As other commenters noted, many of them did have practical restrictions (or at least challenges/friction) on what they could see and do online, and came to understand some benefit to that.

Others are among the "two generations of unhinged children grown up with unsafe [whatever]" who reflect on that experience with concern specifically because they have gone through it and felt like that experience was detrimental to them and deserved more scrutiny and safeguarding. Think of it like parents who had drinking or drug problems in their own childhood, which took them years to overcome, seeking to save their own kids from the trouble and drama of that journey.

Indeed, maybe sometimes either of these groups may go overboard in how they want to address the problems they see, but I don't know if you need to wonder where they came from.

Here's the thing, my parents did forbid me: by denying me access. Kids have way, way more access to the internet than I ever did. When I was a kid, the only computer was in a communal area ans needed explicit permission by virtue of mandating that no one be using the phone. And then when I was older and we had broadband, it was still banned by virtue that my parents didn't think it was great for me to spend all my time on the computer.

My kid on the other hand, has orders of magnitude more exposure to the internet than I did. And it's far more private. Any chat I had with anyone was viewable by my parents by simply walking into the room. My kid has a private device she has 24/7 access too. The calculus is so much different and I say this as someone who is fairly lax in home much screen time my kid has and what she is allowed to view.

Your kid has that private device because you gave it to them.

I left this [1] comment a few weeks ago, and I already knew people like you would have dogged on GP for giving their child this level of access and autonomy, just like I knew the HN thread from the other day about homeschooling was going to dog on people who allow their child to go to public school - because teaching children self-sufficiency, self-assurance, and confidence to deal with bad influences is a relic of a time gone by.

Parents would rather justify to themselves the act of building, end-to-end, what their child is exposed to and around - even when that's not how the world works, rather than building a child that knows how to handle themselves when exposed to, and around, anything - because that's ACTUALLY how adult life works.

There's levels to it, and I understand a child can have all the tooling in the world about how to deal with bad influences, and neglect its application solely due to naivety; but it's still a lot more fruitful than just hand-picking a child's exposure to any and all things during their most formative years - when they're SUPPOSED to be learning how to deal with exposure to as many things as possible, good and bad for them.

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45852694

The linked comment seems to imply that you have no kids of your own, and generally identify with a child still. That's fine, but not a good look for this kind of conversation.

Children should not have easy access to addictive drugs, digital or pharmaceutical. That exposure does not build agency, it does the opposite. You cannot expect a child to be able to resist the combined effort of a multi-trillion dollar industry toward building maximally addictive things.

>"That's fine"

Glad we sorted that out. Barring that, I am not interested in what things you find to be a "good/bad look" for my participation in this conversation.

>"Children should not have easy access to addictive drugs, digital or pharmaceutical."

They should not. And luckily for you, for at least 2/3 things you said, neither do adults. We've already established a baseline belief as a society that those (legally) require permissive access from subject matter experts, so I don't see your point. My originating comment - or the one I linked - certainly doesn't advocate for minors to have more permissive access to those (or any) industries than an adult?

For your comments onwards, you could have saved yourself a lot of time in your reply by acknowledging what I said in GP:

>"There's levels to it, and I understand a child can have all the tooling in the world about how to deal with bad influences, and neglect its application solely due to naivety;"

You are right that exposure does not build agency alone - but I never claimed such; access to guidance and mentorship builds better decision-making and problem-solving for a child, and letting them practice agency and autonomy in their own lives allows them to see real-world use cases and applicability of those decision-making and problem-solving skills.

It's how parenting worked before this newest helicopter-lite style of parenting emerged, which seeks to declare as many hardships, trials and tribulations in life as a boogeyman in which a child CANNOT interact with, and pressures parents to coddle their child and build a zero-problem world around them - when that's not how the real world works. In doing so, a parent does not equip their child with the tools to appropriately carry themselves in a sometimes inappropriate world.

> Glad we sorted that out

I read your "People like you" comment and got angrier and nastier than I should have. I apologize.

I will not continue this discussion. You're arguing against things I don't represent, and have assigned a lot of opinions to me after reading a one-sentence comment.

