> I'm sure many of us wouldn't have been a programmer if we hadn't had access to SO/Github around 17.
I'm sure many of us didn't have any access to StackOverflow and GitHub when we were around 17 years old, because StackOverflow and GitHub didn't exist yet. For several of us, git didn't exist yet. Heck, for some of us, the web didn't exist yet!
I’m kind of surprised but also not surprised in the outrage over the “draconian bulls*t.” The problem I have as a parent is that I can see it causing real social damage to adults around me, my own kids, and kids around my kids. Anti-social behavior, Disrespect for authority, extreme violence is easy to see and normalized (stuff that would normally be considered traumatic), wokeness and anti-wokeness is normalized (must we all have such strong opinions?). I’m talking behavior way more at extreme ends of the polarized spectrum and at earlier ages than what I grew up around.
It’s basically force-fed opinions at a global scale, how can that possibly be healthy? We can barely fathom how this media impacts adults as it stands. All this clear evidence aside, I feel like it’s obvious, how can the absence of these things do any measurable harm to kids?
Regardless of your ethical stance on the subject, it would be a good exercise to consider who you're ok with determining what kind of content your children can view. Allowing a government to step in to pass laws like this is a draconian step too far.
As a parent do you not already have all the tools you need to ensure your children don't use tik Tok? From the light touch and mundane, using the built in features of the operating system (parental blockers and app timers are available on Android and IOS) to the heavy touch of not allowing your kid to have a smartphone.
Why do you want the government taking over this role for you? Maybe there's some parents who don't care if their children are on tik tok. Why should they follow the same parental strategy you have?
I do think this a reasonable rebuttal, but there must be some middle ground here. Generally speaking, I can block TikTok sure, but because it’s so ubiquitous, my kids are ostracized because all their friends have access to it, they still pass around the content like drugs, alcohol and tobacco. It almost becomes one of those things that because they’re not allowed to have access to it, it does just as much damage, socially.
There are three general categories of parents on this, and to be clear, I don’t think any of these are bad parents:
1. Those who are extremely weary and tech savvy, like myself
2. Those who are weary but have no earthly idea how to set up these controls effectively.
3. Those who don’t give a f*all about it at all.
I tend to believe it’s just as bad but it’s about as misunderstood as tobacco used to be. The industry KNOWS it’s bad for kids, it’s been proven bad for kids but it’s peddled to them anyway.
All that aside, let’s just say hypothetically I wanted to manage this all myself and wanted the government out of it, sounds good in theory. The tooling around limiting inappropriate content is mind-blowingly inadequate. At the very least this should be mandatory and more concretely standardized. I’m not flatly against giving kids some access to it but it’s reached a point where my kids can’t even do their homework at all without full access to all of Youtube which by itself has loads of content not remotely appropriate for elementary school kids. Youtube kids is a joke.
It’s pretty frustrating as a parent to manage content restrictions for the 3-4 major browsers, search engines, youtube, messenging apps, iphones, macbook, windows app store, and so on. This could be a full time job. Then, the kids bring home a school provided chromebook or login to chrome with a school account which has no content restrictions at all and I have zero control over anyway. Honestly, parental controls in the current state is largely a waste of time.
The overhead of managing content restrictions on families devices is a very good point. I'll be reaching this stage soon and I'm not looking forward to this additional task.
I also think state sponsored content moderation should be used to restrict access to harmful online media as opposed to lumbering this task on individuals. As you've mentioned, some parents need this enforced upon them.
If we were talking about vaping, which is still highly unregulated and available for children to buy, I'm sure the majority would be in agreement about age restrictions. The fact that we're talking about preventing psychological addiction and trauma makes it harder for people to agree on the harmful effects of this type of content. It's simply not as visible as the huge plumes of oil-steam breathed out by every 12 year old in a bus stop these days.
However, I don't agree with the implementation of content moderation proposed by Utah state. It's totally unworkable and poorly thought through.
