https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
can't believe that people still fall for this shtick
can't believe that people still fall for this shtick
So if you are to censor something, suicide descriptions would be far more morally defensible to censor than porn, as to my knowledge there's little to no evidence that increased access to porn leads to increases in harm to other people.
Having NO kids puts you in a better position to judge, because you are not emotionally attached. You should however impact the effect things have on your children.
And the only way to do that is to expose them to it ... You are not a bad parent are you?(Fallacy: Attacking the man).
The only ones remotely able to say 'think of the kids' are shrink that deals with children with issues/research.
[0]: Or the government censors whatever they like with their filtering infrastructure.
While I agree with the rest of your comment, this is a frustrating attitude to take to any studies which may have been done. Anecdotal evidence isn't evidence!
In the snow! Both ways!
Darn kids these days have it easy... (grumble grumble)
My daughters, since they've been a couple years old, have had unrestricted access to the Internet via tablets and laptops. Quite frankly, I'm far more worried about the impact of shitty cartoons and crap Disney productions than I am them watching porn. Indeed, if I discovered my daughters were viewing such materials, I'd take it as an opportunity to discuss and find out what's going on.
(1) You know (or can tell) what content your kids are exposed to on the internet. Most kids I know are quite adept at keeping what they are upto hidden from their parents and that isnt unique to the current generation.
(2) Parents have a much better sense of content, kids are exposed to on TV (where content is regulated and rated for the most part) than on the internet.
(3)Even if you are an involved parent with the ability to discuss things with your daughter, you both arent living in isolation from society. There are easily more parents and kids that don't have such a relationship than the number that do. So if boys as young as 8-10, growing up in highly unsupervised environments, are constantly exposed to extreme porn, what do you think their expectations of women are going to be?
(4)Addiction. Everyone has weaknesses. And porn sites are getting better and better at keeping people hooked. Kids are the most susceptible.
Freedom has always come at a cost. And the main cost is equality. If all kids are born equal and all families are created equal sure give them all the freedoms they want. But that is unfortunately not the world we live in today nor is it getting any more equal any time soon.
Of course I have seen such ads - when I was searching for porn.
One place where the internet turns into a push medium might be specific services, like online chats. That is of course a valid concern, but porn filters wouldn't help with that.
Now, people working in the games industry are a different story... (Note: I'm not anti-games. But the games industry does consider addiction.)
I fear a world where my children cannot express themselves freely FAR more I do a world where I have to explain to my children that some people are just kind of weird...
Censorship of the internet is NOT ok.
> answered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6082643
Furthermore, you posted this exceedingly stupid "Do you have kids?" one-liner at least four times in this thread, simultaneously managing to portray yourself as accusatory, lazy, superior, and spammy at the same time.
This thread has degraded in quality due to your participation, both in form as well as in content. You mastered the invoking of the infamous "won't someone think of the children" rationale and somehow topped it by assuming only people with children should have a voice in these censorship discussions and this voice would somehow automatically be bound to agree with you. While I find your opinion personally disagreeable it's really your (to use the term broadly) discussion style and tactics that are offensive in the extreme.
If it offends your sensibilities censorship is always an option :)
Look at his behavior in this thread and tell me it's perfectly fine. I mean this seriously, you're a user with gigantic amounts of karma, certainly more than I'll ever have. If you think it's OK, I'll cede that I clearly had the wrong idea about how this place should work, and I'll apologize for overstepping.
Yes, some people might reasonably not want their children to run across pornographic material on the internet. Here are some other things some people might reasonably not want their children to run across on the internet: Anti-religious material. Religious material. Depictions of violence. Any mention of prejudice against racial minorities, women, etc. Websites offering do-my-homework-for-me services. News about upsetting things like tens of thousands of children starving to death every day in poor parts of Africa.
I hope it's clear that the internet would not be improved by having opt-out filters for all those things. I think it's clear, in fact, that the internet would not be improved by having opt-out filters for any of those things.
Yes, I hope my daughter will learn about sex in better ways than by stumbling across porn on the internet. And I hope she'll learn about those other things in better ways than by stumbling across them on the internet, too. It is not the government's, or my ISP's, job to make that happen by making things harder to find online; it probably won't work, and it will probably break other things (as such filters always have in the past), and it's the wrong way to solve the "problem" anyway.
And I also hope that if in the fullness of time our daughter wants to find porn on the internet, she will be able to, and she won't be (or feel) obliged to disclose the fact to her parents, and doing so without telling us won't require her to seek out dubious illegal channels which are likely to be full of stuff much "worse" than she'd easily have found without all the censorship.
> won't require her to seek out dubious illegal channels which are likely to be full of stuff much "worse" than she'd easily have found without all the censorship.
This is one of my biggest fears.
As an analogy (and a true story); they banned selling knives on ebay[1]. Now I have to go to specialist knife-selling websites to buy my knives (I am a collector). Those websites have a much better range and promote knives much better than ebay did.
So if you wanted just "mainstream" porn, you'd get that from places with prominent displays of all kinds of fetishes many of us would never have even heard of otherwise.
Then came the BBS's, and the same was the case - normal mainstream stuff in between every fetish imaginable.
Now I don't necessarily see that as a problem, but it does mean that by adding these kind of restrictions, they are effectively losing all control. They are also likely to massively hasten the move towards technologies to better anonymous, encrypted browsing.
If anything drives "darknets" and systems like Tor to the next level, it will be more extensive porn filtering even more so than piracy, especially because of the amount of money in porn that is legally manufactured and distributed, but that is or may become illegal in large potential markets.