alt Hacker News> Online platforms should do what nearly every other publisher does and provide a rating for their content.
That's fine, but it needs an enforcement mechanism, or we're back to where we currently are ("click here if you're 18").
> It would be easy enough to push a rating to clients, they could even use HTTP headers for it. If lawmakers really felt the need to interfere in all of our operating systems it could require some means to collect and act on those ratings.
I would completely agree it seems reasonable at a glance to have websites push ratings and have the enforcement be done e.g. at the web browser level (with the web browser knowing how to enforce based on the OS's supplied age bracket), rather than making websites read the age bracket and act on it directly. Although it does still run into questions about how you handle websites with content from multiple brackets (like Reddit or X)-- what's the UX supposed to look like if a child attempts to access adult content on one of those platforms? If the platform can't know what's happening (due to your privacy/safety concerns), then you're limited to the web browser entirely breaking the interaction or somehow redirecting them somewhere else.
> That's fine, but it needs an enforcement mechanism, or we're back to where we currently are ("click here if you're 18").
It'd be dead simple to tell if a website returned a rating or not, just pull the http headers and if it isn't there fine them or warn them first and then fine them or whatever. You could even have browsers just refuse to load pages that didn't include a rating header in their response and enforcement would take care of itself.
> it does still run into questions about how you handle websites with content from multiple brackets
I think it'd be up to reddit (or mods) to either set ratings for each subreddit and moderate accordingly. Pages at /r/MsRachel/ would return a different rating than /r/watchpeopledie.
Same with twitter I guess. Every user can specify if their account was intended for children or not. Elmo's twitter account would be shown to everyone, while accounts that don't intend to self-censor wouldn't.
> what's the UX supposed to look like if a child attempts to access adult content on one of those platforms?
browsers that detect a rating higher than authorized can just throw up an about:blocked page telling kids to talk to their parents for access to the page they wanted or click the back button to return to the page they were on.
The platforms would see that a page was requested, and they'd transmit the data to the client along with the rating header. They wouldn't get any signal that the page was blocked. It'd look no different on the server side than it would if the user had clicked a link and then closed their browser/tab/window. If you wanted to be sneaky, you could actually have the browser load the page in the background to avoid platforms guessing between a closed tab and blocked access.
This not only solves the privacy/safety concerns, most importantly it puts parents back in control of what their children can access. Parents would even be able to run software that would log the times/urls of blocked pages, and let them override a rating based on URL or domain. Parents could block roblox.com even though it returns a "for kids" header if they didn't want their 8 year old playing in an ad infested online pedo playground but still allow their mature 10 year old access to plannedparenthood.org even though it has an adult rating without exposing them to adult everything else on the internet.
There are countless better alternatives to what facebook wants us all to be subjected to, but facebook couldn't care less about our interests they are only looking out for themselves and lawmakers are happy to take their bribes and eager to erode our ability to browse without an ID attached to our every action.