Yes, parental controls are not are replacement for teaching kids why this stuff is damaging. It’s not an excuse to be lazy parents. Kids need to hear their parents say it (with the why). Setting limits instead outright blocking can be helpful. It sets the stage for letting the kid decide if they would consider what they just watched be viewed as inappropriate, which believe or not does happen, but some content really shouldn’t be available to them at all.
This probably varies depending on where you live, but where I grew up (in a small town in the UK), the vast majority of 13 year olds did have access to drugs, alcohol and tobacco (which didn't necessarily mean the vast majority were indulging in those things, but they were definitely available).
I mean it’s somewhat true, if it were legal for 12 year olds to have these things AND it was marketed toward them, way more kids would be have it than not. That’s not to say they can’t get it now, but it’s harder and somewhat self regulating because the stigma around doing something illegal.
This doesn’t invalidate your point (I think your correct that making it illegal provides a disincentive and reduces overall uptake), but I should note that making something legal does not necessarily mean making it legal to market it towards kids.
Case in point being that here in the UK it is illegal to market tobacco products at all (including to adults in this case). This also applies to politicians, prescriptions medicine and a bunch of other things. And IMO it’s often a good compromise that allows for harm reduction without outright banning something.
I also want to recognize that in the case of Utah’s implementation，it likely doesn’t have my best interests in mind so I do see your point. There’s always a possibility of an agenda which isn’t necessarily “good for kids.”
Maybe what we should focus on is more standardization, effectiveness of controls and requiring these trillion dollar companies to build parents one single pane of glass to monitor and control content for all platforms. May not even be feasible but it really just sounds like another engineering challenge that requires a major investment to get it done.
Wow I'm almost 50 and I have been interacting through forums (first one on minitel when I was 12), bbs, newsgroup since I was a young teenager. Maybe github or stackoverflow didn't exist but they were plenty of cool places where to exchange.
Haha...I learned when the web was mainly AOL. MSN at the time had pretty good forums which helped a lot. But the main place I was learning programming from was books, but they were expensive - especially for a college kid. When I would run into problems I couldn't solve I would head to the book store with a pencil and paper and copy bits and pieces that I hoped would help. Then head back home and try again (talk about a long debug run loop). Luckily this was around the same time of the rise of big bookstores where they encouraged hanging out so no one ever questioned me.
I remember having to send an email to the admin of sourceforge for permission to have a project and thus CVS access. "Please sir may I contribute to open source?"
Many of us, older people, had access to similar things that made us interested... in the 70/80's it was computer magazines (paper magazines, that is) as people got their first home computers and could follow along programming examples, play games etc. If you ran into trouble, you needed either help from someone you already knew or you would have to find a book or manual.
In the 90's most teens already had access to a primitive internet where they could chat with anyone in the world using BBS[1], which was not too different from a modern social network. Email was already a thing as well for some time, but probably became widespread at this time... by the late 90's the internet was already quite similar to today for geeks, except perhaps videos (and even high resolution pics) were not a thing due to the low speed of the net.
StackOverflow and GitHub only came around in the late 2000's, which is basically yesterday. Before them, there were similar sites as well (the infamous expertsexchange for SO, and SourceFourge for GH, for example) for quite some time, but they surely became very dominant in their areas.
And I know these. I'm not "punched card old" but I did start learning programming before SO got traction. And I remember how big the difference SO made for my own learning/career path, compared to mailing lists.
As a side note, my first intern job was to make a localized ripoff of SO (within a team, of course). It was still a relatively shining new thing by the time.
Cool... it's just that your comment seems to imply that a lot of programmers were learning their basics when SO was already there to help us... that's only true for those of us lucky enough to be really young, like in their 20's :D. Hope you understand many of us are well past that and watched GH and SO take over the world as a very recent phenonenom.
Uh, yes, this is why I said "many of us" not "most of us". (not sure why i need to repeat this...) Of course I know people who are in 20s are not necessarily the absolute majority of HN. But there are still many of them.
Oh I have a lot of ideas. I started learning programming before Stackoverflow got traction. Plus I'm not a native speaker and by the time I didn't really speak English at all. So I practically needed to learn what "Reached end of file while parsing" means in plain English, then tried to find out that I had missed a semicolon :'(
Reddit is also an incredible resource for niche, constructive topics like learning how to build a computer. You could draw the line anywhere you want for social media.
