My own website has a bulletin board that offers a personalized list of messages after you login: whatever threads you have not yet read. And so do many other websites of this style. So this cannot be a differentiating aspect.
Not intentionally - but in the past I did have advertisements to finance it , which I had to stop since that is enough under a lot of jurisprudence to qualify as running a for-profit, which usually means less leniency from judges.
So it is advertisements where we should draw the line -- websites with advertisements should require age checks?
Why did you cherry pick advertisments from my reply and run with that?
It clearly isn't just a singular data point that is a True or False that would include a site in the ban.
Perhaps it should be, "If I had a 12 year old daughter, do I want her to have easy access to pornography, self harm material and the ability to receive private messages from a 45 year old registered sex offender?"
I get your point - "Where is the line in the sand?" and it's a valid point but no need to argue in bad faith.
> Perhaps it should be, "If I had a 12 year old daughter, do I want her to have easy access to pornography, self harm material and the ability to receive private messages from a 45 year old registered sex offender?"
If parents are concerned about this, why let them on the Internet? Why not use parental control systems? Why not teach your children healthy sex education, how to deal with their feelings, and to tell old creeps to fuck off?
Because it is the ad network that I chose 30 years ago that was doing any of the types of tracking you mention. In fact, all of the ad networks from 30 years ago would be considered as doing "teen tracking" today. I do not know how you can do tracking without doing teen tracking, barring precisely I troducing age verification on every single website. And I also do not know if there is any network out there doing advertisements without tracking -- certainly none of the major local news websites use it.
I do think the "wont somebody think of the children" arguments are in bad faith though, and I say this as a father.
These 80yo lawmakers have kids and grandkids and advisers. They know how social media works.
They hate social media because it gives people the power to talk in public about them with near impunity. They want to go back to the old days when if you wrote a letter to the newspaper about potential corruption or wrongdoing among the "more equal animals" you'd get pulled over for a light out whenever you went through that town for the next 20yr.
>If you think you have even near impunity on social media, I have a bridge to sell you. Even a town to go with it.
I specifically said "near" impunity. If you do something bad enough they'll come after you but even then if your gripes are legitimate that's likely to amplify it.
Surely you're not honestly claiming that there is not a significant practical difference between modern internet criticism and the old ways when messaging that could reach the broad public was far thoroughly gated by people and things that had more stake in the power structure.
I wouldn’t say it was gated. More like it was costly. And people having the means to do so was a very small set and prone to agree with the status quo.
But even now, a lot of messages are lost on the internet. And the internet is only decentralized for messages propagation, not for access.
For the record, that is exactly my point . I do not want yet another sword of Damocles for websites, even less if it depends on the mood of a clueless judge.
HackerNews has an algorithm but it's not personalized—i.e. everyone sees the same thing.