I consider myself lucky to have grown up before the internet, but after local BBS' were a thing. My parents had absolutely no idea what went on in those systems, and I found the freedom incredible. Being able to explore and spread my wings a bit was a huge part of my childhood and teen years, and it wouldn't have been possible if my parents were hovering over my shoulder, or if I were unable to make an account because I wasn't 18.

That said, I was mostly dealing with griefers in Trade Wars or LoRD, and the worst thing I could find locally was GIFs of women in bikinis (and waiting for them to download was an excellent way to learn patience). I didn't have to worry so much about the threats that exist today online.

I am so grateful that I grew up when I did and got to experience that.

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ineptech 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I feel like we've always been living on borrowed time, due to the historical accident of the internet being built by academics and public institution employees. If internet protocols had been built by for-profits, HTTP requests would include credit card # as a mandatory header.

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fullstop 14 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ha, I remember finding the adult section of the file uploads. It took fourteen year old me thirty minutes to download one jpeg of boobs.

LoRD was fantastic, as were the turn based games that other people would dial in to take part of. It was such a different era, but we made it work by setting time limits and cooperating.

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1vuio0pswjnm7 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It was less commercial then. It was not as much "occupied" by intermediaries who think the internet exists for their commercial gain and anyone who uses it owes them something

I think it is amusing how these commercial third party intermediaries today are trying to frame things like "chat control" and "age restrictions" as attacks on internet users' rights rather than attacks on their intermediation "business model"

Generally, there is no age restriction on subscribing to internet service. However third party intermediaries that have now occupied seemingly every corner of the web, so-called "tech" companies, want everyone to believe that intermediaries _are_ the internet (as opposed to middlemen who seek to surveil as many internet subscribers as they can)

I am glad I grew up before the internet so that I understand and appreciate the only service that matters is _internet service_. People today take internet service for granted perhaps but I can remember when it was a new frontier

With internet service, there were so many possibilities. Today, so-called "tech" companies portray internet service as a given, apparently useless on its own,^1 whilst they advertise themselves as offering "services" (usually for free, a Trojan Horse for commercial surveillance). They utilise bandwidth paid for by the internet subscriber to transfer encrypted surveillance data to themselves

1. For example, when Mozilla claims something like without an online advertising "ecosystem" the internet would be worthless. The greed and self-entitlement behind this framing is both absurd and hilarious

	▲	holmesworcester 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think it's important to not throw babies out with bathwater here. One can disagree with Mozilla and think advertising sucks, and use tools to block it or FOSS products that don't force it on us, while also seeing how e2ee encryption bans ("chat control") and age verification rules are a restriction of both the rights of service providers and the rights of users. Another way to put it is, just because a regulation is a restriction of the rights of a service provider does not mean it isn't also a restriction of the rights of a user. The former does not make the latter true, but in some cases both are true. I'd also add that if we can't stop bad laws that restrict the rights of (and piss off) both service providers and users , we have no hope of stopping similarly bad laws that only restrict the rights of users. (Service providers, even small ones if they take the time to speak with their member of Congress, can be very credible, sympathetic, and persuasive stakeholders. When we can fight on the same side--realizing that sometimes we will fight on opposite sides--it's better for user rights that we do so. One of the tragedies of the left and parts of the right in the Trump era is that they see any regulation that hurts Big Tech as a win, even if it also hurts user rights. User rights are safer if we can distinguish between regs that hurt Big Tech and users from regs that don't hurt users.)

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nkrisc 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And when I was a kid some of my peers were watching Al Queda execution videos.

I don’t know what the solution is, but I do not think kids should have unrestricted access to the internet, especially if their parents can’t/won’t set limits.

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iamnothere 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If they won’t set limits that’s an issue with the parents, not the internet.

If dad leaves the liquor cabinet unlocked the solution isn’t to ban alcohol.

A free and open internet is non negotiable.

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pasc1878 40 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

How does a parent check what the child does on the way to school or meeting friends in a shopping mall.

Public wifi and smart phones chngaes what can be done and what needs to be done.