I mean, this is why it's a common thing to append reddit.com to your google searchs nowadays. Seeing how others solved problems or getting a feel for their opinions on certain things is actually super useful.
> I’m sure our parents would have all let us sign up for a programming site. This bill still allows for that.
But would the site let you sign up if even with parental permission if it had to do additional identification verification to identify that the permission was from your parent, and was liable for (1) actual damages if you got addicted [0] because of some element of their site design, and (2) huge ($250,000 per feature) penalties if they also didn’t do quarterly audits to identify, and within 30 days after identification eliminate, any feature which might addict you?
How many programming sites see minors in general, much less Utah minors specifically, as that important to their mission to take on the extra costs and risks this bill imposes on serving that population?
[0] Using an intentionally broad definition of addiction
You underestimate how hard it might be to get your parent to sign some weird consent form from a "github" site, especially if it asks for a picture of the parent's ID (to ensure the kid isn't accepting the terms on their own behalf).
Technically it's not spelled out, but chances are Utah law enforcement / regulators won't accept a tech company's measures if a kid can just say another one of their own emails is their parents' and can then consent to the social media access themselves. Everyone affected by this will likely outsource it to a company like Stripe with their Identity product, where you're entrusting Stripe to do the ID verification and to delete the data once it's been verified.
The good part about the COPPA law is that it's an IQ test. If you're under 13, you have to be smart enough to understand that it's a "don't ask don't tell" situation and know to keep quiet. I did when I was 10 and joined Yahoo (the most popular social media site at the time) so I could have a Geocities web site and play fantasy baseball.
I'd suggest that teens in Utah just use a VPN but social media sites have been cracking down on VPN users for years and many of those sites now require phone number verification to sign up. This law illustrates yet another reason why that's a bad idea.
Looking back on my youth, I think these age verification check boxes were my earliest disregard for authority. I understood the checkboxes were there because there was a law that wanted to prevent me from accessing an online service. I thought the law was stupid, and after contemplating it for days decided to ignore it.
I probably wouldn't be a programmer without ordering floppy disks full of random source code by post from software-by-post catalogues - one letter to ask for a catalogue, get the catalogue in the post, send them a letter with your order and a cheque and receive a bunch of disks a week later...
Reading these comments about people relying on SO - a site founded in 2008 - at age 11, doesn't make me feel any younger, and I'm not even that old (inching closer and closer to my mid-30s). I got into Linux and bash/Python scripting by following tutorials on random shady sites and reading official documentation and manpages. Let's just say it wasn't as seamless as Googling an issue and having a SO thread directly answer my question.
Yes, I do realize I now sound like I just said "back in my day, we walked to school, uphill both ways".
Right? I learned through reading browser documentation in elementary school when CSS and JavaScript were implemented and then running to my dad or internet forums/chat rooms when I ran into topics or problems I didn't understand. None of us knew what we were doing. It was great.
"I feel old" on the internet can mean 15yo to 80yo, so you have all the right to feel old at mid-30s lol
When I learned my second programming language (JavaScript), I asked most of my questions via a mailing list. It's quite weird trying to recall it... I almost forgot how mailing list work today.
Yea, it was actually wild when SO came out, because I'd been teaching myself lua pretty much independently, and by the time I got to high school, SO just barely on its way out and immediately everything was a lot easier.
Old man yells at cloud, but kids these day won't even have to look at code, everything will be filtered through natural language.
Certainly you participated in related forums right? Before SO I was much more involved in online communities like https://gamedev.net/ which are also at risk due to this sort of bill.
I actually did not, for some reason. I was on a bunch of phpBB forums in high school, but none surrounding programming/tech. I was obsessed with music and gaming way more than IT stuff, back then. I initially learned programming more as a means to an end (my first scripts were to automate backups to an external drive, transfer stuff between Windows/Linux, that kind of stuff), and just generally for my own enjoyment, than a real plan to do anything with it. I don't even think I realized it was a potential career path before I was already out of high school lol
