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> take great pains to keep minors out of my adult spaces, and don't have to resort to anything as invasive as biometric surveillance or card charges.

What sort of spaces are these (online or in person), and how do you enforce this? I have an online space where such non invasive measures could be useful.

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stego-tech 5 days ago | parent [-]

Mine are rooted in the 90s/00s internet: I know the people I allow into my spaces, and extend to them a degree of trust to let others in who are also of legal age. I rotate the credentials every so often at random, forcing everyone to request the new password from me. Other spaces I inhabit also operate off this sort of "community trust" system, only letting in folks we already know ourselves. It's how we keep out minors and trolls, as well as just bad/no-longer-trusted actors.

It's inconvenient, sure, and it's not SEO-friendly, but it generally works and doesn't require checking IDs or doing biometric verifications. The thing is, I'm building a community, not a product, and therefore don't have the same concerns as, say, PornHub, for checking IDs. It's also not a scalable solution - I have to build individual rapports with people I can then trust to have the access keys to my space(s), and then monitor that trust at each password change to ensure it's not violated. It's hard work, but it's decently reliable for my needs.

For larger/at-scale providers...I think the better answer is just good-old-fashioned on-device or home-network filtering. The internet was NEVER meant to be child-friendly, and we need to make it abundantly clear to parents that it's never going to be so they take necessary steps to protect their children. I'd personally like to see more sites (in general, not just adult) contribute their domain names and CDNs to independent list maintainers (or published in a help article linked via their main footer) so individuals and organizations can have greater control over their online experience. I think if someone wants to, say, block the entire domain ranges of Amazon for whatever reason, then that information should be readily available without having to watch packet flows and analyzing CDN domain patterns.

It's just good netiquette, I think, but I'm an old-fashioned dinosaur in that regard.

	▲	eszed 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> I'd personally like to see more sites (in general, not just adult) contribute their domain names and CDNs to independent list maintainers (or published in a help article linked via their main footer) This would be so useful. I once tried to get this information from a company you've all heard of, so that we could reliably whitelist their services on our corporate firewall, and the answer was "they're dynamic, so that's impossible". I said "but you know them, you could dynamically make that information available to your customers", but got nowhere. I'd like this to be a regulatory requirement, but the people who make the rules aren't sufficiently technically competent to identify technical solutions, and don't seem to listen to people who are. [Edit to add: I really like your old-school approach to building online community for yourself. I don't know your interests, or if I'd like yours, but I wish more spaces with your approach were around. The world in general (not only the internet) is a better place when we interact with each other in ways that aren't commercially determined.]