	▲	iamnothere 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		How does a parent check that a friend isn’t passing pills to them in the back of the bus? How are they checking that they don’t shoplift when out on their own? This is not an argument. Do your best as a parent and that is enough. Perfection is not possible or even desired; kids do have a degree of agency, and if they want to break the rules they are going to do it! And breaking some rules (ideally in a safe-ish way) is one way that we learn how to be independent from parents as we mature.

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nkrisc 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Everything is negotiable. We collectively choose where to draw all the arbitrary lines you draw. Free and open internet is as arbitrary as a completely locked-down internet.

	▲	iamnothere 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We, the people who build and operate the internet as well as the tech that enables it, collectively choose to maintain a free and open internet for the benefit of all free people. Maybe with enough effort you can force the internet to fracture into a centralized TV-style internet and a “shadow” free internet, but you’ll probably kill the economy in the process. Regardless, you’ll never stamp out those of us who will maintain the free internet over whatever channels we can find.

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SoftTalker an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Alcohol is banned for minors so that argument doesn't work.

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rpdillon 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Kids also cannot sign up for internet service, or pay for it. So in both cases, we're talking about society gating access to something, adults obtaining that product legally and bringing it into their home.

The question, then, is who is responsible for the children in the household? I've always answered this exactly one way: the parents. Power and responsibility must go together, so if the parents are responsible, then the parents must have the power. Parents have been held legally responsible for the crimes of their children, and given the coverage of parents being arrested for letting their kids go on a walk across town, I'd say this sets up incentives pretty well.

But all of that is a sideshow; a narrative. What we actually have is a massive swing towards authoritarianism globally, largely fueled by in increase in the internet allowing for unprecedented surveillance overreach, and the folks trying to seize control of those reins are using children seeing porn as a way to seem benevolent to garner support from folks that don't understand what's actually happening. Huge swathes have been duped into believing the narrative and fighting for age-gating in the worst possible ways, and that's because they're missing the larger pattern.

It's manufactured consent.

	▲	SoftTalker 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Kids can access the internet in all kinds of places outside the home, and outside the purview of their parents supervision. Schools, libraries, friend's houses, public wifi anywhere. You may be right about the authoritarianism; it's a tendency of our species and makes it all the more remarkable that Western freedoms have lasted this long. I think, though, that it's more likely simple greed. The giant tech companies, dependent on ad revenue because nobody would actually pay for what they are offering, must be able to track and profile people. The "protect kids from porn" lobby has always been around, it has nothing to do with surveillance or the internet. These people would be picketing a bookstore that sold Hustler magazine back in the 1970s, and demanding that customers be made to prove their age.

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bityard 23 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

They meant banning alcohol altogether. A.k.a. prohibition.

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quavan 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The day we have an epidemic of children and teens abusing alcohol to the point of it turning into a national healthcare emergency, you will find that stricter control of alcohol will certainly be put in place.

We are at that point now with children having unrestricted access to online content that isn’t age appropriate, as well as being influenced by insane weirdos on TikTok and the like at an age where they are particularly impressionable.

	▲	stvltvs 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Isn't that day today? The CDC says 4,000 underage drinkers die in the US every year. Maybe we could reduce that with stricter controls, but at what point does that become too burdensome to the rights of legal drinkers? It's even harder to get the balance right when it comes to free speech issues like online pornography.

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seneca 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it." - Heinlein

If you hand power to the state every time people fail to properly handle their responsibilities, you end up in a dictatorship. It is a parent's responsibility to keep their kids away from the dark corners of the internet. Thoughtful regulation would create tools to allow them to do that easily, not hand parenting over to governments.

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mindslight 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Where are those former peers now? You reference this like their life trajectory must have been irreparably harmed by it. Are they in prison? Were they killed while committing violent crime? Are they on disability from being permanently emotionally crippled? Or what?

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holmesworcester 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Same, so much so!

My feelings of freedom in that era, as a teen in a small 90s US city, were what fueled me to co-found one of the organizations (Fight for the Future) cited in the article!

(No longer in the trenches, just on the board, deserve zero direct credit for any of this work--it's all them!)

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debo_ 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I remember winning a 10-kill LORD game on a local BBS. It took ages of me staying up until midnight to kill all the resurrected players after the daily reset. I had only one real competitor on that server and he gave up after I slew the dragon twice in one week (due to great luck.)