I appreciate the apology, and I want to apologize if "people like you" came off as prickly. I genuinely didn't mean *you* as a person, but rather "someone like you" as an entity that took an action I had expected to see; I knew that someone was going to leave a one-liner criticizing GP's choice to give their child a certain level of digital autonomy, and advocated for GP on their behalf. I should have said "someone" rather than "people like you".

That said, "arguing against things I don't represent" is generally how debates and newfound perspectives go, and I wish we could have continued. I certainly don't think I assigned any opinions to you, let me know if I'm amiss.

I find it weird that you are not DV since the stuff you list here has caused a lot of issues for a lot of people _and_ things have gotten much much worse. The internet is so much more prevalent than it was 15 years ago. The danger is much higher.

The idea of having nothing to do is absurd, child safety is and should be a parent primary concern. Roblox is basically gambling, it puts kids as targets for predators and makes them addicted to several things.

Reading a comment on a news story like this is very very frustrating.

The internet used to be that forest on the edge of town. Once in a while you might find some drug paraphernalia there. Now it's the Las Vegas strip with billboards for hookers and blow.

I think your comparison is more apt than you think but not for the reason you say it is. The Internet of today is like the Las Vegas of today—a largely sterile corporate theme park whose only real goal is just separating you from your money and is ruthlessly efficient at it.

That was an intentional part of the analogy, as far as I know. It's big money.

Attention maximization algorithms and dark patterns took over between then and now. It’s not the same place.

Because the internet is far more optimized at capturing your attention and encouraging terrible behavior (purchases, viruses, scams, etc.)

When you were younger the scariest thing was joining an AOL chat room on a 56k modem. Now you can mind rot yourself on YouTube shorts with the next video loading in milliseconds while being fed content full of sports gambling ads.

To act like the internet doesn’t have significantly sharper edges and dangerous loops which affect children is ignoring the reality around you. The downvotes are not because in principle folks disagree, it’s that the situation is different.

i don't think the situation was that different. You could mind rot yourself on shfifty-five and all sorts of terrible content. People are just making an educated decision that that's not what they want for their kids. Parenting, how bout it.

My wife was a teacher and sexual health educator for most of her career (grades 8-12).

When I was getting sex ed, part of the teacher's responsibility was grounding us in basic facts to dispel word-of-mouth myths that were patently absurd to anyone with any experience (like "sneezing after sex prevents pregnancy").

My wife's tasks was to explain that the hardcore porn they'd all seen was unrealistic in the same way that action movies completely misrepresent fights and stunts, and the real world doesn't work that way. Her problem was that she was arguing with video evidence that it could. The kids aren't unhinged, but they're definitely misled in a completely different way than we were.

Both things can be true; there can be both a moral panic about the exaggerated harms of unrestricted internet access, but also as the internet became commonplace and law enforcement not keeping up, it's plausible and likely there are many more predators on it now than it was back in our days.

Not to mention that getting onto the internet back in our day required a relative level of technical proficiency which could've filtered out vulnerable children, where as today there is no barrier. The corporate push to share personal data everywhere (often nowadays it's hard/impossible to operate pseudonymously - which doesn't seem to stop bad guys in any way but puts legitimate users at risk) doesn't help; in my days the number 1 rule was to never share PII on the internet, which nowadays doesn't exist and is difficult to implement in practice even if you tried.

The 'unrestricted web' from your youth did not have you uploading 8k video of you performing sexual acts that both landed up on pedo sites and was used for blackmail (the threat sending to the whole school). Children are getting roped, not into gramps' porno collection, but sophisticated networks that financially exploit naivety of children in a shocking manner that simply did not exist 10+ years ago. My daughter tried to commit suicide as a result of getting caught up in pedo rings that trawled Roblox. For visibility, I'll spare you the downvote, but you are wrong... things are very different from 'back in the day'

I grew up on the unrestricted internet, it doesn't mean I believe it was entirely good. I did (and DO!) many things that I realize are not beneficial, and do not want my children doing.

I can at least understand being aware of what your kid is doing, but the number of people who say they just ban X outright in there house I'm afraid are gonna be shocked by their kid's actions when they leave the house. Better to teach them when they're young then to all of a sudden have them exposed to everything when they're an older teenager/18.

And also lots of people saying the internet is worse today, I honestly don't think that's true. There's so much more moderation then there was in the early 2000s.