I'll probably get DV to oblivion for this, but I have to constantly wonder where those parents come from that need to forbid their children to roam freely on the internet.

Didn't they grow up in an age unrestricted web either? By now we must have two generations of unhinged children grown up with unsafe World of Warcraft, MSN, Whatsapp and ICQ. Oh and the p0rn... I mean, seriously, do you guys have nothing else to do than to moderate your kids Minecraft servers?

Here's the thing, my parents did forbid me: by denying me access. Kids have way, way more access to the internet than I ever did. When I was a kid, the only computer was in a communal area ans needed explicit permission by virtue of mandating that no one be using the phone. And then when I was older and we had broadband, it was still banned by virtue that my parents didn't think it was great for me to spend all my time on the computer.

My kid on the other hand, has orders of magnitude more exposure to the internet than I did. And it's far more private. Any chat I had with anyone was viewable by my parents by simply walking into the room. My kid has a private device she has 24/7 access too. The calculus is so much different and I say this as someone who is fairly lax in home much screen time my kid has and what she is allowed to view.

The internet used to be that forest on the edge of town. Once in a while you might find some drug paraphernalia there. Now it's the Las Vegas strip with billboards for hookers and blow.

I can at least understand being aware of what your kid is doing, but the number of people who say they just ban X outright in there house I'm afraid are gonna be shocked by their kid's actions when they leave the house. Better to teach them when they're young then to all of a sudden have them exposed to everything when they're an older teenager/18.

And also lots of people saying the internet is worse today, I honestly don't think that's true. There's so much more moderation then there was in the early 2000s.

I find it weird that you are not DV since the stuff you list here has caused a lot of issues for a lot of people _and_ things have gotten much much worse. The internet is so much more prevalent than it was 15 years ago. The danger is much higher.

The idea of having nothing to do is absurd, child safety is and should be a parent primary concern. Roblox is basically gambling, it puts kids as targets for predators and makes them addicted to several things.

Reading a comment on a news story like this is very very frustrating.

Both things can be true; there can be both a moral panic about the exaggerated harms of unrestricted internet access, but also as the internet became commonplace and law enforcement not keeping up, it's plausible and likely there are many more predators on it now than it was back in our days.

Not to mention that getting onto the internet back in our day required a relative level of technical proficiency which could've filtered out vulnerable children, where as today there is no barrier. The corporate push to share personal data everywhere (often nowadays it's hard/impossible to operate pseudonymously - which doesn't seem to stop bad guys in any way but puts legitimate users at risk) doesn't help; in my days the number 1 rule was to never share PII on the internet, which nowadays doesn't exist and is difficult to implement in practice even if you tried.

Because the internet is far more optimized at capturing your attention and encouraging terrible behavior (purchases, viruses, scams, etc.)

When you were younger the scariest thing was joining an AOL chat room on a 56k modem. Now you can mind rot yourself on YouTube shorts with the next video loading in milliseconds while being fed content full of sports gambling ads.

To act like the internet doesn’t have significantly sharper edges and dangerous loops which affect children is ignoring the reality around you. The downvotes are not because in principle folks disagree, it’s that the situation is different.

I grew up on the unrestricted internet, it doesn't mean I believe it was entirely good. I did (and DO!) many things that I realize are not beneficial, and do not want my children doing.

The 'unrestricted web' from your youth did not have you uploading 8k video of you performing sexual acts that both landed up on pedo sites and was used for blackmail (the threat sending to the whole school). Children are getting roped, not into gramps' porno collection, but sophisticated networks that financially exploit naivety of children in a shocking manner that simply did not exist 10+ years ago. My daughter tried to commit suicide as a result of getting caught up in pedo rings that trawled Roblox. For visibility, I'll spare you the downvote, but you are wrong... things are very different from 'back in the day'

Attention maximization algorithms and dark patterns took over between then and now. It’s not the same place.

My wife was a teacher and sexual health educator for most of her career (grades 8-12).

When I was getting sex ed, part of the teacher's responsibility was grounding us in basic facts to dispel word-of-mouth myths that were patently absurd to anyone with any experience (like "sneezing after sex prevents pregnancy").

My wife's tasks was to explain that the hardcore porn they'd all seen was unrealistic in the same way that action movies completely misrepresent fights and stunts, and the real world doesn't work that way. Her problem was that she was arguing with video evidence that it could. The kids aren't unhinged, but they're definitely misled in a completely different way than we were.

[dead]