There's a natural tension between freedom and protection here. Anyone on HN is aware of all the debate for and against section 230. We're also probably the crowd most vocally against ID verification laws for adult sites or just age verification for non-adult content, like YouTube or Discord.

I, personally, am in the "Parents gotta parent" camp, but know that doesn't cover all the problems, plus only addresses children when there's also real harm to adults too.

This turns into a big mess of a discussion involving data privacy laws too, and before you know it you have people talking about how the US needs a GDPR equivalent and someone else complaining about cookie banners, loosing the thread entirely as it turns into this big swirling mess of a problem with some people worried about kids, some worried about privacy, some worried about actual personal impacts/addiction, etc.

I feel like a lot of it quickly becomes disconnected from reality. Let's pick on the adult site age verification laws. I live in Nebraska, which means if I go to HornPub, it tell me "Govenment said no"

Now, I'm not going to pretend they're some beacons of moral authority, but I at least think for their own business interest they'll keep CSAM and revenge content off their platform. But what happens when a 16 year old that absolutely will find a place to watch adult content anyway goes looking? Would we rather them wind up on a platform that's moderately safe, or somewhere that serves the worst of the worst?

That, I think, is the problem: Any rules, laws that say "Let's restrict what websites can serve users" mean either a total country-wide mass surveillance system tied into every ISP filtering every domain and blackholing any request to all but approved DNS servers and aggressively blocking VPNs, or it's a law only hurting the companies at least trying to comply with the laws that do matter.

This article has undertones of asking for better parental controls, but kids will always bypass them unless they're aggressive enough that adults are uncomfortable with them too.

I have seen adults in my life fall victim to addiction to social media (Facebook, tiktok) , online shopping (Temu, Amazon), and I can't help but think the solution is pretty obvious:

Don't kill the product, regulate it's abuse. Facebook? Make algorithmic feeds / infinite scrolling illegal (At least as the default), not social media. Temu? Make gamling-esque UI illegal. Make new data protection laws. Hold executives that violate these laws criminally liable. Fine the companies more than the cost of doing business.

Roblox, Minecraft, and other games with user-created mini-games/servers/etc and random encounters with strangers online? Competitive games with kernel level anti-cheat? We all bitch about them, but the answer has always been obvious: Don't hang out with random strangers. The services should provide a friends-only mode, and that should be the default. Ta-da, problem solved, by social means, not technical means.

A colleague of mine had the idea that an easy solution for a lot of social media content issues would be any content given by an algorithm is exempt from safe harbor laws. You pick what users see? You’re responsible and liable.

> The services should provide a friends-only mode, and that should be the default.

This isn’t such a bad idea, although maybe it should depend on the type of game. As a kid the only place I played games with random people was Quake servers and Battle.net. This wasn’t really an issue, as there’s not much time to socialize when you’re blowing up your opponent. But Roblox seems to be primarily a social meta-game with many sub-games, so it’s riskier.

It’s a spectrum. On one end you have Second Life and VRChat, which should absolutely have a no kids policy. At the other end you have single player games which are obviously fine. In the middle there’s everything from online Mario Kart games to Counter Strike. Some are probably more ok than others. As it stands Roblox is uncomfortably close to the no-no zone.