I was recently at a Hacker Festival in the Netherlands, and one of the things that I found neat was that there were plenty of kids there. There were activities on the timetable for kids, as well as spaces that were dedicatedly for kids. However, the event didn’t feel like it was at all diluted for the sake of families — areas and activities intended more for adults still existed, as well as a general expectation for adults to be responsible and courteous when engaging in adult-only activities (such as drinking alcohol).
It felt like a cool model of coexistence that we don’t get exposed to as much as we should in The Real World ™. Whilst this openness towards the kids is partly for the parents, it’s also cool for the kids who want to take part. For example, I remember that during a soldering workshop, I got talking to a boy sitting at my table — I think he was age 10-12ish. Whilst there was some level of me having to be mindful to be speaking with him in an appropriate way, this didn’t prevent me from engaging with him as a peer; we had an earnest conversation about projects, and the usefulness of concrete goals; hobby burnout; and how much ambition is useful when you’re learning a new skill. I wish I had more opportunities to hang out with kids in a capacity where I’m not actively in a mentoring role
Interesting, what is the name of the festival?
Just like irl spaces for kids and teens have died out, too.
No money? No exist.
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
bring back miiverse
Already on there ;3 Its great!
God no, that wasn’t safe for kids…
don’t forget prime which is an energy drink whose ads target primary school kids
This is the main reason I don’t use tiktok, ever since its inception: It was meant as a space for young people and I don’t want to be one of the jerks who intrudes on that.
Yeah, there’s privacy concerns and brainrot pearl-clutching and all of that, but while those are legitimate, my number one reason for not using it has always been that I believe there should be spaces for young people online that adults don’t mess around or intrude in.
Put aside the internet for a moment.
Kids and teenagers used to have more real spaces to go hang out at. Community centers, shopping malls, arcades, etc.
Not so much these days. And it’s sad.
Parents don’t want to drive kids everywhere, and cities have become more and more horrible for anyone outside of a car to travel around in.
As a parent, I’d be perfectly willing to drive my kids places. But where? Even if I took them to the mall, they’d be labeled “loiterers” and arrested, and if I drove them to the library someone would decide they’re too young to be in public alone and arrest me for neglect.
And everything costs money
Support your local public library
A lot more than it was back then too. It’s probably not viable anymore for some people.
This right here.
If shit’s expensive as adults imagine as a child.
Yeah, almost every town when I was growing up had a youth center. They were awesome. I also remember a lot of library programs for kids. I don’t see those so much anymore. And yeah, like every weekend there was some kind of community event geared toward kids. Also roller rinks and laser tag. They were a bit dated by my time but were still affordable and going strong.
They have plenty of gas stations and mega store parking lots, not to mention the prisons of being monitored 24 hrs by cellphones and cameras on every corner. -oh boy, it’s cool it’s for their safety /s
came here to post something similar to this: Spaces for kids are community centers, parks, libraries, art studios, gaming centers, etc…
The internet was always for work, and malicious adversarial models of engagement. Folks forgot that when they expressed more interests than that in it.
And I say that as an anarchist who loves entertainment in the internet. I do not expect friendships, but adversaries.
There were plenty of old collaborative and encouraging spaces even from the very early days. The message boards and forums were full of helpful and supportive people wanting to relax and just talk about their interests.
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.
Club Penguin goated in child safety. I remember certain servers limiting online speech to pre-selected options off a menu.
Scratch was the social media site I grew up on. It’s still around.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
PBS Kids is a thing and has been for a long time
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
