Since people tend to get a bit more squeamish when the subject is LGBTQ+ youth, the standard for what constitutes truly pornographic material should be the same as what would be applied for heterosexual youth. If we let heterosexual youth read about love stories between a man and a woman, well, let's try to avoid those pesky double standards of somehow seeing a similar story where the love interests happen to be same sex as being "corrupting", "filthy", or otherwise less appropriate.

My point is, the term gets abused. If we're talking things like PornHub and Xhamster and various wank-u-bate cam sites, yeah, that's obviously porn and clearly inappropriate for anyone under 18. If you don't like a story about two boys kissing, that's not pornographic just because it offends someone's Republican brand of family values.

That's strongly YMMV. In fact, in many places we're actually backsliding. Here in Florida, they basically banned LGBTQ+ discussion for all grades (the law left the age appropriateness exception so ambiguous that no school wants to touch it).

The concept that gays have some agenda to groom kids is a bogeyman created by the right-wing. If anything, most sexualizing of minors is done by heterosexuals, and the ones who actually do unspeakable things with kids, again - also mostly heterosexuals.

Personally, I'm in a loving, committed relationship with another middle-aged man. The only interest I have in LGBTQ+ youth is seeing that they get to experience growing up as equals to their heterosexual peers, because I've always believed that progress is made by planting trees you'll never sit in the shade of.

If the companies don't solve their pedophile problems, then you hold the companies liable for their contributory role and punish them harshly. As for who should enforce this, that's entirely why we have a legal system. They'd just have to, dare I say it, do their jobs.

That's also another right-wing talking point intended to divide the LGBTQ+ community amongst itself, making it easier to "conquer". Basically, "Hey, you minorities should turn on each other, that'd make my job of oppressing you a lot easier!" Anybody who's actually picked up a history book can spot it from a mile away.

Usually, I think when people say they want the option to buy directly they're not expecting dealerships to go away entirely. We'd probably end up with something like how it works now with Apple, where if you need the product right away and aren't interested in waiting for a deal from a 3d party retailer (like how Target and Best Buy regularly seem to put iPads on sale), you can just buy direct from the manufacturer's store.

Dealerships would be where you go to waste the entire day playing games with incentives and enhanced trade-in values (because the dealership can make up some of their profit by selling your trade-in at some overinflated price to the next sucker, whereas the manufacturer has no interest in your used car), and you might leave in your new ride while spending a few less bucks.

I've actually dealt with the no-haggle, no-dealership side of things back when my partner and I looked at the Tesla Model 3. They lowballed on the trade-in (again, they're not a dealership so they just push trade-ins off on some car buying company) and the price for the new car was what it was. We ended up just walking out, and because it was Tesla, they didn't even care that they'd lost a sale. Ultimately, after a whole lot of back and forth, we were able to get a price we were very satisfied with on a '23 Bolt EUV at the local Chevy dealer.

I already hate that I need a smartphone app to charge my EV at most DCFC stations (the one saving grace is that I don't need to fast charge all that often), but having to use an app every time you want to get your nicotine fix would be a real pain in the ass. Something tells me if this actually caught on, vapers would just go back to smoking the old fashioned combustion form of cancer sticks.

It does suck, but if I had to pay full sticker price for a car with no negotiating (even if it does take all damn day), I'd probably just have my work vehicle and an e-scooter. Screw $4/gal gas.

Ironically, there's probably some folks on a particular subreddit that would consider one less car in private ownership to be a good thing, even though my car happens to be an EV (just not one of those fancy expensive ones).

LGBTQ+ youth getting tossed in with adults is exactly what happens when you don't have age-appropriate resources available to them. Back in the day, I hung out on adult BBSes and later the m4m AOL chatrooms, because nothing age appropriate existed when I was that age. Fortunately, younger me had enough sense not to do anything stupid in real life (the worst that happened was I'd initially made the mistake of including my real age in my profile on AOL and my damn Windows 3.1 computer kept crashing from getting too many IMs from pedophiles all at once - yeah, it really was that bad back then). To buy myself a bit of peace, I just lied about my age and that seemed to solve the problem.

Don't get me wrong, I also do agree that modern social media doesn't qualify as an age appropriate resource. It's probably just as full of pedophiles as the old school AOL chatrooms. But you've gotta provide the age appropriate resources before you tear down the old inappropriate ones, or you're just going to make a bad situation worse.

You're assuming parents and/or specialists that are going to be supportive. Not every LGBTQ+ youth is lucky enough for that to be the case, and quite many of them are raised in homes where parents (and the local political leadership) see any kid that isn't straight as a problem that's in need of fixin'.

You may want to read up on LGBTQ+ suicide statistics. A depressingly significant amount of them never survive to that point.

