alt Hacker News> I'm not sure why a person would want to let their kids hang out any place where that stuff you report is common,
A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud) are committed by family and friends of the victims. Should we not leave our children with our family alone?
The best move is to teach your children how to not be victimized. It is part of "being responsible for yourself". My parents taught me how to be safe in a bad neighborhood because sometimes you have to go there. They taught me how to pick good friends who wouldn't do bad things to me. They taught me how to spot the precursors to bad things. They let me hang out unsupervised. Because they taught me how to be responsible for myself. Why not teach your kids how to navigate the internet safely.
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That sounds great in principle, but many parents are either not interested or present enough to do so, or themselves lack the skills for it.
>"The best move is to teach your children how to not be victimized."
Your GP advocated world-building a child's physical environment to avoid digital - which is simply unrealistic for their later years as it is, and coddling them so nothing that could even potentially victimize them in the digital world would be able to reach them. So, genuinely: What's it gonna be?
Are you going to teach a child the real-world application and use cases for being responsible for themselves, not becoming victimized and carrying themselves well, and learning to act appropriate in an increasingly-digital world; or not?
Otherwise; saying you'll teach your kids real-world application for being responsible for themselves and not being victimized, and then not giving them a space to see the importance of those practices out of fear that they'll succumb to it, is having your cake and eating it, too.
Teaching your kid being street smart is only a band aid or cope as the younglings say these days.
Because the issue is:
- your street smartness is an outdated smartness
- there are multiple different types of assholes waiting to victimize someone that you don't know about
When the police, court, positive socioeconomic factors work only then do you for sure minimize the risk of your child being victimized.
The internet has open the floodgates to be a piece of shit and made it hard to do something about it.
Because if you live in the wild west it's a matter of when not if.
> A great percentage of serious crimes (from rape to fraud) are committed by family and friends of the victims. Should we not leave our children with our family alone?
But I'm pretty sure that like 50+% of interactions with family aren't crime.
> Why not teach your kids how to navigate the internet safely.
No reason to involve any serious amount of time browsing feeds of shit in that. I don't make them roll around in poison ivy, either. Absofuckinglutely not more than once. Exactly how much exposure to something of approaching-zero value and significant harm do they need? I'm going with "just enough to notice it's one of those so they can run the other way".
[EDIT] To put all my cards on the table, I think an extremely reasonable middle ground for Internet targeted ad networks and content-promoting algo-feed social networks would be to saddle them with an appropriate amount of liability for content they promote, which amount would surely be enough to put them all out of business. I see their feeds as the Internet equivalents of a crack house. I'm not gonna send my kids there—I'd rather see them gone, period. I will tell my kids what they are, and how and why such places might hurt them, in hopes they stay away. But I don't think some kind of "exposure therapy" or something is appropriate. The correct, moderate use of social media feeds is to avoid them entirely.