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Comment by peto123 | Hacker News Reader

I might be a minority here, but I honestly think that making internet porn opt-in is a good idea, I am not from UK, but I support it.

As a reader of /r/nofap subreddit, I have learned that porn have had a very negative impact on a lot of people, and it is certainly not healthy for very young people (or even kids) to have easy access to it (as the situation is now).

I am just not sure if I would support other categories to block (like "esoteric material"), but regarding porn - good idea. You can opt-in if you want, can't you? The only problem is that if there are more adults in a household, and only some of them wants to opt-in.

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Why does government or industry have to intervene in your personal life? If you don't want to view pornographic material, don't search for it. Stay away from sites where you might see something like it. If you're a parent, educate your kid.

This is a waste of time and money. Plain and simple.

If you are a parent yourself, you will know that suggesting education is not enough. By your logic, why is there an age limit to alcohol consumption? Your whole reasoning could be used for that as well - and enforcing alcohol age limit also costs time and money...

The main problem is that somewhere some database will hold the information about citizens and a "likesPorn" flag. That information is personal. Alcohol and cigarettes both have age limits, but there is no database that people need to register into ("wantsBooz = TRUE") before being able to purchase their first drink.

Most countries don't have a 21+ year old age limit on alcohol. It's actually a rather poor idea and harms 18/19/20 year olds who attend college and get busted drinking. It's pretty silly to draw parallels between porn and alcohol. You've said you're a /r/nofap reader. You obviously have a bias against porn.

Alcohol is a drug which has measurable health impacts on children if they drink at a young age. I have yet to see a non-biased scientific study which deems porn (not just the rapey kind) as physically and psychologically damaging to children.

If porn was found to be - without a doubt - bad for a certain age group, then yes I would get behind something where the government would limit its access to minors. This law, however, further stigmatizes porn instead of embracing it as just another weird thing humans do for entertainment.

(I want to make it clear that I'm not referring to illegal pornography. "Porn" where people get raped or that deal with minors is illegal)

The comparison to alcohol is actually very useful: in the US where the drinking age is high (and fairly strictly enforced), binge drinking and alcohol abuse is extremely common in the teenaged population.

Compare with other countries where alcohol usage is not taboo, where the drinking age is low (and/or unenforced), where teen alcohol abuse is a far, far lesser problem.

It turns out that making something taboo and setting up some rudimentary roadblocks to its acquisition does not have the effect on consumption that you think it does...

Speaking anecdotally, growing up in Canada there was no one under the drinking age who couldn't get alcohol if they wanted it. Hell, half of us didn't even like drinking, and we did it for the taboo-ness of it all.

> If you are a parent yourself, you will know that suggesting education is not enough.

...why do you think this? If you raise a child to be intelligent and independent, education is pretty much the only effective way to keep them away from something.

Is a government mandated filter the best way to allow parents to go beyond just educating their children? As a childless person who isn't petrified of naked people, why should I pay for a service that's only any good for lazy parents?

You need to be a responsible adult and talk to your children about pornography. If you don't trust them then you need to install a porn filter. But if you don't trust your kids, you're going to have a lot of bigger problems then porn.

Censoring something is the lazy way of getting people to conform to your ideals. Imagine that instead of a censor campaign, the UK government had made an attempt to educate the public on the effects of porn. This could be done with adverts and studied in sex ed in school.

This has nothing to do with getting people to conform, it is about getting people who want us to conform to believe he is on their side (after offending a lot of said people with the gay marriage changes). The subset of the people he is trying to placate here are a subset who are very much against sex education in school.

I don't think you deserve to be downvoted for expressing a dissenting opinion, but citing "/r/nofap" as sole reference does not really help your argument.

Anyway, we all know that if kids want access to porn they'll find a way or an other, what we need is to educate the parents and explain that you can't leave a kid alone on the web any more than you can leave them alone in the streets.

Blocking porn requires that you draw a definitive boundary around a subjectively defined area. You'll always draw the wrong shape because everyone has their own.

So now you're blocking stuff that people think you shouldn't, like girls in bare ankles or breast cancer papers or who knows, and now you're requiring people to divulge their thoughts by requesting access to it.

And now you have an insight, however primitive, into someone's thoughts. And you have no right to be in there.

If you don't agree with blocking other forms of content, why would you think opt-in is a good idea? Surely opt-out is far more sensible all ways round.

So because you think porn has a negative impact, everyone else should have that decision made for them?

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