What hurts LGBTQ+ minors is the political environment that considers such topics age inappropriate unless you're 18+. In saner societies, teens with teen-level site filtering set up are able to access the resources they need to understand that they're not broken and they do belong. It's just here in parts of the USA that we have certain backwards segments of the country that labor under the delusion that if you prevent a teenager from learning that there's nothing wrong with being LGBTQ+, they'll just "choose" to be straight. (No, it doesn't work like that.)

The age gates aren't the problem. The mindset that LGBTQ+ youth aren't deserving of love and acceptance, is.

Changes will most likely be age gates rather than reworking the sites to make them less "addictive". If social media can't get adults to stick around doomscrolling all day, they'll go out of business. Kicking all the rug rats off (or walled off in a sanitized "kids only" section of the site) might be a slightly more survivable outcome.

Yeah, just like the cigarette companies of old, the social media companies have been operating under the assumption that if you don't hook 'em young, you may never get them as customers. The reality is probably a bit more nuanced than that, as we're not dealing with something that's physically addictive. Social media also has aspects that make it more appealing as you reach adulthood, such as being a place to share pictures of your family and vent over political disagreements, whereas if you didn't start smoking when you were young and stupid, you're probably not ever going to start.

That was always one of the suspension of disbelief breaking aspects of Star Trek, too. As if anyone would deal with all the responsibilities and risks involved in being a starship crew member when you could just fake the entire experience in a holosuite instead.

Of course, open source developers working on their own time have the worst of both worlds - along with the rest of us, they're not living in a Star Trek post-scarcity society, and they're also not getting paid. I've always been kind of surprised that the movement didn't immediately fizzle out. If anyone asked me to do more of the same tasks I perform during my day job, but for gratis during my free time, I'd tell them in some not-so-kind language exactly where they can stick it.
 

Consume, consume, consume, yep, that's all you can do on modern social media - pointlessly shout into the void or read the insipid ramblings of people who are more rich/famous and/or more socially/politically connected than you. Because if you're just Joe Nobody, may the algorithm have mercy on your soul. Come back when you're wealthy or a public figure.

That's why I haven't bothered with BlueSky. If I wanted to circle jerk over famous people or shout into an empty void, I can still do that just fine over on the site formerly known as Twitter.

I don't think dating and casino apps are the best examples, because any app where you're going to be providing billing information already has a de facto age gate in place.

The idea that the user knows best was idealistic and from a time when the majority of people who used computers were technology enthusiasts. Nowadays, the bulk of people using connected devices just want to scroll through social media, take pictures of their kids/pets, and don't understand why they shouldn't click the link claiming their driver's license is about to be revoked for unpaid traffic tickets.

From the perspective of people who aren't interested in the inner workings of technology, software that protects you from your own dumb mistakes is a feature. Look at how much praise the MacBook Neo has been receiving as "this is the computer to get for your boomer parents".

It's probably why there hasn't been much backlash against age gate laws outside of the tech sphere. To people who don't follow this stuff, it just amounts to being automatic parental controls you don't even have to bother setting up. From that perspective, what's not to like about that?

Presumably, the sysadmin's age. If literally no one can log in, you are having a bad problem and will not go to space today.

The Christmas before last, I was over at my partner's relative's place to see his family. One of his teenage nephews asked me if there was a way to get a fantasy football app onto his iPhone because the rest of their family wanted him to join in. Turns out that since the phone was set up with parental controls by an aunt who'd given him the phone, there was no workaround I could think of that would allow the app to be installed. Even adding a second Apple account to the device wouldn't allow the app to download.

Apple's stuff locks down pretty good, and short of getting the adult who set it up originally to turn the parental controls off, a kid is probably not getting around them. Even if you wiped the phone and reinstalled iOS, it'd still remain iCloud locked to the adult's account and you wouldn't even be able to use the device.

Kids being crafty and finding ways around this will likely look more like "going to Walmart and buying a cheap prepaid device", rather than hacking the phone their parents/relatives gave them.

I guess if that's the hill you want to die on. If you read the article, it's not even going to age check users where Apple already reasonably knows the account belongs to an adult. I'm fairly certain I made my Apple account around when the 3rd gen iPod was released, so that'd be back in 2003. I also have an Apple Card, which they already needed more information than just the fact that I'm a middle-aged adult in order to approve me.

So, if this comes here, I'll literally have to do absolutely nothing to be verified as an adult, because Apple already is in possession of all the information they need to make that call. Ironic thing is, most people have set up some sort of billing through their Apple account anyway, either to purchase apps, use the credit/debit cards they already have with Apple Wallet, or like me, have an Apple Card, so for them this process will also be completely transparent.

If you've somehow managed to navigate the mobile app ecosystem in 2026 without giving your billing details to either of our smartphone duopoly players, neat, I suppose. That ship sailed for me when I decided to buy some music for my iPod.

It's not like that's a new exploit. Underagers have been getting people to buy cigarettes and booze for them for as long as there's been age check laws. No laws have perfect compliance, except maybe the law of gravity.