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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

It seems what would be more productive would be for sites to publish metadata about the nature of the content. Then the access method could decide whether, or which of it to show.

Analogy: parent seeing that a movie is R rated and not letting their kid see it.

Age verification means that the content origin still has to rate its material for age suitability, and match that to the user. Asking them to do just one out of these two things is easier.

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Doesn't work, what if both are on the same page such as a home feed? Analogy: the theater shows both R and PG movies, so a forcefield prevents kids entering the building on days where an R movie is shown at any time in any theater that day.

Digital "theaters" do not have the same limitations as physical theaters. The metadata can mark the page as R but include an additional indication that a PG filtered version of the page is available, via a different URL or a website setting that uses a cookie.

If the website doesn't want to make a filtered version than the metadata can mark the page as R with an additional indication that PG content is present on the page. The parent can manually select the PG content or someone will make parental controls that can automatically select or (like an ad blocker) filter for only the PG content.

If both are on the same page, then it it can't be a domain-level (e.g. DNS) property, but something in the HTML markup. Like a certain actual <div> contains 18+ material; if the configured age of the user is less, then that element is not shown. That aspect of it seems the least difficult.

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