The real dangers aren’t dedicated porn sites, but poorly managed social media sites. You can’t just block the domain.

In many cases, the bad material comes from peers. Kids have always talked about “bad” things, but the internet super charges it.

I generally support these efforts, but I’m also very cynical they help.

Politicians focus on the problems they control, like rules for sites that rigorously follow the laws and fit in a clear category. They care far less about the grey areas where the most harm is often done.

I think this is a good thing. I’d feel a lot better if these efforts were combined with rigorous privacy protections.

For example, third party identity verification services should be civilly liable for privacy breeches, and required to carry insurance to meet the obligations.

The point isn't to defend sex work (though you absolutely should), it's that sex workers are just the first targets when it comes to authoritarian change like this. They're the canaries in the coal mines of free speech, and the fact they're screaming in venues like Wired or Hacker News should really give everyone cause for concern that their stuff is next, unless things change.

And on the topic of parenting, look, I hate to be that dinosaur, but age verification doesn't stop minors from accessing adult content: competent, aware adults do, or at the very least put things into context when mistakes happen. As a child of the 80s-2000s who was effectively babysat by technology in some form, STOP DOING THAT. It's bad for the kids, it's bad for the parent-child relationship, and it's offloading your responsibilities as a parent to other adults and entities who did not consent to accepting them. It's about acknowledging that you won't be able to shield them completely for harm, and preparing to put things into a healthy context when mistakes do happen rather than demanding everyone else be punished just so you can avoid temporary awkwardness. We don't need tighter laws in the name of protecting kids, we need parents to do so - and build a society where at least one parent is always accessible to children to oversee their development. It means building technology that puts parental needs above profit motives, creating software that's quick and efficient to force children off apps and back into the real world, rather than turning them into mindless zombies watching videos all day.

Laws punishing consenting adults to "protect kids" are ineffective at their stated goals, but highly effective at punishing threats to a given regime. It's why fascists and authoritarians weaponize sex so early in their regime change: it's all about control in the most intimate way, to normalize its creep elsewhere.

I know it's unlikely to happen because of America's (misguided IMO) extreme distaste for digital government ID, but it seems like the current solution (people uploading pictures of their driver's license to porn websites) is worse in every possible way.

    [Justice] Thomas’s invention of “partially protected” speech, 
    that somehow means you can burden those for which it
    is protected, is particularly insidious because
    it’s infinitely expandable. Any time the government wants
    to burden speech, it can simply argue that the burden is built
    into the right itself—making First Amendment protection
    vanish exactly when it’s needed most.

    This isn’t constitutional interpretation; 
    it’s constitutional gerrymandering.

Can a state now require you to verify your age and identity to read a newspaper they don't like?

Frankly speaking, even for underage teenagers the most harmful thing about porn is the potential for addiction, not the content itself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30441276

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25418862

I don't understand how this makes sense.