was a lot easier back then to do. I bet your parents couldn’t even figure out how to block a single channel on their tv, nor did they likely even try. Most of our parents never did.

It helped that, at the time, most video was broadcast over the air and thus subject to FCC regulations relating to content, and that advertisers would pull funds from stations and networks that aired content that was too controversial. Other, non-regulated or less regulated (“adult”) content was for pay and the systems had child lockouts.

It’s much easier to relinquish parental control of media exposure when the system helps you out by moderating the content. But the Internet changed everything. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be as a parent to oversee media exposure for their children nowadays without pulling the plug on social media altogether.

Not just social media but internet bandwidth altogether. If you have an internet connection someone somewhere is using it to push things to your kids.

Exactly! There was a bare minimum that ensured your kid could only get so far before hitting some sort of barrier. Now it's basically non-existent unless 1) your ISP or service you're using, all private companies at that, decide to give you effective tools that you then have to take time to learn and implement all while knowing you will have to constantly monitor those tools and see how things change (not to mention how your kid changes with time) while trusting those private entities aren't taking advantage of you and your kid. It's maddening.

I am more technoligically literate than most of my peers and even I find I spend a lot of time on this problem. My kids aren't even teens yet, it's going to suck to keep up with this.

Raising a kid takes a village.

It is not like parents are the only influential figures in a kid's upbringing, they are not the only role models, they should not be the only ones paying attention and guiding kids to adulthood.

Parental control options as they stand are severely lacking. If you add the actively predatory enshittification efforts conducted by seemingly all larges tech companies, you are left either forbidding your kid from accessing anything (this does not work if the kid's friends have access) or allowing far more than you are comfortable with.

Lets take YouTube as an example. As it stands you have the options of YouTube (with both the most wonderful content available on one hand, and toxicity and brain rot shorts on the other) or YouTube Kids - an app with controls that do not work. How about allowing parents to whitelist content and/or creators instead of letting the algorithms run the show?

Spotify is another example. How about letting parents control whether the kid's account is plastered with videos, podcasts and AI slop?

How about your run of the mill browser, letting parents review and allow websites on a case-by-case basis? Maybe my kid is ready for news sites but not Reddit? Maybe 4chan and 8kun are better reserved for the more adventorous adults as opposed to impressionable kids?

I agree that age verification is a bad solution, but what the hell are parents supposed to reach for? It's not like Silicon Valley are stepping up with any real solutions or even propositions to these problems, it is left for - at best clueless - politicians to navigate the problem space.

Raising a kid takes a village.

I think this is the real problem, providers have no accountability. Rather than forcing everyone to give up their privacy we should force the providers to use a few basic labels, pornography, educational, etc, let parents actually choose what their kids see, and most importantly make them liable for crossing the line.

It’s ridiculous that schools are forcing young children to carry devices for educational work that will also happily serve up brainrot, video games, and porn — with the supposed solution that the parent needs to be watching over their shoulder 24/7. Let’s just give all the kids loaded guns too, and say if anything goes wrong it’s just bad parenting.

I agree with you, it takes a small friendly village (or at least a largeish multigenerational close family nearby at the lowest minimum).

But we are in western 21st century, people leave their places of birth for myriad of reasons, some better than others but all equally good for them, given its almost never easy to lose one's roots and just move on one's own.

I am in this category, we have 2 small kids and any family is at least 1000km away, the actually helpful good one more like 1500km (and no its not just a hop on some local planes, rather full day ordeal at minimum). No nanny. We see how kids and grandparents enjoy each other, grandparents have more... mental capacity? to teach them after our long day at work and so on.

But there are reasons we moved, its complex mix of leaving poor corrupted place with higher criminality where kids would struggle to achieve a good life via moral legal work and just good efforts. Not everybody has the luxury to come from background where the only difference is amount of money earned. So you give kids a better start and environment, while giving them much smaller set of role models and people who have time for them outside school.

At the end its our choices and our responsibility to raise them. No phones for a loooong time, and even after that some dumb nokia. They can screw up their lives on their own once adults, we won't contribute there even if it would be tremendously easier lifestyle.

Clearly the other commenters haven't picked up on your blatant sarcasm for some reason.

Can happen sometimes. I down voted the comment after reading only the first sentence but then corrected it to an upvote after reading the rest. Not sure if many people have an attention span long enough to do something like this.

Even noticing the sarcasm, it just seems a bit... unnecessary? It interrupts a discussion without adding much, so to me just seems snarky for no good reason.

While I appreciate sarcasm in a time of privacy crisis, I agree. We come to hackernews for discourse and try to follow the rules to have better discourse and comments that only provide sarcasm work against that.

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