We constantly seem to forget we need safe spaces for new people and soft entries for them to into fandoms, careers, and our world in general.
Im so tired of people acting like kids and people in general need to already be invested and fully formed adults in mind so that they can already be talked to and sold to like everyone else.
we need safe spaces for new people
That’s woke
Ha yeah…
Sad now.
don’t forget prime which is an energy drink whose ads target primary school kids
I believe this is from a combination of factors, including the lack of revenue streams from young site visitors and the necessary protections and moderation being expensive to create and maintain. It sucks, but with the modern Internet it won’t exist for long if there’s no money to be made.
the lack of revenue streams from young site visitors
Isn’t it just as easy to show ads to kids as adults? They have to be curated more to make sure porn ads aren’t popping up, but otherwise it should be the same (if not easier because kids are less aware of ad blocking software).
they’d also have to be non-targeted ads due to child privacy regulation, and a lot of internet ads that don’t pay for targetting are scams and porn
Implying that the “childrens” websites of the early 00’s weren’t fraught with sexual innuendo and swearing, and home to predators of all kinds. Neopets, Club Penguin, Habbo, RuneScape, IMVU. I don’t think this poster is remembering them the way that they were.
I will say that growing up with these sites, and exposure to some of these things, I have become a savvier citizen of the internet. I understand wanting to protect kids, but they have to get out there on the real Internet someday, and losing all your rare painted neopets to a scammer makes you real unlikely to give your details to someone claiming to be your bank.
True, moderation was never perfect…
But nowadays no one is even trying.
The methods that all of most of those places … learned they needed to develop and implement?
Basically that has all been forgotten now, skimped on.
Its … really easy, to develop a kid themed game or app, and just remove text chat, and replace it with a clever gamut of canned messages and emotes (as in player animations).
You can even make basically, chainable, combined sets of messages of phrases, like a ‘do you have a’ and then a list of vetted objects… or ‘go to the’ and then places, etc.
Yep, thats not perfect, people will get clever and lewd with it, but its way, way more controlled, and still allows a good deal of free expression.
(Fuck, at this point I think you could make a decent case for just making that kind of thing a lot more widespread, given the just dogshit insanity that is most games chat lobbies…)
You do that, and at least in your own game, you probably dont have a way of luring a kid to some specific off site, out of game thing.
This is just like with anti-cheat measures:
100% safety and security is impossible.
But that doesn’t mean there are not reasonable and maybe clever ways to come up with a paradigm for balancing safety and functionality.
I don’t remember much innuendo on the sites I played as a child (club penguin, bin weevils) although I’ve got vague memories that the censoring was so severe you could learn swear words based off seemingly innocent words being blocked out of the chat. The bigger issue at that age was how exploitative some of those sites were with microtransactions and I can only imagine it’s gotten worse with the current MMO’s for kids.
There was one I briefly played as a child where one of the starting missions was growing something in a garden but if you were a free playing customer you had to plant in the public garden and wait 24 hours, so I’d come back the next day and find someone had stolen the stuff I’d grown and couldn’t progress. It was a weird way to learn about wealth inequality and the privileges wealthier kids got at the age of seven.
There was another site advertised on one of the kids TV channels here when I was younger that encouraged kids to sign up and mark off the chores they’d completed and each chore you completed netted you a prize like a trip to Disneyland. What the ad didn’t tell us at that young age was that your parents would have to pay for the prizes through the sites affiliate link. I think I was at least mature enough by that stage to understand we’d been had and it wasn’t my parents fault but it’s crazy that nearly twenty years later the internet’s somehow gotten worse for exploiting kids for micro transactions.
Currently? I feel like it was years ago that Roblox’s controversies came to the fore.
They used to have controversies. They still do, but they used to too.
Roblox is not the same. I lose faith in humanity when I look at the front page of Roblox and see a bagillion people playing Brainrot Simulator.
Club Penguin goated in child safety. I remember certain servers limiting online speech to pre-selected options off a menu.
Have you not seen the internet? So many spaces aren’t even safe for adults. The scams are out of control.
Go on, tell me the last time you didnt have to say “DONT CLICK THAT LINK MOM” just to be sure they don’t click a very obvious scam. Or have a long conversation about VPNs prior to handling identity online. Or describe AI hacks to someone.
And here you talk like it’s so very easy to make it safe for children.
There used to be an all-Flash site called “poisson rouge” when my kid was a toddler, and it was absolutely awesome. Hundreds of educational games, bright, fun, animated…
Edit: was nostalgic, looked it up - seems they relaunched at some point! https://www.poissonrouge.com/play/
Neopets still exists and is great though
I said this too. I still play every day.
Nah, fuck kids.
They’d better start learning what a fucked up world they’ve been shat into.
Get started on the depression as soon as possible so it doesn’t come as a shock when they grow up.
Kids these days can’t afford to play and be happy and not be traumatised. They’ve got to get ready to kill and eat each other in the water wars.
PBS Kids is a thing and has been for a long time
Weren’t those all flash games and videos? Do they still exist or did they make new games?
(I suppose the videos could just be converted)
I think kids should be exiled to kids only places. But the issue is, a few adults sneak in, and no adults guarding? R.I.P kids.
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Yeah, this is indeed one of the main issues. Its tough being one of the only parents in the school that actually pays attention to what their children do online but perseverance is part of the game.
Isn’t this just called online video games? Basically what Neopets was.
Most videogames don’t do anything to segregate kids from adults (or make sure things stay kid appropriate) and don’t really make the space with kids in mind. They make the space with revenue in mind.
Most videogames, especially with voice chat, you might get an 8 year old saying this is his first time alongside a crochety neckbeard screaming about banging that kids mother
Oh no. Go outside.
I still play Neopets every day. It’s been excellent for my mental health and it’s the most wholesome community I’ve ever been a part of.
