Many users do not desire to interact with underage users for many reasons. Some underage users may wish to opt out of seeing 18+ users so they may bond with people closer to them in age or perhaps for safety. I think a functionality to
- mark your account as 18+
- hide content from accounts who didn’t mark self as 18+
- hide content from accounts who marked self as 18+ would be very useful to those users and set a higher standard of personalized experience for users engaging with social media.
This will just mean that those under 18 will mark their account as 18+ and we are back where we started.
And if it did work, it will allow those adults who want to groom children to easily target them.
Creeps would just mark their accounts as under 18 so they could easily find target.
Worst case scenario, what you suggest is no worse than what we currently have.
On the reverse side, enforcing underage users can be done with device-level parental controls (and if they can circumvent that, well maybe it’s time for them to experience the real Internet).
Voluntarily separating adult material is a no-brainer. If nothing else, this eases the volume of moderation.
What we don’t need is shitty government id programs tapped by shady websites.
Exactly. If it’s just a checkbox (I’m a minor or adult), it’s clear that there’s no authority verifying anything and that it’s just a filter. That has value, just like the “Bot account” checkbox that lemmy has.
It’s not perfect, but it’s easy to add and likely brings enough value to be worth doing.
I mean sure but people lie all the time right? I’m not sure it guarantees that much
What you’re describing is only possible on de-anonymized platforms that essentially have “know your customer” type policies where users have to provide some kind of proof of their identity. While I agree that there is value in social spaces where everyone generally knows the people they’re interacting with are who they say they are, I don’t think this is ever going to be feasible in a federated social platform. I think Facebook is the closest thing we have to what you’re describing, to be honest, and I believe Meta has even kicked around having a more sandboxed Instagram for minors (though I don’t use Instagram, so I’m not certain on the details there).
For me, in most cases on a platform like Lemmy, a person’s age is not something I care about. I care about what people are sharing and saying. But then again, none of my interests for online discussion at this point in my life are really age centric. I think there are clearly better platforms than Lemmy if people want to guarantee they’re only interacting within their age specific peer groups.
You don’t need users to prove their age for it to be effective. Some people will lie, but the majority will probably tell the truth. You’ll probably want stronger protections for something like a dating site, but I can still see value in something like Lemmy.
Good idea on paper, an absolute disaster in practice. Seen it tried before and it was a mess
Seen it tried before
Where?
There were a bunch of smaller social media platforms I’ve been on around 2016 that did the separation for age and it usually just ended up with 18- marking themselves as 18+ and vice versa. I can’t remember the name for it. I think one was called teen network or something. And the other one was a mobile app with a blue target logo.
As said by others creating a giant community of under age kids where anyone could just claim to be under 18 is a bad idea but also any kid could just claim to be born in 1942 like I did when I was a kid
This is a worry and problem I’ve never had and don’t really understand. One of the joys of social media (including the fediverse) is that you’re judged by what you say and who you are, not what you look like. As a lifelong fat slob and general ugly person, I appreciate that.
I welcome anyone bright enough to chat intelligently, regardless of race, color, national origin, sex, gender, religion, disability, age, etc.
I don’t feel uncomfortable talking to kids. Why should I start to be?
Kids and juveniles can learn a lot from adults. Conversations with adults make them smart.
I don’t believe this is the right way.
This isn’t a suggestion to make this mandatory, nowhere did I say such a thing. If you wish to speak to underage people, it’s your choice, as it should be theirs to disable this possibility, as it should be mine to disable visibility of their content.
It’s easy not to talk or not to read content from other people. Why is age relevant here? It does as much as sense to me as to have an option to block other genders, religions or even skin colors.
@Sprite I don’t know if it would be a HUGE leap forward, but it’s a case of might as well.
AFAIK, ActivityPub allows arbitrary fields to be added to the Profile object, so sites might as well add some sort of adult/nonadult tag (maybe not 18+ as ages of majority differ internationally).
It would be as useful as alcohol sites putting up splash screens checking users’ ages before they access the website: No, not trustworthy, but checks the box for legal compliance.
And yes, some users might want to have their interactions skewed toward older folks, again yes, not trustworthy, but it would help some.
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