IDK, I have a kid and nowadays there is OS level filters. Router level filters. The only wah my kid is getting around this stuff is if they guess my password. I mean… Good luck my password vault password is over 20 characters long and I don’t even know the others as a result.

My experience as a parent is parents telling themselves it’s too hard too too complicated to do the basics like turn on parental controls and configure it. I can’t do anything if my kid looks at YouTube, plays roblox or whatever on some other kid’s device, but at least I can do harm reduction same my parents and the harm of the day.

I hate these laws because often I’m forced to either allow my kid access to everything or nothing not even the stuff I want to teach her slowly how to safely use. These laws are the worst because I lost control because other parents can’t be bothered to turn on baked in parental controls, have decent passwords and/or listen to whining.

I hope you got the therapy you clearly need. People drop off the internet for all sorts of reasons. I remember bleeding friends because a platform died. It’s just how it is. This can be their lesson learned that you actually need multiple ways to contact your digital friends.

If it were me, I would have been oh well too with my kid. Taking gambles like lying about your age sometimes doesn’t pay off. Sometimes your parents just up and move. Somehow I survived losing digital and IRL friends because of things I had no control over. Learning to cope with that is an adult skill that you everyone eventually needs.

Ads are super effective. If you have something to buy, but you don’t know much about it, you will tend towards buying the thing that was advertised to you more often than not just because you are more familiar with it over other things. You might not stick with it, but being the first thing someone tries is huge.

It’s not good. Sometimes the only computer a kid has is a chromebook because their parents got it for them for school. I’m seeing more and people just don’t have computers at all. PC isn’t moving fluidly to the next generation as a result. I’ve told parents about steam deck hoping they’ll pick that as their kid’s game console, but it’s not as easy as when I was a kid where you just had a computer anyway and it was about if it could play the game you wanted to play. With the indie scene that concern when away a lot, but now a lot of kids just don’t have PCs

I don’t see why. I grew up with those systems as well, but Nintendo is actively hostile to videogame culture, so there is no reason for my child to develop a love of Pokémon or Mario. She can be nostalgic over new things.

I’m doing my part by never exposing my kid to Nintendo and capturing all my kid’s friends before they leave tablet gaming and convincing their parents to look into PC gaming and steam decks. It’s an easy sell to their parents once I show steam’s parental controls and how every game isn’t full price all the time. Plus remote play makes the initial cost low if they have a computer. Their kid can just play my kid’s games. I’ve already converted 6 kids. My kid just started first grade, so I expect to convert a lot more.

Every company has learned that any friction to using your site is a bleed of customers. There are a lot of people who will just not use your site if it requires a lengthy validation process. If there was some kind of identity system that sites would integrate with like login.gov, then people would ignore this, but I don’t think the UK has such a thing that every site can use, so a lot of people will not use the site and over time fall to piracy or illegitimate sites.