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phantasmish 3 days ago

> You're talking about cutting kids from

> all online services

Not even close? I don’t know how you got that.

> including multiplayer games

Nah. My kids play plenty of multiplayer games. Local’s fine, online with people they know is fine, online in games with no or extremely limited communication is fine (Nintendo consoles are good for those)

> community wikis

Are community game wikis hotbeds of scams, predation, and astroturf rage-bait influence campaigns? I’ve read them much of my life (if we also count Gamefaqs) and never noticed this.

makeitdouble 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Nintendo

For online gaming, that's 5ish game lines ?

Then Splatoon communities are pretty active, with third party tournaments, discord channels especially during fest flourish. Private matches are a pretty core component of getting good at the game in team events, and Nintendo rightfully limits how much it wants to deal with that side of things.

As a result, if your kid gets into the game, they'll be looking at that from the sideline while other kids get a lot more support.

> game wikis

In general any wikis that allows for limited scope communication, like a discussion between two users in some obscure thread where only the two will be notified of updates, is ripe for abuse. Then game wikis are where kids will be found.

While moderation teams are usually doing a stellar job, it's a cat and mouse game with utterly motivated attackers and highly valuable targets. So stuff will happen.

That kind of stuff won't surface outside of very egregious incidents, but working in an adjacent field to gaming communities, it's definitely a thing.

intended 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> While moderation teams are usually doing a stellar job,

This is an assumption, that I would argue, is more muddled in practice.

T&S teams largely want to do a good job, but they are a cost center, and currently they are being defunded or shifted into simple compliance.

The biggest weakness, and the current shift, is for the conversation to move towards talking about the benefits of moderation to community, rather than only reduction of harms.

That process has largely started since last year, and the defunding of teams is also underway.

All of that aside, we do not have any publicly available data, or independent third part assessment that gives us some estimated prevalence rate. (Not that prevalence is truly calculable)

phantasmish 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

"This is good for this" doesn't mean it's the only thing we use?

People are real eager to tear down a point that was simply "maybe don't let kids use algo-feed social media, because it's an actual garbage fire". The vast majority of the Internet does not have the same problems, to the same degree, as places like Instagram and TikTok. Some of it may have other problems and may be worth looking out for! But most of those other places also have, like, some redeeming features.

Am I also to let my kids wander in toxic waste dumps? I'm pretty surprised at the kind of push-back this is getting. I don't got time to supervise my kids on TikTok or whatever, so... no TikTok. I also don't have time to supervise them playing with boxes of rusty razor blades, so I try not to give them access to boxes of rusty razor blades, either [edit: I can predict the disingenuous replies to this part, so further suppose the blades are bubble-gum flavored and literal hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on packaging and presenting the box and blades to encourage kids to put them in their mouths; there, that's closer to algo feed social media, pretty much no reason to engage nor allow your kids near it, loooots of reason to keep it way the hell away].

This seems really straightforward and reasonable to me.

makeitdouble 3 days ago | parent [-]

This comes down to how people raise their kids, so I don't expect we'll all agree.

> Am I also to let my kids wander in toxic waste dumps? [...] I don't got time to supervise my kids on TikTok or whatever, so... no TikTok.

Ideally I don't want to supervise my kid, in the sense that trying to watch over everything they do, every service they use and every possible interaction is a lost cause.

They can IRL go to toxic waste dumps, buy razor blades at the store and let them rust, there will be no way to foolproof even at that level, and I don't to have to watch over them every single time they go to the store in case they buy razor blades. Teaching them to not buy sharp stuff, avoid rusty things, and not listen to people advising them to do so has better time/effort ROI to me. Kids not allowed to go to the store without parental supervision also has to me a lot more negative impacts.

Arguably teaching kids what to avoid on Tiktok or Youtube is a lot trickier, and there will be craftful attempts at bypassing most parent advices, but I hope we have enough of a safety margin and communication occasions to detect when something's going wrong. And if it happens, I'd prefer it happens now when there's many eyes on the kid to detect the issue, than 5 or 10 years from now when they're alone in the ir dorm, can sign contracts, buy a lot of delicate stuff, get access to drugs, drive, get people pregnant etc.