This is a good opportunity to link to the recent archive of Hacker News, for when this happens: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46435308

I agree. There were attempts to do something like this with porn sites via the .xxx TLD I believe, but that inverts the problem. Don't force the public to go to a dark alley for their guilty pleasures. Instead, the sites that want to target kids need to be allowlisted. That is much more practical and palatable.

I dont see why phones can't come with a browser that does this. Parents could curate a whitelist like people curate playlists, and share it, and the browser would honor that.

Combined with some blacklisted apps (e.g., all other browsers), this would be a passable opt-in solution. I'm sure there's either a subscription or a small incentive for someone to build this that hopefully isn't "Scam children".

It's not like kids are using PCs, and if they use someone else's phone, that's at least a severely limiting factor.

AOL returns!

sounds like an app store

If they are persistent enough, no. But then everyone knows it's not going to stop every child in every situation. It sets a president for what society thinks is a sensible limit though, and society raises children not just individual families or parents.

Do we want kids becoming alcoholics? Do we want them turning up drunk to school and disrupting classes? Do we want to give parents trying to do the right thing some backup? So they know that when their kid is alone they can expect that other adults set a similar example.

Sure, you can't stop a kid determined to consume alcohol. But I think the societal norm is an overall good thing.

The same should be applied to the online space, kids spend more and more time there. Porn, social media, gambling etc. should be just a much of a concern as alcohol.

Is there actually a difference between transactions between humans in meatspace (getting a government ID, then using it at a store) and age estimation algorithms?

> If I had a child I'd rather have it watch porn than Cocomelon

As a parent that regularly fears who my children will encounter in the world, I’m glad there’s an “if” at the beginning of this sentence.

A digital ID, like someone said below. But people (in the UK at least) go mental about that, despite the government already having all the information anyway. Creating a easy way to securely share that information with a 3rd party for online verification is apparently the work of the devil.

In the real world you turn up in person with a passport, or maybe use snail mail as a way to verify an address which is hard to fake.

Online we have to pretend it is still the internet of the 90s where it's all just chill people having a fun time using their handle...

It doesn't have to be exclusively digital. You can be psuedoanonymous using some form of key as verification. To get a key, you have to present your ID in person at, for example, the social security office or local DOL.

All the key does is attest that "this person is over X years old" with no other identifying information associated with it.

I think blending in person & digital together is going to be the best way forward. Like going to the store and buying alcohol. I have little privacy risk from the cashier glancing at my ID for a second to check my birth date.

You can take a look at what Switzerland is about to do:

https://www.homburger.ch/de/insights/swiss-voters-approve-ne...!

> combined with studies showing there is zero safe threshold without brain damage markers in the blood?

Are you saying that there's zero safe threshold of choking, or for viewing porn?

(To be clear, choking someone without consent is assault and unacceptable, whether a blood test shows damage or not.)

I'm trying to find the contact for the does-not-imply-causation dept but I think I lost my slashdot account in 2004.

> Before the widespread adoption of pornography, this rate was near 0%

Bullshit. Men and women have been dying of autoerotic asphyxiation long before the internet. And we only hear about the ones that fuck up badly enough to make the news.

I'm puzzled by this phenomenon myself, but there is apparently a significant minority of women who enjoy getting choked in bed:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13178-025-01247-9

This doesn't excuse people who choke without consent, but there's something going on here waaaay more complex than "see it in porn, do it". Humans are weird.

> Before the widespread adoption of pornography, this rate was near 0%.

Big giant citation needed on that one. How would it ever have been near 0%?

First, I’d like to point out that we don’t make other media illegal or age gated with privacy-compromising tactics because it depicts harmful things. There’s no age verification gate for watching movies and TV that depict murder and other serious crimes. You can watch Gaston drink beer and fall to his death and the Beast bleed in a kids movie rated G.

Watching NFL football, boxing, and UFC fighting isn’t illegal even those sports conclusively cause brain damage.

Pornography is singled out because it’s taboo and for no other reason. People won’t politically defend it because nobody can publicly admit that they like watching it, even though most people consume it.

Over 90% of men and over 60% of women in the last month. [1]

Second, what I see missing from your links is really solid studied link to an increase in choking injuries directly caused by changes in pornography trends and viewership. Were these kinks just underreported in the past? Heck, I read 4 of your linked articles and none of them actually compared the rate of choking injury over time, they just sort of pointed it out as something that exists and jumped to blaming pornography.

I am perfectly willing to accept your hypothesis but I don’t think we’ve been anywhere near scientific enough about evaluating it, and even if that was the case, we don’t really treat pornography the same as other media just like I mentioned.

We need a lot more information. Personally, I think there’s nothing wrong with sexual pleasure and believe it’s stigmatized way too much. I also believe that normalizing sexual pleasure helps people talk about consent and avoids issues like doing a sexual act when you don’t enjoy it.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30358432/