I have a friend who is a social worker. Hearing stories from them, I think people severely overestimate the level of involvement that many parents have with their kids. Social workers who are checking in on middle school kids at the hospital with burn marks on their arms or elementary school kids who showed up under the influence of cannabis aren’t also going to have time to enforce online safety.

If this is what it means for a parent to “do their job” then what do you propose happens to parents who are unwilling or unable to police their kids’ Discord account?

For this reason, I think we are seeing the beginning of the end of low-trust social media. They can’t tell if a user is a child or even a human. People will move to things like group chats because they don’t rely on sending your ID to a verification service in the Philippines.

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bunderbunder 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Parents are just burnt out, I think. Online spaces have become so consolidated and enshittified that it’s seriously a choice between basically keeping them offline - which is a very socially isolating thing to be these days - and letting a small number of faux-accountable monopolies ranging from Discord to Google and Meta call the shots. It’s kind of a no-win situation.

I’d love to have my kids in relatively small, intimate online spaces where I can’t necessarily assume they will be perfect (nor do I want them to be - they deserve to have some room to learn to navigate problems for themselves) but I can at least assume they won’t be overwhelmed by the impossibility of successfully navigating life in a globalized fishbowl. But if there’s one thing late stage capitalism abhor, it’s a self-contained community of real humans from which the powers that be can’t extract “value”.

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janalsncm 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And those burnt out parents are the “good” parents who are even trying. There’s a huge cohort of parents that let iPads parent their kid, unsupervised all day. And that’s not illegal.

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bilekas 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Parents are just burnt out, I think.

I'm sorry but I don't buy this. We have been parenting forever, parents get burnt out. That doesn't mean you just ignore what your kids are doing.

It's your responsibility to be their guardians, not the government.

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antonymoose 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No one has the ability to monitor the frequency and volume of their children’s social contact on a platform like Discord or Roblox. It would be a full-time job for me.

Can we normalize “it takes a village” again? After all, we do let bars and liquor stores get a slap on the wrist for selling to minors. If you let a child into an adult movie theater you’d be in jail. Why do we pretend we don’t live in a world with laws and standard conduct the second we connect to a modem?

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Brybry 4 hours ago | parent [-]

For a more fair comparison to liquor stores and adult movie theaters: it would be requiring people to be 18 to sign up for internet service, which is how it already works.

Parents are buying the alcohol from the liquor store (internet service, which kids cannot buy themselves) and giving it to their kids.

If you don't approve of the alcohol you're giving to your kids then stop giving it to them (it is legal in my state for parents to buy alcohol for their kids). So what if other kids are drinking too and it would be socially a pain for the kid? That's always been true of having a parent with stricter rules.

When I was a kid in the 90s my parents limited how much TV we could watch. I knew other kids who could only use the family computer for a limited time and while their parents were in the room.

I sympathize with parents who do want to provide internet service to their kids and want better parental control software.

But making the internet worse for everyone is not the way. Discord has already had a partner leak IDs before. [1]

[1] https://discord.com/press-releases/update-on-security-incide...

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	▲	AppleBananaPie an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I like the alcohol comparison it's interesting in how accurate it is and yet society does it. I also think it's obvious your comparisons of parents limiting time of things like this in the 90s is not apples to apples. Being the person to start a new trend (in your local bubble) is non-trivial and hard to explain to a child growing up around nearly all their peers having access. Doubly so if it's something that (I think science supports this?) is far more addicting than it was in the past. I'm not saying folks get a free pass but I'm not sure we had a global drug crisis that 90% of the population was participating in before which from your analogy is what's happening. Thanks again for the alcohol comparison I'm going to phrase it like that in my head to hopefully get all of my brain on board with the seriousness of the topic for my kids :)

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

Theoretically we shouldn’t need speed limits in school zones. Personal responsibility should be enough, since no reasonable person wants to run kids over. And yet, we have speed limits in school zones.

Laws do not prevent crimes. Neither does personal responsibility. What laws can do that personal responsibility cannot do is convert moral guilt into legal guilt. You might feel bad for running a kid over. You’ll feel even worse after being punished for it.

Also, corporations are legal entities. They do not have personal responsibility. They respond to regulations.

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

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bunderbunder 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Since when is pointing out one of the many ways that oligarch capitalism makes life unnecessarily hard for everyday people, and wishing that antitrust laws were actually enforced so that, among other things, we could have more options for taking care of our kids without resorting to authoritarian power moves like this new Discord policy (or, to take another example, YouTube making it hard for media critics to talk about cartoons without getting age restricted) asking the government to take care of my kids for me?

Believe it or not, the current neoliberal hellscape actually empowers the people who want to parent my kids for me. Because when everything is run by massive and centralized powers, most people (quite understandably) stop being able to conceive of handling things in a way that isn’t yet another massive centralized power move.