The crazy part is how many companies still have IT with servers and support anyways. I have seen it first hand where I work. We have an extensive IT department but also rely heavily on cloud services for all office work. It turns into a poor experience when there’s a work laptop issue because local IT doesn’t support it and Slop services are slop.

Sure you are correct that parents can’t be there hovering at every moment to correct their kid everytime they make a mistake. At this point, it is easier to put controls that actually work on any internet connected device that you give them than any shenanigans that could get up to outside of supervision. Give them a a tablet with parental controls. It will be a better control than when they go to the corner and buy drugs or whatever is the real life equivalent. It’s never been easier for a parent to control their child’s online consumption than now and it will only get better. The offline risks aren’t really changing the same way.

I completely agree. It would be amazing if we could nationally or even globally enforce age restrictions to give an internet kiddy pool to let children learn and grow in a safe online environment. We live in a time where the people who are pushing this in the government should not be trusted to use that information for the real reason. “For the kids” is all made up and not helping kids. Giving up privacy in order to not help kids really highlights how corrupt the people pushing for this are.

I think you make some good points here, but just for context, I do think that there is a level of responsibility on the parents here in combination with the companies. There’s plenty of “online literacy” classes that I think would be appropriate for adolescent education. I’m the unfortunate benefactor of needing to master cursive as a class one year and then typing the next year. Schools would be more beneficial if they included teaching kids internet literacy. They can probably drop some of the old stuff. They also don’t teach several other things like financial literacy in many situations (despite heavy capitalist leanings in real life). The education system sucks, but that is not an excuse to let iPad kids control my freedoms, and the root cause for age verification has never been about protecting children in the first place.

I’m also a layman, but I have read some discussions about this exact comparison. Essentially, the big mainstream sites often have personalized algorithms for each user that learns and adapts specifically to the user to feed the user whatever junk food content it can to keep them engaged. Algorithms on things like base lemmy or maybe reddit in the past just have a sort function like excel that propped up posts with more likes or more comments. You can see what other people are interested in, but it’s not targeting YOU. The predatory targeting algorithm can put a person into a self fulfilling echo chamber that in some ways resembles psychosis. This could naturally evolve into actual psychosis for individuals. I think the old verbage of “touch grass” was the prescription for fighting the effects. I think it’s a lot harder to “touch grass” when people are increasingly online and have fewer and fewer avenues to get out of their own echo chamber while staying online almost exclusively. I’m not an expert and the people I got this info from have no credentials I can source, but the logic seems sound to me. Anyone else with better credentials should weigh in if I’m wrong.

The Internet went from globalizing us to partitioning us pretty suddenly, and I think we are seeing the effects now.

I’m not disagreeing with you when I say this; I just am not on social media other than lemmy and YouTube at this point so, I am out of the loop. What are these sites doing that gamifies watching content? I get all the other crap for posting content like likes and views. It incentivises content producers. How are viewers getting “likes and views” equivalent on Facebook?